The New York Times today reviews the Star Wars exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, showing costumes, models, and other junk from the sets of the movies, along with copious amounts of merchandise, some of which is there to illustrate the Star Wars "mythology" (the catalog strains under the weight of its allusions to Campbell and Jung), and some of which is there to illustrate what's really driving the showing of exhibit, down the hall in the gift shop. It sounds like a real trip, though not necessarily for the stuff on display:

... museum officials alerted me to a Web site (http://boards.theforce.net/message.asp?topic=6077494&replies=0) where guidelines for appropriate behavior have been posted for members of the New York chapter of one of the "Stars Wars" fan clubs. The guidelines specify "NO DUELING of any kind!" and "NO Blasters! NO BLASTERS!"

I'm actually serious about that: the most interesting thing about the "Star Wars" phenomenon by far is the way people are using these lousy movies as a basis for genuine folk art. And I do think the movies are lousy --- the first was an apparently self-conscious riff on the short serials produced in the '40s on the cheap, but given the sheer ponderous pretension of what followed, Lucas either forgot about that, or wasn't smart enough to get his own joke in the first place. But I'm not the guy running around in the home-made cape with the painted paper-towel roll subbing in for a light saber, and I don't understand what makes him tick --- which makes him a lot more interesting than the movie makers, whose millions of motives are obvious.