Being a Gen X Star Wars Fan

(Author’s note: I wrote this in a different form in 2020 at the end of the second season of The Mandalorian. There was much hope in being a Star Wars fan then. Since then, a lot has changed for the big entertainment franchises, but all of us Gen-Xers know that if things seem bleak now, you just need to wait and hope.)

I was young when I met Luke Skywalker, young enough that he didn’t feel like a character, but a real life hero, someone I could imagine becoming. Here was a kid stuck on a farm at the edge of nowhere who wanted to be more than the life he’d been handed. He wanted to fight evil, save the day, get the girl, learn to wield powers he could barely imagine. He was Harry Potter a couple decades before Harry ever picked up a wand, and for a lot of us he got there first.

If you grew up in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, Star Wars wasn’t a movie you saw. It was the air you breathed. It was the toys on the floor, the bedsheets, the lunchbox, the argument with your friends about who got to be Han. You didn’t consume it. You lived inside it.

Then you grow up. And the strange thing about loving something for forty years is that the thing keeps changing while you do.

The prequels were a disappointment. I’ll say it plainly, even though the Clone Wars animated series did a lot to redeem them later. The sequels woke the old feeling up again, then complicated it. I’m one of the fans who actually liked The Last Jedi, flaws and all, but I can be honest now and admit it left me deflated. The last time most of us had seen Luke at his best, he was standing at his father’s funeral pyre on the moon of Endor, the whole bright future of the Jedi waiting in front of him. Decades later we found out we’d skipped all of it. He’d decided he was a failure. The Jedi were finished.

So when the franchise finally gave that moment back, a lone X-wing, a single green lightsaber cutting through what had been an unstoppable wall of enemies a minute before, the gloved hand, the voice, the face, I was near tears. Not because of the special effects. Because of the boy I’d been when I first wanted to be him.

I wasn’t alone. The internet filled up with videos of men my age watching the same scene, whooping and crying, and almost every one of those videos was filmed by their kids, delighted and a little baffled at the sight of dad coming undone over a guy with a sword.

Why do we react like that? I’ve thought about it a lot. It isn’t nostalgia, or it isn’t only nostalgia. Nostalgia is wanting to go back. This is something else. It’s the feeling of a promise being kept. You handed your hope to a story when you were eight years old, and forty years later the story finally pays it off, and for a second the eight-year-old and the middle-aged man are the same person again.

That’s the part I didn’t understand until I had kids.

I have five of them, and they are at least as crazy about Star Wars as I am. Maybe more. My wife Melanie has gotten pulled into all of it too. So now I don’t just get to feel the old excitement. I get to watch it land on people who’ve never felt it before, and I get to feel it a second time through them.

When one of my kids gasps at a reveal I’ve been waiting thirty years to see, something passes between us that’s hard to name. I’m not just sharing a movie. I’m handing down the same thing my own younger self believed: that ordinary people can be brave, that the galaxy bends toward the light if enough people are willing to stand against the dark, that hope is a choice you make on purpose.

You could call that a lot of theological words. I’ll just call it what it feels like at the time, which is joy.

The people making the best of this new Star Wars are Gen X like me. They were the boys on the floor with the toys. You can tell, because they don’t just reference the thing we loved. They remember what it felt like to be small and to believe a story completely. They built their version out of that memory, and they handed it back to us, and now we get to hand it to our kids.

That’s the whole arc of being a fan of anything for this long. You receive a story. You carry it through your own disappointments and your own hopes. And if you’re lucky, you live long enough to give it away to someone smaller than you, who looks up at the screen with exactly the face you once had.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. We never really left. We were just waiting to bring our kids along.

Originally published on Bettnet.com in 2020.