MY FIRST BRUSH WITH SKYWALKERS
I was 7 years old and wandered into the living room to see what my parents were watching…
And froze.
The scene playing out onscreen was unlike anything I had ever seen in my short life. It was Jabba’s palace in Return of the Jedi, and the only thought in my head was that they had discovered Sesame Street for grown-ups. (Which, given Yoda’s antecedents, was truer than I realized.)
I was transfixed.
It was dynamic, tense, and shocking for a girl whose main media diet was Disney and PBS.
I was hooked.
ONCE A FAN GIRL
I watched all of the films, over and over again, which at that point numbered three. (And have never gotten over the fact that I watched them out of order and never got the shock of Luke’s Father.)
I ditched school for the first and only time with friends from marching band to see the first prequel when it came out in theaters. I avoided the internet for a whole month before I could get to The Force Awakens.
And have just had a delightful night watching the new Obi-Wan series. I’ve only seen one episode because vertigo and screens don’t mix and it’s going to take me MONTHS to see it all, but I’ve noticed something odd.
ONE MOMENT OF TRIUMPH
The exultation at the end of Return of the Jedi has turned out to be the only success the Skywalkers have ever achieved.
Since they want to keep making new stories, every one has to end the same way: the plucky rebels win one battle (and usually destroy a death star) and continue to lose the war so we can keep getting new Star Wars movies.
It’s what happens when you try to serialize an epic.
What if in Lord of the Rings, destroying the ring didn’t also destroy Sauron? You could have endless books where the wizards say: “JK, there’s another ring! What’s that? Destroy the guy who keeps making rings? No, no, no… way too hard. We just got to get this ring!”
It’s had an interesting side effect on the message of the films. They’ve become meditations on failure.
PHILOSOPHICAL, DEPRESSED OLD MEN
This is one reason I’m writing this newsletter. Fiction is the most powerful way to move people, but it’s also super finicky. Story is more important than theme, if you do it right, which means that in pursuit of story, you could end up with a message you really didn’t intend.
Like a property aimed at preteen boys that now cranks out story after story about philosophical, depressed old men reflecting on everything they did wrong.
IF YOU WANT TO KEEP BLOWING UP DEATH STARS…
Did anyone plan it like that? I doubt it, but since they started with the biggest threat and the biggest weapon in the first movie they put out, they were kind of stuck. Shrinking the threat would be an anti-climax, and you can’t really grow the threat more than a planet destroyer.
It’s just death stars all the way down, now.
The heroes who knock them out get to jump up and down and maybe get a medal, but then also get to spend the rest of their lives reflecting on their failure to actually conquer evil before it builds yet another death star.
I’M NOT UPSET ABOUT IT?
I enjoyed watching Kenobi working his dead-end job cutting meat with his dead-eyed stare. I felt that.
Particularly because I spent the first half of the pandemic managing a grocery store and spent an appreciable amount of time behind the meat counter.
(Side note: my only beef with the episode was how they clocked out at the end of the night and just left everything sitting around. It takes almost two hours to clean your average meat department with many varied disinfectants. No one in food service worked on this script!)
I felt confident writing this now without seeing the end, partly because it’s going to take me a couple of months, and partly because even if he gets his confidence back and rescues the princess… Literally…
We know how this ends.
Kenobi spends the rest of his life in that desert. Then on one last adventure to rescue the same princess, (Do they have another plot?), his erstwhile student cuts him down.
IT’S UNEXPECTEDLY PRESCIENT
I think a lot of people could enjoy this, but I don’t think kids will get it. It takes a few years to work up a good dead-eyed stare, and a few massive failures to feel any interest in philosophy.
I don’t think when Lucas was writing the original stories (mostly in the 70s and the 90s), he had any idea how much failure was coming our way as the world burns and evil rises. Watching Obi-Wan fail so spectacularly and then live the rest of his life regretting it is unexpectedly validating these days.
AN UNINTENDED DARK SIDE?
Dark side…. get it?
There are also reports of the actress, a black woman Moses Ingram who plays the main villain and was amazing in the first episode, getting a lot of hate. Unfortunately, this is a familiar story for so many actors of color and women starring in Star Wars properties, and this inadvertent focus on failure may contribute to normalizing that.
Again, I don’t think anybody is doing this on purpose. But the empire is not just. It destroys planets. It enslaves lots of innocent aliens.
And none of that is really discussed or fixed in these films. It allows a bunch of people who have much more in common with the empire than the rebels to continue their fantasies of persecution and taking out the man, when they are in fact, the man.
The unintended message of this constant failure is that the status quo, no matter how terrible, is better. That truly changing the empire is an unreachable goal. That the unacceptable is acceptable and just blow up the next death star already…
HOPE
Regardless of the perverse lessons Star Wars now broadcasts, I think the message Lucas did intend to send was one of hope. I know that by the name of the very first movie he filmed, A New Hope. (Literary criticism is hard!) Before we got stuck in an endless loop of mega weapons, it was a revolutionary movie about impossible odds and saving princesses, and changing the world.
And I hope one day, they actually, truly, madly, deeply succeed, not just at destroying the last Death Star, but at making a better universe. It’s a low bar, but I have hope.