Rogue One vs. the Matrix: Resisting Fascism, Heroic Death, Coincidental Commentary (and a Note on Parenthood in Film)

I’ve written responses to pretty much every major geek culture media item that’s been released, and in nearly every case, I’ve read iconic geek films in terms of how they form a cultural conversation with the works of the Wachowskis, who I believe to be the foremost filmmakers of our time (a view few share, I am quite aware) and in particular, their still unsurpassed, yet deeply troubling, film The Matrix. In this review, which by its nature includes spoilers for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, I continue that tradition. I also attach a trigger warning for topics of parental abuse, gaslighting, and suicide.

Rogue One differs from every previously extant theatrical Star Wars film, including the computer-generated Clone Wars, in lacking an opening crawl, and also in one other way that distinguishes it from nearly every other anything in Star Wars since the inception of things that weren’t the first Star Wars movie: none of its major characters are likely to appear in any substantial capacity anywhere else in the franchise, because they all definitely, unquestionably die on screen. These deaths are unambiguous, with none of the “oh well his top half survived” of the actual Darth Maul canon that we now have, or even any implication that any of the characters will live on in the Force beyond the level that anyone in the universe does — which is to say, they merge with the cosmic Force in a way indistinguishable from any other ordinary citizen of the galaxy. For a franchise that is absolutely obsessed with merchandising and brand-creation, to set up characters who will never appear again — or who, in the case of a couple of the longer-serving members of the Rebellion, might have a shot at appearing once or so on the animated Star Wars: Rebels series before it catches up with the film timeline — is a quite courageous move.

It also, however, troubles me because the film’s narrative exists at the intersection of three very important themes, two of which I can very explicitly bring up in contrast with The Matrix as well as with other Star Wars stories and one of which is best discussed in contrast more or less exclusively with the rest of the Star Wars saga. The first two themes are sacrificial death and resistance to fascism; the third is parenthood. Both heroic sacrifice and resistance to fascism are crucial to the works of the Wachowski sisters, and have also appeared in Star Wars, with the cycle of fascism’s rise and fall and the life and death of heroes driving the galactic saga’s main installments in all cases. But the Wachowskis, unlike Lucas’s work and the new Abrams-led franchise, have generally been critical of the idea of lauding selfless death in the service of fighting fascism. Perhaps this is because the Wachowskis are dyed-in-the-wool leftist filmmakers who likely dislike the kind of heroic war tropes that films such as Rogue One are built upon (seriously, Rogue One is like a fusion of The Sands of Iwo Jima and the film of For Whom the Bell Tolls, with a little Inglorious Basterds thrown in minus the token Tarantino cynicism). But given what the Wachowskis have (reluctantly been coaxed into) sharing about their own histories with suicidal ideation, I’ve argued extensively in other contexts that the main reason that The Matrix, Jupiter Ascending, and Sense8 so aggressively repudiate the trope of protagonists voluntarily giving their lives for a cause is that the Wachowskis are writing for a marginalized population like themselves, people who society already tells have lives that aren’t worth living. When Neo and Trinity decide they’d rather launch a head-on attack against a government facility inside the Matrix, in the first film in that trilogy, they’re doing it in direct contravention of their orders from Morpheus to kill him rather than attempt to rescue him and put the post-apocalyptic city of Zion at risk. There are also two other dimensions to Neo and Trinity’s moral choice in the original Matrix, one of which is repeated when the same dilemma is presented to the protagonists of Sense8, and the other of which is not:

1. They are putting their own lives at risk with full expectation that one or both of them may die.
2. They are willing to take the lives of hundreds if not thousands of people, the vast majority of whom are not aware they serve a fascist state, and many of whom are not even armed or resisting.

In Sense8 the protagonists also face a moral choice of asking one of their own to take her own life, or risking all of their lives and a complete victory of the antagonists to save her in an all out assault on a guarded facility. In the television show, however, they explicitly refuse the morality of The Matrix which taught Neo and Trinity that those who were not with the rebellion were automatically the enemy, people whose lives had no value.

The moment where Neo decides to jump out of the way of the subway train, rather than allow Agent Smith to die there with him, is the single most poignant moment in cinema history because of what we now know about its author — that Lana Wachowski nearly stepped in front of the Chicago elevated train as a teen in a nearly-identical subway stop, feeling a sense of inevitabiltiy that she and her sister place in the mouth of Neo’s evil self, his death wish, Agent Smith. The correlation between the actual events of Lana Wachowski’s life and Neo’s fight with Smith have led me to jest — but also, honestly, argue earnestly —repeatedly that The Matrix is probably enough of a transgender metaphor for Keanu Reeves to count as the only cisgender man to ever respectfully play a trans woman — likely because he was unaware he was doing so and so were all the audiences at the time. The scene is a declaration that no marginalized person should let life beat them down to the point of believing the world is better without them. As someone who has talked countless friends and family from the edge of suicide, I deeply appreciate the film’s message, and was troubled when the Wachowskis followed it up with The Matrix Revolutions and V for Vendetta, both of which featured protagonists choosing death for a cause and explicitly declaring their lives to be worthless. It’s worth noting that both were produced shortly after Lana Wachowski’s vicious outing as transgender by members of the Chicago BDSM community, an event which has haunted and undermined the sisters’ careers ever since and was eventually repeated when Lilly was outed in 2015.

So, here’s the big, nasty contradiction in The Matrix, and even mentioning this is going to bring out my doxers and trolls who like to go after the tr*nny who has the idiotic idea that the Wachowski Sisters might have put some of their own life experiences into the movies they made while pretending to be cisgender men: the movie found an audience with the same type of men who adored Fight Club uncritically, and formed the basis for the Red Pill sub-movement of men’s rights activism, which is itself a sub-movement of the now-ascendant fascist alt-right. I haven’t actually managed to withhold my urge to vomit long enough to read anything that this movement has written on how they manage to sustain the cognitive dissonance of using a metaphor created by two transgender women for awakening to one’s true identity as a fundamentally misogynistic and transphobic awakening to a pro-fascist worldview, but I can imagine, and so can you, and I’m sure a few of them will be along shortly to tell us. So, Nazi trolls fuck off, and let me continue with what I’m trying to say: the violence of The Matrix, and the later sustained nihilism of the Wachowskis’ adaptation of V for Vendetta (in which the protagonist, who they, and Alan Moore, originally intended to be read as a woman living in a seemingly male body as a result of disfigurement, but which the studios censored, declares that “all I deserve is at the end of that [subway] tunnel,” where he is incinerated along with the Parliament that represents the ruling fascist government) has likely given the Wachowski Sisters cause to regret their handling of the narrative in general. I suspect this is why they went to such effort to end the first season of Sense8 with a near-bloodless near-recreation of the Matrix climax, continuing to repudiate heroic sacrifice as a trope but also showing the protagonists using lethal violence only against fully aware servants of fascism and only when absolutely necessary.

So what, then, do we make of Rogue One, the movie that has already been condemned by many members of the Trumpite alt-right as an attack upon them despite the fact that even its highly publicized reshoots wrapped long before anyone seriously suspected that Donald Trump would become President-Elect? It’s a story, like The Matrix, of a person who lives a life of slavery to a fascist system, who is asked by a group of rebels — multi-ethnic to the point of unfortunate tokenism, just as in The Matrix — to abandon comfortable but soulless submission to authority to engage in violence insurgence against fascism which is certain to lead to many deaths on both sides. And in Rogue One, our protagonist and her friends die — and unlike Neo, they’re definitely not coming back all Jesus-style. (Darth Vader still might, if my theories about Rey’s identity are correct, but that’s tangential and a different flame war altogether.) Additionally, like in The Matrix and some of the Wachowskis’ more troubling work, little concern is given to the lives of the footsoldiers gunned down in glorious cinematographic detail. We know from The Force Awakens that most Imperial Stormtroopers are conscripts, and the narrative of Rogue One says that killing conscripted servants of fascism is a-OK, even heroic. In fact, its heroes, like the heroes of The Matrix, are willing to — and do — summarily execute those sympathetic to their cause, when they deem it necessary. So we have a film which both depicts a group of largely marginalized people rising up and voluntarily giving their lives to fight a society that doesn’t value them, and also attaches minimal value to the lives of those on the other side. It seems to have the worst of both the Matrix sequels and V and none of their redeeming, life-affirming elements. Despite this, I want to argue that because of its place in the Star Wars saga, and because of the in-universe ways that the characters’ deaths play out, the story is in-fact life-affirming and argues for the value of marginalized lives. Furthermore, unlike The Matrix, the coincidental confluence of the rise of a fascism which resembles a less morally complex, less competent version of the Galaxy Far, Far Away’s Galactic Empire and the film’s intentional callbacks to World War II movies that, in almost any other era, the political Right would laud while the Left condemned, has come at such a time as to make the movie’s message hard to read as anything other than a statement that citizens have a duty to resist within the bounds of their abilities, and that failure to resist oppression means no one is safe.

This is where I bring up the parenthood issue. I also have strong feelings about narratives of parenthood, because of my own challenges in getting my father to understand my mental illness and my identity as a transgender woman. My father was always sort of amusingly forlorn at the fact that he gave me the name Luke at birth, and that this meant that when I reached the age of watching the Star Wars movies, I would (he imagined) identify with a character whose father was the archetype of evil. But of course, Vader is also the quintessential sacrificial hero who gives his life to save his child. This ending certainly stuck with me, and was probably part of why the indiscriminate slaughter the Zion rebels of The Matrix commit bothered me from when I first saw the film at 14 — because Star Wars taught me that everyone has a chance to be redeemed. At the same time, as we see in Rogue One Darth Vader is a literal monster and mass murderer, and no one who aimed a blaster at him with intent to kill 1) can be blamed or 2) with the exception of Han Solo, survived the encounter.

Star Wars is full of terrible parents and parent-figures. While it doesn’t quite reach Harry Potter levels of condoning abuse, not only is the original trilogy’s protagonist the son of a monster who cuts his hand off as part of an attempt to educate him, but ultimately we’re meant to see him as humbled by his father’s last-minute sacrifice, after minutes of watching his son tortured toward death by an even more irredeemable villain. Anakin’s father is literally bacteria and his mother is a completely passive figure, while his Jedi Master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, is as part of the text utterly unprepared to take on the responsibility of training him, as are the other Jedi placed in a parental role over Anakin. We see nothing of Bail Organa’s parenting of Leia, so I won’t comment there. And of course, Han Solo is a terrible enough father to earn a lightsaber to the belly from his own son, a character who I couldn’t help but identify with when his father refused to use the name he had chosen for himself.

Enter Galen Erso, the father of Rogue One’s doomed protagonist, and like Vader, Kenobi, and Solo, a merciless, casual killer — albeit one more tormented by it than any of them are except for Vader for 30 seconds at the end. Galen would seem a candidate for Terrible Father Olympics as well — not only does he abandon his daughter to be raised by a Vader-like Rebel militant who tortures captives with tentacle monsters, but he designs the Death Star of his own free will and then sets in motion events in which he knowingly enlists his daughter in the mission that will lead to her death. However, I argue that Galen Erso is actually a very good father, and here’s the reason: his respect for his child’s agency is complete. He is fundamentally aware of his own moral compromise as a high-ranking Imperial scientist, and he only hopes for Jyn’s forgiveness (which he does receive in a brief reunion after he is mortally wounded by an ill-timed Rebel bombing strike). But at no point does he, like my most loathed fictional father figure, Joel of The Last of Us, decide that his daughter’s life, or the course of her life, is up to him to decide. He asks her to steal the Death Star plans and to make up for his mistake, and she chooses to do so.

But there’s another component to why I think Rogue One is life-affirming: its repeated use of the “hope” trope directly counteracts the fact that its protagonists die. It’s essentially telling the closest thing possible to a real-world war story that one could tell in a fundamentally fantastic universe; its protagonists have skills in combat that few people have, but they are not the larger than life heroes of any other Star Wars cinematic installment, or the vast majority of its extended universe. They are people who follow the religion of the Force but, with one exception, cannot draw directly upon its power in an intentional way, and at no point do they make the decision to go into a situation they know they will not walk away from. In a key scene, Jyn’s love interest, a seasoned Rebel spy, orders an Imperial defector who is a member of the team to “keep the engines running” in their captured shuttle so that the team can extract upon completing the mission. This doesn’t happen — the pilot is killed and the shuttle destroyed by an Imperial grenade, and Jyn and her would-be lover die on a corpse-strewn beach-head as a Death Star generated mushroom cloud envelops them in annihilation. But they go in with the full intention to fly out with the Death Star plans. There is a point in the story where they realize that they won’t be extracting to safety, and they continue to fight; every character who travels on the spaceship Rogue One has this realization, even Alan Tudyk’s standout deadpan-sarcastic ex-Imperial droid. But there is never a doubt that they would escape, if they could.

This is fundamentally the difference between The Matrix and Rogue One. The Matrix takes place in a world where the rules of reality are not fully material, and its central antagonism is between a character and that character’s own suicidal urges, made manifest in digital form (Smith being Neo is confirmed as canon by the sequel films). Thus, Neo’s decision to live in the subway tunnel is about rejecting his own internalized fascism, his own personal message that his life is not worthwhile. He’s shot to death just moments later, then saved by the power of love, because that’s the kind of thing that can happen in that world. In Star Wars, you can come back from a lot of things, like having your entire lower half sliced off, but you can’t come back from a direct hit from a Death Star beam, or even from being blown to bits by a grenade or shot repeatedly in every vital circuit. The movie is a story about characters who overcome the fear fascism has taught them to internalize at the start, and to value not just their own lives but the lives of those that fascism is about to consume.

The scene that is almost certainly the reason the alt-right has been overcome with rage about the movie consists of a well-worn trope: Jyn Erso, bringing testimony of the Death Star’s destructive power, warns Rebel bureaucrats that “it’s not about what hope you have — it’s about what choice you have. If you do nothing in the face of this kind of evil, you condemn the galaxy to an eternity of suffering.” This was not written as a directive to Democratic Party agents, members of the electoral college, Barack Obama, or anyone else in a position to take legal steps to prevent Donald Trump’s inauguration, but by virtue of electing a decaying, spiteful rapist who lives in a tower and likes to brag about torture, we’ve put ourselves in a position as a nation where this pastiche of WWII movies and its scene where the Rebellion, collectively, goes through Joseph Campbell’s “refusal of the call,” is topical. This is not the movie’s fault, nor does it really count toward the credit of its scriptwriters (Donald Trump is, after all, friends with highly placed Disney executives.) But the movie makes a point the Wachowskis never really have, except tangentially in V for Vendetta — the point about the responsibility that marginalized people in a position to exercise power have to protect those who are utterly powerless. The film’s most distinguishing, redeeming scene is one in which Jyn risks her own life to save a child, leading to a series of events in which her team is forced to kill other Rebel operatives to survive. That moment of empathy is ultimately utterly irrelevant in the great scheme of things, as both the child and her mother and the team of Rebels that Jyn’s team came into conflict with are destroyed soon after by the Death Star’s first test firing. However, the repeated demonstration of the destructive power of the station, which in Rogue One is emblematic of fascism itself (along with the Imperial Commander, whose performance imitates but doesn’t quite reach the level of the Nazi commander in Inglorious Basterds), and of the menace of Darth Vader and Moff Tarkin, provide a powerful reminder to our protagonists that doing nothing is not an option.

Is Rogue One “important”? Is it “meaningful”? I’m not sure. Most of us are not in a position to stumble upon secret fascist plans in day to day life. The fascism we face is in the form of the alt-right, a parasitic force which consumes even liberatory media like The Matrix and V to strengthen itself, and exists out in the open. Violent resistance against it would only strengthen it further. Despite that, I think that Rogue One made absolutely the right choice by depicting characters whose lives begin and end during a struggle against fascism, but who never, ever choose to let fascism kill them — they make the bastards work for it. Today, that may be all any of us have.