Pattern Pattern Apocalypse: A Rant

 

This, this scene right here, should have gotten a loud cheer from the "conservative Christian" crowd, particularly the Catholic and Orthodox crowds. The above scene is a masterful climax to an epic space fantasy, where the value of the nature of life itself is affirmed. If you believe in the communion of saints this scene should have reduced you to fucking tears. Rey, an obvious reference to light, takes on a damningly obvious image of the soul as conceived by apostolic Christians. The soul, which is usually depicted as female, channels the light and goodness of the nature she shares with the world and with God, using this light to defeat evil, with a cross. Two seconds of ascetical reading should have made this image obvious. This image would not work with a man claiming to be all the Jedi. Because the human soul is female, not male; the soul, working properly, receives its light and life from God, and its this reception, in and of itself, that is salvific to itself and to others nearby. If there is one image in modern cinema that is Christian it is this one. This is Analogical Reading 101, it is blindingly basic.

Should I be shocked that the Right missed it???

No, I should not. 

But I am.

Because somehow, someway, using classical Christian imagery in an inventive way counts as SJW NONSENSE. Blind idiots!

The thing that really confuses me about conservative reads on the sequel trilogy is that, in theory, they have preserved the truths and tools from the past that would make this whole Skywalker Saga not just a simple tale, but a profoundly beautiful and hopeful one. Dead or alive, we all matter, one way or another. 

And honestly, if it wasn't for the absolute destruction of an actual spiritual sense in our culture, I think more people could see it. As Spengler puts it, we are in the Civilization phase of our society; we are all, by default, atheists at this point. Atheists do not see with the soul, they see with the mind. Which means that, if you're going to not be an atheist, you have to learn to turn your nous, the perceiving instrument of the soul, back on. The nous sees in repetitions, patterns, and sudden apocalypses that re-contextualize what came before, changing it irrevocably.

Oh, if you don't know, apocalypse originally referred to the moment in a Jewish wedding where the woman takes off her veil for her husband for the first time. The word essentially means "a sudden revelation that was only barely hinted at".

The nous (what us Americans call The Third Eye) sees life in terms of patterns and apocalypses.

So does the Skywalker Saga.

DEATH OF THE MENTOR

Pattern

Pattern 

Apocalypse

FACING THE FAILED FATHER FIGURE

Pattern

Pattern

Apocalypse

FACING THE DEATH OF A LOVED ONE

Pattern

Pattern

Apocalypse

Look folks, this is tiresome to me. I don’t enjoy being angry. I don’t find rage entertaining and try to avoid it as often as possible. I’ve avoided writing about Star Wars because I have gotten so annoyed with the popular reception of the sequels that I just don’t want to be bothered. I'm two decades ahead and I know it. And that annoys me. Knowing that in two decades people will have figured that the entirety of the Skywalker Saga is awesome does not make me feel superior, but lonely and inhumanely peeved. I can't just go with the flow, I have to put up with two decades of whining.

Yes, whining.

Yes, you're all acting like children.

Now, the thing is that you could tell me I'm supposed to act with patience about this situation. After all, children need that quite a bit, don't they? If I think you're acting like a child I should calmly and sweetly explain, over and over again, what it is you're missing and then let you put the rest of the puzzle pieces together. After all, that's what adults do, right? They help children grow up.

Whoever says that has clearly never had children. Children are narcissists on a good day and assholes on anything less, and it's frequently less. Yes, patience and niceness can help.... but usually I find you have to hold up the standard of behavior that you expect, let the kid know what it is, and then become as granite in the face of the oncoming storm.

So here's the deal, you supposed guardians of a culture that's been dead for at least a decade now:

The storytelling methods of The Skywalker Saga are the patterns of Western Civilization. Yes that includes the sequels. I get that the corporate buyout of Disney is the deathknell. Yup. I hear you. But the thing they completed? They actually did their job. And you know how I know that? Because I sat down and watched the hell out of all nine movies and think every last thing you'd want a Westerner to relearn to see is not just in these movies but it's the only spot where it's being done currently. This is your shot! You got nothing else! And irony of ironies, a corporation gave it to you!

So you can either sit down and look at the object objectively, without your bullshit lenses, or you can just whine. 

Like a child.

Oh, and progressives, don't think you're off the hook. I don't take your positions seriously enough to comment on them.

So take that as you like.

Last Jedi: The Closer

Throughout the entirety of this series I've been excited and terrified to get to this point. When I first started writing this series I specifically wrote it so I could get to this point. The Last Jedi is, by far and away, the best Skywalker Saga movie, and it was this Closer that clinched that status for me. Every last second of this part of The Last Jedi is on point, mixing and matching the most important moments of Star Wars with a wild abandon that betrays a deep and abiding joy in and love for the whole Saga.

First off:

Visually this is a remix of The Battles of Geonosis and Hoth. A true Rebellion is about to begin and the First Order is trying to make sure that it doesn't happen, like with the Republic trying to stop the escape of the Separatists on Geonosis, which happened on a red planet, which is the underlying reason for this fight. More obviously, however, this is about the good guys trying to get away to fight another day, which is Hoth through and through. But the fact that this is not snow, but salt, is a huge change in the symbolism of what we're looking at. Wikipedia sums it up best:

Salting the earth, or sowing with salt, is the ritual of spreading salt on conquered cities to symbolize a curse on their re-inhabitation. It originated as a symbolic practice in the ancient Near East and became a well-established folkloric motif in the Middle Ages.

By layering these two images (red earth and what looks like snow) and then revealing that it's salt Johnson is telling us that the previous generations of war have completely and utterly worn the galaxy out. Everything you thought you knew does not apply to this battle, because the earth (what you relied upon to understand Star Wars) has been salted. Whatever you'd expect, throw it out, because everything from before is dead.

Yup, the First Order is on the left in both images, with the Resistance on the right! So we're picking up where we had left off previously. This set up references A New Hope, telling us that the attack on the First Order is suicide. None of the Resistance's plans are going to work, trying to kamikaze down the gullet of the Death Star Ram won't do a blessed thing.  No one is going to come and save them, because nobody cares.

And THIS?

First, let's get something obvious out of the way: Finn would not have accomplished anything by trying to kamikaze the Ram. It was not going to work, and Poe said as much. So Rose is not dooming the Resistance by saving Finn. The only person who would have died in that assault was Finn, plain and simple. So her line, while it's corny and possibly a bit naive, is directed right at Finn's central issue: reacting. Finn, at the beginning of VII, was running away from The First Order and then running to get Rey, and now he was running to save Rey. Rose is not reacting, she is choosing her actions, which is not really something  that could be said of Finn.

Second off:

Rose's kiss is a subversion of Finn's original scene with the unnamed friend and finally jolts Finn out of the perma-freak-out he's been in ever since the original incident happened. One of the criticisms of Finn has been his passivity to events. There's not a lot of time where Finn is behind the wheel of his own decisions, he's always having to react. But for these two movies that was the point. Finn is in shock, in mourning, and trying to figure out what to do next. He doesn't have a direction because that direction was taken from him. Rose gives him an opportunity to make a new direction. The fact that it's coming from the right means it's ill-fated, somehow, and I have a hunch as to why that is: the look of longing on Rey's face at the end of this movie. By doing what she did Rose has effectively edged Rey out of Finn's life.  When Finn saved Rey and she hugged him he was coming from the right. At the end of the movie, he drags Rose in from the left and then sits by her side, from the left, with Rey watching, wistful, from the right. Rey is now alone.

Rey herself does very little in the ending section of this movie. She makes sure that the Resistance is safe long enough for Luke to show up. But two very important things happen to Rey in this part: she closes the link between her and Ben and she realizes that her family is right here, with Leia. It doesn't sound like a lot, but keep in mind that, up until this point, Rey has been trying to understand two things: what the Force is, and where she fits. Both of these things are answered in the last act, although the second one is imperfect. Rey feels Luke passing on into Force. For the first time in the whole trilogy Rey finally feels the Force for what it can be for those that are attuned to it: peace. Up until this point the Force was a confusing thing for Rey, something that she didn't understand but somehow had a deep connection with, a connection that frightened her. Luke's passing is the only bit of relational good Rey has ever felt in connection to the Force, although it may be the most important. This knowledge allows Rey to cut the connection with Ben, although she does it from the right, so something about that decision isn't going to work out. What is it? Well, as she finds with Finn, she's not connected to him anymore like she was. Rey lost her friend. She may have gained a Rebel Alliance and a friendship with Leia , but she lost Finn, and that's not a small thing. At the end of this movie Rey very well may be completely alone, exactly where she didn't want to end up. It's not a very hopeful note, as far as I'm concerned.

Every last part of this series has been to set up Luke's triumph in this part. When people first asked me what I thought about The Last Jedi, I found that I couldn't answer without telling everyone what I thought of the entirety of the Skywalker Saga because, to me, The Last Jedi is Star Wars, distilled into one movie. Let's start with the first call-back of Luke's return: the conversation between Anakin and Padme, Luke and Leia.

It's hard to watch this scene without the meta knowledge that Carrie is gone, but even without that knowledge this scene is incredibly powerful, because it's the resolution of the subverter trilogy's trope of The Truth That Changes Everything. There's always a conversation in the subverter part that utterly alters the series, for better or worse. These conversations are always a matter of life and death: it's the final hours of the Resistance and Luke knows that he is going to have to die to save them. These conversations introduce a good deal of darkness: Ben Solo may not be gone (no one ever is) but Luke is not the one to do it and Rey may not be either! But this conversation is different than the others, because it directly leads to triumph. Luke wins against Ben and empowers Rey. There is no doubt in my mind that, had Luke actually been there, that the entire First Order would have been pulled out of orbit within seconds and the whole conflict would have been over. But Luke couldn't bring himself to do this in time, and this is ultimately a lot more satisfying. Everything we needed to end Luke's arc is here. Luke's arc was his powerlessness to stop bad things from happening to those he loved. No matter what happened Luke could not prevent anything in the OT, no matter how hard he tried. This conversation with Leia is him finally breaking that cycle: Luke admits he is powerless to stop the real problem and that there really is only so much he can do, but what he can do, he will, no matter what. Luke's closure begins with the admittance that he is powerless.

The first two moments are two elders trying to bring their wayward sons home. Luke wants none of that. Yoda and Vader are trying to establish control in a relationship that they had clearly screwed up decades ago, which is ultimately why they fail at establishing the relationship that they want: it never existed to begin with. Luke realizes that the failures of Ben are his failures as much as they are Ben's. Luke owns his failures as a mentor and makes no attempt to explain them away. This is the only time when a mentor actually realizes his failures (no, I don't think Kenobi ever figured it out) and actually is able to apologize to his student. The fact that Ben doesn't accept the apology is besides the point for Luke, he merely needs to acknowledge that he did wrong for it to be a progression from the other two episodes. What's interesting is that Ben is justified in hating the image that Luke projects, because he attacks it from the left. Ben is so stuck that his attempts to overpower Snoke's brainwashing, no matter how messed up they are, are good! But once Ben realizes that Luke is not real it all goes sour. Realizing that Luke is not real and that he's been acting out a power fantasy Ben clings to it. But that's not Luke's job, he's at peace with that, and he passes on.

Sunrise

Sunset

Sunrise (Switfly flow the years!)

And here is where Luke finally completely lets go. His body is broken by the act of making the Force Projection, and he accepts it. Looking out, over the twin suns of Ach-To, Luke finally is at peace with who he is. Many people have this idea that somehow The Chosen One was meant to found a new Order of Jedi, destroy the Sith, or do any number of external things. And it's hard not to see why they think it, because even Lucas has said that Anakin is the Chosen One at times. But balance is not just an external thing. If one does not have balance interiorly they cannot achieve balance exteriorly either. And interior balance is acceptance, inner and outer. Luke, after years of not being able to do it, finally returns to balance, accepting what he can and cannot do, and thus passes on.

The beautiful thing about peace is that it's contagious. If you're near a person who is genuinely at peace it spreads to you and makes you happier just by being around them. To be one with yourself, totally accepting of yourself, helps others near you to be at peace. To help yourself, ultimately, is to help others. And Luke's peace, the acceptance of who he is in relation to himself and the world, spreads out from himself to Rey and to the rest of the galaxy. Hope is rekindled, not by hairbrained schemes and laser swords and space wizards, but by having hope, yourself. Peace is not found by making the exterior world better, but by making peace with yourself. Doing this will make ripples across the people you know who, intoxicated by the peace you have found, will find peace themselves, who will spread it further and further out, until the whole world has been affected by one person accepting themselves. We might think the best thing to do is to attack our problems, but those problems are only symptoms of something far harder: acceptance of self.  Every time you achieve a little more peace the world around you will as well. You may not see it. You may not be around it. You may not even live to see how far it goes. But each act of peace is the calming of the ripple in a vast ocean, calming a roiling sea of horrors, one bit at a time. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there.

And that always has been and always will be the message of Star Wars. You do not know your own importance. You never will. Find peace and others will, who will helps others find it. Stop swinging, unclench your fists, and you will be surprised at what happens.

How many broom boys will you affect?

EDIT: I had written this post months in advance, and was thus blind-sided by the announcement that Leia will indeed be in Episode IX. While I'm disappointed with that decision (and find it to be creatively lazy) I think most of my commentary on Rey's emotional state will be correct. Each of the Star Wars protagonists in their trilogies become more and more isolated as their trilogy progresses. I've no reason to believe that, even if Leia could fill the hole of parental figure for Rey, that Rey will be able to process that change. I think she'll go crawling back to Ben, scared to change. I could very well be wrong. But, at least in my opinion, that is the most dramatic situation available at the moment.We'll see.

Last Jedi: The Opener

I've been waiting for this for over 8 months now. Even though I've written about The Last Jedi before, each time I found myself having a lot of difficulty doing so. This is because The Last Jedi is the best movie of the whole saga. Nope, didn't stutter, and no, I'm not crazy. Pound for pound, The Last Jedi understands what Star Wars is better than any of the original six and does a better job at executing Lucas's vision than any other movie in the series. It is the climax of the series, where everything comes to a head. When I think of The Last Jedi I think of the entire movie series. This movie is the climax of the Skywalker Saga. I doubt that I'm wrong, not at this point. If I am I will be more than happy to eat crow. But I think what I'm writing here is accurate, more or less. Like I say to my three year old son (who seems to have more maturity than a lot of The Last Jedi haters): ONWARD! TO THE REVIEW!

After the charm of Oscar Isaac had convinced Abrams to keep Poe on, we add him to the main characters in The Last Jedi. Let's be honest: Poe is a tool. I mean, what did you think was going to happen when the guy who was hopelessly outnumbered and captured by Kylo Ren was going to do when facing down a dreadnought, be serious? But let's not kid ourselves, Poe is a man-child with massive talent, which is perfect considering that he's military. Part of what makes the military so spiritually deadening is not caring about how something is done, so long as it gets accomplished. Those of you who would splutter at my seemingly flippant take on the military and ask about military honor have either never served in the U.S. military or are the type of vet that remained naive throughout their career. Hotshots like Poe can (and do) thrive in a military setting, where their character defects are ignored because of the results they generate... until someone needs them to be a leader. If the groomer has integrity they call out the soldier on the defects of character which, up until that time, were irrelevant. But if the groomer does not... well... that's how we get the vast majority of the U.S. Air Defense Artillery leadership, isn't it? Thank God Leia isn't ADA, cause Poe would have fit in quite nicely in that ancient and venerable branch of the U.S. Army.

(And for those of you who say that Leia couldn't have survived in the vacuum of space, please do some research and leave space fantasy, which you shouldn't be nitpicking at this level anyway, alone. Thanks.)

But Poe is in for a nasty surprise. Vice Admiral Holdo has no time for someone who lost her an entire bombing squad. So she lays it on him, giving him a speech that's incredibly common to hear in the military: shut up and do your job. Hell, as a vet I found her incredibly restrained, not once giving him the tongue-lashing that anyone with five second's time in bootcamp would have been expecting. I mean, I get it's PG-13, but the fact that there wasn't a single F-Bomb dropped along with a hardcore rant about Poe's clear ineptitude actually shows Holdo's charity to someone who just lost his rank for being a shitbag officer. But Poe is egotistical and when he gets the chance to help Finn go off on a half-assed horrific idea of a mission... he does. I'm going to say it again: the movie makes no effort to say that what they're doing is a good idea. No Star Wars plan is, by and large.

For his part, Finn is confronted by his own doppelganger: Rose. Like him, she was someone who worked behind the scenes. Unlike him, however, she's actually got a set of principles and is, contrary to first appearances, not naive. Rose genuinely believes in the cause of the Resistance, something that Finn has never had the luxury of having. The death of her sister Paige unlocked heroism within Rose, in direct contrast to Finn, who just became a runner. It's through her that we find out that The First Order has been preparing for this assault for at least twenty years. But their idiocy and haste gets them jailed, away from the master code breaker and they find themselves trusting DJ, who initially comes in from the right.... and of course they trust him! Because they're far more concerned about results than doing it right Finn and Rose show the callow of youth, begining a chain reaction that no one could have seen coming. Well, except for Maz. She probably would have. Too bad she's too busy being shot at right now.

Ben, for his part, finally encounters the truth that Han tried to tell him first hand: Snoke doesn't give one solitary crap about him and is only using him for his power.  Snoke belittles Ben and refuses to help him achieve any peace at all. Ben, enraged, finally sees that he's been living a lie the last few years. The manipulation that Snoke has been doing to Ben becomes obvious and he wants out of the trap that is his life. But does that mean killing his own mother? No, Ben can't, and that moment of self-questioning will hopefully grow in time. But, for the moment, he thinks that killing the past is a literal thing, as shown by his destruction of his own helmet. For those of you who think that Ben's killing of Snoke is out of left field I present the destruction of that helmet, which was his way of identifying with The First Order. It's not out of left field. Ben is looking for a way out, starting right then and there.

Rey's encounters with Luke are even worse off than I'd anticipated in my prediction of who Luke was. Luke is past despondent, he's ready to die....right? We'll get to Luke's motivations in a minute.With Rey and R2 Luke finds his old self coming back, bit by bit. He teaches Rey while belittling her idealism and shows, once and for all, that Yoda was right: he is afraid and he did succumb. This is where Luke has always been headed, to the point where he lost faith and needed someone's help to get back to the fight. The film does tell us in typical right to left fashion that Luke did fail Ben, and that Rey will also let Luke down, but that's coming up in the subversion, isn't it?

The Force Bond between Rey and Ben is not a new concept. Anakin and Padme had one, as did Anakin and Luke. So no, Force Bond is not a new thing. What's new is the suddenness and strength that it sets on here. Ben is taken aback by it because he knows enough to know this is beyond unusual; this is a one in a million occurrence. Rey, for her part, is too naive to get that she's walked into a situation that she doesn't have all the information for, and Ben is too bitter to do anything other than pretend he's still a monster. He even lies to her face about where he's at. Monsters don't experience doubt. And Ben definitely has more than a little doubt bouncing around in his heart.

Luke Skywalker is the key to The Last Jedi's narrative. The story of Star Wars has always been about how the real enemy is not the Trade Federation, or the Empire, or the Sith, or anyone else; the protagonist must discover that they are their own worst enemy. No one can stop you but you. It doesn't matter what is going on outside of you, if you are your own enemy you will never win at anything.  But sometimes you wonder if you can actually defeat yourself. Sometimes, looking at the interior battle that lies before you, you start to think that the best way to win (and thus help everyone) is not to battle yourself at all. Sometimes, when you face an aspect of yourself that's much darker than expected, you hang up your sword and call it quits, convinced you can't win. Cowed by your own darkness you sequester yourself away emotionally, trying to count down the days until you draw your last breath. You can't kill yourself, because there's still something good in you and you can't kill that. In fact, it's the good in you that comes to the conclusion that only by suffering alone can you help anyone else. In a really screwed up way this is a courageous move.

That is exactly what Luke has done. No, he didn't do the right thing. But he did the next best thing he could think of.

Force Awakens: The Closer

I'm really happy with Rey's motif being a hug. Be it with Finn or Leia, Rey's symbol is always a hug. Someone finally coming back for her. Finn may not have much of a center yet but there is something really good inside of him. The death of his friend (whoever it was) at the beginning of this movie had woken something that Finn had never felt before, a tiny spark of goodness. Journeying around with Rey has made that spark into a small flame. But he hugs her from the right. This isn't what Finn is looking for. His friend died right there in front of him, and he could do nothing about it.This is not the catharsis Finn is looking for, even though he'd really like it to be.





"My son is alive". This comes from the left. Kylo Ren is a mask, a shell, for a hurting and abandoned Ben Solo, who was going to respond to his father... until the light goes away. I'm not sure Snoke had anything to do with Ben's sudden change of heart, but I'm willing to bet that, even if Snoke wasn't directly involved, Snoke's brainwashing was too strong this time around. Ben is hoping that if he can remove his connections he can be free of the pain that he feels, but Leia's pain stuns him and he gets shot in the gut.

Ben is coming from the left, again. So what's he up to? Clearly he's angry at Finn for leaving The First Order (and this completes the loop of them staring at each other over a battlefield), but the film portrays this pain as legitimate. There's something happening inside of Ben with his father's death and no one is catching it. Instead of realizing "Hey, this guy still has something inside of him and we might be able to turn him" they're (understandably) overwhelmed by their emotions and turn on Ben.

This is the key tragedy: Ben can be turned but nobody seems to understand how to do it. Rey calls him a monster and she's wrong. And it becomes obvious that Ben's intentions towards Rey are not lethal: he wants to teach her! She looks inside... and comes back with the Dark Side of the Force. Make no mistake, she's falling here, overwhelmed by her emotions and by reaching into Kylo Ren's memories so she can be...somewhat of a match for Ben? Cause make no mistake, Rey is no match for Ben, on any level. She has a lot of raw power and is learning to access the powers from Ben's memories, but this is not a fight between equals, by any means. He's not trying to kill her here, he wants to teach her and he's nursing a wound that should have scooped out his insides. But fortunately she's spared from her fall and goes off to find Luke so that way she can figure out how to control this power that accidentally became hers. What could go wrong?

Again, this movie makes the case that Rey is no Luke. All of Luke's biggest moments stand in sharp contradiction to Anakin's. Whereas Anakin started naive and became more and more spiritually insensitive, complaining about his lack of power (the only way he had of saying "Something's wrong"!), Luke, by becoming more spiritually sensitive, realizes that there is a great deal wrong in the galaxy. Rey, on the other hand, becomes aware that something is wrong because she fails. Going to Luke is her way of trying to become better, in the face of her failure with Ben, which she doesn't understand.

And this shot sums up what's coming...

Force Awakens: The Subverter

Well, this is different. Lightsaber crystals have been revealed to be semi-sentient things in new canon, but one calling out to someone? That's totally unprecedented. Whereas Luke was handed his father's lightsaber and pretty much ignored it Rey actually bonds with the darn thing. However Maz got it is irrelevant, she has it and that's all that matters. What matters is that crystals don't just go and bond with new people. In fact, Sith usually break a crystal of this bond and forge a new, perverse, bond with it, which is why it bleeds red. Ahsoka Tano has lightsabers without color because she undid the damage, but there's no evidence that the crystals actually chose this. With Rey, however, the crystal calls out and bonds to her, even after having been bonded to Anakin. Rey, to her credit, is as puzzled as we are, although a good deal more scared. She runs off, vowing to never touch that bloody lightsaber ever again. Can't say I blame her.

And with this, she starts the beginning of the end of the New Republic, undoing Luke's affirmation of who he is. Most of this movie is about Rey not being Luke and everyone suffering on account of it. Analogically she denies her calling and the world suffers on account of it. With the New Republic gone the First Order can now have a field day with the rest of the galaxy. Good job Rey, this is all your fault. Get used to it, too. The Sequel trilogy brings back the tragedy of the Prequels: personal failures lead to galactic failures. Or, as the Emerald Tablet of Hermes says: "As it is above so it is below and as it is below so is it above". Rey doesn't yet understand this principle. Unlike Luke and Anakin she has no guide and the narrative is propelled forward, without their guidance. I may have ragged on Obi-Wan and Yoda for being bad mentors but the Sequel Trilogy makes a powerful case for the superiority of a bad mentor over none at all.

But it's not just Rey's failure that makes things worse, but Finn's. Finn, who can't see any way to beat The First Order, abandoned Rey, who was left alone and defenseless against Kylo Ren, who easily takes the scared and confused Rey. Finn pays for his cowardice by losing the connection that made his turn from The First Order mean anything at all. Finn had found meaning with Rey and in losing her rediscovers it. But it's too little too late. Finn is forced to re-live the loss he had faced at the beginning of this movie. By failing Rey Finn has failed his friend.

Han and Leia's reunion is sad but informative. Like I'd said in the previous post, we know what the issue is and everyone but Rey and Finn have known for a long time what happened and why it did. Leia tells Han he can reach their son. It's from the right. We know she's wrong, and so does Han, sadly, but he doesn't want to believe it. It's at this point where Han knows he's going to die and, if we're being honest, so does the audience. But Han knows he has to try, as does Luke in RotJ. This subverts that conversation, undoing it by the knowledge that Han is destined to fail where Luke succeeded. Each and every stroke of this movie has been designed to take RotJ and cut it apart, revealing that the people were of the previous trilogy are just that, people. Heroism is not an inborn trait, it's a gift, and when that gift leaves you there's no faking it. Heroism left with Luke and nobody (and I do mean nobody) else in this entire series has had it so far. It's a hard pill to swallow.

And finally we get the conversation between Rey and Ben. What's important to note here is that Rey has been dreaming of Ach-To for years, probably since before Luke went there. Ben picks up on this odd dream and tries to address it, but his attempts at empathy are limited by his role in The First Order. But something wakes up inside of Rey. As she fights back against Ben they both realize that they share a connection that they do not understand and that is most unwelcome. But connections come with knowledge of the other, including their methods. And Rey is a fast learner. She takes the knowledge she begins to glean from Kylo Ren and turns it back on him. In a similar move from Empire Rey learns about the Force by connecting to Ben and adapting to it. This is not someone who's a virtuoso, but a desperate attempt to fight off mental invasion. And the thing is that Ben, on some level, knows it as well. He doesn't ask how she does it, Ben knows full well how she learned how to fight back against him! And, with this new connection, Rey questions Ben's ability to live up to his idol, Darth Vader, thoroughly shaking him to the core. Now Ben doubts in a completely different way. He doubts his own identity and needs to find a way to prove to himself that he is who he says he is.

Force Awakens: The Opener

Caveat: These last six posts are going to be a bit tricky. We don't have IX yet, so we don't have the full scope of the story. And, since Lucas doesn't have direct influence here, it's going to be a bit hard to see if the same conventions such as the right to left and left to right rule that I've been forging my entire thesis of Star Wars on applies here. However, looking at this trilogy in the same way as I've looked at the first six films has revealed that they CAN be looked at in this way and provide a coherent message. So, for the moment, we'll go with the same conventions. I may have to re-write these reviews come 2020 but, somehow, I doubt it. We'll see.

The structure of The Force Awakens is not just from A New Hope, but from The Phantom Menace primarily.

-Two characters attempt a negotiation, but get split up. A character in black makes evil plans
- A hair-brained rescue attempt leads to going through a dangerous underbelly with horrific creatures and jerk locals.
- The mentor figure takes a chance on a previously unknown Force user in a seedy underbelly
-  The man in black comes for the woman. She leaves for a fake world.
- A surprise journey to the place of final showdown (which involves woods) becomes successful because of the locals
-The man in black kills the mentor
- A battle rages above the planet as the good guys engage in a suicide mission while on the ground the good guys confront the man in black. The mentor dies but the man in black is defeated by a Force user, with a chasm involved.
- After a brief celebration it is assumed that all will be well.

What we are seeing with TFA is the merging of TPM with ANH to create a different thing altogether. But that's not as urgent as the below picture:

What. The. Flaming. Hell. Is THIS??

Oh man, I may need to rethink that. The man in black is coming from the left, right out the gate. Kylo Ren is a protagonist??? What is this? What am I looking at? The guy who kills villagers without a second's thought as well as family friends is a hero? Since when, Disney? Black may be the color of purpose but it's also the color of hell and the abyss! What the heck is this??

Am I going crazy?

But Rey and Finn are both portrayed as heroes as well. This is weird, maybe Abrams screwed it up. Nope, Ren is showed from left to right in almost every single scene in this movie, regardless of what he's doing. It's like the movie keeps telling us that no, it means what it says: Kylo Ren is the good guy here! And it keeps the logic of the previous six films. The biggest takeaway for Kylo Ren is that something else is going on each of these scenes that makes him a good guy, regardless of how reprehensible his actions are. It's a tantalizing nugget of information that makes me question exactly what point they're trying to make.

Rey continues the WTFery. She's a slave, like Anakin, and she's sheltered and ignorant, like Luke, but unlike them she's a hardened warrior already. Don't believe me? Let me ask an awful question: what happens to women in environments where might makes right? Well, they don't wind up having their own place to live, unmolested, whole and healthy, I'll say that much. For all you SJWers out there who are raging saying "Women can be more than just sex-slaves!": I admire your innocence, if not outright naivety. Someone as pretty and with as much spunk as Rey would have been broken and used up well before nineteen and hooked up on drugs to keep them subservient, probably by the age of thirteen, and that's late, as far as sex-slaves go. By nineteen their fates are tragically sealed in a cycle of drug addiction and rape. And that's in the United States, a first-world country where you don't necessarily want to think of those sorts of things are happening. What's going to happen to someone on a backwater place as Jakku?? One would think that Rey, who was enslaved to Plutt at a very early age, would have been long gone. She should be broken, addicted to drugs, self-loathing, and almost past the point of saving in this environment.

Rey is none of these things.

Instead, we get a scrappy survivor, who has taught herself everything she needs to keep herself useful and relatively free. Instead of being thrown into a chainmail bikin Rey proves to Plutt that she can be useful in other ways, and is thus spared from the fate of girls her age in a place as awful as Jakku. She's the exception to the rule, that one in a million diamond in the rough that proves that sheer willpower can get you to wherever you want to go. But the problem is that Rey's mind is made up: she's going to stay on Jakku and wait for her family, who had left her there. Despite her clear aptitude for the Force, which we'll cover in subsequent posts, she still wants that connection to her parents. This attachment to her parents is her source of strength. She wants to be whole and intact for them when they get back. Making an image of who she wants her parents to see when they get back she clings to it, fighting with a ferocity that only the truly desperate can appreciate. She's strong and independent because, on some level, she thinks this will bring her parents back. It's the same with all abuse victims: maybe if I'm what the abuser would have wanted in the first place they'll come back and love me. Maybe, just maybe, if I can be good enough, strong enough, smart enough, I'll be someone worth coming back to and loving.

Finn is another example of the diamond in the rough. Finally(!) the kidnapping of children is flipped on its head and we can see how ugly the Jedi Order had gotten by taking children from their families. The First Order does it now and the context for the ailing Jedi Order's ghoulish ways has been exposed. Finn has been a slave since birth. The death of his friend, however, shocks him, and he can't unsee the blood and anguish that The First Order commits. The thing that I don't see a lot of people commenting on is how the rest of Finn's arc in TFA and TLJ is him mourning the loss of his friend. The shock of losing this person, whoever he was, causes Finn to do something that he had never even thought of before: to rebel. He resolves to get away as fast he can and so he frees Poe. Everything Finn does in TFA and TLJ is in done while mourning his friend. He sees Kylo Ren, the source of all this tragedy, and does nothing about it.

And this is where the tragedy starts to mix in. We meet Han Solo and learn a few things: every single member of the previous trilogy has met tragedy. Luke is gone, having lost hope after the destruction of his school. General Leia and Han are estranged after the turning of their son to the Dark Side, which they're very aware of. They know Snoke is the problem.

Waitaminute, we know what the problem is right off the bat?

Yes, we actually do. Unlike in the first two trilogies, where half the problem is the ignorance of the protagonists about what's actually going on, in this trilogy we know immediately what the problem is. Han, Maz Kanata, and Ben together clue us in that this time will be different. Knowledge is power and, even though the heroes of the Alliance had failed in the long run, they can pass on the knowledge they have... assuming they want to. Han is broken down by the loss of his son and marriage, but this tragedy has turned him into a softer, kinder human being. His speech about the Force and Luke is a testament as to how far Han, the eternal skeptic of the original trilogy, has come. He has seen enough to know that the Force not only exists but that he is a part of it. Many people who complain about the "stagnation" of the original trilogy characters seem to miss that these people are actually very different from when we last saw them. All of them have evolved into completely different people. They're sadder, wiser, and approach life completely differently from the subverter trilogy. But that's what 30 years does to you: you change. Did they stick to their stereotypical roles? Yeah, and that's what changed them. Once in a while you have the opportunity to individuate and become more yourself. Sometimes you take this chance and sometimes you don't. Han, Leia, and Luke didn't and their characters suffered the consequences of sticking with what they knew. But we'll develop that more in The Last Jedi.

We end this post with the reveal that Snoke is actively manipulating Ben with Force visions of his grandfather. With the right to left view we know that what Ben is seeing is not real. It's just an old helmet with no real power behind it. But Ben, confused and angry, clings to it with all his might. He needs purpose and the fake visions provide it. He wants a place in the world and the memory of Darth Vader provides a place for him to put his anger and hurt in a place where he thinks he may actually do something of meaning. I cannot understate it enough: Ben Solo places his entire worth in his resemblance to his grandfather. Snoke has convinced him that this is the only way for him to have worth.

Return of the Jedi: The Closer

It's important to know that Episode 1 and 6 share the same plot. The subverter trilogy and the opening trilogy must sync up in order for the subversion to be complete. The sequel trilogy, while necessary, doesn't have to subvert the first trilogy in entirety because it's been already done by the subverter trilogy. And, as has been pointed out by men far smarter than I, RoTJ subverts TPM. Like in TPM two Force users face a Darkside user. What does this tell us about Vader? Luke is right about him. But... they're coming from the right. Luke's wrong about what he thinks is going to go down and so is Vader. Only the Emperor seems to have a clue about what's going on. He holds all the cards and he knows it and so does the camera. Luke can't hold up under pressure and so he attacks the Emperor. Yes, he's making a mistake here. But... can we really blame him?

And this is where the Ewoks and Han come in, both of which were saved or recruited by Leia and Luke. There's no way Palpatine could have seen this coming. While he learned from Padme's compassion he never thought of the Ewoks as worthy of thought and I doubt he knows that Han Solo even exists. But it's Han who blows up the shield generator and it's the Ewoks who made it possible. All the chickens have come to roost and Palpatine, who thinks he saw all this coming in the Force, is proven to be completely wrong. While Palpatine may be a genius and stupidly powerful in the Force his ability to see into the future is completely discounted here. Palpatine is no Qui-Gon.

This lightsaber fight is my favorite in the saga. Luke completely surprises Vader. Gone is the foolish young man who Vader has to pull his swings with. In his place is someone who can let the Force flow through him in a way that Vader hasn't done in years. Luke is every bit of what his father was before the dip in the lava. He has a power so raw and overpowering that even Vader can't match it, getting kicked down the stairs headlong because Luke's genuinely better than Vader. And Vader knows it. He doesn't rush at Luke after that kick, but stalks back up, trying to intimidate Luke with raw, overflowing  hatred and darkness.


Instead of being intimidated Luke intentionally drops his guard, calling the bluff, and Vader is faced with a choice: to kill his son or to let him live. And, whether he likes it or not, Vader winds up doing something he never thought he'd do: let Luke live. The man who butchered children spares his child. Luke catches that second and rubs it in Vader's face, trying to get him to wake up to what he is. Vader, unable to believe what he just did, denies it and lashes out, angry at Luke for getting through. Palpatine mistakes that anger for killing intent and chuckles. But Vader's emotional armor is permanently cracked and it surprised him. And hopefully we all get to the point where our Shadows get surprised as well, where we are surprised by our own goodness and, even if we resent it, we realize there's more to us than we ourselves can see. And this can piss us off. How dare someone see us better than we see ourselves! How dare they! And sometimes, instead of giving in, we get even angrier, desperate to get our power and control back. So we push and push and push at those who see us better than we see ourselves, trying to get them to back off.

Sometimes we push them too hard, though.
(FROM LEFT TO FRICKIN' RIGHT! YEAH!)

That moment of Luke screaming is my favorite moment of all Star Wars, hands down. All the pain and horror of the Skywalker Saga (so far) just EXPLODES onto the screen. Luke lets fly and Vader finds himself hopelessly outmatched. For all of you who think that Vader was holding back, I present the fight between Obi-Wan and Grievous:

 Notice anything? Grievous is ridiculously stronger than Kenobi. His fists literally make imprints upon metal with a punch. And Kenobi cannot, for the life of him, exchange blows with Grievous, not straight up. Ben, not once, is able to overcome Grievous through brute force, defeating him by his trademark "find the weak spot and blow it up" approach.

There is no moment in ROTJ's fight where that is the case. Not. One. Single. Frickin'. Moment. Luke drives Vader to the ground, he wears out a cyborg. No one previous to this point has ever overpowered Anakin, nevermind driven him back. Once Anakin got going there was no stopping him. Luke is, by all counts in the Skywalker Saga, the strongest saber combatant, blow for blow. 

The Emperor sees every bit of this. And he offers Luke a job.

I'm not going to lie, this picture is here because it's the fulfillment of Luke looking at his face in Vader's helmet. He looks down, and sees that he's becoming Vader. Luke's actions, while damaging to Vader, has made him like Vader. This is an analogical truth to Luke. It's not that he literally stole Vader's hand, but he did steal Vader's hand.

Analogically it makes sense and you KNOW IT!

This is the secret of Star Wars, right here. Throw away your weapon when going against yourself, it won't work. And, what's more, what you do to  others you do to yourself. Luke, looking down at his own hand, finally sees what his wanderings for a year, on his own, have done. Others did not fail him, only Luke can fail Luke. And so he tosses the lightsaber aside, proclaiming the ultimate the truth: he has become everything his father ever wanted to be. He's fulfilled his father's dream: he's freed the slaves, fought for the downtrodden, and realized a level of compassion that no one in the entirety of the Jedi Order had done in probably over a thousand years. It's such a momentous occasion that the base on the moon blows up right after his declaration. As we'd covered in TPM, the smushing of these scenes means that one does indeed cause the other.

Many people are convinced that Anakin is the Chosen One. That's complete and total hogwash, because to bring balance to the Force is to find balance within yourself. And that's not something that Anakin ever managed on his own. So far in the series Luke is the only one to have done it, without help. Regardless of where he goes later Luke was, is, and always will be the Chosen One. The entirety of the series hangs its hat on him. Right here, at the end of RoTJ, Luke becomes the gold standard for what a person should be, Jedi or not. It's no small wonder Vader defends his son at this point, even if it means his death.

One of the things that Star Wars emphasizes is that people in epic events do not understand what it is that they're doing. They do things that happen to be huge and don't understand the personal and sociological implications of said actions. And that becomes the clearest here, with Luke and Vader. Luke doesn't understand that there's a lot more to life than, well, being alive. How you live is incredibly important and Luke, who is 23 at the time, has no real idea of just how true that is. But Anakin finally understands and he passes on in peace. And for the first time in the whole trilogy Luke, the man who never shed a tear over those that he lost, finally cries.

It all ends the same way that TPM did: in fire, tears, and celebration. But this time the Empire is finished, Palpatine is dead, and there will be peace.

Right?