An alternative Episode IX crawl

Yesterday I wrote about Episode VIII. Unfortunately, we never saw the promise of that great film fulfilled in a sequel that continued its themes and narrative arc. Instead, we got Episode IX, which was dead on arrival.

When I wrote about IX two years ago—a lot of words, by the way—I mentioned an idea for an alternative crawl that would have opened a much different, far better capstone to the Star Wars trilogy of trilogies. I did have an idea, and a good one, if I’m to be trusted; but I’ve since forgotten it. Thinking about VIII yesterday got thinking about IX again, though, so I thought I’d try my hand at that crawl (which, on Earth-2 and/or in the divine mind, not only exists but is followed by an actual Episode IX film written and directed by none other than Rian Johnson). Here it is:

Princess Leia has died.
Her body lies in state on Naboo
during an armistice granted by Kylo Ren,
Supreme Leader of the FIRST ORDER.

As a grateful galaxy gathers to mourn,
Rey, first of a new order of Jedi Knights,
calls together leaders of the RESISTANCE
to prepare a daring attack on Ren’s faltering rule.

But Rey has just received a shocking message.
Kylo Ren wants to meet her—alone—on
the mysterious planet of Myrkr. Is it a trap?
Old friends and new allies assemble to offer
counsel that will decide the fate of the galaxy . . .

The most important thing about an alternative Episode IX—call it alt-IX—is that it avoid Palpatine, Rey’s lineage, and digitally reconstructed Leia. Instead, the way to honor Carrie Fisher’s legacy and abrupt passing would be to explicitly mourn her in the film’s opening. Create a visually and aesthetically impressive funeral for a royal figure. Moreover, let that opening funeral be a hinge for the plot. First, in that it throws our heroes (Rey and Poe especially) off kilter. Second, though, in that it throws our Big Bad, Kylo Ren, even more off balance. Third and finally, in that it only adds to the poignant open-ended question at the close of The Last Jedi: Will ordinary peoples and systems across the galaxy rally to the side of the rebels against the First Order? Here, not only does the story of Luke’s heroism light a fire across the worlds; Leia’s passing calls them to their senses, and they show up en masse to mourn and remember and celebrate her. That presents both opportunities (now the Resistance has numbers on its side) and challenges (who can be trusted among all these new allies and would-be friends?).

As for Ren, he is shaken to the core by the death of his mother—remember, he couldn’t bring himself to kill her in VIII—and this only exacerbates his ill fit as Supreme Leader. Who wants Millennial Darth for a dictator? Besides, wasn’t Vader second to the Emperor? Dissension in the ranks, doubts about Ren’s true intentions, even rumors of spycraft and sabotage begin to unravel the First Order from within.

So Ren flees to Myrkr, a semi-canonical planet from the original Thrawn trilogy that is home to a species of animal that repels the Force. Think of them like Force vacuums; put enough of them in one place, and Force-users can neither feel nor use the Force. To meet Rey on such a planet offers a kind of neutral playing-field, where they can talk rather than fight.

I don’t have the whole film mapped out. In my mind, Rey goes in spite of her advisors’ wishes, in good faith; nor is Ren meaning to spring a trap. But her friends sabotage the meeting, to her surprise, even as Ren’s enemies, in his absence, enact a coup d’état. From there, battle lines as well as alliances are redrawn, and the fight to the finish is begun . . .

UPDATE: I’d forgotten one other idea (taken from my brother Mitch): If VII is about Finn learning not to run away (i.e., the vice of cowardice) and VIII is about Finn learning not to seek a glorious but meaningless death out of blind hatred (i.e., the vice of recklessness), IX needed to conclude his arc through his learning the virtue of courage through daring but prudent military leadership. And so what he does in alt-IX is sow the seeds of doubt and rebellion within and among the First Order’s storm troopers, who (as we know) are not clones but kidnapped and brainwashed orphan children. It is Finn, not Rey, who assumes command of the Resistance following the death of Han, Ackbar, Hondo, and Leia; and in the final battle, it is General Finn who directs the pincer movement of Poe’s squadrons and revolting storm troopers to seize control of the First Order’s home base of operations on some heavily fortified but centrally located planet. That planet in turn becomes New Coruscant, the staging ground for reconstructing oversight and governance by and for the New Republic, which did not and could not die with the destruction of a few planets (in VII), but survives in and beyond the pitiful reign of the First Order, now destroyed once for all.

Or so I imagine. Indulge me my fan-fic imaginings.

Interpreting The Last Jedi

I’m on record, and have been from the beginning, as a lover of Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi. When I was on Twitter, I enjoyed having friendly—key word, that—debates with others about it. In fact, just last month I introduced myself to a senior academic at another institution, a person I’ve read but have never met before, and as he shook my hand he said, “Oh, I know who you are. You’re the one who thinks The Last Jedi is a good movie.”

Touché!

What I don’t enjoy, however, is the reception of the movie as filtered through the culture war. When that happens, the terms of the debate are prefabricated, overdetermined, and (worst of all) boring. All heat, no light.

But perhaps what’s most annoying is how shoddy so much conventional interpretation, pro and con, of the film is. It’s not just that people have good or bad opinions, more or less well reasoned. It’s that it’s not always clear they’ve seen the movie, or at least paid attention when they did (in the theater, once, four years ago).

So, granted that talking about talking about Star Wars is potentially insufferable and inescapably meta, here goes. Here is what The Last Jedi is and is not about; here is how (not) to talk about it.

1. “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to” is not the theme of the film. It is Kylo Ren’s view, which is not that of either Rey or Rian Johnson.

2. The theme, or one of the major themes, of the film is what one’s relationship to the past, and to venerable tradition, ought to be. Note that that theme is a question. Johnson is asking the audience, as he asks his characters (esp. Luke, Rey, Ren, Finn, and Leia), to decide what that relationship should be. He gives his answer, though you don’t have to agree with it. In a sense, the visceral reaction of a certain segment of fans to the film is itself their answer to the question. As Matt Zoller Seitz has observed, that means the question was one worth asking.

3. Neither Rey nor Luke ultimately answer the question the way Ren does. Luke is tempted to, but the trio of Rey, Leia, and Yoda change his mind.

4. Luke’s answer is not, however, to receive the past as it is; it is not a bare affirmation of the status quo ante; it is not to be silent about the errors and crimes of his forebears. To do that would only perpetuate the cycle he rightly perceives in the decadence of the Jedi: tradition for tradition’s sake; immunity to reform on principle. That way led to disaster.

5. Rey speaks from want and need, desire and innocence; she doesn’t have an argument to make, only an honest appeal for help. But Yoda does have an argument. Yoda understands that failure need not be absolute. Life follows death, good comes from loss, the young learn from the mistakes of the old. Sometimes a fire is cleansing—though purgation is far from pleasant. The same act (burning a tree, say) can come from opposed intentions: one to purify, the other to destroy. Luke’s impetuous urge to annihilate is a form of the latter; Yoda’s lightning from above, the former.

6. Note well: Yoda does not obliterate the sacred Jedi texts. He knows Rey took them when she left. Nor is he impugning them. He’s telling Luke that they have become for him nothing but “a pile of old books,” unread totems of a lost age worthy of little more than repudiation. Thus fossilized, they are useless for Luke, who has reached the end of his path. But not for Rey. She is a new start for the Jedi—one both continuous and discontinuous with the old order.

7. In short, The Last Jedi is about the sublimation of the past—of history, heritage, inheritance, and tradition—neither its rejection as wholly unworthy nor its pristine persistence into the future. Luke was the last Jedi; Rey now is the last Jedi: the eschatological Jedi, the last of the old and the first of the new. The Jedi will continue, though not without change. The blinkered self-regard and decadent haughtiness shall be no more. Padawans in the line of Rey will be Jedi, to be sure; but what it means to be a Jedi will not be the same as it was in the days before Palpatine.

8. Ren’s solution is wrong, therefore, because he believes that his past—his lineage—determines, must determine, who he is. And yet that lineage includes not only Anakin (himself redeemed before the end) but Han and Leia. That is why patricide and matricide are major themes of VII and VIII (following VI). His parents’ living goodness threatens his simultaneous act of self-creation and self-binding to Anakin’s turn to the Dark Side: he will make himself (in spite of his parents) through forced imitation (of his grandfather—not, note, his maternal grandmother!). Killing Snoke is his second act of patricide; the final duel with Luke seems, at first, to permit him the third and final stroke. But he’s robbed of the occasion, just as Vader was with Obi-Wan. He can’t kill the past: even when it dies, it lives on (“See you around kid”).

9. Whatever one thinks of Johnson’s handling of this theme (and I’ve not said anything about Finn or Leia, both of whom come to terms with their own past and its bearing on the future), the important thing to see is that it is an honest grappling with the story of the seven preceding films. It’s an honest reckoning with the through-line that runs across the prequel trilogy, original trilogy, and Abrams’ semi-remake sequel. The story of cyclical decadence and Jedi failure is the subtext of those seven Episodes, considered as a single narrative, and what Johnson does is make that subtext text. Luke comes to terms with one more Jedi Padawan rebelling and murdering his fellow students, having once more been seduced by the Dark Side, and like Obi-Wan and Yoda before him, he runs away into exile and the consolations of self-pity. And then he realizes this very dynamic, in self-conscious reflection, and decides to throw a spoke into the wheel: no more Jedi; no more cycles of Light versus Dark; no more high hopes dashed by devastating failure, and lives lost in the balance. This is where Luke is when the film opens, and it’s the only honest emotional and spiritual place for Luke to be in, given how The Force Awakens ended.

10. In that sense The Last Jedi is indeed a meta-reckoning, as a film, with Star Wars as such. The failure of interpretation is to see it as Johnson disliking Star Wars, either its story or its fans. Instead, it is Johnson putting Star Wars to the test, and seeing whether it will bend or break. The stress test is substantial, but after bending to the breaking point, it snaps back into place: Rey and Luke, together a sort of Jedi apocalypse, save the day; they fight back the First Order, deliver the Resistance from defeat, and light a spark that will burn through the galaxy, inspiring the apathetic and unbelieving to join the fight that will crush the remnants of the Empire once for all. Johnson, like everyone else, loves this franchise; like everyone else, he wanted his heroes to be heroes. But given the cards he was dealt, given the story he’d inherited, he couldn’t cheat. They had to earn it. And so they do.

At any rate, that’s what Episode VIII is about. It’s about other things too. It’s not perfect. And you don’t have to like it, whether or not you think Johnson succeeded in pulling off this particular set of themes. (I certainly don’t like Episode IX, which I prefer to pretend never happened.)

But there’s no question about what Johnson was trying to do; there’s no ambiguity about what the film is up to in this regard. So far as I can tell, there’s nothing to debate there. It can certainly be fun to argue over Star Wars. But only if we know what it is we’re talking about in the first place.

Notes on The Last Jedi, Godless, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Though not in that order, because spoilers.



Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

–I did not like this film. I admired its craftsmanship, not least the acting, the unwieldy plot, the attempted control at something like permanent tonal dissonance (which is, I suppose, a backhanded way of saying I thought the tone was out of control), the thematic complex animating the film's every turn. I generally admire and enjoy the work of both the writer-director Martin McDonagh and his brother. But not this one.

–Eve Tushnet captures a great deal of what's wrong with the film here. These two paragraphs sum it up:

Or take the reason for Mildred Hayes’s furious grief. She feels guilty about her daughter’s horrifying death–of course she does, that’s how anyone would feel. But the film doesn’t trust us to accept that anybody would feel that way. The movie has her feel guilty because she literally, exactly in these words told her daughter to go walk in that field and get raped and murdered, and then she did!!!!!, and it’s just all so on-the-nose and unnecessary. It’s chintzy.

The huge, sad and sordid problem with the movie is that racism and black people are ciphers in an alphabet used to talk solely about the sins and redemptions of white people. Racism is a theme the movie insists on grappling with but it just cannot do it well, because the black characters aren’t people. They are plot furniture who might as well blink out of existence as soon as they’ve performed their role in the moral drama of the white folk.

The film simply does not trust its audience, nor does it trust the would-be ordinary griefs and grievances the film is ostensibly about. Everything is turned up to eleven: Mildred doesn't just set up outlandish billboards, she throws Molotov cocktails at the police station; the dumb racist violent cop isn't just dumb and racist and violent, he marches into an office building, walks up to the second floor, beats up a man, and throws him out of a window (all filmed in one take, thus doubling down on the scene's histrionics with fussy cinematic virtuosity); and so on.

–Tushnet also touches on the wild tonal swings that, while perhaps not doomed to failure, certainly fail here. One moment Mildred's talking to her ex-husband, busting balls; the next he's throwing the kitchen table against the wall and grabbing her by the throat, their son holding a knife to his own father's throat—only for the ex-husband's dim-witted half-his-age girlfriend to walk in the doorway and drain the tension because she has to pee. It's as if a Judd Apatow comedy interrupted a Scorsese film.

–The first act is mostly good, but everything falls to pieces the moment Woody Harrelson's cancer-stricken sheriff kills himself. Not only are his final words to his wife (in his suicide note) execrably romanticized, but all of a sudden the jolly, ever-recognizable voice of Beloved Actor Woody Harrelson becomes the Ghost of Christmas Future for the characters left behind. Mildred and said dumb racist violent cop receive posthumous letters from the sheriff-turned-seer, poring into their souls and speaking, as only Beloved Actor Woody Harrelson's voice could, their future best selves into being, guiding them from beyond the grave. Having lovingly, generously, self-sacrificially "saved" his wife and daughters untold grief at "having to watch him" suffer and die, and thus be "left" with "that lasting image" of him—instead of the "one final perfect day" they do have—he now transforms himself into a truly selfless saint. Light a votive candle while you're at it, Mildred.



Godless

–Scott Frank is one of the best living writers in Hollywood, and anything that gives him work is cause for celebration. Doubly so when it's a long-gestating limited series Western for Netflix.

–In an interview on Fresh Air, Frank said he didn't want to avoid the classic tropes of the great Westerns; he wanted to include every single one, and then some. Amen. As with all genre, the way to go is either radically revisionary (a la Tarantino) or pure specimen with a twist. Anything in between usually falters; and more to the point, you have to show you can master (or have mastered) the genre's necessary features in order to succeed at all, and few directors are so accomplished as to be able to go the Tarantino route. Frank chose wisely.

–The series centers on a town of women, widows who one and all lost their husbands in a single tragic mining accident. A stranger comes to town, adopted son and deserter of a viciously violent leader of a criminal gang. As the vengeful Bad seeks vengeance, we learn about the stranger, the woman who took him in, the town's inhabitants, and its supposedly cowardly sheriff.

–The series is gorgeously shot, lush with all the Western geography you could ask for, and shots of men riding horses with such skill and beauty you convince yourself God made one for the other, and both to be captured in moving pictures. The actors are uniformly superb, particularly Michelle Dockery (of Downton Abbey fame), Scoot McNairy (from Halt and Catch Fire, among other things), and Jeff Daniels (simply reveling in a truly wicked part without ever crossing the line into Hamville). Frank takes his time with the characters and with the moments that make them who they are, or who they become. The details and the dialogue are lived-in and witty without ever calling attention to themselves.

–Two problems keep the series from making good on its promise. The first is pacing: stretched across seven episodes of varying length, one can easily imagine the two and a half hour movie version of this story. At least two episodes (five and six) are pure filler, and other side plots could be scratched without loss. Such a problem is permissible if everything else works. Unfortunately...

–The finale simply does not deliver. The climactic shootout does deliver, as a piece of sheer filmmaking. But as climax to the narrative, it's a flop. Minus two minor characters who meet their doom quickly and without fanfare (one halfway through the series), no major character loses his or her life. Perhaps acceptable, if not for a serious issue at the script level: namely, the slaughter of Blackdom. You see, outside La Belle (the town of all women) there is an all-black settlement, founded by buffalo soldiers and their families. In the series finale, these characters—mostly a detour from the main plot lines—confer with one another about whether or not to help the all-white town. This is the first the camera has visited these characters without a white character standing in for the audience. Only moments later, however, Jeff Daniels comes a-knocking, and three minutes later every man, woman, and child in Blackdom is dead.

If Frank had committed to this kind of atrocity culminating his story—just one more feature of the impartial, unconquerable godlessness of the Western frontier—this decision could have been justified. Instead, more or less every white character gets to live on, kept safe (by Frank or by God?) from the hateful, meaningless death and destruction meted out just one town over. It is a profound misstep that undoes whatever good will the series has built up to this point, and undermines whatever Frank was hoping to say. Happy endings for the (white) leads, an unmarked grave for the rest.



The Last Jedi

–I am fascinated by what appears to be a wide divide in reactions to Rian Johnson's film. A number of critics as well as SW fans downright love it, hailing it as one of the best SW films ever, rivaling the 1977 original and Empire in quality, depth, and craft. Those who disagree aren't merely in the middle, however; they actively dislike the movie and think it largely fails. What's going on here?

–First, my own take: I think TLJ is a rousing success, marred only by a minor side plot (the trip to Canto Bight), which ends with a silly CGI scene and makes the pacing of the film's second act sag unnecessarily. A few other nits to pick, sure, but otherwise, the film is great. Everything with Rey, Kylo Ren, and Luke is A+. (Agreeing, as more than one person has, then commenting that everything else is a problem is a bit like saying Lord of the Rings is a failure except for all the scenes with Gandalf, Aragorn, and Frodo. Because, um, aren't they in most of them?) And there are at least three moments that took my breath away: the throne room, the lightspeed kamikaze, and the showdown between Luke and Ren. More on the good anon.

–Here's my take on the divide I'm seeing so far. Those praising the film up and down and those disappointed by it appear to be talking about different things. That is, nobody's arguing opposing sides of the same topic; it's all about what one was looking for, what one was struck by, and thus what one holds up for emphasis, as emblematic of the film's quality. Those who love TLJ are talking about Rey, Ren, and Luke; about Johnson's direction; about composition and color; about the film's core themes; about the departures from previous SW entries; about off-loading detritus from Abrams; about upending (even taunting) fanboys' expectations; about where the film leaves the story and its characters. Those left dissatisfied by TLJ aren't talking about any of that. They're talking about the silliness of Canto Bight; about the narrative dead-end of DJ and the covert mission of Finn and Rose; about the odd fit of Laura Dern's character and the half-baked nature of Poe's mutiny; about Leia's Force moment in space; about the premature deaths of Snoke and Phasma; about the further echoes and rhyming repetitions of past SW films; about Luke never leaving his Jedi island of loneliness, never unleashing some serious Force destruction on the First Order.

Note well: The lovers' love has a great deal to do with formal qualities and decisions, combined with the main characters' arcs. The haters' hate concerns specific matters of content, especially plot, especially relative to The Force Awakens. So I suppose this rift is going to continue. The haters aren't going to come around (they already grant the goodness of the Rey-Ren-Luke stuff), and the lovers just aren't worried about some of those plot matters, or think focusing on them is disproportionate to what the film does well.

–Another way to look at it: I think TLJ is a three-star film with two or three bona fide four-star moments and one or two two-star moments, whereas TFA is a three-star film that basically never rises above or sinks below that quality (minus the overall fact that Starkiller Base is an indefensible redux of IV and VI). And it's true that TLJ never quite has an extended sequence like the first act of TFA, which not only never stops moving, but may be the most well-paced, flawless 45 minutes in all nine SW movies. And there's no through-line like Harrison Ford's farewell Han Solo performance or Ridley and Boyega's banter (though the connection between Ridley and Driver in TLJ runs deeper, and is more interesting).

All that to say: I can understand having a preference for TFA over TLJ (leaving aside the original trilogy!); but that's simply comparing different movies with different agendas, different sensibilities, different stories, and different goals.

–So why am I, a TLJ defender, unconcerned about the haters' criticisms? Here's a preliminary response. The running of the CGI alien-bulls on Canto Bight is prequel-worthy nonsense, even cringe-worthy. Granted. But the trip itself is an interesting idea on a number of fronts, so the mere presence of a dumb 5-minute chase scene doesn't torpedo a 150-minute movie. First, the initial reason to go to the planet is to find a way to disable the First Order's ability to track the Resistance's fleet. Second, it provides something the SW series rarely offers: a fleeting glimpse into how the various machinations of the super-spaceships and military maneuvers and Jedi duels actually relate to ordinary planets and their inhabitants—or rather, how ordinary places and people perceive and are affected by this apparently unending galactic civil war. That's a narrative idea worth chasing. Third, the fact that the casino trip fails to result in what Finn, Rose, and Poe dream up for it does not make the whole thing a waste of time; that failure is one in a whole string of failures that mark the film from start to finish. Johnson has constructed TLJ as a kind of Dunkirk in Space: even star wars are less about heroism and triumph than sheer survival, against all odds. Live to fight another day, because maybe that day will be the day you don't get smashed to pieces by the bad guys.

So while Johnson should have rewritten what happens on Canto Bight—make it a heist, make it sleek and fun, make it devoid of all CGI—the trip itself, before and after, is perfectly warranted, and integral to the film's plot and themes.

–Otherwise, I'm basically unperturbed by TLJ's other flaws, real or perceived. Committing to Luke's near despair and total withdrawal (from the war, from those he loves, from responsibility, from the Force) is a brave narrative choice, and it succeeds. The same goes for leaving ambiguous just what happened between Luke and Ren that night when Ren tore down the temple. Relegating Maz to a cameo, making Hux a pitiable joke, and killing off Phasma is altogether shrewd storytelling revisionism, extended canonical universe and fanboys' imaginations be damned. The centerpiece of the film—the throne room scene—is pitch perfect, and killing Snoke before we learned anything about him is the point. He was just another Palpatine (and did we, in 1983, know anything about him, either?), and in shocking the audience through both killing him before IX and uniting Ren and Rey in battle, however briefly, Johnson unwrote Abrams's overweening nostalgia and freed him to finally tell a genuinely new story in the conclusion to this third trilogy. Whatever we might have "learned" about Snoke—whatever time we spent with him—would have been underwhelming and, ultimately, boring; leaving the First Order in (now) Supreme Leader Kylo Ren's hands is brilliant, bold, and wide open, narratively speaking. So much so that I can't believe Kathleen Kennedy let Johnson get away with it.

The rest is noise. And it's in Abrams's hands now, anyway. That's either very good news or very concerning. We'll see in 2019. Until then.

Coda:

 –One thing this experience, and the rift in TLJ's reception, has taught me is how difficult it is to assess a film this highly anticipated and this culturally significant based on a single viewing. I often have trouble with this: the first time I saw—to limit myself to big serial blockbusters—Skyfall, The Force Awakens, Rogue One, The Dark Knight Rises, and others, all I could register was the problems, real or imagined, with each film's script. It was only on a second or third viewing that I was actually capable of taking the film in, as a film. I'm already eager to go back and have this experience with TLJ.

–I see that there are some who feel like TLJ is basically a combination of Empire and ROTJ. I suppose this is true in a way; but I wonder how such folks feel about TFA, which at times is like a note-for-note remake of IV. In a sense, Johnson played the hand that was dealt him: if what Abrams wanted was to retell the original trilogy with new characters, Johnson sped up the process, so at least IX could be freed from all such expectations. I also happen to think TLJ is neither redundant nor predictable, but your mileage may vary.

–As for whether or not TLJ lets themes and messaging overtake the priority of story—so that, e.g., the film's gender politics become flashing neon lights instead of plot-integrated subtext—I'll just say that (first-time viewing syndrome again) I didn't even catch on to the fact that so many scenes played out between an individual man and woman, the former stubborn with pride, the latter drawing (or arguing, or fighting) said man into the good, the right, the undespairing future. I'll have to see how it plays in the second viewing. But precisely because I didn't see those flashing lights the first time, and since I don't recall a moment when the movie turns preachy, I doubt I'm going to think this is a problem, either.