Hi, I’m Mrs. Han Solo, and I’m an alcoholic. I’m an alcoholic because George Lucas ruined my life. I mean that in the nicest possible way . . . George is a sadist. But, like any abused child wearing a metal bikini chained to a giant slug about to die, I keep coming back for more.

—Carrie Fisher, roasting George Lucas at the 2005 American Film Institute ceremony where he received a Lifetime Achievement Award

Star Wars turns forty this week, the first movie in the saga premiering in three dozen market-testing cinemas on May 25, 1977. One of the venues was on Hollywood Boulevard, and as the crowds gathered for the matinee screening, Lucas happened to be across the street in a restaurant, having lunch with his wife. He had been up all night and morning trying to finish the soundtrack before the movie’s general release; as described in Brian Jay Jones’s recent biography George Lucas, the director was oblivious to the launch of his own intergalactic fame:

“It was like a mob scene,” Lucas recalled. “One lane of traffic was blocked off. There were police there . . . There were lines, eight or nine people wide, going both ways around the block.” He and Marcia finished their lunch, then stepped out into the street to see what all the fuss was about. “I thought someone must be premiering a movie,” Lucas said later.

Someone was. Emblazoned in huge letters on the marquee on both sides of the entrance above the loud, teeming crowd were two words: STAR WARS

Carrie Fisher’s memoirs, written in her trademark mix of stand-up comedy and breakdown pathos, tell their own prequel-sequel saga of how she felt inextricably chained to Star Wars throughout her “Leia-laden life.” Wishful Drinking closes with a description of the Leia’s save-the-Empire hologram message in the movie — (“This is our most desperate hour. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi — you’re my only hope”) as a George Lucas “poem” that drove her into dependency: “I can’t forget that stupid, fucking hologram speech! That’s why I did dope!” In The Princess Diarist Fisher describes other life-imitating-art moments, such as the day she landed, at age nineteen, the Princess role and the double-bun look to which she became wedded: “My life had started all right. Here I was crossing its threshold in a long white virginal robe with the hair of a seventeenth-century Dutch school matron.”

In How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, Chris Taylor traces the evolution of a $35 billion franchise industry (one so exacting, joked Fisher in her AFI roast of Lucas, “that every time I look in the mirror I have to send you a check for a couple of bucks”). In The World According to Star Wars, Cass R. Sunstein explores how we engage with the saga on multiple levels — religious, political, Oedipal, technological, and more — and how Lucas’s worldview is especially concerned with the issue of free choice. Sunstein is an eminent legal scholar with an interest in behavioral economics; he is also co-author of the bestseller Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness. That book is also about free choice: by nudging individuals toward their best possible options, private and public sector “choice architects” can “influence choices in a way that will make choosers better off, as judged by themselves.” The Star Wars universe is driven, says Sunstein, by nudging, whether towards Jedi or Sith behavior:

Here’s Leia, speaking of Han’s apparent desertion of the rebellion in A New Hope: “A man must follow his own path. No one can choose it for him.” Here’s Obi-Wan to Luke, again in A New Hope: “Then you must do what you think is right, of course.” Here are Lucas’s own words: “Life sends you down funny paths. And you get many opportunities to keep your eyes open.” He was talking about his own life, but he might as well have been talking about Star Wars and the characters who populate it.

Fisher’s memoirs sometimes convey that she felt as if her life had been over-nudged, sometimes that she herself had failed to keep her eyes open to her best path choices. In the last months of her life she became a nudger herself, writing an advice column for The Guardian newspaper. Her encouragement to “Alex,” who had asked about coping with the same sort of mental problems that afflicted Fisher, has an Obi-Wan ring to it: “Move through those feelings and meet me on the other side. As your bipolar sister, I’ll be watching. Now get out there and show me and you what you can do.”

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2qjWIsq

Twelve years ago, I wrote my first book review for The Washington Post which one of the staff members fittingly named “Brainiacs Need Love Too.” As a black guy who grew up in and around the D.C. area for much of his life, and who by fifteen was scrupulously following Michael Dirda’s literary column, I was elated. But what most sticks out about the occasion was the sheepish look that my late, great aunt Marguerite directed at me after she read my article in the paper, which she received every day. Though a consummate hostess able to interact with all sorts of people and put them at their ease, she was confounded by what I’d written. Certainly, its allusions to Dante and the history of the Church’s ambivalent relationship to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake sailed past her. But as much as it bothers me to admit it, I doubt I would’ve been more pleased if she’d gone into raptures over my review because, I knew it wasn’t written for her. It was written for my editor — from whom I naturally wanted to get more work — and for a rarefied audience in my imagination. I naively thought of it as a calling card that would secure my admission into the intellectual class.

I was reminded of this and other unflattering episodes from my life while reading Making It, Norman Podhoretz’s astute though not necessarily always likable memoir about his rise to prominence as a literary critic and later as the editor of Commentary. The book, which was originally published in 1967 and has now been reissued by NYRB Classics, charts the author’s will to power, which takes him from Brownsville — still one of New York City’s most shamefully neglected neighborhoods — to the Upper West Side. Thus, the famous first sentence: “One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan — or at least from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn to certain parts of Manhattan.”

It takes considerable equipoise or security in one’s status to read Making It and not measure oneself against it, for better or worse. You don’t have to be involved in the publishing racket to feel goaded by the author’s account of his accumulation of cultural, social, and monetary capital (in that order), since the text is tension-laced with competitive energy. Furthermore, the author’s guiding precept is that success has displaced sex “as the major ‘dirty little secret’ of the age.” The corollary to this statement is that to deny one’s psychological investment in the competitive field of human endeavors is a sure sign of repression. It is impossible to affect indifference within the context of such a worldview without courting the charge of self-deception or calculated disingenuousness.

Yet, when Making It was first published, people all over the world, notably students, were questioning the legitimacy of the moral order around them. (In the ensuing years, Podhoretz made himself into an enemy of the counterculture.) A book about assimilating into the Establishment could hardly have been more out of step with the zeitgeist of the era. So it was that in early days of 1968, The New York Times published Frederic Raphael’s take on the book, “What Makes Norman Run.” Toward the end of the piece, Raphael shows himself an adept in deploying the type of criticism that Podhoretz, in his book, describes as his forte — i.e., that which uses the book review as a means to touch on larger cultural issues. “We no longer,” Raphael writes, “look to critics with the same servility . . . The resurgence of the movies, as everyone’s medium, a medium which largely postpones judging until showing has been completed, suggests that the whole structure of our presuppositions may be on the point of subversion.” By questioning the sacrosanct dimension of the literary critic’s vocation — which Podhoretz gives every indication of subscribing to — and looking to a changing social structure that threatens to devalue his position, Raphael leaves readers wondering why they should care about a self-described success whose long-term prospects appear shaky.

In Making It, Podhoretz gamely owns up to his own hypersensitivity toward negative criticism. “I responded even to the most enthusiastic reviews,” he writes about those he received for his first essay collection, “as though they were attacks (in this acting exactly like many other writers I had always despised for their childish behavior in the face of criticism).” I hesitate to imagine what Podhoretz, who, after Making It came out, drifted from the anti-Communist Left to the staunchly pro-Establishment Right, must have thought of the Times review of Making It. Even though it was mild in comparison to the drubbing he received in The Nation, which called the book “deplorably inbred,” or The New Leader, which referred to it as “a career expressed as a matchless 360 pages of ejaculation.” But as Norman Mailer (then a friend from whom Podhoretz eventually grew estranged) observed in “Up the Family Tree,” a sympathetic albeit critical appraisal of the book in Partisan Review, “The Establishment has qualities, not the first of which we might suggest is its absolute detestation of any effort to classify or examine it.”

But within these various full or partial snubs one can spot evidence of Making It‘s most useful quality for anyone with writerly ambitions: as a mirror that offers up a painful but perhaps necessary reflection. Early in the book, one finds the sort of admission that’s likely to gall bien-pensants who wish to present themselves as incorruptibly egalitarian or are loath to reflect on their class prejudices. Recalling his well-bred, Vassar-educated high school teacher, Mrs. K., who did her utmost to help him shed the markers of his Brownsville acculturation, Podhoretz states, “She was fond of quoting Cardinal Newman’s definition of a gentleman as a person who could be at ease in any company, yet if anything was clear about the manners she was trying to teach me, it was that they operated — not inadvertently but by deliberate design — to set one at ease only with others similarly trained and to cut one off altogether from those who were not.” Although the young Podhoretz balked at his teacher’s instructions on how he should dress and comport himself, he internalized them to forestall a break with his surrounding community. A break, he notes, that many of his elders in the neighborhood anticipated much sooner that he did.

As the precocious second child of working-class immigrants, Podhoretz grew up with keen sensitivity to class distinctions. At his alma mater, Columbia, he resisted but still felt burdened by a “code of manners” that “forbade one to work too hard or make any effort to impress a professor or to display the slightest concern over grades.” Later, he writes, “So far as the characteristic, upper-class disdain for ambitiousness is concerned — the species of disdain I encountered in youthfully exaggerated form at Columbia — no doubt it was originally adopted as a weapon to be used by those whose wealth was inherited or whose position was secure against those who were occupied with accumulating the one acquiring the other.” Many years later, I found traces of a similar moral code in place when I went to Vassar. Indeed, it was my richest friend, a true scion of the upper class, who dismissed my attempts to foster relationships with my professors and thought nothing about lamenting over how he was too lazy to take advantage of the opportunities that life had afforded him.

Today, when so many people have a tough time finding or keeping decent-paying jobs, and when a subject like income inequality has trickled into the storylines of everything from popular television shows to video games, a book about the obsession over status could hardly feel more relevant. (Recently, one of the most popular stories on The New York Times website concerned the cultural differences that a young man perceived when he left his hometown of Flint, Michigan to attend a summer semester at Phillips Exeter.) If anything, our love/hate relationship with social media, which goes hand-in-glove with the ideology that enjoins us to be our own brand, has probably made us as status-conscious as the courtiers of Versailles ever were.

If you’re fascinated by code switching — adjusting one’s behavior to suit different milieus — or have ever received the cold shoulder from someone at a party who, apart from anything having to do with attraction, assumed you were not in their league, then you will likely find much of interest in this book that plunges deep into the pressure cooker of the American class system.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2q0ZO5v