"The Last Jedi" and the Politicization of Storytelling
*Writer-director Rian Johnson believes division was inevitable if Star Wars was to “grow, move forward and stay vital.”
There’s been a disturbance in the franchise: Ambivalence, rather than anticipation, has characterized the online response to Disney’s announcement of the deluge of new Star Wars projects we are to be saturated with over the next several years. And while the trailer for Solo: A Star Wars Story (scheduled for May) was expected to be received with some misgiving, many fans are actively rooting for it to flop.
The origin of this disturbance is not difficult to pinpoint: Until a few months ago, Disney had nimbly sidestepped any serious divergence in the fan base of the IP it acquired for $4 billion. But that changed dramatically with the release of the most recent installment.
Indeed, the biggest twist of The Last Jedi wasn’t in the film itself but in its audience reception. Though its commercial profitability was always comfortably assured, its revenue disparity with The Force Awakens is the steepest sequel-to-sequel decline on record and its second-week box office plunge is the biggest in history. In China, Hollywood’s largest overseas market, the film took a blistering 94 percent nosedive after the first week and was pulled from theaters with less than half its predecessor’s earnings.
*Archetypes and the mythic storytelling form never lose relevance. They are timeless and universal.
First, the 1977 original, far from accommodating the cultural climate of its time, was tonally counter-cultural. Its clear-cut portrayal of good versus evil eviscerated the moral relativism of 70s cinema. Its hopeful optimism was an antidote to post-Vietnam nihilism. It was a conscious throwback that paid homage to the sci-fi adventure serials Lucas grew up with.
Secondly, the reasons for its enduring appeal have eluded Johnson entirely. How has the original trilogy remained such a cultural touchstone? Why are studios still making films in its shadow after so many decades?
One reason is that archetypes and the mythic storytelling form never lose relevance. They are timeless and universal. By contrast, loading a film with political messaging for 2018, using it as a vessel to comment on current events, makes its relevance transient. Ironically, Johnson’s attempt to “update” the saga is precisely what caused his entry to feel dated at an accelerated pace.
*If all the consternation is an objection to minority characters and strong female protagonists, why does its predecessor enjoy such high audience ratings?
One conspicuous difference is that The Force Awakens’ diverse cast played characters integral to its story, whereas, in The Last Jedi, characters are shoehorned in with no discernable purpose other than demographic representation. The most glaring example of this is Rose Tico, played by Vietnamese-American actress Kelly Marie Tran: Her entire subplot (helping Finn find a codebreaker) ends up having no subsequent significance or narrative payoff, and the rest of her time on screen is barely less superfluous.
If such perfunctory tokenism and pandering to vapid identity politics are what is meant by “diversity” then certainly, that was one aspect of The Last Jedi which drew criticism.
*Its shallow identity politics reflect a cultural hegemony adrift from deeper moorings.
https://fee.org/articles/the-last-jedi-and-the-politicization-of-storytelling/
