Rewriting History or The Art of Perfection?

Something I have been struggling with recently is the notion that certain forms of art can be a constant work in progress. I manage to get my head around the fact that in some cases this can be an interesting form if applied to some visual and tactile arts: Painting, collage, sculpture and such like, and it can certainly be applied to storytelling, but I’m having difficulty understanding its application to a story told. Can a story, a finished, published, viewed, loved and acclaimed story be tinkered with after the best part of 35 years? Obviously the physical act of doing it is possible but does its author, its creator have a right to go back and change facts within the story that change one’s perception of a character or of a political climate just to make life easier for future writing? This act of going back and changing events and or characters within a story arc is known a Retroactive Continuity and is a fairly recent literary device which uses the concept that the future is not merely a consequence of past actions rather that history flows from the future into the past. I have seen it work both well and not so well within some comic book worlds. It is within this type of storytelling that ‘retcon’ works best but that is only because its readers come to understand quite quickly that Comic Book and Science Fiction worlds and their tales evolve in a different way to most other types of writing. Indeed Retroactive Continuity was first used in the DC Comic ‘All Star Squadron’, the ‘retcon’ applied is the setting of the story in an alternate universe in which normal physical states apply, for example: The character of Superman (or, indeed, any major character) has not aged very much over the years within his usual comic book world, but in his ‘retcon’ world aging is now a factor, so in the All Star Squadron universe of ‘Earth Two’ circa 1980 one would see a Superman well in to his Sixties. 

A sixty three year old Superman

This works because the reader is aware that the story is set in a different ‘universe’ and is safe in knowledge that, if it is not to their taste, they can buy other titles set within the normal Comic Book ‘universe’ or that they can go back to older editions and re-read the stories set therein. Retroactive Continuity can be a refreshing change when reading a series of comic book stories and can give different and interesting perspectives, but I view it mostly as a last resort for a novel writer who is having difficulty or is just can’t be bothered to keep track of facts within the world he has fleshed out. It was created by comic book writers a way to keep storytelling fresh in an industry that must produce multiple editions per month, and there it, for the most part, must stay. There is, however, a more sinister type of revision at work at the moment that has started with one man but threatens to spread amongst the more arrogant storytellers and it is with this that I am struggling.

 George bloody Lucas! He just can’t leave stuff alone. I can just about understand the visual changes he made to the original Star Wars trilogy, the C.G.I. during the assault on the Death Star being an obvious improvement, but one thing I cannot forgive or forget is his tampering with, what in my view, is a very important character trait of Han Solo. Oh, and before I continue, I must confess that… yes, all of this long windedness has purely been for the purpose of setting up a rant about how George Lucas raped my childhood. You see, with a completely ridiculous and, let’s face it, half arsed bit of computer generated tampering, the Almighty Beard destroyed an important part of Han Solo’s character. In the original version of the cantina scene, Han Solo coldly murders the bounty hunter named Greedo, he knows that Greedo was prepared to kill him to get his bounty so Han guns him down before the bounty hunter gets his chance.

Han Solo, like Clint Eastwood with a Wookie

 This scene sets up Han Solo’s character brilliantly as a man who moves in dark circles and is prepared to do whatever it takes to stay alive in an unfriendly place, it also shows us that he is a fair man, he actually wants to pay off his debt to Jabba and resolve the conflict peacefully even though his loss of the cargo was not entirely his own fault, this shows us a man who has the potential to redeem himself of his past misdeeds. But what does Lucas do twenty years later? He inserts a crappy computer graphic that has Greedo taking a shot at Solo and Solo dodging jerkily to the right like he’s found himself as an 8-bit avatar in an equally crappy game on some spotty adolescent’s ZX spectrum. And so, in a blink of an eye, years of intrigue have been made redundant, years of wondering about Han Solo’s dodgy past, If he can murder a guy in a crowded bar and show absolutely no remorse then what else had he gotten up to? But alas the wondering was all in vain because the Powerful Bearded One deemed it too dark, besides, he had always felt that it just wasn’t in Solo’s nature to do something like that and he had always envisioned it playing out that way blah blah fucking blah, bullshit blah blah. Ok, I might have been a bit childish there but the point stands, if he had envisioned it that way then why not just film it that way? Did he really accidently film a scene that was far more interesting than the one he had actually written and then twenty years later decide to replace the lucky stroke of genius with a banal self defense plea, or did he fall foul of corporate thinking and replace it because it sends out a bad message and therefore sensitive parents may frown upon it and not take their kiddy winks to see its re-release which would have jeopardised his raising of cash to make the vastly inferior prequels? Truth be told, I’m not sure I care, I just know that what Lucas has done has changed my view on a character I have known and loved almost as long as I’ve had cognitive thought. It’s isn’t just this scene I have issues with, there are so many throughout the whole saga but I have shagged myself out with rage at just thinking about them. I suppose what I really want answered is does he have the right to rewrite history in this way and not give a choice whether to buy into his vision or to stick with what was a master stroke of storytelling, because Darth Lucas has vowed that this way is the true way and the original will never be released to the public that has put him where he is now. It would seem that Papa Beard knows best, and if you don’t like it…. too bad.

I know it has been fourteen years since he made these changes but it still stings. (sniff sniff, blub blub.)

P.S. I hate you George Lucas you stinky head!

Nigel Hammond age 33 (nearly 34)