The Last Jedi: Quaternary Thoughts

I'll burn my books!—ah, Mephistopheles!

Doctor Faustus

In a 1980 interview Mark Hamill recalled how George Lucas had originally wanted Star Wars to begin:

"It started with a helicopter shot of an enchanted forest and they push the camera through the window of a tree and you see a mother Wookie trying to breast feed this squealing baby! He keeps gesturing towards the bookshelf and there's all this Wookie dialogue going on. She goes and points to one particular book and the baby gets all excited. She takes the book off the shelf and we see it's titled Star Wars. She opens the book and that's when the ship comes overhead and the film we know starts... Then, at the end, after we get our medals, we bow and it cuts back to the baby Wookie asleep — hopefully not like the audience. And the mother closes the book and puts the baby to bed."

The first Star Wars movie was the end result of a decade-long editorial process; ten years of cutting, simplifying and pruning Lucas's original script. Screeds of political back story were cut back to “it is a period of CIVIL WAR”; pages and pages of mumbo-jumbo about Bogons and Midichlorians were condensed to two lines from Alec Guinness about an energy field. And this ill-judged prologue was reduced to ten of the most famous words in cinema history: 

“A Long Time Ago In a Galaxy Far Far Away…”

Mark Hamill thinks the studio objected to the prologue because the Wookies weren't wearing any pants. If this is true, the scene must have been at least partially filmed, and is presumably preserved somewhere on Skywalker Ranch. Perhaps that is the real reason Lucas tried quite so hard to stop us from seeing the Star Wars Holiday Special: it's all that is left of a path he decided not to take. But that caption, "A Long Time Ago In a Galaxy Far Far Away.." appears in neither the novelization nor the comic book adaptation. It must have been added quite late in the day. 

Alan Dean Foster's 1976 novelization is subtitled "from the adventures of Luke Skywalker" and begins with a 500 word prologue taken from "the first saga" of something called "The Journal of the Whills." Lucas seems to have envisaged the Journal of the Whills as a mystical tome. But Foster's "first saga" seems to merely be a history book, giving us a rather dry account of the rise of Palpatine and how Empire succeeded Republic.

Foster's history book is very different in tone from Lucas's proposed Wookie scene. But it serves the same narrative purpose. It draws a frame around Star Wars and turns it into a story within a story. Lucas agrees that this was the intention:

"Originally, I was trying to have the whole story told by somebody else there was somebody watching the whole story and recording it, somebody probably wiser than the mortal players in the actual events."

William Goldman famously used this kind of device in The Princess Bride, which is presented as the story which a modern-day grandfather is reading to a modern-day child. Although The Princess Bride didn't reach cinemas until 1987, the novel (presented as an abridgment of a longer text) was published in 1973—exactly when George Lucas started to work on his epic space saga.

So: Star Wars is a story. But what kind of a story is Star Wars? 

"It is history" says the Journal of the Whills — ancient history, maybe, but history nonetheless.

"It is a fairy tale" says the opening caption and the lost prologue; something to put children to sleep with, but maybe not to be taken too seriously.

"It is a movie" says the opening crawl: specifically, it is the kind of movie you watched at Saturday morning pictures in the 1950s.

But history, fairy tale, and movie are three very different things. "Episode I" and "The First Saga" are part of very different conceptual worlds. If something is history, or even legend, then it is legitimate to look for the facts on which it is based. But a story is just a story. You might very well  watch a movie about Jesse James or Davy Crockett and ask "Is it true? If not, what really happened?" But it is literally meaningless to ask the same question about Shane or the Milky Bar Kid or the Lone Ranger.

The Wookie, and the listener to whom the words "a long time ago in a galaxy far far away..." are addressed is looking back to legendary days long passed when Luke Skywalker saved the rebellion and restored peace to the Galaxy. So too are the students studying the writings of the Whills and the audience watching the movie serial. But Princess Leia reminds Ben Kenobi of heroic deeds done “years ago”; Luke Skywalker hears about how his heroic father fought in the Clone Wars and Ben Kenobi evokes the days of the Old Republic when the Jedi Knights stood for Peace and Justice. The people we are looking back on are themselves looking back; the characters inside the legend have legends of their own.

But their legends are not true.

Star Wars may be a fairy tale, but it is a fairy tale in which the golden coaches are tarnished and most people don’t believe in fairies. To Han Solo, Ben Kenobi is an old fossil; to Uncle Owen, a crazy wizard. The Imperials regard the Force as a quaintly obsolescent superstition; Han disbelieves in it altogether. Granted, in Episode IV the fairy tales all come true: the moody farm boy rescues the captive princess and his faith in the Force saves the galaxy. But in Episode V all those certainties fade away. Luke’s heroic father fades into the horrific Darth Vader; Ben the wise old Jedi knight turns out to have been a manipulative liar.

If Luke can’t believe what Ben told him about his father, why should he believe what he told him about the Jedi Knights?

But if Luke can’t believe Old Ben’s tales of the Jedi, why should Baby Wookie believe a single word of what Mummy Wookie tells him about the Star Wars….

Here is Luke Skywalker talking to Rey in the Last Jedi:

“Now that they are extinct, the Jedi are romanticized, deified. But if you strip away the myth and look at their deeds, the legacy of the Jedi is failure. Hypocrisy, hubris. At the height of their powers, they allowed Darth Sidious to rise, create the Empire, and wipe them out. It was a Jedi Master who was responsible for the training and creation of Darth Vader… “

My first reaction to this speech was to be revolted by it: to see it as an attack on the whole idea of Star Wars.

The Jedi are the spiritual centre of the movies. They provide the magic and mystery and colour. They are what gives the Saga its significance: behind the battle between Empire and Rebellion is the deeper battle between the Dark Side and the Light. The inner light is more powerful than any battle station; faith is very much a match for a good blaster by your side. Remove the Jedi and what you are left with is a lot of big spaceships blowing each other up.

George Lucas placed the saga in quotation marks. Because it was “only a story” we could enjoy the outrageous swashbuckling while at the same time admitting that no-one could possibly be quite that heroic in real life. But now we have a character inside the frame questioning the story. It is one thing for Obi-Wan to lie to Luke Skywalker. But what happens if the story itself turns out to have been lying? If going to Alderaan and becoming a Jedi like your father was never a terribly good aspiration; if the EVIL GALACTIC EMPIRE was maybe not so evil and the WISE JEDI KNIGHTS were maybe not that wise?

I still think that my first reaction was correct. From a certain point of view.

What Luke Skywalker calls "the myth" of the Jedi Knights is what Obi-Wan told us about in Star Wars. It was that myth that we first generation Star Wars fans fell in love with. The Jedi Knights were the most important thing in Star Wars because they were almost completely absent from it. The most wonderful thing about Jedi is that Ben Kenobi is the only one.

What Luke Skywalker calls "the reality" is what George Lucas showed us in Episodes I, II and III. Everything Luke says is entirely accurate. Obi-Wan really did create Darth Vader by stupidly disobeying Yoda. The Jedi Council really did fail to spot that Jar Jar Binks had nominated a Sith Lord as President of the Republic. They aren’t even that great at preserving peace and justice. By the end of the second movie they are waging a terrible war across the entire galaxy. And Qui-Gon seems perfectly happy to condone slavery and gangsterism on Tatooine.

What Luke Skywalker has in fact done is acknowledge that the prequels were a bit of a disappointment.

Did you get that? The fact that the Phantom Menace wasn't very good is now part of the text of the Star Wars saga. The idea of the Jedi does not live up to the reality. The prequels did not live up to the first trilogy. This is not Rian Johnson deconstructing Star Wars. Star Wars has already been thoroughly taken to pieces by George Lucas. What Rian Johnson is attempting to do is put Star Wars back together again.

Luke says that he is going to destroy the Jedi books which are stored in a holy tree on Act-Tu; but the ghost of Yoda invokes Force lightning and destroys them himself. At the very, very end of the movie, in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it scene, it transpires that the books were not really in the Jedi Tree: Rey had hidden them on the Millennium Falcon.

It still irks me that they are books. The Jedi store important information on small cubes called Holocron. I realize that this is a parodically fannish thing to be irked by, but irked by it I am.

Are we supposed to think that Rey has deceived Luke and Yoda? Or that Yoda and Rey have conspired to fool Luke? Or possibly even Rey and Luke have fooled Yoda? The narrative logic seems to say that the burning of the tree is a decisive step and that Yoda really has brought the Jedi to an end. I am inclined to think that the brief shot of the texts on the Falcon represents a last minute editorial cop out; that having filmed a scene in which the Jedi came to an end, Johnson was persuaded to splice in a get-out clause which allows J.J Abrams to bring them back if he wants to.

But I also note that Yoda says that the books contain nothing which Rey doesn't already possess, which is just the sort of double-tongued thing he might say if what she literally possessed was the books themselves. Splicing in an extra scene which reveals that an apparent Bad Thing didn't really happen after all -- that would be a very Flash Gordon thing to do.

Luke thinks that by destroying the books, he will destroy the Jedi; but Yoda implies that Luke himself hasn't read them. We can see what it might mean for a religion to venerate texts which it no longer bothers to read; but we can't see how this applies to the Jedi because we don't know what's in the books. (Were they rescued from Coruscant when the Temple was destroyed? Or are they texts which even the Jedi Council has forgotten? Or did Mace Windu come on study trips to Craggy Island to read them?) The Jedi training we have seen doesn't get very far beyond Mindfulness 101 -- hold your mind still, don't give in to distractions, let go of your conscious self, act on instinct... You don't need secret texts to access this very basic spiritual practice. Luke seems to think that the Jedi were somehow hoarding the Force instead of sharing it,  but it isn't clear what difference setting fire to some texts will make.

But still: Yoda and Luke, together, burning texts. After Luke has so thoroughly debunked the Star Wars saga, it is a very suggestive image. Perhaps it is one of those scenes which would have been better dubbed into Chinese, or explained with a couple of words of inter-title?

La la la 
old books burning;

La la la 
old order passing

Yub nub 
new way of doing things
Allay loo ta nuv

You don't suppose these "ancient Jedi texts" could be the Journal of the actual Whills, do you?

The first three Star Wars movies ended on tableaux; the characters all line up so we can say goodbye to them. The one in Return of the Jedi felt painfully like a curtain call. The Last Jedi seems as if it is going to end the same way. The four or five surviving rebels are gathered on the Millennium Falcon and Leia tells them "we have everything we need".

It is another hopelessly cryptic moment. What is it that they have got? The Jedi books? Rey's knowledge? Rey herself? But what is Rey's significance? Is she the next chosen one, stuffed to gills with Midichlorians, with a chance to fulfill the bloody prophecy and  make up for Anakin’s descendants buggering everything up? Or is the important thing about her what she learned from Luke? Which is what? That the Force is not power but balance? That it's about wisdom, not floating rocks? (She's really, really good at floating rocks.) Does Rey have everything she needs because spontaneous, untutored spirituality is going to replace text-based religious studies? Or does she have everything because she preserved the texts that Luke was going to recklessly destroy...and is actually intending to read them? Is the point of the ending that both extremes are true? Or merely that Johnson can't decide and wants to tip the ball back into Abrams court?

But this isn't where the film ends.

The film ends back on Canto Blight, the unimaginative Casino Planet where Finn and Rose went for their contrived mid-movie adventure. (When Chewbacca and Artoo Detoo wanted to pass the time on the rickety old Millennium Falcon they play a chess like game with holograms of live aliens. When the richest people in the galaxy want to have some excitement, they put physical coins into mechanically operated slot machines.) During this side-quest, our heroes encountered a group of kids who help them escape. In the very brief epilogue, one of the children uses the Force to levitate the broom he is meant to be sweeping up with. He also has a signet ring, given to him by Rose, with the insignia of the Resistance on it. The film ends with him looking out to the stars. 

The boy doesn't have a name. We will probably never see him again. He is nobody. This is the message of the Last Jedi: bloodlines and books and prophecies never really counted; the Force always was available to everybody. That's why it all comes down to a fight between Kylo Renn, son of Han Solo, third generation of Anakin's bloodline, the logical next step in the Skywalker saga….and Rey who doesn't have a last name. Up and down the universe, thousands and thousands of Nobodys can use the Force and thousands and thousands of Nobodys believe in the Resistence. We don't need no stinkin' Jedi Knights. It's all us Nobodys who will burn the First Order down.

Except, sorry -- can it really be a plot point that the whole idea of the Adventures of Luke Skywalker was a misunderstanding? Can it really be that we have been reading the wrong book all these years?

The boy with the broom isn't merely Nobody: he is very specifically a slave. And I know who else was a slave: Anakin Skywalker, that's who. So the message could just as easily be: here is a new bloodline; here is another child conceived by the Midichlorians; here is another shot at completing the prophecy. The whole Vader - Luke - Kylo cycle is going to play out again, and burn the galaxy down in a new and bloody war. Unless Rey really can learn from Luke’s mistakes.

Johnson has gone to some lengths to leave matters open; to allow Abrams the final say in what Star Wars is really about. Rey is important because she has preserved the Jedi books. Rey is important because she doesn't need the Jedi books. The boy with the broom is of no importance; he's just one of many people who can use the Force. The boy with the broom is of huge importance; the next film will be about how Rey finds him and trains him.

The boy is discovered playing with improvised action figures. He is re-enacting a scene from the movie we have just seen: Luke fighting Kylo Ren on Crait. Perhaps the scene is saying that Anyboy can use the Force if he plays with his action figures? Perhaps all it ever took to be a Jedi was to say "I do believe in fairies" and think beautiful happy thoughts. The Force is become a metaphor for fandom. It is the quality which those of us who believe in Star Wars have got, and those of you who disbelieve in it will never have.

We are all Jedi now. 

Luke stopped believing in the legend of the Jedi, and cut himself off from the Force. The boy can use the Force because he does believe in the legend of Luke Skywalker. The boy with the broom is a hopeful thumbs up sign at the closing moment of what could otherwise have been a pretty damn depressing film. He's a lot like the little boy who redeems everything by telling King Arthur that he still believes in chivalry even if nobody else does. He is what heals the rift between the two trilogies and refutes Luke's claim that the Jedi were a failure.

We are inside the movie; inside the framing sequence. And a little boy is telling stories about Jedi Knights. It is as close as Rian Johnson dare go to the Baby Wookie's bedtime.

La la la 
hopeful final scene;

La la la 
upbeat conclusion

Yub nub 
maybe young will save the day
Allay loo ta nuv
Allay loo ta nuv

All charter members of the Andrew Rilstone fan club get a free -- I don't know -- marshmallow. 

The Last Jedi: Tertiary Thoughts

People who don’t like Star Wars seem to have mostly liked the Last Jedi; it is Star Wars fans who seem to have had misgivings about it.

This is doubtless why the vibe on the opening night was so negative. The five hundred people who had sat through the Force Awakens/Last Jedi double bill were, by definition, the five hundred biggest Star Wars geeks in Bristol.

The five hundred biggest Star Wars geeks who could afford to go to bed at 4AM on a school night, at any rate.

The media still talks as if Star Wars fans are some obscure cult, like collectors of 78rpm vinyl or Juliet Bravo enthusiasts. But even in 1977, when Star Wars was new and strange, it was also the most popular film of all time. Not a movie, more of an industry, said Barry Norman, before it had even opened in the UK. In the ensuing 40 years it has only grown bigger. It is strange to look at Star Wars Lego and Star Wars computer games and Star Wars Lego computer games and realize that millions of kids who have never seen a Star Wars movie know the identity of Luke Skywalker's father.

There is a show on Radio 4 in which guests are challenged to try things they have never tried before. So the notoriously well-dressed journalist is asked to buy a pair of jeans; the serious food writer is asked to go to McDonalds; someone who claims never to have eaten cheese is presented with a vast tasting palette of the stuff. The title of the show is I’ve Never Seen Star Wars.

We are all Star Wars fans now. 

*

Richard Dawkins famously said that if atheism is a religion, then not playing chess is a hobby. Garrison Keeler, almost as famously, said that in Minnesota, even the atheists are Lutherans: it is the Lutheran God they didn't believe in. 

Everyone has seen Star Wars. Nearly everyone likes Star Wars. But if you are reading this you are part of a tiny minority who have seen all the films an average of 16 times each; and have spent time thinking about them — as history, as mythology, as drama, as the possible subject matter for role-playing games.

It may be hard for you and I to believe, but the overwhelming majority of people who saw the Last Jedi didn’t have any strong feelings about it either way. They honestly haven’t given it a second thought since they left the cinema. They are, however, enormously looking forward to the Black Panther. Trust me, if you think the Phantom Menace retrospectively ruined your childhood, or even if you take the contrarian view that A New Hope is boring and dated and the sequels are where it's at, then you care infinitely more about these movies than nearly anyone else in the world.

Any schism between people who hated The Last Jedi and people who quite liked it is a schism within that tiny minority. It is not an argument between people who like Star Wars and people who do not. It is an argument between Star Wars geeks who like Star Wars and Star Wars geeks who don't. People who are geeky about liking Star Wars and people who are just as geeky about not liking it. There are, in fact, a fair number of people in the world whose hobby is telling other people to stop playing chess.

In this corner a group saying it is just so great that this film annoyed Star Wars fans because we fucking hate Star Wars fans, us, and want to see them getting annoyed. And in that corner a group saying we, the fans have ownership over this material; we, the fans get to decide how this material is used; and no-one else has any say.

And in the middle, an overwhelming majority whose review of the Last Jedi is the same as my mother’s review of A New Hope when she took me to see it at Barnet Odeon in 1978. “Yes, that was an enjoyable film. Now can I please forget about it?”

Is it possible to find balance between the two sides?

Who is Star Wars for?

*

We are all Star Wars fans now.

The Last Jedi cost literally $200,000,000 to make. It is on show in every multiplex cinema in the world. It is the literal definition of mainstream. It’s target audience is everybody.

But "everybody" isn’t invested in Star Wars in the way that you and I are. Everybody will not feel that their whole day is ruined if someone uses the Force in a way that no-one has ever used the Force before. Everyone doesn’t care if the film’s very existence does spoil Return of the Jedi. Everyone doesn't think very hard at all about what the film means. Everyone is probably not even giving the film their full attention while they actually watching it. 

When I am in a cynical mood, I say: “Oh: I suppose that means that everybody but me just gazes zombie-like at the big coloured lights and listens to the loud bangs?”

When I am being less cynical, I say that if you watch the movie for the landscape and the battles and the shape of the story without engaging with it at a cerebral level you are watching it in exactly the way it is supposed to be watched.

I once speculated that Star Wars could best be understood as a succession of images held weakly in place by a plot — that the emotional power of the first movie comes from seeing a little spaceship and a big spaceship and a scary man in a black cloak and a golden robot and a squeaky little robot even if you aren't quite sure exactly what a "consular ship" is. George Lucas considered dubbing the film into Japanese, or into some entirely made up language, to force audiences to attend to the imagery. Mark Hamill told Leslie Judd that the story of Star Wars is “only so much non sense to hang a great visual spectacle onto.” 

The plot of Star Wars is a little long a song lyric. Not a song by Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, just a pop song. We understand them perfectly well. They go:

La-la-la 

the sort of thing that people say in love songs 

la-la-la 

the kind of thing a young lad might say to a girl at a party

La-la-la

The kind of thing which people say in songs like this

La-la-la

Sex

The person who asks exactly where the strings of one's heart are located, and what exactly it would feel like if one of them went "zing" has clearly not quite got the idea of songs yet.

*

We are all Star Wars fans now.

I am a big fan of The Godfather Part II, although I always get lost during the Cuban sequences. Most people agree with me that it is a fine movie. Some people say that it is one of only two sequels which is actually superior to the original. (I forget the name of the other example.) 

But The Godfather Part II doesn’t stand alone. Al Pacino Robert De Niro is not merely portraying Vito Corleone; he is quite specifically portraying Marlon Brando portraying Vito Corleone. It is a fabulous performance precisely because we can so easily believe that Pacino De Niro is the young Brando. You wouldn’t think me a pathetic gangster geek if I said that you really won’t get very much out of The Godfather Part II unless you have seen The Godfather. The Godfather is one of the things which the Godfather Part II is about. The main thing, even. 

Yes, Mr Exception, I know you saw Part II before you saw Part I and enjoyed it very much. Please say so in the comments below: I am sure we will all find it fascinating. 

People sometimes propose the experiment of finding someone, maybe a child, who really has never seen Star Wars and showing them Episodes I - VI, in that order, in George Lucas’s preferred, redacted form. Would they understand them? Would they even be watching the same movies which we love so much? Would Darth Vader's dramatic entrance in Episode IV be even more dramatic if you immediately thought “It’s Anakin! And the lady in the white dress must be the girl baby all grown up! And he doesn’t even know!” Would it be more fun to see Old Ben drive the Sand People away if your immediate thought was "Golly gosh! Ewan McGregor has sure let himself go!” And would the climax of Empire Strikes Back be even more climactic if all the way through it you were thinking "Vader is Luke's Dad, and Luke doesn't know! Vader is Luke's Dad, and Luke doesn't know. Is he going to tell him? Is he going to tell him?"

Once we have done that experiment, we could try to imagine what it would be like to watch The Last Jedi without having seen the Force Awakens; nay, without even having seen A New Hope. 

“The old guy has gone into some sort of space ship. Is it the ship the younger woman came in? I suppose the thing that looks like a dustbin is a robot of some kind, a much more primitive version of the one we saw the guy in that little red and white space ship talking to earlier? The way he’s touching it, I suppose he must think of it as a friend. Maybe he used to own it? It is showing a very old film of a girl. Who is she? Sounds like she’s in some kind of trouble. I suppose the robot is reminding him of some time long ago when he helped a person in trouble. Maybe it’s a reference to some previous film.”

It is possible to watch a film like that. It can be quite fun. I have occasionally enjoyed watching a detached episode of a soap opera, where all the characters present themselves as “that-kid-who-has-to-admit-to-his-dad-he’s-done-a-bad-thing-I-have-no-idea-what” and “that-woman-who-is-meeting-someone-she-shouldn’t-be-meeting-I-have-no-idea-who”. Back when I only read Marvel Comics (on religious grounds) I used to positively enjoy it when someone else’s DC title fell into my hands. The Teen Titans felt so much more superheroey than the X-Men because I hadn’t got the faintest idea who any of them were. Because I didn't know the backstory I could actually attend to the surfaces. It used to be quite normal for films to be playing on endless loops and for audiences to catch the second half, of one and the first half of the other. You'd get to see some car chases and some kissing; you could tell if it was a police movie or a romance. Only some kind of weird movie geek actually care about the plot. 

But these are accidental pleasures. When we saw Star Wars for the first time there was indeed a kind of joy in hearing people talk about the Clone Wars and the Jedi Knights and having no idea what they were. But George Lucas intended us to have no idea; very probably he had no idea himself. Rian Johnson knows perfectly well what Artoo Deetoo is and why the hologram is important. He expects us to know as well. If Mr Exception goes to see the movie and enjoys the confusion of not knowing, then he is finding something in the film which the director didn’t put there.

But it's a silly question. there is no way of carrying out the experiment. Everyone knows who Luke Skywalker and Artoo Detoo and Princess Leia are. We are all Star Wars fans now. 

*

Who is Star Wars for?

At the very end of the movie, we see Luke Skywalker meditating, floating above a rock, looking into the sunset. It is a double sunset; Ach-Tu is a binary system. After a moment, we see his empty robes fall away: he has vanished.

It is theoretically possible that John Williams thought “I suppose I had better play some sad music at this point. I can’t be bothered to write a new tune, so I will bung in one I’ve used before. It’s not like anyone will notice!” It is possible that he said “This scene needs a bittersweet sound track with an element of triumph and an element of sehnsucht” and just happened to compose a tune that was very similar to the tune he composed the last time he wanted to signify sadness and happiness and triumph and nostalgic longing. And certainly, if you have Never Seen Star Wars you would not sit through that scene thinking “I am baffled! What is this music and why is he playing it now? I feel confused and excluded!” 

But everybody has heard this music before; during the iconic Binary Sunset scene in the first act of A New Hope, when Luke was looking out to the horizon wishing for adventure; and again in the final seconds of Revenge of the Sith, when the infant Luke first arrives on Tatooine. The meaning of the scene depends on our familiarity with the score. The music, far more than the pictures, is saying: “Luke is setting off on a big adventure” and “Luke has come home”. 

In fact, if you could translate what the music and the pictures were saying into words, it would come out much more like “LUKE SKYWALKER!!!!!” or possibly even “THE SUMMER OF NINETEEN SEVENTY BLOODY SEVEN!!!”

The man who has Never Seen Star Wars might look at the scene and say “What just happened? Has Luke been beamed up to the Starship Enterprise? Has someone done a conjuring trick? This crazy science fiction stuff is impossible to understand!” You and I are remembering that moment when Darth Vader struck Ben Kenobi down his cloak fell to the ground in two parts, but Ben's body was not in it. And that moment on Dagobah, when Yoda's body vanished, leaving only his robes behind. We may not even be thinking of those specific scenes: but everybody knows that when good Jedi go to be with the Force, their bodies vanish.

You may think that this is all so obvious that it is hardly worth saying. But it would not be obvious to your Mum, to Mr Exception, or to the man who has Never Seen Star Wars.

*

Who is Star Wars for? I do not have an answer. I am minded to accept the theory that I have spoiled the Last Jedi for myself by over-thinking it. There is a strong case for saying that when I ask myself whether Luke's grounds for rejecting the Jedi order are fair I am making a category mistake. It isn't exactly that I am the only person who is listening. Everybody is listening. But everybody else hears  Luke's speech as a song lyric. 

La-la-la, mystical nonsense,
la-la-la, the kind of thing old mentors say in this kind of movie,
la-la gub-gub hey nonny no. 

Everyone may even think that the Ach-Tu sequences are just the boring bits they always put in between fight scenes so you have a chance to go to the toilet and get some more pop corn.

And yet the film seems to demand a fairly high level of engagement. It seems to think that we can identify musical themes and recurrent motifs. It seems to be about Star Wars in just the same way that the Godfather Part II seems to be about the Godfather. The film's entire punch comes from the fact that this is not just some guy saying that it is time for the Jedi to end (and then sacrificing his life to keep them going) this is Luke Skywalker. The kid who wanted to pick up the power converters at Toshe station; the kid who flew down the trench; the hero with a thousand faces who tried to save his father and found he already had. Luke Skywalker.

**********L*U*K*E  B*L*O*O*D*Y S*K*Y*W*A*L*K*E*R **********

Only Star Wars can possibly be expected care about this stuff.. But we are all Star Wars fans now.

For whom is Star Wars?

For a limited time only

become a charter member of the 
Andrew Rilstone fan club

The Last Jedi: Second Thoughts

The controversy over The Last Jedi has become so incendiary that one hesitates to rejoin the fray. I thought I was going to be one of a small minority of purists who wasn’t happy with the film. In fact my review turns out to have been one of the moderate ones. 

The debate has reached Colstonian levels of absurdity. If I continue to not like the Last Jedi very much, I am aligning myself with dangerous nutters who think that the very existence of Daisy Ridley is part of a Cultural Marxist plot to emasculate young men. But if I decide I quite liked it after all I am taking the side of people who think that Star Wars fans are contemptible and that any film which irritates them is a good film.

I largely stand by the criticisms I made after my first viewing. I still think that the Last Jedi is muddled. I still think that it uses humour inappropriately. I still think it includes imagery which is incompatible with the established look and feel of Star Wars. I still think that there is evidence of multiple rewrites and poor editing. I still don’t know how Rey goes from having an emotional climax in the Supreme Leader’s throne room to being all “yee-har!” on the Millennium Falcon five minutes later. I still think that several plot threads fizzle out without pay-offs. I am still concerned about the direction it seems to be taking the saga. 

However.

I think that the film is far smarter and far more interesting than I initially gave it credit for.

Star Wars is all about landscape and scenery and imagery; about kids with binoculars looking at binary sunsets and small moons turning out not to be. The Last Jedi is full of genuinely beautiful moments. Luke Skywalker and Kylo Renn facing each other, samurai style, from opposite ends of the letter box screen. Holdo crashing the Rebel capital ship into the Imperial dreadnought. The whacky beauty of Luke's Craggy Island retreat.

The whole thing — I don’t know how better to phrase this — is shaped like a space opera: the clash of mighty dreadnoughts forming a background against which knights battle with laser swords; soldiers mutiny against their leaders and traitors face execution. I adore the way that Finn's big confrontation with Captain Phasma takes place on a ship which has already been wrecked and is going to break up at any moment.  Phasma has no particular importance to the plot, but she looks utterly fabulous. The scene put me in mind of Captain Victory and the Hunger Dogs. Star Wars was always more Kirbyesque than we cared to admit.

Star Wars is a movie serial and fairy tale and a Wagnerian saga, but the and biggest yellowest letters are the ones which tell us that it is about a series of WARS fought out among the STARS. The Last Jedi follows Rogue One in actually feeling like a war movie. We’ve always had Mon Mothas and General Dodonnas telling the galactic Few what target to aim at; but never before has the Rebellion felt so much like a military operation. Never before has so much of the plot taken place on board a Rebel command ship. 

And yet, I was disappointed. Why?

If you are not very careful “that was not at all what I expected” can turn into “that was bad”. I honestly can’t remember whether my first (and therefore truest) reaction to the Empire Strikes Back was that the surprise ending was gobsmackingly cool or that it was a bit of a cheat because it totally changed everything about Star Wars.

This is a big problem with blockbuster culture. You live for three years on speculation and hints and leaks about what is going to be in a movie, and then spend two hours thinking “oh…so that rumor was true and that rumor was false and why wasn’t that bit in the trailer?” rather than actually watching the film. I can very clearly remember my first (and therefore truest) reaction to Rogue One. It was “How the hell did they keep that ending a secret?” We can only experience a film once we have already seen it. Where that leaves the question of spoilers I really couldn't say.

So my first (and truest) reaction to the Last Jedi was disappointment. "After 30 years, is this really all the Luke Skywalker we are going to get?" One of the lovely things about the Force Awakens was that we got a big, meaty chunk of Harrison Ford playing at being Han Solo before his Proper Major Plot Arc started to kick in. I suppose I wanted to see Luke Skywalker the swashbuckling hero swing across one last chasm or fly one last X-Wing down one last trench. Or at least walk into a bar and chop a walrus man's arm off. He may be getting too old for that kind of thing, but he’s not as old as all that. Canon says he was 19 in Star Wars so he is barely 50 in Last Jedi. Star Wars never did handle time very consistently.

That would have pleased me, pleased the crowds, pleased the fans. It is doubtless to Rian Johnson’s credit that this isn't where he went. 

Back in '77 we expected to get a Star War every couple of years. We assumed we’d eventually get to Star Wars Part XVII in which Very Old Jedi Knight Luke Skywalker rattles around the galaxy in a rickety old starship, dispensing fortune cookie wisdom to the new generation of hot young turks and probably cutting down a few Bad Jedi along the way. By '83, we were imagining a film about the early days of the New Republic in which Luke sets up a new Jedi Academy while Mr and Mrs Solo play politics in the reconstituted Senate.



And, from a certain point of view, this is exactly what does happen. All the obligatory plot developments have, in fact, developed. Han and Leia did marry and have a son. Luke did set up Jedi Camp for younglings. But Mr Johnson and Mr Abrams have correctly spotted that people living happily ever after is not what Episode VIII of a space opera saga should be about. (What were you going to call it? Star Peace?) The various comic books and novels told us that our heroes hardly had time to do the washing up after the Ewok party before, whoosh, they were off on another adventure. The new movies tell us that their happy ending lasted for a quarter of a century. But we don't rejoin the action until everything has gone horribly wrong. The story resumes in the immediate aftermath of the apparent triumph of evil; when the surviving Jedi are all hiding out in swamps and in deserts and on islands and some people are holding out for a new hope. 

Exactly where we came in during Episode IV.

I expected Old Luke to be kind of a strange old hermit; or maybe even a wise Councillor to Leia or Mon Motha. (Obi Wan always seemed more Merlin than Lancelot.) Maybe he could have been one of those old alien duffers who sit in the Jedi Temple being serene and insufferable. But in retrospect, he was always going to become Yoda; hiding away on an uninhabited planet, cooking soup, milking cows, refusing to train obviously talented students who come looking for him, not taking the film quite seriously. It's easy to forget how comedic Yoda was when he first appeared. That was everyone's second reaction as the lights came up at the end of Empire Strikes Back. “Alec Guiness’s mentor was a muppet? Are you kidding me?” Luke’s rejection of Rey’s precious lightsaber is an important plot-point. Luke chucking the thing over his shoulder as if it was a piece of junk is not a misstep (as I first thought) but a perfectly judged piece of characterization. It’s just the kind of thing which Yoda would have done.

From the fannish point of view, it seems a great shame to have put Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher into the same studio and only given them 30 seconds of screen time together. And we all wanted Luke and Artoo to take one last trip in an X-Wing, or at least on the Millennium Falcon, with Threepio making annoying comments in the background. But that would have just been a tribute act: getting the band back together to sing all the old hits. That kind of thing never works. And anyway, it would have gone against the whole idea of the saga. Heroes get old. They pass the torch, or at any rate the lightsaber, to the younger ones. Po and Beebee fly the X-Wings nowadays. Luke is a supporting character in their movie, just as Alec Guinness was a supporting character in his. That is the way of things. The way of the Force. That was the life lesson that Joseph Campbell thought that the Journey of the Hero taught us. Life is a journey; everyone has a character; one man in his time plays many parts. (And women too, but not so much.) You've had your go at the Reckless Young Hero template. Now it's time to have a go at the Mysterious Old Mentor.

The few seconds which Luke spends with each of Leia and Chewie and the two robots will prove more memorable than any anticipated reunion scene could have done. The wink at Threepio is just perfect.

But still. Doesn't this failed Luke, this defeated Luke, this Luke who came to Ach-To in order to die, undermine the ending of the Return of the Jedi -- and therefore of the original Star Wars saga.

Yes. Yes, it does. Of course it does.

Return of the Jedi ended with a resounding full-stop. Granted, some people looked at the fireworks and listened to the gub-gub song and said “Well, okay, they’ve destroyed a really, really big battle station…but is that really the end of the Empire?” But the prequels answered that question. The Empire turned out to be the final gambit in a centuries long struggle between the Jedi (hooray!) and the Sith (boo!) George Lucas had originally conceived Star Wars as a multi-generational saga about the Skywalker clan, but the death of the Emperor and the redemption of Vader had such finality that for years he said that there couldn’t be any more episodes. I agreed with him:

The cycle, which has been more like a spiral, is completed. Lucas is absolutely correct to rule out making Episodes VII, VIII and IX: there is absolutely nowhere left for the sequels to go. Hochsten Heiles Wunder! Erlosung dem Erloser!

(That's your actual Wagner, that is.)

So where does that leave the Last Jedi? Is it a story set after the end of the story; a new cycle which begins after the final notes of Gotterdamerung have faded away? Or is it merely a new chapter in which it turns out that the story wasn’t quite so over as we thought it was?

Perhaps Star Wars is like Lenseman where behind each ultimate evil there lurks an evil even more ultimate? Or is it more like Middle-earth, where each iteration of evil becomes pettier but more insidious? 

It is quite late in the day to start complaining about spoiling happy endings. Star Wars -- Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope -- is a perfectly framed fairy tale, with a satisfying happy ending. It has always seemed rather vulgar to imagine more adventures after the medal ceremony. Luke is a Jedi the moment he switches off his targeting computer: it is almost sacrilege to think that he has to go to a swamp and take extra P.E lessons from a frog.

But it makes no sense to be a Star Wars fan and wish that there were no Star Wars movies.

The ending of Star Wars was spoiled the moment someone said “We could do Star Wars 2”. The ending of Return of the Jedi was spoiled the moment George said “Okay, let’s do a third trilogy after all.” But that, I suspect, is also the way of the Force.

(continues)

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The Last Jedi, Intertextuality and Fanishness.

Almost the first thing we know about Star Wars is that we are watching one part of a larger saga. 

Granted, when we first saw Star Wars it was just Star Wars and not Star Wars: Chapter IV - A New Hope. But the opening crawl was undoubtedly telling us The Story So Far, and the story was already well underway when we started watching. We kept hearing about things like the Spice Mines of Kessel and the Clone Wars as if we ought to know what they were but didn’t.

As more and more episodes (and comics and cartoons and games) have come out, we have learned more and more about the Star Wars universe, but we have never really felt we are in possession of the whole saga from beginning to end. Watching the hidden parts being unveiled has always been one of the pleasures of a new Star Wars movie.

Some of us went to see Empire Strikes Back honestly not knowing who Luke Skywalker’s daddy would turn out to be. Some of us can still percieve that Vader’s identity was a choice; that until the moment of revelation the story could have gone off in a quite different direction. Some of us still wish that it had. What would a sequence of sequels in which Darth Vader had literally murdered Anakin have been like? More like Star Wars, I sometimes think. 

"Gradually showing us more and more of the setting” is one of the ways in which the Star Wars saga unfolds. The more questions the saga answers, the fewer possibilities there are. If the Clone Wars are revealed to be this, they can’t also be that. The alternative is not to tell any stories at all. 

So: in A New Hope, an Emperor is mentioned. In Empire Strikes Back, we see this Emperor as a hologram. And in Return of the Jedi, we finally meet him face to face and discover that he is an evil Jedi. In the prequels, the concept of “evil Jedi” is further explicated: The Emperor is identified as a Sith master and Darth Vader as his apprentice. Some of this is problematic (I am suddenly troubled by Tarkin telling Vader that he is all that is left of the Jedi religion) but this gradual decoding is clearly a big part of the trajectory of Episodes IV-VI and I-III. 

We reasonably expect The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi to develop in a similar way: introducing new mysteries about the Star Wars universe and gradually untangling them. When The Force Awakens withholds key information about certain characters while clearly coding them as “mysterious” that expectation is reinforced.

The Force Awakens is constructed in such a way as to make us wonder about the identity of Kylo Ren. Kylo Ren’s identity isn’t a mystery or a secret inside the the Star Wars universe: Luke, Han, Leia, Dameron and some of the First Order officers all know perfectly well who he is. But it is a piece of information which has been withheld from the viewer: a puzzle, a source of tension. About half way through the film, the set-up pays off: it turns out that (SPOILERS) Kylo Ren is Ben Solo. This is a good dramatic moment in the film; it makes sense of what we already know of Kylo; it fills in a wodge of background about Han and Leia and it increases the emotional jeopardy. We now know that Han Solo has a personal stake in the action. 

The Force Awakens was also constructed in such a way as to raise the question about who or what Snoke is. Again, Leia and Han and Poe and Kylo Ren and the various First Order functionaries know who he is, but we don’t. He’s presented very much as the Emperor was in Empire Strikes Back, only more so: a gigantic hologram that we don’t get a good look at; who appears to have some kind of facial disfigurement, bespeaking some previous fight. So, we expect there to be a similar revelatory moment about Snoke, one that explains and deepens him and makes the plot more complicated. Not necessarily “I am Yoda’s sister” — the family ties thing is specifically about the Skywalker clan — but some hint about who he is and how he got there.

The original trilogy tells us that however strongly the Force may be with you, you still have to go off to Hogwarts to learn how to use it. Luke is the most powerful Jedi in the universe and he still doesn't have any Force magic until he meets Ben. Nor does Anakin, who was literally conceived by the Force. (Yes: the prequels are canon. Episodes VII and VIII reference Clone Troopers, Darth Sidious, the Jedi Temple and the idea of bringing balance to the Force.) 

So, the rules we have been taught encourage us to ask, “Why is Snoke so Forceful?” Is he another alumnus of Luke's Jedi school? Did Darth Sidious have a backup apprentice? Is there a mysterious Sith Temple churning out little Darth Mauls? "Actually, there are lots of natural Force users running around the Galaxy who don’t need to be trained" would be a permissible, if rather boring, answer, but if that's the case why does Snoke talk as if he is part of some wider conspiracy? If people can just spontaneously start levitating rocks and telling Stormtroopers which droids they are meant to be looking for, why does Luke Skywalker's Jedi school even matter? But the film doesn’t give, or imply that answer. The question doesn’t seem to have occurred to it.

Episodes I - III reconfigured Star Wars as being about the battle between the Jedi and the Sith. They hinted at some interesting stuff in which the "Dark Side" wasn't wholly dark and the "Light Side" wasn't wholly light, and suggested that there were secret teachings within the Jedi tradition that Yoda and Qui-Gon were privy to. So we reasonably want to know what happens next. Did the death of Vader bring the Sith’s thousand-year history to an end; or are they going to spring up again in some other form? Is Snoke a new Sith Lord, or is he part of some other Dark Side tradition? But if there are Dark Side traditions apart from the Sith, what was defeated when Darth Vader was defeated? If Snoke is a Sith, is Kylo Ren his apprentice? Or has Ren independently decided to revive Granddad's cult? If Ren doesn't see himself as the continuation of the Sith, in what sense does he think he's the new Darth Vader? (But why hasn't he taken on the title Darth?)

I agree that one can be too obsessed with this kind of thing. I agree that many fan theories — however ingenious they might be — are palpably not the kind of thing that would ever happen in a piece of mainstream popular culture. There were a couple of fans who were convinced that the final episode of Doctor Who Season I was going to reveal that Christopher Eccleston was not, in fact, the Doctor but a new incarnation of the Master and the real Doctor was imprisoned on an asteroid somewhere. Brilliant, but just not the kind of thing the BBC would ever do. There certainly are people who spot that the new movie contradicts something mentioned in a footnote to a backup strip in issue #6 of the new Darth Vader comic and claim that this ruins the movie for them; just as there are fans whose whole interest in the Last Jedi rests on a rumour they heard that it will award canonical status to Jaxxon the rabbit. I agree that this kind of thing is tiresome. 

On the other hand: if Disney are going to make a big song and dance about anathematizing the whole of the Extended Universe and creating a new, singular canon in which everything is “true” I think we are entitled to expect very broad consistency between the comics, the movies and the cartoons. If Clone Wars tells us that Younglings were taken off to a special cave and taught how to make Lightsabers that suited their particular abilities, I think I am entitled to be surprised if a movie says that Obi-Wan bought his in Ye Olde Lightsaber Shoppe on Diagon Alley.

And yes: if Star War IX mentions Ye Olde Lightsaber Shoppe then twelve hours later three fan sites will upload five excellent stories about how the Empire conquered Ilum and three Jedi preserved the craft of lightsaber forging under cover of a shop. No canon is so contradictory that it is impossible for exegetes to harmonize. 

There is a theory that the normal, indeed correct, way of watching a movie or a TV show is with your ears turned off, one eye on your smartphone, one eye on your popcorn, letting the big funny lights wash over you. Those of us who give multiplex movies our full attention are therefore bound to misunderstand them: we're trying to do something with them that they were never intended for.  ("But Andrew" says an elderly TV viewer of my acquaintance "Normal people don't analyze Doctor Who in the way you do. They just watch it.”) 

There is something to this. But the line between "Star Wars fan" and "casual cinema goer" is much wobblier than it used to be. The prequels were incredibly "fannish" and people still went to see them. The Clone Wars cartoon series is (among other things) a fannish exercise in redeeming the prequels, and it went out on the Disney Channel. There is a fine moment in Star Wars: Rebels where the scooby gang is sent to meet an old-wise-mysterious Rebel contact, and she turns out to be Anakin Skywalker’s estranged padawan from Clone Wars. (Who doesn't know what happened to her old master, but is aware that the Empire have an incredibly nasty Sith Lord working for them. It doesn't end well.) That seems to be supremely fannish, if by fannish you mean “asking questions about what happened to subsidiary characters after they left the stage” and “expecting characters from one series to turn up in another” and “being interested in the shape of the saga, not just the fight scenes”. But Star Wars: Rebels is quite clearly a kids’ cartoon.

Some fans are more obsessive than others. Some people would regard me as quite a lightweight: I am still inclined to think of spaceships as “pointy ones”, “big pointy ones” and “really huge pointy ones”; and couldn’t confidently tell you the difference between an A-Wing and a B-Wing. But "a person who saw the prequels" and "a person who pays attention to the dialogue" is quite a puritanical definition of "fan".

I don't think The Last Jedi is a failure. I do not think that Johnson is ten thousand parsecs from embracing Russel T Davies' theory that coherent story telling is for wimps. On one viewing, I would say that Last Jedi is better than any of the prequels, but not as good as the Force Awakens or Rogue One. I only say that some of the narrative decisions were disappointing and may turn out to be damaging to the Saga as a whole.

Here is a question. Please do not try to answer it.

1: In the Force Awakens, the identity of Rey’s parents is presented as a mystery. Which of the following is true of the eventual solution?

A: J.J Abrams knew when he wrote the Force Awakens that Rey’s parents were blah blah mumble mumble mutter mutter.

B: J.J Abrams did not know who Rey’s parents were when he wrote the Force Awakens: he presented it as an unanswered question but left it open for his successor to answer.

C: When he wrote the Force Awakens, J.J Abrams intended Rey’s parents to be, for example, yadda yadda yadda, but at some point during development, Johnson changed this to mumble mumble mutter mutter blah blah.

2: As a way of developing a film script which is part of a forty-year saga is this

A: About how you would expect things to work.

B: A bit of an odd process, frankly.

C: Completely fucking deranged.

How Andrew rates the Star Wars movies.
For amusement only. 

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The Last Jedi: first impressions.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi was a mess. 

The atmosphere at 4AM in Screen 7 of the Cabots Circus Showcase was subdued. Not Phantom Menace subdued ("I piss on the evil of that film”) but still subdued. We had almost definitely seen something mostly very good; but there was a lingering sense of disappointment. Of having been cheated. 

I kept hearing expressions like “mad” and “crazy”. 

Some people are already comparing this film with the Empire Strikes Back. It’s the middle volume of the trilogy, don’t you know. And it’s about the Rebels, strike that, Resistance falling back and trying not to be annihilated, and an ice planet, and walkers, and the main character spends most of the film isolated from the action and learning the ways of the Force from an incredibly irritating Jedi Master. 

Sad thing is; I agree with them. The last time I felt this way was in the Leicester Square Odeon one afternoon in 1980. Yes, the walkers were great, and yes, the green muppet Jedi was great, and yes, the fight on the bridge was great, and yes, the Bounty Hunters, and yes the big reveal at the end, so why am I feeling this overwhelming sense of disappointment? 

I have always been an apologist for the Prequels. No, there is no need to list their deficits again; I know them and I largely agree with you. But I can see what Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith are doing and I think it is largely what they ought to have been doing even though I wish that they had been doing it better. 

I am not sure what The Last Jedi was trying to do. I am far from sure that whatever it was trying to do was what the eighth Star Wars movie ought to have been doing. But I am in no doubt at all that it did it very well. 

I assume that there must be someone who signs off on new Star Wars movies — if not George Lucas any more than some Franchise Runner? It cannot surely be that in a universe this size and a franchise this expensive very big decisions about which major characters live and which major characters die and who turns out to be who’s cousin are decided on a case by case basis by whoever happens to be producing this episode? 

Surely the final fate of Luke Skywalker —  and wild horses would not make me reveal what his final fate is, although irritating sparkly goats might persuade me to hint that it is not actually anything terribly interesting — surely the final fate of Luke Skywalker is decided by someone with an over-arching plan? Someone who knows where the Saga is headed? Surely after forty years and nine movies it doesn’t come down to someone called Johnson deciding, about six months ago, what might make a cool scene?

The Last Jedi doesn’t feel like a sequel to The Force Awakens: it feels like a repudiation of it: as if Rian Johnson has his own quite different vision of what a Star Wars film should be and takes on J.J Abrams’ characters only reluctantly.

The Force Awakens ends with Rey offering Anakin’s lightsaber — by now a literal holy relic — to Luke. The question left hanging is “will he take it, or not.” The Last Jedi begins with Luke taking the lightsaber.., and throwing it in the sea. (It is rescued by penguins. They are not referred to as Porgs anywhere in the film, but then, neither were the Ewoks.) This raises a laugh from the audience. It doesn’t feel to me as if Abrams set up a joke and Johnson delivered the punchline two years later. It feels to me as if Abrams left the story at a great big dramatic crux and Johnson chose to undercut it. 

There is nothing wrong with a Star Wars movie making the audience laugh. But this humour is too meta-textual: too dependent on shifts of register and gentle pushes at the fourth wall. This feels quite wrong. For Luke to have discovered a small cache of foundational Jedi texts is one thing; for him to realize that these dry old manuscripts do not contain the truth he is seeking is another; but for a character — I won’t tell you who, but they were a major supporting character in the old films and we weren’t necessarily expecting them to crop up here — to say “Page-turners they are not” is something else again. 

It’s the wrong sort of humour. Ewoks and Gungans to this undercutting of the material prefer I do. 

And, at risk of being incredibly geeky: anyone who has ever played the Star Wars RPG knows that there is no paper in the Star Wars universe. This is not, of course, a very big deal: but if you are always being reminded that bar-tenders use portable computers to tell you what your bill is and that messages are sent by hologram, not carrier pigeon, then you can’t forget that this is an alien galaxy, very different from our own. (Of course, Luke could have explained to Rey that these are strange ancient things called books made of a substance called paper. But he didn’t.) 

When Finn and a new character whose name I didn’t catch run off on what can only be described as a side quest to an alien casino we see aliens being served drinks in martini glasses and tea in cups and saucers. Is that the best we can come up with to indicate wealth and sophistication – Martini and Tea? Back in ‘76 one of the cool things about Star Wars was the blue milk. Milk just happens to be blue and no-one comments and nothing follows because we aren’t in Kansas any more. 

Does Johnson basically not get Star Wars? Did the keeper of the holocron never take him to one side and quietly explain it to him? 

The Force Awakens was criticized for being a little too safe and conservative, so it is perhaps unfair to criticize The Last Jedi for veering a little too far towards the unexpected. But we have reasonable expectations about what should happen in a Star Wars movie — obligatory scenes — and leaving those scenes out seems borderline sinful. If you’ve cast Mark Hamil and Carrie Fisher in the same movie than for George’s sake give them some screen time together. If a Major Character got killed off in the last film, then spend some time showing us how it affected his big furry companion. (Until next years ill-advised Han Solo movie comes out we aren’t going to know if the “Wookie Life Debt” thing is canon: but I would like it not to have been quite so much taken for granted that now Han is dead Chewie automatically stays with the rebel humans.) 

I suppose the original sin was committed in the opening seconds of Episode VII. What we want — what we need — is to see Luke in the Obi Wan Kenobi role: as the wise old man accompanying the kids on their adventures. But Abrams decision to make him the McGuffin of the first movie pretty much guarantees that he can’t be anything other than the Yoda of this one. He’s detached from the action, having very little dialogue with anyone apart from Rey. His major plot arc (which I don’t buy for one second) takes place in a few isolated flashbacks, which have the distinct look of having been added at quite a late stage in the proceedings. 

I know I am going to get punched for saying this: but I kept thinking of the Lone Ranger. This is not quite as rude as it may sound: I didn’t hate the Lone Ranger nearly as much as you presumably did. But both movies have the same feeling of vast, expansive splurging; of throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks; of arguments between creatives and studios that were never quite resolved; of changes of direction part way through; the absence of a singular vision of what kind of a movie this is meant to be. Several times characters are on the point of laying down their lives nobly to save their friends when they unexpectedly get rescued, or turn out to be less dead then we thought, in ways that don’t give the impression that our hero has affected a dramatic hairsbreadth cliffhanger escape, so much as the impression that one writer wanted to kill them off and another writer overruled him at the last moment. 

We know what we want from a new Star Wars movie. We want the chance to play Star Wars one more time — to pretend to pilot and X-Wing, to pretend to be in the Rebel Alliance, to see all the great big ships crash together and explode. But we also want it to be the next chapter of the Saga, the unfolding of some more of the history of the Skywalker clan, revelations about who is who’s father which raise even deeper questions. What does the title mean? Who is the last Jedi? And why? But while it’s doing those things, it also has to be a good film: a film which hangs together and makes structural sense. 

The Last Jedi unequivocally succeeds in the first area. It’s the most visually exciting Star Wars movie we’ve so far seen. Po Dameron is basically what happens when Luke Skywalker and Han Solo get smashed together: the charming rogue whose also a hot young fighter pilot. The opening scene, in which Po takes on a Star Destroyer with a single X-Wing is fun in the way that the Death Star Run was fun in 1977. (It also feels like the kind of stunt which a player character with too many Force Points might have pulled.) 

I would say that the film pretty much crashes and burns in the second department. The Force Awakens left us with a series of big, interesting questions; and fans have spent two years coming up with more or less interesting answers for them. Johnson doesn’t merely fail to answer the questions – he seems actively uninterested in them. No, madam: I do not in fact think that The Last Jedi ought to have included long disputations about the fuel to speed ratio of the Millennium Falcon. There are, indeed, some things which are of interest to fans but of no interest to the general viewer. But I do think questions like “Who is Snoke? Why is he so powerful?” would occur both to fans and to people who have never owned a single Star Wars action figure.

As to the question of whether it is a good film or not… Well, I come back to where I started. The Last Jedi is a mess. Some of the material is good (the Great Big Space Battles) some of it is rather disappointing the entire Luke/Rey plot) and some of it – the whole Casino sequence – makes you drop your jaw and ask “Did I go to sleep and wake up in an entirely different movie?” I think that there is so much action and plot movement and aliens and jokes that the non-action-figure-purchasing community will like it very much indeed. But I think that a very large number of fans – people with an element of buy-in to the Star Wars milieu – are going to say “Yes...but wait a minute… what?” 

We have asked the question “What is the difference between fan fiction and any other kind of fiction?” several times in the past. In the end, it is (I am truly sorry) a question of canon. You are quite free to imagine in your head what should have happened to Luke Skywalker after The Return of the Jedi; and I am quite free to imagine it in mine. But what the Last Jedi imagines happens to Luke Skywalker after Return of the Jedi will now effect every Star Wars film comic book and novel for as long as they carry on making Star Wars films, comic books and novels. And it doesn’t seem to realize this; or spot why it matters. 

I think that history may show that The Last Jedi has damaged the integrity of the Star Wars saga much more irrevocably than Phantom Menace ever did.

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The Last Star Wars Article

Where do we go when we watch Star Wars?

We know where we go when we watch Doctor Who. No such place ever actually existed, but everyone claims to have been there. It was a very long time ago: everything was black and white. We were very small: small enough to fit into the interstices between walls and furniture. TVs were very big. Pieces of furniture in shared family spaces, not electronic toys in our private rooms. “Putting on the TV” was a positive choice. The pictures were both real and not real. We wanted to look at them and hide from them at the same time. Middle-class. Suburban. Domestic. Ubiquitous. Safe.

Modern Doctor Who has written about that space almost obsessively, but it has never remotely taken us there. 

Yoda voice: That is why it fails.

Where do we go when we watch Star Wars?

There are AT-AT Walkers: new AT-AT Walkers that walk on their knuckles and something in the background that might be a floating galleon but might only be an Imperial Shuttle.

The Walkers arrived in Empire Strikes Back. They were a replacement for the Death Star. Never quite as magical. But magical just the same.

There are white alien goats on a snowy background. I suppose if there are Walkers there has to be Snow. First films have Sand and Second films have Snow. The third film will go back to Jakku, you mark my words.

The Millennium Falcon is being chased through a fiery red cave by TIE Fighters; which makes us think of the wrecked Star Destroyer from part VII and the Death Star superstructure from part VI and the space worm from part V and coming out of hyperspace near Alderaan in part IV. This will come very near the beginning of the film, as a warm up, to tell us that Star Wars has started again and the toys are all intact.

There is Chewbacca on the flight deck, as if he was escaping from Mos Eisley, except that Han has been replaced by a Penguin. Every saga has a Jar Jar. Every trilogy has an Ewok. We complained about George's silliness but we missed it when it wasn't there. The Penguin will have a very small part. He may only appear in this one scene. Everyone will always have heard of him and he will even eventually have his own comic, but all he will actually do is shout “It’s a trap!”

There is battle with big space ships and TIE fighters and X-Wings and a stirring speech about lighting the flame that will become the spark that will burn the fascists down although we all know that the fascists won’t burn down until the last ten minutes of Episode IX. There is Po Dameron looking resolute and Finn fighting the shiny gold lady Stormtrooper officer with a a big glowy laser-chainsaw. This will happen at the end. Po and Finn will be blowing things up resolutely while the Proper Plot happens somewhere else.

The Proper Plot will be about Rey turning to the Dark Side, and Ren turning back to the Light. Or perhaps about Ren resisting the light side and Rey resisting the Dark. That is the Proper Plot of every Star Wars movie except Star Wars. Someone is tempted by the Dark. Someone is tempted by the Light. Indeed, that is the plot of every possible movie. (I think Joseph Campbell said that.)

*

We always knew that this moment would come. Not when he lit the torch at his Father funeral pyre but from the very first moment in the cave. I-was-once-a-Jedi-knight-the-same-as-your-father. There would always come a moment when stroppy James Dean teenage Luke Skywalker would be old. We need him to be old because we need him to be a Jedi Knight and Jedi Knights are old. Alec Guinness is the only and all Jedi Knights just as happens Leonard Nimoy is the only and all Vulcans.

The moment we imagined, when Luke Skywalker is a Jedi like Obi Wan and he is teaching other Jedi (including me, me, please, including me) — the moment when the Jedi actually Returned — has already happened and is already over, somewhere in the space between VI and VII. I suppose we should never see it, in the same way we should never have seen the Old Republic, because Luke Skywalker and the New Order of Jedi, is part of the happy-ever-after which was implied during the fireworks and the Ewoks. And it was not a happy ending. Of course it wasn’t a happy ending because everyone living happily ever after is how a story ends and there have to be more stories. So we get to see old Luke, but we don’t get to see Jedi Luke. We get to see Luke the Last Jedi.  

*

Episode VII finishes with Rey holding Luke’s lightsaber out to Luke, and us not knowing is Luke takes it or not. (Spoiler: No.) The Trailer finishes with Ren holding his hand out to Rey and us not knowing if she takes it or not. And that makes us think of Daddy Vader holding his hand out to Luke, which is why Great Big Hologram Leader Guy (who has got smaller) bellows “FULL…FILL…YOUR…DES…TIN…EE” in the trailer. (He is probably saying it to Kylo Ren, but he could just as well be saying it to Rey. Of course he might not say it at all. That sometimes happens with trailers.) This will happen in the middle of the movie. Rey will face a difficult time in her training when she is tempted by the Dark Side. Maybe she will break off her Jedi training with Luke because she sees a vision of Kylo torturing Po and Finn. Maybe when she is on the point of  turning to the Dark Side, Ren will say "No, Rey, I am your half-brother."

Ren has a shiny black Tie Fighter, just like Grandpa’s. As he whizzes around he looks for all the world like Anakin Skywalker in the cartoons. (But Anakin in the Cartoons is now the Real Anakin. Anakin in the Cartoons very nearly makes up for Anakin in the prequels. He is a, waddyacall, Redemptive Reading.) But he, Ray, can hear Snoke’s voice, just like Luke Skywalker heard Ben’s voice and it goes boom boom boom FULFILL YOUR DENSITY boom boom boom BECOME WHO YOU WERE MEANT TO BE boom boom boom. All films are always about becoming who you were meant to be. (I think Joseph Campbell said that.)  Carrie, god bless her is on the big ship (the same kind of ship that Mon Motha had) and Kylo is aiming his weapon at her. Luke’s big moment was to blow up the Death Star. Kylo's big moment is to kill Mum. (SPOILER: He has already killed Dad.) 

Maybe he will kill his Mum and go totally over to the Dark Side. Maybe he will not kill her an come back to the light. Maybe the Millennium Falcon will come over the hill at the last possible moment. 

One thinks of Locutus of Borg, possibly.

Luke says “I’VE SEEN RAW STRENGTH LIKE THIS ONLY ONCE BEFORE IT DIDN’T SCARE ME ENOUGH THEN IT DOES NOW” and Big Hologram Gollum Guy says “When I found you I saw RAW UNTAMED POWER”. I suppose Luke is talking to Rey about Kylo Ren and I suppose Snoke is talking to Kylo Ren about Ben Solo. I suppose Luke is going to refuse to train Rey in case he buggers it up and sends her to the Dark Side as well. Which will send Rey into the arms of Ren for help. Which will result in Ren’s ultimate redemption. 

Or else something completely different will happen.

To summarize: Rey and Ren are powerful Jedi and are going to be tempted in various ways and there is going to be a battle involving X-Wings and capital ships and walkers and a chase involving the Millennium Falcon.

Which is, I suppose, only like saying that this cowboy film will definitely have horses, a criminal, a sheriff, some native Americans and a big gun fight in a frontier town. Star Wars isn’t a saga. It’s a genre. (I said that.)

*

Where do we go when we watch Star Wars?

A flea-pit olden days 1970s cinema with fizzy orange juice and ice-cream. Or maybe some nuts. Or a big London movie house with posters and programmes and people selling knock-off merchandise outside? 

Or am I misremembering? Was Star Wars always something that we were watching again on DVD. Or VHS. Or just ITV?

The movie called Star Wars (there is only one movie called Star Wars) was great, and we have all seen it forty or fifty times and will see it another twenty, thirty forty times before we die. (I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.) But before there was a movie called Star Wars there were Star Wars toys. The original dolls were almost comically badly done: no-one even tried to model Mark Hamil’s face and the white plastic smock molded onto his body has only the most passing connection to the greying desert gear he wears in the movie. I almost wonder if the appeal of the figures wasn’t in the packaging: the shiny card with the Star Wars logo and a big colour picture of the iconic twin suns scene printed on it? The closet you could get to putting your hands on a bit of the film and keeping it? No-one could afford to buy them, obviously. We went on pilgrimages to toy shops to gaze at them enviously.

Isn’t that what the word “iconic” literally means? 

The idea of Luke Skywalker, the blond guy in white with a utility belt and glowy sword can somehow be contracted to three inches of barely articulated plastic and have endless battles with the idea of Darth Vader, a black masked villain with a cheap cellophane cape. How many millions of battles did Luke Skywalker have with Darth Vader on how many thousands of bedroom floors between 1977 and 1980? 

At least until their lightsabers snapped off.

We can now see that the action figures were insufficiently iconic: that they contained too much of the real Mark Hamil and the real Alec Guinness. Forbidden Planet will sell you brilliantly authentic replicas of Darth Vader costing hundreds of pounds but those are not for children to play with, they are for adults to put on the shelf and forget about. The real Star Wars; Star Wars stripped of all particularity and specificity, the pure idea of the Dark Side and the Light, is now surely the Lego figurine? (I am serious. Every child has seen thousands of Lego Stormtroopers before the Star Destroyer swallows up the Blockade Runner, and every child knows that Vader is Luke's father before they know who Vader and Luke are.) 

We can't watch Doctor Who again. We wouldn't physically fit behind that damn sofa. But perhaps we can crouch down on the bedroom floor one last time. There can't ever really be a new Star Wars story, and we wouldn't want there to be. (George Lucas never really understood this.) But we can take the Lego minifigs out of the box and play out our favorite scenes in a slightly different order. I'm pretty sure Joseph Campbell said that.