Last Jedi stuff - part 2

More ramblings, as they come:

Spoilers

Last Jedi clearly set itself the task of developing Star Wars by questioning some of its assumptions. As noted, when it does this some people see it as having made mistakes, and the mistakes are of two kinds: mistakes of content and mistakes of form. Remember, above, we identified two propositions being put by some: that the film is making what we called continuity errors of characterisation, and also that is it making technical mistakes of narrative. The first is the content mistake, the second is the form mistake. The very fact that the film is being criticised on these two axes concurrently suggests that it is consciously working on those same two axes concurrently. It is by no means clear that the silly critics are actually as deluded as we might want them to be. I mean, they’re being silly, but they’re not entirely imagining the things they’re being silly about. They whinged about Force Awakens being an SJW conspiracy, and they’re whingeing the same way about Last Jedi – and in both cases, while their claims are both malignant and overblown, they’re not wrong to suggest that both films are more politically conscious, or that both deliberately position themselves in a certain way in terms of current political discourse. This is also – perhaps even more so – true of Rogue One. There is, to be frank, a germ of truth in the idea that Star Wars has gone all SJW. Of course, it’s only a germ. The series has always had a basically liberal orientation (with all the pros and cons that entails) and part of its reinvention has been an interesting shift towards greater diversity and inclusiveness, etc. I’ve looked at this, and suggested possible reasons for it (and ambivalences around it) elsewhere. This is why it’s fair to say that the axis of criticism we identified as targeting what it thinks of as a content mistake (see above) can also be characterised as an ideology mistake. There is clearly a link between the worry about characters behaving ‘out of character’ and characters not thinking or saying the right things, ideologically speaking. Luke isn’t just (supposedly) not behaving like Luke, he’s doing so in a particular way. Indeed, it is probably the specific way he is behaving (the things he’s saying, the ideas he’s espousing and/or questioning) which is the real spur to the complaints that he’s acting out of character. It’s wrong because he’s saying things he shouldn’t be saying, and we know he shouldn’t be saying them because they’re ideologically dissonant. He’s seen as behaving ‘wrongly’, which is then seen as a writing mistake, because he is saying things that are judged as ideologically incorrect. This isn’t new. Nobody believed that Stefan Molyneux was worried about Rey’s alleged hyper-competence because it offended his ideas of narrative plausibility. It was seen as a mistake (a violation of the aesthetics of storytelling, and/or of believability) because it was seen as expressing ideology he found odious, namely that women are not necessarily all worthless garbage. The film’s brave stance on there being no reason why women shouldn’t behave as implausibly as men in fantasy narratives was characterised by him as evidence of a female supremacy agenda. To buttress this case, he – and many like him – pointed to Rey’s mysterious abilities and alleged the film of ‘making no sense’, etc because it was thus full of writing mistakes. What they meant, of course, was that it made no sense to them to suddenly see a cultural product like Star Wars rejecting a double standard they were used to, and which flattered them. They apparently failed to notice that it was a plot point that Rey had mysterious, magic abilities – much as it usually is in such narratives. Did they fail to notice that half the students at Hogwarts were girls?

The issue of who is fallible and who is infallible continues to be a way of phrasing these ideological objections. Much as Rey in Force Awakens was said to be infallible (i.e. the magic hero, and thus magically heroic), so Luke in Last Jedi is said to be distressingly (and wrongly) weak, etc. But again, this isn’t a mistake, a continuity error of characterisation. It is a conscious choice which both fits in with established narrative structures (i.e. the discouraged old hero must be roused from their slough of despond and given new hope… if you want to be all TVTropes about it) and also allows the story to communicate one of its deliberate stances. The story is deliberately trying to subject some things about the Jedi to question, and some things about heroes generally. It deliberately has Luke mimic the established (if, so to speak, accidental) pattern of old defeated Jedis just giving up and fucking off into hiding. 

Actually, the scrutiny and deconstruction to which Last Jedi subjects the Jedi, Luke, and the series generally, is pretty weaksauce. The Jedi are explicitly called out by Luke for permitting the rise of Sidious and training Vader, but their failure is cast as a lack of proper supervision. In their pride, they failed by not being efficient guardians. The film does not seriously question the idea that they have the right to be the guardians in the first place, or that people need guardians. What it questions is how good the Jedi are at this apparently necessary job. Is it not the case that their pride and hubris calls them to fall down on the job? What seems glossed over is the fact that both Vader and Sidious emerged from the Jedi/Sith continuum, the Force religion as practiced by moral warriors (light or dark). Vader was a Jedi. Sidious arose as a reaction against the Jedi, drew power from the exact same religion/energy as the Jedi, and rose to power in the Republic, the political system the Jedi enforced, and which the Resistance is still trying to resurrect!

The Jedi are seen as failing – but could the truth be that they succeeded? Aren’t the Jedi actually reliant upon the Sith (or whatever) to give them meaning as warriors? They two are not oppositions so much as an eternal and mutually-reliant continuum. This itself is not questioned.  It's semi-recognised - in ways I'll go into - but even the recognition of the existence of the continuum is not questioned.  At most, it is an unfortunate inevitability.