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Song as Story: The Music Video

/ Rick Ellrod / 7 Comments

The Story of a Song

A song—especially a love song—often implies a story.

Some songs, it’s true, just express a state of things:  say, being in love.  The Beatles’ “Here, There and Everywhere” talks about things that happen (“Someone is speaking, but she doesn’t know he’s there”)—but nothing actually changes in the song.  It’s a snapshot of a relationship.

But frequently the song refers to a sequence of events, and this sequence is at least a fragment of a story.  “She Loves You,” after the refrain, starts out “You think you lost your love” (addressing someone who had been in love, but they seem to have broken up).  The lyric continues:  “Well, I saw her yesterday” (the singer/friend brings new information)—and eventually looks to the future (“Apologize to her”).  The song describes a progression in a relationship.

The Story of the Video

When the modern music video came into vogue in the 1960s, and picked up steam with the advent of MTV in 1981, a new factor was added.  If the video simply showed the band performing the song, then the story implied by the song didn’t change.  But if the video began to incorporate other elements, such as actors or band members acting out things that occurred in the song, then new possibilities opened up.  Is the story we hear always the same as the story we see?

Steven Curtis Chapman, from The Great Adventure music video
“The Great Adventure”

The pure performance video represents what we might call the null case—just the song, illustrated by imagery of the band.  The next step is represented by a video that provides a sort of impressionistic imagery the illustrates themes or ideas in the song, without altering the storyline.  For example, the video of Peter Cetera’s “One Good Woman” shows clips of Cetera singing the song, interspersed with roses and bottles on tables, kisses and embraces, the faces of women who might be the one referred to in the title, plus other images whose relevance is less clear (clocks, hats, a metronome, abstract shapes).  The concept video for “The Great Adventure” riffs on the lyrics (“Saddle up your horses / We’ve got a trail to blaze”) with Western ranch scenery, as well as images of walls falling that express the movement of the song.  For similar examples, check out “True Believers” and “Once in a Lifetime.”

Showing the Story

“Austin”

In the most literal sense, the video can amplify the impact of a song by simply depicting the events described in the lyrics.  For example, Blake Shelton’s song “Austin” tells a rather charming tale in which a woman has gone off to Austin, but realizes from the answering-machine messages of the man she left behind that he still loves her.  The video actually shows us clips of the events the song is talking about, interspersed with shots of Shelton singing, making the story more vivid.

Such a visual rendition in effect replaces our imagination of the story with a particular interpretation, in the same way that a movie makes visible in a particular way the action of the book it was based on.  Of course, this runs the risk of disrupting the viewer’s appreciation, if the filmmaker’s idea is distinctly different from the viewer’s:  “I didn’t picture it like that at all.”  But it can also bring out the story more forcefully by providing lifelike imagery where our imaginations might not have been so vivid.

The video can also intensify the effect of a song by providing a visual mini-story that doesn’t exactly correlate with what the song is about, but reinforces it thematically.  Take, for instance, Martina McBride’s “Ride,” which is about an overall attitude toward life.  The video gives us a sequence about young people stuck in a traffic jam, who (watching a projection of McBride’s performance on a billboard) start having fun with each other in the spirit of the music.  There’s nothing specific about traffic jams in the song, but the video sequence does add a further element of enjoyment to the effect of the song alone.  Or take a look at the video of Carrie Underwood’s “Love Wins,” which very effectively underlines the song’s message through images of people making their way to a celebration.

Expanding the Story

“Mine”

The video can also take a slightly different direction by sticking to the original storyline, but adding elements.  For example, in “Mine,” Taylor Swift describes her character as “a flight risk with a fear of falling,” and her boyfriend tells her that “we’ll never make my parents’ mistakes”—but the actual backstory isn’t specific.  In the video, we see footage of her parents quarreling while Swift’s character as a child looks on, and this adds weight to the fight described in the song’s bridge—and thus to the uplift of her lover’s refusal to give up:  we actually see them marrying and having a baby at the end.  The story has expanded.

Similarly, in the video of Gloriana’s “(Kissed You) Good Night,” we get some opening dialogue adding context that may not have been contemplated in the song itself:  the boy is in the Army and leaving the next day.  The titular kiss goodnight is a more definitive farewell than we could have guessed from the lyrics alone.  In Dierks Bentley’s reflective “Home,” the variety of the faces of America appearing in the video add depth to the song.  The music video of Brad Paisley’s “Welcome to the Future” actually incorporates brief clips of children explaining what they want to be when they grow up—reinforcing the sense of possibility and achievement that makes the song compelling.

Changing the Story

Sometimes, however, the video seems to take off in a different direction from that of the original song.

“I Know You’re Out There Somewhere”

I’m fond of the late Moody Blues song “I Know You’re Out There Somewhere” (1988).  (In fact, I have a sketch for a novel partly inspired by the song, but that’s another story.)  As the title suggests, the lyrics depict a man searching for the girl he once loved.  The video isn’t entirely inconsistent with that idea:  the singer is clearly looking back to a love affair in the ’60s.  But the singer is depicted in his actual persona, as a budding rock star, hustled away from her by the demands of the music business.  As a result, we see much more of her longing for him than of him longing for her.  The regret is mutual, but the emphasis is different.

Taking the discrepancy further, Céline Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now” evokes a pair of lovers who had broken up but are now getting back together.  At least, that’s what the lyric sounds like to me.  But in the video it appears that Céline’s lover rode off on a motorcycle and died in an accident.  Unless she’s being visited by a very substantial ghost—which would actually fit the rather Gothic tone of the video—they don’t actually seem to be reunited at all.  (It gets weirder:  according to the notes at the bottom of the lyrics page, the song was actually written for a play based on the Peter Pan story, and the lyrics were inspired by Wuthering Heights.  As for the motorcycle, who knows where that came from.)

Gary Allan’s “Every Storm Runs Out of Rain” appears to be addressed to someone who’s lost their love, encouraging them to last through their pain and find someone new (“And walk out that door, go find a new rose, don’t be afraid of the thorns”).  The video features a woman who’s clearly suffering (in a rainstorm), but at the end her soldier husband comes back.  They were separated, true, but she’s not finding a “new rose,” just watering (as it were) one that was drooping.

Adding a Comic Note

The temptation to make the music video more of a humorous riff on the original song—a spoof of itself—must be strong.  In a number of cases, the video makers seem to have decided just to have fun with the concept.

“Heaven is a Place on Earth”

We started with the Beatles; their movies A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965) consist largely of song performances, but the accompanying video clip often has little to do with the subject of the song; sometimes it’s simply surreal.  There’s a similar feel to the video of Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is A Place On Earth,” which opens with a bunch of masked children carrying lighted globes.  We see these globes, apparently inspired by the mention of “Earth” in the title, splashing into water, or lying on a dark reflective surface.  There are also shots of Carlisle singing and embracing a lover, but we keep coming back to these kids and their globes.  Often they appear to be running in place.  If that means something deep, I’m missing it.

“Shadows of the Night,” best known for a Pat Benatar recording in 1982, is one of those songs in which a pair of lovers is escaping into the darkness from some unspecified amorous angst.  Might be an interesting story, though the lyric doesn’t provide much detail.  Apparently it was actually composed for a movie about two young runaways in New York City, as discussed here, here, and here, and what seem to be the original lyrics were distinctly different.  None of them, however, refer to anything like what we see in Benatar’s wacky music video, in which she seems to be playing the part of a World War II aviator/spy—or perhaps Rosie the Riveter, daydreaming.

“I Got You”

The filmmakers for Thompson Square’s “I Got You” decided to take off on the fact that the song has almost the same title as, and develops the same theme as, Sonny & Cher’s iconic hit “I Got You Babe.”  The duo is performing the song on a TV variety show hosted by themselves dressed up like Sonny & Cher.  The video has fun with the gap between the two time periods:  the pair hands “Sonny & Cher” their CD, but since that format didn’t exist in the ’60s, the hosts have no idea what to do with it, biting it like a donut, using it as a mirror, finally employing it as a coaster.

The video of “Take On Me,” by a-ha, starts with drawings of a motorcycle race, apparently part of a graphic book a girl sitting in a diner is reading.  When the boy in the drawing reaches out a three-dimensional sketched hand to her, she takes it, and is literally pulled into the story as a line drawing.  As far as I can see, the video has nothing to do with the song, but it is good wacky fun.

At times it isn’t clear whether the humor is intended or inadvertent.  Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” is a fine song, but the video takes the Gothic further than Céline and the random further than Carlisle.  We see stained-glass windows, doves fluttering, Tyler looking out at the moon.  A man walks in, and, apparently because Tyler’s backup singer refers to her as “Bright Eyes,” the man has literally glowing eyes.  Boys sit in a classroom and toast around a table.  Dancers with wings cavort around the singer.  There’s literally an invasion of ninjas; at least, I think that’s what they are.  The effect is so surreal that someone called “dascottjr” did a “literal video” version, having a woman sing lyrics that actually describe what’s happening on-camera.  It’s hilarious.

Conclusion

The music video is a distinct art form, building on music but adding a new dimension.  The two aspects may cohere, collide, or simply spin off in different directions.  The result is a combination that we can enjoy on its own merits.

Tangled in Sequels

/ Rick Ellrod / 7 Comments

So, okay, I gave in and signed up for Disney+.  It’s not as if I needed the streaming service to see the Disney fairy tales, or Star Wars, or the Marvel movies; I have those on disc.  But there were these other things.  First, I wanted to see the Hamilton movie (just as impressive as it’s cracked up to be).  Then, since I was already subscribed for a month, I figured I’d check out The Mandalorian, if only to keep up my geek cred—it had taken me a while just to figure out where all the “Baby Yoda” memes were coming from.

By the end of the first month, I’d scanned the offerings and marked down a bunch of other things that I’d sort of wanted to see, or that I hadn’t known about but looked interesting, and now could get without paying more than I already was.  And I was off and streaming . . .

One of the unanticipated things I turned up was a set of ancillary videos related to the 2010 fairy-tale adaptation Tangled, Disney’s version of the Rapunzel story.  And thereby hangs a blog post.

A Tangle of Sequels

I’ve always been fond of the Tangled movie.  But the continuing story also turned out to be remarkably good.  As a rule, sequels to Disney princess movies tend to be humdrum affairs dashed off to exploit the movie’s popularity—though I must admit that I say this without having seen very many of them; ventures like The Little Mermaid II or Cinderella II:  Dreams Come True never seemed to deserve even a look.  (Frozen II is a decided exception.)

But the Tangled folks managed to pull off some impressive work in the follow-up media.  To discuss it in detail, of course, I’m going to have to deploy detailed spoilers.

Spoiler Alert!

In 2012 Disney released a six-minute cartoon, Tangled Ever After, which is basically a comic bit about the exploits of the animal characters during the wedding of Rapunzel and her romantic interest, Eugene Fitzherbert (who previously used the name of legendary rogue-hero “Flynn Rider”).  Nothing of interest there.

Rapunzel and the black rocks

However, in 2017 the Disney Channel debuted a 55-minute short film, Tangled:  Before Ever After.  As the title indicates, this story takes place before the wedding sequence.  The day before Rapunzel’s coronation, her lady-in-waiting, a tough-minded and capable girl named Cassandra, helps her sneak out beyond the kingdom’s walls to get away from the stress and chaos of the preparations.  At the site of the magic flower that originally gave Rapunzel’s hair its healing powers, they find a stand of mysterious pointed black rocks.  When Rapunzel touches one, more rocks suddenly sprout from the ground, forcing them to flee.  But Rapunzel’s hair, which was cut short and returned to its natural brown in the original movie, suddenly turns blonde again and reverts to its 70-foot tower length.

This business with the black rocks is the story’s “One Ring,” the MacGuffin that links the old story to the new and provides the plot driver going forward.  It isn’t explained or resolved in Before Ever After, but serves as the hook for the three-season TV series (2016-2020) that followed.  The series was initially labeled “Tangled:  The Series,” but in its second season was rechristened Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure.  Season 1 follows Rapunzel’s experiences in her parents’ kingdom; Seasons 2 and 3 take her and her companions on the road on a long-running quest.  Wikipedia has a handy list of the episodes.

Rapunzel's Tangled Adventures, opening graphic

The series is where most of the plot and character development occurs.  It concluded in March 2020.  At this point it’s pretty clear that no further follow-ons are necessary, though one can’t rule out the possibility (“never say never again”).  There’s also a stage musical (a version of the movie) and a video game, which I haven’t seen and assume are not in the continuity.  Wikipedia’s convenient overall reference for the Tangled franchise is here.

Opening Out the Ever After

The first challenge in making a sequel to a fairy-tale movie is what to do about the ending.  Traditionally, these stories end in a romantic happily-ever-after.  If the main characters marry at the end (or immediately afterward), we’ve resolved the romantic tension.  In addition, it may be hard to reconcile the vague vision of enduring happiness with the kinds of perilous adventures that would give life to a sequel.

The “before ever after” notion is thus productive.  The characters can have further adventures even before their happiness is, as it were, sealed.  We can stave off the fairy-tale ending, without subverting it entirely.  To ruin the romance would be opprobrious, diminishing the appeal of the original story; but there’s no reason it has to come to fruition (presumably in a wedding) at once.

It’s particularly easy to take advantage of this idea if the couple hasn’t actually become engaged in the original story (even though the audience knows perfectly well that’s going to happen).  Some reduced degree of romantic tension remains if the character still has to work up the nerve to propose, though the issue becomes more comical than dramatic.  (A similar tactic was used in Frozen II.)

Eugene proposes to Rapunzel

Thus, Eugene proposes to Rapunzel several times in the course of the sequels.  She doesn’t accept at once.  She wants to marry Eugene, but she isn’t quite ready yet.  This brings out the familiar “moral” that a girl’s future is not solely bound up in marriage.  It also makes psychological sense—and this is one of the ways in which the Tangled sequels intelligently carry forward the original storyline.  As other characters point out, Rapunzel has spent almost all her life locked up in a tower, never meeting another human being but her “mother” captor.  It seems hardly appropriate to expect her immediately to enter into a marriage.

Of course, Rapunzel could marry and still have adventures.  The story thus plays around with the notion that “happily ever after” means the end of adventures and of our interest in the characters—a notion I’ve criticized elsewhere.  It both dodges, and runs into, that trap.

The World and the Plot

Varian, alchemist with goggles
Varian

 

Since the continuing story takes Rapunzel into new territory, both within and later beyond the Kingdom of Corona (which turned out to be a somewhat infelicitous name for this year, however appropriate for a princess), it was also necessary to expand the world.  The writers carry out this worldbuilding exercise with enough novelty to earn some credit.  For example, one of the new secondary characters is a young alchemist named Varian.  Although his alchemy is technically magic, he firmly takes the position that it’s science, not fantasy.  He thus adds a sort of steampunk vibe to the whole business.

Picture of Adira
Adira

 

The second season of the series introduces a secret society of crack warriors who are in some way protecting or defending the source of the black rocks.  An enigmatic woman named Adira provides them with clues, along with ominous nonspecific warnings, and occasionally ends up sparring with the suspicious Cassandra.  She and other members of the “Brotherhood of the Dark Kingdom” sometimes end up opposing or challenging the main characters, though they are basically on the same side.  This secret society’s stance is reminiscent of the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

The most striking element of the plot is the long-running plot arc, which begins with the black-rock episode in Before Ever After and isn’t completed until the final episode of the series.  The black rocks are tied in with the “sundrop flower” that originally gave Rapunzel her powers, so they link back neatly into the original movie.  Keeping such an über-plot going over sixty episodes is a challenge, and the writers lay in enough complications and reversals to make it work.

This long-term development isn’t perfectly uniform.  There are one-off episodes sandwiched in, often with throwaway plots (Max the noble steed is threatened by a competing evil horse!  The queen’s annoying sister shows up for a visit!).  Nor do the “side quest” episodes always make sense.  In one show (Season 2 Episode 6), Rapunzel and Eugene decide to go off on a “date” while the group is encamped on the road in the middle of nowhere.  (Butterbur in The Lord of the Rings:  “Well, you do want looking after and no mistake:  your party might be on a holiday!”)  At the same time, these one-offs do sometimes have a point.  The “date” introduces some characters who eventually turn out to be crucial to the plot.  For another example, in a primarily silly episode (S2 E18) which turns most of the characters into toddlers, we get a fairly interesting lecture on parenting styles, courtesy of Rapunzel and Eugene.

The metaphysics, the “theory of magic,” is somewhat murky.  Rapunzel’s “sundrop” and the “Moonstone” source of the black rocks have a sort of yin-yang relationship, but the Moonstone power is sometimes presented as evil, and sometimes as merely complementary.  Rapunzel’s long hair, as restored in Before Ever After, has lost its power to heal, but has now arbitrarily become invulnerable—uncuttable—just like the black rocks.  The conclusion of the story does make some degree of sense, though, so this particular worldbuilding weakness isn’t fatal.

Captain Quaid and citizens in Vardaros
Captain Quaid’s return

 

The story is willing to deal with serious issues.  For example, the story introduces some genuine moral dilemmas, as when Rapunzel has to break a promise to Varian in S1 E16, which leads to no end of trouble for everyone.  Some cogent sociopolitical points are raised, unlikely though that seems in a cartoon, in the second and third episodes of Season 2.  Rapunzel and her followers want to reform the city of Vardaros, whose citizens have collapsed into a state of mutual distrust and predation.  Rapunzel’s effort to use sheer niceness to show the inhabitants a better way doesn’t work:  the locals don’t trust these strangers.  Instead, Rapunzel and company have to convince the former “sheriff” everyone trusted to come back out of retirement and lead the reform.  The success of this strategy is still a bit cut-and-dried, but for two 24-minute episodes, it’s handled pretty well.

Other character developments can also be surprisingly sophisticated.  The scheming girl Eugene was supposed to marry ends up being reformed—but she still steals the party’s money; she doesn’t suddenly become sweetness and light.  An entire episode (S1 E2) is devoted to showing that, even though Rapunzel is so adorable that everyone loves her, there’s one old guy in Corona who doesn’t—and he’s a good guy, respected by everyone, kind and helpful; he just doesn’t especially care for Rapunzel.  And the moral of this story is that you don’t have to make everyone like you—a good thing for a young viewer (or even an older one) to recognize.

The sequels are thoroughly genre-savvy—a good platform for ringing new changes on the stock fairy-tale conventions.  In S2 E 23, the characters are threatened by “…lethal, inescapable traps.”  An array of nasty spikes springs up—and immediately crumble into ruin.  “They’re old,” one character remarks, pinpointing one of the silly aspects of Indiana Jones-type adventures where centuries-old mechanical devices work perfectly without deterioration.  And at the end of the second season, the characters walk into a whole series of classic Star Wars and Lord of the Rings tropes in succession—surely on purpose.

Carrying On the Characters:  Rapunzel

The most interesting aspect of the Tangled sequels is the treatment of Rapunzel herself.

Rapunzel’s role in the movie is that of a “fish out of water” character—the naïve newcomer to the world, to whom everything is new and fascinating.  That’s one of the things I like about the movie.  Another is that she faces this brave new world outside the tower with kindness and wonder, though not without a sensible caution that’s sometimes deployed against the wrong targets, for comic effect.  It isn’t by accident that Eugene calls her “Sunshine.”

Although she has to deal with progressively more fearsome and even heartbreaking problems as the series goes on, Rapunzel doesn’t lose that essential innocence.  Yet, imperceptibly—and that’s the artistry—through the second and third seasons, she develops into the genuine leader of the group.  She becomes capable of making difficult decisions.  She isn’t intimidated by threats.  When she has to take over governance of the kingdom, she falters at first, but later on becomes perfectly capable of running things without her parents.  The changes are highlighted in the “dream trap” episode, S2 E19, where the matured Rapunzel speaks with her earlier self.

Rapunzel on horseback, brandishing hair

She even becomes a capable fighter in her own right.  Rapunzel uses her long, indestructible hair like Indiana Jones’ whip, as both a weapon and a tool.  Of course, this is cartoon physics.  This slender girl hurls around what’s essentially a 70-foot rope without any issues of strength or leverage; it catches onto things and releases them just as she wishes, like Indy’s whip.  The hair only gets in her way, or is used against her, when the plot requires it.  It never frizzes or becomes unruly (fortunately for everyone nearby).  Nonetheless, her trademark feature, which seems a romantic beauty mark at first glance, transforms her into a melee fighter, who can hold her own in a scrap.

While Rapunzel is no longer a magical healer, she does gain the ability to use ‘sundrop power’ over time.  This power is erratic and not dependable, but it does rise to cosmic levels at the point where she can blow up an entire landscape at the end of Season 2.  TV Tropes rightly cites her under the Films–Animation section of Badass Adorable.

The really remarkable thing about this maturing process is that Rapunzel is not altered out of recognition.  She retains that essential sweetness of character that made her so likable in the movie.  To depict a character who is both powerful and “nice” is difficult, and rare.  When we have a chance to see the character visibly grow into that maturity, with both continuity and change, the writers’ achievement is noteworthy.

Carrying On the Characters:  Others

Not all the other characters fare as well.

Romantic interest Eugene, in the sequels, gets somewhat dumbed down or, in TV Tropes’ term, “Flanderized”:  turned into a caricature of himself.  His vanity, a nicely balanced flaw in the movie, becomes tiresome when played out in every episode.  His capability is uneven:  sometimes he’s clever, sometimes clueless; sometimes he’s a formidable fighter, sometimes ineffective—as the plot may require.  This is a classic problem in a continuing series, where different writers may produce inconsistent characterization.

Rapunzel’s parents, also, are not too well managed.  In the movie, they’re merely props:  the welcoming family to which Rapunzel can finally return at the end.  In the series, we’re told that her mother, Queen Arianna, was once a sort of adventurer herself—but we see little of that.  Her father, King Frederic (what a promising name!), tends to play the overbearing, irrationally restrictive father, generally as an obstacle to Rapunzel’s self-assertion.  The two of them tend to fade out almost entirely toward the end of the series to give Rapunzel sole center stage.

Cassandra
Cassandra

 

The great prize among the new characters is Cassandra.  Her edgy but loyal personality makes her a perfect foil for the sunny Rapunzel.  That same sardonic cynicism makes it plausible when she veers from the path of righteousness and aligns herself with the enemies at the end of Season 2, a development that is carefully shaped over much of that season.  In particular, she highlights an aspect of hero-stories that doesn’t get much attention.  What happens if you’re not the Chosen One?  If the whole motion of the plot is toward Rapunzel’s destiny, how does the henchperson feel whose role is simply to support the main character?  Doesn’t she have a destiny too?

The series as a whole shows a certain bias toward what we might call the “Arthas Effect,” a plot staple in the World of Warcraft game:  an initially good character becomes corrupted and turns into a major villain.  The two most prominent secondary characters, Cassandra and Varian, are both subject to this kind of transformation at different times.  The basically positive tone of the Tangled story is borne out by the fact that each eventually repents and returns to the side of good.  But the “turn to the Dark Side” motif helps keep the tale from becoming too optimistic or Pollyanna-ish.

The Romance

The Tangled sequels honor the original movie’s romance.  We see from the very beginning that Rapunzel and Eugene do get married eventually.  But that aspect is sidelined in such a way that the impetus of the romantic interest is largely lost.

During the entire first season, Rapunzel and Eugene hang around the castle, waiting for—what?  We noted above that Rapunzel puts off the wedding, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  But her reasons remain rather vague, and we don’t see much of the longing or attraction I’d expect from a couple of young people who are very much in love.  It’s as if the writers every now and then remember that there’s supposed to be a love affair going on, but mostly take that to be understood.

The diverging development of the two characters also creates a somewhat unsatisfying disparity.  While Rapunzel develops in power, competence, and maturity, Eugene has no comparable character arc.  As a result, by the end we may ask ourselves whether he’s really sufficient for her.  The lovers are “unevenly matched,” a problem I’ve noted before.

Rapunzel with Eugene and Cassandra

Conclusion

The key theme of the extended Tangled story, as I see it, is that power and innocence are compatible.  You can be a consummately nice, caring, pretty, cheerful sort—and still have the determination, endurance, capability, and courage to fight what needs fighting.

Rapunzel is not the only example of such a seemingly-paradoxical character.  But the writers were able to take advantage of the extended development of the TV series to showcase in detail how a person can grow to take on that mantle.  It’s something we always need to see more of.

Human Extraterrestrials

/ Rick Ellrod / 12 Comments

Introduction

Even though science fiction is often focused on the future, its assumptions are tied to the present.

Aldrin descends from Apollo 11In some respects this is obvious.  A story about the near future can become dated by history itself.  Every SF story prior to 1969 that describes the first moon landing in detail (happy 51st anniversary, last week!) is obsolete.  And every story that predicted a smooth reach out into colonizing the solar system directly after that first landing, unfortunately, is also defunct.  Stories can also be rendered unbelievable by scientific advance:  all the delightful tales based on a habitable Venus or Mars are gone with the, er, vacuum.

But there’s also a subtler way.  Even though F&SF specialize in examining our assumptions about the universe, the assumptions that seem plausible shift over time.  Fashions change.  To take a heartening example:  SF stories from the late 1940s and the 1950s tended to take it for granted that there would shortly be a nuclear world war.  (Hence it’s spot-on characterization when the 1955 version of Doc Brown in “Back to the Future” accepts Marty’s recorded appearance in a hazmat suit as logical because of the “fallout from the atomic wars.”)  But for over seventy years, we’ve managed to avoid that particular catastrophe.

One assumption that’s always intrigued me is whether we are likely to meet people like ourselves—and I mean, exactly like ourselves—on another planet.  If we discovered an Earthlike planet of another sun, might we climb down the ladder from our spaceship to shake hands with a biologically human alien?

Not Really Alien

I’m talking about a “convergent evolution” hypothesis—the notion that the human species might have developed independently more than once.  And, incidentally, the standard biological definition of “species” as “interfertile” (a more precise definition can be found on Wikipedia) is what I’m using here; because, obviously, one of the potential uses of the assumption in a story is to make possible a romance between two characters from different worlds, and romance is not unrelated to sex and reproduction.

The Cometeers coverSo we want to set aside, to begin with, a class of stories in which people from different planets are all human because they have a common ancestry.  For example, in Jack Williamson’s classic space opera The Cometeers (1936), Bob Star finds his true love Kay Nymidee among the human subjects of the decidedly nonhuman masters of an immense assemblage of space-traveling planets, the “comet.”  But the reason there are human beings present is that a research ship from Earth was captured by the Cometeers long ago, and these are the descendants of the crew.

It’s not uncommon for the inheritance to work the other way around.  David Weber’s “Mutineers’ Moon” (1991) starts with the eye-opening assumption that our Moon is actually a long-inert giant spaceship—and reveals that the humanity of Earth is descended from the original crew members of that spaceship.  Thus, it’s perfectly plausible when hero Colin MacIntyre falls for a preserved member of the original crew; they’re from the same stock.  Similarly, in at least the original 1978 version of Battlestar Galactica, the human survivors of the “rag-tag fugitive fleet” are human because Earth itself was one of their original colonies, which apparently fell out of touch.

The Era of Planetary Romance

In the early days of modern SF—say, from about 1912 through the 1930s—it was commonly assumed that the answer was yes:  human beings (with minor variations) might be found independently on other planets.  Arguably, this may have been because the early planetary romances—melodramas set on exotic worlds, heavy on adventure and love stories—were less interested in science than in plot devices.  But biology was less advanced in those days; recall that DNA was not identified as the basis of genetic inheritance until 1952.  It’s easy to forget how little we knew about things we take for granted today, even in relatively recent periods.

A classic early case is that of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom.  In A Princess of Mars (1912), Earthman John Carter is transported by obscure means to Mars, called by its inhabitants “Barsoom.”  Those inhabitants include the nonhuman “Green Martians,” but also people identical to humans in several colors, particularly the “Red Martians” among whom Carter finds his lady-love, Dejah Thoris.  As a Red Martian, Dejah is human enough for Carter to mate with, and they have a son, Carthoris, thus meeting the “interfertile” criterion.

Lynn Collins as Dejah Thoris in John Carter of Mars

Lynn Collins as Dejah Thoris

To be sure, the biology here is a little mysterious.  Dejah looks entirely human, and even, to borrow a Heinlein phrase, “adequately mammalian” (see, for example, Lynn Collins’ portrayal in the loosely adapted movie John Carter (2012)).  But Martians don’t bear their young as Earth-humans do; they lay eggs, which then develop for ten years before hatching.  It’s not easy to imagine the genetics that could produce viable offspring from an individual whose genes direct live birth and one whose genes result in egg-laying.  But that didn’t stop Burroughs.

E.E. Smith, whose initial SF writing goes back just about as far as that of Burroughs, was willing to accept this trope as well.  In The Skylark of Space (published 1928, but written between 1915 and 1921), our intrepid heroes travel to a planet inhabited by two nations of essentially human people—although the double wedding in the story does not involve any interplanetary romances, but is between two pairs of characters from Earth.  Smith’s later Lensman series (1948-1954), which features one of the most diverse arrays of intelligent creatures in SF, also allows for apparently interfertile humans from a variety of planets.  My impression is that this sort of duplication was also true of some of the nonhuman species in the Lensman unverse—there might be, say, Velantian-types native to planets other than Velantia.

This approach wasn’t universal in old-time SF.  The more scientifically-minded John W. Campbell’s extraterrestrial character Torlos in Islands of Space (1930) was generally humanoid in form, but quite different in makeup:  his iron bones, for instance.  It’s been argued that a roughly humanoid form has some advantages for an intelligent species, and hence that we might find vaguely humanoid aliens on different planets—though this is pure speculation.  But “humanoid” is a far cry from biologically human.

Darkover Landfall coverWe see some persistence of this tradition into the second half of the twentieth century.   Marion Zimmer Bradley’s iconic planet Darkover, for instance (first novel published 1958), is populated by the descendants of Terran humans from a colony ship and also by the elf-like indigenous Chieri, who, despite minor differences like six fingers and golden eyes, not to mention the ability to change sex at will, have interbred with the Terran immigrants.

An interesting variation can be seen in Julian May’s Saga of Pliocene Exile (first story published in 1981).  When modern humans are sent on a one-way trip into the distant past, they are enslaved by the Tanu, aliens from another galaxy who have settled on Earth.  The story indicates that the Tanu were specifically searching for a place where the local gene pool was similar to theirs—which might also account for why they came all the way from another galaxy (also a somewhat antique trope) to get here.

It’s slightly odd that, even where basically identical human beings turn up on other planets, other animals never seem to be similarly duplicated.  On Burroughs’ Barsoom, one doesn’t ride horses, but thoats; is menaced not by tigers, but by banths; and keeps a calot, not a dog, as a pet.  In a planetary romance or science fantasy setting, one is less likely to see Terran-equivalent fauna than parallel creatures with exotic names and slight differences—whence the SF-writing gaffe “Call a Rabbit a Smeerp” (see TV Tropes and the Turkey City Lexicon).

At the Movies

The all-too-human trope is carried on into the present day in video media—movies and TV.  Again, this may be partly because the science is often subordinated to the plot; but the cost and difficulty of putting convincing nonhuman characters on-screen is surely another factor.  Filmmakers’ ability to depict exotic creatures, however, has changed immensely in the last forty years, to a point where almost any imaginable creature can be created if the budget is sufficient.  Thus, the original Star Trek series of the 1960s stuck largely to slightly disguised humanoid aliens, perhaps relying on the ‘universal humanoid’ hypothesis mentioned above, while later series were able to branch out a bit.  Similarly, the Star Wars movies could readily give us nonhuman characters like Jabba the Hutt, Chewbacca, and C3PO; they, too, grew in variety as the capabilities of CGI and other techniques expanded.

Jupiter Ascending movie posterStill, it may be harder for us to adjust to interactions among characters where we can see their nonhumanity, rather than just reading about it.  So we still tend to see extraterrestrial humans on-screen.  The Kree in Captain Marvel (2019), for example, are indistinguishable from humans—an actual plot point, since this makes it possible for Yon-Rogg to tell Carol that she’s an enhanced Kree rather than a kidnapped human.  The Kree do have blue blood, in the movie; it’s not clear what kind of biological difference (hemocyanin?) might result in that feature.  We also see a number of alien humans in Jupiter Ascending (2015), though I think of that tale as a deliberate throwback to pulpish science fantasy or planetary romance.

A Match Made in Space, fictional coverI keep wanting to cite the fictional novel written by George McFly as shown in the closing scenes of Back to the Future, “A Match Made in Space,” since the cover seems to suggest an interplanetary romance (and one thinks of George as a nerdy romantic); but it isn’t actually clear whether that’s the case.  All we have to go on is the title and the cover, and that could just as easily depict a match between two humans, fostered by an alien matchmaker (or vice versa).

The Modern Era

We don’t see nearly as many extraterrestrial humans in modern SF, and for good reason.

The more we understand about genetics, the less likely it seems that another human species, so closely similar as to be interfertile, could evolve independently.  What we know about evolution suggests that there are just too many random chances along the way—cases where the prevailing mutations might have turned out differently.  Even if we assume that humanoid form is probable, why not have six fingers, or hemocyanin rather than hemoglobin?  While I’m not well enough educated in biology to venture any actual probabilities, I think our growing sense of the complexity of the human body and its workings, over the last seventy years or so, has simply made it seem vanishingly unlikely that an independently evolved intelligence would come out that close to the human genotype.

For example, the scientifically-minded Arthur C. Clarke depicted a galaxy in which each intelligent species, including humans, was unique:  The City and the Stars (1956, developed from an earlier story published in 1948).  In one of the unused story fragments he wrote while working on 2001:  A Space Odyssey (1968), his hero, well along on his journey into mystery, thinks:

He did not hesitate to call them people, though by the standards of Earth they would have seemed incredibly alien.  But already, his standards were not those of Earth; he had seen too much, and realized by now that only a few times in the whole history of the Universe could the fall of the genetic dice have produced a duplicate of Man.  The suspicion was rapidly growing in his mind—or had something put it there?—that he had been sent to this place because these creatures were as close an approximation as could readily be found to Homo sapiens, both in appearance and in culture.  (Clarke, The Lost Worlds of 2001, ch. 39, p. 220)

Contemporary SF writers who are really adept at building interesting and coherent aliens—David Brin and Becky Chambers, to name two of the best—give us a wide range of wildly exotic creatures from other planets, but not humans.

The Uplift War, coverIf we are still fond of the idea of interplanetary romance, we might find a possible work-around in the shapeshifter.  The Tymbrimi female Athaclena in Brin’s The Uplift War (1987) uses her species’ unusual abilities to adjust her appearance closer to that of a human female—but of course she has an entirely different genetic heritage, as that ability itself demonstrates.  The result wouldn’t meet our criterion of interfertility, no matter how close the similarity in physical structure.  To adjust one’s genes in the same way would be another order of change altogether.

Starman movie posterThe 1984 movie Starman, in a way, plays off this idea.  The alien in this case is apparently an entity made of pure energy, without a physical structure of its own.  Using hair from the female lead’s deceased husband, it creates a new body with a human genetic structure.  The two do, eventually, prove to be interfertile.  If we’re willing to accept the notion of an energy being in the first place, this approach is actually more plausible than, say, mating with the oviparous Dejah Thoris.

If one were writing a SF story today, it would be rash to assume that Earthborn characters could run across independently evolved humans elsewhere.  The idea may not be entirely inconceivable.  But it’s out of fashion for good reasons.  Attractive as the notion of interplanetary romance may be, at this point we’d best confine it to the kind of case noted above, where some common ancestry—no matter how far-fetched—can account for the common humanity.

Happily Ever After

/ Rick Ellrod / 9 Comments

Six weeks ago I complained about the lack of happily-ever-after romances in the Star Wars series.  It occurred to me that it would be useful to take a look at what exactly makes for a “happy ever after” ending (“HEA” in genre romance code).  What do we really mean by that, anyway?

The Thrill of the Chase

“All the world loves a lover.”  We enjoy seeing stories about people falling in love, whether it’s with someone they’ve just met or by discovering someone who was always “right before my eyes.”  (Unless, of course, we’re too cynical to give any credence to so vulgar and sentimental an idea; in which case it’s the trope we love to hate.)  I’d call it the courtship phase of a relationship, if that term weren’t so archaic.  But “courtship” does express in a useful way the stage I’m referring to, when the lovers-to-be are maneuvering around each other, trying to figure each other out, and (almost invariably, in fiction) overcoming initial obstacles to their mutual attraction.

Couple silhouetted against sunset

“Forever Mine” by welshdragon at DeviantArt

It’s not hard to see why this is.  The courtship phase includes a lot of fun stuff.  We get to see the thrill of discovery, the novelty, the tentative reaching-out and missing connections, the achievement of initially establishing a base of trust and affection.  There’s uncertainty and thus suspense in those first contacts.  The process reminds me of the “handshaking” by which communications systems establish a protocol for exchange of information (anybody remember that windy ‘modem connecting’ sound on a dial-up connection?).

And this process is both tricky and essential.  The relationship can’t move forward until the common foundation is established.  I’ve quoted Lois McMaster Bujold before:

The question a romance plot must pose, and answer (showing one’s work!) is not “Do these two people get together?” but rather “Can I trust you?”  Which is most certainly not a trivial problem, in art or in life.  (Response to a reader question on Goodreads (10/30/2017).)

And the relationship does have to move forward.  Courtship is only a prelude.  It inherently looks forward to something else:  a life together.  (Even to “forever,” but that’s another subject.)  We feel something is missing in a case like that of Romeo and Juliet, where circumstances cheat the lovers of that opportunity.

Falling in love is fun to watch.  But if that’s all a character is interested in, we get the self-centered thrill addict who keeps wanting to have the same experience over and over again—as if they wanted to relive high school graduation repeatedly, Groundhog Day-style.  We can’t fall in love indefinitely; eventually we have to land somewhere.  Whether the story ends with a wedding or just a commitment, there has to be a conclusion.

Yet the conclusion itself is only the kickoff for the real relationship—the HEA.  “Each happy ending’s a brand new beginning.”

What It Isn’t

“Happily ever after” doesn’t mean the initial thrill of falling in love lasts forever.  That simply isn’t possible; human emotions can’t remain at that fever pitch.  At some point, the “dizzy dancing way you feel” is going to ebb.  If we expect to feel the same way always, as I’ve just noted, we’re setting ourselves up for disappointment and unnecessary disillusion.  On the other hand, that thrill can always reappear from time to time.  Wise couples will take steps to encourage and renew that early glamour throughout their marriage.

Couple dancing, from Dancing in the Minefields music videoNor does HEA mean freedom from all troubles.  We can put this aside momentarily to celebrate a wedding, visualizing only a life of unimpeded bliss; but real lives invariably encounter problems and difficulties.  We may even want to remind ourselves of this on the occasion of union itself.  When I ran across Emily Hearn’s wedding video online, I was struck by the fact that the first piece of music set to the video was Andrew Peterson’s “Dancing in the Minefields”:  “And it was harder than we dreamed / But I believe that’s what the promise is for.”

Even the vision of a couple facing adversity staunchly side by side isn’t always going to be valid.  We’re told that even healthy couples have their arguments and disagreements.  Indeed, a couple that never disagrees may be harboring unresolved issues under the surface.

It seems to me that all these flaws or troubles can still be accommodated in the “happily ever after” archetype.  Couples can recover from adversity; it can make them stronger.  Even crises in a lifelong love affair can be healed or overcome.  It’s the overall trend or direction, and the overall tenor of the romance, that leads us to call it “happy.”  Of course, when we wish someone happiness forever, we hope that their troubles will be relatively few and their recoveries maximally joyous.  But a life together need not be perfect to be “happy.”

What It Is

If the ever-after need not be perpetual bliss to count as HEA, what is it made up of?  I am hardly so wise as to prescribe sure-fire ingredients for a happy marriage.  But if we think about what we’d expect to see in a story that depicted a happy couple, we can point to a few things.

Carly Simon singing The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of at Martha's Vineyard

Carly Simon sings “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of”

If it’s going to compete with the initial falling in love, being in love has to gain in depth and resonance what it loses in surface intensity and thrill.  It’s “the slow and steady fire.”

What can a couple that’s been together a while do that lovers who’ve just met can’t?  Consider the cumulative pleasures and joys of two people who know each other well and have learned how to please and help each other.  If they continue faithful to each other and to their union, their mutual trust will grow and deepen.  And the more they trust each other, the more each can express their individual strengths (and admit their individual weaknesses).

Since loving someone doesn’t consist only in having a feeling about them, but in enacting love for them, we can learn to love someone better through experience and attentive learning.  I may start by giving you a gift I would like—but eventually I learn how to give you the gift you would like.  Meanwhile, the sharing of memories and experiences, families, running jokes, can enrich and strengthen the bond.

All these things are compatible with the imperfections and difficulties noted above.  They make up what we’d expect to see, down the road, in a story that goes beyond the courtship—a happy-ever-after.

How We Tell the Story

Because the HEA lacks the surface glitter of the falling-in-love story, we see far fewer stories depicting it.  But for purposes of example and illumination, it’s very useful to see depictions of ongoing marriages.

Such mature romances can crop up in odd places.  For example, in a series that goes on beyond the resolution of initial relationships, or perhaps longer than the author expected, we may see the original lovers ‘age out’ of the focus, but still have the chance to watch them practice the art of love.

Shards of Honor coverExhibit A is Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga.  The first two books in the main sequence, Shards of Honor and Barrayar, deal with Aral Vorkosigan and Cordelia Naismith, whose son, Miles, is the principal character in most of the stories.  So we see Cordelia and Aral fall in love—but then we see them continue through a whole series of other tales as both parents and political prime movers on Miles’ homeworld of Barrayar.  We get to see them working together in common causes, both personal and cosmic.  We see their continuing affection and evident harmony.  Each is so distinctive a personality that we never think of either Aral or Cordelia as merely an extension of the other; rather, they provide an ongoing example of the kind of relationship we wanted to see in their initial stories—and to which Miles aspires for himself, having that example always before him.

Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern give us another example.  In the first book (as published, not chronologically), Dragonflight, we see the rocky road of the strong-willed main characters, Lessa and F’lar, to love.  Both of them are so stubborn and willful that it’s hard to picture them in a peaceful marriage.  And indeed, on Pern, nothing is ever entirely peaceful for long.  But as more couples come and go through the long series of sequels, F’lar and Lessa remain onstage a good bit of the time.  Neither is ever tamed, though they both mellow a bit.  The scrappy young Lessa becomes a little steadier and more mature as she gets older and has a child, but she still retains the original fire.

I frequently refer to the classic Lensman series, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned that the final novel, Children of the Lens, shows us the lovers whose activities dominated the three middle books, Kim Kinnison and Clarissa MacDougall, as middle-aged parents a generation later.  The story is so action-oriented that we don’t get to see much of the family in peace, but what we do see gives us the satisfaction of knowing that Kim and Cris have lived a happy life together (and will continue to do so).  And since the surclimax (if I may invent a word for a secondary climax occurring after the main one) involves Clarissa’s use of the power of their mutual love to retrieve Kim from an otherwise unsolvable trap, it’s clear that the romantic connection consummated at the wedding in the previous volume (twenty years earlier) has not lost its fire.

Second Spring coverAndrew Greeley wrote a whole series of novels in which the romance is generally about falling in love.  But in his O’Malley family saga, in which the titles all refer to seasons (of life), he continues the story of one such couple from the post-WWII era right through their “Golden Years.”  The young lovers of A Midwinter’s Tale have to grapple with some pretty serious psychological issues themselves, as well as family drama, over the course of years.  But the “crazy O’Malleys” emerge stronger from their troubles as they go on, giving us a picture of people who are always becoming more themselves as they adjust to changing circumstances.

God is an Englishman coverThere is a subgenre of family sagas—the kinds of long-running, multicharacter stories that always make me think of TV mini-series—and some of these also give us extended looks at maturing romances.  In some such stories, the conflicts arise from the dysfunctionality of the family itself; Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna novels are a case in point.  But in others, we can see a couple holding strong.  I recently reread R.F. Delderfield’s God Is An Englishman, the first book of his “Swann saga.”  His central couple, Adam and Henrietta, grow in significant ways over the course of the story.  Their love waxes and wanes, but after it wanes, it always comes back.  I’d count that as a HEA.

The novella I’m just finishing up, Time Signature, takes place in the Deerbourne Inn common setting created by the Wild Rose Press.  This gave me the chance to show how a secondary couple who were engaged in Amber Daulton’s Lyrical Embrace was getting along, a little later.  While their appearance is brief, I enjoyed the opportunity to represent a growing post-courtship romance, even in its early years.

Real Life

For purposes of inspiration and example, of course it’s even more helpful to be acquainted with real-life successful relationships.  My parents, for instance, lived long and happy lives, and despite religious and political differences, they always remained in harmony.  Though they argued about many subjects, they never, so far as I know, quarreled.  While their lives could not be said to be untroubled (after all, I was one of their children), I’d say they qualified as a happy-ever-after.  I’m privileged to know a number of other couples whose romances have flourished over many years, on whom I’d be glad to bestow the accolade of HEA.

The accumulation of such real and fictional examples gives us the wherewithal to refute those who scoff at the happily-ever-after ending.  None of the characters of our favorite romances will have perfect later lives unmarred by any suffering or any down times in their love affairs.  But if we’re willing to accept that solid happiness can be consistent with life’s inevitable troubles, we can look forward with hope to a satisfactory ending for those couples who approach their lives with both realism and love.

Lonely Hearts of Star Wars

/ Rick Ellrod / 5 Comments

The Conclusion of the Skywalker Arc

I’m going to assume that by now, everybody who wants to has seen Star Wars IX, The Rise of Skywalker (“TROS”).  So we should now be able to discuss the plot freely, though I will hang out a

Spoiler Alert!

just in case.

Star Wars - The Rise of Skywalker posterAnd we are now in a position, after forty-odd years, to reach conclusions about the story as a whole.  We can consider the main storyline or central arc of Star Wars complete.  That universe is already expanding (for the second time) into side stories and prequels; and it’s quite possible that we’ll see more stories set after the end of TROS, even including some of the same main characters.  (Personally, I wouldn’t mind seeing about four separate spinoffs from the ending of TROS—for reasons discussed below—as long as there are NO MORE DEATH STARS.)  But it appears we’ve seen a conclusion to the main story.

There are, of course, a lot of things one might say about the nine-movie saga.  The one I want to consider here has to do with love stories.

Star Wars and Romance

Star Wars isn’t primarily a romance.  But adventure stories, particularly of the swashbuckling sort that Star Wars set out to revive, frequently do end up with a pair of characters getting together romantically.  Sometimes more than once; I’m looking at you, Indiana Jones.  Even James Bond movies always end with a sex scene.

So it’s not unreasonable to expect a sweeping space opera like this to include, as a minor element, at least some romantic achievements.  Do you recall how many successful romances, in the sense of “happy ever after” (“HEA”) endings, we see in the entire Star Wars saga?

None.

Not one romantic combination in the entire series leaves us relatively content with a couple’s life story, despite the number of such combinations that are teased over the course of the movies.  This fact strikes me as remarkable, and it’s puzzling how to account for it.

The Original Trilogy

The original Star Wars movie (the title later changed, for those of us too young to remember, to A New Hope) did suggest a conventional romantic development—although with some ambiguity.

Luke & Leia kiss on Death StarLuke is recruited into the Rebellion through seeing an image of a beautiful damsel in distress.  He’s clearly infatuated with her (I always enjoyed the fact that even in stormtrooper armor, you can see the bashfulness in Luke’s tilt of the head when he finally meets Leia in her prison cell).  Just before they swing across a pit, she gives him a quick kiss “for luck.”

And then there’s Han.  Though he starts out merely kidding Luke about taking an interest in Leia (“Do you think a princess and a guy like me—”), by the end of the movie, one imagines the interest could become real.  The three of them exchange characteristic glances at the final ceremony, showing a certain affection, but leaving it up in the air whether a genuine romance will develop in either case.

When the first movie became a howling success and Lucas decided to continue the trilogy, he had to pick a side.  Empire gives us a pretty straightforward Han-Leia romance, albeit one interrupted by a cliffhanger.  (“I love you.”  “I know.”)  In Return of the Jedi (“ROTJ”), the writers terminate the competing Luke-Leia possibility permanently by making them siblings.  To all intents and purposes, the finale of ROTJ includes a traditional HEA conclusion, in which we can expect a successful marriage between Leia and Han.

Nobody else in the original trilogy has a romance going on.  Lando doesn’t get a girl, at least not onscreen.  It would be entertaining to imagine a Madame Yoda (especially now that Baby Yoda is a worldwide favorite), but we don’t see that either.  But at least we did have Han and Leia.  From 1986 through 2015, we could assume that the series had achieved one HEA ending.

The Prequel Trilogy

A romance is in some degree central to the plot of Episodes I-III.  Anakin Skywalker’s troubled attraction to Padmé Amidala is a major motivator in his descent into the dark side.

Star Wars - Attack of the Clones posterOne of the things for which I admire the prequel trilogy is a convincing depiction of how a basically decent, if unstable, person can gradually be corrupted into an evildoer.  There are a number of factors involved, some of which could be attributed to “the system.”  I’ve never been convinced there was a good reason for the Jedi order to take children away from their parents when barely toddlers, or to forbid them to marry.  And the fate of Anakin’s mother Shmi is another strong driver.  But his fixation on Padmé is where we see his “Face-Heel Turn” working itself out in action.

For a nine-year-old, the boy Anakin is already oddly focused on Padmé in The Phantom Menace (episode I).  Attack of the Clones (episode II) lays out a burgeoning love affair between them as young adults, culminating in a secret marriage at the end.  Unfortunately, this star-crossed romance is handled ineptly by the movie-makers, IMHO; there is absolutely no chemistry between the characters on-screen.  Nonetheless, the plot requires us to consider this a compelling romance, in order to set up the third episode.

In Revenge of the Sith, Anakin is besieged by nightmares of Padmé dying in childbirth.  His desire to protect her makes him more and more obsessed with acquiring forbidden powers to save her life.  In a well-managed ironic turn, this obsession takes him down a path that ends with Anakin killing Padmé himself.

Given the backstory we already knew from the middle (original) trilogy, it was clear that the Padmé-Anakin romance was fated to fail.  Anakin would become Darth Vader, and something was bound to happen to Padmé, since the children (Luke and Leia) were raised separately by foster parents.  So no HEA for the main characters was in store.  While there are various side characters involved—most notably Obi-Wan Kenobi, who seems to have faithfully carried out the marriage proscription by never having a romance at all—none of them contributed anything to the tally of Star Wars love stories.

Deconstruction

When the new third trilogy opened, the writers of the first movie, The Force Awakens (episode VII, “TFA”), made a crucial decision:  to sour the one romance standing by undermining the ending of Return of the Jedi (VI).  In the intervening years, Han and Leia’s son Ben (Kylo Ren) has turned to the dark side.  Lucasfilms might have depicted this tragedy as pulling his parents closer together.  Instead, it apparently shattered their marriage.

Han and Leia meet in The Force AwakensTFA shows Han and Leia meeting each other again after a long separation, in which both of them have gone back to their earlier selves.  Leia is leading yet another rebellion, while Han has returned to pointless smuggling.  The characters have regressed rather than progressing.  The character arcs we thought had been completed in the original trilogy have been reversed.

More important for our purposes here, Han and Leia’s love affair in retrospect seems limited and bitter.  One hopes they had happy years together while Ben was a child.  But we don’t see any of that.  And any hopes for a long-term return to a life together are eliminated when Ben kills Han.

One must admit this outcome is realistic.  It could happen that way.  But it’s also unsatisfying, in a particularly frustrating way:  it undoes the happy ending of the middle trilogy.  This is a classic fault in sequels—to negate or deconstruct what the characters achieved in the previous episodes.  And that fault occurs in the Star Wars saga in more than one way.

We might expect that at least some of the numerous new characters introduced in the sequel trilogy might find love.  But while the writers tease us with all sorts of possibilities, they never deliver on any of them.

Star Wars - The Rise of Skywalker, final group hugThus, TFA suggests that Rey and Finn will end up a couple.  But they don’t.  In episode VIII, The Last Jedi (“TLJ”), Finn is involved with another new character, Rose Tico, who at least is clearly in love with him.  Nothing comes of it.  The final episode, TROS, hints that Finn might become involved with still another woman, Jannah, who like Finn is a former stormtrooper.  But there’s no suggestion at the end that they’re actually going to get together.

Meanwhile, we keep getting hints that Rey is eventually going to get together with Kylo Ren, the redeemed Ben Skywalker.  They are supposed to be a “Force dyad,” whatever that means.  But Ben gives up his life to save Rey, as they share one kiss.  There’s thus no real Rey-Kylo romance (fortunately, in my view; I never liked Kylo anyway).  Nor does Rey get together with anyone else.  She doesn’t have to; she’s a great character regardless.  But it’s one more romantic potential that came to nothing.

Poe Dameron, the third main character of the sequel trilogy, finally gets a possible soul mate in the last episode.  This is new character Zorii Bliss, an armored fighter with a grudge against him from earlier events.  He actually extends an invitation to her at the end—and she turns him down.

It’s not impossible that some of these tenuous relationships might turn out to develop into something later.  I wouldn’t mind seeing Poe and Zorii continue their prickly antagonism into some kind of romance; or Finn getting together with somebody; or Rey having further adventures, in the course of which she might meet that special someone.  But as far as the nine-movie main storyline goes, we’re left with nothing.

Why Don’t Fools Fall In Love?

There’s nothing wrong with an adventure story that doesn’t contain a romance.  But as I noted above, going through nine episodes in this genre without a happily-ever-after is a little peculiar.

Illustration for Edmond Hamilton's The Star Kings

Edmond Hamilton’s The Star Kings

Look at classic space opera for a minute.  The archetypal space operas, E.E. Smith’s Lensman and Skylark series, each include more than one satisfactory romance.  Jack Williamson’s pulp-style epics, such as the Legion of Space series, generally gave the stalwart hero an irresistibly beautiful woman to rescue and marry.  Edmond Hamilton, credited by Wikipedia with creating the space-opera genre along with Smith, often did the same, as in The Star Kings.  On a more popular level, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers had their Dales and Wilmas.

Of course this isn’t a universal rule.  Early SF authors could be so focused on imaginary technology and adventure that romance wasn’t a consideration.  For example, John W. Campbell, a close competitor to Smith with galaxy-spanning adventure tales in the thirties (later a formative editor in the field), not only eschewed romance but seldom even included women in stories like The Black Star Passes.

Why were romances common in old-time space operas?  A HEA ending was part of the reward for the hero, who “gets the girl.”  (Or vice versa, in principle.)  More than that, I think, the preservation and fulfillment of beauty and love is part of what save-the-world stories are trying to achieve; they show vividly what is at stake.  Thus a romantic commitment, or even a wedding, is a natural part of the celebratory ending of an upbeat adventure story.

By and large, then, one tends to associate colorful, sweeping space opera with a romantic element, even if it’s not very sophisticated or central to the story.  So why is that factor absent from this nine-episode extravaganza?  All the lonely Star Wars people:  where do they all come from?

We can ask this “why” question in two ways.  Internally, from a narrative standpoint, what is it about this universe that seems to discourage HEA endings?  And externally, from the writers’ point of view, why didn’t they put some in?  Of course, we can only speculate about either matter.  (If anyone knows of an explanation from the screenwriters or showrunners that would shed light on the latter question, I’d love to hear about it.)

In terms of the narrative itself, maybe the answer is that the Star Wars universe just isn’t hospitable to happy endings.  It’s a very violent world, for one thing.  Slavery on the outer planets, the ascendancy of tyrannies on the more civilized worlds.  When you come right down to it, how many people do we see living happy, contented lives anywhere in the Star Wars ’verse?

Star Wars awards ceremonyThis cheerlessness is itself an odd thing, given the way the series started out.  The relatively lighthearted original trilogy, and especially A New Hope taken by itself, gave us the sense that once the Death Star was destroyed, the galaxy could prosper in some kind of freedom.  But the more detail additional episodes added to the background, the grimmer the universe seemed to become.  In the end, post-Episode IX, it just doesn’t seem like a very nice place to live.

In terms of the authors’ intent, it seems to me that changes of directing or authorial handling may have taken a toll.  The J.J. Abrams–Rian Johnson team that handled the final trilogy is a different ‘voice’ than that of Lucas’ original trilogy.  Johnson’s middle episode of the last trilogy, TLJ (VIII), seems to have devoted itself deliberately to deconstructing all the expectations created in TFA (VII).  And Abrams’ partial re-reversal in TROS (IX) didn’t save the love affairs.  Apparently the third-trilogy directors simply didn’t want a HEA romance.

But why was that?  I don’t know, of course, but I think part of the answer is simply that times have changed—again.

The original A New Hope in 1977 was a blockbuster precisely because it broke a long string of jaded, cynical movies in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  It invited us to enjoy a kind of upbeat adventure story that had long been out of fashion.  And that atmosphere was one in which a relatively light, upbeat romance could also flourish.

But any romance in the prequel trilogy, as noted above, was bound to be downbeat.  And the sequel trilogy directors/writers seem to have felt that audiences today wouldn’t buy a sentimental HEA ending—or to have been so bent on defeating expectations that they were unwilling to close the deal on any romantic interest, because a romantic happy ending is something we expect.

Personally, I think the sequel trilogy would have been better off with one or two successful romances, out of the several possibilities.  But that isn’t the story we’ve got.  So, until someone decides to remake the whole Star Wars saga from scratch—and at the current turnover rate of remakes, maybe that’ll start in another ten years or so—we’ll have to enjoy Star Wars for virtues other than those of the happily ever after.