The Patreon Letters - 16th December 2017

Hi, friends!

Jackson here with this week's Patreon Letter. So a quick thing: on monday, I started taking antidepressants again. I don't know why because I don't remember this being the case last time but the adjustment period is hitting me hard. My head is swimming constantly, I'm getting migraines, can't eat much without feeling nauseous. It's a bad scene. Anyway, I hope that doesn't affect the letter too much, but if it does, then my bad. It will at least be better in the long run than me being depressed all the time.

That said, I saw Star Wars: The Last Jedi on Thursday. I have kinda complicated thoughts on the movie. I think it's a much better film than The Force Awakens, but I definitely enjoyed it less. This is entirely because of my specific relationship with Star Wars. I'm going to get to that in excruciating spoiler filled detail in a moment but first let me talk in general terms. 

• It goes on for about seven hundred years, but it's good. Everyone has an arc, the plot mostly makes sense, i did not leave the movie having to google "which planet did they blow up," unlike I did last time. It's a well made movie. If you enjoy watching Star Wars movies, you will enjoy this one. 
• Rogue One is better in almost every way. This is more of a war film than any other episodic Star Wars movie, and so it ends up covering a lot of similar thematic ground about hope and what have you. Which is a shame, because while Rogue One was a mess structurally, it had that shit nailed down. The Last Jedi just can't compete.
• Mark Hamill is great. Everyone gets better when they are surly and old.
• One of the biggest bummers about The Force Awakens is that there wasn't really any space battles. *literally five seconds into the movie* Well good god damn, there we go.
• It's a real shame, but John Williams' score just isn't all that, once again. Which is a shame, because the guy was doing incredible stuff for the prequels.

Watching The Force Awakens in the cinema was an event. It wasn't even that good as a movie, but the first screening felt incredible. The Last Jedi was obviously not that, but seeing it opening day was obligation viewing to avoid spoilers more than anything. I wondered how quickly it would be before the Disney Machine made me exhausted of Star Wars in the same way I am deeply exhausted of Marvel anything, and sadly the answer is: even quicker than I expected.

The good news is the Star Wars movies are all much nicer to look at than the Marvel ones, which are almost all inexplicably shot with the same flat style until suddenly The CGI Happens. But I digress, like Star Wars or don't, we're all on this ride for the long haul. You know, until they merge with Fox and build up the Planet of the Apes cinematic universe.

Right. That's enough rambling. Now I am going to spoil the whole thing. Okay?

Don't go past here if you haven't seen the movie.

Consider this your warning.

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                                  S P O I L E R S     B E     H E R E

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In Revenge of the Sith, Anakin Skywalker walks into the Jedi Council chamber, full of children hiding from the massacre. Desperate and terrified, one walks forward and asks him, in the most earnest voice in cinema, “what are we going to do?” Anakin murders him, and everyone else. Not even the younglings survived.

This is the same man on whose redemption the entire series hinges. We must believe that there is still good in him, seeing him fall to the dark side must be a tragedy. Instead, he murders children. In cold blood. For no real reason. In a kids movie!

In The Last Jedi, Luke Skywalker almost does the same thing. He stands above the peaceful, sleeping child of his sister and his best friend. The child they have trusted him with caring for. And, with murderous intent, he turns his lightsaber on. The moment passes, and he looks away, but by this time it is too late. Ben is awake, and he sees his master beside him, weapon raised. No shit, this guy burned the temple down.

It's a revelation that spurs the movie into overdrive, bringing Rey and Ben together. He kills Snoke to save her life. They stand back to back and fight Snoke's imperial guard. It is absolutely the coolest shit that happens in this movie. The movie stands on the edge of something incredibly fascinating and exciting, a world in which the dogma of the Jedi and the Sith is thrown out in favour of something personal and, you know, balanced.

Obviously the second this scene is over Ben's all "rule with me and we shall become more powerful," and his rejection of the past is turned into pure nihilism. Which is... fine for his character, he's a shithead and a straight redemption would have sucked even more, but felt like such a cop out thematically. Like KOTOR 2 before it - a much beloved game by Star Wars fans, which I don't connect with - it raises these passionate and scathing critiques of Star Wars, but for its conclusion it just kind of shrugs and reifies the existing structure of Star Wars. There's critique, but there's no growth.

Back on his rock, in a fit of guilt and panic, Luke tries to burn the Ancient Jedi Texts (lol), but can't bring himself to do so. At this very moment, Ghost Yoda shows up and does it for him. You see, the thing he didn't understand was that he was focusing too much on living in the past, he hadn't moved on, and he needed to let go of these nostalgic signifiers of his past. But this moral is delivered by a perfect recreation of the Empire Strikes Back Yoda puppet! It is one of the most thematically dissonant things I have ever seen put to screen!

At the very end of the movie, Luke sacrifices himself to let the remains of Leia's utterly destroyed forces escape in the Falcon. For his big moment of climactic applause he basically turns to camera and says, word for word, "the war is just beginning." 

This is the tenth theatrical Star Wars movie.

It could not be a more disappointing resolution to a movie where, in the middle of it, Luke Skywalker almost kills a child. By the end, The First Order controls the entire galaxy and Leia rebrands the resistance as the Rebellion once more. We need to move on from the past.

Over the last couple days, as the reactions have been pouring in, I've been thinking about why I'm so specifically disappointed about this. The movie is getting a lot of praise for its bold choices, and fans are fucking pissed that Luke dies, or that none of the 'mysteries' were actually mysteries. By the standards of the Disney 4X Blockbuster Machine, this is as subversive as it is possible to get. The film does complicate Star Wars.

And I kept coming back, as I always do, to the Younglings. To Anakin, tears in his eyes, yelling about how from his point of view, the Jedi are evil. There's an early scene in The Last Jedi where Snoke lectures Kylo Ren over idolizing and imitating Vader. "You are no Vader," he says, "you are just a child in a mask."

I'm sorry, but there is no better description of Anakin Skywalker than a child in a mask. The Last Jedi complicates Star Wars, but it fails to realize that Star Wars is already complicated. There is a core tension in these new films that comes from the prequels, and the decade of media centered around them. And through Kylo and Luke, there are perfect opportunities to attempt to dig into these tensions, to make grappling with them the core thematic conceit of the movie. 

Kylo is a sad and desperate kid who, when he feels betrayed by the Jedi, kills everyone in the temple and runs away to his Emperor. But the movie wants us to think he's no Vader. The Jedi were war criminals who fought with a slave army, and this doesn't come up in Luke's reasoning for why they need to end. To attempt to deconstruct and remythologize Star Wars, as The Last Jedi does, without acknowledging any of this feels fundamentally dishonest. The film is textually about integrating the past into your older, wiser self and moving on stronger, but now an Empire rules the galaxy, and the brave rebellion oppose them in the Millennium Falcon! Everything is as it was, everything is as it should be.

The Star Wars are only just beginning.

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PS: everyone needs to watch The Clone Wars. It makes exploring the tension of the fact that Star Wars is basically a huge mess into the premise of the show. It's really good. I'll finish it one day and then I'll watch Rebels.

PPS: This movie is just "what if that episode of Battlestar where the Cylons reappeared every 23 minutes was also Avatar: The Last Airbender"