May The Nostalgia be with you, Star Warriors

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This article was published 19/12/2015 (3608 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Maybe the perfect illustration of the pop-culture power of Star Wars: The Force Awakens is that picture of Joseph Gordon-Levitt attending the glittering, glamorous L.A. première wearing an adorable handmade Yoda costume. With felt ears and an old bathrobe and pyjama bottoms, JGL looks kind of like a sleepy, excited eight-year-old.

In the lead-up to the Star Wars VII extravaganza, which exploded worldwide this week, the series once again revealed its Jedi-mind-trick ability to call up childhood memories, connect with deep-down emotions and make grown men goofy.

J.J. Abrams, The Force Awakens director, is a master of pop-culture nostalgia. A fanboy himself, he brought his nostalgia-steeped skill set to the Star Trek reboot in 2009. Even Super 8, a 2011 stand-alone project, was powered by Abrams’ yearning for a lost cinematic past. This is a guy, after all, who got his start restoring Steven Spielberg’s home movies while still a teenager.

You can feel the Force of the Star Wars nostalgia. It’s not just that the franchise still inspires retro round-the-block lineups (two Aussie fans were due to get married while camped out in L.A.), the new instalment is also being helmed by a guy who really knows how to work that Star Wars-superfan-time-stopped-in-1983 vibe. Enigmatic trailers for The Force Awakens were exquisitely calibrated to echo emblematic images and iconic music from the original trilogy. Fans have been dancing for months on the precarious point between memory and hope.

No wonder ticket pre-sales broke the Internet. No wonder people were making social-media confessions about bursting into grateful tears at glimpses of the grizzled Han Solo or the greying General Organa (Leia isn’t a princess anymore). No wonder celebrities were being encouraged to reminisce about their geeked-out Star Wars experiences. (Simon Pegg wrote a university paper on the Ewoks. Benedict Cumberbatch does a great Chewbacca impersonation.)

Pedants demanded fans prep for the new movie properly, not just by avoiding the Trilogy of Which We Do Not Speak — the films released between 1999 and 2005 — but even dodging the adulterated versions of the original trilogy. George Lucas’s constant tinkering with his movies has resulted in one controversy so deeply felt and hotly disputed it has its own Wikipedia page (titled “Han shot first”). To return to the pure nostalgic perfection of 30 years ago, one commentator advised viewers to seek out VHS copies and watch them on someone’s basement rec-room VCR.

Last week, the Film School Rejects website offered a handy fill-in-the-blanks template review that tapped into viewers’ neediest, nerdiest Star Wars nostalgia. This was a comical but canny recognition that whatever critics say won’t matter “because the most important review of The Force Awakens is the one you’ve already written in your heart.”

The nostalgia-fest wasn’t confined to true believers. Even the Star Wars parodists have been getting a little wistful and misty-eyed lately, as new posters for Space Balls: The Schwartz Awakens circulated online. (Sadly, they were fake.)

Nostalgia can be a potent force. The first Star Wars flick was itself rooted in nostalgia, being a postmodern mix of samurai sagas, westerns and war movies, all mashed up into a gee-whiz space opera.

Nostalgia can also be tricky. By jacking directly into viewers’ deepest desires, it can sometimes become “weaponized nostalgia,” as one commentator dubbed it, a kind of flagrant fan-pandering that chases its tail in a tightening series of shout-outs and callbacks.

To really work, The Force Awakens needs to use the force of nostalgia without going over to the dark side. It needs to look back but move forward, feel completely familiar but absolutely new, reference the original but make its own honest stand. Going by ecstatic fan response and enthusiastic critics’ reviews (“This is the sequel you’re looking for”), including one by our very own Randall King, it looks like Abrams has hit the nostalgia sweet spot.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca