Jonah, I want to throw in a few more things as grist for your mill.

I saw Star Wars on its first run, and enjoyed it. I saw the Empire Strikes Back, and did not enjoy it. Check out moment: the Numinous Negro basso profundo of Darth Vader saying, Luuuke–I yam your fawther. Junk on stilts.

Then I saw Star Wars when it was re-released some years ago. The bar scene is funny. Harrison Ford was a star being born. It was fun watching Alec Guinness (did I get the right Brit? it wasn’t Gielgud, was it?) walk through a part without trying, though that is a decadent pleasure–art should not be made for the sniggers of critics.

The rest of it? Utterly awful. Lame lines, terrible music, synthetic story. Why was it no surprise that Lucas admired Joseph Campbell? One may be inspired by specific stories–but by a theory of stories?

Someone is sure to say that Star Wars was a pop culture trope of Reaganism. Ronald Reagan had read Witness, and been threatened by commie union goons. He was much more serious than that.

I’m not averse to the relevant genres. I admire the Lord of the Rings (the book), and I enjoyed Star Trek (the first TV show, and most of the movies).

I’m not a snob. I don’t defer to the great names unless they earn it. I recently read Shelly’s The Triumph of Life, and Keats’s Hyperion and the Fall of Hyperion: three incomplete works by great poets, trying to create new mythologies; the Triumph of Life is an atheist’s vision of hell; the Hyperion poems try to make an epic out of the fall of the Titans. Despite much glorious writing, I found myself thinking of Poe, Lovecraft and Hammer films. These are not compliments. Keats’s and Shelley’s imaginations did not match their talents or their intellects.

I am, finally, not in awe of the preceding era of movies. I remember the first time I saw a Rat Pack movie–not Oceans 11, but something about gangsters in Chicago. Sammy Davis and Dean Martin were very talented, and Frank Sinatra was probably a genius. But this movie was so corrupt it glowed. It was excrement you would not put in the compost.

But–George Lucas made a hugely successful piece of rubbish. Steven Spielberg, in his wittier way, has made many more. And we have all suffered.

Thought experiment: post-Lucas, post-Spielberg: Could Lawrence of Arabia be made today?