We went to see the new Star Wars movie yesterday. I liked what George Lucas did with the Darth Vader/George Bush parallels (you may not admit it Lucas, but it's clear as day), and I liked how the story lines tied together to pave the way for the first Star Wars movie's story to begin. I found myself engaged in moments, especially when Yoda was on screen. But overall, I found the acting quite wooden, the droid/clone voices quite laughable (although nothing was as bad as JarJar Binks, thankfully.) And I realized something--I would never want to live in that galaxy far far away. For several reasons. The endless war is the main one (we're approaching that on our planet, but at least the air isn't always full of battles.) But also, it is such a completey unsensual world. It is a cold world, a world of dark shiny surfaces without warmth or aesthetic pleasure. A world of very little nature. I saw no plant life whatsoever in the cities. The only place with any green was Yoda's home, and even that had a sort of dingy quality to it--the nature was eclipsed by all the battlements. It is a post-nature world, a post-body world, where androids have intelligence but no sensory feeling, where it doesn't really matter if your body is hacked apart and burnt to a crisp, because you can just attach robotic limbs to the stumps, a robotic breathing system to the beleagured lungs, and still try to take over the world. It makes me sad, this denigration and devaluation of the body. Even the love story, the pregnancy and birth in the movie, felt divorced from any real embodied truth. A world I definitely would not want to live within. I am grateful we live in such a sensory-rich world, grateful we live in these fragile, transient bodies that can enjoy our gorgeous planet.