With today’s long-anticipated release of Star Wars: the Rise of Skywalker, there’s an apparent popular reëvaluation of The Last Jedi, the previous franchise entry. When it debuted two years ago, the apparent consensus said the movie had many good ideas, but was too long and talky, with characters explaining the story’s thesis to one another. Now, at least on Blue Twitter, the new consensus is, it’s the best SW film since The Empire Strikes Back.
So, dedicated to both scrupulous honesty and pop-culture deconstruction as I am, I made the only reasonable choice and re-watched the film. In fairness, without the cloud of expectations lingering from the original trilogy, it’s better than I remembered. It still takes too long to make its point, then keeps going after it’s made. But it has charming characters, an interesting take on class consciousness, and more well-rounded female characters than most mainstream genre films.
Yet I remained dissatisfied, and couldn’t quite place why for over two hours. It mirrors Empire, still the best SW movie. Then suddenly, as the last vestige of the beleaguered Rebellion settled into the realization that help wasn’t coming, General Organa eased herself into a chair, groaning: “Hope has died. The spark has gone out of the galaxy.” And I realized why the story continued to bother me.
This movie ties together two incompatible moralities.
Empire also features the Rebellion in retreat, moving into desperation as the student Jedi, lost to their larger cohort, learns that ancient morality. Yet in watching this retreat, I felt something very different. Han and Leia fleeing Vader have highs and lows: when they find refuge with Lando Calrissian, sure, their surcease is false hope. But they don’t know that. We never get, as with the Resistance, the sense that they’re trying to convince themselves.
The Last Jedi features the Resistance going from defeat to defeat, digging deeper to find resolves of courage to keep believing. Luke Skywalker re-enters the fight and turns the tide only after the Resistance has literally given up hope, and prepares to die. Empire never involves surrender to fatalism, even at the nadir. This one-way trek through defeats into the lowest possible ebb reflects the standardized screenwriting beat sheet from Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat!
If you’ve noticed that movies, especially genre blockbusters, look remarkably similar recently, blame Blake Snyder. His screenwriting guide gives a breakdown of story progressing which, he contends, creates instant audience recognition and emotional bonding. He gives instructions for writers to make stories instantly relatable, with clearly defined heroes who sacrifice everything, including themselves, to prevent monolithic evil. But they find victory, in Snyder’s “beat sheet,” only by progressing from defeat to humiliating defeat.
Sound familiar?
Snyder’s beat sheet, though, isn’t just a storytelling device. It includes a specific moral mindset, one reminiscent of early Christian martyrdom. Snyder teaches that characters’ suffering is ennobling, and that only through suffering do we discover their true golden nature. Characters should constantly do right, even suffering great personal violence, and remain undeterred as the universe repeatedly demolishes their every accomplishment, confident that the universe will ultimately vindicate them. It’s like a medieval saint’s hagiography.
Except Star Wars isn’t based on this morality. George Lucas famously wrote the first movie with two books on his desk: a Webster’s dictionary and Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Campbell, who was raised Catholic but abandoned faith when he discovered Jungian psychology, contends in this book that all religions, philosophies, and myths descend from the same internal struggle all humans face when passing into adulthood. Morality, to Campbell, is basically psychological.
Most important, to Campbell, suffering is common, but it’s not necessary. It’s simply a by-product of becoming yourself in a world that demands you conform rather than mature. In Empire, the Rebellion struggles because it believes in capital-T Truth, in a universe that is deeply impersonal and frequently unjust. In Last Jedi, the Resistance struggles because a morally invested universe needs to purge human illusions, before it can permit the Conversion Experience, and ultimate redemption.
There you have it. That’s why I still can’t get behind Last Jedi: because it tries to impose a humanist demi-Christianity on a narrative founded on moral psychology. The two moral forms don’t fit together, and the result feels awkward. Y’know what, though? I’ll still probably see The Rise of Skywalker this weekend. Because through it all, Star Wars is founded on faith in hope. And hope, I guess, will always keep me coming back.
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