Viewing Order Vexations

A couple of years ago, a "Star Wars" fan named Rod Hilton introduced the concept of the "Machete Order," which postulates that the best way to watch the "Star Wars" films is to watch Episodes IV and V first, skip I, move on to II and III, and then finish off with VI. This way a new viewer isn't spoiled for the revelations at the end of Episode V, gets to avoid the Jar-Jar, and gets to enjoy the meat of the backstory that the prequels provide. There are certain flaws with this approach - Episode III spoils several revelations in Episode VI, for instance - but I can see the appeal. Lots of "Star Wars" fans have latched on to the "Machete Order," to the point where it regularly gets brought up in just about every online conversation where someone recommends the series to a newbie.

I completely disagree with this whole approach. Personally, I think it rarely matters what order you watch a film series in. Sure, if you have access to all the movies at once, watching them in order of production or chronologically avoids a lot of confusion and lets you see a larger story unfold in a straightforward, step-by-step fashion. However, individual movies in a good series ought to be able to stand on their own, and watching a series out of the preferred order is rarely as much of a stumbling block as it seems. The film franchises that I became the most attached to as a teenager were invariably ones that I watched out of order. My family didn't go out to the movies very often, and didn't start regularly renting videos until I was in junior high, so I saw most of the popular trilogies and ongoing film series in very piecemeal, haphazard fashion.

My first exposure to "Star Wars" for instance, happened in 1992, when NBC showed edited versions of "The Empire Strikes Back" and "The Return of the Jedi." My brother and I convinced our parents to rent "Star Wars" for us the following week, so we could see what we had missed. I actually like the original "Star Wars" the least out of the three movies. It was fun, but didn't have the emotional depth and more developed mythology of the other two. I went on to become a massive "Star Wars" geek in high school though, so the ordering clearly didn't hurt anything. Then there was "Back to the Future." Any 90s kid will tell you that the series was a mainstay of cable and syndicated television, but the rights to the three movies were held by different people at different times, so they were almost never aired together or in the right order. So I saw Parts I and III first, and then Part II several months later - another rental. The "Back to the Future" installments had plots that were much more tied together than "Star Wars," and I ended up finding the novelization of Part II at the library to help fill in some of the gaps. Still, I had no trouble at all following Part III, which works perfectly well as a stand-alone Western adventure.

"Indiana Jones"? I watched "Raiders" and "Last Crusade" from taped TV broadcasts constantly in junior high, but didn't see "Temple of Doom" until I was in college. "Star Trek"? Saw IV, II, III, and I in that order. Skipped V and VI entirely. "007"? I experienced the Connery, Moore, and Brosnan eras pretty much simultaneously. Frankly, the idea of choosing what order you want to see a set of films in still feels like a luxury. And looking at the more recent film series that have come along, I don't think following strict serialization would make much of a difference at all. All the "Harry Potter" movies feel pretty self-contained. It hardly takes much time at all to get caught up on what's going on in each "Lord of the Rings" chapter, and there's really very little that connects the Marvel movies when you get down to it. Sure, a lot of the fun of "The Avengers" is watching all these different heroes from different movies team up, but if you take that away you've still got a nice, shiny action movie with Joss Whedon dialogue.

Sure, it's fun to geek out and make mountains out of molehills about the tiny nuances of a viewing experience. To become a fan of a franchise, though, perfect viewing conditions aren't necessary. You can always go back and catch up on what you missed later. Sure, some things get spoiled, but then you also get little mysteries that other people don't - what was that disappearing fax message at the end of "Back to the Future Part III" all about? And how did Marty get back to 1955 at the beginning of the movie?

Someone who saw the trilogy in order just wouldn't understand.
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