Critical Psychosis: Genre, Détournement, and Critique in Mr. Plinkett's Star Wars Reviews

Who's the more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?-Obi-Wan KenobiWhen Harry S. Plinkett uploaded a review of Star Wars: Episode I-The Phantom Menace to YouTube in 2009, he became a brand of Internet celebrity. It is difficult, however, to detach "review" from rather large scare quotes. Posted in seven parts, Plinkett's rant is as smart as it is genre-bending. Yoking audio commentary to film theory, the review ostensibly takes the shape of a nonfiction video essay: a detailed, scene-by-scene analysis of the CGI-saturated Star Wars prequel. But simultaneously, as if unable to sustain the necessary level of repression, the review fractures into the narrative of Plinkett himself-a wheelchair-bound centenarian who murders his wives, actively abducts people, and offers to mail Totino's Pizza Rolls to viewers who comment on his "webzone." Plinkett is a fictional character, voiced by independent filmmaker Mike Stoklasa and produced by Stoklasa's Milwaukee-based RedLetterMedia. RLM's website boasts many short films and webseries, but the Plinkett reviews are among the most highly anticipated.1 Plinkett's takedown of The Phantom Menace alone has received more than five million views on YouTube, and was even screened at the CPH PIX film festival in Denmark ("Mike's Coming"). Through Plinkett, Stoklasa stitches his reviews together using schizophrenic metalepsis and intentionally awkward editing. Overlaying tropes from video essay, mockumentary, mash-up, and even horror, Plinkett blurs the line between art and armchair criticism. And at seventy minutes, The Phantom Menace review is, by most accounts, a feature-length film unto itself. By recontextualizing supplemental footage and other Star Wars marketing material, Plinkett is a subversive response to a garishly overcommoditized film industry. His reviews are evidence that cultural producers do not possess ultimate control over the identities of their products. Stoklasa moreover uses a "deranged" mind as the template for defamiliarizing the hegemonic logic of consumerism. Psychosis is figured as a form of catharsis in response to the colossal disappointment of the Star Wars prequels, but it is simultaneously a form of critique. By fictionalizing his critic, Stoklasa reveals the lengths to which criticism is not merely derivative, but generative-a "productive mutation," as media critics Anne Burdick et al. might call it (11), detourned from extant cultural forms and morphed into an eclectic performance of argument."Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was the most disappointing thing since my son," Plinkett begins. "And while my son eventually hanged himself in the bathroom of the gas station, the unfortunate reality of the Star Wars prequels is that they'll be around. Forever" (Stoklasa, Episode I). These opening lines of The Phantom Menace review attest to the indelible inscription of Star Wars upon our cultural imaginary, just as the figure of paternal authority might enroll us into a drama of imminent castration. But how could a Star Wars film be so disappointing? Speaking only from personal experience, I do not remember watching the original trilogy for the first time. My identity is premised on having always already seen it. I suspect this is true for many people born after the 1970s. And yet, even if you have never seen Star Wars, you probably know that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father, just as you probably recognize the quip, "May the Force be with you." Over the last halfcentury, Star Wars has been exalted amongst American mythoi, its narratemes quilted into the backdrop of shared cultural experience. One could therefore argue that when George Lucas set out to create a prequel trilogy in the 1990s, there was simply no way it could live up to fans' expectations.Indeed, there has been no shortage of ire slung at the newer films. The fully CGI character Jar Jar Binks, for example, has been the focus of much derision, as has the postulation of midi-chlorians as the material basis for Force-sensitivity. …