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Vintage THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980) promotional stills. I would look at these in endless fascination as a kid, back when I hadn’t seen the films yet. And still really (which is why they are called “stills”). I had seen Return of the Jedi, but the first two were rumors to me, ads in old magazines. I’ve talked about that before.

So I already knew how the trilogy ended, but that didn’t matter—that never matters. The point isn’t what happens, it’s how it happens. We know James Bond and Batman survive each film, but we don’t know how, and that’s the mechanism that provides the entertainment. The joke about Titanic (1997) back then was people saying, “Why should I watch it, I know how it ends. The boat sinks.” But a story isn’t just its ending.

You could write a story about a man whose father is killed by his brother, and then the brother marries the widow, and it’s a soap, a dime novel. But when you’re Shakespeare, the result is Hamlet.