Star Wars Marathon, Blink

So we were originally scheduled to have a big Star Wars mega-marathon today, watching all six episodes "back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back," as Colin's email had it. But we didn't get started until after 10:30, so after Episode 2 we wouldn't make the 3:00 showing of 3, and we couldn't go to the 5:00 show or we'd miss dinner, so now we have to wait until 7. Which means that so far today all I've done is watched the first two movies, which I though were horrible. An interesting thing happened though: I enjoyed them a lot more this time around. I sat through The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones back to back, and was happy and entertained the whole time.

I have a couple of theories about why this might be. First, I understand the Byzantine plot beforehand, and can pay more attention to the little clues about what's going on, and less trying to figure out who the hell is on what side. If nothing else, this makes the battles more enjoyable. It certainly makes some of the more strained conversations believable when you understand what the characters are getting at.

What really surprised me, though, was that those god-awful love scenes didn't look so bad anymore. I think that this is because I stopped holding Padme and Anakin to regular standards of human behavior. Hayden Christensen's lines still set my teeth on edge, but it seems like they should. He's playing an adolescent ex-slave warrior space monk prodigy. That kind of thing would certainly have had me saying some weird shit at seventeen. After Revenge of the Sith, you don't just know in some abstract way that this kid with the funny haircut is supposed to become Darth Vader, you've seen it from the inside. You understand it. It's his destiny man, in a very literal cinematic way, and you expect him to act funny.

I've heard that Lucas intended to create a new myth for our time, and on reflection the movies do a lot better considered in that light. Think about the Odyssey, for example. The little jaunt to the island of the lotus-eaters would be pretty crap as a stand-alone story; it's much better in the context of the entire narrative. Ditto for Star Wars. I feel like, as with any good myth, we're supposed to know the basics of the story ahead of time. They're supposed to be just understood as part of the culture. Well, as a full-bore geek, Star Wars is certainly part of my culture, and I've found that once you've got the whole thing in there, each individual movie is actually a pretty good "telling" (what in Linguistics we'd call a "token") of that part of the larger myth.

Anyway, while we wait for dinner I've been reading Blink, at a rate of about a hundred pages an hour. A lot of it is stuff I've heard before, either in descriptions of the book or in CogSci classes, and I've read enough synopses that by this time the whole "thin-slicing" idea doesn't even seem all that weird. What I really want, is to hear some music by this Kenna character.