All of Life is Grieving: Introductions

 

One of my oldest friends is the survivor of a child rape gang. I didn't know until well after I'd grown up, and when I did I was incredibly surprised: he'd been married for years and, while being an incredible source of wisdom and empathy, was otherwise just... well.. a normal guy.  He was not the person you'd imagine when you think "former child rape gang victim", at all. As a survivor of childhood rape myself I had the barest inkling of knowledge of what this poor person had been through. And I've not handled it half as well, I assure you! Go ahead, read this blog: there's some weird stuff on here. So when I asked him how he managed to not go crazy, my friend, using sadness to smile, told me "All of life is grieving."

I dedicate this entire thing to him. I don't know if he'll ever read it. I doubt it. But I hope he does.

Now, my friend didn't mean that you had to be sad all the time. That's not really what he meant by grieving. What he meant was more along the lines of "Life will always disappoint you, and if you don't accept the disappointments and tragedies as they are you'll not last long. You'll always live if you accept what is, pleasant or not." But All of Life is Grieving is a more poignant and poetic statement, don't you think?

What this has to do with Star Wars really should be obvious, but I'll spell it out: anyone who grew up with Star Wars has an image of it in their heads. I know I do. I was terrified of Vader as a child. That breathing creeped me out. Watching Luke process that the genocidal murderer he'd been fighting was actually his father and still had something in him worth saving was something I attached to. I just so happened to be living in the wake of my own tragedies and Luke's problem was my problem: someone was not who I thought they were, and I had to figure out what to do with it all. At six. Luke maintaining the humanity (and thus goodness) of his father helped me realize I had options in how to deal with my rapist. I did not have to hate her, I could control how I responded to the tragedy. A large part of my personality was formed in the experience of watching Luke pull the helmet off of Vader, to find an old, infirm, and pathetic man underneath. The monster was pathetic. To be a villain was to be pathetic.

I wish I could tell you that I've lived up to this ideal. I've tried. And tried. And tried. And tried. And I have failed. The resentment was just too much for me to deal with. Over the years I have become known by family and friends as a fusion reactor of rage. That is not what I ever wanted. I wanted to live up to this:

And I have not. I can't. The older I get the more I have realized I was never going to. With the return of my childhood memories at twenty-six I've realized that time was never on my side: eventually, no matter how hard I tried, I would not forgive, I would resent, I would do the thing that everyone else did before that wretched mask came off. And then one day I realized that even if the mask had come off I'd still not have done what Luke had done. 

The Last Jedi dropped not even a month after that realization. 

If it had come any later I shudder to think what could have happened to me. Because there was Luke, failing himself. Folks:

Time. 

Wears. 

People. 

Out. 

It is an actively destructive force on us all, and nobody survives it.  The forgiveness Luke had to show himself for being mortal became another model for me. No, I'd not done what Luke had done. But I could try again. I needed to try again. Time, that nice word for death, be damned, I had to try again. I could not change what I had failed to do, but I could change what I was doing... provided that I accepted (grieved!) what I had been up until that point. The story opened up what I thought were my options.

Hey look, the Star Wars fandom!

Everyone who has grown up with Star Wars has some version of that in their head. It may not be filled with as much darkness and angst, but they have it. That's what art does: it open us up and helps us understand the world and ourselves in a different way. That is a reason why art exists. So when someone adds to a story it produces whiplash! And it's going to be intense! And it's going to get ugly! Really ugly! 

And for me, initially? It wasn't. The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi were exactly what I expected of an actually serious look at the world of Star Wars post-OT.

No, I never really considered the EU a serious look at it.

No, I'm not a Disney shill. Remember what I just wrote about Luke. If you think that's got the hint of someone who hasn't spent a great deal of time thinking about Star Wars and what it means to him then I genuinely don't know what to tell you. And I have no idea how to else to communicate what it does mean than the above vulnerabilities.

For everyone else, no, I didn't consider the EU serious. Lucas didn't, as the below clip discusses very frankly.

 

And, really, why should he?

And no, if Lucas sells his property to someone they're not obligated to do what he wants with it. That's how selling something works. If you don't like that, I'm sorry.

All that out of the way I'll be frank: The Rise of Skywalker threw me for a loop. I like what it did, and we'll get to that as we go, but for the first time I felt that sting: it wasn't how I understood Star Wars. The lessons I'd learned from everything up till that point, the things they'd helped me process, were moved around and recontextualized. And that hurt. I didn't like (and still don't like) that feeling. The Rise of Skywalker changed things. For me, it really changed things. And for the first time I felt the whiplash, the burning resentment. The more I think on it the hotter it burns. There's nothing rational about it, at all. I could use rationality to justify it, but that's hardly the same thing as something being coherent in and of itself.

I do not know if that's what all the people hating on the sequels feel. In the final reckoning I doubt people will be found to be so different from each other, once all the shadows are stripped away. So, I have to assume on some level that what I have always perceived as fan-boi "You took my childhood" rage I encounter in all (yes, all, please own up to it) sequel haters has at least a passing similarity to what I feel.

But you what helps that?

Facts.

And introspection.

Let's try that out, shall we?

I guess I'll take a look at what TROS has actually turned the Skywalker Saga into. We'll go full Death of the Author, take a look at this thing as a totality, and see what happened.

There's probably a subsection of anyone reading this who will go "But why? It's a show about space wizards and lazer swords". To those people I say the following:

1. It is the silly things that are the most important and broadest ranging: utterly hilarious concepts such as love are much more important than gravity, which is much sillier than serious things like politics. I mean, really, standing on a ball that's spinning so fast that I'm effectively glued to its surface, unless I get far away enough? Don't tell me that doesn't sound absurd.

2. The exercise of a mind is more important than what it is the mind is focusing upon, by and large. I've frequently found that the skills developed in understanding and integrating fictional and recreative elements bring a measurable and obvious increase to my own ability to see the world as it is. I am more important than your idea of what is a serious matter.

3. At the end of the day the urge to understand is objectively better than the decision to be angry. 

4. Criminy's sake, if it makes you mad then it obviously means a great deal to you, and if you think I'm not going to call out that obvious bad-faith argument then you've not been paying attention.

So, off we go!