THE FORCE WAKES, ONCE MORE CANNOT QUITE BRING ITSELF TO LOOK AT WHAT’S GOING ON OUT IN THE THEATRE, SO ROLLS OVER AND DRIFTS OFF
Samuel Delany
[S. R. DELANY’S REVIEW OF *THE FORCE AWAKENS”] 
 Here are two general observations that can help us understand how the world works politically, which can also help explain why certain works of narrative art, especially popular narrative art, might not be as interesting or as involving as they could be.
First: People come in bunches. So if you want to know why any “one” is like she or he is, don’t assume that he or she was identical to the bunch. But look at the bunch to see why the person is exceptional if she or he is. 
Second: All art is borrowed. Since you are more or less doomed to it, if you have a problem, borrow from the best, borrow the right thing, and use it in the way that most helps you.
When, in the mall, I left the showing space yesterday evening, to walk up the hall to the men’s room, crowded with the overflow from the auditorium that had let out, I’d decided, by the time I came emerged with the male crowd, to join my adult kids waiting for me in the well-lit, crowded hall, that the gaping hole in the film was Fin and the second weakest character, though Abrams had certainly tried, was our protagonist Ray. 
My daughter went off to get the car, because it was drizzling. Ben and Iva in the front seat, my daughter driving, and me in my black hoody and knitted cap in the back, pulled away from the mall in the rain and we drove home to pick up my life partner, Dennis, then go off to a Pho Restaurant back in our own small suburb for dinner. (Dennis self-describes as “not a movie person,” though he has seen all the first three and films and even recalls enjoying them. But he’s only caught snippets of the second trilogy or the enriched trio on the tube.) 
All right: here’s a quick run-down of who was in the car: 
A forty-year old white cysgender straight male cook, computer consultant, and extremely competent carpenter and home improvement guy. He’s also a kind, generous, and smart man, by my book.
A black forty-two year old straight female cysgender doctor, who works at a nearby hospital. She’s worked in foreign clinics as well as in this country. Another pretty amazing person, and my daughter. They’ve been together seven years.
A seventy-three-year old male black cysgender gay writer and retired professor--dad of the doctor. (Sounds like “Thor of the Jungle.”) 
Dad’s 61 year old white cysgender mostly gay partner with whom he has been sharing a bed now for 26 years and continues to share one today, now that the kids have taken us in. Call it an Ordinary American Family, at least that’s how it feels to me; at other times I see it as an ordinary family without the caps, like the one the sitcom Modern Family has been trying to parody since it picked up one actor and several conceptual notions from Married With Children; the show has always seems to be a misguided attempt to acknowledge that more and more families like mine are around everywhere, from trailer parks to gated communities or scattered among the theater attendees this season at Star Wars.
In various kinds of short-hand and in using various examples, laid out not in any complete way, the rest of this is going to be about the disconnect between the bunch of people in the car and the created-and-carefully- controlled images of future or parallel worlds individuals, which for a couple of hours in multiplex Auditorium 12 we’d watched, with growing boredom, swells of excitation and swells of pleasure, involvement in this or that sequence, rising and falling emotional identification, laughter at this good line and that recognition of this or that recall of material from the first film, surprises that registered against that film, and some that I assume were supposed to be with film in general, which, despite the complexities we were finding and sharing and considering, including passages of immersion through editing skill, and others of quiet exasperation with the cliché level of the basic images, where their suturing was not clever or inventive enough, or their humor content high enough, eventually made me feel that the whole thing was not involving enough to have the effect of that “good story” everyone assumes is waiting to be made manifest by actors doing the right thing skillfully enough in the right costumes in the right setting, and the totality of which experience I will mark with my straight white cysgender son-in-law’s “Ennn,” because, complexities aside, his “Ennn,” feels close enough to my gay black cysgender one. (And, though after a couple of reads through it, I think it scans, I suspect that last sentence is one for the Faulkner Bad Writing contest.) 
About fifty hours ago, more than a day before I began this one, I wrote in an earlier piece, “The first Star Wars film was the most borrowed SF film ever made.” Would that this one had done more borrowing, and from the tradition of written science fiction which the first one channeled so well for so much of its liveliness and energy. 
What do we know about Fin? He was taken away from his family, and raised to be a storm trooper. Well, to me, that’s not what the character felt like as I watched him. To me he felt like an overprotected suburban kid who perhaps had always wanted to be a storm trooper but never had gotten close to them. 
One of the best and earlier SF novels about a boy raised to the situation is by Judith Merrill and C. M. Kornbluth—Mars Child and its sequal Gunner Cade. But however you see Fin’s character. If Merril’s and Cornbluth’s character had been black, I would not have questioned it. Fin’s character did not give the flat, affectless over masculinised and repressed affect of the military. It was the much softer and confused affect of the suburbs. But there is no “bunch” against which to read him. In what ways was he similar to them? In what ways was he different from them? Three of those white plastic masks removed with ten seconds of banter among them might have told me volumes, weather they had all been white, black, aliens, or whatever; or about whether his personality was similar to or different from a random bunch of his fellows. Without some visible bunch for him, we can never know this about Fin, having nothing do with Fin’s race or theirs. 
In the film, there was lots of good background stuff—in keeping with the level of detail and thought in the first three films: a fair number of technological military/industrial giants, which we recognize from IV to VI, had been scattered over the desert: the war machines that we learned about in Empire, were now rusting on the sand. 
(The notions that inhabitable worlds were going to be all deserts—or all anything—is one that lingers from Dune and was roundly critiqued by SF writer Chelsea Quinn Yarbro in the late sixties, well before the films of Dune and Star Wars joined forces (ambiguity intended) to set the science of diversity evolution back fifty years in a piece that changed the way I wrote about worlds, even “sand worlds” such as Mars, ever afterward. Would that it had done the same to SF film.) 
If you’re curious, on a scale of one to ten, I’d give The Force Awakes a six and a half, maybe a seven—seven and a half if I’m really looking for stuff to praise. 
Characters from the first films had actually gotten older—which was not just nostalgia, but part of the story. Some of the jokes were good. Some of them were not so good. There was one that got a laugh that recalled the “Kessell run in under 10 parsecs,” which for a while was the biggest scientific blooper in the West, and still, apparently gets recognized at a full theater showing in King of Prussia, PA. It did yesterday.
The detail work on the film is sumptuous. But it can produce contradictions over time. While we were first driving back from the mall that night in the rain, my son-in-law produced a little impromptu disquisition on the contractions in the various developments of the light sabers: Why do they need switches if only those strong with the force can use them and can turn them on and off with the force itself, the same way they can levitate them out of the snow or up from the sand. Indeed, if can only Jedi use them, or only Jedi who have been trained by other Jedi . . . etc, etc? I contented myself with recalling that with the Sith in the second trilogy, the light sabers had finally developed sparks and colors other than white-blue (pink . . .!) and ripplings up and down its length. Nor did I mention the piece I’d finished yesterday which he hadn’t seen, or quite possibly hasn’t seen even yet.) If it’s just for Jedi, why does everybody have to build his—or her—own? 
To me, what he was saying suggested a series of images that had quite possibly entered someone’s mind at different times that no one had as of yet thought through carefully, in the course of the other films. (I swear, I repeat, I didn’t say a word. And as far as I knew, he hadn’t read yesterday’s post.) Apparently this was one of the things that had contributed to his “Ennn.” (As my daughter remarked, only an hour ago, in response to the circulating complexities: “We all have our different reasons for our particular ‘Enns,’ but we do all have an ‘Ennn.” Then she laughed. 
The all too easy incinerating of whole planets (without either visible oceans that we can see or human populations that we can see), but humanoid aliens (which are no more likely to develop on single surface planets than are human primates, with out insects, bacteria, paramecia, fish, birds, mammals, and worms, etc.) still strikes me as the most immoral thing on the screen, as did putting out an entire sun to do it—as in the first film when Leas’s world was destroyed and Jedi and aspiring Jedi felt the “force” shift. As images go, both then and now it still felt like a sign of our own problems in this planet rather than any pointing to a solution. And not a very new one. So what’s the point of repeating it, only bigger?
But lets leave the maddeningly impoverished external landscapes alone for a while—which say, again and again, that you can live like this, even if there are no cities, no forests, and everything has to be imported over light years from places where there is such variety, such industrial possibility—cultures that can build their own Death Stars. 
Near the start of the film, Flin sees a friend of his killed, who marks Flin’s white helmet with his bloody hand, and dies—while, just then, in the background, a Mai-Lai style massacre is going on from which we will assume no one escapes—and suddenly he decides he’s had enough and is going to switch sides to the Rebels—whoops, sorry: I mean the Resistance. 
Thinking about it a little later, I recalled the lapel buttons many of the film’s first viewers began to wear; it hinged on a scene that had gotten into the comic book version, which had been done from the uncut script, and a version in which a scene occurred between Luke and his bunch—friends who were also planning to go off and join the rebels, and who were going over possible paths to take: Later on, Luke drops in passing, “Perhaps Biggs was right,” only the scene and Biggs him had been cut from the film. What comic book and the original script revealed is that Biggs and his bunch are planning on their return to the academy (that’s a pilot school) to switch sides to the Rebels, as well, what he recommends to Luke and what the button memorializes beside the change in sides (which is what is replayed here with Fin): Biggs observations is that in the fight for what’s right, everyone has a part, not only in a military ship but on the home ground at the shire—did I say that?—I meant the farm! “You could always just stay at home with your Uncle and help him on the farm the way you always do. You could help him fight the Empire from taking over his lands here are home, instead of running off to fight them in the sky like I have.” In short, Biggs is Luke’s friend who tries to valorize local solutions to political problems other than joining the military. (For me this is the only moral position that can come close to justifying warfare.) 
<http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Star-Wars-A-New-Hope.html>
To me, what he was saying suggested a series of images that had quite possibly entered someone’s mind at different times that no one had as of yet thought through carefully, in the course of the other films. (I swear I didn’t say a word. And as far as I knew, he hadn’t read yesterday’s post.) Apparently this was one of the things that had contributed to his “Ennn.” (As my daughter remarked, only an hour ago, in response to the circulating complexities: “We all have our different reasons for our particular ‘Enns,’ but we do all have an ‘Ennn.” Then she laughed. 
This is the voice that is cut from the film, largely because of time—but lingers in an unconnected fragment. Without Bigg’s revelation, the film says: You have to go join the army, to win. With the scene, it says: Staying and looking out for what you have at home is just as important as protecting it from afar—which will be confirmed by the murder of two of the most important people Luke’s bunch: his uncle and aunt. 
As to the central story cut loose from the landscapes that support it (in actual terms a total fiction; what fiction, for me, is about is what holds the two together), let’s cut to the chase. 
In this new film, Rey is our protagonist. She has been abandoned as a child on this planet and although she goes flying around presumably to others, she keeps coming back because she’s hoping against hope that they will come back to get her. 
As with Fin, she has no bunch either. She is more closely bonded to her current landscape than he is, though. She speaks three alien languages, though where and how she learned them is anyone’s guess. (Flin speaks narry a one.) 
In a society at work on a biological field that tends to segregate people into races, genders, sexual persuasions, aliens and humans, people (intelligent creatures) come in bunches. The bunches are informative, because they let us know what “most of them are and feel and do” but some do otherwise and say and suggest, and that is the landscape in which any individual moves and grows. The bunches are not perimeters delimiting actions – though they can lean us toward finding some actions likely or unlikely—but they are parameters for describing a range of possible actions as likelihoods or unlikelihoods, and so therefore, for the fiction writer, what action, if you choose them for your character, will need more or less support. 
You can find out some interesting things—not everything equally so, but some—if you look at the bunches a character comes from as a child, the bunches they worked with over the years, the groups they belonged to, the bunch in gay bars (or the straight ones or the mixed ones), the working class dives or the fancier lunges they hung out at, if any. 
In the world of Star Wars, there is no don’t ask/don’t tell problem in the Empire military or the Resistance, just as there is never an expansion of sexually dimorphic marriages to include same-sex marriages on any planet or nation we have visited on any Star-Wars world. The death penalty has not be rescinded by any local government and then, over the next decade, rigorously reinstated, nor has their been any legalizing of safe abortions and a proscription on unsafe ones, which has—again—been rigorously fought and chipped away at, year by year almost since, in this country, the laws were passed.
Does this mean it is a simpler time than ours. No. It means it is a time for more constrained in ignorance, repressed fear, and intolerance. 
Do any of the young folk in Star Wars even go to a university, or look forward to lives as adjunct where, only a few years back, once they thought they might be tenured professors? Is there a higher educational system that statistically treats women differently from men, in a technological field where pilots land on the sand, hop out of their space ships, and wander off on foot to a bar for a drink? 
And let’s not talk about medical insurance or even medicine itself.
In short, is anyone in Star Wars wondering what kind of chances Fin or Ray, Luke or Leia, has in getting into and through film school, or being stopped and frisked in the market. 
Well, people in the audience are. 
Nor do all of them go to the movies all of the time to get away from these questions. Sometimes they want to laugh at them directly. Sometimes they even hope they can come and laugh at these problems at the movies—and sometimes they hope there may be a solution to some local aspect to one of these suggested by something on the screen.
Finally, when you’re trying to balance a male and a female character, giving them both interesting and intriguing things to do, you don’t do it by taking away the male’s friend because you’ve left the woman’s out. You give them both friends, possibly at different times, possibly at the same, and then you let them learn, all four, to live with and adjust to each other; like a bunch, which may always require couple of further extensions. That the film comes as close as it does in plus. That it seems to tentative about, as if it doesn’t want the wrong audience member to take offense is not a plus.
The new Star Wars is a work to appeal to the child in us? But what child? The child from ten years ago? The child from seventy years ago? A child who is non existent, finally? 
To repeat, people come in bunches. Cutting the bunches out, like cutting out the landscapes, is more often than not cutting out the fiction.
For years I have told the story of the two pounds of hate mail I received for my first review of Star Wars, back in COSMOS in ’77. When I walked into the office and it was waiting for me on the desk at which anyone who was briefly in the office but needed an hour to work would sit. It was the most mail I’d ever received for any piece of non-fiction I’d ever written: almost two pounds, and all of it, I learned as I went through it, angry and vituperative. (A year and a half before, a piece of science fiction had received more than that and of a generally positive character. It wasn’t until the end of the eighties that received a letter from Canada for the third volume of a fantasy series, scrawled in red ball point on a leaf of paper torn from a ring binder that began: “Dear Mr. Delany. You think you’re so smart. Well, fuck you!” It went on for three pages.) Hate mail can be highly instructive—or at least I have been luck enough to find it so. The message I began to put together as if the pages were transparent and the message was clear when you looked through them all, to physically inscribe them on top of one another. “We don’t want blacks, women, or anything else in our movie—and Star Wars is OUR film. It’s ours because we love it. We don’t want them there, even as an extra crossing in background, because, whenever we see one, we see a problem, a problem that is somehow other than ours and which the suggestion is, somehow, by being where we are, doing what we do, acting the way we act, WE cause it. And we don’t feel like we did. So stop making us feel bad when we’re in middle of having fun.” And when, two years later, the Empire Strikes Back opened and we saw handsome black Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian, front and center in the plot, I gained some respect for Mr. Lucas. Or rather I gained more respect for him. If I knew what I knew from simply suggesting for one paragraph at the end of a six page review, otherwise overwhelmingly positive, that the smallest suggestion, squeezed in at the end of it all, that there might be a little diversity in the lily white field, could elicit two pounds of objection and anger, laced with four letter words and worse, then Lucas must know it too. And the fact that he had decided to take it on, and risk loosing millions and millions of dollars spoke well of him to me. By doing that, I knew he was risking many millions of dollars on a gamble that he could make these kids, by the end of the movie, have a good time. And more or less he did—though he did it once more by having no bunch for Lando, for Han, for Chewy; Lea’s bunch had all been blown up by the end of the middle of the first film. Luke, however, was learning step by step that who he thought had been his bunch was really an entirely different family after all—with much bigger fish to fry. 
<http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/dec/24/star-wars-the-force-awakens-fans-hate-mail-critic-bad-review> 
In The Force Awakens, because she is a self-employed scavenger, Ray doesn’t have to worry about either tenure or a raise or taxes presumably with or without representation or owning a gun, with or without anyone’s interpretation of the second amendment.
The infamous Bechtel Test, is basically about locating an elective member of the bunch, for women. (One reason it’s important is because back to Gilgamesh and Enkidu, it’s been a given that men need one, and in the early ones probably with a little hanky-panky as well, despite what a later capitalist society wants to impose on itself in terms of fetishizing material and biological reproduction for profit; the hanky-panky will not hurt anything if both guys are strong and one of them is the King. That at least was the ancient view.) For years, western narrative has been claiming, “Look: I will show you mothers worried over their son’s fortunes and coming marriage, and/or their daughters’. Won’t that keep you quiet?” Eventually, though, you get tired and give up—and capitalism crows out its win from the doorstep. And you try to explain that everyone is not thinking, twenty-four seven, about the dispersal of a dowery. Yes, a bunch has got to contain family, if you have some. But it’s got to contain people who aren’t family too, if you have some of those available. 
Was utopia a world where we felt it was all right to look for partial and provisional solutions in art to the problems around us, and where most people didn’t resent having it pointed out why you were unlikely to find full scale and finished ones, whether in Les Miserables, The Mysteries of Paris; Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, or War and Peace, Moby-Dick or Mansfield Park? 
Probably more people have seen Star Wars—and shortly will have seen this particular Star Wars—than read any of those other in the first years of their divers celebrities. 
And just going back to reread, online, the scrap of a scene cut from the script that showed us Luke and Biggs, I find myself frowning—and convinced that Lucas wanted us to get something out of his work, the same kind of thing he put Lando Calrissian into Empire for—but the same thing they began slicing away for “commercial reasons” even before A New Hope (that was the title, after all) hit the screen. (You don’t usually subtitle a book of a movie “a new dawn” unless some part of you can convince yourself you’re writing about one.) I don’t feel all the cutting and revision and many drafts was entirely because of entertainment. I’ve done too much of it myself. 
—December 24, 2015 
 Wynnewood, PA
Gwyn McVay
An aspect of this I did like -- and I am not by any means quibbling with any of what you've put here -- is that "Princess Leia" (unearned royalty title, first name) is now "General Organa" (earned title of skill, surname). She grew up, while his being faced down by two entirely different groups simultaneously demonstrates that her paramour, still a "Solo" agent, totally did not. So while the two speculate that the defection of their son to the Bad Guys caused their split, I think she's quite clearly grasping at straws. The story is older and less specific than that. She grew up, like Wendy Darling. He, like Peter Pan, did not -- arguably not until his gunslinger stroll down that catwalk. And her hopeless look as he holds her, even before his last cowboy/samurai quest (I'm thinking of the manga "Lone Wolf and Cub" in a way), suggests that she knows that all too well, that -- contrary to her first impression -- the supposed bestial, savage copilot ("that thing") of the Millennium Falcon always was the brains of the operation. In a realistic universe, she might have lost her government position entirely for having a baby with this (again, almost literal) loose cannon, so I'm kind of glad it isn't one -- as Neil deGrasse Tyson points out with regard to a spinning beachball robot on a sand planet, and the science of friction.
Jean-Louis Trudel
Will get back to it later, but, so far, the whole SW series seems to be an argument for good fathering.
Kent Williams
I'm imagining a Venn Diagram, showing the intersection of two groups: one, people who love Star Wars movies, and the other, people willing to consider it in the cultural context in which it has come to be, and to do so at length in print. You may be one of the few members of the intersection of those two sets.

The fact that you would write 4000+ words on the topic and share it with us, the ones lucky enough to be your facebook friends, is an extraordinary Christmas gift. Thank you! And have a great holiday.
Michael A. Armstrong
I like this idea of the bunch.
Michael Harper
Well-written and analysed, Chip, as always. But it's still space opera, so one shouldn't expect too much from it. The reason Empire worked as well as it did was that Lucas deliberately went looking for Leigh Brackett, one of the very best writers of space opera, to get her to do the script. She died before she could turn in a shooting script, and Larry Kasdan finished it. Old friend, your critique is like Shakespeare reviewing "Twilight". It's not up to your level of intellect. I'm gonna get more coffee now.
Jean-Louis Trudel
A further comment: "self-employed scavenger" might describe pretty well a lot of modern university adjuncts...
Samuel Delany
Thanks Michael Armstrong--thought it might be a useful image.
Jean-Louis Trudel
I think the analysis of Fin is spot-on. The character as seen on the screen works within the confines of the plot, but not within the framing of the film and his putative past. In essence, he is a first-draft character who hasn't benefited from any critical revision and rethinking. I do believe, though, that pondering _Star Wars_ has to be limited to looking at the characters as you do (or at ideas, when they survive the commercial filter: I might quibble that, politically, opting for armed resistance instead of local action is not quite the same as joining the military). The rest of the SW universe is a fantasyland rendering of 40s pulp fiction with too many free variables. (If you can build a Starkiller Base and drain a sun's power, perhaps you can also have planets with weird ecologies and even stranger economies. And there's probably a way to explain how a Tie fighter flies in an atmosphere and why the Resistance doesn't have suitcase/tactical nukes for use in sabotage, let alone on the bombing runs of X-wing fighters.)
Samuel Delany
Criticism humbly taken, Michael Harper. But here's a brief synopsis of everything this "review" and my subsequent comments and previous comments on the topic flail at: Lucas convinced me in that first Star Wars showing I saw in New York City in '77, that he wanted to reflect something of the world around him and his own trip through it (including SF and the new and old films he'd been steeped in by film school) on the screen. The Force Awakens convinces me only that the people who made it want to make that film again, and make at least as much money while doing it, regardless of how the world has actually changed in 38 years. Both Lucas and Disney more or less succeeded. But I don't think what the second succeeded at is anywhere as interesting as the first. (Blow up a planet in 77, where the force shifts throughout the galaxy far, far away, and it says: this is what we may end up doing to ourselves. Blow up two or more planets in 2015 and use up an entire sun to do it is a bunch of kids in the back yard saying, "He, we can make an explosion even bigger than the last one--and maybe even bigger than that!" And that's not as interesting. It's also why, for all the people who love it, so many folks old and young go "Ennn,")
Michael Harper
Agreed. Bigger isn't always better. The destruction of both the Death Star and Starkiller Base should have had an effect, a shock wave, that would have had an impact on the target world they were near. There was nothing. The absence of cause and effect is a quibble for me. You don't destroy a planet that large without some negative effect. Apart from that, SW7 was very Edmond Hamilton. Give 'em a great story, screw the science.
Michael A. Armstrong
In the first Star Wars, Lucas follows Joseph Campbell's monomyth, the Hero's Journey. That's deliberate. Lucas knew Campbell. The Force Awakens wants to be monomyth, but misses a lot of elements. Who is Rey's mentor, for example?
Joseph Thomas
I'm in PA visiting family. Nearly drove to King of Prussia to see Star Wars - if only I had! I would have loved to have seen you - tho I'm sure I wouldn't have intruded on your outing, as I'm intruding on your Facebook post.

We're going to see a 70mm projection of Hateful Eight on Monday - tho in Philly, not KoP.