Deconstructing Star Wars and ‘The Last Jedi’

Every subsequent Star Wars film has attempted to recapture Lucas’ initial magic, with mixed success. Each trilogy is wildly different, from the archetypal myth of the originals to the shallow politics of the prequels to the meta, self-referential Disney films.

And yet they all share one thing in common: the failure of authority structures. In the original trilogy, Luke has to come to terms with the reality that he is the son of the most iconic villain in cinema history. The prequels loop back to observe the tragic rise and fall of that character, and his disenchantment with the stilted bureaucracy of the Jedi Order. The Last Jedi combines both of these anxieties—the crisis of absent, immoral parents and failed institutions. But having abandoned its mythic roots, TLJ has no way to handle these conflicts.

The Story

In one of TLJ’s three plotlines, hotshot X-Wing pilot Poe Dameron locks horns with General Leia and Vice Admiral Holdo, two experienced female rebellion leaders. A secret mission he organizes fails (due to an eleventh hour betrayal by new character played by Benicio Del Toro, doing his best Peter Lorre) and this failure undermines Holdo’s more secret plan to retreat to safety. (We can leave aside why Holdo kept this plan secret, insisting on leaving her most senior subordinates with the impression that she had no plan whatsoever to save the fleet.) Holdo dies defending the retreat. The few rebels that make it to refuge are decimated in an ill-fated charge. The rebellion is reduced to . . . maybe 30 people.

Meanwhile, Rey is stuck on an island with Luke Skywalker, who’s doing Alec Guinness by way of grumpy cat (I’m only half kidding: Hamill’s very good with what he has). Luke blames himself for Kylo Ren’s turn to the Dark Side or the First Order or whatever. His solution is to strand himself and the last Jedi texts on an island until they waste away. Luke is so disillusioned with the Jedi religion that he claims it’s pointless and redundant—”the Force doesn’t belong to the Jedi,” he mutters. He’s making a very modern case for spirituality over organized religion: If all roads lead to the Force then the dusty tradition and doctrine doesn’t really matter.

Yet still, Luke guards the last texts, a backslider who can’t quite bring himself to apostatize fully.

Rey, as her name might imply, is full of hope—in the Jedi, in Luke, in the rebellion, in her parents, even in Kylo. She has faith in the central myth of Star Wars itself: in Luke Skywalker’s journey through darkness to save his father. The Last Jedi reveals all of her hope to be misplaced. Her attempt to persuade Kylo to turn, as Vader did, fails and Luke, the ultimate symbol of the humanist journey, dies defending the few rebels to escape from the First Order’s slaughter. It’s time for the Jedi to end. Rey’s parents were nobody. Writer-director Rian Johnson’s deconstruction of the Star Wars mythology is quite thorough.

Hope

So why do so many characters in TLJ talk about hope? For the rebels, the entire movie is the story of a failing battle, a war of attrition with two strategies: reckless kamikaze attacks and poorly-executed escapes. This is not a world where victory is possible, so when characters talk about hope, it sounds empty.

This hopelessness goes deeper, as characters seek to find meaning in a world in which all structures have crumbled, both religious and familial. When his uncle fails him, Kylo seeks the perverse fatherhood of Snoke and adoration of the specter of Darth Vader. When Luke loses faith in the Jedi Order, he can find no reason to go on. When Rey confronts her greatest fear, it’s that she is a spiritual orphan who cannot build on ancestry or tradition to define herself. When she looks into the darkness, all she sees is an endless line of reflections—no beginning or end, turtles all the way down. (Compare this with The Empire Strikes Back, where Luke’s greatest fear is that he will echo his father’s darkness.)

For all three of our protagonists, there is no bigger picture, no greater story within which they can orient themselves. They are alone in the universe and the Space Nazis are winning.

That’s a strikingly different message for Star Wars, which began with a story claiming the exact opposite: that a young farm boy discovers he can join a great drama in the world beyond his dusty planet. Back then there was no need to democratize the Force (this was the pre-midichlorian days). In theory, anyone—from Han Solo to Lando Calrissian—could take up a lightsaber and tap into the Force because it “surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.”

There was nothing about the original Jedi religion which was exclusive, so there was no reason to demolish it. Luke’s reaction to Kylo wasn’t a problem with the Jedi; it was a problem with Luke.

But The Last Jedi wants to teach us something—and failure is key to that lesson. Yoda says, “The greatest teacher, failure is.” But what are we to learn from failure? Not to see ourselves as legends? To embrace self-doubt? That’s a fine lesson as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far. Self-doubt is a cheap, modern substitute for humility.

As Chesterton observes:

Jake Meador argues that we should be content that while the film rejects the good-versus-evil duality of the original trilogy, at least it recognizes a sort of makeshift morality, wisely using power to free the captive.

But the film isn’t fully committed to even this morality. Instead, it’s filled with a restless discontent, a modern loneliness in which our greatest fear is aimlessness. Looking into the vastness of eternity and seeing nothing but an endless reflexion of ourselves is a disturbing image. The Last Jedi spends an entire film demolishing organized religion, Luke Skywalker, the notion of legends, the nobility of the Resistance ( the rebels somehow buy weapons from the same arms dealers as the First Order), and family history. And then it asks us to cheer for Luke Skywalker as the Jedi order continues with Rey and her adoptive family because . . . well, because there has to be an Episode IX and Disney has lunch boxes to sell.

The Long Defeat

It didn’t have to be this way. Hopelessness isn’t inevitable in a story about failure. Take the other major modern myth, The Lord of the Rings. Failure is central to its plot, yet it is never hopeless. Tolkien wrote, “I am a Christian and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’—though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.”

In this vein, Tolkien’s characters all see their quest—to take a magic ring into the very heart of enemy territory in order to destroy it—as a desperate venture, nothing more than “a fool’s hope.” Yet they fight on, nonetheless, because of faith in an ultimate victory and inspiration from an ultimate beauty.

While he lies on the sulphurous, barren plains of Mordor, Samwise Gamgee catches a glimpse of a glistening star through the choking fog:

There is nothing like this kind of beauty in The Last Jedi. The closest we come is the moment when Kylo Ren betrays Snoke to a surge of the Force leitmotif, a sort of fake-out Darth Vader redemption story. In similar fashion, Luke’s epic return to the fight isn’t a salvific, eucatastrophic turning of the tide. He accomplishes only his redemption, and a tragic, Boromir-like redemption at that, making up for a movie where he’s been more like Denethor, ranting about the failure of tradition and the inevitability of death.

(In The Lord of the Rings when the characters are trapped in a mountain fortress over a series of crystal caves, their desperate last charge is successful, because their calls for help are answered. In The Last Jedi, Leia’s transmissions calling for aid go unanswered.)

The Lord of the Rings also has a strong narrative that encompasses human frailty yet looks beyond it. “You have no place in this story. You come from nothing. You’re nothing,” Kylo tells Rey. By contrast, gardener Sam Gamgee realizes, with a sense of wonder, that he’s in the same story as the great kings and angels who fought in the early days of Middle-Earth. He says, “Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?”

Relics, such as Galadriel’s star-vial, connect Tolkien’s characters to ancient stories. The Last Jedi makes a point to destroy its central relics: Anakin’s lightsaber. Luke’s first action in the movie is to toss his father’s lightsaber over his shoulder down the cliffside, a lazy, dismissive action which plays the strength of the original Star Wars stories for a laugh.

The desire to move on from the Star Wars mythos is understandable. The Force Awakens was little more than recycled nostalgia, offering few new ideas and little understanding of the old ones. The Last Jedi preaches the benefits of failure, but failure teaches only when there’s something to learn. The Last Jedi agrees with Luke: That he has nothing to teach Rey except fr what not to be. She’s on her own. Our only hope is ourselves. And when “we” are thinly-sketched characters who fail at every turn, that isn’t much hope at all. We need a narrative that’s bigger than us, and a redemption from outside ourselves.

If Star Wars wants to regain its mythic power, it will have to do more than deconstruct the old, it will have to provide a new narrative, a new story, and most importantly, a new hope.