(fair use)
We went to see Episode VII of the Star Wars saga tonight.
We enjoyed it.
I’ve been watching with some amusement as one of the more pretentious among my obsessive critics — his particular favorite theme when discoursing about me is my intellectual vacuity and cultural shallowness — has been holding forth of late (anonymously, on a mostly atheist message board) regarding his contempt for Star Wars and the lack of “high culture” in America. It seems that Mormonism and Star Wars are precisely the kind of middle- to lowbrow stuff that third-rate minds such as I eagerly lap up.
Now, I’m certainly not confusing Star Wars with Shakespeare’s King Lear, Sophocles’ Antigone, Goethe’s Faust, Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, or Frayn’s Copenhagen — all personal favorites of mine that I’ve both read (in the original languages: I, too, can show off) and seen in production — but I had a fun time at the movie theater tonight, and I’m not so insecure that I need to pretend otherwise.
On the whole, I would be slightly more impressed with those who like to boast of their intellectual depth and cultural sophistication if they spent less time telling others of their remarkable mental qualities and aesthetic capacities and actually demonstrated some of their purportedly deep thinking and incisive cultural insight.
If you haven’t seen the new Star Wars movie yet, you’re a rare Americano indeed. But I bet that you’ll enjoy your time in the theater. And, if you do, don’t be ashamed to admit it.
Posted from Richmond, Virginia
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