The Sigh Of Skywalker
Star Wars fandom might kill what it loves, but only if Disney doesn’t beat them to it
As I was daydreaming about a fancy new graphic grappling for my ranking of all the saga films (or whatever we’re calling the core Star Wars films these days), my favorite thought was about this street installation at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum that puts the planets proportionally far from the sun (the Museum) along the Mall, which is pretty cool, because a)it still includes Pluto as a planet and b) the gap between Pluto and the rest of the planets just about captures how I feel about the prequels’ distance from the rest of Star Wars.
But I was also noticing something festering in the Star Wars discourse, like blue milk gone horribly bad. We’ve been down this rabbit hole in the Twitterverse before of course. I am an irrational, tribal human being like the rest of us, so I had previously associated most of the gnashing of teeth at Star Wars with a particular side of the political spectrum, and their awful Shitstorms (actual German word).
It seemed very clear to me that most of the online howling about The Last Jedi was clearly motivated by a combo platter of the MRA/Gamergate brigade’s misogyny (the dead will never die) and the general nostalgic racism of white fan-bros. That combination from hell produced a reaction that could only be described as rabid. Digital vitriol was sprayed over everyone involved, it was directed at Kelly Marie Tran, at John Boyega, and at Rian Johnson. It was all so spectacularly cruel that naturally the same Russian bot networks that disrupted the 2016 election did their thing, dousing an already fiery dumpster with VX gas laced kerosene. When dumpster fires get that big, I stop paying any attention or caring to what anyone at all says about a cultural text that I love, and I desperately love The Last Jedi.
As a critic, withdrawing from engagement with other people’s reactions is not good, but it was essentially self care in 2018. Eventually, in 2019, I was able to have a conversation with temp roommate on a gig because he (you absolutely knew it was a he, didn’t you?) was so passionate in his love for all other things Star Wars, especially The Clone Wars, that I heard him out on the things he didn’t like about TLJ. I even watched that agonizing 20 minute video “destroying” TLJ as an “objectively” bad film with him, you know the one, YouTube made sure of it (I could be indulging my love for Haim’s music videos or teaching myself how to use fields in Cinema 4D, but YouTube wanted nothing more than for me to click on that video). Racist misogyny aside (NB: describing how much you dislike a woman of color as a character is way more telling than saying things like “I’m all for diversity”), what struck me most about that video, which I will not link to, is that this dude (again, you already knew that) had a very clear set of expectations for what constitutes a Star Wars hero and a Star Wars story arc (spoiler alert: it’s the hero’s journey). These expectations are grounded by the films and by his sources of pleasure in experiencing those stories. It is achingly close to being actual film criticism, except for that entirely inconvenient belief that his expectations are so inherently correct that Star Wars shouldn’t ever be different from them because then it would be terrible, the worst thing ever, “objectively bad.”
#LeSigh
Personally, I have found that the most successful survival strategy going into these tentpole style global cultural experiences that giant corporations hope to make shitloads of money from is to hope they don’t suck and to hope no further. By the “Please don’t suck” metric The Rise of Skywalker is . . . fine. It’s fine. The production design is as comprehensive as ever. The music, the special effects, the supporting elements are all that money can buy. John Boyega and Oscar Isaac getting more time on screen together is a win for all of humanity. Babu Frik is delightful. The traumatized droid who recoils from touch and says “No, thank you,” is almost too perfect for words. Rey continues to be easily the best character in the new trilogy, and her connection with Ben/Kylo is still intense, easily the best dynamic of this entire trilogy and we got lots of that. I’m grateful The Rise of Skywalker wasn’t an absolute train wreck, which is what the prequels were most of the time, in case you forgot.
As a movie that is fine and nothing more, there is plenty to pick apart about #TRoS. The Palpatine family lineage stuff is, well it’s a loaf of sour dough that could have used more time in the oven: smells good, has a good crust, but when you cut into it, yeah that’s, it’s a bit doughy. There is a maddening lack of coordination between the directors and screenwriters of each installment on which characters matter and why i.e. and to wit the wild swing of Rose’s involvement from one film to another (about which certain screenwriters should probably stop talking), and just generally not having a clue how to, (*ahem*no one believes this) “end” a saga. I am not bothered by those criticisms, they are founded in an understanding of narrative craft and effective filmmaking and more importantly, they don’t exclude the possibility of enjoying a thing that is decidedly not perfect.
When I had seen the movie and I felt like it was safe to go back online what I discovered was a lot of merciless shredding, which I had been excepting, to be honest, but this vituperation was coming from a completely different part of the Twitter community! The tactics were different, there seemed to be far far less overt toxicity, but there was a lot of anger and a strangely similar closing down of the possibilities available to anyone trying to make a Star Wars movie, which I found so monumentally frustrating about The Last Jedi reaction. Pointing out inadequacies is one thing, subsequently insisting that all of Star Wars is ruined by these qualms is ludicrous. @Drvox is normally a voice of reason on Twitter, but he threatened to quit Star Wars altogether because of lightspeed skipping, among other engineering things (Force healing, something that has existed in every Jedi based video game since 1997, came in for a lot of stick as well). That is a far too uncomfortable echo of the misogynist reaction to the all female Ghostbusters reboot.
Julia Alexander wrote an excellent piece on the next Doctor Strange movie that explores the how Stan Lee’s concept of the illusion of change presents a storytelling quandary for the MCU in the Disney+ era. Aja Romano’s put together excellent roundtable on how fandom changed in the 2010s. Combined, these pieces reminded me that every sufficiently invested fan base experiences an often unhealthy tension between creators and fans (and the money they are given), a tension that often leads to fear, which leads to anger, which leads to hate, you get the idea.
Whether you think #TRoS is a direct rebuttal of The Last Jedi, there’s no question in my mind that the blowback affected The Rise of Skywalker itself and not generally for the better. The creatives and executives certainly had conversations about what went wrong on the last go round to avoid another rage party, found one on their hands anyway, because that is the new normal for Disney and Star Wars whether they like it or not. In the process, they created a movie that everybody agrees could have been better . . . just not how.
The Rise of Skywalker is set to gross just about $1 billion globally when it’s all said and done, it’s safe to say the most negative parts of the discourse aren’t winning. Yet. The real struggle over Star Wars and Marvel (and DC if they ever got their shit together) will be to find a healthy way to keep the tension between creatives and fans from devolving into shitstorms and that’s going to require some work by Disney, no question, but I think it requires the work of fans as well. We have to be able to offer these films and books and games and TV shows and the people behind them some grace, to be ready to offer forgiveness for risks . . . and for mistakes. There is a sentiment often expressed in new play circles: we should afford new plays the same generosity of intention we give to one William Shakespeare. Which is to say, that when you encounter a problem in a text, rather than blaming the text and doing some daft like altering the text without the playwright’s permission (do. not. do. this.) or pressuring the playwright to “fix it,” you fill in the gaps with the best intention you can. This does not mean there is no criticizing anything ever, far from it (no one should ever produce The Taming of the Shrew again, for example). It just means that the process of interpreting a work ought to be generous, rather than strict, forgiving rather than ruthless. “Hold on tightly, let go lightly” as they say. If we don’t give people space to make bad choices as well as good ones, soon there will be no space at all.
