For complicated reasons—busy parents, culture shock, lack of friends outside my family circle—I reached the age of 8 without seeing a single movie. The whole business was a mystery to me. Because everyone was talking about Star Wars that summer (it was 1977), I begged my Maiguru Sana (Auntie Sana, my mother’s big sister) to take me to a screening of it in Wallingford. She agreed. She, too, had never seen a movie in her life, even though she was 33 at the time.
We traveled to Wallingford, we entered the theater, we sat near the front row, the spectacle began, the spectacle ran, the spectacle ended—and I was totally transformed. (My maiguru, on the other hand, slept through the whole thing—even the explosive space battle couldn’t wake her up.)
Now to explain the cause behind my great transformation. Before seeing the movie, I understood the war of Good against Evil to be an entirely Christian one: God versus Satan. The war happened on the ground, in the sky above, and in the immense dark space beyond the moon. The universe was ordered by heaven and hell. So imagine the shock of seeing on the screen a whole different order, a whole different war between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil; a war, furthermore, that made no mention of Jesus, or Lucifer, or the star of Bethlehem, the Romans, the beasts in The Book of Revelation, or the Last Supper. Yet, even in the total absence of the Christian drama of good and evil, I still recognized the drama of good and evil in a faraway galaxy.
