Jack tried to sit up, but failed. "I don't know if I like the new music they put on the end of Jedi. I miss that Ewok yub-yub stuff."
Dot yawned. "I can't believe you never saw the Star Wars movies before, Jill."
Jill snored.
"Oh man, she's asleep!" Charlie looked at the clock. "And it's only ... 3:37 a.m."
Jack staggered to his feet. "I don't think I've moved in four hours. I might have forgotten how."
Dot scratched her head. "How can you sleep through Jedi? And for the first time watching it?"
"Jill, you awake?" Charlie said. He put fingers on her eyelids and lifted them. Jill stared at him.
"Let go of my eyes."
"Sorry. Just seeing if ... um, REM sleep hit yet."
"You could ask." Jill rubbed her now-fingerless eyes. "Hey, are the movies over?"
"Yeah." Charlie rubbed his back."Ooh. When did you fall asleep? I'll ... uh, rewind it."
"I don't know. I think in the forest. You don't have to play it again."
"No, you should see it all the way. It's your first time. You gotta know what happened in the end."
"It doesn't matter. Good guys win or something. I just want to go to bed."
"But you don't know the end."
"I don't care. Just some stupid movies. I want to go to sleep."
Charlie stumbled into the hallway. "You don't like Star Wars, well then you can ... go home ... watch your stupid other movies. Your stupid 'Beaches'."
Jill meandered into the hallway. "I probably should go home. It's late."
Dot got up. "Yeah, I got a paper to work on tomorrow."
Jack . "You always have a paper to do."
"It's school. Blame the teachers."
Charlie kicked over an empty beer bottle. "Stupid 'Spitfire Grill'."
"Hold on," Jack said, "I'll walk you guys home. There could be, I don't know, Stormtroopers out there."
Dot laughed to herself. "With Stormtroopers' aim, I think we're safe."
"Stupid 'Steel Magnolias'," Four more beer bottles went over.
"Hang on," Jill said, "I, uh, gotta go to the bathroom, first."
"Me too," Dot said. "That half a Corona five hours ago just went through me."
"Okay, um, how 'bout if one of you uses the third floor bathroom. The weird girls up there are sound sleepers."
"You sure?"
"Positive. They all slept through Charlie puking last night."
"Hey..." Charlie managed to get out, "you just ... don't talk about me. I'm ... I'm like, uh, not functioning right now."
Jill tip-toed upstairs while Dot took the second floor bathroom.
"Dude," Charlie whispered, "it might just might be 3:30 in the morning talking here, it might be the Coronas, but you know what that thing is between you and Jill?"
"What?"
"Her butt."
"Uh-huh."
"Did you see her butt? Ni-ice. You see that butt, you think 'I want me some of that', and then you pretend it's love or something because you don't want to be one of those guys who dates someone because of their butt."
"It's not that. There's, um, I don't know, something there. It's late. I can't think now."
"But your attraction to her, it's all butt, man."
"I'm not even a butt guy. I don't know what you're talking about."
"Well, if she had this sagging potato sack of a butt, would you still have that thing for her?"
"Charlie, you've got the butt thing, not me."
"We both got it. I'm just being honest with myself. Dude, search your soul. You know it to be true."
"Shut up. Jill'll hear you."
"Jill'll hear what?" Jill tip-toed down the third floor stairs.
"Uh, the ending to Jedi. We gotta keep it a secret for you."
"Doesn't that other Death Star blow up, too?"
"Uh, maybe."
Dot came out of the second floor bathroom. "When was the last time you guys cleaned that place?"
Charlie laughed and searched through the empty bottles. "When was the first time?"
"Oh God. I need a shower."
"You want to use ours? We got some mildew in there." Charlie triumphantly pulled a half full bottle from the glass herd. "Aha! Thought I'd lost you, you half filled little ... um, beer."
Jack put on his jacket. "Let's go, before Charlie reenacts last night."
Charlie looked up from the now-quarter-filled bottle. "You're ... mean."
Jack blew out, seeing his breath. "Yeah, it's like Hoth now." Dot laughed.
"There," Jill said, "there's something I don't get. Every single little bit of the movies you guys have memorized. Why? It is that interesting?"
Jack began counting off on his fingers. "First of all, Hoth wasn't a little bit, it was a whole planet. Second, it's just something we like to do. You memorize the words of songs you like. And you memorize the stuff from movies you like. Third," he looked at the middle finger in his hand, "um, come on, it's Star Wars."
"I still don't see why they're the focal points of everyone's lives."
"It's something we all grew up with. We all had Sesame Street, we all had Scooby-Doo, we all had Star Wars."
Dot shook her head. "Don't remind me of Scooby-Doo. If I hear one more Velma comparison..."
Jill stared at her. "God, you do!"
Jack looked. "Wow, I never noticed that before."
Dot blushed. "I don't wan't to talk about it."
"Maybe I'm out of the loop.
"You know that stuff Charlie said about the movies?"
"You're going to have to be more specific. All Charlie's said for the past ten hours was Star Wars."
"That stuff about the audience. How that George Lucas guy designed the movies to have everything in it that an audience wants out of a movie."
"Oh yeah," Dot said. "He figured out what people wanted to see in a movie, and then put it all in."
"Yeah, like how Lando was supposed to die at the end of the third one, but the audience didn't like it, so they had him live."
"Lando lives through Jedi?"
"Aw, dang it. Um, maybe. Possibly."
"It's okay. I don't care."
"I really can't imagine how you don't care."
"Well, look at Scooby-Doo. Watch it now, and it's stupid. Just a formula plot and Scooby and Shaggy putting on hula skirts every other episode. But when we were kids, we loved it. Because we were kids, and we were stupid. That entertained us, because we liked stupid monsters and talking dogs and meddling kids. But if it came out now, we'd all hate it, like we all hate the Power Rangers. You get some notion that something's good just because it caters to your stupid emotions at this one moment in time, and you spend the rest of your life justifying it."
"Remember that stuff that Charlie was saying about Star Wars."
"You're going to have to elaborate, Jill. All Charlie said for ten hours was Star Wars."
"Okay, like about George Lucas making Star Wars so it was exactly what the audience wanted to see."
"Oh yeah," Dot said. "Like having Lando die at the end of Jedi, and then having him live because the preview audiences didn't like that ending."
"He did that for the whole movie. It's geared to be exactly what people want. They want a happy ending, they want all the characters to change for the better, they want little furry things. So Star Wars is exactly what most people want in a movie. It's not art, it's merchandizing."
"Wait. It's not like that at all."
"Yes it is. The only reason why you haven't realized how stupid the whole thing is is because the whole rest of the world's caught up with it too."
"No, there's something more to it. There's, uh, Boba Fett."
"It's all about how much you think about it. It passes that initial test, because you like it from the beginning. It's got the happy ending and the exploding Death Stars and Wookiees. But if the bad guys won, or if Lando died or something, you wouldn't think of the movie as much initially, and you would have forgotten it like most every other movie in existence. You could appreciate the good parts of it, but you wouldn't get this feeling that it's the greatest movie ever made. You'd like it, but you wouldn't love it."
"So you're saying you're incapable of loving it?"
"Well, once you realize it's all just catering to your desires, you see just why you like it so much, you feel a little shallow. You didn't know that when you first saw it, so you had years and years of thinking this was good, so it's kind of hard for you to shake. Me, I just saw it, and from the get go I knew why people would be attracted to it. So on that level it's okay to me, but so's a Power Ranger episode. You all have this, I don't know, Star Wars magic." "Force."
"Whatever. But I know why it's happening to me, so the magic's not really there. And if you saw it my way, the magic wouldn't be there for you, either."
"No, there's something else. It's not just something basic. Trust me. There's gotta be."
"You're spending this huge chunk of your life dedicated to something because of some instinctual belief you probably shouldn't have had in the first place."
"Well, what's so wrong about instincts?"
"Nothing, so long as you realize your instincts are all just survival and reproduction. If you think there's something more to them, then your just deluding yourself."
"You're ... mean."
"But I won't be disappointed when Star Wars loses it's magic."
"Well, at least I've got the whole rest of the world believing me."
Dot swiped her ID card in the card reader and the door slid open. Dot went in silently. "Yeah, may the Force be with you."
"Force my butt," Jack said. He walked back to Townhouses, out of earshot. "Or maybe yours."