Fifteenth Plus Five
May. 19th, 2019 06:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerFive years onward from May 19, 1999, I was still entangled in the unpleasant thought “to see it again, or to see its predecessors again, or to see anything else even somewhat comparable, might only have me at last seeing the problems ‘everyone else’ is still stuck with.” Ten years onward, it had been almost five years since I’d managed “not too late” to happen on even a few other people who weren’t stuck with anything either, but the specific day itself passed without much in the way of online access. Fifteen years onward, I finally managed to mark an anniversary of The Phantom Menace, and received a politely dissenting comment. Looking back now, though, I see I did manage to write a fair bit.
In wondering what I might then say now (and at the risk of a more detailed dissent), then, I realised one of the things I’d said then was how it was already getting harder to suppose the approaching “under new management” Star Wars movies wouldn’t be pitched straight at those still making a big deal of their old disappointments, and that feeling only got sharper in the remaining countdown. Perhaps for me The Force Awakens itself didn’t feel as smugly contemptuous towards its “distant past” as it had been all too easy to suppose its promotion and first reception had been insinuating, but it’s at least possible to wonder if all that suspicion helped lead to the thought developing just hours after I’d left the theatre that in fact its fate for the original Star Wars characters, whose adventures and achievements had presumably been worth “redeeming,” felt awfully depressing. I can suppose “in fact things didn’t end happily ever after” and even “a hard-times hero turns himself around at whatever cost” might be compelling, but in an abstract sort of way; it seems all too easy to start making bland comments about “I don’t feel as if things were sold to me well enough.” That then has me aware of all the times I’ve been ready to admit my reactions to “a six-movie saga” have been “managed,” and yet somehow the most basic currency of “cinematic vistas and exciting action” feels inadequately supplied for me when it comes to these “Disney space movies.”
Having got through all of that, I’m at least conscious of the way lengths of time can feel different depending on personal vantage points, how 1977 “looked amusingly quaint” in 1997 where somehow 1999 feels more similar to today, the difference between “gumdrop iMacs” and smart phones aside. Even so, to have endured in even a certain way (or two, or more) for twenty years seems something, despite a thought or two that ”Star Trek: The Motion Picture was around yet dismissed in 1999” (which I did realise wasn’t that different from a thought I’d had five years ago).
In wondering what I might then say now (and at the risk of a more detailed dissent), then, I realised one of the things I’d said then was how it was already getting harder to suppose the approaching “under new management” Star Wars movies wouldn’t be pitched straight at those still making a big deal of their old disappointments, and that feeling only got sharper in the remaining countdown. Perhaps for me The Force Awakens itself didn’t feel as smugly contemptuous towards its “distant past” as it had been all too easy to suppose its promotion and first reception had been insinuating, but it’s at least possible to wonder if all that suspicion helped lead to the thought developing just hours after I’d left the theatre that in fact its fate for the original Star Wars characters, whose adventures and achievements had presumably been worth “redeeming,” felt awfully depressing. I can suppose “in fact things didn’t end happily ever after” and even “a hard-times hero turns himself around at whatever cost” might be compelling, but in an abstract sort of way; it seems all too easy to start making bland comments about “I don’t feel as if things were sold to me well enough.” That then has me aware of all the times I’ve been ready to admit my reactions to “a six-movie saga” have been “managed,” and yet somehow the most basic currency of “cinematic vistas and exciting action” feels inadequately supplied for me when it comes to these “Disney space movies.”
Having got through all of that, I’m at least conscious of the way lengths of time can feel different depending on personal vantage points, how 1977 “looked amusingly quaint” in 1997 where somehow 1999 feels more similar to today, the difference between “gumdrop iMacs” and smart phones aside. Even so, to have endured in even a certain way (or two, or more) for twenty years seems something, despite a thought or two that ”Star Trek: The Motion Picture was around yet dismissed in 1999” (which I did realise wasn’t that different from a thought I’d had five years ago).