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...worst legacy of Heaven's Gate may yet be this: that 39 people sacrificed themselves to the new millennial kitsch. That's the cultural by-product in which spiritual yearnings are captured in New Age gibberish, then edged with the glamour of sci-fi and the consolations of a toddler's bedtime. In the Heaven's Gate cosmology, where talk about the end of the world alternates with tips for shrugging off your fleshly container, the cosmic and the lethal, the enraptured and the childish come together. Is it any surprise then that it led to an infantile apocalypse...
...ghostly theremin whistling in our inner ear. So a warning: don't infer too much from the connection of cults and culture. For most folks, The X-Files is not the Bible, it's a bedtime story. Only 39 people chose to rev the once-upon-a-mind of sci-fi into revelation; only 39 took their jumble of theological and televisionary lore to beds from which they never awoke. At least, we think they didn't hitch a ride on that UFO. Unless...maybe...
...Star Wars brought a wave of mixed feelings. I sat in a theater surrounded by an audience, the vast majority of whom were not even born when I first saw the film in 1977. I thought the scenes dragged in comparison to the manic action of today's sci-fi extravaganzas. I realized that not a single adult in the theater felt the way he did when he saw the movie for the first time. Not a single preteen managed to make it through without suppressing some yawns. The story of the good guys' triumph is too slow...
...next bit of news was significantly less welcome. Apparently, Sir Alec is not an entirely contented participant in the Star Wars, which was originally just a nutty sci-fi picture he agreed to work on because of his admiration for George Lucas, eclipsed the rest of his long and distinguished career. Indeed, in his 1985 autobiography Blessings in Disguise, written some eight years after the first part of the Trilogy, Guinness mentions Star Wars only once (that once is a snide comment about how much money it earned him). The conclusion seemed unavoidable: Obi-Wan was whining. My friend added...
...publicity mill of Twentieth-Century Fox makes abundantly clear--in the course of leafing through some 39 handouts--that Lucas has maintained an ongoing infatuation for many years with the sci-fi heroes who thrilled a generation, and then some, of American youths from the 1930s onwards. Lucas worked hard on "Star Wars"; his first film since the 1974 hit "American Graffiti," the 33-year-old director spent the better part of three years writing the script (during which time he drew up four different versions) before he commenced shooting in March 1976. A lot of care and effort went...