Star Wars Miasma

(( Hey y'all, I'm going to start posting articles here because I want to write about Film but I'm still unable to do much on camera because of the surgery, so I hope this is enjoyable. Also as you could expect: spoilers, lots. ))

So I got Disney+. It was up for free trial so I took advantage even though everything from the outside seemed like it was kinda just...not gonna be that great. But then I started watching stuff on it and I found myself watching the new original content and no matter what my opinion was on any of it, I was suddenly watching Disney output again.

The real hook for me was the documentary series about theme parks. Somewhere inside me, I can't shake the feeling that I'm watching propaganda but yet there's something startlingly aspirational about it. Something people don't know about me is that I love theme parks, specifically Disneyworld. I know a lot about it and I've been a couple of times and it's always been a huge deal for me. Maybe it's a product of growing up poor but I've always seen Disney as the 'best place on earth.' The new documentary about the theme parks propagandizes about how lofty and important Disney is to the world while conveniently removing anything bad but it also captures what I love about Disney so much. 

There are no flaws.

Disney is a PR situation where, in order to maintain the theme of the company, they have to hide things constantly. I wonder if any company in history will ever write more non-disclosure agreements than Disney. But that's the point. Disney is meant to be a perfect world where everything just goes right no matter what age you are. This, in part, is why it's always meant so much to me. It's a place devoid of conflict. Even the fucking Haunted Mansion is conflict-free...and people are dead! It's a brand of optimism that is completely demonstrably unreal while also feeling real because of its sincerity. It's an optimism that doesn't exist anymore and probably never did. So they do their best to remove any and all human error when they can.

But the best thing about Disneyworld is how, if you look past that facade, you will see that Disney makes mistakes constantly. It's kinda amazing how often things don't work out for them, but because they keep their chin up and their eye on the theme, no one ever notices. In Disney's own identity and IP, they do wonders with that attitude even if what they're doing is moneygrubbing. But I would almost say it's worth it for the mission statement: create a place where dreams come true. Sometimes we need a place where things go right when everything feels like it's going wrong. Unfortunately, the way that intersects with capitalism makes it impossible for any of those idealogical perks to shine through but yet...I feel like it does.

But that starts to get a bit wonky when Disney has to explore things that aren't created with that in mind. Star Wars and Marvel aren't really about that. And yet, this is the hand that our generation is dealt with. A matchup that looks like it's going to be perfect but is actually flawed from the offset. Disney and Star Wars is not a successful blend for a million reasons that should be very obvious after having seen the latest film in the series. Many have jumped to say 'Disney is the problem' for a while now but I don't think we really have interrogated how thematically at odds they really are. 

But what even is Star Wars even? It's a film series but what the fuck is it about? Underdogs winning against all odds? Well, then why are the best movies about failure? But it's not a series about failure, it's about the above. So why the hollowness here? Are the prequels still considered Star Wars? I want to say they're the most Star Wars thing but they are also the least Star Wars thing. How do we navigate all this? How do we deal with a series that is so flawed that it's disproportionately messier than it is good? And why do we still love it?

When I was a child, I saw Episode 2: Attack of the Clones in the theater. It was my first cinematic disappointment. See, when I was a kid I really liked Phantom Menace and I obviously grew up with the original trilogy. Phantom Menace didn't seem 'flawed' to me, it seemed easily discardable. The way the adults talked about it in comparison to everything else was weird. They'd say 'yeah there's Star Wars, and there's Phantom Menace' as if to imply that they didn't belong together in a lineup. But it was still a hidden distaste. It wasn't hatred like nowadays. Everyone collectively accepted that it was part of the story and that was fine even though no one liked it. But Episode 2 really demonstrated it all to me.

I was right at the age where my love for film was at its childhood peak. I went from thinking 'all stories are wonderful because they're stories' to 'some stories aren't for me, even though all stories are wonderful.' You'll notice that I haven't changed much. But it was a big moment for me because I left the theater feeling a weird chill in my soul. I'd just learned that the things I love are actually made by people...ya know, like my mom or worse yet, my dad. Then I started to draw those lines. Oh, people that are wrong sometimes tell stories, and sometimes those stories can demonstrate their inability to connect with human emotions. And Episode 2 is absolutely that movie. Its hollowness is nearly a meme and its stilted in-affectivity is myth. 'I don't like sand, it's coarse and it gets everywhere.' That line is meant to connect the dots to how Anakin grew up a slave on a desert planet, but it comes across as a surface-level observation that someone is making about something insignificant. 

And of course, it has to be significant because it's in the story. So why isn't it?

And there we can start talking about The Rise of Skywalker (henceforth dubbed ROS). See, growing up for my generation meant learning that sometimes movies are bad and you can't always see the world the way Disney sees theme parks. Generations don't forget, and fans of stuff don't ever forget about the time the series got a little fucky-wucky. And this puts an outside company like Disney is scary place where they know the fans never forget and they never forgive but their strategy of 'pretend everything is magical all the time' is the only one they have so they're just gonna head that direction. It's the idea that they can power through, but only if the movies feel correct, feel significant, feel nostalgic, feel complex. 

So there's the stalemate. Star Wars is this series that has launched a million creative minds that long to expand what is possible with story. And yet those people aren't really in the position to work on it. Those folks all went on to tell interesting stories in their own right. But Star Wars is still here and it's being run on a contradiction. 

The Force Awakens checks all of its boxes. It's got new characters with interesting internal conflicts that have the potential to take us to new and amazing places with interesting stories. It's already an improvement on the prequels solely because it's aim is to move us toward something that could speak truth to something pure within us. While the prequels were Brazil-esque in nature minus the affectation, this series of films have the potential to tell stories with affectation. It's a moment where Star Wars could become literature. To take it from a pulp melodrama place and actually use that for something. 

Then The Last Jedi comes out and takes it to that exact place. If Star Wars is a collage of moments, then The Last Jedi is the most in tune with those moments. And whether or not you agree with the storytelling ethos or the politics, the movie has a lot of pathos that speaks to things we needed to see. We needed to see that kid use the force on the mop because it means we all can. We all have stories. Star Wars is about us. It's a long time ago in a galaxy far away, and yet humanity is the same. Star Wars has always had an undertone of 'everyone can be a hero when they decide to,' and The Last Jedi was the first film in the whole series to make that the entire point. It's a movie about failure, yes, but not a failure of humanity. Humanity is alive and well within the tragedy. We're going to be fine because we're human.

The Rise of Skywalker is about winning against the opposition because that's just how things go and if you go fast enough no one will care. And also the evil in the film doesn't really stand for much of a larger point. Is it meant to say the ultimate villain of space fascism has returned? Is this a story where they just bring space Hitler back because they needed someone that everyone loves to hate? What is the ultimate act of this film? To course-correct Star Wars away from Last Jedi? To tie things up in three hours so we can all move on, happy with the time we've spent in this universe? Is it to please the fans of the series? Who is the movie for? Because it feels like it's a movie that was trying to meet criteria for the fandom and the internet but then later had to be for everyone so they just cram all of it together.

I'm not interested in the collective cultural dogpile of Star Wars because I know that those working on the films love their job. They love what they're doing. They go to work every day thinking 'how can I make the world happy?' And what human person wouldn't love that with all of their being? 

But where did this possibly come from? 

I think it's fear. It's a movie intimidated by its predecessor. It's a movie that is meant to be a headliner but only knows how to be an opening act. It comes across as if the entire series was writing checks and when it came down to this, there was never any way to cash those checks. It's a movie that answers itself because it thinks it has to because it's afraid that if it doesn't this will all be in vain. It's a movie that wants that 'whoa what?' moment from Empire without actually earning that. It wants to tell the same story in an engaging way but doesn't know how to do that with the pieces given so it makes some up.

Many have argued that if The Last Jedi would have actually given the series something objective and concrete, then this movie would have stuck the landing. But what that really sounds like to me is 'if only we had lowered our standards....' And that's never good to do.

ROS isn't a movie concerned with taking our hand and showing us where our adventure ends, but rather asking us where we want the adventure to end. And we all said different words at the same time and they tried as hard as they could to do all of it. It's a movie that's too afraid to answer the hard questions and thinks it can get by on affectation. It's a movie that wants Star Wars to be in line with the creative ethos of Disney. It wants to ignore the flaws and pretend it's all been intentional the entire time. But really, it's the Disney Avatar World. An expensive and exciting thing that seems to have forgotten why we even like this at all or what anyone actually wants from it. 

Last week before I deleted my Twitter account, I said that Star Wars has always kinda sucked, which was a pretty vague and underwritten statement because it's twitter and twitter is a breeding ground for the less-than-thought-out. But what I guess I meant is that Star Wars has always been exactly what it set out to reference, a goofy space melodrama. It didn't have to obey any higher standard for how or why we tell stories because it views itself as a low story that has a high impact. But it's not that. It's never been that. It's never needed to be that. 

Star Wars has a confidence problem and we just watched it fail again, because of that. Disney may say Star Wars is in good hands and is progressive and is taking big leaps for Film as a medium but in reality, it's just exposed a greater problem that we all have. Why can't we just treat this like what it is? A story.

<3 May

Also hot take I'm fine with the Reylo kiss moment but not the death afterward. It feels cheap, like a kiss without consequences. I wanna see them try to have an emotional relationship while Ben Solo has to come to terms with all the people he's killed and face punishment for that. That's a more interesting and compelling story than one that Star Wars has ever told, but because it was to difficult to tell, they just had him die.