‘The Force Awakens’ Means We Don’t Have to Care About Star Wars Anymore
I spent December in another world. For a month, it seemed that the whole world cared, and had always cared, about Star Wars. For a month, Star Wars was everywhere: our ice cream, tissues, makeup, our Ubers, even in the window display of Bloomingdale’s. (Interestingly, there was no trace of the prequels.) After 32 years of anticipation, the world was finally ready to learn the fates of Han, Luke, Leia, and the Rebel Alliance they served.
And so what did The Force Awakens add to the most important story in cinema?
Almost nothing.
The Force Awakens isn’t a bad film. Indeed, it’s the first good Star Wars film since 1983. It’s decently paced, well-written, and returns the saga to the frontiers of space where it belongs. It also prominently features a diverse cast, a welcome change to both Star Wars and Hollywood action fare. Its plot works very hard at offering nothing new, but if we’re ever going to care about Star Wars again it first has to be fun and watchable, and Abrams has certainly succeeded in that regard.
But from its very first moments, TFA seems afraid to fulfill its potential as successor to a beloved myth. The opening scene finds Poe Dameron facing possible execution at the hands of Kylo Ren, surely as tense and dreary a situation as that faced by the poor sap Vader choked out at the start of A New Hope.
But rather than legitimize Ren as an intimidating villain, the film chooses to undercut him: Poe mocks the gravity of the situation in the cheeky, Avengers-esque humor that’s become all the rage. “Who speaks first? Do you speak first? Do I speak first?” he queries. It’s cute, no doubt, but it’s a strange choice: Rather than situate us inside the world of epic conflict we’ve missed for so long, it mocks it.
And it continues. When Finn appeals to Poe’s moral sensibilities during their escape, Poe responds with the deadpan observation, “You need a pilot.” Finn, with timing that could have been ripped right out of The Office, admits, “I need a pilot.” It’s funny, but it’s a joke at the expense of an actual moral awakening — which is exactly what an epic space opera might need.
There’s nothing wrong with humor in Star Wars. Comic relief has always been a part of the series. But the humor of the original trilogy — a wry dig from Han Solo, a hypochondriacal comment from C-3PO, a surprising new gadget in R2’s arsenal — never undermined the reality of the Star Wars universe, or the drama that unfolded inside it. Star Wars humor is classic; the kind of jokes that a storyteller might convey to an audience in the oral tradition. (Appropriately, it’s the droids, whom Lucas has always considered the storytellers, who often serve up comic relief in the original trilogy.) TFA’s jokes, by comparison, feel trendy and performative. Will we still laugh in 30 years when Finn gets so excited taunting Captain Phasma that he has to be checked by Han Solo? Or will we say, “Eh, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler did it better?”
Again, this isn’t to say that the jokes weren’t funny – they were. But their presence in the place of actual epic drama, and the way they needle at the dramatic world of Star Wars itself, should give us pause. Have we used up our suspension of disbelief? Has our approach to escapist cinema changed so much in 30 years that a straight space opera is no longer possible? Or, asked another way, can we still take Star Wars seriously?
What gives Star Wars its lasting power, its enduring hold on the American imagination, may well be its perfect distillation of our national psyche. Its central story – that of a young dreamer coming of age, seeking freedom from a world of authority, finding companionship among a band of friends – is as American as they come. Coupled with a vision of a technologically–enhanced future in which Manifest Destiny extends into the far reaches of space, it’s no wonder that Lucas’s tale has become a de facto religion in the U.S. and beyond.
But each of those narrative elements is inherently political, and if the story of Star Wars can proceed no further, if TFA is forced to reboot and joke about the universe it inhabits rather than believe in its ability to grow, then it may stem from the fact that the political struggles that once made Star Wars resonate so strongly remain largely and frustratingly unsolved in our own modern world. We can’t tell a story about what happens after you defeat an evil Empire because we don’t know what happens and we can’t imagine it.
For the generation that grew up watching Star Wars in basements and living rooms around the world, Empire analogs abound: Capitalism. Neoliberalism. The military-industrial complex. But in the nearly 40 years since Star Wars premiered, those global systems have only gained in strength, not weakened. For those viewers who saw in Star Wars a veiled statement about American imperialism and the Vietnam War (among them, George Lucas), the Star Wars myth must have seemed cruelly impotent as the U.S. once again entered into wars of choice.
Or perhaps it’s something more personal than a Galactic Empire: Perhaps it’s the tale of Luke, the young romantic who finds friendship and success while bucking the system. That tale, too, must ring hollow today, now that Millennials — the generation of kids who grew up believing the Star Wars myth— earn less money than their parents and are more stressed. For that generation, the dream of up-ending the established order has been smashed on the rocks of high rent, student loans, non-existent pensions, and a political system increasingly viewed as corrupt. Today, if a child of promise and intelligence wanted to emulate Luke (or Rey) and overthrow the establishment, we wouldn’t tell them to rebel. We’d tell them to join a startup.
Even fascism, the easiest Empire allegory of all and one long-thought discredited in the U.S., came galloping back into America last year with the rise of a presidential candidate who, perhaps not coincidentally, launched his campaign with the statement, “The American Dream is dead.”
Now that we know what happens to the heroes we grew up with — and now that we’ve found that it’s more of the same, that the world of Star Wars is, like our own, stuck in a loop of the same political and spiritual problems, of indistinguishable battles and wars without end — can anyone really care about their outcome? Star Wars should move forward, and in the best parts of The Force Awakens, it does just that. But Han Solo can only die once, and if that’s the only interesting thing left to do in the Star Wars universe, then perhaps it’s time to move on.
Star Wars can’t be blamed for the intractable political problems of our own world, of course. But even as a vessel for escapism, the world of Star Wars seems to be running dry. Can its story move forward? Can our own? Let’s hope so, because if not, next December will find us in a world full of Star Wars makeup and Ubers and window displays, and no Star Wars.
