“I didn’t know there was this much green in the whole galaxy.”
I take inordinate ownership of Rey. Not ownership in the “I made her” sense, but rather, in that she is my representative in the Star Wars universe. I don’t know if it’s true that when I was a kid, I dreamed of a female Jedi, following in the footsteps of Luke and Obi-Wan; I do know that when I played dress-up superhero, I played Wonder Woman and Supergirl, not Superman. There’s an empowered girl inside me; always has been. And then Rey came along, and it all became vividly real.
There have basically been three Star Wars figures I’ve been dreaming about since I was a kid. These are 2 of them.
— Matt BB-8 (@tederick) September 2, 2017
As with most (strong) emotional connections, there was a real-world context. By the time Star Wars: The Force Awakens had finished unspooling that first night in 2015, Rey’s trek to the top of that mountain on Ahch-To became very much my own. I was in a bad place; I was in a bad way. “I know all about waiting.” I’d waited. Something about that green and misty peak called to me, and I knew it was time to find the next adventure.
At first, I took it pretty literally; I made plans to go to Ireland. I had a good and stable job at a place whose skill — among many other, more wholesome things — was in making that goodness and stability seem too lucrative to pass up. (The money didn’t suck, either.) I bided my time with a phalanx of creative projects on the side; used the job’s daytime flexibility to support a whole ecosystem of film-adjacent pop cultural discourses; and learned the hard way never to make a Voltron reference in a board meeting. Those people don’t know from Voltron; they know from Go Trains. They were good people. They were not my people.
Waiting is easy, especially when you’ve figured it all out, as above. Quiet nights eating puff-bread, watching ships take off, wondering if I’d ever be on one of them. Waiting is also dangerous. It is, categorically, a form of self-harm; and if it’s not self-harm enough, the world has a way of underlining the point with worse and worse tidings. I got hurt in 2016, badly. By one person who should have done better and one who was, I think, just fundamentally broken. I learned a lot about self-harm that year, and how I’d been practicing it without knowing; and a lot about self-care, too, and how I’d been using it to medicate something I should have just worked directly to heal.
Long story short, though, I didn’t go to Ireland. I went a lot further than that.
And TOMORROW….. pic.twitter.com/64wmpR8PJl
— Matt BB-8 (@tederick) January 25, 2017
I can’t remember the exact dates but I’m pretty sure by just about exactly a year after I met Rey for the first time, I was walking in the door of the Lightbox dressed in a green sweater, heading to a second interview that would prove to be the last one. A month after that, I worked there. And yes, I’d found my people: I’d found out “how I fit into all this.” It’s a heady, uncanny change, and not one I expected to come to twenty years after film school. I thought film school was over, a thing I’d wanted but wasn’t good enough to get. And sure, I’d drop all of this in a heartbeat if Lucasfilm calls up and wants me to direct the Obi-Wan movie. But I cannot put nearly well enough into words what it was like to be sitting in the meeting room we affectionately call “Selma Blair” and realizing, for the first time, what I was now a part of; what decisions I would be helping to make; what work I would be helping to bring into the world. It changed everything.
My Voltron jokes go over better, too. Everyone at the Lightbox knows what Voltron is. My people. Every day unfolds a new layer of this; the work is incredibly challenging, mutates and morphs constantly, and knocks seven bells out of me more times than I’d like. It’s the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. I can tell you unequivocally: I didn’t know there was this much green in the whole galaxy.
This is the short version of a longer story. To circle back on Rey, it’s the underlying context by which she became my hero — the one who suffered her loneliness right up till the moment the universe (the Force?) gave her no choice but to see that her suffering served nothing. I think about that idea a lot: wasted pain. Wasted time is easy for us to quantify, but we rarely discuss wasted pain. I think wasted pain feels a lot like waiting. I’ve done a lot of it. I know all about waiting.
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