Directors like George Lucas are “semiotically nourished authors working for a culture of instinctive semioticians,” the late and great writer Umberto Eco once wrote. That is, Star Wars is not a single movie, nor a lonely cliché floating in ether. It is “movies,” the gathering of hundreds of clichés from several genres, celebrating a reunion in outer space. A story that alludes to just one story is derivative. A story that alludes to nothing in cinema or literature is incomprehensible. Star Wars traces the thin overlap between never-before-seen and aha-I’ve-seen-this-before. It is an original
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