This post is not a review of the latest Star Wars
movie. I may (or may not) do this in
a future post, but for now, I will just point out that I liked it
enough to want to watch it a second time. In this post, I just want to discuss one point about this film that, in my humble opinion, shows us what a
good director Rian Johnson is.
Supreme Leader Snoke |
Now, there has been a lot of angst in geekdom over the early death of Supreme Leader Snoke, just over halfway through the second film of the intended trilogy. Too soon, scream the fanbois. Why introduce the character at all, if he is only to be extinguished without any backstory?
The simple answer, of course, is that he simply does not fit
into the story that Mr. Johnson was wanting to tell. But there is a deeper,
more important point to his somewhat premature death than just wanting to make
Kylo Ren the central villain of the trilogy, and this is a theme that is
constantly returned to throughout the film.
This theme, of course, is that it is not just the great and
the good who matter. History is made, not only by the emperors and the knights,
but also by the little people. As Luke Skywalker, the man who is a legend in
his own time, says to his prospective apprentice, it would be vanity to imagine
that the Force belongs to the Jedi, or that for hope to be reborn, it is
necessary for the Jedi Order to be re-established. “You don’t need me,” he growls,
and he is right. As long as there are nobodies like Rey and the little stable
boy on Canto Bight who looks to the stars at the end of the film to carry on
the fight, there is no need for the Skywalkers and the Solos, because heroism
and courage are not the exclusive property of a chosen few but belong to all of
us.
So why kill Snoke?
Because his early death was the most efficient (and
dramatically satisfying) way of making this point to the audience.
There was a significant amount of discomfort in geekdom when
The Force Awakens first came out, and
it became apparent that the old Empire had never really gone away. What
nonsense! screamed the pimple-scarred. We all know that our heroes killed the
Emperor and destroyed the Empire, so why do we have a carbon-copy of it sailing
around in the same Star Destroyers and flying the same TIE fighters? Is this
the best that JJ Abrams could do, just recycle the past in a different package?
Or rather, the same package, but just with slightly different lettering?
And the answer to that, of course, is that the Empire was
never destroyed. All that we saw in Return
of the Jedi was that the Emperor was killed, along with his right-hand man.
We simply assumed that the Empire must have been destroyed because we were
trapped in the ‘chosen few’ paradigm presented by the original trilogy. Destroy
Palpatine and Vader, and balance will be restored to the galaxy, and everyone
will live happily ever after.
This is the central complaint that many fanbois have about
both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. That no such thing ever
happened. Han and Leia did not get married and live happily ever after like a
stereotypical fairy-tale couple. Luke did not mature into a wise and powerful
Jedi master. And the Empire was never destroyed.
Unlike Sauron and his Nazgul in The Lord of the Rings, it did not just vanish into thin air because
the central character of its trilogy
had accomplished his quest. It simply picked up the pieces, regrouped its
forces, and reinvented itself. As the Roman Republic did after the assassination
of Julius Caesar, when it reinvented itself as the Principate. And as the
Principate did later on, when it reinvented itself as the Dominate after the
Crisis of the Third Century. In other words, our Empire (the Star Wars one) simply did what any
empire worth its salt would have done.
This is where Mr. Johnson’s brilliance as a director shines
through. He does not (as a lesser director might) use the clumsy device of a narrator to explain this to his
audience. He does not tell us anything. He shows
us. The demise of Snoke does not mean that the polity that he rules must end
with him. Assuming that it would is where we were going wrong, until Mr.
Johnson shows us otherwise. Just as we were wrong to assume that the Empire was
destroyed because Palpatine was killed in Return
of the Jedi, we were also wrong to imagine that if Luke Skywalker were to
return to the fray and defeat Snoke, the First Order would also be destroyed.
No one man (or woman) can
achieve this alone. No one being, whether human or alien, has the capacity to
overcome evil by his or her (or its) efforts alone.
When Snoke dies, his place is simply taken by his
apprentice. Mr. Johnson takes great care not to make this happen immediately or
automatically, so as not to give his audience the idea that this is simply a
case of the chosen apprentice taking his rightful place at the helm. Instead,
we are treated to that brief delicious moment of watching General Hux toy with
the idea of seizing power for himself, only to back down when Kylo Ren begins
to wake up. And we understand, almost immediately, and without having to be
told. We understand what probably happened all over the galaxy when Palpatine
and Vader were killed at the end of Return
of the Jedi, and why the Empire was not destroyed but simply reinvented
itself. But more importantly, we also understand why it is that Luke does not want to return to the fray.
Because in his wisdom, born perhaps of years of study and reflection,
but almost certainly also from the pain of having to live with the knowledge of his own
ultimate failure, he understands that the story of this struggle is not about him. Nor can it be about any one other chosen person, which is why he
chooses to reject Rey.
In contrast to the story of the original Star Wars trilogy,
the story of this struggle is not about
a Chosen One, or a chosen Few. This story, the story that Mr. Johnson has
chosen to tell, and which I hope will continue to be told in Episode IX, is
about the little people, the small folk. It is about the Biggses and the
Porkinses, who get blown away after thirty-five seconds of screen time and two
lines of dialogue. It is about the Rose Ticos who are in awe of the ‘heroes’ of
the Resistance, and the Nien Nunbs whose utterings are incomprehensible to the
audience. It is about the stable boys and stable girls of Canto Bight. And it has to be, because if it is not, then the First
Order, like the Empire before it, will survive in another form.
This then, is
why Snoke has to die so early. Because the audience must be
told, one way or the other, that this is not just a rehash of the original
trilogy but a very different story. The brilliance and talent of Rian Johnson
is that he tell us all this in the most effective way possible, which is not
by actually saying it to us (either by the use of a narrator within the film, or in
an interview without) but by showing it to us as part of the dramatic action of the
film itself.
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