I have been re-watching the Star Wars saga chronologically in preparation for Episode IX. I've reached, at long last, The Last Jedi (Die Letzten Jedi, as i like to refer to it, to show that it's plural!) and have been watching all of the Forces of Destiny shorts in order as well as a few of the other ephemera.
So far, i have read several of the comics and working my way through a few novels that are now considered "canon". Of course, i have throughout my days read some of the Star Wars universe literature (Timothy Zahn's trilogy, Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina, and Splinter of the Mind's Eye), now all disavowed. But now i plan to make a slow crawl through this new canon.
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Source: funko.com
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I promise not to drag it out here and bore you all with an epic play-by-play (as i have been guilty of for some other sci fi universes...), but the pop-cultural mass-production machine has put a mythology together which is vast and rich. They will spend the next decade exploring it in upcoming tv shows and a new trilogy and more Star Wars Stories (i expect)...
With this third trilogy about to finish its arc (as well as put a closing argument on the entire nonology), I think it's worth noticing both how each trilogy was a set of its time, but the themes of the entire story are timeless and timely.
Much attention has been paid to Kylo Ren's line about "killing your past to become who you were meant to be". I think this has been read largely as a millennial claim of the future (from the hands of the likes of, say, Boomers like Kylo's annoying dad and his former teacher). While this trilogy does serve to pass the torch to a new generation, it's also a reminder to us all to leave behind the vestiges of the prior generations that would hold us back in our whole new world.
Kylo's request of Rey (implicitly at this moment and explicitly later) to join him and join the existing corporate power structure {aka "The Dark Side"} and help him overtake it) is one of multiple poles in the power nexus in this galaxy far far away (and so too ours as well). We will call this particular position the Zuckerberg Lane, a young upstart acquiring a vast amount of power while the primary great powers of government (The Empire & The Rebellion) are focused on consolidating their own power against each other.
Another "power pole" (i don't love this term...) that explicitly states its case in The Last Jedi is when force ghost Yoda says to Luke that "we are what they grow beyond. That is the true burden of all masters." This is an acknowledgement of the idea that our next generation not only will be our betters, but must be. It's a radical acknowledgement - and one that used to be inherent, unspoken. When we look back, we (the "now people") look better, smarter, more intellectually sophisticated compared to our ancestors. This doesn't mean we don't honor them and appreciate them, it's just a different stance from blind fealty.
It's easy to think of the Jedi (current and former) as a bloc of good - all light side, all the time - but I think they more closely resemble something like, say, "Democrats". Sure, they mostly do good things most of the time and are generally on the right side of history, but in order for them to truly have power we also have to accept the Joe Manchins and John Bel Edwards who may think some things we don't want them to sometimes, but also mostly agree that governments (Galactic Senates or domestic ones) can do some good. As a bloc, they have also accepted some evils (whether those be Southern Segregationists or an Imperial Clone Army), but those are products of historic naiveté, and must be accepted within its historical context in order to build the movement, n'est-ce pas?
Yoda's line about passing history on to your progenitors is fundamental to a progressive perspective of history. Each generation must both believe itself to be the best, most enlightened, best suited to move history forward, and also willing to let the next generation be better than they were once their time has passed.
This is the era we now inhabit, where our "resistance establishment' (pro-Biden Democrats - also perhaps Deval Patrick's constituency) is struggling to make arguments against The First Order (the Tea Party ==> the Trump Party), but hand wringing and hemming and hawing at the radical approach Democrats who want to let the system crumble and build it up new (here Yoda and Luke are played by, I guess Bernie and Warren?? - I think this all ultimately will come to mean that Rey is AOC & Stacy Abrams wrapped in to one, and we will pass the keys on to them soon enough...).
This closing trilogy of the Skywalker Epic is unfolding in tumultuous political times not just here in the US, but globally. Trumpian politics are dripping even in the first installment in 2015 with the First Order taking out a vast portion of the inner planetary systems and the existing establishment politics. "Draining the Swamp" as it were.
The Prequels began in a pre-9-11 moment, and the world they introduce us to in the first installment, it's a dreamy vision of the always better erstwhile. The Phantom Menace's Coruscant (and even moreso Naboo) are an idyllic past to the familiar worlds we knew from the original trilogy. While there is a nod to Clinton-Era political squabbles and self-dealing, the world is an "OK, Boomer" dream status that will never be revived.
It's the middle trilogy, the original set, that comes from an era of our world when they didn't know yet what they were really all about. It's a big part of why the themes of the movies are so general and mythological. The trilogy knows it's about struggle, but what that struggle is wasn't clear until much later. 1977 - 1985 was just at the start of the Era of Inequity that we live in now.
This is the struggle of our era - it's the fight of our lives. We will see what the Rise of Skywalker has to say about it in a month's time. And then, let's see what we do next in 2020 in our own response.
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Watching Star Wars: Behind Closed Doors from REELZ (is that a thing?), and the clarity of misunderstanding of the prequels is made clear. A lot of the critique of the prequels is couched in storytelling - i.e. the original trilogy made the battle versus good and evil the main point, but the prequels are so bureaucratic, administrative and political. The new trilogy has been exciting and modern and definitely better than those pesky prequels. It's a fair argument, but i think is the argument for what i said above.
The simple way to say this is (unfortunately) that people were simpler. But it's not just that. The more important function of (American) history is that the era of the prequels (1999 - 2005) was an empty era (i know, i know - 9/11 happened then, but 9/11 is a logical conclusion of the 1970s/80s Islamic Terrorism that we ignored for most of the 80s and 90s).
Politically, and culturally, it's a kind of boring time. 1999 was a kick-ass year for movies, and the era of prestige tv was about to begin (or maybe did, i don't have exact dates), but it was sort of easy politically. [NOT HISTORICALLY by the way!!! Bush v. Gore, then 9/11, then re-electing the (up to then) dumbest person we had elected president. And culturally, the technological superfuture was still sorta basic.
My argument basically is that folks watching the original trilogy needy clarity (good vs. evil, dark v. light) because they'd just come out of Vietnam, Watergate, hippie reclamation, etc. The prequels came out when it was only just becoming clear that all of the powers that be (Republicans and Democrats and large corporations and big tech {whatever that might be!} and all of it were aligning against actual regular people who weren't already rich and had maybe just trusted the hangover of the New Deal to carry them through to retirement could just start to grasp that everything was conspiring against us, the regular people.
I think in this context the prequels read amazingly well. They are prescient, not just of Anakin's turn to the dark side, but of a vast chunk of America - first in the re-election of a war criminal president, and then later in the historic and wonderful and also par-for-the-course election of Barack Obama who governed as a Compassionate Centrist (and i love him dearly and what he accomplished, but by the time The Force Awakens comes out it is clear we are off the rails and are going to elect someone for our times like either Donald J. Trump {or Bernie!}.
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