Dale Peck has an interesting review/essay on Star Wars in the Observer. I particularly liked this quote:
People who do stupid things and fail are called fools; people who do stupid things and succeed are called visionaries; the people who buy into this stupid binary are called consumers. But consumers exact their revenge. They torture their celebrities mercilessly: stalk them with paparazzi, dissect their every move and speculate wildly about their motives, force them to diet and suture themselves, encourage their excesses, fan their idiosyncrasies and insecurities into outright perversion, and, most of all, glut in their fall. We live in a discriminatory era whose prejudices are cruel but whose love is even crueler. Witness Howard Hughes; witness Princess Diana; witness Michael Jackson. We prefer these more flamboyant or grotesque examples of egomania and destruction to the more straightforward banality of greed—which, when you get right down to it, is the only real explanation for the making of all six of the Star Wars movies, and the success of the last five.
