rogue one

I was a guest on Daniel & Shana’s Oi! Spaceman podcast again, this time talking about ‘Rose’ and ‘The End of the World’.  But now, back to the ongoing saga…

 

The last time I wrote about Star Wars, I said that it sees the galactic politics and history it depicts as being essentially powered by neurosis, specifically male neurosis.  Rogue One very explicitly adheres to this pattern – though, laudably, it represents a counter-strain in opposition.

In Rogue One, the Death Star openly represents the immense strength and immense vulnerability of any imperial system, the simultaneously terrifying and ridiculous urges and principles which animate such systems.  At a different-yet-connected level, it represents the same mixture of dangerous power and ridiculous vulnerability within one of the techno-bureaucrats who run that system.  It sees the causal throughline as very clearly running from inside the heads of at least two men, out into the universe.

I have mixed feelings about this.  The thesis that politics comes from emotions and psychology, though I believe it is ultimately wrong, doesn’t necessarily have to collapse into a reactionary ‘fix yourself first’ ideology.  Psychology clearly plays a role in politics, and in resistance and struggle.  The subjective factor is important.  We are generally supposed to think that the ‘mass psychology of crowds’ is negative and scary, but crowds can also be expressions of unifying principles rather than just the loss of individuality, and collective struggles create dialectics of learning and cooperation that expand people’s political horizons.  This is why it is generally a mistake to too ruthlessly criticise mass political movements that, while broadly on the right side, also have imperfect or even pernicious elements.  A lot of people who demonstrate against Trump will have ideas that are retrograde, unpleasant, unhelpful, conventional, short-sighted… but they’re still better than anyone else because they’re there, on the street.  And the collective process of protest creates a space – found nowhere else within capitalism – in which people can encounter strange new people, and strange new ideas, face to face as it were, in struggle, in unity but not in conformity, where they can learn and grow and expand, can improve their political consciousness.  The social effect of mutual support and solidarity in struggle is a vital part of any radical movement.  This is undoubtedly psychological.  Indeed, it is only the vulgar reduction of psychology, society, etc into discrete and separate things (itself an aspect of bourgeois ideology) which sees the psychological aspect as being apart from the other dynamics of political struggle.  Anything that impedes this dialectic is to be shunned, including criticism that stops being constructive and becomes sectarian doctrinaire nitpicking, whether it comes from identity politics or from class politics.  (Again, the apparent schism is a false dichotomy.)

On the other hand, the way Rogue One – and Star Wars generally – depicts cosmic levels of political tyranny and turmoil as emanating directly from inside addled and repressed and anxious male brains can be, as it were, reclaimed. …

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Spoilers 

Orson Krennic, director of the Death Star project, is a middle manager type who has achieved a position of authority above his abilities, possibly owing to his pre-existing relationship with engineer Galen Erso.  He climbed the greasy pole owing to his association with a brilliant technician, and their partnership working on a prestige project.  He’s ambitious and unscrupulous, but also essentially inadequate.  He spends the entire film playing catch-up, being bounced between various superiors, looking for recognition, taking his frustrations out on others, and generally failing. 

Tarkin’s attempted usurpation of Krennic’s control over the completed Death Star looks like a cynical power-grab, but could as easily be seen as a sensible management move.  As Tarkin correctly notices, Krennic is not suited to a command role.  In any case, Krennic’s shocked outrage is ludicrous given that this is just how the Empire works.  His own successes come from appropriating the work of others, yet he has the temerity to feel aggrieved when his own work is appropriated.  Moreover, the usual way you rise in the Empire is by showing more ruthless unscrupulousness than the other ambitious drones.  You ‘work towards the Emperor’, and fuck over any competitors as you ascend.  Then you get to preach against ‘ambition’ to those lower than you.  It’s social-darwinism as a government system, and is yet another clear indication – and an unusually acute one – that the film sees the Empire as a clear analogue for Nazi Germany. 

(The Nazi state was similarly based on this kind of wasteful infighting between multifarious bureaucrats with overlapping remits.  And this was deliberate.  It was doctrinal.  Hitler believed the best way to get results was to set ambitious men against each other.  Their epic pen-pushing battles over spheres of responsibility were supposed to mirror natural selection, the struggle for supremacy inherent in all life, or something.) 

In Rogue One, it is strongly implied – in a flashback sequence of Jyn’s that adds nothing to the plot – that Krennic knew Galen and his wife, not only professionally but socially, before Galen fled imperial society.  Krennic then spends years looking for him, to bring him back onto a project that could manage without him.  The first thing he does, despite his stated intention of taking Galen’s wife and daughter alive, is to kill his wife.  He hardly needs to, given the situation.  Unable to find the daughter, he basically forgets about her.  She’s out of Galen’s life.  It’s fairly clear: Krennic wants Galen all to himself. 

Despite claiming that Galen is a terrible liar, he allows himself to be fooled by Galen’s resigned-act for two decades.  He has to be informed (in a roundabout way) of the obvious – that Galen is the traitor – by someone else.  His refusal to see Galen’s treachery before then causes him all the career problems he spends the entire film coping with.  Upon learning of Galen’s betrayal, he stages a public humiliation and punishment for Galen, killing everyone but him.…

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Yes, yet more Star Wars.

I still have a Patreon, as does Eruditorum Press (please give to the group before you give to me).  And Wrong With Authority Ep 2 is still downloadable.

Note: This isn’t a ‘review’.

SPOILERS

 

As noted previously, Rogue One is a Second World War spy movie.  This is probably why the Empire in Rogue One looks more explicitly Axis than ever before.  And it was always pretty specifically Axis, with its Stormtroopers and its officers’ togs reminiscent of WW2 Japanese uniforms.  But in Rogue One the Empire is placed specifically in the role of the baddies in a WW2 movie.  I talked a bit about this last week, and Jane showed up in the comments to observe that Rogue One is also a Pacific Theatre movie, with its showdown in a beachy, tropical location, and its nukes. 

The irony of the carefully scaled-down deployments of the Death Star is that their very comparatively small scale makes them spectacular in a way the destruction of Alderaan wasn’t.  Alderaan just blows up.  The city in Jedha, and the base on Scarif, are both destroyed locally, which means that the blasts can be observed from the point of view of the planet on which they occur.  The result is, as Jane suggested, is something very visually reminiscent of the mushroom cloud, which itself – especially in this context – inevitably brings to mind Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  As I myself noted in previous essays, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were always lurking in the series’ subconscious.  Here they billow to the surface.

But there’s an obvious inference here.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki were perpetrated by the United States.  America remains the only country in history to ever actually deploy nuclear weapons – the ultimate indiscriminate killer, and therefore the ultimate war crime – against civilians as part of an actual conflict.  Again, the implication of the US in the crimes of empire, of the twentieth century’s greatest horrors, has always lurked in the series.  Here, again, it becomes more open than ever before.  The scaling-back of the Death Star’s deployment makes the semiotic effect less bombastic, and hence less obscure.  The Death Star becomes the Enola Gay, dropping Little Boy and Fat Boy on Jedha and Scarif.  Consequently, the Empire is implicitly compared to the United States.  Whereas before it has sometimes looked like the British Empire or the Confederacy, here it’s the USofA herself, and at the height of the good war and the greatest generation.  More pertinently, it is the US at the historical moment when it became the world’s greatest superpower, which is another way of saying the world’s most powerful empire.  This isn’t exactly coherent… you could certainly suggest that it looks like America attempting to put its own crimes onto the victims of those crimes… but sometimes incoherence is more eloquent.  There is as much power in the implied association as in any implied victim-blaming, especially when you consider that there are other ways in which Rogue One flirts with implying quite a strong critique of US imperialism.…

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Welcome back to Eruditorum Press: A Star Wars Blog (apparently).

Some notes before we start.

Firstly, I still have a Patreon, and I send life-changing good vibrations through the ether to all those people who contribute to it.

Secondly, episode 2 of Wrong With Authority is still downloadable, here.

Thirdly, this post coincides (purely accidentally) with an excellent piece about Rogue One posted yesterday at Storming the Ivory Tower by Sam Keeper.  Here.  I strongly recommend it.  

Fourthly, I may be dishing up something more substantial about Rogue One myself soon.  It’s an interesting movie.

Finally, please forgive me if what follows is a bit sub-par.  I’m really quite ill at the moment.

Oh, and SPOILERS

 

The alt-Right and MRAs and MGTOWs etc have a point about Star Wars these days.  They say all the new Star Wars films are part of the cultural Marxist/white genocide/misandrist conspiracy against straight white men and the Right.  They’re wrong about that, of course… though it certainly is nice of them to admit – in the manner of Fox News labelling some wallscrawl reading “NO FASCIST USA” as ‘anti-Trump graffiti’ – that they, and the version of straight white maleness they prize, are essentially identical with “the evil GALACTIC EMPIRE” (as the opening crawl from Star Wars describes it).  But yeah, I for one certainly walked out of Rogue One wanting to go and kill fascists.  Of course, I feel like that most of the time, so that makes it hard to judge how much of it was down to the movie. 

But there’s no denying that the film at least clearly thinks, and openly says, it’s about a brave, multi-ethnic band of rebels, some of them explicitly the denizens of a world occupied and looted by foreign imperialism, led by a woman, killing loads of space fascists and giving their lives to help destroy space fascism.  It doesn’t just think and say it’s about this… unlike many fantasy films which are under the impression that they have an uncompromisingly anti-fascist message, this one makes a good case for itself.  It’s claims for itself are fairly convincing. 

Rogue One is, of course, a massive exercise in nostalgia and pastiche.  It is as much a ‘structre’ (the spectre of a structure) as The Force Awakens (see here).  I won’t go into this in huge detail.  There is something interesting in the way Rogue One deliberately gets everything slightly ‘off’.  Even as it slavishly aims for aesthetic continuity with Star Wars, to the point of designing itself to be satisfyingly watched immediately before Star Wars, it nevertheless deliberately leaves out all sorts of key elements.  There’s no opening crawl; there are no wipes.  The film is very consciously not positioning itself as fantasy, as a pastiche of Flash Gordon the way the original did.  Instead, Rogue One is self-consciously Star Wars as a war movie, very specifically a World War II spy movie.  In its original form, the heroic group of titular rebels would all be played by Richard Burton and Richard Harris, etc, and Krennic would report to Donald Pleasance’s Himmler instead of a CGI Cushing as Tarkin. …

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