The Last Jedi as Commentary on Itself

Luke:    I'm ending all of this: the tree, the texts, the Jedi. I'm going to burn it all down.

Yoda:    Ah, Skywalker, missed you have I.

Luke:    So it is time for the Jedi Order to end.

Yoda:    Time it is for you to look past a pile of old books, hmm?

Luke:    The sacred Jedi texts?

Yoda:    Oh, read them, have you? Page-turners they were not. Yes, yes, yes, wisdom they held, but that library contained nothing that the girl Rey does not already possess.

The Last Jedi (2017)

All right, I'm going to say it: The Last Jedi is my favourite Star Wars film.¹

 

Crikey, just look at how awesome this Last Jedi fanart is! Thanks to the talented HugoVRB at newgrounds.com.

By that I don't mean that I believe it’s objectively the best one, only that it was the one I enjoyed the most when I saw it, but I gather that that’s still something of a controversial opinion to hold. And I gather also - forgive me for the impending sweeping generalisation - that a primary reason why that’s something of a controversial opinion to hold, is that an awful lot of die-hard fans felt that The Last Jedi was simply too dissimilar to its predecessors. It did too many unexpected things. It didn’t feel like a ‘proper’ Star Wars film. “This is not going to go the way you think,” promised Luke in the trailer, and that promise was certainly kept.²

Well, it's actually exactly that characteristic that’s also a primary reason why I like it so much, but it was only recently that it occurred to me quite how that followed. Here’s what I think: it's possible to read (or ‘watch’?) The Last Jedi as commenting on its own nonconformity within the Star Wars canon. The film itself kind of anticipates fans’ negative reaction to that nonconformity, confronts them, and articulates its defence of what it does. I think it does this primarily through the portrayals of Rey, Luke, and Kylo Ren: each of them can be read as illustrating a particular possible fan mindset or reaction.

First off, consider Rey. Rey’s quite a lot like me: she’s a new fan, with little to no background in the Star Wars fandom. For her, things basically began with The Force Awakens, and though she’s familiar enough with the stories that came before to not be totally clueless about what’s going on now, her knowledge of the finer points of lore is shaky at best. Ask her for a definition of the Force, and she’ll come out with something like, “It’s a power that Jedi have that lets them control people and make things float.” Still, she loves the story, she does, and she’s thrilled that she can now be there and involved, as she wasn’t before, while new chapters are unfolding.

Next, consider Luke. Luke’s old guard: he grew up with the original trilogy and, in a way, those films made him. He knows the canon better than anybody: to him, it’s close enough to sacred, and he devotes himself to knowing and preserving it just as it is. This is the kind of guy who can recite every line of dialogue, name every minor character, and outline the pros and cons of a dozen possible solutions to any plot hole you think you might have found - and he’s the kind of guy who makes liking Star Wars intimidating. He is witheringly condescending about Rey’s admittedly poor attempt to describe the Force, for example: “Impressive. Every word in that sentence was wrong.” He loves the story, but specifically he loves the canon that already exists, and doesn’t see room for any new and different manifestations of the Star Wars story. The analogy breaks apart slightly in that this kind of fan probably does want new films to come out, whereas Luke doesn’t want any new Jedi to be trained, but functionally, the result is the same: the only new film the Luke-type fan will be happy with is one that deliberately panders to his fondness for the originals - one that’s hopelessly derivative and crammed full of obscure references - which would sentence the kind of love of Star Wars he had, where the story was his as it happened, to die with his generation.

Finally, consider Kylo Ren. Kylo Ren’s a bit different in that he doesn’t stand for the fan reaction such as what the fans think they’re reacting against. He’s a foil, a representative of what some might accuse The Last Jedi of doing, namely showing no proper regard for its heritage in the form of the previous films. “The Empire, your parents, the Resistance, the Sith, the Jedi,” he says. “Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to. That’s the only way to become what you are meant to be.” In portraying this attitude as an unambiguously Bad Thing, The Last Jedi declares that that’s not what it’s trying to do itself. Its subverting certain conventions of how one would expect a Star Wars film to go is not to be interpreted as a tearing down of what Star Wars fundamentally is. At the same time, though, there’s an acknowledgement that it’s probably time to put some of the clichés to bed. The brilliantly dramatic moment when Kylo Ren killed Snoke instead of Rey is symbolic of this:³ it’s exactly the sort of unexpected happening that so characterised the film, but you know, haven’t we had rather enough of slimy-looking supreme villains sitting robed on thrones and ordering their subordinates about in an archaically grand and condescending fashion? That particular death was laudable not just morally within the world of the story, but also from an external storywriting point of view. Kylo Ren’s subsequent desire to send everything else from the first Star Wars films the same way as Snoke, though – “It’s time to let old things die: Snoke, Skywalker, the Sith, the Jedi, the rebels” – is abhorrent, again, not just morally within the world of the story, but also from an external storywriting point of view: those are the foundations on which the thing was built and it can’t be severed from them. What The Last Jedi is advocating here, then, is discernment; it’s advocating keeping what’s good and shedding what isn’t. That’s the attitude it takes to its predecessors, and it’s also, therefore, the attitude it permits its audience to take towards it. One ought not to feel obliged to like every single aspect of the film: pointing out bits you think ought to be got rid of is allowed, or commendable, even, because if the fans were to just unconditionally endorse every directorial decision, there’d be nothing to hold the filmmakers to account, and stop them churning out an endless procession of increasingly awful episodes. Equally, there’s no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater: just because a few aspects of The Last Jedi may have annoyed you, that’s no reason to condemn the whole thing to the scrapheap.

So that’s what we learn about how to handle canon from Kylo Ren. What we learn from Luke, meanwhile, is the importance of being willing to accept the new and different. The crucial thing is not that the sacred texts should be preserved - inert, untouched, and never reapplied or reinterpreted - but that the essence of what they’re about should continue to live and thrive.⁴ That’s why it doesn’t matter that they get comprehensively frazzled to a crisp late on in the film, as per my opening quotation: not because their contents isn’t valuable, but because the way its value takes effect is by being employed by people like Rey to fight evil in the real world. Luke isn’t killing the past, the way Kylo Ren wanted to; he’s only killing relics of it, and what really matters is thus set free to live on. Star Wars won’t stay dynamic and brilliant if it only ever tells the exact same story over and over again. And yes, with new blood and new ideas comes the risk of making some pretty hefty mistakes, but it’s that or let the thing die out altogether, so it seems fair to say the risk is worth it.

Finally, from Rey, we learn the value of learning and appreciating preexisting lore as well as focussing on present developments, and that participation in all these aspects of Star Wars culture is open to anyone. Rey’s lack of relevant background is no obstacle to her playing a vital role in the story, but she has to be trained before she can play that role to the fullest extent. Likewise, new fans like myself will get more out of the films that we’re watching as they come out, if we take the trouble to properly familiarise ourselves with the lore that’s already been written. The Last Jedi knows that what it’s doing is weird and unexpected, but it doesn’t do that in order to kill the past: it does it to put the same old heart into a new tale, and so allow a new generation of fans to have the same joy of owning the story that their predecessors did with the originals. That’s a massive gift to a newbie like me, a massive reassurance that Star Wars has room for the new: room for future episodes that don't overrely on previous ones, and room for fans without a background in the fandom. It's an encouragement that the previous canon is something I can meaningfully engage with - I'm not doomed to never really get it just because I wasn’t there the first time around - but at the same time, it's OK that my heart's really in the new stuff, the now stuff.

And so, I suggest, The Last Jedi kind of functions as a commentary on itself. It recognises its own nonconformity, and it makes its apology: look, it says, I’m not trying to burn down everything that went before - I condemn any attempt to do that - and in fact I have massive respect for the preexisting canon and I think we should learn and appreciate it, but equally, it’s no good being so set on preserving it exactly as it is that we lock newcomers out of properly engaging with the story and end up producing stuff that’s simply boring - whatever the cinematic equivalent of ‘not a page-turner’ is. You’ve got to strike the balance, you know? After all, this is Star Wars we’re talking about: balance is kind of a pretty big deal.

Footnotes

¹ I also wrote about the film shortly after it came out – see ‘Plan B’ under January of this year in the box on the right – but apparently the bit of my subconscious that devises blog posts took a whole year to get this one well-formed enough for it to be successfully pitched to my conscious.

² I.e. this trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0CbN8sfihY.

³ I absolutely love this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyIPvIjVMYo.

⁴ There’s also an analogy here about how to treat the scriptures, as in, don’t just read the word, do what it says: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=james+1&version=ESVUK. Or similarly, think of the scribes and Pharisees, who knew their Law and Prophets inside out, but were neglecting the weighty matters thereof, to the point where they didn’t recognise the very Word of God when he was standing right in front of them.