in which it becomes clear that power fantasies for children have fucked up a generation or two of grown-ups
In the decade since Lucasfilm was sold to Disney and the modern era of Star Wars storytelling began, the most important single piece of writing about not just the new material but the saga as a whole came from this piece by Matt Zoller Seitz:
“Vader’s hallway rampage in Rogue One underlined an area in which Lucas’s vision always needed bifocals: the tendency to let the spectacle of violent domination become an adrenaline-stimulating drug powerful enough to shatter any philosophical frame the storytellers try to put around it.”
Matt’s generous enough to reinforce that this has been a structural problem from the beginning: that you don’t get from there (Luke Skywalker nuking the Death Star) to here (Vader going kill-crazy in a darkened hallway full of powerless men, to thunderous applause) without having led some component of your audience down, for lack of a better term, a dark path.
I’m dullard enough, on the other hand, that the unexpected reaction to Vader’s return in Rogue One has put a particular chill down my spine for most of the years since the film’s release. A lot of the early response to Disney Star Wars revealed, reinforced, and confirmed a foundational truth around Star Wars that has only become more and more amazingly obvious as the new material has rolled out: a titanic section of casual and fervent Star Wars fans… don’t understand what Star Wars says.
This, on one level, is fine: as hard as it is for very interested film or pop culture devotees like myself to accept most days, the majority of people who engage with film — a popular, and populist, medium — don’t actually think very much about the mechanics or meaning of what they’re seeing, at all. Effectively: most people go to a movie once a month or once a year; the experience they expect is to have a good time watching something, to eat some popcorn, and to go home afterwards. And for any mass-market medium, like movies, to exist, we’re talking about probably 98% or 99% of all of the audience falling into that category — the category of people for whom movies do not have mechanics or meaning. The financials don’t work out, otherwise.
Star Wars is as successful as it is because it delivers, 100% of the time, the experience that that 99% wants, or at least, it is supposed to. All of the “arguments” about whether this or that movie is “good” or not are well outside the point. That stuff is for the fans and the obsessives (again, like me). Mass-market audiences probably remember if they liked a particular movie or not; with franchises, they might have a sense of whether they like the franchise or not, and it is possible to flip that switch from “yes” to “no” with enough entries that under-meet their expectations for a good time at the movies. (See also: the MCU.) But otherwise, this sort of interrogation just does not occupy a huge amount of contemplative space, broadly.
Back to first principles: Star Wars (the film, not the franchise, hence the bold-face) is a power fantasy for young people, ostensibly boys between 10 and 12 in the 1970s, that is built within a mythic model. Myths, culturally, are intended for that same age range, and are nominally the means by which a culture transmits to its adolescents the moral parameters of increasing power in a complex and contradictory world. Myths answer the question: how do you be a good person, a productive member of our society, once given the power of adulthood?
In Star Wars, the answer is: blow up the Death Star, because the tyrannical Empire is using it to murder millions of people in order to maintain their stranglehold on all the people of the galaxy. This, being Star Wars, is not complex, nor is it meant to be. Tyrannical Empire: bad. Using your (magic!) power to stop the tyrannical Empire from hurting people: good. Again, it is meant to be understood by, and appealing to, 10-year-olds, which is why Luke using the Force to blow up the Death Star is one of the coolest things any of us has ever seen. You’re supposed to want to be that cool, that heroic, that powerful. Power fantasy for young people, instructing on using power for good.
Now, Star Wars (the franchise this time, hence the lack of bold-face) has always had a problem with the absolutely over-the-wall excellence of its visual design. Even as a child, I recall that while the servants of the Empire may have been frightening — I certainly did not want Darth Vader to come out of my bedroom closet, ever — they were also cool. Darth Vader had the best costume since Batman. (Boba Fett’s entire status as a character, for forty years, has been based on literally nothing besides a costume design.) And over time, some fans of Star Wars naturally vibed one way or the other, Rebellion or Empire, largely based on aesthetics. Of the latter group, the Empire fans, some became the blessed whackos in the 501st Legion, who show up at Disney-approved events and occasionally raise money for charity. Some also, tangentially, gave us one of the funniest and most spectacularly nauseating moments in the Disney era, when a bunch of people who dig the Empire confessed that they didn’t like it when an Empire that had been clearly and repeatedly coded in the look and feel of 20th century fascism throughout the entire franchise, was referred to as an allegory for… fascism. Or worse, Nazis. Or worst, Americans.
This is one of those slipping-the-frame moments that I think Zoller Seitz refers to, and it must have happened gradually, over time, with the original trilogy in everyone’s tail-lights. Whether you believe the Empire is meant to be representative of Hitler’s Germany or the American invasion of Vietnam or just general space badguyism, the story doesn’t actually work if you don’t at least acknowledge that they are bad. That Palpatine is bad. That Darth Vader, for 95% of the trilogy, is a brutal, terrifying monster. There aren’t “heroes on both sides” (a quote from the title crawl for Revenge of the Sith that has been hilariously, catastrophically misunderstood from the moment it appeared). The Empire smokes an entire planet in the first hour of Star Wars to similarly nuke any false equivalencies that you may, as an audience, be entertaining. The Republic? Sucked. But the Empire? Sucks a whole lot more.
There are a lot of things that have been great about Andor, but certainly very near the top of the list is the relentless, resolute recasting of the Empire as the bad guys. Not just bad guys, the worst guys! The torture-Bix-with-the-screams-of-dying-children guys! There’s nothing cool about how relentlessly cruel the Empire is in Andor; they’re just baldly, nakedly, terrifyingly cruel. The one time there is an aspirational element to an Imperial character — Meero girlbossing her way past her smug and generally useless male colleagues to become top muckity at the ISB — that element is immediately weaponized against us, the audience, by showing how appallingly cruel an empowered Meero can then be.
With choices like that, Andor becomes corrective to how uncomfortably viable relentless heartlessness has become in the past ten years, as a kind of badge of modern (right-wing) political courage. (“Fuck your feelings!,” rave the Trumpists.) And Andor is a reset this franchise has desperately needed for most of the Disney era, and perhaps going back to the Prequels — which I tend to defend, but will also be the first to admit are rhetorically muddy as hell — because Both Sidesism isn’t just a result of lacklustre creative control on these stories; it’s also, unfortunately, a merchandising goldmine, which is after all why Disney is here in the first place. Buy a Stormtrooper sippy-cup if you want, man, but don’t tell Cinta.
But back to the real sore spot of it all, for me anyway: how, in the name of hell, did so many people come out of a childrens’ story that is variously about compassion being more powerful than hate; resisting industrialized military might being not just plausible, but moral; and “fascism bad don’t be fascism;” thinking that the point of the whole thing was vwimm-vwimm-blow-shit-up? Was there ever a philosophical framework to contain Star Wars, or was it shattered from the moment it started? Do people who fundamentally reckon the world a violent place thrill at the violence to such a degree that the outcomes of such violence simply do not compute? (Do people watch the whole movie, when they watch one of these movies? Or do they turn off Return of the Jedi when Luke springs out of the darkness and attacks his father, going in for the kill?) (That dweeb who cried when CGI Luke showed up in The Mandalorian and emulated his father’s hack-and-slash spree through a darkened hallway… has he seen the whole movie he claims to love?)
Those kinds of fans want power. They don’t want story, because story requires progression; they don’t want the power fantasy to ever end. (Perhaps more precisely: they want “story” as we have come to understand it in video games, where progression directly and only equals increases in power, without consequence or stake.) It means that these fans don’t want The Empire Strikes Back, the arrival of which signals the point in the story where the power fantasy begins to fall apart, gaining contours and shades, and accumulating meaning. And yeah, they sure as hell don’t want The Last Jedi, or Andor.
One more thing. I was watching some Clone Wars stuff and some Rebels stuff, and then I watched The Force Awakens for probably the fortieth time. It’s hard not to think that broken, withdrawn old Luke, living on Ahch-To, wasn’t on to something, albeit having gone about it for generally selfish reasons and via backwards methods. As far as the ersatz mythology of the Jedi vs. the Sith goes, it really was time for the Jedi to end; and a lot of the hero characters in latter-day Star Wars are in agreement with him. What is the fall of the Republic, with the Jedi descending into the chaos of war and never pulling themselves out, but the final failure of the Manichaean dogma that evil could be banished by code and creed; that violence could be engaged in altruistically; and that a political body (the Senate) was fundamentally, inextricably virtuous, regardless of on-the-ground reality? The Jedi, in the last days of the Old Republic, have succumbed to a power fantasy of a different sort: a fantasy of never being required to make conscious, complex moral decisions. Ahsoka figures this out. Based on his speech in The Last Jedi, Yoda seems to have figured it out, either on Dagobah or post-mortem. Luke, and variably Kylo Ren, figured out parts of it and acted accordingly. I hope some of these characters can continue to pull on that thread, because it might be the unifying thread of all three eras of Star Wars. Beyond the shattered frame, there could be even more rewarding ideas.