Two Years Since The Last Jedi
It's time to break into some discourse.
Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi is my favourite Star Wars film. Seeing it felt like a religious experience. It was as though Rian Johnson went straight into my head and brought me all the things I love about the franchise, but understood all the doubts and concerns I ever had about the series and even my own relationship with it, all while directly challenging this in the process. This sounds very cheesy, but the film moved me in a way that so little art does, let alone mainstream blockbusters.
I understand not everyone had this response.
I can’t read anyone’s mind, but I think people are reacting to some of the same qualities in the film. The Force Awakens was an exercise in evoking nostalgia that simultaneously obsessed itself over what this nostalgia meant, without ever really having an answer. The Last Jedi had the task of answering this and did so in a way that neither rejects or affirms it. The ultimate statement it makes is that the power of myths and symbols are essential for any kind of movement of change. Ultimately it really is the image of Luke Skywalker, the idea, that saves the Resistance. But it does this by challenging the idea that these things alone have innate value. It rebuilds the idea of Star Wars as a myth, but to get there, it has to tear it down first.
This is where it seems to rub people the wrong way. It spends a lot of time undercutting much of the power of the history of this franchise. Luke is reduced to the weakest, least heroic possible version of himself. Speeches about the mysticism of The Force are contrasted with sarcastic humour. As ScreenCrush critic Matt Singer put it recently, “The Last Jedi is shockingly and almost perversely anti-Star Wars”. It has a deep, deep love of the franchise, but less as a worshipper than a relative, aware of its every flaw and comfortable teaching it a lesson.
The funny thing is that of the Disney-era films, The Last Jedi has by far the deepest respect and, crucially, understanding of the franchise. I’ve talked about the Ring Theory a lot in these newsletters, and while Abrams either deliberately junked all the previous films complex patterns and rhymes or simply didn’t know they existed, Johnson is most certainly in conversation with them. Throwing the AT-ATs in at the end of the film, travelling from left to right this time, is as big an “I get it” statement as any. The patterns are all over this film, not just in terms of flipping Empire Strikes Back but conforming to the structure of Attack of the Clones. As a certain former Star Wars director would say, it’s like poetry, it rhymes.
The engagement with the prequels is everything. As my friend Valondar pointed out on Twitter, the irony of the pro-prequels contingent who so hate this film is that Johnson is one of them. In a now deleted tweet from a year before the film’s release, he described the prequel trilogy as “a 7 hour long kids’ movie about how fear of loss turns good people into fascists”. This theme he alludes to, bluntly stated in The Phantom Menace’s “fear is the path to the Dark Side” speech, is definitely something he evokes with Kylo Ren’s arc, and the reveal that Luke betrayed him all along (it’s an under discussed brilliant trick of these films that Kylo aims for Darth Vader but ends up at whiny Anakin). And there’s certainly a strong critique of the way the Jedi Council was run in the later days of the Republic, that I kind of think was always intended by Lucas but certainly never articulated as it is here. It even injects a touch of the tonal strangeness of the prequels in the sequence on Canto Bight, a genuine delight that expands the tonal palette of the sequel trilogy beautifully. This is the film that takes the original trilogy, the prequels, and The Force Awakens and unifies the whole thing. Later entries into a franchise will often have to find ways to make disparate parts seem cohesive, but rarely do they do it as gracefully as The Last Jedi. And that’s not even what the film’s about.
We’re going to have to talk about the elephant in the throne room. The less interesting twist that Snoke is killed off without having a huge impact on the franchise exists alongside what really matters: Rey’s parents are said to be “nobody”. Let’s look at what Kylo says in full, because it the script is ever screaming its themes, it’s here:
“They were filthy junk traders who sold you off for drinking money. They’re dead in a paupers’ grave in the Jakku desert. You have no place in this story. You come from nothing. You’re nothing. But not to me.”
It’s easy to see why this infuriated some. It’s the kind of twist, much like the Mandarin reveal in Iron Man 3, that feels like it’s telling people the time they invested theorising was worthless. It’s anti-mythology. It doesn’t give Reddit more to chew on. But it isn’t just what has to happen in Rey’s arc, it imbues the entire franchise with new meaning. In a stroke, a franchise that has always claimed left wing politics is no longer a struggle of a fascist ruling elite against a more liberal one, but a challenge to the very idea of a select few altogether. While The Force Awakens had little more than a surface level commitment to diversity, Last Jedi believes to its bones in opposing selective ruling classes.
To stretch a metaphor I seem to have fallen into, this is not quite Star Wars for the Trump era, but it’s certainly Star Wars for the reaction to the Trump era. It’s the movie made in a time when increasingly rampant inequality really does feel like a precursor to fascism. It’s about what it means for liberal democracy to lose, and lose badly. It’s kind of a downer when I put it like this.
My friend Zack Handlen, who likes this film less than me, expressed some reservations about whether this franchise behemoth was really the place to be able to pose these questions. “You can't build a revolution in a theme park”, he claimed back in 2017. I don’t think he’s wrong, really, but the response to the film has in a sense suggested that you can. Culture critic Joshua Rivera recently stated that “the hardest thing about producing work that pushes against capitalism is that your audience—the people who capitalism hurts most—desperately wants capitalism to win”. This gets at what’s happened with Last Jedi so succinctly. In denying the reaffirming product audiences expect from this franchise, so many rejected it completely. If it’s not giving them what they want, it’s not what they want. In challenging the very foundations this franchise was built on, the film has put the whole thing in a tailspin from which it may never recover.
And if that’s not the truest, most deserving legacy The Last Jedi could have, I don’t know what is.