longwhitecoats

I saw a movie and these are my very spoilery feelings about it.

This also contains spoilers for the first Harry Potter movie and for season 2 of Avatar: The Last Airbender. It also mentions Nazis and briefly discusses real-world politics around the 2016 US election. I wrote this without reading anyone else's meta about the movie.

First, a few miscellaneous thoughts:

- I now love porgs, but lolwhut. Why is there a weird scene where the porg confronts Chewbacca.
- This movie is totally stealing good visual gimmicks from other media. Rey finds the Mirror of Erised down in the Sith temple for some reason! There is no war in Ba Sing Se and here is a giant drill!
- This franchise is trying really hard to make it clear that Nazis are bad. Like. I don't know how much clearer they can make it.
- You will pry Finn/Rey from my cold dead hands
- ....on a related note, polyamory is a perfectly good solution to multiple ships
- ALSO I love that these movies are pretty much the story of Finn, The Best At Making Friends, who just casually rolls around the galaxy finding incredibly brave, attractive people who love him instantly and want to make out with him <3333333

ON TO THE LONGER STUFF:


Failure / Learning

This movie, and to some extent TFA as well, is meditating on failure. The Resistance has failed to save the Republic and is on the run. Luke failed to save Ben Solo, as does Rey. Perhaps the Jedi have failed, too.

But as Yoda tells Luke (us) explicitly, failure is the greatest teacher. By implication, it's what we learn from our failures, and whether we learn from our failures, that defines us.

The people who succeed in this film, who survive, are those who learn from their failures and allow those failures to change them. Rey allows her failure to save Kylo Ren to change her mind about him, and instead to spend her energy on the people who need her. Poe learns from his failure to trust his commanding officers and gives Finn the same command Leia gave him, to save himself and the remaining crew rather than taking down the cannon. Luke finally learns from and redeems his own failure, and to some extent, the failure of the whole Jedi order, by trusting in Rey and Leia and saving the Resistance.

And Kylo Ren refuses to learn. He keeps returning to his failure again and again, to the same place in his emotional past, and he keeps failing, over and over. He doubles down on his failure over and over. He keeps trying to burn and murder his way free, and he can't. And I think it's really important that the movie showed us that distinction, and shows us that you can't save people from their own evil if they don't want to be saved. As my friend coraline said, #TEAM NO REDEMPTION ARCS FOR FUCKBOYS.


Trust / the System

As a card-carrying Gryffindor, I fucking love that this movie explodes our notions of what a hero is supposed to be. It begins with our beloved Poe Dameron doing exactly what we expect a Star Wars hero to do, flying around blowing up the bad guys; very quickly, it shows us that Poe is fucking up. His desire to destroy the enemy at any cost comes at, well, too high a cost (more about that in the next section), and he can't fucking follow orders. His struggle with Admiral Holdo, which proves to be an utter failure and costs even more lives, isn't just about toxic masculinity and heroic hubris; it's about trust.

Poe doesn't trust the system. He thinks only about particular people whom he trusts and respects, rather than believing in the Resistance as a whole. This lack of trust is reflected elsewhere in the film, too: Luke doesn't trust Rey, and vice versa; arguably, the moment where Luke contemplates killing Ben Solo is also about lack of trust.

And the hacker character is about this, too. He tells Finn that the whole system is rigged, it's all one machine, and the only way to win is not to buy into the system. Finn seems taken in by that, briefly; god knows it would resonate with him, since he left a broken system and doesn't have a lot of experience with the Resistance. I think it must have been very tempting for him to buy into this ideology, that all that matters is your own needs, and to hell with everything else. It's not dissimilar to the choice he faced in TFA, after all, where he almost ran away to the Outer Rim because he was so scared.

But then, horribly and gloriously, the movie shows us that not only is the hacker wrong, he's literally benefitting from the system. (GOD I hated that guy.) There's no way to be separate from the world; Luke learns that lesson, too. There's no way to declare yourself independent of the machine. You have to grapple with it.

In other words, the Gryffindor choice is wrong. The cowboy choice is wrong.

This movie tells us that maybe the women who are in charge got there by knowing what the fuck they were doing. It tells us that just because you're a young, angry Bernie Bro man, that doesn't mean you're right. Most importantly, it tells us that not all systems are broken, but that even the good ones will break if we don't trust each other.

I feel like this is the least subtle political message of the movie, right after Nazis Are Bad. This movie is definitely #WithHer. It tells us that sometimes, being a hero doesn't mean running outside into your X-wing and blowing shit up, and it doesn't mean looking cool or fitting an image. Sometimes, it means doing what is necessary to pass the torch (the spark) down to the next generation.


I'm Nobody (I'm Everybody)

Speaking of passing the torch: I love that this movie emphatically tells us that the important kind of lineage is not bloodlines, but education. Rey is Luke's heir, the next Jedi, not because they are related but because he teaches her and she learns from him. Yoda's appearance underscores this; we see how important their relationship is to the arc of these films, even though it was an adversarial one and even though Luke left Yoda, just as Rey left him.

This is in stark contrast to Snoke's ideology. Snoke thinks that the important heritage is literal blood, which is itself quite close to the way the Jedi came to think about lineage after Anakin Skywalker was lost to the dark side. Luke and Leia were the Skywalker kids, and so they were the only ones who could save the galaxy. Snoke is obsessed with Kylo Ren because he's the continuation of that bloodline. Even Kylo Ren himself is obsessed with that heritage, feeling that he either must fulfill it and become like his grandfather, or destroy it and everything associated with it -- first his family, then Snoke.

But the lesson of this movie is: don't believe the hype. There's nothing special about Kylo Ren that can't be found elsewhere. In fact, this movie tells us that we shouldn't believe anyone's hype. It does this comically when Rose shifts from hero-worshipping Finn to tasing him when she realizes he's just another pod-stealer; it does this dramatically when Luke rages at Rey that his legend doesn't give him the power to stop the march of the First Order.

Rather than telling us that there are no heroes, though, TLJ wants us to understand the exact opposite. "I'm nobody," Rey says, weeping over Kylo Ren's revelation about her parents, that she came from nowhere. But the fact that Rey is nobody means, paradoxically, that she is everybody.

She's the kid in the stables who uses the Force to grab his broom (which becomes a lightsaber). She's the ragtag band of the remaining Resistance, who made the choice to do what they could with what they had where they were.

And she's Anakin Skywalker, in a sense; Anakin, who was also nobody, just a child on a nothing planet.

This movie is saying, you don't have to come from somewhere special to be a hero. You can be a jedi too. Luke isn't the last jedi -- and neither is Rey. There are more. There will always be more. To make too much of legends is to deny the power of our own actions. We can become our own legends. We can be our own heroes.

For my money, that's a Gryffindor lesson too. And so is this:


Saving What We Love, Not Destroying What We Hate

Rose Tico is the beating heart of this movie, its moral compass and its most necessary hero. Through her actions and her words, she delivers its central message. Right before she kisses Finn, she says it:

We'll win by saving what we love, not destroying what we hate.

Even though Rose says she wants to put her fist through that whole rotten gambling planet, she doesn't accept Finn's declaration that their failed wild ride through town was worth it -- until she sets the animals free. To her, getting caught and failing wasn't worth it if all they were going to do was destroy some rich people's paradise. But it was worth it if they could save something that needed to be saved.

Rose teaches us that life matters -- Finn's life mattered. The Resistance isn't just a churn of bodies to throw at the new Death Star. That's the whole point of the Resistance. If we're trying to save people, then that has to *include* the rebels. Resistance fighters and activists aren't just fighting for other people, they're also fighting for themselves. They matter. They count. They are also the ones who need to be saved.

In this way, I think Rose is a foil for Kylo Ren. Finn and Rey both spend TLJ learning this lesson, that we must save rather than destroy, but they learn it in different ways. Finn needs Rose to save him, to show him that he is worth saving; Rey needs Kylo Ren to learn that Kylo Ren isn't worth saving, even if she felt she had to try, for the very reason that he's only interested in destruction.

I find the Rey and Kylo Ren arc very frustrating, but to be honest, I think it's also quite realistic. I think a lot of people who walked out of TFA going Ugh, how could anyone think Kylo Ren was worth saving are the same people who insist that their Racist Friend Chad will come around one of these days. This movie is like, y'know, Chad Ren is making a choice about his behavior, and you should stop making it ok for Chad Ren to be that way. Just because Kylo Ren hates Snoke (and maybe loves Rey?) doesn't make him a good person with good values. He still wants to burn the world, not save it. He doesn't care about the people trapped on the Resistance transports, even though it would be so easy for him to save them. In fact, he spends the end of the movie trying to kill them.

(I kind of deeply love the reveal that Snoke is the one who kept connecting Rey and Kylo Ren's minds, if nothing else because the scene in the rock hut reminded me so much of Miranda and Sebastian from The Tempest being manipulated by Prospero, and fuck Prospero, that guy was the worst.)

Luke Skywalker is part of this destroy/save binary, too. Like Kylo Ren, he wants to destroy what he sees as the failed past, although in Luke's case, the great failure isn't his family, it's the whole of the Jedi order. And that's when Yoda teaches him Rose's lesson. When Yoda destroys the temple, Luke finds himself rushing to save it. He realizes that there was actually something inside it that he loved and wanted to save; he realizes that some things are worth saving. Not everything is lost. By deciding to save what he can, namely, Rey and the remains of the Resistance, he redeems the wrong choice he made in the past -- when he came to Ben Solo's room while he was sleeping, and thought about destroying him, just for a second.

Many of these choices revolve around questions of the past: should we destroy it? Should we run from it? What is the place of the past?


The Future Is Female

Since I saw TFA, I keep asking myself, why are these movies retreading the exact narrative arcs of the original trilogy? In ANH and TFA, the Death Star / Starkiller Base destroys a planet / a planetary system, and then the good guys destroy the giant weapon. Han Solo even makes the explicit comparison. "So it's bigger," he says, shrugging. In TESB and TLJ, what's left of the Rebellion / Resistance is on the run from the Empire / First Order and narrowly escapes after the new Jedi trainee runs away from his / her teacher to save his / her friends and then confronts his / her parentage.

Why?

Because these films' narrative structure is echoing their message. They ask: can you repeat the past, as Han Solo tries to do? No, says TFA. But can you escape the past, as Luke tries to do? Also no, says TLJ.

So what do we do with the past?

In this film, the First Order wants to restore the brutal, imperial past through violence. Kylo Ren just wants to burn the past down (and then maybe restore brutal, imperial order through violence). Rey is in love with the past, dreaming of her parents, and can't let go. Luke is running away from being a legend -- he doesn't want the past to be used and manipulated, so he also wants to destroy it. Eventually, Luke realizes that his status as a Jedi doesn't just give him great power, it gives him great responsibility, and he remembers that he is a person who can act in the world. When he says goodbye to Leia and returns those dice to her, he honors the parts of the past that were good, that were worth saving and passing on.

That's what I think this new trilogy wants to take with us. While Han Solo was trying to repeat the past in TFA and Luke Skywalker was running from the past in TLJ, Leia, who was supposed to be the focus of the final film, is thinking about something else: the future.

And so is Admiral Holdo, who gives everything to preserve the Resistance.

And so is Rose, who saves Finn's life and the lives of abused animals, who gives away her last piece of her beloved sister to save the Resistance.

And by the end of the film, Rey is thinking about the future too.

The last shot of the film is Rey holding Luke's broken lightsaber and asking Leia how they can possibly build a resistance from this. And Leia answers, "We have everything we need right here." They have saved what they can. Now they will build.

This is what makes me believe that Star Wars is finally thinking through the end of modernity in a way that complements stories of the early 20th century, which were thinking about the beginning of modernity. The Lord of the Rings is about trauma and being unable to return to the past; so is The Great Gatsby. But while Star Wars makes the same point, that we can't repeat the past and we can't return to it, it also asks us to move beyond it.

Star Wars is asking us to think about the place of the past as we move into the future. It tells us that we can't burn everything down or run away. It tells us that the past is with us, for good and for ill; but we can't live there. The past is not a place of life. Only the future is.

And we have everything we need to build the future, right here.

That's what the General would have wanted.