"Ready Player One" is a YA novel

The buzz around Ernest Cline's novel Ready Player One was extremely positive, so I borrowed a friend's copy last year when I was in serious need of diversion. On the one hand, I stayed up late for a couple too many nights reading it. On the other hand, that was despite my impatience for its weaknesses. I found myself skimming past sentences and paragraphs because I was more interested in the plot's resolution than in how it got there.

To be fair, Ready Player One's weaknesses are baked into its premise. The Oasis, a virtual reality social media/gaming platform has become one of, if not the, primary arenas for all human interaction. Even public schools have migrated onto the Oasis's platform. Since a great deal of the action takes place in the Oasis, page upon page is taken up with exposition: the Oasis's history; its social order; its effects on the real world; its appearance; its fantastic sights; so on and so forth. However, not all the exposition is necessitated by the premise: the narrator would rather explain relationships (ex. "He is my best friend") than show them at work.

Overuse of exposition is the great weakness of young adult novels, apparently because their authors don't trust their young readers to put two and two together. (The excellent Hunger Games does not fall into this trap.) I was thinking I might recommend Ready Player One to my teenage son until I ran into some explicit, albeit clinical, discussion of masturbation. With those bits expurgated, it could easily be moved to the juvenile section of the library.

Still, the main characters are interesting and sympathetic, and the plot engages the reader almost inevitably. It centers around a game which is coded into the architecture of the Oasis; accordingly, one is drawn into the plot precisely because human beings all, always, want to know who wins.

Given that Steven Spielberg is directing, I expect the film version, for once, to be better than the novel. All those dizzying visual elements will be shown, sparing the viewer from being told too, too much.

From a former youngster to today's youngsters

I was seven years old when Star Wars (spare me this "A New Hope" nonsense) was released, and saw it overdubbed in Spanish (because my family had just moved to Madrid), a language I did not understand at all. My little brain was overwhelmed with amazement, and finally seeing it English only magnified the experience's transcendence. Naturally, I avidly anticipated and celebrated its sequels, then eventually put the whole thing behind me until George Lucas issued big-screen rereleases when I was in my late 20s. With some seminary classmates, I excitedly entered the movie theatre only to take one more inevitable step towards becoming my father when I realized something he first understood way back in 1977.

Star Wars is not a good movie.

The dialogue is hokey, "the Force" is a stupid new-agey pseudo-religion, the plot trajectory is both overwrought and obvious, Joseph Campbell's hero's journey is an over-simplifying exercise in cultural appropriation and imperialism, and every halfway decent shot is directly stolen from an immensely superior cinematic predecessor. With that, I was done, especially since Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark continues to hold up marvelously well.

But then I had my own kids, and J.J. Abrams took over the franchise for the long-promised, but never-expected, final trilogy. I took Thing One and Thing Two to The Force Awakens, and found it a pleasing diversion even though it never had a chance of reconverting me to my fanboy past. I was actually impressed by The Last Jedi, and so was surprised to learn that today's fanboys were, to some extent, wildly outraged. If I may take a moment to speak in a condescending, patronizing tone to today's youngsters, I think their youth has ill-served them to receive this installment of the Star Wars saga in the spirit in which it was offered.

One of the problems with the young people these days is that they encountered the original Star Wars trilogy only after it had been entirely released. Those of my children's generation don't even remember a time before the prequel trilogy had been completed. They encountered the saga as a whole, and therefore as a text whose ending had been written before they began its study. Thus, when they hear Darth Vader intone "I am your father, Luke" towards the end of The Empire Strikes Back, they know Luke Skywalker is learning a truth about his family and background which will permanently alter his self-understanding.

This was not how Generation X experienced that moment.

We could not simply pop The Return of the Jedi into the VCR (or, worse, the DVD player; or, still worse, stream it from the interwebs). We had to wait three years, during which we engaged in a frame-by-frame analysis of The Empire Strikes Back. Although it seems obvious in retrospect, we didn't know that the Star Wars saga was really a family history of the Skywalkers. To many of us, it seemed very possible that Darth Vader lied to Luke. After all, he was, to not put too fine a point on it, a bad guy. And bad guys lie.

Just as The Force Awakens imitated the general outline of Star Wars, The Last Jedi echoes The Empire Strikes Back. Substitute Luke Skywalker for Yoda and an agonizingly slow pursuit through outer space for the peregrinations of the Millennium Falcon, and the parallels are obvious. Within that framework, Kylo Ren's villain's journey provides the most food for thought and debate. He appears to have rejected the common dark-side-of-the-Force narrative, but he certainly doesn't seem to be embracing the light. Is he imitating his grandfather and telling Rey the truth about her family, or deceiving her for his own nefarious purposes? Rather than accuse Rian Johnson of tossing aside all the plot boxes J.J. Abrams wrapped up for him, why not imagine that he's just put another bow on them? The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi have pulled off the remarkable feat of both upholding and subverting Star Wars stereotypes. This should delight fans, not outrage them.

We had to wait three years between installments of the original trilogy. You youngsters only have to wait two. Don't waste them complaining; instead, fill them up with delighted, giddy speculation. That's how you make it your Star Wars.