The Fall of the House of Skywalker
About five years ago, after Disney bought Lucasfilm and announced that it would be making a new Star Wars trilogy featuring the “Big Three” from the original trilogy, I expressed my misgivings about that idea to a friend. The greatest story of those three characters had already been told, and I felt that no matter how much I wanted to see those three in action again, the best storytelling move was to push the new trilogy a hundred years into the future, so the Big Three would be long-ago legends and their great-great-grandchildren could take center stage, and the audience could get some distance from the Rebellion/Empire conflict. In response, my friend — whose capacity for Eeyorish-behavior equals only mine — said to me:
“What if the whole Saga is actually the TRAGEDY of the Skywalkers?”
Although I hated the very sound of that, nothing that presents a chance to cheer on depressing GrimDark is out of the question in my industry these days, so I never managed to shake Eeyore’s depressing words. Then I saw The Force Awakens, and his words started to seem prescient.
“Nah,” I thought to myself. “Just because they completely regressed and deconstructed Han Solo so they could repeat his whole Original Trilogy arc on fast forward in one movie, and just because it seems right now that the only outcome of the Han/Leia romance that the OT carefully constructed over the course of three movies is brokenness, estrangement, and death at the hands of their sole offspring who is such a rotten emo brat that he seems to be a bad millennial stereotype on steroids (Question: if Kylo Ren now inherits the Millennium Falcon, can we rename it the Millennial Falcon?) doesn’t mean that the trilogy will continue in this direction. That would be an insult to the idea of heroism. It would destroy everything that is morally good about Star Wars and makes it worth passing down to your offspring, the way our parents sat us down every year on Easter to watch the annual “Wizard of Oz” broadcast on CBS. Continuing down this path would turn the whole Saga into another “nothing matters” story about a cursed family. The Skywalkers CANNOT be the House of Atreus, right?”
Well, I just saw The Last Jedi and:
As a person wiser than I am (i.e. some random on Twitter) put it, the way things currently stand in Star Warsville, the Skywalker lineage is now a horrific blot on the galaxy far, far away.
I’d add, to give some specifics to this statement, that the Skywalkers have led to billions of deaths, multiple destroyed planets and two galaxy-wide fascist governments over the course of fifty years. More directly, the Skywalkers have brought despair and death to the three characters who are portrayed as actually loving a Skywalker — Han, Padme, and Obi-Wan. Can we really doubt that Han would have been better off if Luke really was stymied by lack of demand for his landspeeder now that the XP-38 came out and was unable to pay the 2000 credits in advance? Or that Padme should have walked out of the room the second Anakin started flying fruit across the table to her? Or that Obi-Wan and Yoda should have looked at infant Luke and Leia and said, “um, maybe send them to the spice mines of Kessel and tell them their last name is Smith, because we’re done here.”
Meanwhile, as the Skywalker body count grows exponentially with each movie, everyone seems to be talking about redemption for the latest Skywalker problem child, Kylo Ren, which I dearly hope does not happen. How many chances can a patricidal, complicit-in-avunculicide, almost-engaged-in-matricide, and, worst, deeply uninteresting character unmoored from a workable backstory, get? Because if we’re playing with the House of Atreus story, Kylo Ren is no Orestes and the Force (more than ever after TLJ) is not an angry Greek God, my friends.
Why, in a “story made for children,” as the Disney Lucasfilm folks like to say (while making sure their movies get the PG-13 rating that pretty well confirms that these AREN’T for children), would filmmakers provide any support for such a character, even going so far as propping him up by showing one of the greatest heroes in cinema history hovering over him with a lit lightsaber, considering — albeit briefly — killing his nephew who as of that moment done nothing wrong except wrongthink? Worse, why would a production company now run by a woman (Kathleen Kennedy) support ANY implied romantic longing between this character and the female protagonist, Rey, when every beat of their interaction is also suffused with the dynamic of a male abuser and his female victim?
And what about the larger redemption now needed, if Star Wars is to remain that “story made for children” — the redemption of the whole Skywalker lineage, and even its two least problematic members, who have been written in the sequel trilogy to be failures as parents, political leaders, and military leaders (Leia) and runaways who let the galaxy burn and their family and friends suffer for a good long time because they made a horrible (and out of character) mistake one night (Luke)? The ending of this trilogy now seems irrelevant, given the moral rot suddenly underpinning the whole Saga due to the direction of the sequel trilogy.
What The Last Jedi has presented us with, in addition to the appallingly stupid theme of “kill the past” (an odd thing to say when your next film is about…Han Solo, a 40 year old character) and the this-is-not-news “revelation” that Force-users can come from anywhere, is, taken as a second act to the nostalgia-fest-with-a-nihilist core, The Force Awakens, the sloppy and ugly message that, even if you kill the past, you can’t escape it and you will repeat it over and over and over until the Star Wars movies stop being profitable. Your history, your genetics, your family determines your destiny — not only if you happen to be a Skywalker, but also if you’re a random left on a desert planet to fend for yourself, because you may somehow be destined for greatness without effort, training, or any stakes in anything that’s going on whatsoever. So what we’re SHOWN is that everything is ultimately pre-determined for you, while being TOLD that it’s not. But ultimately, it doesn’t matter who wins, because only the weapons traders really win, or something like that.
The ST has, in a span of two years, accomplished an almost unimaginable feat: it has transformed our pre-eminent modern myth about hope, love, finding your family, and perservering against tremendous odds into a cynical troll job that tells us that nothing really matters, that you will fail in the end, and you might as well forget the past so that, while you’re repeating it, you can at least pretend you’re making original mistakes.
And why waste the wonder years of the children these films are allegedly made for — or even the wonder that lives on somewhere deep within us as adults — on that kind of toxic and ultimately hopeless messaging?
Next up: I, Tonya and the Weird Trend of Identifying with Wrongdoers
