Can you please shut up about the new Star Wars movie

It’s embarrassing everyone else


Peel your eyes away from DJ Khaled’s snapchat story for a second and find a television. Watch it until you see some adverts, then turn it off and have a think. What did you notice? 

Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

You’ll have noticed, then been fatigued by, then been oppressed by full-spectrum coverage and advertising for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Adverts like this one for Subway or this for Dodge or this for Duracell.

Off the screen there’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens cereal and stamps and limited edition mascara and laptops and poppadoms and New Era caps. And then just look at the fucking state of these Star Wars: The Force Awakens oranges:

But what’s more irritating about Star Wars: The Force Awakens is that it is literally impossible to ignore. It is everywhere. It’s colonised the shop windows of Selfridges and every neeks’ Facebook profile picture.

The underlying message is hysterical and, for want of a better word, religious. Everyone has to be in on Star Wars: The Force Awakens and everyone has to enjoy it and be nice about it.

As I type these words there are poor, baffled, non-nerds out there Googling nonsensical shit like “General Grievous” and “Kylo Ren” and “Mos Eisley Spaceport” in a vain, futile attempt to join in this pageant of geekery.

This lot won’t have to google anything

Disney’s plan for Star Wars include episodes VII, VII and IX to be released in 2015, 2017 and 2019 – but three other spin-off movies will appear in 2016, 2018 and 2020. If you want a vision of the future imagine a Star Wars film, with all the attendant hype and tie-in oranges, coming out every single year for the rest of your life.

I can’t fight the suspicion that the whole thing is for feeble people who can’t handle the real world. Getting hyped for a film full of aliens and robots is childish in the deepest sense of the word – it’s escaping to a place where the good guys always win and the most sexual thing that ever happens is a chaste kiss at the end.

Star Wars fans want to escape from reality; reality with its motorway service stations, Westfields, its poundlands and greasy spoons, its old people’s homes, its dog shit parks and its ambulances and hospitals. If we’re always trying to escape from this place we’ll never try and change it.

During my unspeakably dreary adolescence, before I discovered girls, pints and parties, I was the kind of kid who could tell you the difference between Jar Jar Binks and Chewbacca. I had t-shirts with X-Wing schematics on them.

But what was good about being a nerd back then was that it was a secret. You wouldn’t have been able to tell I was a nerd, people wouldn’t have wanted to know and if they had done they’d have (quite rightly) bantered me into another dimension.

Instead of being a source of shame and regret, I reckon that Star Wars: The Force Awakens is dangerously close to passing the party test – you could get away with talking about it socially without people thinking you’re a huge nonce. Nerd culture has become mainstream.

It ought to be the other way round. People who talk about Millennium Falcons and Boba Fett out loud, in front of other human beings ought to be pariahs, consigned to Games Workshops and IMDB message boards.

I haven’t told anyone that I’ve booked tickets to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens this Sunday. Frankly, I’d feel embarrassed and uncomfortable if anyone I liked saw me at the cinema – and that’s the way things should be.