Maclunkey

or, why my friend and I walked out of the Charles Theatre’s 7pm screening of Star Wars (1977)

He’d been talking about it for weeks.

The Charles Theatre and the Senator, Baltimore’s cornerstone local movie theaters, both host their own ongoing revival series. That is, every season, the projectionists dust off the old reels of classic films and bring them back to the silver screen. My first big, public experience as a Baltimore local had been a revival of Rosemary’s Baby, the whole crowd cheering raucously when Rosemary Woodhouse says in her gentle voice, “Guy’s from Baltimore,” then reaching a cacophony when the satanic Roman Castavet murmurs, “Baltimore. Great city.”

And it is. A friend of mine I’d met up in Ithaca years ago, Luz, has invited me to quite a few revivals over the years. They’re always a blast (from the past) and then some. So it was a no-brainer when Phil and I saw the classic 70s poster come up in the Charles, the one where Luke has an eight-pack and Leia looks like a romance novel heroine. Of course we’d be attending.

First, Phil bought us tickets for the 11am screening on Saturday. Then another friend of ours reached out to us asking for a day out to the National Air and Space Museum. He’d recently been one of the many, many professional casualties during the war on science, his position at Johns Hopkins axed by the “chainsaw for bureaucracy,” his livelihood stripped from him. Another no brainer. Star Wars or a proper sendoff? Of course we drove to the Capitol.

Phil purchased our second set of tickets on the drive home. He’d peer at me very seriously over the weekend leading up to Monday.

“If it’s the special edition,” he repeated, “we’re heckling, right?”

I’d offer a noncommittal hum, privately refusing to entertain the idea. I’ve always been uncomfortable with making a scene, any scene. I’ve only recently started honking in traffic.

For those of you who don’t know, the original Star Wars movie was just called Star Wars. It wasn’t A New Hope, or Star Wars: Episode IV, it was just Star Wars. There was a more character-driven sequel called The Empire Strikes Back. It was at the very end of that film where Darth Vader became the literal Dark Father of cinema, altering the epic story of a fascist regime crushing a rebellion beneath its shiny black heels into a family squabble forever. By this time, the two-part bummer needed a satisfactory closer, and The Return of the Jedi was born. Inexplicably, the black-clad evil warlock who’d just spent the last two films trying to kill every single person he came across transformed into a penitent dad, gasping asthmatically about how Princess Leia, who hates and wants him to die for most of her adult life, believes there’s some good in him after all.

Unlike most of my peers, I didn’t grow up watching the prequels. I had overtly negative associations with Jar-Jar Binks and the incomprehensible Anakin. Padme Amidala was something of a supermodel to me, but she could exist anywhere in my imagination, decontextualized as she was in magazine clippings and the Lego Star Wars video games. I genuinely thought she was a better character than she was and, whenever my prequel-obsessed cousin and I played outside, I’d call dibs on being either her or Obi-Wan while Ashley insisted upon playing Anakin, always.

Our versions of these characters were, with full disrespect to their creators, leaps and bounds beyond the canon versions. My Padme fell more in line with the crop-top wearing Lego who pantomimed exhaustion with the plot and handled her own shit. Ashley’s Anakin, on the other hand, was a complex, brave creature, driven less by his own passivity and more by a true lust and curiosity for power.

We were basically Villeneuve’s Dune.

All this to say, for the purpose of this blog post, the prequels do not exist.

They don’t.

No Anakin, no Padme, no Jedi Order wearing desert robes, no literalist interpretations of the original screenplay, no Easter eggs, no retconning, no incest.

I’ll explain my reasoning later. For now, I’ve got something to tell you.

I found him.

My unknown grandfather.

He’s alive.

---

I’m working on a longer piece about this because everything happened rather quickly. When I die and my grandkids go through my things, they’re going to find the part of my planner labeled JANUARY 2025 and see, in bright blue marker, EVERYTHING CHANGES written over the entire month. In January of 2025, I signed a contract with a literary agent, flew to Sundance Film Festival, reconnected with a lot of old friends, got my Ancestry DNA test results back, entered into an email dialogue with a talent agent for actors, began to drive cross-country for the zillionth time–

and found him.

I’ve written about him before. A good starter pack for the Grandpa Canon would be my two pieces, You Can Eat What You Want of What I Feed You and I am (not) your father, which both allude to my own father’s status as a pre-ICWA adoptee and the resultant controversy over his parentage.

The Ancestry DNA test had been an impulse purchase I made while cohabitating with my Grandma Rose in her apartment in Minneapolis. I bought it, spat in a tube, sent the tube to the Mormons, and paid an extra fifteen bucks to have them test it ASAP. If you really pressed me on it, I couldn’t tell you why. I just had a feeling it was the right thing to do.

There’s not much else for me to say. I’m gatekeeping the whole story until I can assemble a pitch for a real publication (no offense to this blog and you, my loving and devoted readers) detailing every shocking cinematic beat, every twist and turn on that long, frigid road to my homelands. What I will say, though, is the Whole Story changed over a matter of days. There was one story I lived with: once upon a time, there was a Native man who had a baby with a Native woman, and that Native woman gave up my dad. Then there was the new story unfolding before me, told by many different people spinning many different rumor mills, landing on something coherent–that the Native man wasn’t actually Native at all, but a first-generation Norwegian-American who let the doctors believe he was Native to fully relinquish any responsibility he had to his son, my father.

Then there was his story. The man himself did speak up.

And I listened.

It reminded me, in a stupid, embarrassing way, of the Star Wars franchise.

How no matter how many alterations you make in post, how many lines you add, how much computer-generated shit you fill the frame with, the original story has a staying power. It insists upon itself through memory and care.

During that long, lonely roadtrip out, I heard all kinds of things. I heard and I relayed it to my father, apologetic, at first, then excited, then annoyed at myself because the way I picked at this brand new wound disgusted me. That I should be so excited about something my parents never wanted me to pursue disgusted me. That I held it all in my phone and in my hands, every number to every living relative, every brand new old photograph of the man with my youngest brother’s face.

But I keep looking at him. The nose, the eyebrows, the little half-smile identical to Misko’s, the goofy, carefree grin like mine.

“He wants to meet you,” one of my new aunties says, and I feel the future shift.

---

Growing up, we had a phonograph in our house that actually came with the house. Mr. Dunster, our elderly next door neighbor, had grown up watching his uncle build that house. It was a remarkable thing to inherit. My parents took good care of it. I spent hours in front of that phonograph, paging through the worn vinyl sleeves we stored beneath the record player itself. If I was home alone, for whatever reason, I always pulled out one record in particular. The Story of Star Wars, which was essentially the whole film, pressed into plastic. The dialogue, the soundtrack, everything. I’d pop that onto our phonograph, pull out my copy of the 1977 Star Wars comics, and piece together my own film in my head.

We had the special editions of the original trilogy on VHS, plus an extra fourth tape explaining all of the CGI bullshit Lucas added later when he had full creative control. I’d watch in grim fascination as he shoehorned a furry bug with spittle dangling off of his uvula to scamper into the frame and break the fourth wall, screaming his kid-friendly song. Jabba the Hutt’s scantily clad harem, the same since the 80s, gyrated in the background, blurred by the brand-new Bowdlerized version of the crime lord’s den of iniquity. Over and over again I watched it, trying to understand.

Only later, when my parents’ ban on the prequels was lifted and I finally watched them all, did I get it. George Lucas, owner and proprietor of Lucasfilm, former boy wonder turned lazy-ass studio tyrant, was trying to fuse two fundamentally different projects–the Dune-inspired, uber-racist prequels with the Samurai-meets-Spaghetti Western antifascism of the originals–together after the fact.

He was trying to make the past his, and only his.

---

Shuffling into the Charles, I dug my fingernails into my palms. I couldn’t help it. We were in bad company. I profiled the shit out of everybody else in line with us–nerdy millennials with neon-dyed hair, milky skin, Star Wars t-shirts and thick hipster glasses.

I still held out some hope that the Charles would hold up their vaguely-worded end of the bargain–that this would be my time machine to 1977, when my six-year-old father sat down to watch a new space opera, only to have his brain chemistry altered forever. I wanted, after everything, to sit with the little boy version of my dad. To bond with him in some way. To know what he knew and see what he saw.

I am already becoming an offshoot of him, the grown-up him, now. I hear it in the way I talk. How I’ll say things like, “I floated him some cash,” or, “I might as well be nice to her.” Little things he throws out into the world that sound distant and measured but amount to his reputation as a “sweet guy.” Filing into our seats as the kitschy vintage pre-show video counted down to our program, I felt a swell of kinship with the tiny, furtive suburban boy my father had been, once upon a time.

Then the title crawl started.

“A New Hope,” Phil whispered through gritted teeth. “Must be… must be the eighties edition.”

“I hope so,” I whispered back, but I had my doubts.

These doubts only worsened when the audience snickered knowingly at everything but the actual jokes in the movie. Anything that could possibly call forward to the prequels, sequels, or the absolute glut of spinoffs Disney Plus keeps churning out was met with chuckles and elbowing, bright eyes glancing at each other. Did you hear that? He said the thing.

When the Stormtroopers are sent to Tatooine by the apoplectic Darth Vader, we saw them.

Two CGI lizards, cluttering the frame.

Phil slumped in his chair, looking as angry as Vader sounded. I, on the other hand, was experiencing something close to divine rage. I’d known for quite some time that this wasn’t just the 80s rerelease. This was the Lucasfilm 2012 cut, the one he shit out before he sold the whole franchise to Disney.

The Maclunkey Edition.

Even knowing this dreadful truth couldn’t keep me from experiencing another, newer emotion. This one more primordial, it churned within me with every shot of Luke Skywalker, Uncle Owen, Aunt Beru, and their farm.

Grief, was it? Or something close to grief?

I kept coming back to the same thought, the same string of words. Over and over again, with every carefully framed original shot that remained in this slipshod CGI clusterfuck, with every beautifully written line and weighty pause.

This should have been left alone.

This was a much better story than what it became.

This is a much better story than what we’re making it into.

---

It took me forever to make the decision to leave. By then, Phil had already checked out and was playing Sudoku on his phone, his version of blowing up the entire theater with everybody inside, really, because he abhors being rude at the movies. But I kept hanging on because the longer we stayed, the more we sat with Luke and Obi-Wan on Tatooine, the more my adult brain filled in the Whole Story, absent all of the retcons and spinoffs and cash grabs that came after. It was all just right there, in the original screenplay, being spooled out for us by top-notch performances with total sincerity.

Then the Stormtroopers massacre the Jawa droid traders, and our friends in the audience loudly guffawed, bowled over by the line, “Only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise.” Get it? Because of the meme?

At this point, I had absolutely no qualms about getting up and leaving. I wanted nothing more to do with these people and their ironic detachment. We hurried out of the theater, Phil muttering about how he wasted twenty bucks, no, forty, on this bullshit, and I realized I’d ruined my healthy appetite on popcorn and peanut M&Ms.

At R House, the yuppie cafeteria in Remington, I stewed over the film. I’d been shocked to walk out, shocked to see us walking out, but now I was just mad. Mad and creative. I churned the dialogue to this first film over in my head, brow furrowed, only occasionally resurfacing to look at Phil and splutter something about the conclusions I was coming to.

See, the story of Star Wars, taken at face value, is not the story of the Skywalker dynasty. This isn’t one monarchist family fucking up a galaxy because of their trauma, this is a movie about the final stages of an authoritarian regime. We meet Darth Vader just as he invades a senatorial ship, a ship he presumably was meant to be on good terms with mere weeks prior to the film. There’s Princess Leia, pushing contraband into a magic trash can who’s in a goofy domestic partnership with a shrill Oscar statue. Then there’s the desert planet just below the senatorial ship, which Trash Can knows to navigate to, but Gay Statue doesn’t.

There’s a board meeting in an evil-ass room on an evil-ass sphere where Darth Vader and Grand Moff Tarkin inform the rest of the bad guys that the senate has been dissolved. Panic ensues–without bureaucracy, how will the Empire function? I shuddered when this line was spoken, for obvious reasons, and gripped my chair when Tarkin smoothly says the Empire is returning the governance to the States–I mean, Regions–with the assurance that fear will keep them in line.

Darth Vader, in this scene, is very much not the boss man here, but a violent, paranoid sorcerer, viewed with naked scorn by his superiors, but respected for what he is: the embodiment of chaos and sadism. It’s him who volunteers to torture Princess Leia for information, him who does the Emperor’s dirty work, him who chokes out his peers for shits and giggles because he’s just that evil.

After about twenty minutes establishing the depths this Empire is willing to sink to, we finally meet our hero. He’s a kid named Luke who, after being orphaned during the Clone Wars, lives with his unnamed father’s brother, Owen, and Owen’s wife, Beru, doing pretty much the same boring stuff his dad was probably doing, expressing the same restlessness.

Any mention of Luke’s father or Obi-Wan Kenobi triggers a stern, grave response in Uncle Owen, who meets his wife’s urgent blue gaze with the facial equivalent of a stop sign. She does the classic midcentury mom face, that little “well, what if?” quirk of her thin lips that usually spells out certain doom for our cast. Sure enough, when they’re alone together, Owen and Beru give us pretty much all of the exposition we need in less than a minute: once upon a time, Owen had a brother, and the brother wanted to leave. Owen will do anything in his power to keep his adoptive son from doing the same, right down to implying this old Ben Kenobi is a creep, and that stupid teenage Luke would do well to stay far away from him.

Stupid teenage Luke, of course, cannot. The plot demands he follow the rogue trash can robot into the dune sea, where animalistic tribesmen knock him into a vulnerable, twinkish pose, and a robed old man comes to his rescue.

When they have their conversation about Luke’s father, you don’t get the impression that the unnamed father was anything more than a farm boy who followed an older man off-world. We’ve already learned, through Luke’s whiny insistence upon applying for pilot school and Owen’s firm refusal, that Luke’s father was, himself, a pilot. He ostensibly went to the same program Luke wants to attend. Here we find out what happened next.

Obi-Wan, wearing the robes everybody on Tatooine apparently wears, long before Canon decides no, these are Jedi Robes, he tells Luke his version of the story. We can fill in the blanks here: Obi-Wan and Luke’s unnamed father had been friends who left Tatooine together. The both of them joined a religious sect of space wizards and taught many others before the Clone Wars. Then they fought in these wars together. Did Luke’s father die in the wars? No, Obi-Wan says sadly, he was murdered. By the very same chaos agent who’s torturing the princess, as it were. Obi-Wan’s former student, Darth Vader.

Then Obi-Wan gives Luke his father’s lightsaber, telling him that although Owen fears Luke will follow his father down that same doomed path, Obi-Wan has faith in Luke. There’s still a sinister element to this interaction, though, because Obi-Wan then immediately asks Luke to leave the planet with him, weaponizing the teenager’s crush on the beautiful Princess Leia. Luke refuses. I can’t fight the Empire, he whines, I’ve got work! I laughed, Phil laughed, nobody else in the audience laughed. They were, I assume, waiting for another Easter egg.

I couldn’t stop picking apart this whole preamble. Why bother making the prequels at all, when everything’s just right there? And if you were going to make them, if you were really that strapped for cash, why did they have to be so inaccurate to the world you built in this first story? Why make Luke’s father an only child, but turn Luke’s love interest into his sister? Why retcon the poverty of Tatooine into a nightmarish, yet still kid-friendly hellscape of slavery and pod-racing? Why give the droids to Obi-Wan after all, when he’s only now meeting them for the very first time?

Why make Darth Vader Luke’s father in the first place? Was it really that upsetting that the Evil Name you Randomly Picked for your Evil Patriarch had no canon anchor point? Does every single word your characters utter have to be literal?

Why couldn’t Darth Vader have been the one to kill Luke’s father? It would simplify the narrative beautifully, too, balancing the more character-driven, grimdark tone of The Empire Strikes Back. Most importantly, in my opinion, it would have forced the writers to keep working together for a satisfying ending, one that wasn’t just a recycled plot plus cutesy critters.

As we walked out of the theater, Phil reread the description of the Monday night screening obsessively, trying to find any evidence that we were in for the Maclunkey Edition. It read:

Retcon it all you like. This is the only truly great ‘Star Wars’ film, the only one that can exist without the others, the only one made without consideration for a galaxy- spanning intellectual property and shareholder value. And a powerful, inspirational piece of filmmaking it is, for all its clunky bits and post-release tinkering. Also: Han shot first. -Lee Gardner

“Post-release tinkering,” Phil repeated. “Was that our warning? Were we supposed to just be able to tell that this wasn’t going to be the original version?”

He put his phone down and rolled his eyes, groaning. I looked at the skyline, the last rays of sun painting our low buildings green, purple, and red. The planets have been aligned for a while now, something I wonder about from time to time, especially when I can’t sleep or I meet someone intriguing. Other people have said this before, but there’s something so deeply tragic about the fact that George Lucas grew up watching samurai movies, Westerns, soap operas and wartime footage and decided to make Star Wars, while people in my dad’s generation grew up watching Star Wars and decided to make more Star Wars. I imagined a world where Lucas dropped dead in 1981 or got bored and left his creation well enough alone. Would a power vacuum open up? Would another maverick have stepped up to the plate to fill that void?

Would we still be burning millions of dollars trying to make sense of a senseless franchise?

I don’t know who I’d be without the sexual tension between Leia and Han in The Empire Strikes Back, but I know I’d still be myself if Jar-Jar Binks had never made it out of the concept art phase. If Anakin’s Paul Atreides ripoff of a life hadn’t been written out, his caring and exhausted older brother Owen nowhere to be found. Maybe more of us could find the resources to make our own daring films instead of darting through the shadows of juggernauts, picking up the crumbs.