Unpopular Fandom Opinion (once more)
Feb. 29th, 2016 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerI've got this journal through two leap years already, and with its use of calendars to organize and access posts the thought of marking each February 29th has been compelling. Assuming I should do something "rare," I've tried articulating "unpopular fandom opinions." This time around, even with the thought not too many "friends" are following this journal any more, taking a risk and bringing up something kind of big for someone to perhaps stumble on has crept up on me.
There's less than a year left until the Star Wars Special Edition will have been around for just as long as the movie itself was before it returned to theatres in 1997 (the Special Editions for The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi have already passed that mark), but a certain number of people, in fixating on the old version, might yet still bring up the bumper sticker-level slogan about the cantina shootout. Negativity can drive out any positivity, but perhaps that's produced a reaction from at least some people in the other direction; I've seen counterarguments from those who might be said to also take a "saga viewpoint" along the lines of "artists should retain some rights to revisit and yes, revise" and "you bought a movie ticket, or even a VHS tape; you didn't buy a promise to be supplied exactly the film you remembered in ever-increasing resolution into perpetuity." These are valid, and yet I do wonder if they might have some overtones of keeping the central point "change." Instead, I've found myself of late more and more ready to say "the change everyone is fixated on reduces possible interpretations of the scene, but it doesn't force a new interpretation."
If people supposed "Han Solo started off as the kind of ruthless gunslinger who'd get rid of a minor annoyance," then I can suppose myself this would cause a nasty negative reaction. If it's possible, though, to suppose "Han was at risk of being shot; he responded calmly," then maybe it's also possible to suppose that interpretation has carried all the way through. This doesn't deal with whether things were "too spelled out" to start with or the aesthetic problem of having to fake things up after the fact, but neither of those seem to bear on accusations of "the scene was inverted and the whole movie was neutered."
Of course, in considering "you can always avert your eyes anyway" I have to admit to that being something I've tried myself, but then for years I did the same thing when Luke's hand was cut off. In any case, The Force Awakens didn't seem to get around to offering something that might be taken as an explicit "we get it" statement, just as my uncertainties about The Lego Movie were relieved in the end. On the other hand, there's talk of particular spinoffs yet...
There's less than a year left until the Star Wars Special Edition will have been around for just as long as the movie itself was before it returned to theatres in 1997 (the Special Editions for The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi have already passed that mark), but a certain number of people, in fixating on the old version, might yet still bring up the bumper sticker-level slogan about the cantina shootout. Negativity can drive out any positivity, but perhaps that's produced a reaction from at least some people in the other direction; I've seen counterarguments from those who might be said to also take a "saga viewpoint" along the lines of "artists should retain some rights to revisit and yes, revise" and "you bought a movie ticket, or even a VHS tape; you didn't buy a promise to be supplied exactly the film you remembered in ever-increasing resolution into perpetuity." These are valid, and yet I do wonder if they might have some overtones of keeping the central point "change." Instead, I've found myself of late more and more ready to say "the change everyone is fixated on reduces possible interpretations of the scene, but it doesn't force a new interpretation."
If people supposed "Han Solo started off as the kind of ruthless gunslinger who'd get rid of a minor annoyance," then I can suppose myself this would cause a nasty negative reaction. If it's possible, though, to suppose "Han was at risk of being shot; he responded calmly," then maybe it's also possible to suppose that interpretation has carried all the way through. This doesn't deal with whether things were "too spelled out" to start with or the aesthetic problem of having to fake things up after the fact, but neither of those seem to bear on accusations of "the scene was inverted and the whole movie was neutered."
Of course, in considering "you can always avert your eyes anyway" I have to admit to that being something I've tried myself, but then for years I did the same thing when Luke's hand was cut off. In any case, The Force Awakens didn't seem to get around to offering something that might be taken as an explicit "we get it" statement, just as my uncertainties about The Lego Movie were relieved in the end. On the other hand, there's talk of particular spinoffs yet...