The Last Jedi and the Banality of Evil (SPOILERS)
When I was a child, my parents more or less primed me to become a Star Wars geek. I mean, I always would have turned into some kind of geek, but my parents didn’t let me see Star Wars until I was nine, but they did talk about how much I was going to like it — and, of course, the self fulfilling prophecy was quite prophetic. They set it up so that I saw the Original Trilogy (which was all there was back then) at a very formative stage. But they had concerns. Specifically, concerns about the way that Star Wars framed bad guys.
My parents would both qualify as “very liberal,” both on the American political spectrum and on the academic/activist one where “liberal” is often constituted as a kind of false consciousness. They don’t see things that way, though. My mom is as much of a geek as me, and she more or less actually believes in the Force. She doesn’t like Star Wars that much, because of the Wars part — violence bugs her. She left a promising academic career in cognitive science because the funding for her research was clearly coming from military sources with the intent to put it to military applications. My father, conversely, is an ex-Marine who viewed himself as “conservative” until the meaning of that word shifted so overwhelmingly in the George W. Bush era. Both of them, therefore, valued the bourgeoise liberal concept of “perspective” when it came to morality.
This is an essay about Star Wars, so let me just cut straight to the chase: my parents felt like Obi-Wan at his most philosophical. They wanted me to take what Obi-Wan said when justifying his lie to Luke about his parentage to heart, and apply to not only Darth Vader, but the whole of the Empire. This logic later led to my parents actually encouraging me to get the video game TIE Fighter in addition to X-Wing, because it was important to humanize the “bad guys.” Then, we got three whole movies of nothing but trying and failing to humanize a bad guy. And that seemed like it would be it — geeks like me moved on to seemingly greener (but poisoned) pastures like Firefly/Serenity or the admirable yet massively flawed Battlestar Galactica reboot. Until one day, Disney offered a sum of money that would bribe even God himself to recalcitrant auteur George Lucas, and suddenly, we were going to get more Star Wars.
Now,I had consumed the expanded universe, the world of novels and video games and comics that had grown up around the six Star Wars movies that existed then. I was disappointed to hear that all of that, including my beloved Knights of the Old Republic franchise — more on those video games in a second — would become “non-canon,” franchise speak for “that totally never happened, bro.” But I would get new Star Wars movies. I had been wrong that day so long ago, aged seventeen, when I sat in the theater and thought “this crappy movie is going to be the last time I see Star Wars on the big screen.”
I had been a senior in high school then. I was an assistant professor in my first year when I walked into The Force Awakens, an interesting hodge-podge of fan service (and make no mistake, every Star Wars film is fan service, with the amount of fanservice increasing with each new release as if it were a bitcoin being mined and the hash calculations were chainmail bikinis) directed by J.J. Abrams. The part that most engaged me was its indirect reference to the Expanded Universe and specifically to the character of Darth Revan from Knights of the Old Republic. I said there would be spoilers — you probably assumed I just meant for the movie that came out yesterday, but actually, the 15 year old video game is on the block too. So, in Knights of the Old Republic, Darth Revan is you. You don’t know this — you find it out at a pivotal moment obviously evoking the “I am your father” scene, when you confront a Sith Lord who you realize to your presumed horror is not just anyone, but your former apprentice in evil! It’s all very Fight Club with less spurned masculinity. J.J. Abrams, in The Force Awakens, took both the visual aesthetic and the Fight Club nature of Revan and placed him into Han Solo’s wayward son, Kylo Ren. You all know how it went — Snape kills Dumbledore, and wow, did that Snape seriously look like Snape.
That brings us to the intersection of what I wanted to see happen, and what I see in the world. A thing about me is that I’m autistic — that’s the kind of insult alt-right assholes sling at me, but it’s also true. I find the world weird and confusing, and I understand it best with familiar references. So right now, my world is Star Wars. That doesn’t mean I think lightsabers or the Force are real — it means that I see the same fundamental conflicts at work there.
Full disclosure, I also have a massive crush on Adam Driver/Kylo Ren/the specific case of Driver playing Ren. I wanted really badly for him and Rey to go all Fifty Shades on the Eclipse (Supreme Leader Snoke’s command ship), even though I knew the majority of my Twitter timeline would be up in arms about gender roles and what this says about men and women if that happened. More to the point though, on some level, I knew, in the same way that Luke Skywalker knew who his father really was, that Kylo Ren as a lovable romantic hero who just happened to stab kids sometimes would be morally abhorrent and also a betrayal of the character, a man whose ambition is very much actually “I want to kill innocent people and look really cool doing it.” (That doesn’t mean Ren is devoid of feeling or love for other people — he loves his mom, his dad (who he killed), and Rey, and the romantic tension did happen. The relationship doesn’t, on account of him not agreeing to not murder all of her friends.)
Kylo Ren is a Nazi. Let’s just get that out of the way. In film, I believe firmly that you have to take outside context into consideration, especially when it’s a franchise so grounded in references to other franchises, and directed by an auteur enmeshed in Hollywood’s power structures. Hollywood made a huge amount of money making (justified, useful, good) propaganda about how we should kill Nazis, back when we were legally in a state of war with them. Even though we literally started hiring Nazis the same year the second World War ended, our entertainment industry, part of and complicit with Empire (the real thing) as it is, has never given up on hating Nazis. Even movies like Independence Day, which is American jingoism at its most disgusting and also most sickeningly seductive, present American Empire as the justified, heroic, humane alternative to what amounts to Naziism (“we’re not fighting against tyranny, or oppression. We’re fighting to live on. We’re fighting to survive!”)
The First Order doesn’t perpetuate the Holocaust. Star Wars seems to ask us to suspend our disbelief and assume that racial groups are of no consequence (being superseded by species), even though racial groups corresponding to Earth geography obviously exist since it’s a series with live, human actors from Earth. The First Order, according to canon fiction outside the films, follows the Empire in perpetuating a genocide against aliens — you know, space aliens. I’m not here to compare Jews (or Roma, or queer people, etc.) to space aliens. So it’s a different thing.
But these are guys who blow up fucking planets. The fact that one of them is kinda femme and sad and really charming when he has you tied up for interrogation doesn’t change the fact that, 1) we shouldn’t date Nazis, and 2) honestly, Kylo Ren and all of his friends are shit. Not just morally, but… cosmically. Kylo Ren goes on and on about an eschatalogical expectation of purging literally everything about tradition and the past, clearly trying to move past his (very real and very legit, involving people trying to stab him to death while he was a kid) trauma and betrayal. It’s genuinely heartbreaking when he begs Rey to join him, but instead they fight. But it had to happen, and the deeper element to the heartbreak is that even if Rey had joined him, even if they had remorselessly slaughtered Luke and Leia and crushed the Rebellion, their eschatology would leave them with boring old fascism and a bunch of evil spaceships based on 2000-year-old designs.
Rey leaves Ren behind, severs her deep emotional tie with him, not primarily because he’s evil, but because she’s taking his advice — let the past die, kill it if you have to. But don’t die chasing after it to kill it. That is the way of the shitty space edgelord Nazi. Instead, Rey rejects the entirety of Jedi orthodoxy and follows Ren’s advice to leave behind Luke and the Jedi. Luke agrees with her, and pretty much literally goes quiet into that good night after a Matrix-derived stunt-gasm. The payoff of all this is that my parents taught me wrong: it’s not, really, meritorious to empathize with the Nazis. Or if you do, only do it far enough to help destroy them (yeah, Ender’s Game, I went there).
“Don’t kill what you hate. Protect what you love,” says Rose, the new love interest introduced for Finn in a (not lethal, but oww) slap in the face to the hopes of Poe/Finn shippers. That’s the overall message Rian Johnson is sending, and honestly, as our lives start to look more and more like a Republic fleet under siege, slowly losing everyone one by one… it may be our only hope.
Eleanor A. Lockhart holds a doctorate in communication from Texas A&M University, but is currently on unpaid medical leave from her position as an assistant professor due to PTSD and executive function disorder. If you’d like to help her continue to examine the gaps between the light and dark side, or just survive long enough to find out if Kylo Ren takes his shirt off again in Episode IX, donations to her Patreon or her Ko-Fi are deeply appreciated. May the Force be with you. (She’s a nerd.)
