Young White Ren

I watched The Last Jedi on Saturday, one of those (re)watches where every single thing about it is just hitting, you know, like, it just feels like a frame-by-frame miracle that the Disney whateverthefuck managed to spit this (and Andor) into the world unsullied. I was watching the movie that day cuz I figured it would be the optimal “thing to have been doing” when It Happened, except It didn’t end up Happening, but hey. Still a good way to spend an afternoon.

There’s a lot to unpack in that movie, and I get a little bit of something new out of it every time. This time I was thinking a lot about how Luke reacts to Rey’s experience during “Lesson One,” the one where she kind of Force-flashes to the evil sucking hole in the bottom of the island — the anus — and Luke freaks out about it. “You didn’t even try to stop yourself!” he gasps, re: Rey grasping for (what Luke believes is) the Dark Side that lives on his perfectly balanced island.

Well, duh Luke. Here’s a girl who showed up on Ahch-To and said “I need help” and you said “I will not help” and now you’re gonna be salty about how untrained, unhelped Rey behaved when confronted with the exact thing she asked for help with? Feels to me like something one would maybe not feel free to comment upon, were one wishing to not sound hypocritical.

Here’s something else: Luke — and the filmmaking, at least initially — are pretty insistent that the anus in the bottom of the island, which makes weird noises and occasionally burps saltwater, is evil. “Powerful darkness,” Luke says. Except: why does he think that? Why does anyone think that? When Rey finally goes down there to try to find some of the answers she’s looking for, the mirror cave beneath the anus only shows her the truth: that she is the one she’s been searching for. This, I’m realizing, is true of Luke’s experience in what we all call “The Dark Side Cave” on Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back. Yoda called that one “strong with the Dark Side of the Force.” How? Why? Because it shows people something no one else (cough Yoda cough) will tell them?

Rey’s disappointed by her experience in the cave because she didn’t get to see her parents’ faces, and Luke already hates the cave for reasons unexplained; but they’re wrong about it being somehow, fundamentally, evil. What, exactly, is Dark Side about the island showing Rey something difficult, important, and real? That just sounds like “the Force,” to me.

There’s a lot of talk about what the Force actually is and isn’t in The Last Jedi, and a lot of parallel, sometimes confusingly similar-worded talk about what the Jedi were and weren’t. One of Luke’s whole points is that the Jedi weren’t the Force and didn’t have dominion over it; maybe future Star Wars projects will tease this apart further (ha! as if), because the Force as a force sure seems like a more interesting, compelling spirit of the universe in moments like this, than anything that lets people lift rocks and do double-jumps.

When you watch The Last Jedi with the deleted “Lesson Three” scene in place — the one where Luke fakes Rey out, telling her that pirate raiders are about to slaughter everyone in the Caretaker village, while it turns out that they’re just having a really big party — you can more clearly see that Luke really has beef with the Jedi: as a dogma, as an idea set, as a “thing that was supposed to look out for us and turns out doesn”t.” Part of the problem is what is said vs. what is meant: Rey turns up on the island, says “I need help” and what she means is “I need help understanding the Force inside me,” but what she actually says is “We need the Jedi Order back,” which makes Luke angry because that’s what he thought needed to happen and so he read all the books and built all the shrines and then Ben Solo turned to the Dark Side anyway. So even though Rey is in front of this man saying: HEY: MAN: THE GALAXY NEEDS YOUR HELP, all he’s hearing is “the Jedi will save us!” and that makes him really angry, probably rightly so.

But also kinda, wrongly so, because the only reason Luke hates the Jedi Order so much at this point in his life is that he gave himself fully to the premise of that Order, and it turned out that the rules of the Jedi Order weren’t equal to preventing Ben from turning into Kylo Ren. Which is maybe actually Luke’s fault and maybe actually Snoke’s fault and maybe, just maybe, no one’s actual fault but Ben’s, but Luke is carrying a huge festering guilt-wound about the whole situation, and the way he’s articulated all that pain is by stuffing it down into an anus marked “if I hadn’t believed in the teachings of the Jedi none of this would have happened,” thus declaring that the teachings of the Jedi are the problem, and this wasn’t all just a case of “shit happened.” Which — hey, even per last week’s piece — is just not a comfortable idea to have to deal with.

I’ve danced around the fucknut here, but let’s just hit him head-on: Kylo Ren remains such a thermonuclear source of energy for the Sequel Trilogy as both a story and as an idea for what Star Wars could explore now that it remains galling that the Jaje completely whiffed on closing the loop on his own idea. Putting that to one side, though, Rian Johnson absolutely clobbered his lap around the potential of that character and that theme set, taking Abrams’ mopey little princeling from The Force Awakens and simultaneously demonstrating that he’s actually significantly more pitiable than he seemed back when Rey called him a monster, and also, significantly more of a monster. Which, when Kylo spits “Yes I am!” back at Rey’s reiteration of same, means he is absolutely, 100%, dying inside. Kylo doesn’t need an anus at the bottom of the island to tell him what’s what; he takes every single input from the universe around him, whether it’s Rey’s righteous fury or Luke’s glowing green blade, and stuffs it down into a hole inside himself that simultaneously tells him: yes, you’re as awful as you think you are; and oh, you poor loser, I’m going to hurt you with this now too.

It’s just incredible to me that, possibly without even trying to and certainly without any real sense of what they had on their hands, the Jaje and his team created the avatar of this political moment — a moment which is now well over a decade old, just as The Force Awakens inches towards its decadeiversary — in Kylo Ren / Ben Solo. They ate the entire energy of the Gamergate incel clusterfuck, and spat out the type of person who would end up bringing down the American government, and then made him the bad guy in a Star Wars story.

That Ben’s the child of two of the most beloved heroes in the history of movies only deepens the point: this is the future that all of the past generation’s struggle made. This is the worst thing that can happen: change actually happens, things actually improve; people grow up in a better world, and then descend into delusion, having forgotten what it actually meant to live in the worse one.

It’s a bit narcissistic of Luke — okay, a lot narcissistic of Luke — to think he’s somehow, at least solely, responsible for all this. His mistake with Ben is the same one he’s in the process of making with Rey when The Last Jedi starts cooking: here’s a kid with undisciplined ability, for whom the Force is offering them something they want; and instead of looking at that thing and helping them with it, he’s called the whole thing the Dark Side and told her/him/everyone never to go there.

I don’t think Luke is wrong to feel bad for the mistakes he made with Ben. I also don’t think it’s wrong to call Ben an asshole for being an asshole. We can call it the “male loneliness epidemic” or whatever, and point at the voluminous ways in which the system has failed a generation of people (particularly, IMHO, in education, which is another unexpected Ben Solo parallel), but at some point you have to put it back on the lonely males and say, “hey, you’re still acting like dipshits.” Loud, amoral, self-pitying, intentionally cruel, and (in at least Ben Solo’s case, among other, more real-world examples) sometimes murderous dipshits.

What’s wild is — per Rian Johnson’s dogged deepning of Kylo in The Last Jedi, above — I can feel a lot for those guys, and also think they’re worse than we even give them credit for. One of the reasons for that is that I did, to some extent anyway, grow up with a a male physiology and hormone set, and my own unique/universal pressures of toxic manhood pushing down on me, like (as I’m fond of saying) using the lid of the pot to crush spinach in the pan. It’s so easy to take all that narcissistic anguish and turn it outward; and I did, lord knows I did, more than once. It just didn’t take. At some point, I got over myself, and built something better, and boy oh boy, if Kylo Ren wasn’t stuck on “let the past die / kill it if you have to” I bet he could have too.

The September Festival

TIFF 50 is here! It’s always sobering to see Venice eating TIFF’s lunch year after year after year, but if Bilge Ebiri’s reviews are any indication, Chloe Zhao’s got another banger on her hands; and GDT’s Frankenstein is, yeah, Frankenstein. Looking forward to both, albeit in a non-Festival setting (though I wouldn’t say no to a free ticket to either, readers!).

I pushed myself through the meat grinder and managed to get a few tickets myself but I’m mostly looking forward to visiting the Criterion Camper Van, and posting myself up in the rush line outside the Princess of Wales all day tomorrow to try to get into Wake Up Dead Man. (EDIT: Scratch that, ticket acquired!!)

But per the usual, that’s me: three weirdo movies I’ll never see in normal circumstances; and one thing I can watch on Netflix in 2 months, but won’t, because no movies in the last ten years have been more fun with audiences than Rian Johnson’s.

And to hype myself up for Wake Up Dead Man, I threw on Glass Onion the other day, and wow, that movie’s still an absolute slice. And — per the Kylo Ren thing above — boy, Johnson gets the maximum tuition value out of his eerily prescient skewering of, in this case, tech billionaires: that elevated form of loser sadboys, from which Kylo Ren also descends. I think Johnson meant his satire in Glass Onion to be taken “in general,” but in September of 2022 it was pretty hard not to just go “Elon Musk and all of his douchebag acolytes,” who, give or take one gutting of the American bureaucracy later, seem less like the (semi) harmless fop Miles Bron and his coterie, and a lot more like the unleashed id of school shooter Kylo Ren once again.

Look, nothing Johnson is doing in Glass Onion is (or is attempting to be) subtle. He’s painting his satire with the broadest possible brush, because the statire isn’t the point (an entertaining mystery movie is the point!), it’s just the set design, both literally and metaphorically. But the detail he’s getting out of that brush, ho lordy. Same as when he was working in the Star Wars mode; same as when he was delivering the mail on Breaking Bad. The guy knows how to work his audience. Like I said, these movies play great with audiences, and if Netflix wasn’t after something other than being a great movie studio, they might actually keep this industry alive.

And/or (Andor!) the miscellany

• Apparently now it’s time for Emmy nominee Dan Gilroy (brother of Tony Gilroy) to get out on the podcast circuit for Andor season 2. He sounds just like his brother, it’s eerie. (Script Apart)
• And as Andor bleeds into the real world more and more, here’s a progressive disruptor taking the lesson. (The New Republic)
• Me, I’m genuinely curious — whenever It Happens — to see if the broad coalition of right-wing lunatics in the United States will be able to hold it together without their demagogue / organizing principle / forgiver of all sins. We’re probably not lucky enough for the answer to be “they can’t,” but it’s worth thinking about. But on the broad likelihood that “they can,” we must acknowledge that fascism in America isn’t “coming,” it’s already here. And it’s time to adjust. (Strategy for Life)
• “There are a lot of ways to go pro on the internet; “shout-guy” is just one option.” This is lovely, and among other things a good reminder that The Last Battle is a cunning work in its own right, if you can get past the whole killing-the-children thing. (The Reframe)
• Every Monday my meditation instructor Susan sends out a video to her entire list, about some topic or other, before she leads us through a 10-minute sit. This is a particularly good one. (The Open Heart Project)
• Lifetime movie notwithstanding, this would make a great script. It’s The Act meets Forever! (The Cut)