Seeing Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back With my Son Made Me Understand It For the First Time

I’ve always wanted to be a father in part so that I could share with my children all of the things that I loved and that were special to me growing up. I wanted to experience the art and trash and entertainment that I dug as a kid with my own progeny, to see and hear familiar movies and television shows and albums through new eyes and ears.

I wanted to show my children the early seasons of The Simpsons and Back to the Future and Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and “Weird Al” Yankovic and all of the other treasures that made my adolescence just barely tolerable.

I was consequently delighted, if not particularly surprised to discover that Declan, my eldest, is just as obsessed with pop culture as I was when I was his age, if not more so.

Declan is an eight year old hurricane of energy, creativity and ideas. Also, ADHD. He is a scarily talented artist who is always drawing or sketching or thinking about new things to make.

Like seemingly every child of his generation, he has been obsessed with the Star Wars universe but since he was born in 2014, just before the release of 2015’s The Force Awakens and final trilogy and five years before The Mandalorian, that means that his Star Wars experience is very different than mine.

Declan loves things that are cute and morbid. So, like every child in the world, he really loves Baby Yoda. How could he not?  He’s SO fucking cute. Look at that little face! How can you not love that little guy?

But he also loves things that are dark, even in musicals. For example he has a big trip planned for the end of the year to go to New York for the very first time with his grandmother and aunt to go see Phantom of the Opera on Broadway before it closes.

My son is as obsessive as I am, if not more so. So he has historically fixated on specific moments in the Star Wars saga, particularly that awful, iconic moment when Anakin Skywalker battles Obi-Wan Kenobi on Mustafar, is gravely injured and comes close to dying before before being saved and transformed into Darth Vader.

It’s perhaps the single darkest, grisliest moment in all of the films and Declan cannot stop thinking about it or creating art based on it.

Declan grows by leaps and bounds these days. Last year he couldn’t read. Now he’s reading in the upper 99 percentile. He similarly did not have the attention span to watch movies other than The Nightmare Before Christmas, Turning Red and Encanto until very recently.

So Declan was utterly obsessed with Star Wars and its various spin-offs despite having never seen the original film or any of its sequels.

That changed recently. During Thanksgiving break we made a heroic attempt to watch The Phantom Menace but its abundant and fatal flaws were apparent even to a child who has seen very few films.

I wondered if seeing The Phantom Menace through my son’s innocent eyes would give me a new perspective and a new appreciation for it. It did not. It’s an ugly old frog that stubbornly refuses to turn into a handsome prince.

The same is not true of Star Wars. When I watched the space opera that started it all with Declan on Disney+ I understood the film’s appeal for the very first time.

I’ve long been a Star Wars skeptic. I have dismissed the franchise in my writing as silly space nonsense for children but watching Star Wars with Declan I finally got Star Wars.

I loved how 1970s Star Wars feels. I love the grit and the grime and the practical effects. But I also dug the characters and the world-building.

I was even more impressed by Empire Strikes Back. The 1980 blockbuster is widely considered the best film in the series and one of the greatest sequels ever made.

I’ve always liked Empire Strikes Back but this time around I was blown away by it. Watching it alongside my boy, I felt like a kid again. It’s a wonderful feeling to bond with your child over something you both love.

After watching Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back Declan and I continued our journey by going to an immersive Star Wars exhibition. It was amazing and now Declan is watching The Mandalorian.

As someone who has devoted much of his career to extolling the joy of fandom when it comes to stuff like Phish, Insane Clown Posse and “Weird Al” Yankovic I now feel a little embarrassed about being so dismissive of Star Wars fandom. I shouldn’t have been so snarky, condescending and dismissive about something that gives so many people so much joy, particularly children.

It doesn’t matter that Star Wars is mainstream and big business. What matters is that movies like Empire Strikes Back mean the world to my son and that he is having a goddamn blast with everything Star Wars right now.

Star Wars isn’t just silly space nonsense for children. That’s true of the Star Wars Holiday Special, The Phantom Menace, Jar Jar Binks and The Ewoks but it’s not true of the original trilogy.

George Lucas’ brainchild means something much more to a lot of people, something it’s taken me forty-six years and fatherhood to fully grasp.

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