Taking the place of today’s ordinary paid subscription entry in the main screed.
Star Wars At Its Most Kurosawa. Depending on which Star Wars fan one asks, Star Wars has been experiencing storytelling problems for awhile now. There’s the prequel trilogy, which tells a convincing story about Anakin Skywalker’s fall from grace but comes close to ruining the religion, philosophy, mysticism, and mythology aspects of Star Wars with things like Midichlorians. There’s the sequel trilogy, which somehow manages to make people of all persuasions angry, and whose biggest flaw is that there was basically no plan: no board somewhere that laid out the path from Point A to Point B to Point C, in the swirl of changing directorial hands from Abrams to Johnson to Trevorrow and back to Abrams again. There are the mixed qualities of the shows: animated shows like Clone Wars and Rebels often rank high in the estimation of fans; The Mandalorian’s first season was incredibly strong, its second season mixed but still well-done, and its third season, together with the intervening Book of Boba Fett, less than compelling. (Andor soared, but it is also in a league of is own, thematically speaking.) Most of the people I know who grew up loving the franchise, as I did, now feel about it the way they do about Marvel, another favorite for me: a kind of cold indifference or even outright distaste, whether the revulsion of a jilted lover or a hardened cynic or some mixture of the two. I can’t say I blame them, necessarily, nor can I ignore that the Disney machine requires that things be produced and released on such a schedule that is not only inhumane but also has cranked out some pretty bad art. But there are certain things we all agree on for ourselves, points of personal sustenance for the psyche that we stay committed to against our temperament; one of mine is that I refuse to live in a world where I don’t like Star Wars, so I try to hold out hope that things will turn around for the franchise in the long run, even if that hope seems irrational some days. (Star Trek, another long-time love of mine, has been faring much better with Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks.) Ahsoka seems to reward that faith that Star Wars can get better by returning to its roots, and those roots are, in the end of things, pretty simple: Star Wars is about samurai wizards from space who fight fascists, full stop. As such, it is at its best when it draws heavily on the tradition of samurai films, on the Jungian/Campbellian hero’s journey tropes (including when the goal is to complicate or in some way deconstruct them), and on the idea of the Force as divine or magical rather than reductively scientistic. Dave Filoni, who created both the character Ahsoka and the show named after her, gets this, not just because he was George Lucas’s true heir all along, but because he can rescue the best of Lucas from the worst of Lucas by highlighting those best elements of Star Wars and simply neglecting the worst ones. If Filoni had been in charge from the beginning, I suspect things might have gone very differently in Star Wars’s Disney era, which is unlikely to end anytime soon given the massive amount of cash Lucasfilm makes for Disney.
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