End of an Era
The final installment of the Star Wars sequel trilogy produced under the auspices of Disney is finally out. As I’m writing this on 18 December 2019, the early reviews and the critics’ reactions to the Rise of Skywalker have been lukewarm or mixed. There is utter regret for what could have been, palpable disappointment for how the clunky plot of the sequel trilogy has been mishandled, and sheer sadness over the misuse (some would say abuse) of the legacy characters.
In hindsight, this is a result that’s been seven years in the making. The unwise decision to discard the pre-Disney lore material which antagonized the core audience, a baffling marketing strategy to target global audiences who did not experience Star Wars in the 1970s and thus have no affective attachment to the saga (e.g., China), a cheap dilution of the franchise through marginal side quests explored in anthology movies, theme parks attractions that inexplicably disregarded the original films, poor top-down communication skills, the sore lack of leadership skills, and the indifference towards the development of a road map have been - to put it mildly - bewildering [1]. The urgency to deliver and make a profit after the company’s acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012 for $4.05 billion has led to an astonishing series of rushed and inappropriate business decisions, and I think that many, if not all, of them are connected to the lack of knowledge and insight about what the DNA of Star Wars really is.
To put this in an economic context, it is worth noting that this is not the first time that Disney has mismanaged one of its newly acquired assets. In 2001, Disney bought the rights to produce the Power Rangers TV series following the buyout of Fox Family Worldwide for $5.3 billion. In 2010, as a consequence of the failure to manage the franchise, original developer Saban bought back the rights of Power Rangers from Disney for $65 million (James 2017). Lucasfilm has already suffered multiple production setbacks and severe disruptions because of clashes over creative control with appointed directors, leading to a highly divisive episode that disregarded the in-world continuity (The Last Jedi, 2017) followed by the first bona fide Lucasfilm box office bomb (Solo: A Star Wars Movie, 2018). Meanwhile, the new Star Wars theme park Galaxy’s Edge is underperforming and merchandise is suffering as well. There is no denying that Star Wars and Power Rangers are two wildly different intellectual properties, yet I can’t help but wonder if Disney’s inability to manage Star Wars will result in a similar outcome. The current state of affairs is a far cry from the grandiose 2012 fanfare that accompanied the Disney buyout. How did we come to this?
The most obvious answer is that today Disney is a corporation in the business of making money by developing intellectual properties as scheduled products, not as “art.” However, while there is a kernel of truth here, I find this answer rather superficial. I’m a historian by trade, so I stepped back, looked at the bigger picture, and did my best to try and make sense of this baffling situation. The end result of my effort was three handy tables - the ones you can find below - in which I re-organized the major components of the Star Wars saga according to media theory and philosophy of art (for an introduction see Brooker 2016). (It goes without saying that this is just a post and not an essay - therefore, please consider the following quick-and-dirty tables as merely illustrative. Caveat lector!)
Making sense of it all
First, the mandatory introduction. What we got below is a quick recap/reminder of phases, acronyms, timeline, and main inspirations behind the development of the Star Wars universe (see Fig. 1).
FIGURE 1. As you can seen in the grey block just below the title, I have categorized the Star Wars films in rough chronological order according to the philosophical and cultural trends that characterized each of them.
As you can see, and as many Star Wars aficionados know well, the most important influence on Lucas’ space opera has been the academic study of religions.
As recalled by Martin Scorsese, and reported by biographer Brain J. Jones, in the early 1970s George Lucas was
“reading Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, as well as Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion - and comic books like Jack Kirby’s energetic, vibrant and somewhat psychedelic New Gods” ( Jones 2016: 200).
Later, with Empire Strikes Back, Lucas adopted Joseph Campbell’s comparative template to sketch the hero’s journey of Luke Skywalker (Jones 2016: 294) [2]. Even more important for the destiny of the whole saga was the collaboration with producer Gary Kurtz (1940-2018), a Quaker who worked with Lucas on American Graffiti, A New Hope, and Empire Strikes Back. Incidentally, Kurtz “studied comparative religion in college, with a particular interest in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Native American religions” (Taylor 2014: 175), and his penchant for grand mythological storytelling is visible in two of the films he produced after the end of his collaboration with Lucas, i.e., The Dark Crystal (1982) and Return to Oz (1985). Basically, it was Kurtz the one who made sure that the plot of the first two episodes was so compelling.
Interestingly, as recapped in the table below, the academic study of religions itself went through a similar sequence of cultural vogues (see Fig. 2). Again, I’m simplifying as much as possible; a deeper analysis may not identify themes and items as clear cut as these tables might suggest.
FIGURE 2. Star Wars and the various disciplines involved in the study of religions seem to have followed roughly parallel historical trajectories after the end of the OT, reflecting or retreading for better or for worse grander socio-cultural trends. It’s important to note that this might not have been the result of intentional strategy and direct influences, since a similar cultural design can be the result of similar cultural constraints (institutional management) and a similar material (mythology and religion).
Once we compare the two tables above we may surmise that the deference to authority in most of the SWEU and the study of religions (i.e., the hermeneutical extension and ongoing discussion of the closed canons, respectively, the OT and the phenomenological works of the founding figures) has ultimately led to a critical reaction in postmodern terms. In anthropological terms, what I can see there is a cycle of emic vs. etic strategies, that is, respectively, a fluctuation between an acceptance of the insiders’ point of view (the fans in Star Wars, the scholars-believers in the study of religions) vs. a rediscussion or a radical rejection of the core principles (as The Last Jedi did in Star Wars), followed by another reaction in the other sense (The Rise of Skywalker seems to move towards another emic appeasement of the fanbase) and so on and so forth (cf. van den Akker and Timotheus Vermuelen 2017; see Fig. 3).
FIGURE 3. Common features between the Star Wars saga and the academic study of religion.
There is something here, I think, that can possibly explain the mixed critical results of the Disney sequel trilogy: for all their differences, I maintain that the rejection of the foundational - modernist - tenets may have damaged the core ideas of the original modernist project behind both Star Wars and the academic study of religions. Because the Star Wars saga, in the first place, was meant to apply the results of the scientific study of religion to produce a fairy tale that embodied the unifying, non-religious, mythical storytelling that our postindustrial, secular times needed.
Mystery boxes as rococo devices
If the cinematic powers that be truly want to avoid making the same mistake they did with Power Rangers, I sincerely think that they should restrain from hiring directors, screenwriters, and collaborators who are self-proclaimed fans of the franchise. It might seem counter-intuitive at first, but let me explain. The DNA of Star Wars - that is, what made Lucas’ original cinematic and pop culture pastiche work so well - was the modernist study of mythology. Regardless of how the original authorial intentions have changed over the course of more than four decades, the aim of the saga was to provide moviegoers with a meaningful and universal mythos for our secular era through a cross-genre “compilation [of] all the things that are great put together” (Lucas, cited from Zito 1977: 13; included in Gordon 1978: 319) [3]. While its purity of intent is somewhat questionable in the light of the increasingly toyetic nature of the brand (especially towards the end of the OT) there is no doubt that the independent nature of Lucasfilm at that time, and the technical requirements desired by Lucas himself to fulfill his artistic vision, necessitated the investment of the huge income generated by merchandise revenues in cutting edge digital R&D. (To put it simply, no 3.75-inch action figures then, no special effects as we know them now). And, after all, are perhaps religions themselves completely alien to brand marketing and economics? (e.g., McCleary 2011; Mitkidis and Levy 2015).
And yet, I’m wondering if maybe, just maybe, the toyetic value of the OT is the real intergenerational problem here, the by-product as it were, for the directors, screenwriters, and collaborators of today were the young children who played - or watched and envied (or despised) the other kids play - with those toys. What followed in the Disney era has been a series of self-referential postmodern reboots and hollow metamodernist parodies, as if there was no real stake and definitely no deeper meaning to the saga. Lucasfilm didn’t need self-proclaimed fans of the franchise; they needed fans of the characters able to understand the underlying message.
We can easily discern what the topics and universal messages of the OT and PT were. First we had the oedipal clash of father vs. son, the mythical twins, a princess warrior, the discovery of the self through trials, tribulations, and errors, plus some of the typical themes uncovered by the modernist study of religions (e.g., Frazer’s idea of the violent replacement of the old monarch or priest by an untarnished youth - also suggested in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now to which Lucas collaborated). Then, and for all the uneven and at times convoluted exposition that characterized the PT, came the conflicted story of the rebellious fallen angel and a timely discussion about the manipulation of democracy and the rise of dictatorship. In the Disney trilogy we have unresolved mystery boxes, botched social commentaries, incomplete (or absent) character arcs, an inane indecision between cheap nostalgia and subversion of expectations, and an inappropriately apolitical undertone that downplays any serious distinction between good and evil, mostly played for laughs and shock value (e.g., The Last Jedi’s inclusion of the everyone does it fallacy in the Canto Bight scene, insofar as the financial and military interests of both the Resistance/Republic and the First Order/Empire were concerned). The reason behind these pitfalls is, in my opinion, that those new directors hired by Lucasfilm under Disney were the original brand fans, children playing with the OT toys who became special effects whizzes or postmodern revisionist with no interest in the mythos of the saga. Basically, they learnt how to tell a story in the same way they learnt how to deploy their toys to play. They did not have to figure out what kind of story to tell - that work had already been done by George Lucas himself. Once grown up, these directors mastered the cinematic techniques - not the concepts - and they took these devices to their extremes: lens flares, witty quips, breakneck pace, and cliffhangers, on the one hand; slow pace, shock value, out-of-character interactions, ‘meta’ approach, and an utter disregard for in-world continuity on the other hand. But the story was nowhere to be found. What they achieved is not very different from the Rococo ultra-ornamental if shallow features after the sheer classical elegance of the Renaissance.
Space wizards for kids?
My point is that maybe those directors were not the best choices for the saga. As with all mythical and religious storytelling, Star Wars is not just for kids. It’s also for kids. That’s a huge difference. Yes, infancy and early adolescence are particularly receptive stages insofar as role models to follow and negative examples not to follow are concerned. Yes, toys can play a big part in supporting a franchise, but what’s the long-term legacy of cheap (and unethically polluting) plastic or digital merchandise when these take over the quality of the storytelling? Everyone, adults and kids alike, can find comfort and joy in a universal take on human moral values and social relationships, whether it’s a new experience or a retreading of old memories. We are storytelling animal, and while everything goes as far as gossip and chit-chat are concerned, we need certain kinds of stories to truly make sense of the world. And toys are only as good as the characters they represent. Also, Star Wars is not just a movie with space wizards (the stupidest comment I’ve ever read about the saga) - no movie is just a movie for that matter. Movies are a gym for simulating reality and ponder possibilities within our hypersocial brains. Movies inspire us, they shape us. Whether religious or fictional, we need myth-like story arcs like we need air to breathe. Indeed,
“no clear-cut division can be made between fictional and religious narrative […]. Religious narratives may be read as fiction, and fictional narratives, as we know from fiction-based religion [like Jediism], may be understood as religious texts” (Petersen 2016: 517).
And yet, Lucasfilm did not provide the audience with credible character arcs in line with the already established canon, unceremoniously ditched 3/9 of the canonical saga (i.e., the prequels), and retconned pivotal elements and characters as they saw fit.
It is only fair to admit that the Lucasfilm Story Group has failed to offer narrative cohesion to the sequel trilogy, as it was merely employed to offer damage control through byzantine justifications and ex-post rationales to plug the holes left by superficial if not incompetent screenplays. Likewise, instead of providing a streamlined, multimedia narrative experience, the new canon encompassing TV shows, comic books, and novels, has been faltering while accumulating inaccuracies, which, again, only goes to show the lack of a road map. While the SWEU made up for its disjointed character by being genuine and passionate, the post-acquisition canon had no such an excuse to cover its flaws. This is kids’ stuff, and it’s not meant for grown-ups - they say. However, if “kids’ stuff, after all, is the stuff that dreams are made of”, Lucasfilm has long lost the ability to dream (Gordon 1978: 325).
Star Wars: The Last Jedi, 2017 © Odeon, private collection.
Leadership and where to find it
The fault for all these mistakes ultimately lies high above in the corporate hierarchy. In the joint interview that Lucas and newly appointed Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy released in December 2012, Lucas stated clearly that Star Wars has been so successful because
“it’s based on human behaviour, human psychology, you know, mythology, which is the, sort of, archaeology of human behaviour” (Star Wars Youtube channel 2012).
In hindsight, again, it’s painfully obvious how Kennedy and her Disney bosses failed to understand this key concept and took a turn in the wrong direction. Postmodernist and metamodernist approaches in the study of religion(s) can be ethically questionable or scientifically bankrupt, and their adoption in academia have proved controversial, to say the least. Indeed, while highly successful initially, postmodernism could be considered as one of the main culprits behind the current crisis faced by the Humanities as a whole (although superficially similar, poststructuralism is quite a different matter; see Ambasciano 2019). Having adopted the same philosophical approaches, the sequel trilogy suffered the same fate, leaving the audience distraught and feeling betrayed. Now, I wholeheartedly concur with Religious Studies scholar Bruce Lincoln that irreverence is the key to a properly skeptical, modern, scientific, academic study of religions, but the storytelling business is another cup of tea (Lincoln 2012: 135). Star Wars episodes were never meant to become essays on deconstruction - the saga was a myth for our secular era. In this sense, unimaginative soft reboots filled with ironical deja-vus and unexplained (and inexplicable) mystery boxes set a dangerous precedent by meddling with the saga lore. Sure, these tricks guarantee a quick buck, but was this whole operation a worthy long-term investment? Likewise, subversion of tropes and complacent cynicism may interest a slight percentage of consummated or apathetic cinephiles - adopt these techniques at your own risk in your 40-years plus space-opera, myth-imbued tent pole.
Maybe financially speaking the Disney trilogy will become sufficiently successful with general audiences. As a matter of fact, we had five Transformers movies of increasingly poor quality, and the same has recently happened with the Star Trek franchise, whose core identity has been misinterpreted and mismanaged by J.J. Abrams’ production company Bad Robot. But if you lose the loyalty of the hardcore fans because you told them that the mythical lore can be desecrated, ignored, or made fun of, don’t be surprised if what was supposed to be your target audience goes elsewhere to scratch that storytelling hitch.
Theme park ride syndrome
In the era of cognitive historiography and Big Data approaches to literature, both Campbell’s hero’s journey and its smug subversion are simply outdated. We now have improved models of storytelling at our disposal, and groundbreaking studies on religions and mythologies past as good as anything that came before (e.g., Boyd 2009; Reagan et al. 2016; for a summary on the history of Comparative Religion cf. Ambasciano 2019). Even accounting for the injudicious and short-sighted exclusion of the SWEU and its best stories (like the magnificent Knights of the Old Republic from 2003), there is an entire world of awe-inspiring mythological materials and theoretical literary patterns worth of Star Wars out there, waiting to be re-purposed for our modern era, but no one seems interested in exploring these sure paths, and no one happens to be talented enough to take advantages of such storytelling tools. And that’s a real shame. Good directors today are a dime a dozen, but no theme park-ride worthy special effect can make up for the lack of substance and plot coherence. Blockbuster eye candy is cheap and burns very bright (cue Transformers), but it leaves no legacy behind and no long-term return on investment. It’s just disposable, hollow entertainment, something Star Wars was truly never meant to be.
In my personal opinion, no successful screenwriter, whether at Lucasfilm or elsewhere, has so far demonstrated to be able to convey the same powerful messages and masterful storytelling behind Lucas’ Star Wars with the same modernist simplicity (Age of Resistance, the 2019 engrossing sequel to The Dark Crystal produced by Netflix and The Jim Henson Company, may be a noteworthy exception). A case can be easily made for the successful colonization of the same niche once occupied by Star Wars by its literary and mythological predecessor in our modern ultrasocial world, that is, comic book movies (Carney et al. 2014). However, as Scorsese as recently pointed out, with some remarkable exceptions, most superhero comic book movies have perfected the recipe for this disposable forms of entertainment and can hardly be considered free of the theme park ride syndrome (Shoard 2019).
Conclusions
In 1980, Kurtz left Lucasfilm because he disagreed about the sway of the merchandise over the quality of the storytelling and because he didn’t feel like a second Death Star and a happy ending for the OT were good ideas (Jones 2016: 338-339). In the 2010s, intoxicated by the acquisition of a huge money-making intellectual property, Disney retrod the safest path and gave us a third Death Star (in The Force Awakens), and another weird, self-contained happy ending (at the end of The Last Jedi). This time, however, the new corporate owner witnessed the collapse of both storytelling quality and toy sales while facing the disappointment of the fans. With The Rise of Skywalker, Lucasfilm doubled down once again and gave us an entire arsenal of Death Star tech installed on thousands of Star Destroyers and a third, controversial happy ending. With the collaboration between a new generation of filmmakers eager to play in Lucas’ sandbox and their younger collaborators steeped in postmodern literary criticism in the control room, it feels like the toyetic features of the saga have finally took control of the plot itself, as if Lucasfilm didn’t know what to do with the saga anymore.
I don’t know if Disney will be able to retain the rights of Star Wars. At any rate, after the Disney buyout Lucasfilm should have engaged in a radical reorganization of the Story Group with the inclusion of Religious Studies scholars and the co-option of someone as talented as Gary Kurtz in the control room. They didn’t. They could have just stuck to Lucas’s outlines and put the saga mythos centre stage (midichlorians and Clone Wars TV show lore included), owning the prequels’ themes with pride - at the very least for the sake of internal coherence. They didn’t and to close the whole saga Lucasfilm called the screenwriter of bloated and rushed DC Extended Universe first chapters, Batman v. Superman (2016) and Justice League (2017). Finally, Lucasfilm messed with canon and continuity - and any historian of religions worth their salt can tell you that that’s something you need to consider very carefully to avoid charismatic dissent, counterhegemonic conflicts over authority, and holy wars (Possamai 2011; Lyden 2012). Lucasfilm didn’t have any creative plan for anything, and now it’s becoming hard to see the difference between the new Star Wars - or Star Trek, for that matter - and any Transformers flick.
Notes
Please note that this post has been updated on 27 February 2020. Posters added on 5 May 2020.
[1] There are just too many materials published online these days to keep track of everything in a single post. For the sake of brevity, I will limit myself to cite here the two following articles: Hiatt 2019 and McMillan 2019.
[2] However, Star Wars has been seen through the lens of Campbell’s monomyth as early as 1978; see Gordon 1978.
[3] According to Lucas, among these other “things” there were “all the books and films and comics that I liked when I was a [12-year-old] child” (“Star Wars: The Year’s Best Movie.” Time, 30 May 1977, p. 56). In 1977, Lucas stated that the comic book medium as a form of art conveys “a certain cultural manifestation on a vaguely adolescent level but is much more pure because it is dealing with basic human drives that more sophisticated art sometimes obscures” (excerpt from “The Force Behind George Lucas.” Rolling Stones, 25 August 1977, p. 43). As a result of this cross-genre operation, the mise en scène of Star Wars was definitely postmodern, but the message, or the heart if you will, of the OT was inherently modernist. All citations are from Gordon “Star Wars: A Myth for Our Time”.
Refs.
Ambasciano, L. (2019). An Unnatural History of Religion: Academia, Post-truth and the Quest for Scientific Knowledge. London and New York: Bloomsbury. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350062412
Boyd, B. (2009). On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Brooker, W. (2016 [2009]). Star Wars. London: BFI/Palgrave.
Carney, J., R.Dunbar, A. Machin, T. Dávid-Barrett, and M. Silva Júnior (2014). “Social Psychology and the Comic-Book Superhero: A Darwinian Approach.” Philosophy and Literature 38(1A): A195-A215. https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2014.0019.
Gordon, Andrew (1978). “Star Wars: A Myth for Our Time.” Literature/Film Quarterly 6(4): 314-326. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43795691
Hiatt, Brian (2019). “Lucasfilm’s Kathleen Kennedy on ‘Rise of Skywalker’ and the Future of ‘Star Wars’.” Rolling Stone, 19 November. https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/lucasfilm-president-kathleen-kennedy-interview-rise-skywalker-future-star-wars-912393/
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