Word: obi-wan
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...Obi-Wan Kenobi: "Oh, he's not dead...
Imagine my shock, then, when he called me up two weeks ago in a complete panic and told me to brace myself for extraordinary news: Sir Alec Guinness, the distinguished British actor who played Obi-Wan Kenobi, was not dead. Very maturely, I replied, "You wanna bet?" But he was convinced and began to recite the evidence. He had just come home from a family vacation and had seen a copy of a book written by Guinness in 1996. What's more, he read an article in Time magazine which seemed to make it very clear that...
...trusting comrades, who in turn transmitted it to their comrades. In short, I am responsible for an entire community of people who are convinced that Alec Guinness, who is presently alive and well and living in a London suburb, actually bit it back in the late '80s. Obi-Wan Kenobi's dialogue with Luke in that memorable scene from Star Wars, as a result, had its unlikely effect on me: "Oh, he's not dead; not yet." Well, apparently...
...Star Wars became an almost "academic" exercise in refashioning ancient myths for modern audiences (at the time--no surprise--he was reading a lot of Joseph Campbell). In this vein, Lucas' most memorable invention was his notion of the Force--"an energy field created by all living things," as Obi-Wan Kenobi puts it. "It's a distillation of a lot of mythological religious teachings," Lucas says. "Not that I'm promoting a particular idea or anything. I believe in God, and I guess that's reflected in the movie, but that's about as far as it goes...
...sleek retro-kitsch; even the opening logo has acquired the classic blockiness of a '56 DeSoto. One can find endearment in the lame badinage of C-3PO, in Carrie Fisher's bagel-like hairdo, in the whining and bickering of the lead characters, in the varying pronunciations of Obi-Wan Kenobi and the planet Alderaan. The invocation to "trust your feelings" seems a woozy echo of the '67 Summer of Love, not the '77 summer of Wars, but Alec Guinness carries himself with the majesty of a Jedi knight and an acting peer. The climactic dogfight, copied in a quillion...