Editor's Disease

CE Jenkins

            George Lucas recently unleashed the Phantom Menace in theatres once again, this time in 3D comparable to the way the film reached off the screen and wrung your brain out the first time it came out. I can only assume this is part of a ploy to either shamelessly make money or—no, actually, that’s pretty much the only reason.

           But honestly, I just pick on the Star Wars prequels because it’s fun and easy. I like them just fine myself, although I won’t debate the fact that the originals are better.  What really interested me about the re-release was the interview with Lucas that appeared shortly before Phantom was shuffled back onto the big screen, in which the director answered to many of the complaints fans have raised about the changes he made to the original trilogy in previous years. Living proof that editing is to art forms as cocaine is to Charlie Sheen, to me Lucas’s changes are less about terrible decisions and more about how hard it is to put down the red pen when it’s been surgically grafted into your hand.

           Most artists I know are perfectionists; they live in conditions ranging between squalor and crazy-cat-hoarder, yet heaven forbid a single period goes out of place. And don’t get me wrong, I’m totally an advocate of spending Saturday nights debating the use of two nearly indistinguishable adjectives. You really should think your own work is perfect before you get it published or file it away or burn it cathartically or do whatever it is people do when they finish something. However, as wonderful as you might think the final product is at first, it’s a statistical guarantee that at least one other person is going to think it’s a pile of maggoty bat-droppings. And as soon as they start pointing out all the things they think is wrong with it, the illusion is shattered and your inner editor starts flexing the carpal tunnel out of her fingers.

           Another tough thing about any creative pursuit is that not only will some other people not like your work, but eventually you might not either. You’re always learning new and better ways of doing things that make plenty of your previous achievements look like crap; the ability to look back on your earlier work and cringe in emotional agony is the mark of a great artist, or at the very least an artist who is good enough to know when they’re bad. And of course it’s torture to look at something you’ve created and see everything that’s wrong with it, knowing that if you were given just a little time and some shitty CGI you could finally live up to your new standards of perfection.

           Going back and revising something in a story that everyone is already familiar with is about as annoying as that person telling a joke who keeps backtracking to say that “no wait, the duck was actually orange! And from Sweden! Or was it Switzerland? And now that I think about it, the duck was actually blue!” Once a story’s been told, that’s it. You can put it in different bindings or convert it to Blu-ray, but you can’t add bonus chapters and poorly rendered lasers that clearly wouldn’t have missed at point blank range, come on George you can do better than that.

          This post might be a bit more accurate if I started writing it mostly in the first person; at this very moment I’m working on a short story that I slapped down on my desk and declared complete three months and fourteen pages ago. But there comes a point where you have to stop and accept that your work isn’t going to get any better by adding a three-chapter prequel and changing the font to wingdings. Once the story has gotten to a certain point, any future changes you make will only end up distorting it.

           It’s an unfortunate truth that no matter what you do, eventually you will hate it. And then you will love it again. And then you will try to destroy every copy of it that ever existed. The point is that it’s finished, set in stone, and all you can do about it is either try to live with it or change your name and move to Greenland. Otherwise you end up slapping eye-assaulting CGI over your original scenes and rearranging the order of an already beloved bar-scene shootout. Figuratively speaking.