What’s this all about? I turned 30 on Sept. 26, 30 days from the start of this series. To celebrate, I’m watching one movie a day for 30 days and spending 30 minutes writing about each one. This post is about 2017. Click here for the original newsletter in the series. Other entries: 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016
Think about the first time you saw “Star Wars,” the 1977 one. Try to forget everything you know about Darth Vader, Luke and the Skywalker saga. What are you left with? A simple tale about how good triumphs over evil and how anyone, even an orphaned farm boy, can become a hero.
Long before “The Empire Strikes Back” filled in the gaps on Luke’s parentage and way before the prequel saga filled in the gaps on Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader’s past, the original “Star Wars” was a Joseph Campbell hero’s journey movie that allowed movie fans to think that they, too, could save a galaxy.
Of course, nearly 50 years of “Star Wars” later, it’s impossible to separate the prequels from the originals and the sequels; our viewing of each is colored by knowledge and lore added later. We see the original 1977 film with the knowledge that we’re watching a father and son duel, and the knowledge that Obi-Wan Kenobi nearly killed Anakin years before. We watch the prequels looking for signs of future events. It’s hard to view the films as an original audience did, as a piece of pulp entertainment nobody thought would become such a phenomenon.
When J.J. Abrams stepped in the director’s seat for “The Force Awakens,” he did so knowing he would have an impossible job- he had to please longtime Star Wars fans and neophytes alike. The easiest way to do that was to create a “legacyquel” with new characters, but stick to the story of the first series of films. The result worked, but it was almost like watching a remix or an adaptation of “Star Wars” instead of a continuation. At this point, it’s American folklore. It’s hard to untangle everything Star Wars at this point.
With “The Last Jedi,” new director Rian Johnson tried something different. He burned everything we knew about Star Wars to the ground and started anew.
“TLJ” is the only “Star Wars” film since the original that doesn’t feel wholly beholden to everything that came before it. The sequel trilogy (“Force Awakens,” “Last Jedi” and “Rise of Skywalker”) is just as much about Star Wars — both the original movie and the massive cultural phenomenon it became— as it is about new characters Rey, Finn and Poe. Yes, it has some of the same characters from the original, it keeps the same feeling and it is still distinctly “Star Wars.” But TLJ is the only film of the sequel trilogy that actually reflects on the franchise’s legacy and moves it forward.
TLJ is about failure, making it of a piece with the other middle chapters in the Star Wars Saga, “Empire Strikes Back” and “Attack of the Clones.” (Cue George Lucas’ “it’s like poetry, they rhyme”). It’s a fundamental part of every Hero’s Journey Epic. Once the hero leaves home and embarks on a journey, they are tested. Here, all of our heroes are tested and most of them fail. But the film’s ethos is not that failure is something to be avoided. In TLJ, and in life, it is a given that failure will happen. But it’s what you do with that failure that makes you a hero.
Moreover, TLJ posits that the past is important, but nostalgia is a dangerous thing. We see the dangers of idealizing the past in Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), who seeks to re-create the glory days of his grandfather Darth Vader, but he’s only picking and choosing the parts of Vader’s legend he wants to memorialize; he’s cherry-picking his own history in order to get back to a romanticized version of the past, and of the Empire, that never existed. That leads to the dark side, glorifying the way things used to be.
We also see the dangers in running too much from the past in Luke, who is filled with regret at how he mismanaged his training of young Kylo and fears it was his fault that set him down an evil path after he almost killed him. Where Kylo wishes to bring the past to the present, Luke wants to completely forget his past, going so far as to never train another Jedi again.
All of that comes to a head in the best scene in the entire sequel trilogy (and one of the most important in the entire series).
Luke, distraught with anger and fear, decides to set fire to the last remaining Jedi library. He hesitates, and that’s when the Force Ghost of his old master Yoda shows up, and sets fire to the library for him. Yoda gets a big kick out of it too.
“Time, it is, for you to look past a pile of old books,” he says.
Let’s watch:
“The greatest teacher, failure is. Luke, we are what they grow beyond. That is the true burden of all masters.”
We are what they grow beyond. That’s true of Luke, and it’s true of Star Wars. At some point, you need to recognize that it’s important to grow— grow from your mistakes, grow from your successes, grow from your experiences. Too much looking back will hinder that. It’s important to look back, but it’s harmful to keep looking back, especially in anger or overt nostalgia — or rabid fandom.
That message, delivered to a bunch of Star Wars fans who presumably had grown up with these characters, (fans who would later overwhelmingly decry “TLJ” as being one of the worst Star Wars movies ever made, precisely because of the way the film treats Luke) was a bold move for a franchise tentpole series. It honors the past, but urges us to move on. And in doing so, Johnson finally pushes us beyond the Luke mythology and into something new, echoing something old: the final shot of the movie is of a lowly stable boy who discovers that he maaaaaybe has some Force power in him. And if he can do that, anyone can.
That’s hope. That’s Star Wars.
Up next: One of the wildest movies I’ve ever seen, Boots Riley’s 2018 masterpiece “Sorry to Bother You.”
Letter of Recommendation
I’m increasingly having more fun with “Star Wars” books, TV shows and video games than I am with the actual movies. One of the best I’ve seen is the seven-season run of “Clone Wars” on Disney+.
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