On Star Wars, the Last Jedi

I gave a school speech, in costume as George Lucas, on this subject in 1995 and everyone thought I was a huge dork. This was before the rereleases and prequels had brought Star Wars back into the public eye. These days, you don’t need to argue that Star Wars is great and a cultural treasure, because culture has come around to it again and everyone has collectively agreed on it and bought the t shirt.

So the only reason to bother making the argument is to make it differently, from a different perspective. Which I assume was the idea here. It was great because it’s greatness was something a bit different and weirder than you thought, and that ties into justifying some controversial opinions of what Star Wars is or isn’t. It’s the approach Anthony Bourdain takes with a country he visits that everyone knows is obviously interesting. It’s not a story to tell everyone what they already know, you have to find a new angle.

I think there’s some good material here, but the message about Star Wars is being subsumed by its connections to later (current, soon to be dated) movies and critical and fan reactions playing out on social media. Star Wars does have a weird arc. It started out by being surprising and subversive in how it established itself in relation to what was dominant at the time, while being, frankly, very orthodox and conventional in relation to classical tales in many respects. It just didn’t look how we expected on the surface.

After that, it slid into an almost painful predictability of formula, repeated lines, repeated situations, repeated visuals, repeated music, repeated characterizations. Everything that was surprising at first just kept coming back, slavishly so, so it became banal and conventional (where a slightly lighter touch could have kept it fresh feeling much longer, without any real major changes, as with the Marvel movies).

As someone who actually read a lot of books, the books managed to keep things interesting with the same characters and world for years. They didn’t have to rip up the whole fabric for the mere sake of novelty. Star Wars wasn’t just a trick of surprising us with something new and subversive, it was really surprising us with something old, something classic, but in an exotic new space to watch it play out. Star Wars got dull because the surface stuff stayed the same, and the nostalgic power started to wane after being reused so much over four decades, and later creators thought that stuff was what mattered.

Both of the newest movies tried to recapture the magic and failed. The first really did capture the feeling of that place, we knew we were back there. But it’s worship for the past was little too great. It was too caught up in existing in relation to the past, to righting the wrongs of the prequels and proving its cred as old school star wars.

And the last Jedi spent all its time doing the opposite, trying to prove it wasn’t the old Star Wars by pushing away what The Force Awakens had set up, while at the same time being slavishly repetitive in its reuse of elements from both TFA and the original trilogy. It’s by far the most schizophrenic film. It’s trying to cut ties with its immediate predecessor (which was trying to cut ties with its immediate predecessors), while surprising you at every turn while giving you the same elements at every turn, while imitating the surprising establishment of the conventions of this new world like the OT did while flushing those established conventions down the toilet, while also changing its mind and just leaving you back with those same conventions in the end, but not the deep, classical ones, the shallow ones (music, storm troopers, Jedi, tie fighters, big cannons, small hero group calling themselves rebels, space Nazis led by crazy fornerly good origin bad guy, fights on desert planets and white snow looking planets, weird alien bars, journeys into caves, etc etc etc.

The Last Jedi has no idea what it wants, only that it wants more of the same, but it wants you to be extremely surprised and confused at having arrived at the same place seeing the same stuff all over again. The only things it really managed to change were the lead actors (all disposed of), the fictional rules for space travel and warfare (four decades established, now a mess), and any other metaphysical rules that might limit creators who don’t feel like researching much or putting in much work (power with the light requires patience and discipline and isn’t just granted instantly for no reason, power with the light doesn’t make you a great warrior, nor does being a warrior make you great; the force has clearly different good and evil sides with distinct characteristics, the power of goodness is its goodness, not its abilities, the ability to make friends, have optimism for the future, sacrifice, and see the best in others).

The Last Jedi wants to tell us that the force is more than moving rocks, which frankly is just meta commentary and makes no sense in-universe (has Rey seen the movies?, she acts like she has, like she’s just an empowered stand-in for a star wars fan transported into the world). But you would only think that the force was just movigg rock if you had seen the movies but not paid much attention to them. It’s the sort of thing someone who was just culturally familiar with star wars would say, not actually knowing the point of the movies (that the force is about letting go of your preconceived notions of what power and significance are, or where they come from, and the need to let go of your conventional ideas about power and significance in order to discover a deeper reality).

The force really is more than just moving rocks. It’s a phisophical and spiritual ideal. It’s the same classic inversion that comes up all through the Bible. And the message isn’t just represented to us through the force, but through the entire plot of the movies. The great things being made humble by the small things. The Empire didn’t lose to Ewoks because Ewoks were so badass or they were so incompetent. They lost because they were so invested in the symbols of worldly power, giant ships and walkers and death lasers, that they saw no significance or power or threat in the small things around them. Rome, which laughed at the oddity of early Christianity and happily executed them in amusing ways, never could have foreseen that it would conquer and outlast the empire. All the huge nations that captured or tried to wipe out the Jews never imagined they would outlast all those empires.

These are foundational, classical stories of our culture, repeated again and again in our history and art. Moses was a nobody in a basket, trash found in a river, but saved his people and defeated the most powerful nation and gods on Earth at the time. Joseph was a slave and prisoner, but ended up saving his people and all of Egypt. Jesus was born in a stable, but he was a king; he had all the power in the world, but he let himself be taken and didn’t use any of it.

Goodness defeats evil not by means of matching its power, but by being itself, by finding something deeper and greater that can change the world. It’s still surprising when we see it happen, because we’re all the Egypt and Rome and Empire of our own time. We’re all still always impressed by the big and strong and conventional, and even though we’ve heard the story a thousand times now, all it takes is a fresh new example to shock us and remind us what our classical stories are always telling us, the story of the inversion of power.

The story remains surprising because, deep down, we all agree with the Empire that money and vast possessions, huge walkers and giant lasers and the ability to throw people around and shoot lightning, that is real power. We’re all quite shallow and conservative deep down; we believe in what we can see and what gets things done. Little guys lose. Ewoks defeating the Empire isn’t on our radar any more than it was on Rome’s when they were using Christians for torches and lion fodder, any more than it was on Britain’s mind when those American colonists started getting sassy.

Anyway, the point is, Star Wars was surprising, but in a very well established way, thematically, just in a new skin. So it was great in how well it achieved that, how well it rolled out the old, shocking lessons in way that reminded us how shocking and controversial and counter to human instinct they really were.

That’s what’s so great about Star Wars. It managed to take the classic stories we keep telling ourselves and strip away the familiarity so we could see them with fresh eyes. The newer movies don’t seem to be sure what they want to do. Slavishly peddle the remaining borrowed power of a forty year old work, milking it for borrowed significance? Both the new movies do that in excess. One more blatantly, but honestly, the other less blatantly but no less thoroughly, and so more disengenuously.

Maybe the worst crime of The Last Jedi is that, in the end, the force is just about moving rocks. You don’t need new perspectives or growth of patience or humility, just gobs of power handed to you so you can win because you can move more rocks more easily than anyone ever. The Jedi are gone, the books are gone, but then they aren’t and the books are fine. We hang on to the trappings of the story for marketability and lose the actual message behind it all that was the real heart of it and the real surprise and lesson behind it all.

In any case, my main problem with the later films is that they exist primarily as meta-exercises in franchise management and commwntaey rather than as legitimate stories of their own. The two strengths of Star Wars are: the classic story that always surprises us because it runs counter to human nature, and the weird world that lets us see that story with fresh eyes.

Disney could have bet on one of these two virtues and gone fairly right. First, by exploring weird new corners of the universe, making the vessel feel fresh again (but instead we saw the same stuff, just with a few decades more pixels and polish). This was what the old extended universe did successfully, mostly. It preserved the heart; it was a bit less surprising than at first, but they kept it interesting by adding weird new imaginative elements and situations for the classic characters and story to play out in.

The new movies don’t do that at all, they’re terribly familiar in that sense. All the same stuff is back and seems pretty similar. The other option that Disney could have gone with would be to add to and expand and go deeper with the story and message, really add to it, while keeping the same familiar setting and elements (presumably to either save effort or help with marketing through nostalgia).

Ironically, you can’t subvert the original themes and messages of Star Wars without accidentally ending up back somewhere conventional (the conventional wisdom that power is power and it would be great to just have it be given to you and be able to do what you want). If you want to innovate with the message you would have to find new depths or a new angle on the same theme, or it wouldn’t really be Star Wars any more, returning full circle to conventional practical wisdom (exemplified by Uncle Owen and the Empire).

I mean, in an ideal world you would find deeper depths and more keen ways to tell the classic message while making it fresh and exciting with exotic new elements, keeping the world fresh and exciting, helping to do again what Star Wars did, but that seems overly optimistic. I think one reason Star Wars stuck with people so much is that both of its original sequels did that, with some success. The means available were more limited to the filmmakers at the time, but they kept expanding the world, adding new places and sounds and people and experiences that made the world seem bigger and fresh. And they kept pushing deeper, maintaining continuity with the story and themes, but taking them farther.

What Obi Wan and Luke’s destruction of the Death Star hinted at, Yoda expanded, and the confrontation with Vader put it to the test and challenged it (conventional power got to have its say and its day, challenging but not defeating the thesis of the first movie). The second movie iterated on and continued to develop the themes from the first movie.

The third movie brought it all to fulfillment, where hidden power and value was so small that even the little guys, the rebels, didn’t see its value until it was truly revealed (and yes, I do mean the Ewoks, who were to the rebels as the rebels were to the empire, showing that even the little guys can have the same flawed thinking as the big bad guys), and Luke followed through and went beyond even his teacher (Ben), who tried to change Luke’s ideas about power and conflict, but still said that he had to kill Vader, and took his second teacher’s ideas to their greatest extreme that you never would have guessed at, defeating his archenemy without fighting.

The whole tension of that final ending is the question of whether Luke will be pulled back into the conventional ideas about power and significance, or whether he’ll go all the way and really go all in on the inversion of power thesis, that goodness has a power greater than mere force. If Luke wins the duel, he actually loses, because he loses himself and his ideals, he loses what he’s learned, he loses the message the movies have been trying to teach us this whole time. The whole premise of Star Wars itself is at stake.

Luke tries refusing to fight, but it isn’t that easy; he can’t help himself, his whole character arc is being tested. And in the end he realized that he can’t defend the thesis of the movies without paying a terrible price, possibly his very life. And that’s exactly what Palpatine wants. He’s trying to use Luke’s like and the lives of his friends to convince him to betray his principles. It worked on Vader, as we know from the prequels. But Luke is the hero because he can stand true where others couldn’t. He stops himself, throws away his saber, and chooses the spiritual victory, to remain uncorrupted and to put his faith in the message. An becaus it’s a hopeful, positive story, he wins. He conquers his enemies in way they could never have imagined. Luke’s goodness conquers his father so completely that he gives his own life to preserve his son’s.

Our stories tell us about how the world should be, as well as how it is, which you see revealed in the endings. Things end as they should end, in a just world. In an inversion of much (but not all; and we love and remember the stories where it did happen) of history. Luke’s fisth is vindicated. He finally conquers Vader completely. Not by force, but in his heart, in his person; with pity and love, he changes him, in a way conventional power never would have thought possible or considered, and so evil is defeated.

Each movie takes the setting further, giving us a richer and more engaging world, and each story builds on the themes, taking them further and deeper, challenging them, testing them, and finding new depths from which to rise in triumph.
The new films don’t really do either. The skin isn’t really any different, it just has a bit of fresh polish. We see how little has really changed; basically, nothing in forty years. Everyone is basically doing the same stuff with the same tools in the same sort of places as four decades ago. And they don’t really seem to have much new or special to say that makes the classic story come through more clearly. If anything, it’s more muddled and obscured and unclear and contradictory.

Obfuscation and lack of clarity aren’t innovation. Contradiction and subversion isn’t inherently clever. Anyone can do that; it’s a retrograde achievement, not a positive, progressive one. You’re not charting a new course, you’re just muddying and contradicting the existing path. Rather than either walking the line into new territory or going in a new direction, these movies are the equivalent of walking the exact same path and direction in the sand while brushing a broom over your tracks, so the direction laid behind is obscured and unclear, so you can’t see that you’re walking the same old path. Effectively, it’s like becoming lost while not going anywhere.

And that’s to say nothing of the fact that these two films, both struggling to define themselves in contrast to their predecessors, are supposed to be part of the same story, the same trilogy, and in fact the same supposed 9 film saga.
And so I guess I was wrong. It’s hard to keep a discussion of the merits of Star Wars fairly short and simple and not have it devolve into a discussion of other, later films. My apologies.