Outside Your Heaven

The Revolution Is Not About You: Why The Last Jedi Is The Greatest Star Wars Movie

Posted: 17 Apr 2019 11:48 AM PDT

At this point I feel pretty firm in my view that The Last Jedi is the best Star Wars film. When I first saw it I liked it, but the way certain sections of the fan base have responded to it over the past year and a half has pushed me to see it as a great piece of pop art, a real political barometer for our times. It drilled a hole right through the heart of the zeitgeist and hit a nerve so raw a lot of people couldn't handle it. It's a socialist* Star Wars film. It de-centers the Campbellian individualism of the saga at every opportunity and reshapes the it around a collective struggle with a desperate beating heart. Why do you think it's so red?

It's impossible to talk about the movie at this point without talking about the backlash. I find this frustrating as a cinephile because it is one the best reviewed movies in the franchise among film lovers/critics, i.e. people whose love of storytelling, good writing, and cinema exceeds their love of Star Wars. I am one of these people. Yes, I grew up with Star Wars. I had all the toys, saw the original movies a billion times on VHS in the 80s, memorized all their dialogue. But I also give a shit about film as an art form. Movies are not just superheroes and blockbusters to me. I'm a real nerd. And a real cinephile. You can be both.

My initial response to The Last Jedi was to think it was a daring if uneven piece of work. Walking out of the theater my main impression was that it was like a great episode of Battlestar Galactica, borrowing that show's sharp character focus and world building acumen in ways the benefited Star Wars greatly. I loved how character-driven it was, how it opened up the Star Wars universe by addressing the economic and social causes of war, how conflicted it seemed about the legacy of Star Wars in general. My fan-brain hit speed bumps when Luke tossed away the lightsaber or when Snoke got sliced in half mid-way through the film, but by the end it was clear all these choices were purposeful and served the story, which is what my cinephile-brain looks for. My only genuine criticism upon first viewing was pacing. I felt it lacked the economy and razor focus of The Force Awakens, and while the film didn't exactly seem confused about who its protagonists were, it did feel pulled in several directions, towards giving minor character more screen time than you'd expect and giving major characters less.

It wasn't until I saw the film a second time that I really began to see what it was doing, how all its pieces fit, how its eccentricities and flourishes were more purposeful than I originally thought. I now see it as an extremely tight movie. It's ambitious and sprawling, which makes it a bigger beast than The Force Awakens, and closer to larger scope, multi-thread epics like Lord of the Rings. I can't imagine taking anything out because all the parts so carefully reinforce each other. The underlying logic of The Last Jedi -- and this is the main thing I missed the first time -- is that the storytelling is collectivist rather than individualist.

This is socialist storytelling. When we get an entire sequence in the opening set piece that focuses on a random bomber pilot -- a character we don't know, a nobody, who sacrifices herself to take down an enemy flagship -- it's not writer/director Rian Johnson being sloppy or excessive. It's the film telling us that everyone, not just the so-called main characters, are important. It's telling us that traditional heroics, like those that Poe indulges in that kicks off the bombing run, have human cost we normally never see. But we're going to see it in this movie. And yes, it's going to come at the expense of seeing Luke Skywalker be a badass. It's going to come at the expense of all the men in the film being badasses, because this is a movie where the women are all better socialists than the men, and the story is about these women trying to get that through their thick fucking skulls before the fascists wipe us all out.

Every narrative choice in The Last Jedi makes sense when viewed through this lens. And I don't mean kinda makes sense; I mean makes clear, careful, considered sense. The Poe/Holdo/Leia plot thread makes sense this way. The Finn/Rose/DJ plot thread makes sense this way. And the Rey/Kylo/Luke plot thread makes sense this way. They can all be boiled down to women teaching men that the revolution isn't all about them. Because only being able to see yourself as the hero of your own story, rather than an ally in someone else's, is how the fascists win.

The Poe/Holdo/Leia one is the most obvious. It's about Poe being taught that leadership is about what's best for everyone under your command, not gambling their lives on your own super awesome plan just because you think it's super awesome. Leia desperately wants him to learn this, which is why she demotes him for his costly bombing run but also forgives him after he mutinies. Carry Fisher had a hand in writing her own dialogue in this movie, and she's gone on record saying that part of Leia's motivation here is to reform someone who reminds her of Han, a brash badboy who could be a great asset to the cause if he wasn't such a grandstanding dick. The fact that Poe's mentoring gets off-loaded onto her disciple Holdo after she's wounded is what gives this whole plot its tension: Holdo has neither the patience nor the personal drive to reform Poe that Leia has, which is how this story becomes about Leia's two students (in contrast to Lukes two students) failing to find common ground. Poe mutinies because he imagines he understands what Leia would want better than Holdo does, until finally Leia recovers and smacks some sense into him, pointing out that Holdo's a real hero because she's more interested in minimizing loss of life than proving to everyone how right she is.

The Finn/Rose/DJ plot is a bit less obvious. It's about Finn being taught to believe in a cause that's bigger than himself. While not selfish exactly, he isn't a committed revolutionary -- he cares mostly about his friends. He ran away from the fascists in the first film when he couldn't stand it anymore, and he tries to run away from the Resistance in this film when it looks like they might lose. Of course Rose, a lowly mechanic and sister to the woman who died in the bombing run -- another "nobody" -- stops him, mainly to process her bitter disappointment that he isn't the hero she thought he was. The story of his heroics inspired her and her sister, and Rose spends the rest of the film trying to shape Finn into a hero worthy of her sister's memory, taking him on an odyssey of class consciousness that springs from her lived experience as a working class cog in a capitalist war machine. Along the way they meet DJ, the libertarian thief who serves as a foil to Rose's revolutionary idealism, who insists that the only reason the (star) wars keep happening is because its good business. Finn resists DJ's cynicism, embraces his identity as an antifa revolutionary, but gets schooled by Rose one more time when, in a fit of ideological rage, he attempts a suicide run that would do nothing except provide him with catharsis. Rose stops him and is like you fucking idiot, the revolution is not about you!

The Rey/Kylo/Luke thread is the least obvious, though it provides the thematic glue that ties all the stories together. It's about Luke realizing he can make a difference, even if legends are bullshit, and that in fact bullshit might be his only real superpower. Rey is really the protagonist of this segment, and it's clear she imagines she's on her own hero's journey to become a Jedi, which is why she's so taken aback when Luke constantly shuts her down. Luke, after the mistakes he's made, has come to the correct but incomplete conclusion that "heroes" like him, like the Jedi Order, keep fucking things up and making the galaxy worse. Rey keeps telling him he's wrong, partially out of ideological commitment to the Resistance but mainly, deep down, because she feels lost and wants to believe being a Jedi is proof that she's special. When Kylo tells her that her parents were nobody it cuts right to her core: she thought she could see herself as the hero who could single-handledly turn Kylo, single-handledly win the war like Luke did, but she was wrong. That's why Luke didn't want to teach her, because he knew she was fixated on that narrative. Even though Rey abandons Luke when he refuses to participate in her story she does soften his cynicism, which is what ultimately leads to his epiphany: that refusing to participate is still a way of thinking that the revolution is all about him. He thought that because he couldn't live up to his legend he had no value, when in fact the real value of his legend is to inspire other people to live up to it. This is why he puts on the ultimate show at the end, giving the galaxy the revolutionary icon it needs, and it's also why it's so important thematically that he isn't really there: the Luke everyone sees isn't real. It's him playing to what people want to believe about him, that he's super human. It's all a trick. He beats the fascists by turning himself into propaganda. He accepts his fate as a Che Guevara t-shirt. That's why Leia says, in the film's final moments, they have everything they need to rebuild the rebellion from nothing, and that's why the movie ends with poor slave kids telling stories about Luke and imaging their brooms are lightsabers they can beat their capitalist slave masters with. The revolution has begun.

Obvious, right?

In a way, it is. Like any film with carefully crafted callbacks and thematic echoes, its pretty easy to read once you unpack all these things. Not that I think Rian Johnson necessarily thought of his film as socialist -- that is my chosen word for what he's doing here -- but it's clearly no accident that the film brings up class, war capitalism, and how conflicting notions of heroism either foil or enhance our ability to interrupt those systems. Yet it retains nuance and ambiguity and invites you to interpret what it might be specifically saying about these things. Some of the pieces might be obvious ("war is bad. duh."), but the larger thematic, poetic, ideological puzzle they fit into is not. That's what makes it a great piece of pop art, a big commercial movie that has something to say but invites your participation.

I haven't even talked here about all the other things the film does that make me love it: how beautifully shot it is, how its portrayal of space combat is deeply coherent and thrilling even by saga standards, how it uses a wide range of filmmaking techniques -- cross-cutting, slow-motion, shifting depth-of-field, extreme close-ups -- to tell its story, how sharply drawn all its bit characters are, how well its iconic moments land, and for giving us the greatest sequence in the history of Star Wars, when the Altman-esque threads of fate cross in that exquisite montage that ends in Laura Dern ripping the Universe in half. As filmmaking it's thrilling, but it also feeds back into the socialist stance the film takes towards heroic agency. None of these people can fully grasp how their actions have affected each other, so only we the audience know how they are all part of the same butterfly effect in that moment. It's like Cradle Will Rock in space.

The Last Jedi is firing on so many cylinders here, as well as repositioning Star Wars at the center of the current political zeitgeist, that a minor pacing issue here or a momentary dip into on-the-nose dialogue there barely register as flaws.** This is for me what puts it over the original Star Wars and even Empire Strikes Back. If you account for historical significance, for the boundaries in filmmaking those films broke, I'd still probably put The Last Jedi after them. But if we're talking just as films, as pieces of art with something to say judged on how creative, layered, and rich they are in saying it, no other Star Wars film comes close to The Last Jedi.

A special thanks to my partner in life and cinema Clara for being a part of many of these insights, specifically the one about how the film undercuts individuality.

NEXT TIME: I dig into the backlash the film has faced, and continues to face almost daily, since its release, its causes, and what it says about fandom at this historical moment.

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* My use of the term "socialist" here is both careful and cheeky. I'm extremely aware of the term's history and its many, sometimes contradictory, meanings. I'm using it here because it's currently being reclaimed in U.S. politics, and our political spectrum is so utterly fucked that "socialist" has become cultural shorthand for simply giving a shit about other people at all. There is an attempt here to rewind the term to its pre-Stalinist/Leninist connotations. I could have said just "collectivist", but that doesn't have the political bite "socialist" does, nor would it have reflected the film's critique of capitalism. And yes, I'm well aware that The Last Jedi is the product of capitalism, and some purists say that means it can't be anti-capitalist and/or socialist. To that I say there is a long history of works that critique capitalism being produced within capitalism, representing a wide spectrum of compromise. To me The Last Jedi isn't as socialist as early Soviet cinema, though it's easily as socialist as any of Charlie Chaplin's Hollywood output.

** On the whole The Last Jedi is an extremely well-written film. The Canto Bight sequence, while the thematic and ideological centerpiece of the movie, is the one area that feels slightly under cooked to me. While I love that Rose schools Finn, the script stops just short of saying "War profiteering is bad!" Also the chase could have been a little shorter, and the humor doesn't land quite as well as the rest of the movie. It feels like it was maybe one draft away from being as pitch perfect as the rest, though the way it ends -- with Finn's thwarted suicide bombing -- feels just as strong.

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