Pass On What You Have Learned — Thoughts on Star Wars: The Last Jedi
With the latest installment in the Star Wars saga finally available for home video, Jeff Siniard writes how Rian Johnson’s entry is mostly about learning the right lessons from history, the dangers of idolatry, and the importance of failure when teaching.
I’m the step-parent of two teenagers and more than ever, I feel the weight of responsibility which comes with preparing inexperienced kids to face the challenges of our modern world. Also, a core function of my work is training new employees to work in a production environment, as well as writing the policies and procedures they use to help them through their work.
There were lots of things I liked about Star Wars: The Last Jedi aside from the main idea behind this post. The settings were fantastic, and the fight and battle scenes are nicely staged and executed, even if they are sometimes a bit problematic from a real-world standpoint. Of course, there are also many flaws with The Last Jedi, but I’m choosing to avoid talking about them in order to focus on the subject at hand.
More than anything, the theme of teaching in The Last Jedi really hit home for me, and maybe more than it did for other people because of where I’m at in my life and part of what I do professionally. Considering the series’ history of Jedi Masters and Padawans — as well as Sith Lords and their Apprentices — this is fertile thematic ground that had yet to be explored in such depth. Until, well, now.
Oh yeah, one more thing: it’s been over four months since the film first released. You know what that means.
Get Your Head Out of Your Cockpit: The Education of Poe Dameron
Please allow a minor digression here, inspired by “Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway” by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully. “Shattered Sword” is an extraordinarily detailed account of the pivotal World War II battle, with emphasis on Japanese doctrine, strategy, and tactics.
In particular, this passage from Shattered Sword is pertinent to the discussion regarding Poe Dameron, the arrogant pilot played by Oscar Isaac:
“The balance sheet for the engagement had to be assessed not materially, but rather in terms of the demands made on resources by time and distance… for the Japanese, if an objective wasn’t important enough to require sending all six carriers, it wasn’t worth going after at all.” — Shattered Sword, Page 421
I’ve inverted the context from the book, but the principle holds. What Dameron has to learn is when and how to commit resources to battle, and when a low-odds fight is justified versus when it’s correct to retreat and fight another day.
In Rogue One, A New Hope, Return of the Jedi, and The Force Awakens, the Rebellion/Resistance is completely justified in launching attacks against Scarif, the Death Stars and Starkiller Base because they all represented existential threats to the Rebellion/Resistance. Every opportunity should be taken to eliminate these threats, regardless of the resources at hand and regardless of the odds of success.
These battles also offer a dangerous incorrect lesson: fighting a battle against the odds is always justified. In The Last Jedi, this is the precedent upon which Dameron acts. Going further, it’s especially difficult for the ace pilot to think otherwise, precisely because the Rebellion/Resistance has been victorious in the past under similar circumstances.
We see the result of learning the incorrect lesson at the beginning of The Last Jedi. Dameron does a brilliant job of stalling the Dreadnought long enough for the last transport to escape the planet, and then taking out the Dreadnought’s surface cannons to give the Resistance fleet a chance to escape. Dameron’s insistence on taking out the Dreadnought, however, is where his decision-making costs lives.
The Dreadnought does not pose an existential threat to the Resistance. The Resistance, as led by General Leia (the late Carrie Fisher) and Vice Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern), was justified in abandoning their base and preserving military mass (as well as fuel and munitions) for a more decisive battle. Just looking towards the future, imagine how the scope of the battle on Crait would’ve changed if the Resistance were able to deploy their bombing ships.
Dameron’s demotion is fully justified because he committed the Resistance to battle on unequal terms, the battle offered little to no strategic value to the Resistance, and the battle inflicted heavy losses for the Resistance with no tangible value added. He still hasn’t learned this lesson when he sends Finn (John Boyega) and Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) off to Canto Bight in search of the code-breaker, and mistakes Holdo’s attempts to simply survive as cowardice.
After having seen almost all of the Resistance transports destroyed — and following the breaching of the hangar on Crait — Dameron realizes that the Resistance is facing an immediate existential threat. Yet when Luke Skywalker’s (Mark Hamill) force avatar appears, the pilot reaches the correct conclusion — Luke is buying time for them to escape, just as Holdo did earlier. Invigorated with a newfound appreciation for this alternate approach, Dameron correspondingly makes the correct decision to escape.
Leia confirms his decision in what amounts to her passing the baton of command to Dameron:
“What are you looking at me for? Follow him!”
In so doing, the cocky, reckless pilot becomes the leader of the Resistance.
It’s Time for the Jedi To End: The Education of Rey
Luke Skywalker’s quote about Darth Sidious and the Jedi Order is the key to understanding his character:
“At the height of (the Jedi’s) powers, they allowed Darth Sidious to rise, create the Empire, and wipe them out. It was a Jedi Master who was responsible for the training and creation of Darth Vader.”
Rey (Daisy Ridley) believes in the myth, the legend of Luke Skywalker, and believes — without direct knowledge — in the power and wisdom of the Jedi Order. When she departs at the end of The Force Awakens, she expects to find the idealized version of Luke, a version which has been passed down as legend by Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and as the great hope by Leia.
Once Rey arrives on the planet of Ahch-To, Luke wastes no time in deflating her expectations. He starts the process of tearing down the legend by tossing away both his and father’s old lightsaber with a casual flick of the wrist. During her first lesson, he ridicules Rey’s previously-held belief about the Force being a source of power rather than the spiritual balance in the galaxy.
Luke wants to destroy his own myth and also shatter the myth which still surrounds the Jedi Order. There’s two reasons for this, and both inform Luke’s eventual decision to tutor Rey. The most obvious is Luke’s own guilt and shame over his failure to prevent his nephew, Ben Solo (Adam Driver), from turning to the Dark Side. The other reason is because it stands in opposition to what Rey believes about Luke Skywalker, the nature of the Force, and what the Jedi Order represented.
Further, part of his first lesson is not simply teaching Rey how to reach out with her feelings. Luke tells her that the positive tension and power the Force represents does not belong to the Jedi — nor, implicitly, does the darkness belong to the Sith. He says to believe this is vanity.
All this focus on demystifying the legend is Luke’s feeling that he trusted too much in his own wisdom and power when he elected to restart the Jedi Order. As a result, his focus with Rey is on making sure she understands the Force not as power, but as balance. He wants Rey to remain humble, something he wasn’t able to do. He tries to convince Rey not to trust her feelings and instincts when it comes to Ben’s conflict — yet his first instruction to her was to reach out with her feelings.
What I find fascinating is that this characterization makes Luke a mirror image of his failed pupil, Ben. They both want to burn it all down; appropriately enough, the scenes in The Last Jedi which explicitly feature fire are when Solo kills Snoke in the throne room and when Luke almost burns the Jedi texts.
Rey sees Luke’s failure for what it is: temporary weakness at the worst possible moment. This gives her the confidence to try and turn Ben Solo, while also having learned the difference between empty belief in a myth versus real-world experience.
Failure is the Greatest Teacher. The Re-Education of Luke Skywalker
What’s also fascinating is that while Luke acknowledges his failure with Ben Solo, he’s still not quite willing to own it. He forces Rey to stop during her first lesson as soon as he sees the extent of her abilities, her power in tapping the Force. When Rey leaves the island in an attempt to turn Ben Solo, his frustrated instinct is to burn the tree containing the sacred Jedi texts.
Most importantly, outside of self-defense and helping to heal Leia, he has closed himself off from the Force.
Luke still hasn’t learned how to handle failure. Until he can accept his failures and own them, he can’t be the teacher Rey needs, much less the great hope the galaxy needs. Which, conveniently, leads us to the mentor Luke desperately needs…
…Yoda, who appears to Luke as a Force ghost and chastises his former student for not passing on what he has learned. Not merely success but, crucially, failure. Yoda reminds Luke that failure is the greatest teacher. Luke has forgotten his failure in the cave on Dagobah, as well as the failure to heed Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back.
The one way he has passed on his wisdom-through-failure — and thus the way he succeeds with Rey — is in acknowledging (in sequences which owe a debt to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon) his failure with Ben Solo at the moment of confrontation. Going back to Luke’s quote above, it was a Jedi Master responsible for the training and creation of Kylo Ren.
At the end of the day, thanks to Yoda’s assistance, Luke ends up becoming precisely the myth and legend he mocked Rey for seeking out. He also lives up to Leia’s perception of him: the great hope for the galaxy. Most importantly for Luke, he achieves redemption for himself. He defeats his nephew without physically injuring or killing him while overcoming his own fear of failure.
He does this while absorbing Yoda’s greatest lesson — “keeping his mind on where he was and what he was doing.” As Rey says, he leaves the mortal coil with “peace and purpose,” becoming a Force ghost just as his mentors Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda did and looking to the future with his task done.
So Ends The Lesson
As much as I appreciate the richness and depth of the teacher and pupil themes, I don’t think it’s enough to make The Last Jedi a masterpiece.
There are plot holes you can drive a truck through. Some parts of the narrative bog down. Some moments make you question things you’ve seen in all the previous Star Wars films — specifically, the kamikaze jump to light speed.
It’s also true that Johnson isn’t interested in simply filling in the questions and details left over from The Force Awakens, which makes many fans feel like their effort and emotional investment have been wasted.
All that acknowledged, I have to say that I was deeply moved by this film, probably more so than any Star Wars film since Return of the Jedi.
As the heroes of the original trilogy — Han, Luke, Leia — give way to a younger generation, Rian Johnson has made a film which stresses the importance of having teachers willing and capable of sharing their experiences in a meaningful way, the dangers of hollow worship of the past, and making sure the newcomers learn and apply the right lessons from history.
In so doing, the lesson of The Last Jedi is not as Kylo Ren says:
“The Empire, your parents, the Resistance, the Sith, the Jedi… let the past die. Kill it, if you have to. That’s the only way to become what you are meant to be.”
Rather, as Yoda says…
“Pass on what you have learned. Strength. Mastery. But weakness, folly, failure also. Yes, failure most of all. The greatest teacher, failure is. Luke, we are what they grow beyond. That is the burden of all masters.”
Jeff is huge cinephile who, by his own account, watched 51 movies — both new and old releases — for the first time in 2017. You can keep up with Jeff at @JeffSiniard and the blog @unpluggdwithngl.
