Four Years Since The Force Awakens
It's time to pass the torch.
Hey, welcome new subscribers to this newsletter! This is mostly my thoughts on film and TV. We’ve got a few more Star Wars entries to go, but then we’re moving on to other things in 2020.
What does a film have to do to call itself Star Wars?
Once upon a time, it seemed the answer was that it had to come from George Lucas’ mind. If Lucas said that Watto was Star Wars, then so it followed that Watto was Star Wars. If he said that the Stormtroopers were mostly clones of Boba Fett’s dad, then I guess they were mostly clones of Boba Fett’s dad. Or so Lucas thought.
But that was never really true. To this day, you have Star Wars fans insisting that “Han shot first” despite the canon edition of the film showing Greedo to pull the trigger before him. Lucas went to such lengths to obscure the theatrical cuts of the films because people believed them to be the “real” Star Wars. If he could just decree that Greedo shot first, he wouldn’t have to worry about any of that.
The Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger would probably tell you it just has to feature the franchise’s intellectual property. When Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012, so it followed that they bought Star Wars. If the money people say that The Mandalorian or Jedi: Fallen Order or Galaxy’s Edge is Star Wars, then dammit, it’s Star Wars, baby!
As much as cold capitalist logic might want to believe this, it simply isn’t the case. There’s a world where The Force Awakens is a disaster, audiences would have rejected it, moved on, and forgotten it ever existed. It wouldn’t have mattered because it wasn’t “real” Star Wars. Disney’s $4 billion investment in Lucasfilm would’ve been for a handful of library titles and nothing else. Buying the franchise does not in itself make it yours.
So what is it, then? Kathleen Kennedy and J.J. Abrams were tasked to answer this, and it feels like both had slightly different answers. To Kennedy, Star Wars seems to be in the iconography. Use the right props and designs, bring back Harrison Ford, and put in a John William score and voila, you’ve got Star Wars! The more lifeless entries into the franchise, such as Solo and The Mandalorian (don’t @ me) suggest she see it as that simple.
Abrams, though, has another interpretation. It’s not that the iconography isn’t important, but it’s a means to an end. Star Wars, as he understands it, is a feeling. It’s the way he felt as a kid seeing it for the first time. His work has often been obsessed with evoking those hazy childhood memories, and he’s never been more in the zone with it here, understanding not just that seeing the Millennium Falcon causes an emotional response in people but why it does this.
Of course, making it feel like Star Wars is only half the task. You then have to actually tell a story. Abrams, a lifelong magic trick obsessive, approached the problem with a sleight of hand. This is a Star Wars film about the cultural weight of Star Wars. It very directly lifts from the 1977 original, yes, but it also reflects the cultural significance that film brings. How can Star Wars matter in a world where its influence has infested everything? That’s the fuel The Force Awakens runs on. It’s not just that it’s a nostalgic film (though it certainly is that), it’s a film obsessed with the cultural force of nostalgia.
It doesn’t really have an answer to this question, which is perhaps part of why it has receded in the zeitgeist since 2015. Abrams approaches this film like a pilot for a relaunched Star Wars, setting up plots and introducing ideas that can be figured out later (this isn’t a knock on Abrams or the film. Everyone does this. Everyone). There’s an assumption that a question is only as good as its answer, but I don’t really believe this is true in storytelling. Abrams infuriates people on this assumption, that asking the questions is the “easy part”, and it just isn’t.
Perhaps the other reason why this film hasn’t quite maintained its popularity speaks to the way in which the world has changed. I mentioned last time that Return of the Jedi felt so very much a product of the Reagan era, and the later prequels also speak to Bush era post-9/11 anxieties. Thankfully, Abrams let me extend this metaphor, and The Force Awakens is undoubtedly Star Wars for the Obama era. It knows that the Lucas era was too white and too male, and looks to make things look, as Abrams claimed, like the world. It’s a celebration of a particular kind of embrace of diversity. I mean, it even has a song written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, surely the personification of Obama era American patriotic diversity. It doesn’t really have any internal critique of why the films were so trapped in white patriarchy, it just knows that Star Wars is good, and it’s even better if people of different backgrounds can see themselves in it! The cognitive dissonance of Abrams himself, a son of two TV producers who became friends with Steven Spielberg as a teenager, is not even noticed. Drew McWeeny might be the most important critic in the arena of Star Wars writing in the last two decades, and this take is not one of his best, but it certainly gets at what the film thinks it’s doing:
If this movie is an Obama era diverse poptimism relic that feels like it’s from a different planet today, then it’s certainly one of the best made in the era. Abrams and his Bad Robot people consistently do some of the best casting work around, and they get it so right here. Adam Driver was walking around the first two seasons of Girls like a movie star in waiting, yes, and Oscar Isaac was already hitting, while John Boyega had his own cult cred. But to get them all right, while finding Daisy Ridley doing whatever she was doing at the time? That’s no accident. There’s an energy to this cast and Abrams uses it to carry so much. It’s just such fun to go along this ride.
There’s a fair critique that this is all it is. All the complex patterns and rhymes that epitomised the prequels’ relationship with the original trilogy are totally absent here. Lucas’ movies were about a lot of things. Abrams’ movie is mostly about how much we all love Star Wars.
But, you know what. I do love Star Wars. This film hits me exactly how it’s supposed to hit, for its flaws. They captured exactly what they needed to capture, which is something so rare in the filmmaking landscape that The Force Awakens deserves every one of the plaudits it received.