Plan B

“Hope is like the sun. If you only believe in it when you see it, you’ll never make it through the night.”

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)

Confession time: I didn’t see any of the Star Wars films until I was eighteen years old.

 

Check out this absolutely gorgeous stained-glass rendering of A New Hope by the very talented GeneralBloodrain at newgrounds.com.

At that point, a friend of mine, who was exactly as outraged by my sorry ignorance as I anticipate some of you are upon having read that last sentence, took it upon herself to fit me for participation in human civilisation by sitting me down in front of episodes four, five, and six. And I enjoyed them, I did, but there nevertheless remained in me a firm sense that even if I were to watch them twenty times over, even if I were to familiarise myself with every detail of their lore, even if I were to reach a point where I understood even the obscurest meme relating to their content, they could never be truly mine. Other people had grown up with them where I hadn’t, and that didn’t mean I couldn’t be a fan, but it did mean I couldn’t claim a heart-and-soul stake in them, the way I can in Harry Potter and relaunched Doctor Who and Disney and W.I.T.C.H. and so forth. I could never own Star Wars the way other people could.

And then came The Force Awakens, and everything changed.

These new instalments of the franchise – these can be mine now. I can be on tenterhooks viewing them for the first time together with the rest of the world,¹ instead of knowing all the big spoilers before I witness them. I can be part of the conversation as it unfolds, instead of only retrospectively realising the context of oft-repeated references. I haven’t missed the party; I just arrived a little late, and there’s plenty more fun to be had before the end of the night.

On which note, please do go and see The Last Jedi before you read the rest of this post. In fact, the analogy I draw from it is so stunningly obvious anyway that you probably won’t have to bother with the latter, and it’s such a phenomenally good film that I would feel morally compromised if you were to exploit my weekly ramblings to spoil it for yourself. Well. Maybe that’s a bit strong. But still. Off you pop. Go on.

All right, now that we can speak freely, can I kick off by saying, how cool is Vice Admiral Holdo? And I don’t just mean the snazzy purple hair, either. Holdo stepped up to lead in the middle of a gargantuan crisis; devised a very clever plan and stuck to it; was calm and collected and determinedly, steadily hopeful even as the already-desperate situation deteriorated; successfully put down a mutiny; willingly, uncomplainingly chose to sacrifice herself for the sake of saving her comrades; and even right at the end conceived of and executed one more brilliant plan to protect them. (The Resistance cruiser smashing through the First Order’s flagship at lightspeed was definitely one of my favourite moments, against, it has to be said, some stiff competition.)

But of course, I didn’t feel that way about her all the way through the film. I’m usually pretty easily led by ostensible character portrayals, and this was no exception: as Poe grew increasingly suspicious of Holdo’s intentions, so did I. Just like him, I turned my nose up at her weak, unspectacular way of doing things. I didn’t trust her to do what was best for the people for whom she was responsible. I mentally cheered on the mutiny that sought to depose her. I pinned my hopes on Plan B – Finn and Rose’s attempt to disable the First Order’s lightspeed tracker.

I ended up feeling rather sheepish.

But the worst of it was, Plan B didn’t just fail to work: it also punched a serious hole through Plan A. If Finn and Rose hadn’t hired an unscrupulous codebreaker and entered the First Order’s flagship, said unscrupulous codebreaker would have had no opportunity to betray the details of Plan A to the enemy. The First Order would never have scanned for smaller ships, never have shot any of them down, never have followed them to the abandoned base on Crait. Granted, it would have been a shorter and less thrilling film, but, you know, working from within the world of the story, a lot of lives would have been saved. A lot of lives.

It wasn’t that Poe, Finn, and Rose disagreed with Holdo about the desirable end-goal: both parties were trying to protect the Resistance from being destroyed by the First Order. It was that they looked at the situation in front of them and couldn’t see how what Holdo appeared to be doing (and not doing) stood any chance of achieving that end-goal. They wanted what she wanted, but they didn’t trust her to make it happen, and so they devised their own alternative means of doing so. They didn’t trust that Plan A would work, so they decided to try a Plan B.

Or, to use other terms, they didn’t trust that Isaac would come, so they decided to produce an Ishmael.

When God told Abram that he would have as many descendants as he could see stars in the sky, Abram believed him. He was on board with that, as an end-goal. If God was going to make that happen, brilliant. But then time passed – nearly ten years of it, if I’ve understood the chronology rightly – and it’s easy to see how Abram and Sarai started to think that Plan A wasn’t going to work. God hadn’t indicated any further details as to how he was going to achieve the end-goal – “maintain current course” – and they were surely running out of time. They wanted what God wanted, but they didn’t trust him to make it happen, and so they devised their own alternative means of doing so. Sarai told Abram to sleep with her servant Hagar, and Ishmael was born.²

 

A whole lot of stars. This was taken in Arizona, apparently.

But Sarai and Abram’s Plan B wasn’t going to work, any more than Finn and Rose’s did: Ishmael was a child of flesh not promise, and on that account, though God blessed him, he wouldn’t – couldn’t – fulfil his promises through him.³ After all that, they ended up reverting to Plan A anyway. It turned out, funnily enough, that God did actually know what he was doing, even though Abram and Sarai hadn’t seen as much evidence of that as they would have liked.

Vice Admiral Holdo, as it turned out, knew what she was doing, but Poe hadn’t seen as much evidence of that as he would have liked, so he and his friends devised a Plan B. But more than that, he orchestrated a mutiny. He was on board with his leader’s end-goal, but he didn’t trust her methods to achieve it, so he decided to put himself in charge instead, and run things according to his own methods.

Or, to use other terms, he pulled a Jeroboam. (Yep, double whammy of Biblical analogies today.)

When God told Jeroboam that he and his line would (on condition of obedience) be established as king of the ten northern tribes of Israel, Jeroboam believed him. He was on board with that, as an end-goal. If God was going to make that happen, brilliant. And he duly took over the kingdom. But he didn’t trust that God’s way of doing things would achieve the security of his throne; he worried that if his people went back to Jerusalem, in the now-rival kingdom of Judah, to worship, as God had commanded them,⁴ they would end up transferring their allegiance from him to Judah’s king, Rehoboam. And so he flouted God’s instructions – those which God had told him he must follow in order to achieve the security of his throne – and built sites of worship within his own land.⁵ Golden calves, to be specific, which should ring a rather depressing bell.⁶ He was on board with his leader’s end-goal – that he and his descendants would rule Israel – but he didn’t trust his methods to achieve it, so he decided to put himself in charge instead, and run things according to his own methods. He orchestrated a mutiny against the ruler not just of one spaceship but of the whole wide universe.

The rule of his mutiny, like that of Poe’s, didn’t last very long.⁷ Indeed, Jeroboam’s Plan B – his golden calves – punched a serious hole through Plan A, namely that God would establish his rule. He was on board with God’s end-goal, but what he did to try to achieve it actually dashed any hope of its being achieved, not dissimilarly to how Finn and Rose’s attempt to save the Resistance actually ended up causing the deaths of large numbers of them. Banking on Plan B didn’t just fail to work, as it nothing had happened: it actually did far more harm than good. In Jeroboam’s case, the people of the northern kingdom persisted in his idolatry until they were conquered and exiled by the Assyrians.⁸ Mutinies against leaders who do, as it turns out, know what they’re doing, don’t solve problems so much as cause them.

Still, much as I’m a huge fan of Vice Admiral Holdo, she is, at the end of the day, just another fallible mortal being. As it turned out, she did know what she was doing, but we couldn’t know that for sure the way we can with God. Nothing is beyond his wisdom and foresight, and the righteousness of his decisions is inscrutable: if God has put forward a Plan A, then no Plan B is ever going to be an even slightly decent alternative. On the contrary, it will do far more harm than good.

One variety of Plan B which I think we’re often tempted to bank on in the current cultural climate relates to the issue of how we go about convincing people that following Jesus is a really good idea. We’re on board with God’s end-goal – that the Church with a capital C will increase in number – but we look at the situation in front of us and can’t see how what God appears to be doing (and not doing) stands any chance of achieving that end-goal. Plan A – preach the gospel, no fancy trimmings – doesn’t seem to be doing the job. And so we tone down or dress up the gospel in such fashion as we think might render it more winsome; we obsess over peripheral details of the delivery of the message instead of core components of the substance; we try to bring about God’s promises by means of Ishmaels and golden calves, not trusting his methods but directly contradicting them, and consequently doing far more harm than good.⁹

All the same, the very reason we have to trust God’s Plan A – nothing is beyond his wisdom and foresight and the righteousness of his decisions is inscrutable – is the same reason we can rest in the certainty that all our Plan Bs (or Plans B?) and all our mutinies cannot scupper his ultimate Plan A to make a people for himself. In Holdo’s case, even though her plan was a good one, she, lacking perfect wisdom and righteousness, nevertheless couldn’t prevent the deaths of many of her comrades when factors she hadn’t anticipated came into play. That isn’t a problem God has. The ultimate Plan A stands firm in eternity, just as we were chosen to be holy and blameless before him before the foundation of the world, just as the Lamb was slain before the foundation of the world.¹⁰ Indeed, however we may be guilty of miscommunicating the fact, it remains true that, from eternity past, Jesus willingly, uncomplainingly chose to sacrifice himself for the sake of saving us from every atom of our guilt, despite all the Plan Bs and mutinies by which we have made ourselves guilty. Holdo’s sacrifice of herself was one part of her Plan A; Jesus’ of himself is the very heart of God’s ultimate Plan A.

And with a Plan A like that, why would we ever want a Plan B?

Footnotes

¹ I saw The Last Jedi earlier this week in Grantham, taking advantage of the five-quid flat ticket price offered by the Reel cinema there on Tuesdays and Wednesdays: https://reelcinemas.co.uk/grantham/now/. I love the Reel because it’s small and cute and inexpensive and that’s basically everything I want in a cinema.

² See Genesis 15-16 for the details: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+15&version=ESVUK.

³ I’m looking at Genesis 17, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+17&version=ESVUK, and the end of Galatians 4, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gal+4&version=ESVUK.

⁴ In Deuteronomy 12, to be precise: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+12&version=ESVUK.

⁵ You can find the story in 1 Kings 11-12: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Kings+11&version=ESVUK.

⁶ Namely this one: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+32&version=ESVUK.

⁷ He himself was permitted a twenty-two-year reign, but in recompense for his wrongdoing, his heir Nadab was usurped and his family line annihilated: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Kings+15&version=ESVUK.

⁸ As the scriptures make explicit: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Kings+17&version=ESVUK.

⁹ Here’s a truly hilarious Lutheran Satire sketch along similar lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MP8tTXKzObc.

¹⁰ I here allude to Ephesians 1:4 and Revelation 13:8. The clause translated ‘before the foundation of the world’ in the Revelation verse comes at the end of the sentence, so there has been some disagreement about whether to attach it to ‘the Lamb who was slain’ or to ‘whose name has not been written in the book of life’; the ESV plumps explicitly for the latter, but the former seems to me to have a stronger case as far as syntactical arguments go, simply by virtue of proximity. Maybe the ESV committee’s decision was made with reference to the Ephesians verse. Those among you who read Greek might like to take a look for yourselves: https://www.stepbible.org/?q=version=ESV|version=SBLG|reference=Rev.13.8&options=GVUVNH&display=INTERLEAVED. In any case, God’s ultimate Plan A has clearly been a certainty from eternity past.

In Defence of the Remake

Architect: You see, about a hundred years ago, the global entertainment industry ran completely out of ideas … so we built a time machine to snatch people out of the past … back when everyone was still watching good TV shows and movies … We figured if we kept you isolated and we watched everything you did … we might be able to come up with some kind of new entertainment programming … based on your actions and conversations.

Sam: You mean, like, a reality show?

Architect: No, but that’s a really good idea! I can’t believe we didn’t think of that. You should be a writer – or maybe just a studio executive.

The Strangerhood S1 E16, ‘The Montage Exposition’ (2006)

Remakes: yay or nay?

A picture significantly relevant to the post beyond the fact that it includes part of a cinema? No. A pretty one? Yes. That will do.

I ask because there seems to be an awful lot of them about at the moment, not least at the hand of the talented folks at Disney, who have already produced live-action reimaginings of Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty (under the moniker of villain Maleficent), Cinderella, The Jungle Book, Beauty and the Beast, Pete’s Dragon and probably more I can’t think of, and are set to continue their rampage across the dear-held animated stories of your childhood by subjecting a host of others to the same treatment, among them Mary Poppins, Aladdin, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Mulan, Peter Pan, The Sword in the Stone, Dumbo, The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Pinocchio, One Hundred and One Dalmatians (which will re-emerge as Cruella De Vil), The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh (now featuring a grown-up Christopher Robin), and even that ten-minute scene from Fantasia¹ set to Leopold Stokowski’s adaptation of Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov’s version of Modest Mussorgsky’s tone poem ‘A Night on Bald Mountain’.² And who can blame them? Remaking beloved classics is a peculiarly effective method of persuading the cinemagoing public to part with our cash, at least if the profits made by the aforementioned examples are anything to go by: The Jungle Book, for example, having grossed nearly $1 billion worldwide during its cinema run, remains the thirty-sixth highest-grossing film of all time; Alice in Wonderland managed over $1 billion, making it the highest-grossing film of the year outside North America and the fifth highest-grossing film ever at the time; and Beauty and the Beast did the best of the lot by grossing $1.263 billion worldwide, making it the highest-grossing live-action musical of all time and still the tenth highest-grossing ever film of any genre.³ (That’s plenty enough uses of the word ‘gross’ for one paragraph, methinks.)

Should we despair at such data? Should we mourn what appears to be a loss of innovative thinking in the film industry, the first few slick steps of a slippery slope towards the state of creative desolation described by the Architect in the penultimate episode of The Strangerhood (as quoted above)?⁴ Should it give us cause to lament that many of the most successful films of the past few years have not only been unoriginal in the contents of their storylines, but explicitly, ostentatiously, deliberately so – that they have not only imitated earlier work, but made doing so the whole point and appeal of their existence?

Part of me harbours an inclination to answer in the affirmative. The possibility that films presenting original stories should be squeezed out of mainstream cinema, replaced by a torrent of remakes, sequels, and sequels of remakes, is certainly a depressing one.⁵ Originality in fiction is a good thing. Originality is what makes a story spark our imaginations into spirited activity when they are worn down by the dull predictability of everyday real life. Originality is what makes us see the world through different eyes to those through which we have been accustomed to see it. Originality is where the magic of new and astonishing possibilities is wrought.

But all that said, somewhere in this mind and heart and soul of mine there’s still a keen little Classicist knocking about, and said keen little Classicist is swift to chime in that in the classical world, ‘remakes’ (as it were) were arguably even more ubiquitous than they were today.

The place is Ancient Greece, the time is the sixth century BCE, and the event is the invention of the theatrical play. Exactly what happened remains poorly evinced and hotly contested, but what ultimately emerged was a type of performance in which actors playing characters interacted with one another, which was pretty innovative for the time. The earliest playwright whose work is extant today is Aeschylus, who wrote tragedies. And every single play he wrote told a story his audience would already have known. In actual fact, every single play every tragedian wrote told a story his audience would already have known. That was what tragedy was. It selected a chunk of the pre-established mythology known to the Greek people and rendered it in dramatic form. Different playwrights would frequently cover the same material: we have extant versions of the story of Electra by both Sophocles and Euripides, for example. Ancient Greek tragedians, then, produced nothing but remakes and indeed remakes of remakes.

Was this unoriginal? Did it betray a lack of imagination or a slavery to people-pleasing? Can it be sniffed at as creatively lacking? I mean, I’m not actually a great fan of tragedy (one of the key reasons why I was a bad Classicist, the other being the fact that I’m not actually a great fan of Homer), but it’s pretty hard to slate it for a lack of innovation given that this represented the very birth of the western theatrical tradition.

 

A Greek theatre in Sicily, if the tags given this picture on my favourite online stock-photo repository are anything to go by.

The thing is, the tragedians were original – not in their subject material but in what they did with it. Take the story of Electra, as I mentioned briefly above. Sophocles and Euripides both have their versions, of course, and the same events are covered by Aeschylus in his Libation Bearers, which, happily for our purposes, is also extant. The basic outline of the myth is that Electra, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, plots with her estranged brother Orestes to murder their mother and her new husband Aegisthus as an act of vengeance for her murder of their father (which was in turn an act of vengeance for his murder of his other daughter Iphigeneia, as a sacrifice to appease Artemis who had cursed the Greek fleet with unfavourable winds as an act of vengeance for – well, you get the picture, there was a lot of vengeance going on). The three tragedians tell the story in significantly different ways, however. Aeschylus launches into the lengthy recognition scene between Electra and Orestes virtually as soon as the latter shows up, and only has him perpetrate a deception about his real identity when Clytemnestra comes on the scene, whereas Sophocles’ and Euripides’ versions of Orestes are both deceitful about their real identity from the start, even in front of Electra. Sophocles has the matricidal pair finish off Clytemnestra first, and cuts off the action before Aegisthus’ death has even been announced, whereas Aeschylus and Euripides both have the two kill Aegisthus and then Clytemnestra, before an ending which makes explicit that they have rendered themselves guilty and deserving of punishment. And Euripides, as is his habit, just goes a bit weird, really, and introduces an extra plot point of Electra having got married and moved to the country before dealing with any of the standard plot points.⁶

Of course, such differences as these are of a largely mechanical nature, and I have no wish to bore you (or myself) by going on to expound an exhaustive procession of minor plot details that differ from one tragedian to another. As important as differences of plot are, so are the differences of tone and feel and message – much more difficult to pin down or agree upon – that accompany them. Innovation can be displayed both in the substance of the story and the manner of its telling. Euripides’ tragedies are often remarked upon for being remarkably un-tragic compared to the earlier Aeschylus’ grave and weighty dramas, for instances.

Moreover, innovation can be displayed both by forging in an altogether different direction to one’s predecessors, and by tracing but subverting their version of things. There is, happily for the flow of this post, a particularly fine example of such subversion in Euripides’ Electra, in the form of an undisguised parody of the recognition scene in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers: Euripides’ Electra laughs off as ridiculous the notion that a lock of hair, a footprint, and a scrap of cloth should betray any indication that their owner might be her long-lost brother, while these very tokens were the precise ones by whose evidence Aeschylus’ versions of the siblings recognised each other.

Compare Disney’s remakes today. Some, like Beauty and the Beast, have adhered very closely to the predecessors they imitate, almost shot-for-shot in places; others, like Maleficent, have made a point of problematising the story as it was originally told and subverting the notions it presented. Some, like Cinderella, have retained a similar emotional tone to their predecessors, and others, like Tim Burton’s characteristically dark and disturbing rendering of Alice in Wonderland, have told a similar story with a significantly different feel. New plot points and characters are added; old ones are elaborated upon, or changed, or removed. We see Disney scorning as silly the traditional notion of love at first sight, for example, as clearly as Euripides scorned as silly the traditional Aeschylean recognition scene – a fascinating reflection on the values of our own moment in time as compared to those of earlier ones. These new takes on old stories we love do catch us by surprise, do give us fresh perspectives, do open up enthralling new possibilities.

Is this unoriginal?

This isn’t Ancient Greece, of course – dramatic storytelling has moved on a smidgen since the tragedians’ day, and I hasten to affirm that I’m all for there being more on at the local multiplex than simply remakes and more remakes. Still, I’m also all for there being, as a constituent part of a good variety of films, some remakes. Nothing is completely original anyway – all films (and indeed all fictions) have their influences and generic ancestors – so why should a remake automatically be artistically inferior to a film that uses an original story? It should be assessed for what it does, not what it doesn’t do, and if it does what it does well, then it, like any artistic achievement, should be applauded. In actual fact, a good remake may in some ways be more innovative than an original-story film that nonetheless saturates itself with tired clichés and predictable storytelling. If nothing else, a remake’s innovations often stand out all the clearer by virtue of sheer contrast with the original.

So bring on the deluge, Disney: I’ll be fascinated to see how you engage with your own canon in upcoming releases, how you alter it, how you elaborate upon it, how you uphold or subvert it, and what that says about the kind of story our society is currently telling. And if you manage to spark off the odd blog post idea in the process, well, so much the better.

Footnotes

¹ Comprehensive details of the live-action remakes of pure-animated classics (so not including Mary Poppins or Pete’s Dragon) that we know of currently are provided by Noelle Devoe at Seventeen, http://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/movies-tv/g2936/list-of-disney-live-action-remakes/. I notice she missed the Chronicles of Prydain franchise we’ve been promised as a relaunch of 1985 animated classic The Black Cauldron, http://www.seventeen.com/celebrity/movies-tv/g2936/list-of-disney-live-action-remakes/, although that’s probably because it is in its very early stages, so maybe best not to get one’s hopes up: it’s just that The Black Cauldron was one of my real childhood favourites, and Disney films were about all I watched as a kid.

² Namely this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLCuL-K39eQ.

³ Stats gathered from Wikipedia, notably its list of the highest-grossing films of all time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films.

⁴ It’s a series of short videos filmed on the Sims 2 and dubbed, and one of the staple sources of hilarious quotations that my siblings and I chuck at each other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0WwO9pv72s&list=PL0E148580E52F7216. “Oh man, I hope that wasn’t me that just died...”

⁵ If, for some mad reason, you’d like to read more of my opinions on this subject, might I point you to a post called ‘Cinema’s Suicide’ that you’ll find under ‘2016’ then ‘January’ in the box on the right.

⁶ Just stick the relevant titles into the Perseus search engine if you want to check this jazz for yourself: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/. Or your favoured whole-Internet search engine will probably work equally well.