The Spark that Lights the Fire: Myth vs. Reality in The Last Jedi
Recently I was trapped in a Salt Lake City parking garage, waiting to escape the hellscape that is downtown Saturday night parking during the holiday season. As I was waiting to leave, I noticed a young family walking towards the elevator. A husband, wife, and two children, headed towards the cinema that just happens to sit directly above. As they turned away from me, I was struck by the young daughter. She couldn’t have been more than 9 years old. She wasn’t wearing a Star Wars shirt, or cosplaying as Captain Phasma, or wielding a toy lightsaber. But as they turned, I caught a glimpse of the back of her head, and her hair, three vertical buns, intricately, carefully, studiously done in a perfect imitation of Rey.
I suddenly found myself fighting back tears.
This wasn’t long after my second — and just before my third — viewing of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, a film that succeeds because its writer/director Rian Johnson, more-so than his predecessors, understands that mythology matters. George Lucas was interested in the Cambellian structure of myth, the way archetypes repeat throughout history, and how he could weaponize those structures in a modern fantasy. JJ Abrams was interested in replicating and perpetuating that same structure for a new generation. But Rian Johnson isn’t interested in the pattern of the myth, but rather in asking why it matters in the first place?
Oddly enough, the film The Last Jedi most thematically resembles isn’t The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi, but instead, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. In Dunkirk’s final scene, we see the soldier’s return home, as they read Churchill’s iconic “We shall fight them on the beaches” speech in the morning paper. The army is decimated, their equipment abandoned, their (the soldiers’) spirit broken. But, as the story of what happened at Dunkirk spread, the “Dunkirk Spirit” was enough. Enough to stall Hitler’s invasion of Britain, enough to hold off the German bombers, enough to defend that tiny island until the new world could step forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old. Survival was enough, precisely because the myth was enough to inspire.
One common complaint I’ve heard about The Last Jedi is that the ending is oddly hopeful, considering that the Resistance is all but wiped out. How can the two dozen freedom fighters left on board the Millennium Falcon possibly birth a rebellion capable of contending with the military might of the First Order?
Earlier in the film, Luke Skywalker discusses the legacy of institutional failure that is the Jedi Order. This was always the true message of the prequels, and is partly why so many of the original trilogy generation fans rejected them. While Obi-Wan Kenobi mythologized them as the guardians of peace, the prequel trilogy paints a very different picture of the Jedi. In the prequels, we meet an institution that is already failing. Rather than espousing any philosophy of the force, the Jedi are consumed with rules, regulations, political squabbles, blood cell counts^1, who can and can’t be in love and who should and shouldn’t be trained. A once honorable religion of peace has been politicized, weaponized, and ultimately corrupted.
Luke makes this point explicitly, telling Rey that the Jedi aren’t deserving of their mythologized status, as at the height of their power the Jedi allowed Darth Sideous to destroy them and create the Empire. And similarly, Luke’s revitalized Jedi Order — the one the entire Resistance is counting on returning — was also a failure, specifically because Luke compromised the achieved balance of the Force by favoring Ben Solo and the “mighty Skywalker blood”. But Rey’s response is crucial: we may need a myth now.
This conflict, and not the traditional good versus evil, light versus dark, is the central conflict of The Last Jedi. And this conflict, the myth versus the reality, is happening in every subplot of the story. Poe Dameron wants to be a mythologized hero — he acts like he’s in a Star Wars movie. But Leia, and later Holdo, constantly remind him that he has to take reality into consideration for the Resistance to have a chance. Leia later tells him that Holdo was more interested in protecting the reality of the resistance than she was being seen as a hero.
When Rose meets Finn, she meets the myth of the Resistance hero. The First Order defector who saved the galaxy by infiltrating Starkiller base and confronting Kylo Rey one-on-one. But she quickly learns that the reality is much more disappointing. Likewise, on Canto Bite Finn learns to see beyond the myth of the fantastical space Vegas to the dark reality lurking underneath. This in turns, leads him to question the myth of the entire Resistance, and re-examine what in reality is worth fighting for.
Kylo Ren grew up with mythological figures as parents, ones who consistently disappointed him. Luke only began to rebuild the Jedi once he saw the raw strength that Ben Solo possessed. Ben was the next chosen one in the Skywalker bloodline. But Kylo is conscious of his role in the mono-myth, and actively rejects it at every turn. His tale is the inversion of the Anakin Skywalker myth. Anakin wanted to be good. But he was tempted over and over again by the dark side of the force and eventually fell. Ben wants to be bad. Despite numerous chances to return to the light he always choses to break bad, actively rejecting the galacticly mythologized narrative of the fallen Jedi turning back to the light.
Then there’s Rey^2. Looking for parental figures at every turn, wanting so desperately to be part of that family mythology. “Skywalker I assumed, wrongly” as Snoke says. But the reality of the myth is so much more. In a recent interview with Slashfilm, Rian Johnson explained that:
But the bigger thing was, if you look at for example, the Vader “I am your Father” moment from Empire [Strikes Back], I think that moment’s so powerful because it’s the hardest possible thing that Luke and the audience could hear at that moment. It takes away the easy answers basically. We thought he was just a bad guy that we could hate and want to kill, but that one sentence and suddenly it’s more complicated than that. It’s harder than that.
If Rey in this movie, if someone had told her yes, here’s the answer. You are so and so’s daughter. Here’s your place in this world. Here you go. That would be the easiest thing she and the audience could hear. It would hand her on a silver platter her place in all this. The hardest thing for all of us to hear and the thing that she doesn’t wanna hear and maybe we don’t either is that no, this is not going to be something where it’s going define you. And the fact that you don’t have this is gonna be used against you by Kylo to try and pull him into your orbit. This is going to be hard. And you’re gonna have to stand on your own two feet and define yourself in this story^3.
Rey wants to be part of the myth. It’s made clear in her lessons with Luke that she’s aware of the details of the myth of Luke Skywalker (in other words she’s seen the original trilogy). She believes that she can be that same myth, that whatever connection exists between her and Ben Solo can be used — just as Luke did — to turn Kylo back to the light side. She can replicate the story. For his part Kylo believes the same about the Palpatine/Anakin myth, that where Vader failed to turn Luke to his side, Ben can succeed in turning Rey. In the film’s stellar lightsaber action sequence each figure momentarily believes they’ve succeeded in fulfilling the myth by turning the other. But the reality turns out to be much more difficult: the connection between Rey and Ben was a ruse by Snoke, Rey is a nobody from nowhere, and some bad boys can’t be saved.
But the entire film hangs on Luke Skywalker. Famously JJ Abrams was convinced to take on The Force Awakens by the question: “who is Luke Skywalker”. He also famously punted on that question by turning The Force Awakens into a literal quest for “where is Luke Skywalker”. But for all the flak The Force Awakens has taken over the last two years, its very structure is critical to the narrative success of The Last Jedi. The Force Awakens is the myth, replicated, restored, perpetuated. The Last Jedi is the response, the reality, the answer to why it mattered in the first place.
There’s been a significant amount of discussion as to whether The Last Jedi is Rian Johnson’s way of saying he didn’t like the The Force Awakens. I would argue it’s his way of saying how important that myth was. In The Force Awakens Rey says of Luke Skywalker “I thought he was a myth”. When she arrives on Ach-To she’s expecting to meet the mythical figure who destroyed the Death Star, defeated Darth Vader, and restored the Jedi. But what she finds is much different. Critically, Rey doesn’t start with asking Luke to train her in the ways of the Force. She simply tells him the galaxy is in danger, and asks him to come back.
But of course, as in every other storyline in the film, the reality of the myth is much more complicated. The crucial sequence in which Luke goes about his daily routine illustrates that this is not a myth, it’s a man at his most base, spending much of his day just attaining the necessary resources to stay alive. Everyday he actively chooses to reject the call ^4.
Luke’s ultimate realization in the excellent Yoda scene is twofold, and again represents the central conflict of the film. On a personal level, he learns that his failure was to believe too much in his own myth. That he failed to impress the reality of the Jedi in Ben Solo, and instead he — for lack of a better term — bought into his own hype. In reality Luke was saved at the Death Star by Han, defeated by Vader in Empire, and on the verge of being killed by the Emperor before Vader saved him. His greatest accomplishment was throwing down his weapon and refusing to fight at all. But by the time Luke decides to create a new Jedi Order he is the myth, he was, as he says “Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master”. The perception of him had become the lightsaber wielding warrior, more reminiscent of the Luke-Skywalker-fighting-the Darth-of-the-week of the old Expanded Universe than the Luke we got to know in the original trilogy. By buying into this myth, Luke believed he could bring back the Jedi Order. But, like his masters before him, he cared so much about the myth of the sacred texts, the Jedi rules, and creating a new galactic organization, that he failed to see the reality of what was happening on a personal level with his nephew.
The second realization however, is that despite whatever the reality of the Jedi’s institutional failures — and his personal ones — the galaxy (and us) needs the Jedi to inspire. That the myth of the Jedi, of Luke Skywalker, of the entire Star Wars saga, of storytelling, still matters. That’s why he projects himself across space (not unlike the way films are projected on a wall). He can’t actually “step out with a laser sword and take on the first order himself”. At least not in any way that would actually make a tangible difference. But if the galaxy believed he did, if the Resistance survived to spread the story, it could be the spark that lights the fire.
This is why the film’s final coda, completely unlike anything else in a previous Star Wars film, is the fulfillment just not of the themes of The Last Jedi, but of the entire saga. The reality is that across the world, people are oppressed, living difficult lives, or trapped in situations they long to escape. But just as Anakin, Luke, and Rey were inspired by the myth of the Jedi when they looked into the sky and dreamed of freedom, we can be inspired by our myths to reach for something more. I was that kid holding the broom. You were that kid with the Luke Skywalker action figure. Or a Harry Potter wand. Or trick or treating as Wonder Woman. Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi is the best film of the year, and the best film in the Star Wars story, because it asks us to contemplate why — and if — in a world with nuclear weapons and rising authoritarianism and changing climates, do these stories matter? And it resoundingly answers that yes, myth matters, simply because it can be enough to inspire us. It was enough for that kid holding the broom. It was enough on a towering screen in 1977. It was enough on the beaches of Dunkirk and the skies over London. It was enough for that young girl out to the movies with her family. Godspeed rebels.
[1] This is why the much maligned midichlorians are so necessary to understanding the prequels. While you were screaming online that George reduced the Force to a blood disease, he was somewhere at the Ranch mumbling “yes that was the point”.
[2] Just because there’s nowhere else to say it: my God was Daisy Ridley the find of the century. Whatever flaws JJ Abrams has as a storyteller, he’s one of, if not our greatest casters.
[3] http://www.slashfilm.com/reys-parents-rian-johnson/
[4] There’s a larger point for another time about Luke’s progression through the Campbellian hero’s journey in the course of just this film: the call to adventure, refusal of the call, meeting an old mentor, crossing the first threshold, etc.
