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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Some Slave Traders Were Very Fine People, Apparently.

New readers start here:

The Bristol Post has given three column of its letters page over to a carefully researched essay by three academics, enumerating Edward Colston's investments in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and his profits from it, in great detail.

I refuse to be brow-beaten into submission and belittled, just because my views are different to university academics. I have a right to express my view... I suspect Roger Ball and Mark Steeds have a totally different mind set and agenda...Lets not forget that Marx, Trotsky and Lenin were all academics. Also Maclean, Burgess, Philby, Blunt and Caincross were all Cambridge University academics...
David Whittern.

I now realize those attacking the Colston name are just creating urban myth, where half truths and outright misinformation, if repeated enough, becomes accepted as fact, which it is not. There are those of a certain political persuasion who are very adept at creating these myths, and use the media very effectively. This is very much like social media fake news. Edward Colston's name has been much maligned by those with a particular agenda. Clearly our Georgian and Victorian forefathers knew much more of the truth of his conversion and good works. (*)
Also David Whittern

Notwithstanding his connections with the slave trade, my recent letters on the subject have always supported keeping Colston's name (warts and all) as an integral facet of what it means to be a dyed-in-the-wool Bristolian.
R L Smith


...Without sounding flippant I nominate "The Colston Hall" [as a new name] -- for that is what the venue will be forever known to me and thousands of other real Bristolians. It irks me that right-on, politically correct, middle-class softies who, after studying at the University, like it so much here that they decide to make Bristol their home, then start wanting to change our history. I can't remember a time when I didn't know of Colston...but I have never wanted to whitewash him out of our history (pun intended). Name one city that doesn't have a murky past? What next, is the Hatchet to be demolished because naughty pirates used to drink there? {**} My point is, I an proud to be Bristol born and bred and I have never wanted to leave, and this may sound infantile, but if you don't like it here, then clear off to Shoreditch with the other dreamers.
Name and address supplied.


(*)The idea that Colston was, like Newton, a Christian convert who was ashamed of having been a slaver forms no part of the Victorian Colston cult, and seems to have been invented by apologists since the Great Hall Kerfuffle -- i.e in the last eight months.

(**) It is true that there has been a pub on the site of the Hatchet since 1606, and the current owners claim that Blackbeard drank there -- although since nothing is known of Blackbeard's life before his alliance with Hornigold in 1716, it's hard to know where they get this information from. If Edward Teach really was a former customer of the Hatchet, he was a good deal more than naughty. Need it be added that no-one is proposing the demolition of Colston Hall.

Stand Down

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