Star Wars, The Mornings After

A handful of mostly unrelated thoughts on the latest Star Wars installment after reading a number of essays online:

• The Discontents Of Star Wars-Land: Christopher Orr in The Atlantic takes on critical reversal on Star Wars: The Force Awakens (which includes Peter Suderman's meh review, something I touched on briefly here), and earns his paycheck with this one sentence:
  

  Even George Lucas has gotten in on the act, complaining that the movie is all recycled ideas, and that his experience of selling the franchise to Disney was akin to selling his children to “white slavers.” (Which mostly raises the question: Who’s worse? White slavers, or the person who sells his children to them?)

  Ouch. Thanks, George. You're now allowed to buy a small tropical paradise and disappear from our cultural landscape. (I guess he must have gotten a call from someone at Disney.)
  
• Mary Rey? In the context of such a play-it-safe approach, it seemed likely Rey would be held up as a feminist icon, Abrams having already addressed "will the fans embrace this episode?" questions. The issue of whether she is a sort of Mary Sue has come up in multiple corners, with Charlie Jane Anders at io9 wrestling with definitional problems:
  

  “Mary Sue” is one of those terms that had a useful meaning in fan culture at one point, long ago, and has now become both vague and toxic. Originally, a “Mary Sue” was an author surrogate, inserted into fan-fiction. The “fan fiction” thing is important, because part of the fantasy of the “Mary Sue” was the fan-fic author getting to live at Hogwarts or travel on board the U.S.S. Enterprise. And this thinly veiled copy of the story’s author is incredibly good at everything, to the point where all the established characters marvel at her (usually it’s “her”) wonderfulness.
  
  The “Mary Sue” is a very specific wish-fulfillment fantasy, in other words. It’s about getting to hang out with Harry, Ron and Hermione, and having them admire you. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of fantasy—we’ve all had it, when we get especially invested in a particular universe—but the term acquired a pejorative meaning because people felt it made for bad stories. Fair enough.
  
  Over time, the term “Mary Sue” has broadened until it means “any female character who is unrealistically talented or skilled.” Which is insane for a couple of reasons: It makes this “trope” so vague as to be meaningless, and this is also purely a way at tearing down female characters who are good at stuff.

  Rey isn't perfect — she manages to get captured (conveniently!) by Han Solo and Chewbacca — but she's plucky and resilient. Rey is indeed many things female fans have longed for since the opening trilogy — a heroine in her own right in a heroic story. Nevertheless, the familiarity of the arc leads us to wonder just how much of her story isn't Luke Skywalker in drag.
• Whose Feminism? The Atlantic's Megan Garber takes on the broader subject of feminism as it appears in The Force Awakens. There's a great deal that's positive to be said about Rey's handling of herself; as Garber writes,

  Rey’s feminism does not protest too much. It is not insistent; it is not obvious. It is, instead, that most powerful of things: simply there. Rey, tellingly, is not an archetype, but rather a fully realized character, subtle and nuanced and human. She, as a character, luxuriates in her own subjectivity.

  I'm not entirely sure what Garber's trying to get at with "luxuriates in her own subjectivity", but it sounds like writerly fan service. Yet Rey as a new feminist model can only come too soon. As with Miss Piggy, whose martial arts exploits go underappreciated, it would represent a step up from many of the modern acolytes operating under that label.
• Slave (Leia) To Fashion: I guess it was inevitable that Carrie Fisher would catch a bunch of sniggering about her 30-years-older visage, since the last time we saw her in the series, she was wearing a metal bikini. Consequently, awful people are on Twitter (and elsewhere) saying awful things about her appearance:

  Please stop debating about whetherOR not👁aged well.unfortunately it hurts all3 of my feelings.My BODY hasnt aged as well as I have.Blow us👌🏼

  — Carrie Fisher (@carrieffisher) December 29, 2015

  Fisher apparently had a fairly ambivalent relationship with her role as a sex symbol in the series, on the one hand warning Daisy Ridley, "Don’t be a slave like I was… You keep fighting against that slave outfit." Simultaneously, she recently mocked people objecting to the bikini as failing to see the whole picture (which is that she was about to kill the "giant testicle" that had imprisoned her). Live by the sword, I guess.
• Laurie Penny Is Still A Horrible Person: Witness what limitless self-pity and identity politics yield:
  

  This isn’t just about "role models". Readers who are female, queer or of colour have been allowed role models before. What we haven’t been allowed is to see our experience reflected, to see our lives mirrored and magnified and made magical by culture. We haven’t been allowed to see ourselves as anything other than the exception. If we made it into the story, we were standing alone, and we were constantly reminded how miraculous it was that we had saved the day even though we were just a woman. Or just a black kid. Or just - or just,whatever it was that made us less than those boys who were just born to be heroes.
  
  The people who get angry that Hermione is black, that Rey is a woman, that Furiosa is more of a hero than Mad Max, I understand their anger. Anyone who has ever felt shut out of a story by virtue of their sex or skin colour has felt that anger. Imagine that anger multiplied a hundredfold, imagine feeling it every time you read or watched or heard or played through a story. Imagine how over time that rage would harden into bewilderment, and finally mute acceptance that people like you were never going to get to be the hero, not really.

  The sense of entitlement involved in telling others how they need to tell the stories you want in the manner you want and with the characters you approve of — STFU. Really, what this is about is whether you get to operate the machines of culture while forcibly annoying others.
  
  Update 1/1/2016: It occurred to me that Penny here embodies a great deal of what's wrong with modern feminism: it's not enough to simply enjoy a movie with a strong female hero. A good bit of Penny's enjoyment comes from sticking it to men. There's no small irony in that, given who Rey is and what Penny is not. In Penny's telling, patriarchy is a suffocating conspiracy to suppress women like Rey. Rey is about doing; Penny is about kvetching, a permanent, dull narcissism that rejects even the idea of empathy between the sexes.

Instant Review: Star Wars Episode VII [Spoiler]

The first three are two and a half good movies; to that, we can add this one, which expels George Lucas from the management of his brainchild to the franchise's apparent betterment. J.J. Abrams has, somewhat unexpectedly, managed to produce the third best Star Wars film. It's unsatisfying in ways already outlined by Reason's Peter Suderman (incoherently, at Vox):

... as much as I enjoyed the acknowledgement, I also found the movie’s near-total reliance on elements recycled from the original somewhat disappointing. At times it felt like I was watching the cinematic equivalent of a very polished Star Wars cover band — playing all the old favorites, but without adding anything beyond a few clever riffs.

Tascha Robinson in Vox argued that Rey's arrival means we've already reached Peak Strong Female Character, which, having seen her, wasn't the annoying, Didactic character I figured she might be, given the itch To Teach All Of Us About Strong Female Characters. Other remarks:

• Somewhat surprised to see Carrie Fisher in this one; she looked terrible, like a bad combination of botox and obvious plastic surgery. I would have preferred she keep herself honest.
• Harrison Ford pulled the escape chute to get out of future episodes, with Han Solo dying in this film, and just as well.
• So it's interesting that the two actors with, shall we say, shallow resumes since Star Wars concluded have both the possibility of future roles within the franchise. Good business move.

The Amoral Landscape Of Star Wars

Collin Garbarino nails it: everybody lies in Star Wars, or at least, all the major Jedi do: Obi-Wan lies to Luke about his parentage, his father's actual occupation, and more. Yoda lies about Luke's readiness as a Jedi, or at least is badly confused (and possibly tired). Vader, unlike every other Jedi we encounter (save possibly Luke), actually tells the truth, but is a sociopath. It's an analysis that fits nicely with my view that the Jedi are in fact corrupt as hell, but because the story is told from their perspective, they get to be the good guys. A good short read.

Star Wars And The Naked Fascism Of Ben Domenech

I find alternate Star Wars plot analysis fascinating, as for example Keith Martin's classic from 2005 in which Chewbacca and R2D2 are the principle actors, the drivers behind their more visible agents, Han Solo and C3PO. It's a plausible retelling of the story that makes a good amount of sense, particularly in its handling of the Luke/Leia relationship.

But where I think it falls down — and the Star Wars films more generally — is in its misapprehension of the nature of power. In particular, one conceit of the Star Wars universe I almost never see questioned is how the Jedi somehow always manage to be good guys, Darth Vader notwithstanding. This seems highly unlikely. Think about it: possessed of enormous and effectively unlimited mind control powers, they would have no incentive to restrain themselves, and no one to restrain them. Male Jedi could (and certainly would) seduce every desirable woman imaginable (and perhaps not a few men). No property would be safe with a Jedi in the area. With women mysteriously, constantly turning up pregnant (and infected), and possessions missing daily, society would shortly be thrown into chaos. The only hope would be a turncoat Jedi or Jedis who would somehow assist with the project of their extermination, i.e. Darth Vader (who is in fact a good guy, or at least is less awful than his corrupt brothers), the Emperor, and the Sith. That is, the entire series is a colossal lie of omissions, told by the power-mad, narcissistic Jedi themselves.

What, then, of the Empire's brutality? Innocents like Aunt Veru, Uncle Owen, sand people slaughtered by the score, the entire population of Alderaan, Ewoks and Gungans (ugh) — surely, if we read those deaths at face value, the Empire itself is still corrupt, murderous, and evil. It may well be. Nietzsche's proscription seems apt: "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster." Faced with such an existential crisis, it's all too easy to imagine an Empire that takes on the character of its enemies.

With this in mind, it's interesting (if repulsive) to read The Federalist's Ben Domenech recent, open advocacy for such an Empire as a force for good. There are times when it's hard to tell if he's kidding, but not when he starts to wind up his essay (emboldening mine):

If you have no idea that Vader turned, that he carried out a final act of redemptive courage in the face of destructive evil, what do you think happened on the second Death Star? You basically think the Rebel Alliance, a group of anarchist terrorists led by believers in an inhuman cult, destroyed the lives of millions, murdered your supreme emperor, and to add insult to injury, defiled Darth Vader’s corpse. It’s like Pearl Harbor II, and this time they killed FDR too.

In the face of such calamity, would the Galactic Empire, a supremely powerful organization spanning systems and planets of countless millions, guided by the Sith belief that those with the capacity of vision and the ability to lead have a duty to do so, and to make the hard choices about the destiny of the universe, simply disappear? Of course not. The Sith understand that the arc of history is long, and it bends toward barbarism and chaos – and that those who understand this and have the capacity to change that arc have a duty to do so in the interests of order, for the benefit of all creatures. They should not merely sit around in monkish robes intoning about balance, controlling passions, refusing to intervene, watching history happen with the dispassion of an ascetic.

For the Sith, the setback at Endor would not destroy them. They would be more inspired than ever to crush the rebellion and its little destructive furry moppets.

In Domenech's telling, order is the only good choice. It doesn't matter how brutally applied that order is, it doesn't matter how many collateral deaths there are, the only thing that matters is suppressing "barbarism and chaos". One gets the sense, especially reading the comments, that a great number of conservatives chafed at George Lucas' earlier ham-handed attempts to tie in Bush/43 foreign policy to the franchise. If so, it was because they were so clearly on the wrong side. The Jonathan V. Last alt-universe story errs, not in its reading of the Empire, but in its witless, soulless mania for power. Someone who could write the words, "Palpatine is a dictator--but a relatively benign one, like Pinochet" has not lived in a state where people could be taken from their beds, never to be heard from again. That Domenech does not realize this (and apparently looks on approvingly) shows he makes the same mistake all who pretend to dictatorship do: they imagine themselves in power indefinitely, and exclusively.

2021-09-22: Fixed the Jonathan V. Last Empire link (the Weekly Standard is a thing of shreds and patches).