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star wars

Forward, to the Past! 2 – Episode 2: First Order of Business

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Spoilers

 

Even as it complicates the Star Wars universe in some ways, the sequel trilogy clings close to the old liberalism vs. fascism dichotomy that dominated the politics of the original trilogy and prequel trilogy, and which dominates fantasy narratives generally. (See this by Phil, for instance.) The First Order’s politics is essentially contentless. They hate the Republic because reasons. They wear black and grey uniforms, and have red and black banners, and rallies, and they’re therefore fascists, and the fascists hate liberal democracy because they just do. This dichotomy, which is pervasive throughout stories of this kind (look at Harry Potter for instance) tells us something about the permissible horizons of ideology in the capitalist mass culture industries. It is this which gives rise to the syndrome I talked about in my villains essay, in which I point out (amongst other things) that villains are usually the only people in stories like this who are trying to fundamentally change the world. 

Actually, the original trilogy scores slightly better on this than many other such narratives. It is set in a period when the fascists have already won, and the people trying to change the world are the good guys. While it set the fascism/liberalism dichotomy template for a generation of fantasy narratives, Star Wars actually had a marginally better version to offer. The odd thing is that, while consciously more ‘right on’ (or does one day ‘woke’ these days?) in many ways, the sequel trilogy is actually retrograde in this respect, because – at least in Force Awakens – the First Order is more like a challenger to the reign of the New Republic, a splinter group, a secessionist movement. 

I noted in this essay how much the First Order looks like the Confederacy. This is the spin that Force Awakens put on the old dichotomy, and it’s valuable – except that it once again positions the bad guys as the only people trying to change things, the only people challenging liberal democracy. And that’s a shame because liberal democracy needs challenging. It’s better than fascism, but that’s a low bar. The Union was better than the Confederacy, and the Civil War was worth fighting (to push for the freedom of the slaves, etc) but it’s also true that the Union was capitalist and imperialist, and that imperialism was built into its actual motives for fighting the Civil War. The Union went on to build its further expansion on imperialism, invasion, slaughter, warmongering, oppression, genocide, etc. 

In the fascism/liberalism dichotomy, the baddies are almost always the only people challenging such systems. They often get to point out the hypocrisy of liberal democracy, before being proved wrong and crushed. The ideological utility of such moves doesn’t take much parsing. You eternally consign challenges to the status quo to the category of villainy and fanaticism, and to doom.

There is something to be said for storytelling – in the late teens of the twenty-first century – that is open and unambiguous about fascism being a bad thing that needs to be stopped.

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Forward, to the Past! 2 – Episode 1: Mind Tricks

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Spoilers

A note on formatting: I refuse to call the movie Star Wars “A New Hope” or “Episode IV”, so when I put Star Wars in italics (like just then) I mean the first movie they made, the one with Jawas and Greedo and Mos Eisley, etc.  When I put Star Wars without italics (like just then) I’m referring to the series or franchise or meta-text as a whole.

 

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Having finally seen The Last Jedi, I was free to take a look at what others were saying about it. I’d been aware that the film was proving controversial… by which people seemed to mean that almost everyone liked it apart from a tiny sliver of white men whose disapproval was creating the artificial impression of controversy, and who – paradoxically enough – probably also deny the existence of privilege.

I won’t go into the objections of the tiny layer of voluble fanboys who decided to hate (or rather angst over) Last Jedi. I’m sure all that has been well covered elsewhere. But I will just point out one thing: the tendency to point to moments when the film took a stance or expressed a viewpoint and to see these as objective mistakes.

It was, some say, a mistake to depict Luke in the way the film did. It was also, according to some, a mistake to depict Poe the way the film did, especially in his relationship to Holdo. It was a mistake to leave Snoke unexplained, and to kill him off. It was a mistake to reveal that Rey’s parents were nobodies, of no significance to the plot or mythos. It was a mistake to see Leia use the Force impressively to save herself.  Etc.  And so on.

The ways in which these things are said to be mistakes varies, but the basic idea of the mistake is a running theme in the complaints. The film is also too comedic, which was yet another mistake. It’s a comedy of errors, one might say. Though it lacks identical twins and dirty jokes.

Luke, it is said, is depicted wrongly according to his established character. The mystery of Rey’s background is squandered. Etc, etc. The mistake is either a betrayal of some established bit of lore or characterisation (a continuity error of characterisation, basically), or it’s a bug in the storytelling mechanics, a bit of faulty engineering.

This is all rather telling, and in ways that are pretty obvious really.To adumbrate the complaints is almost to explain them.

We’re often dealing with people who see storytelling in terms of correct and incorrect decisions, with these measured against a kind of ‘instruction manual’ conception of how narrative works.

This is, of course, a case of the porgs coming home to roost, since such a view of storytelling has a purchase on the ideas of a couple of generations of fanboys precisely because of the slavish (if initially post-facto) devotion to Campbellian ideas about mythic storytelling that were championed by Lucas, and which turned out to be so unfortunately influential.…

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Shabcast 35, Part 1 – Chatting Star Wars & Rogue One with Sam Keeper

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At long last, here is Part 1 of an extra-special Shabcast, in which I am joined by the brilliant Sam Keeper, of Storming the Ivory Tower, to chat about Star Wars, with particular emphasis on Rogue One. 

Very pleased with this one.  There were some technical difficulties with it, but I’ve hammered it into eminently listenable shape.

Part 2 next week.

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Here are Sam’s articles on Rogue One:

A Galaxy Very, Very Near: Are Time And Space in Rogue One Core to its Resistance Narrative?

Modern Myth-Busting: Are Rogue One’s Characters Worthy Star Wars Heroes?

Film Theory Theory: MatPat’s Star Wars Theories Are Nazi Garbage

and

Nerd-On-Nerd Violence: Why Is Geek Star Wars Crit So Lousy?

and here is her announcement of the upcoming (expanded and revised) collection of these essays (plus bonus content).

 …

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Sex in the Time of Empire

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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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An Increasingly Inaccurately Named Trilogy: Episode VII – The Force Awakens

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It is damning with faint praise to say that “George Lucas done right” is a task perfectly suited to J.J. Abrams’s abilities, which is of course why it’s such a fun thing to assert. It’s not quite true, for reasons we’ll get to, but there’s more truth to it than not, and for the most part the truth is more revealing. Certainly it’s very obviously the logic Disney applied in hiring Abrams for the job of making Star Wars into a viable property again, and their benign cynicism is on the whole easy to understand. The prequels had made Return of the Jedi a better end to the saga in more ways than one, their famous awfulness drying up the bulk of the cultural goodwill the franchise had while muddying the question of what Star Wars should look like post-1983 with a host of unsatisfying answers that nevertheless needed to be considered.

Abrams, in this context, was an eminently safe pair of hands. He’d already rebooted Star Trek with an aesthetic that could uncharitably be summarized as “wishing it was Star Wars,” and with Super 8 had shown himself a skilled practitioner of 1970s nostalgia. More broadly, he was a director who could solve both of Disney’s immediate problems. On the one hand, he was fluent and respected enough in geek culture to keep rabid Star Wars fans on board. Such fans make up a negligible share of the audience for a major tentpole film, but are vocal and engaged enough that losing them creates a significant marketing problem. On the other hand, he was actually capable of making films that people liked and wanted to see.

I noted when I reviewed the film that Abrams was decidedly more interested in making a good Star Wars film than he was in making a good film. This is indisputably true. The Force Awakens works because it is a well-executed Star Wars film. Abrams strikes an intelligent balance between the obligatory wipes and stylistic tics that define the saga and more dynamic, lively moments. Much of this is little stuff – the shuddering, darkly lit shots of Storm Troopers in their shuttles, for instance, or the cut from Finn’s helmet to Rey in her goggles – that hardly merits praise, but there’s still a form of sophistication to it that Lucas simply wasn’t invested in. And these are mixed, in the early sequences, with teasing shots of ruined Star Wars iconography: a crashed Star Destroyer, or a fallen AT-AT. There’s a cheeky, illicit thrill – a child getting to play with the grown-up toys, and yet rising to the occasion so that their exuberance is tempered with real technical nous. Abrams is awed by the material, but not overawed.

This is, in the end, because Abrams is a joyless cynic interested only in appearances and iconography. Abrams is, throughout the film, singularly interested in making sure everything looks good. Over and over again the tone the film reaches for is “here’s a classic Star Wars moment… but it looks good, no?”…

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An Increasingly Inaccurately Named Trilogy: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi

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The standard line about the original trilogy is that Return of the Jedi is its weak link. It will surprise nobody to learn that I’m suspicious of this logic, which is at its heart rooted in an aesthetic that says that big reveals like Vader being Luke’s father are good and Ewoks are bad, but it’s nevertheless worth recognizing that Return of the Jedi is the one film in the original trilogy that’s markedly improved by the presence of the prequels. This isn’t a new observation – it’s at the heart of the famous Machete Order, which suggests putting the prequels between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and which basically prompted this entire series with its argument for why you should skip The Phantom Menace while doing this, which was the immediate cause of my remarking that prequel criticism was generally worse than the prequels themselves.

The problem that Return of the Jedi has on its own merits is Luke’s constant assertion that there’s still good in Darth Vader, a claim that not only lacks justification in the films but is actively unjustified by the sheer degree that Darth Vader is an ostentatious force of pure evil badassery. As we’ve discussed at length, it’s not that the claim that there’s some good in him is particularly justified by the prequels either, but at least the line is uttered by Padme in Revenge of the Sith, and more to the point, the prequels put significant effort into making Anakin an actual character. It’s difficult to actually imagine the Darth Vader of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back making an abrupt face turn, but while it’s still a bit out of left field, it’s perfectly possible to imagine the Anakin Skywalker of Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the SIth doing it. (I mean, hell, he’s so fickle in Revenge of the Sith that it’s basically possible to imagine him doing anything.)

More broadly, the relationship between Luke and Vader is, in the original trilogy, a pure abstraction – it matters entirely because of the basic ideological valences of fathers and sons. Indeed, the fact that it literally only matters because of patriarchy goes a long way towards explaining the weirdly outre status of Leia within this relationship, with her involvement a somewhat disposable third movie reveal in which she gets played as the fool, getting a piece of information the audience already knows and that has no actual bearing on the plot. But as a conclusion to the entire Lucas-governed saga it’s a far deeper relationship, and that gives the film new weight, a fact reflected in Lucas’s decision to replace Sebastian Shaw with Hayden Christensen in the final scene. (Honestly not a bad decision, though he probably should have replaced Alec Guinness with Ewan MacGregor in this and The Empire Strikes Back to set it up better.)

But it’s worth interrogating why this should be the case. After all, it’s not obvious that the solution to an undercooked finale is to go back and add more stuff before it while not actually changing anything about the finale itself save for swapping out “Lapti Nek” for “Jedi Rocks.”…

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An Increasingly Inaccurately Named Trilogy: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back

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Ring theory – essentially the best read on the interrelationships between the prequel trilogy and the original trilogy to date – is based around nested correspondences among the films. The fringes of this, which pair Return of the Jedi with The Phantom Menace and Revenge of the Sith with A New Hope, are an inherently tricky business, with its interpretations standing in opposition to the more intuitive approach of reading The Phantom Menace and A New Hope as roughly analogous. But the middle, in which Attack of the Clones and The Empire Strikes Back are read as fundamentally related films, is a rock solid bit of interpretation that pays considerable and rewarding dividends.

The most obvious similarity is structural: both films spend their middle sections alternating between two roughly equally weighted storylines, to the point where they very clearly have two protagonists, in this case Luke and Han. This is most interesting in terms of Han, whose upgrade to co-lead serves as confirmation of his moral centrality to whatever the saga is doing in this second trilogy. And in this regard, the most interesting thing about The Empire Strikes Back is its ending, with Han encased in carbonite. Sure, it’s not the only massive misfortune to befall our heroes by the end, what with Luke being maimed and all, but he’s already got a proesthetic by the end. The change that has consequences and that provides the direct hook going into Return of the Jedi is Han being taken off the board. After all, our case for Han’s centrality to A New Hope was rooted in a willfully silly reading of it in contrast to the prequel trilogy. In terms of the film’s own concerns, Han is a secondary character introduced well into a film that’s almost entirely about Luke’s journey. Here, however, his removal from the narrative is a deforming crisis.

Which brings us to the big difference between Attack of the Clones and The Empire Strikes Back. Where Attack of the Clones was liberated by its status as the middle portion of a trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back is constrained by it, and especially by the fact that it has to be the middle part of a trilogy whose first part was made under a completely different mythology and without the assumption that it would be part of a trilogy. We’ll come to the biggest consequence of this in good time, but for now I want to look at the ways in which this means the film has to set up a new status quo without it seeming like setup, which is the lengthy opening on Hoth, the primary narrative purpose of which is to quickly reconfigure the relationship among the principal characters so that Han/Leia is a more obvious ship than Luke/Leia and reaffirming Han’s loyalty by having him abandon his plans to leave in order to rescue Luke. (Arguably this makes Han/Luke the most reasonable ship of all, but never mind.) This mostly gets hidden behind what’s admittedly the best action sequence of the original trilogy, but it’s still flagrantly what Hoth is there for.…

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Love in the Time of Empire

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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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An Increasingly Inaccurately Named Trilogy: Episode IV – A New Hope

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Coming at A New Hope off of the prequel trilogy, what jumps out first and foremost is how much smaller and more intimate a story it is. No small part of this is because of the twenty-eight year backwards jump in film technology, which isn’t something that can be erased even by Lucas’s extensive efforts to tinker with the original trilogy. Which I suppose are a digression worth getting into at this point.

Obviously the special editions are easy to get cranky at. Hell, I’m on record making fun of the “redo old special effects for the DVD release” approach when it comes to Doctor Who. And the scholar in me is unsurprisingly appalled by Lucas’s active efforts to suppress the original theatrical versions of his films, to the point of denying film festivals focused on the 1970s permission to screen an original print. But these days there are multiple gorgeous reconstructions of the theatrical version up on BitTorrent for people who care, and while that doesn’t invalidate the understandable frustrations of people who spent decades wanting to watch the movie of their childhoods and not a CGI-ed over mess where Greedo shoots first and there are a bunch of cavorting aliens around Mos Eisley, it at least makes them a somewhat easier pill to swallow.

But the bigger difference between the special editions and replacing a dodgy puppet snake with a dodgy CGI snake in Doctor Who is that if you’re watching Doctor Who for its visual spectacle you have already fucked up. Whereas Star Wars has always been about raw visual spectacle in a way that makes the original trilogy’s aging into a problem for them. Without wanting to get into a (desperately tedious) debate about the superiority of traditional special effects vs CGI, it’s on a basic level understandable that Lucas would want a reaction to A New Hope other than “well that’s dated.” A uniform style of special effects across the saga is an entirely sensible desire when the saga is going to be presented as a single unit. So long as the actual historical objects are preserved in some fashion – and I’m fine with that fashion being BitTorrent – I can at least see the sense of trying to give a six-part film series a unified design.

No, the problem is simply that, as I said, you can’t actually bridge that gap. Lucas can and did narrow it, and it’s certainly less jarring to watch the special edition of A New Hope after Revenge of the Sith than it is to watch one of the restored theatrical versions, but at the end of the day A New Hope feels like a fundamentally different kind of object from any of the prequel films. It follows only a handful of characters, never moving wider than those caught in the immediate consequences of Leia’s ejecting R2-D2 and C-3PO onto Tatooine to find Obi-Wan. To its original 1977 audience, this basically appeared to be a film about a single space station.…

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