The Hollow Shell at the End of Nostalgia: On the End of the Star Wars Saga (The Nostalgia Trap, Part 7)

I’m going to indulge myself a bit here, and discuss Star Wars, which is possibly my first major love when it comes to narrative. At least the first major one I remember. I can recall going to the library to acquire books set after the end of the movies, I can remember playing video games that filled out gaps in the plot. Hell, I can remember listening to an audio book of a comic that a friend pirated for me back when you had to do that sort of thing with audio cassette.

Star Wars was always going to be one of the cultural artifacts we touch upon in the “nostalgia trap” series. It’s an active cultural institution, and one that it looked like you could set your watch by fairly recently – the future of Star Wars on film is, of course, up in the air after Solo, which was a perfectly fine movie released just a month after an Avengers movie, and thus did poorly. But Lucasfilm has only ever done Nostalgia pieces. Getting angry at Star Wars for nostalgia is like getting angry at Star Trek for being utopian.

But there is a difference, it seems to me, between nostalgia and this hollow thing that we are left with.

Allow me to back up: I had the movie intentionally spoiled for me. I sought out spoilers, because I wanted to know what I was in for. I knew that John Boyega and Oscar Isaac weren’t happy with it; I knew that Kelly Marie Tran – who was horribly abused by supposed fans the last time around – had about seventy seconds of screen time; I knew a lot about the material surrounding it. I wanted to know about the plot. So, in the parts that do touch upon the latest Star Wars, expect spoilers.

First of all, it’s been a while since I’ve been to the movies; it might even have been since Solo, I don’t really recall. Instead of the agreed-upon fifteen minutes, we were treated to thirty minutes of previews, complete with commercials interrupting the previews – which I realize is probably not news to anyone but me, but that’s...that’s new, and seemed egregious. Of the previews that were attached to the film, only two were original properties (“Tenet” by Christopher Noland and “Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar”,) while the rest were sequels, many of which were about law enforcement, the military, or by Marvel. It took so long that I almost forgot what I was there for, my brain having essentially been bleached by a barrage of light and sound without context.

So, let’s discuss the movie.

Settle in, get comfy.

The spectacle of the film was fine. Set design, costuming, choreography, performances, all phenomenal. My problem is with the script, and the necessary pressures it put on everything else. Quite frankly, the writing doesn’t measure up to the rest of the production.

I’ve written previously about The Last Jedi, and my stance on the film, but to reiterate: I can respect much of what Rian Johnson was doing, but the choices he made in pursuit of that I found disappointing and uninteresting. Adam Driver is an excellent actor, but Kylo Ren or Ben Solo or whatever I’m supposed to call the character is just not interesting to me: I went to an all-male high school. I knew that guy. I knew several of that guy. Thrusting him into the spotlight didn’t make him more likable.

At the same time that Johnson played up the inorganic romance angle, he shifts focus away from Finn, the viewpoint character of the first film, and created a subplot for Poe that revolved around him learning a lesson about misogyny because someone refused to explain a plan to him. The film, by and large, was driven by miscommunication, which is a particularly American – and specifically American television – trope.

This is a powerful image, and it’s very early in The Force Awakens. Almost every aspect of this image is shoved aside as a concern in later movies.

An aside: I feel that the deprioritization of Finn as the movies go on is criminal. It makes the new Star Wars trilogy feel like a potted rehash of the history of 20th century literature and culture: we get one moment where we’re opening up the cultural institutions to people other than non-white, non-male, and non-hetrosexual individuals (The Force Awakens is hardly the Harlem Renaissance or Civil Rights-era literature, but Boyega attracted a lot of ire – just like novelists Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin did over the books they wrote,) and then someone comes along and dynamites the whole thing because these tropes are old and overused (The Last Jedi is clearly the most post-modern of the Star Wars movies, and parallels postmodernism eclipsing the influence of black literature, just as these black writers were moving from the periphery to the center: there is no longer a center! The center doesn’t matter! They don’t speak for us because no one speaks for anyone else, but we’re still going to publish all these Don DeLillo and Brett Easton Ellis books for some reason,) then there’s a bit of a course correction, a shrinking-back, and a retreat into the nostalgic forms of the past – without really allowing anyone else to have a turn on the playground equipment.

Another aside: Last Jedi does deserve praise for a variety of reasons, including bringing in more women. Kelly Marie Tran’s Rose Tico is criminally underused in this latest movie, and I feel like she was created solely to serve as a potential love interest for Finn (a character that the latter two movies aren’t interested in,) but I like the character and would have liked the character more if she was given something more to do.

Instead of continuing on the course that Johnson set them on, Abrams returned to the plan he originally had, which required that a full hour of the movie be spent on course-correction. So much had to be explained away, backstories had to be recreated, and all of Carrie Fisher’s scenes had to be rewritten to use the dozen-or-so lines of previously cut dialogue that were left after she passed away (which, honestly, I feel were cut for a reason.)

Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s “Pier with Lamp” from his Carceri series of prints.

To reiterate: the spectacle was amazing. The Sith planet at the heart of the plot was fantastically designed, bringing to mind the work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Zdzisław Beksiński, sources that I’m generally a fan of (for fiction; god forbid I ever have to step foot in such a place.) The conjunction of the two evoke a certain type of evil that slots neatly into the universe of Star Wars: a sort of nihilistic anti-humanism, a rapacious, razor-edged thing that seeks to spread and consume. It’s a background that that has so much more depth than what’s going on in the foreground, to the extent that I almost wish that they had lingered more on the architecture and window-dressing than the events playing out in front of it. I think this may be because the art department had much more free reign, and weren’t as weighed down by what had happened in the prior movies as the

Again, to reiterate: the story was a dumpster fire. Instead of continuing on with the course that Johnson plotted – which, to be frank, would have been better – Abrams decided to go with something perceived as “safe”. Which brought back the Emperor. You know, the guy who was the villain in the two previous trilogies, and who essentially began in the original Star Wars script as a Richard Nixon pastiche. Yeah, that guy, Richard-Nixon-But-Also-Sauron.

In the first of the new trilogy the heavy was presented as Snoke, a towering presence that was implied to be an order of magnitude older, more evil, and more mysterious than Palpatine: a lot of people thought that he might be the “Darth Plagueus the Wise” mentioned by Palpatine in Episode III. Then, Episode VIII killed this character off in a dramatic and unexpected fashion. All of a sudden, the tantrum-throwing man-child, the neo-nazi-coded Jedi-school-shooter was at the top of the evil food chain. This, more than anything else Johnson did, was interesting. I was still curious about the Snoke character, but I thought this change was something new.

There’s an alternate universe where the third movie involves a duel between Adam Driver’s character and Hayden Christensen as a force ghost, looking like this (not one of these, but moving back and forth like an oil slick on troubled water.) It could have been a potent image of the truth trying to reassert itself in the face of historical narratives. Instead, we got Space-Nixoned.

Then Abrams brought back the Emperor, and made him responsible for everything. This had the added side effect of essentially invalidating the first six movies in the story, as far as narrative necessity goes. The original trilogy of Star Wars was Luke’s story, culminating in him throwing aside his weapon and convincing his father to do the right thing. The prequel trilogy of Star Wars was Anakin’s story, depicting his fall, the fear and anxiety turning him into a tool of evil (it also includes a lot of dumb shit, like “I hate sand” and “there not being any OBGYNs in space.”) But it recontextualized the first trilogy: it’s still Luke’s story, but now it’s also Anakin’s story, showing him as a representative of Space Fascism and then being redeemed; the sign that he’s redeemed being that he immediately kills the Biggest Space Fascist, the aforementioned Richard-Nixon-But-Also-Sauron.

A terrible comic, still (somehow) better written than the new movie. If you don’t believe me, you can read the summary.

The new trilogy, by having the emperor survive this (somehow, even the Star Wars comic where the emperor came back explained how right on the page instead of making you buy a bunch of other books to track down the exact explanation,) essentially invalidates Darth Vader’s sacrifice. It’s now a pointless death, because he died trying to kill someone who’s still alive thirty years later.

It reminds me of nothing more than the sort of sequels you saw in the 1980s, our collective favorite decade (apparently), when it was compulsory to retread the plot points – and even the one-liners – of the original point-by-point (compare the two original Ghostbusters movies.)

I can’t help but feel that, it would be possible to replace Star Wars’s heart with something metachronic instead of hollowly nostalgic: it is, after all, the epic form remade for American culture. Couldn’t we have a movie that shows an acknowledgement and abolition of a militaristic past? A story of reconstruction, instead of destruction? Tell me, in the intervening thirty-odd years between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, was there ever the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission? Where’s the Alderaanian Munich? Where’s the Jedha Schindler’s List or Barefoot Gin? The stories from our world that surround horrible tragedies are bitter medicine, but maybe replicating their forms in a fantasy context can sweeten it, and help us get that medicine down?

Forget Rian Johnson. Forget the guys who did Game of Thrones. Beg Taika Waititi to sign on for a trilogy when he’s done with the next Thor movie. (photo taken from wikimedia commons, originally shared by Gage Skidmore under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.)

Maybe. It might also just be disrespectful. A Jewish, or a Romani, or a Japanese, or an indigenous, director, scriptwriter, or producer might have some useful things to say on that. I will stop at the point of saying that it seems worth considering.

So, frankly, I’m a bit miffed about the whole thing. I knew it would upset me, and I went anyway, I have no one to blame but myself. All of this being said, I think that it calls into question the validity of Disney as a cultural institution: all of Star Wars is owned by them, as is Marvel, and Fox, and Lifetime, and Touchstone, and Pixar, and ABC, and Vice (apparently.) It’s spreads its tendrils far and wide, and it cannot coordinate between them. The signs of this are apparent in the history of Solo, which (as mentioned) I thought was perfectly fine: it suffered at the box office because it came out the week after Endgame, instead of coming in the winter like the other Star Wars movies had. If it had been released in December, the biggest contender would have been Spider-man: Enter the Spider-Verse, which was the hit of the season, but had a long tail, unlike Avengers: Who Gives a Shit, which took up all the oxygen for the next month or so. In short, Disney put out a flop because they hadn’t finished with their hit of the season.

This inability to coordinate between the different divisions, coupled with the inability to generate new and worthwhile ideas, strikes me as a major weakness. Given that Disney now owns just about all of American Culture, having a seemingly limitless well of capital from which to draw and literally not a single fucking new idea, I think that we’re in trouble. It’s all going to be just the same thing, over and over again, endlessly degrading like a song – or a full-cast recording of a fairly bad Star Wars comic – on a cassette tape, played over and over and over and over and over...

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