Lit A/V The Force Awakens and the EU [TAGGED spoilers.]

I can't wrap my head around George's math.

 

Probably best that you don't.

 

The kriff?

 

How old is 15 in parsecs?

 

Yeah. And it sounds like they were all pretty into it.

A bunch of creepy old men.

I like the first two better. Individually, I really like the father-son stuff and the Grail as McGuffin, but taken as a whole the movie feels too much like a conscious retread of Raiders.

And it was actually more complicated than it being the opposite of what Lucas wanted. If I recall, originally Lucas wanted it to be a haunted house movie, but Spielberg convinced him otherwise. Then Lucas suggested the Holy Grail as the McGuffin, but Spielberg balked before eventually giving in. Then Lucas balked at the idea of focusing on the father-son relationship over the Holy Grail, until Spielberg convinced him otherwise.

So Lucas was initially against the best part of the film, but at the same time I can't help but feel it was Spielberg's influence that made them step back from the scary, experimental nature of Temple and instead try to re-make Raiders, which wasn't necessarily the best decision in my opinion (at least from a creative standpoint).

 

Others have already said it by now, I know, but...

 

most women are pretty much fully developed by 15 anyway so I can see where they are coming from


















wait wut

 

Lucas didn't want to cast Sean Connery either. And the thing is, the things Lucas were opposed to are what gave the movie depth. Instead of Indy chasing another artifact, he's finding his father.

 

Yeah, I agree. But all I'm saying is both had different ideas about the movie, and both of them were convinced otherwise one way or another to produce the final product. I don't think it's a slam-dunk indictment on Lucas's sensibilities as a filmmaker because he was initially dubious about something. It's like all those people claiming Lucas is a hack because his rough drafts for Star Wars were very, well, rough.

It's not quite as big a deal, but Spielberg didn't want to include the opening scene with Young Indy because Empire of the Sun had a kid in it and didn't do too hot. That's pretty dumb reasoning, and it would have robbed us of an iconic sequence with River Phoenix. But it doesn't mean Steven Spielberg is bad at making movies.

 

Thank god he finally put his foot down on the alien invasion movie.

 

So I wonder what wookiepedia is going to do once/if the movies come out and it is nothing like the EU. Star Wars fans can pick and choose what they want to pay attention to but wookiepedia really does need to say what is canon. It will be interesting because probably over 90% of wookiepedia is full of stuff that never was seen in the movies or on television.

 

The official stance now is that it's "all one canon" so I guess anything released from now on forward is going to be slapped in there. Stuff before that pronouncement?

 

It's not as though Wookieepedia doesn't already have non-canon material on it.

 

Wookiepedia is going to become an even bigger mess than it already is. I say they just make a separate timeline for all the pre 2015 EU.

 

orly

 

Is it wrong that I'd take the Lucas who was subversively hiding 27-year-old/17-year-old relationships in the backstory of his movies over the Lucas who has to make sure his hero doesn't shoot the guy pointing a gun at him first?

 

Woookiepedia 2.0 (misspelling intended) or the Wookiee-is-still-aliveapedia.

Seriously though, I think it will be fine. Just tag a section of the article or the article itself as non-canon like usual if anything comes up and leave everything else as is.

 

I don't know what kind of guy George Lucas is, so I can't comment on his character from an excerpt of a brainstorming session. He's talking about the creation of a fictional character here, though; he's not commenting on the real life issues. He doesn't say "molesting children is funny", he essentially says "having a hero character that has such a socially unacceptable spot in his past is amusing". This could be a big proverbial middle finger to the audience ("oh so you root for that guy"), and it could be one of those dark and gritty conflicted main character people that people love to death these days ("he's making and selling drugs? he's so cool!"). The math doesn't add up because it's constantly changing. They're debating how far they can go, twenty seconds later on they have settled on a somewhat different age. Plus, Indiana Jones as a character is a bunch of flaws. All the stories revolve around him making up for his sins. In the second movie he's going into the temple to become rich and famous, not to save slave children and starving peasants. The last two films show how much such a man messes up his family situations. Just because we love snarky Harrison Ford doesn't mean that Indiana Jones is a nice guy (which is probably why Ford enjoys the role). And seeing James Bond as a role model for the Indy character - Bond is the very definition of the beloved PANTShole. In the very first movie he sleeps with a woman and then threatens her with a gun because he knows she's a spy - no reason to not use her for fun if she's been willing to use him for work, how cool. And to bookend this, in the most recent movie Bond obviously smoothly makes his move on a woman who's told him she's been a sex slave since her youth, and when she gets killed for helping him by turning on the villain who dominates her, he and the movie do their best to shrug this off with a cool Bone one-liner. The basic problem at work might be that audiences don't really get "ambiguous heroes"; there's simply a line, and on one side of it everything gets shrugged off no questions asked. How many people did put the "I was a child!" line into question?

That being said, in the context of a creative brainstorming of an end product that they haven't settled on, I think this excerpt proves and even implies nothing. Which doesn't mean that I know anything; I don't know enough about 70s culture, and there's always Polanski.

Edit: And then I just thought of Nabokov's "Lolita" - maybe they wanted to cram just one more thing into the cultural pastiche that is Indiana Jones. Would explain where the age came from. Either that or Taxi Driver.

 

Well, I've read the whole transcript, and it's just sort of a freewheeling bull session between these guys about how to create the movie, and I wouldn't take everything that's said absolutely seriously (it's actually both hilarious -- Spielberg comes off like a giant adolescent -- and incredibly informative -- it really does show off Lucas's brilliance back in the day). This incarnation of the character (the female lead was previously a Marlene Dietrich-type German torch singer double agent) is about two minutes old (as far as I can tell -- the transcripts aren't complete), when Kasdan suggested the tack of her being the daughter of Indy's mentor who has some clue he needs. They're just spinning out stuff, and they are going for a little more complex character. Notably, right at the beginning of the transcript, the first three characters Lucas immediately brings up when referencing this new character he's created are James Bond, The Man with No Name, and Sam Spade. He's going ambiguous. Notably, this is what follows the section that was quoted in that linked article:

G — There would be a picture on the mantle of her, her father, and him. She was madly in love with him at the time and he left her because obviously it wouldn't work out. Now she's twenty-five and she's been living in Nepal since she was eighteen. It's not only that they like each other, it's a very bizarre thing, it puts a whole new perspective on this whole thing. It gives you lots of stuff to play off of between them. Maybe she still likes him. It's something he'd rather forget about and not have come up again. This gives her a lot of ammunition to fight with.
S — In a way, she could say, "You've made me this hard."
G — This is a resource that you can either mine or not. It's not as blatant as we're talking about. You don't think about it that much. You don't immediately realize how old she was at the time. It would be subtle. She could talk about it. "I was jail bait the last time we were together." She can flaunt it at him, but at the same time she never says, "I was fifteen years old." Even if we don't mention it, when we go to cast the part we're going to end up with a woman who's about twenty-three and a hero who's about thirty-five.

So he's going for the idea of giving them a backstory that leads to conflict and gives her ammunition to use against him, and of sort of subtly sneaking in this sort of subversive ambiguity for the character.

 

On the concept of age ranged of people who are sexually involved (which I think is how this whole debate here got started) isn't Lucas married to a lady who is 20 or so years younger than him? That kind of stuff goes on all the time these days and is even becoming more common for women to date guys significantly younger than her. As long as they stay over the 18 (21 just to keep things safe) mark it isn't a significant deal.

 

Not to mention that Indiana Jones was 22 in 1921. I know it may not seem that long ago, but you just need to read older Agatha Christie novels to realize how different morality could be back then. One should refrain from judging past mentality with our own standards--not because we ain't entitled to think we're right, but because it doesn't make sense.

 

Dodgy interviews and strange relationships aside... am I wrong for suddenly finding myself more excited about the prospect of two new Indy films than I am Episode 7?

 

Well, she says it right in the movie, so I'm a little surprised by the surprise...

"I was a child. I was in love. It was wrong and you knew it."

"You knew what you were doing."

translation -- "I was under 18. You should have known better." "Whatever honey. You were into it. Now, where's the headpiece?"