Air fills pseudo-space, fake-tech, and the average head?

FARCE WARS

I had never bothered to see any of the Star Wars films
in theatres.
But recently I saw a few minutes of a tape,
being played in the lobby of a Tenderloin roach-tel.

This pseudotopia looks like World War Two,
without the blood.

Inside the largest "space" ships,
you're really on an ocean liner, on a calm sea on Earth. Gravity prevails;
no person floats weightless; up is always up, down is always down.
Some rooms in these so-called "space ships" are larger than those on ocean ships.

( Okay, this didn't bother me when I watched Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy, because that film was designed to be silly. But was Star Wars meant to be farce? )

The fighter planes and smaller space-craft are streamlined, to fly thru Earth-type air,
not thru airless inter-planetary and inter-stellar space.


A two-man plane is controlled by one human pilot, not by a computer.
( Indeed, the pilot seems to lack a computer, and scarcely looks at his instruments.
He seems to fly by naked eye-sight;
like a child steering a bump-em car at an amusement park.)


Apparently these films were made for audiences who think
that friendly local air fills the un-imaginable distances between stars and planets;
and that habitable (Earth-like) planets are just days away from each other, not decades or centuries;
and similar 14th-century nonsense.


Audiences who wilfully ignore everything we've seen about real space flights
( cramped, weightless, dangerous; both tedious and terrifying... ).
Indeed, audiences who wilfully ignore what we know about submarines,
where maintaining a breathable atmosphere is a constant challenge.


Atmospheric AIR craft in a vacuum?
Air fills the pseudo-space of Star Wars,
and the skulls of those who can watch without laughing.


And why stop there?
Why use fake-tech at all?
We might as well have cowboys riding (winged?) horses
thru pseudo-space.
Will Phoneywood bring back the ancient pagan gods,
recast as illegal space aliens?


Star Wars convinces me that the average U.S. movie fan is, at heart,
really a seven-year-old who desperately needs to be fooled.


A so-called "adult"
who can take Star Wars seriously
is gullible enough to elect
a proven liar as President.


-- TBL
29 March 2008

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