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Dante: So? Randal: A construction job of that magnitude would require … a lot more manpower than the Imperial Army had to offer. I’ll bet they brought independent contractors in on that thing. Plumbers, aluminum siders, roofers— Dante: Not just Imperialists. Is that what you’re getting at? Randal: Exactly. To get it built quickly and quietly, they’d hire anybody that could do the job. You think the average Storm Trooper knows how to install a toilet main? All they know is killing. Dante: So they bring in independent contractors. Why are you so upset? Randal: Those innocent contractors brought in are killed, casualties of a war they had nothing to do with. Look, you’re a roofer. Some juicy government contract comes your way. You got a wife and kids, the two-story in suburbia. This is a government contract, which means all sorts of benefits. Along come these left-wing militants who blast everything within a three-mile radius with their lasers. You didn’t ask for that; you had no personal politics. You’re just trying to scrape out a living.41

      This passage leads us deep into the world of Star Wars lore, where aficionados, in their rivalry with Star Trek aficionados, generated a feature-length film about this very conflict in critical preference: Fan Boys (2009). It is also, of course, a world of white male adolescence and a seemingly jejune obsession with trivia. Nonetheless, I propose that we take Randal’s analysis as a genuine example of doing criticism, not least for the way he supports a critical judgment with a highly particularized and, in its way, cogent account of his objects.

      For all its creative license, then, what seems powerful and true about the scene is that it captures a certain critical energy very much embedded in everyday life, and it does so in an environment not obviously distinguished for its cultural richness or sensitivity: the Jersey Shore. (Think of Snooki and Pauly D from the wildly popular reality television show of that title that ran from 2009 to 2012.) Yet people in the most ordinary circumstances do have arguments like this about works they care about, and the works that Dante and Randal care about are the three films in the first Star Wars trilogy. It matters some that these films were actually not so recent in 1994, having appeared between 1977 and 1983. In the lifetimes of Dante and Randal, presumably young men in their early twenties, this is no small gap in time. Randal says he has just seen Jedi again today, presumably on the VHS player in the video store. It is of course precisely the institution of video rental that provides a new “library” function for ordinary cinephiles in this period, making it possible for Randal to rescreen a film from more than a decade earlier so as to get to the bottom of a critical instinct he has about it. Dante and Randal stand at the start of an era of expanding resources that continues into the present moment, as relatively affordable film streaming services offer ready access to thousands and thousands of film and video materials.

      FIGURE 1.4 Jay (Jason Mewes) sneaking a Twinkie in Clerks.

      The course of this analysis has returned us to the poetry of the refrigerator with which we began. Set against the background of such scenes of consumption, Dante and Randal’s critical discussion of George Lucas’ trilogy takes on a distinctive cast. If the milk man and the egg lady go beyond the sheer impulsive gluttony of Jay’s gorging on Twinkies to something like an exaggerated form of selectivity, Dante and Randal go beyond selectivity (“which movie did you like better?”) to a developed and articulated response. In so doing, one might say, they develop their own articulate responsiveness. Articulate responsiveness may be understood, paradoxically, as both a goal and a condition of doing criticism well. And herein lies an important if somewhat circular principle for the arguments and analysis involved in doing criticism: Criticism develops responsiveness to works that reward it, and it does so by the practice of responding to them articulately. These issues will be addressed further in Chapter 2, which looks at the mutually connected role of questions and judgments in criticism.

      1.5 Criticism between Page and Screen

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