The Last Jedi is the First Existentialist Star Wars
Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world — and defines himself afterwards.” — Jean Paul Sartre
You cannot escape your destiny — Obi Wan Kenobi
[SPOILERS BELOW]
Rian Johnson has somehow managed to turn the Myth of Sisyphus into a space opera.
Existentialist fiction is mostly images of life viewed through keyholes. Sartre’s No Exit takes place in a single room, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot on a purposefully, perpetually nondescript hillside, and Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground within the mind of its subterranean protagonist. The narratives are personal, the struggles often with oneself rather than a larger political or social external foe.
Rightly so. Existentialism reminds us that our lives are fundamentally small, our grandest successes lack any real cosmic import, and our names are no more enduring than a brief Jakku sandstorm. The methods existentialist artists use to make their arguments— irony, black humor, farce, absurdism — reinforce that bleak view of life. They subvert, deconstruct, tear down false idols.
Epics tell the opposite story. Epics build idols. Their forms and elements — sweeping narratives across time and space (Star Wars), behemoth armies whose victory or defeat will decide the fate of whole worlds (Lord of The Rings), legendary heroes and far-flung journeys (The Iliad and the Odyssey), otherworldly monsters (Beowulf), quests blending the human and the divine (Gilgamesh, Noah) — all of this is designed to elevate the existence of the characters, and thereby elevate all of us, too.
This is how Star Wars has always been told. There’s Luke Skywalker, in one of the greatest moments in cinematic history, staring wordlessly out at the twin suns of Tatooine while John Williams’ score rises to meet his gaze, as he wonders if he’ll ever escape the mundane, the failed ordinariness of things.
There’s Rey, an oversized, ill-fitting rebel pilot’s helmet on her head, sitting in the Ozymandian shadows of grand wars gone by, wondering if there’s a special place for her, too, in all of this.
We’re there, wondering with them.
The promise of Star Wars has always been that the answer to that wondering is ‘yes’. You can escape the ordinary, cross the threshold into the Campbellian land of myth, face your demons and win. Immortality — lasting transcendence — awaits, just there, beyond the Dune Sea.
The Last Jedi reminds us that no victory ever really lasts.
Leia’s New Republic, the culmination of her life’s work (indeed, the work for which two generations of Organas have died) has been blown away in an instant, the remnants of her old heroes’ fellowship dying one by one, scoring Phyrric victories as the galaxy apathetically wastes away in gambling, horse racing, and other late Roman frivolities. The rebels put out a distress call for salvation— no one answers. Han is dead. Luke’s Jedi renaissance ends with his temple smoldering on the ground and his sacred tree ablaze. Ashes to ashes. Stardust to stardust.
In the original trilogy, the pathetic is transformed into the divine. The thieving, cackling, bent-double swamp creature Luke finds turns out to be the wise and powerful Jedi master Yoda. The jester turned warrior priest. The epic’s alchemy again at work. In the Last Jedi, the formula is reversed, subverted. Rey finds the wise and powerful Jedi master, and he’s haggard, cracking jokes and milking space cows for laughs. The warrior priest turned jester.
If first year philosophy students remember anything about existentialism, it’s Sartre’s summation of the ethos: existence precedes essence. Meaning, on the existentialist’s view, can’t be determined by any inherent features of the world around you. The universe is absurd. If we have any hope of avoiding despair, each individual must forge meaning for themselves. The Last Jedi embraces this view of the world in a way no other Star Wars has.
In Empire, Luke ventures into a cave that represents the personal conflict he will have to overcome to fulfill his destiny. He encounters a macabre vision of his own face within the disfigured metallic frame of Darth Vader’s helmet, signifying that his own search for meaning will culminate in his confrontation with his father. It’s all very Oedipal and classically tragic.
Rey finds her own mystical cave in The Last Jedi, and, despite being warned to stay away by Luke, she enters, desperate to find the direction and purpose her new master refuses to give her. However, in contrast to Luke’s cave in Empire, this cave reveals only reflections of herself, receding and multiplying into the past and future, ad infinitum. She must create her own meaning — the world will not provide one for her.
The film’s villain, Kylo Ren, undergoes a similar transformation. Once he dispatches Snoke, he is no longer in thrall to some arcane, sadistic religious order that provides his life with purpose, nor, after he destroys his mask, is he beholden to worshiping a delusional, idealized version of Darth Vader. His goals and his desire for power, and his confusion about those desires, now come from within, from his own will.
The Last Jedi is Rian Johnson’s Rosencrantz and Gildenstern to George Lucas’s Hamlet. It’s the Waiting for Godot of Star Wars — the angels and devils are missing, and when we find them, it turns out they, too, are merely men and women. No one, after all, can tell you what your place is in all of this. The failed ordinariness of things is all there is.
When fans complain that Rian Johnson is “trolling” Star Wars fans, I think this is part of what they’re trying to say. We had our golden calf — how dare you melt it. But the lesson of The Last Jedi is that we don’t need golden idols to have an epic worth believing in. Flawed men and women, in the end, will do.
The traditional epic asserts, as Yoda tells Luke in Empire, “Luminous beings are we. Not this crude matter.” The Last Jedi proclaims that our radiance is not in spite of our humanity — but because of it.
Like Camus’ Sisyphus, The Last Jedi stares clear-eyed at the grim conclusions of existentialism and yet manages to find meaning anyway. It claims that even in the failures, the toppled temples, the plans that come inevitably to nought, there are people, ordinary people and legendary Jedi alike, who refuse despair, whose power comes from their own choices to keep going, even knowing that they will fail again. What makes The Last Jedi remarkable is that it manages to wrap these existential themes in the trappings of epic — without accidentally turning epic into farce.
The Last Jedi’s ideas echo those of what some consider the first existentialist text, the Hebrew book of Ecclesiastes:
“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh… I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity… there is nothing new under the sun.”
There is irony in this. For in embracing these ideas, Johnson and co. actually did, in fact, produce something we’ve never seen before. An existentialist Star Wars movie. Something new under the twin suns.
