rock over London. rock on, Chicago.

it was just about 9 am on Sunday morning, and I put “Star Wars” on. it is 2012. this movie is now 35 years old. it needed to be celebrated.

my niece, the one old enough to talk, she wanted to watch “Curious George,” but Uncle Matt said to hell with that noise. it was entirely too early in the day, I reasoned, for children’s programming. you want to watch a movie? okay, I said, I got a movie for you. so we sat there and took in this pop culture staple while my younger, newborn niece slept on my lap, until my older niece got bored and ran off somewhere. she may be a bit too young yet to dig Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker and the rest playing great archetypes, staring wistfully at the two suns, teaching us lessons conveyed through swashbuckling romanticism, all while shitting all over the droids, the underclass in a galaxy a long time ago and far away.

that’s okay, she shouldn’t watch too much TV anyway. but Catherine was sawing logs and I couldn’t reach the remote from the couch, so I finished it out. not like it was pulling teeth or anything because, goddamn: “Star Wars” is a great flick. it involves a pretty simple plot, employs plenty of crazy shit to look at, and makes sure to roll out dozens of little one-liners that imply a lot. which reminds me …

I read a book recently, sometime back in the foul year of our lord, 2011, called “Neuromancer.” it was science fiction and very dense — kind of like a noir set in a future dystopian Internet age. I was impressed by it, and started looking up reviews, and came across an interview with the author, William Gibson, who made mention of how struck he was by a throwaway line in “Escape from New York” – a movie that’s great on its own and I could riff on for hours. in the scene he referred to, Manhattan warden Lee Van Cleef says to Snake Plissken:

“you flew the Gullfire over Leningrad. you know how to get in quiet.”

this is the only mention of Leningrad in that entire movie, to my knowledge. and that could mean any million of things (mostly about a USSR that didn’t collapse in 1991, and a World War III where western commandos infiltrated a Soviet citadel). but the ability to do this is an important, necessary and wonderful facet of science fiction — you can intentionally leave an implication just hangin’ out there, swinging, and allow it to add color the depths of the scenario you’re trying to create and maintain. I can’t do this; I haven’t written fiction of any sort since college. but this is something I’ve always dug about this particular genre.

anyway, something as fantastical – and, as I said, full of “plenty of crazy shit to look at” — as “Star Wars” has a lot of these implications. here are a few:

the appropriately named Greedo: “Jabba’s through with you. he has no time for smugglers who drop their shipments at the first sign of an Imperial cruiser.”

Han Solo, that rascal: “even I get boarded sometimes. do you think I had a choice?”

hmm … just who is this Jabba character, and what kind of illegal mobster shit might he be into? or consider this line …

Han, referring to his boss-ass ship: ”it’s the ship that made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs!”

wait, the ‘Kessel run?’ and what in the shit is a parsec? my mind is blown! but here’s the one that always got me:

Luke, to Obi Wan, in response to an offhand remark by the ol’ Jedi: “you fought in the clone wars?”

now, I remember this line from back in the day, before George Lucas got a money bug up his ass and decided to make three pull-out-all-the-stops, kid-in-a-candy-shop sequels to the original “Star Wars” trilogy. before Lucas showed his starving, supple audience what the “clone wars” his characters were referring to actually were, it was a fictitious contest left entirely to our imaginations. and imagination was not wanting. these movies titilated nerds’ daydreams the world over. hell, I only watched these movies a couple dozen times each, and at the utterance of this particular line the pubsecent version of me always thought: ”holy shit! the clone wars? what is that shit all about? clone wars, that sounds kind of terrifying and exciting at the same time.”

but then, I had my answer. Lucas started making his prequels. and in them he explained all of the backstory as to why Vader is Luke’s father, and how the storm troopers were an army raised and trained at a clandestine space facility by CGI space elves to serve then-Prime Minister Palpatine — who was actually an evil Sith Lord in disguise – and that these petri dish soldiers were all clones of a bounty hunter named Jango Fett, whose only price for allowing himself to be copied was a clone he could raise as a son, which explains the origin of the minor villain Boba Fett from the earlier-made episodes V and VI … and so on and so forth, and in great detail and to little effect. 

because when you weren’t crushed by how bad these new movies were, and by how blatantly driven they were by the promise of a revenue bonanza, you knew that what was originally left implied, I tell you … what was left implied was so much better before we were given an answer. 

so, to end: happy 2012! my niece is healthy, and I’ve changed a diaper. let’s see where we are in another year.