Author: Sean Gates

Sean is an aspiring screenwriter, novelist, a trained artist and photographer, an avid reader, film buff, sports fan, working man, bird hobbyist, social liberal, fiscal conservative, and occasional smartass. He also enjoys craft beers, pizza, and long lonely walks wondering just where the hell his life went wrong.

Star Wars and Economics, Part One

Star Wars is one of those things that is applicable in nearly every area of life.  I mean it doesn’t have much useful relationship advice, I’m afraid, but apart from that it’s pretty solidly on point.  Now, I post a lot about politics and I post a lot about popular culture, and it’s always interesting to me when I can bring the two together.

As it happens, Star Wars is very much about economics.  I realize it doesn’t seem that way, crazy movies about magic warriors with swords made of lasers and super weapons with embarrassing fatal flaws, of bickering robots and annoying-ass frog aliens who ruin your enjoyment of the prequels.  But Star Wars was one of the first entertainment properties in my life that proved stories could keep on giving, almost indefinitely, when they were built properly.

I’m not alone in that.  My generation is almost defined by our love of Star Wars.  If you don’t believe me, ask Disney’s bankers.  Hell, Kevin Smith has basically made a career out of being a fan.  Remember this scene from Clerks?

It’s funny, but it’s also bullshit.  I mean, that’s okay, it can be bullshit, it’s Randal.  Randal’s hardly a bastion of reason and sanity.  And Kevin Smith was making a comedy.  Still, I always feel the need to tell anyone who will listen that there’s no such thing as independent contractors in the First Galactic Empire.  The reason is simple economics.

Don’t believe me?  Let’s begin with the Original Trilogy and try to understand, from clues in the films, what kind of economic structure the empire has.

In the first film, retroactively titled “Episode IV: A New Hope,” there are many clues about the structure of the empire.  Let’s start with life on the desert world of Tattooine.  Luke Skywalker lives with his uncle, Owen Lars, and aunt, Beru Lars (nee Whitesun).  They’re farmers, in the middle of the desert.  The landscape is dotted with these odd antenna-like structures called vaporators.  The vaporators pull moisture, either from deep in the ground, or from the air, and use it to feed the crops.

Given Owen’s talk about hiring more hands the following year, and being unwilling to let Luke leave for the Imperial Academy until next season, it seems the Lars farm is rather large, so they’re probably commercial farmers.  Seems all very familiar to our own reality, right?  Given that Luke’s landspeeder (Star Wars for “car,”) is battered, scorched, and missing an engine cover; and given also that Uncle Owen buys his droids on the black market from scavenging Jawas who sell whatever useful stuff they find to farmers and frontiersmen they come into contact with, we may deduce that the money is tight, and that this is a backwater star system, far removed from the usual business of the Empire.

Additionally, we never see how goods move offworld, or the market where goods are bought and sold.  So we don’t know for sure if the Empire controls it, or not.  It’s actually fairly unclear if Tattooine is part of the Empire, or is an independent system.  It’s referred to as being along the Outer Rim, meaning it’s a fairly remote part of the galaxy, not one of the core systems, and as far as we can tell in the movie, the only imperial presence there follows Princess Leia’s corvette, the Tantive IV, into the system during the opening moments of the film.  It doesn’t look like the Empire would have much interest in a sun-scorched ball of sand, particularly one containing nothing but farmers, nomads and scavengers.  Indeed, when Obi-Wan is trying to recruit Luke to his cause, Luke says, “it’s not that I like the Empire, I hate it, but…that’s all so far away from here.”  Likewise, Obi-Wan, as we come to learn, was trying to hide from the Empire so it makes sense he’d go where the Empire is not.

In fact Tattooine is run by the Hutts, who are notorious gangsters.  But the thing about gangsters, they have legitimate front companies to hide their illegal activities behind.  Jabba, the Hutt who seems to be the boss on Tattooine, is into smuggling.  We know this because we learn that Han Solo, captain of the Corellian light freighter Millennium Falcon, was employed by Jabba when he was detained by an Imperial starship and ditched his illicit cargo in order to avoid getting in trouble.

The best way to think about Han in this context is that he’s actually a truck driver; in fact he is what is known as an independent operator.  He has his own freighter and he hauls what he wants to haul, when he wants to haul it.  This leads me to believe that Jabba is probably responsible for the movement of goods to and from Tattooine.  In this way he can also buy and sell things under the table and use his operators to move contraband in secret, in exchange for some extra, unreported income.

Though it isn’t canon, as far as I know, it has been suggested in various peripheral materials that the shipment Han dumped was Spice.  What “Spice” is, in Star Wars, is never explained, though it’s generally understood to be something like the Spice from Dune.  However at the very beginning of the movie, as C-3PO and R2-D2 are dodging blaster fire during the arrival of the Imperial boarding party on the Tantive IV, Threepio muses that they’ll be “sent to the Spice mines of Kessel, smashed into who-knows-what!”

When Obi-Wan and Luke talk to Han and Chewie in the cantina on Tattooine, Han boasts that Millennium Falcon is “the ship that made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs.”  As a parsec is a unit of distance and not time, this claim is nonsense, unless the ship folded space in some way, but what is clear from this is that Han probably has hauled spice.  What is also clear, from Threepio’s remarks, is that the Empire actively mines spice, and uses labor camps as punishment for miscreants.

This would seem to point to the Empire controlling production of goods and services within its own borders, and probably explains why they detained Solo, as they would probably do routine stops of freighters along trade routes.  We have scales for trucks; no doubt they have something analogous to “weighing stations” for starships, even if it’s only boarding and physically inspecting at a chosen port, like you’d do for a seagoing freighter.

Where we do see the Empire, we learn some very important things.  First, we learn that Princess Leia is an Imperial Senator who is secretly a member of what the Empire calls the Rebel Alliance (they call themselves The Alliance to Restore the Republic).  We also learn that the commander of the Death Star, Wilhuff Tarkin, is referred to alternately by his rank of Grand Moff, or the less formal title, “Governor.”  We are also present in the briefing room as Tarkin sweeps in and announces “the Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us; I have just received word that the Emperor has dissolved that council permanently.  The last remnants of the old Republic have been swept away.”

When General Tagge presses the issue, asking how the Emperor will maintain control without the bureaucracy, Tarkin says something else very telling: “The regional governors will now have direct control over their territories.  Fear will keep the local systems in line.  Fear of this battle station.”

It isn’t just that the Empire governs with an iron fist; it’s that Tarkin is a regional governor, as in the Roman Empire.  He wears a uniform, he is a military officer, but he is also a regional governor who will rule over his section of the Empire and report only to Emperor Palpatine.  In other words, what was probably sort of a communist oligarchy is now for certain a military dictatorship.  The last pretense of democracy is gone.

You will also notice visual cues within the Empire.  The interior of the Death Star, and the capital ships, are all grey and austere, bare metal, fluorescent lighting, exposed conduits and open maintenance pits.  On the bridge of the destroyers, the officers stride around on catwalks while the crewmen at their consoles sit in pits below them, forced to look up as a slave to a master.  TIE fighters are simple and geometric, no hyperdrive, no shields; they’re disposable, and so therefore must their pilots also be.  Stormtroopers wear buckets that hide their entire face.  Protection, to be sure, but also dehumanizing, faceless goons with numbers like TK-421 as their identifiers, rather than names.  As we would learn in the prequel trilogy, these are clones, human beings grown for the express purpose of being used as cannon fodder.  Serfs.  Slaves.  This is the way of the First Galactic Empire.  Even the symbol of the Empire is a cog wheel.  Think about that a minute.

Meanwhile the Alliance has rickety starfighters scorched with blaster marks, patched with mismatched sheet metal, paint jobs not maintained; but the ships have shields and hyperdrives.  The pilots are few, they have names and faces, and their lives are precious.

The only new economic information we get in Empire comes when Han, Leia, Chewie, and Threepio, aboard a crippled Millennium Falcon, come limping into port at Lando Calrissian’s tibanna gas mining colony, Cloud City, hovering in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant called Bespin, in the Anoat system.  Anoat, like Tattooine, is a backwater system and Calrissian’s mining colony is shiny and bright, a veneer of respectability across the place.

Han refers to Calrissian as his friend, but makes it clear to Leia and Chewie that he doesn’t trust Lando, “but he’s got no love for the Empire, I can tell you that.”  Almost immediately upon arrival we learn that Millennium Falcon used to belong to Calrissian, apparently put up as collateral and lost, in a card game with Solo.  This seems to still be a point of some contention for Lando, and the two have a tense reunion where all of the humor seems forced and neither man ever seems quite relaxed.  This is at least partially due to something we learn later, which is that the Empire arrived before the Falcon did – after all, the Empire has functioning hyperdrive – and Lando wanted to warn Han off if he could.  The escort shooting at the Falcon, and Lando’s line, “you know seeing you sure brings back a few things,” are subtle hints.

Still, the fact that Calrissian used to own the Falcon suggests that he was once a smuggler, too, and it begs the question, is he still?  Solo pokes him a little, teasing him for being responsible.  Calrissian shrugs it off, sort of noncommittal:  “yeah, I’m responsible these days.  It’s the price you pay for being successful.”  Like much of what Lando says in these scenes, this could easily have a double-meaning, since he’s going to sell out his friend before he’ll destroy his business.  But suppose Lando has become successful in another sense, too, having moved on from hauling contraband, to managing it?

Down in the bowels of Cloud City, there’s a facility called the carbon-freezing chamber.  Here, the tibanna gas is frozen in carbonite slabs for easy transport aboard freighters.  When Darth Vader and his minions arrive, having been summoned by bounty hunter Boba Fett who tracked Millennium Falcon to port, Vader begins making arrangements to lure Skywalker there as well, in order to freeze him in a carbonite slab and transport him, without fuss or muss, to the Emperor.  Of course he plans to test the process on Solo, in case it doesn’t work he doesn’t want to kill Skywalker.

Well, if you can freeze people safely in carbonite, you can do it with damn near anything, and if one were a former smuggler, say, with underworld contacts and a lust for profit, one might see opportunity.  After all, a lot of contraband could be easily frozen inside these slabs and moved across the galaxy with no one the wiser.  When Lando sells out his friend Solo, he says he’s “just made a deal that will keep the Empire out of here forever.”  But when that doesn’t work out for him, he makes a play to free Solo, and fails, then escapes offworld with Leia, Chewie, Luke, and the droids.

The implications are twofold.  First, the Empire will take over Calrissian’s operation.  It’s just what they do.  If there’s usefuless in this mining colony, they want it to be their own.  But, given Vader’s thought for using the carbonite to transport his prisoners, it’s just possible he suspected that Lando was up to no good, whether or not he actually was (of course he was, it’s Lando…).  In either, or both, of these contexts, it makes sense that Lando would want to keep the Empire out, and would flee when he realized that he could not.

In Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, we revisit Tattooine, and this time get acquainted with Jabba.  Depending on your preferred cut of the films, we either only know him by reputation, or have met him only briefly in Docking Bay 94 in the Mos Eisley Spaceport way back in Episode IV.  In either case, here we see his palace, a kind of science-fiction harem with alien slave girls, cruel droids, and an assortment of thieves, thugs, bounty hunters, and smugglers as hangers-on as the band bangs out a few jazzy numbers and Jabba’s girls dance for his pleasure.  Then there’s Jabba himself, a huge, corpulent slug of a thing, sucking on a hookah and swallowing frogs.  He’s done quite well for himself, and all of this begs the question: what kind of an economy creates such an overwhelming market for smuggling?  The answer is, “the kind that’s been over-regulated all to hell.”

The simplest lesson in economics is that he who controls the flow of money, has all the political power; and he who has all the political power, controls the flow of money.  That’s why the free market is a good thing, because the ability of the private citizen to control his or her own money, is that citizen’s power, and freedom.  You choose to support what you believe in, and not support the things you don’t.  That’s your voice.  Nobody should be able to make you buy anything you don’t want.

One of the things the movie “Rogue One” did so well, was it had Mads Mikkelsen’s Galen Erso, a scientist, having turned away from his work because he turned away from the Empire.  He was living as a subsistence farmer on a distant world until the Empire came and found him, and threatened him until he agreed to go back to work for them.  He isn’t hired, he isn’t offered a contract.  He is simply taken, and kept by the Empire, provided with work, lodgings, food, uniform.  It also showed us his daughter, Jyn Erso, as an inmate in an Imperial Labor Camp.  This is exactly what the Empire is in the original trilogy.

Remember, slaves don’t own property, and don’t get paid except in food and lodging.  When the state controls production and distribution of goods and services, and the people work for a share of said goods and services, that is the exact definition of slavery.  The lack of freedom leads to desperation; and when the government is hindering the people, the people will cast off the law and do for themselves according to what they know is right and good.

Well, that’s it for Part One.  In Part Two we’ll explore the Prequel Trilogy, and see if my understanding of the nature of the Empire, and the economic nightmare that is the galaxy far, far away, is corroborated by the story of how the Empire came to be.

Continue to Part Two by clicking this link.

So, About That Clever Meme…

I’ve seen memes like the one below rattling around Facebook for the last week or so, and the sentiment behind it is nothing new.  I hear people asking why people who are Christian would vote Republican — nevermind that a lot of Christians are liberal and vote Democrat exclusively — but the argument is one I have heard so often that, as a Christian, libertarian, and former Republican, I’ve often wanted to answer it, and having this little soapbox upon which to stand, I thought I’d do it.

Never mind the fact that this blatantly misrepresents what anyone actually wants to do…

The United States of America isn’t a theocracy, to begin with.  Let’s start there.  Our government was founded on, among other things, the freedom of religion.  So although many of us are Christian, and try to live out the teachings of Jesus Christ, those teachings are not really foundational to what our country is, or what it stands for.  The United States was founded on the principle that all human beings are endowed by their Creator with certain rights, and that any system of government should not infringe upon those rights, but respect the right of the individual to live his or her life as they see fit, provided that said individual does not infringe upon the rights of others.

Because of this, although many of us may be Christian, the only place that this, and our government, intersect is upon the principal that the government cannot, and should not, prevent us from worshiping as we would.  That goes for members of every religion.  With that said, let’s talk a little bit about that meme, and about the Gospels with regard to government.

Imagine, if you would, that it is December 17th.  You stop off at Walmart on your way home from work — you need, say, Orange Juice, socks, and a pair of pliers — and as climb out of your car and into the bracing cold, you are greeted by the sound of a bell, clanging insistently.  Clang-clang, clang-clang, clang-clang.  Sounds like Christmas.  As you approach the door, you see him; Santa hat and safety vest, a kind of red cauldron suspended under a tripod, a sandwich board emblazoned with the red shield of the Salvation Army.  Clang-clang, clang-clang, clang-clang.

You have a choice, of course: you can toss some money in the pot on the way by.  You can make an elaborate show of fishing in your pockets, coming up empty, and shrugging apologetically as you dash past Safety Santa.  You can try to avoid eye-contact and eat the sixty seconds or so worth of guilt you feel when he calls, “Merry Christmas!” after you.  Or you can get back in the car and drive to Target.  Options.

Of course the right thing to do is to give money.  Lot of good reasons why you might not, though.  Perhaps you don’t have cash.  Perhaps you don’t like what the Salvation Army stands for.  Perhaps you’re actually going into Walmart to pick up groceries to take to the homeless shelter and cook supper for the people there, and the money you’re carrying is for that purpose.

Or, perhaps, like Ebenezer Scrooge, you figure that you pay your taxes and some portion of that goes to benefit the poor and destitute, and in this way you believe you’ve done your part.  Scrooge shot down the plea of the two men collecting alms, with that exact argument.  The point of that wonderful story, of course, is that paying your taxes does not constitute being charitable or merciful.  Truly doing good is when you see a need, and you know you can solve that need, and then you do so.  The government is bad at solving things — people who can’t pay off their debts end up in jail, for instance, and that’s not just in Dickens’ day, it still happens now.  Government is terrible at solving problems.  It is, in fact, uniquely inept at problem-solving.

But the point remains, whenever you see Safety Santa or any of his ilk, you have a choice.  Choice is freedom, and how you decide says something about the kind of person you are.  Either way, if you walk past him into the Walmart, do you know what happens?

Nothing.  Nothing happens.

If, on the other hand, you don’t pay your taxes, do you know what happens?

You go to jail.

It is our tax dollars that pay for government programs.  And while that’s fine, to the extent that people who need help get help, it doesn’t change the fact that tax dollars are not voluntarily given.  This is provable by the above point, that if you don’t pay your taxes you go to jail.  That’s not a choice, it’s literally robbery.  Jesus didn’t advocate robbery, it’s actually against the laws of God.  You’re thinking of Robin Hood, a folk hero whose name literally means, “thieving brigand.”

I think all our mothers taught us the old saying that “two wrongs don’t make a right.”  Stealing from one person to pay another doesn’t make everything right, it merely transfers grievance.  That isn’t any kind of a real solution.  As I often repeat, “responsibility is the price of freedom.”  Being truly free means being responsible for your own actions, like any grown adult should be.  You are allowed to own weapons, so you must be responsible owners.  You are allowed to speak freely, so you must also do so responsibly.  It is the responsibility of the individual to be charitable, compassionate, merciful, and kind.

Not that the government shouldn’t be a benevolent presence; merely that government is not in any way CAPABLE of being a benign presence.  After all, does not power tend to corrupt?  Why then would you give away your own power and freedom to a government that says it will take care of you? Since we started off talking about the Gospel according to Matthew, consider Matthew 7:6:  “Do not give to dogs what is sacred; and do not cast your pearls before swine, for they will only trample them underfoot, and turn and tear you to pieces.”

By the basic philosophy of our founding documents, rights are things you are born with.  The power of the government is in either recognizing those rights, or not recognizing them; and to that end the Bill of Rights is framed as a bunch of stuff the government can’t take away.  Because it isn’t theirs to grant, and therefore it isn’t theirs to take.

Looking back, then, to that meme:

1.) This is the hardest one to defend.  Some of us would just as soon end these programs entirely because, again, stolen money.  But Republicans worry that food stamp programs, and others like it, are used to help keep the poor people, poor.  After all, poor people usually vote Democrat.  Why would the Democrats want to get them out of poverty when they’ve cornered their vote?  Republicans generally want to help people get out of poverty, not keep them there.

2.) Obviously the goal is NOT to poison the water for the Standing Rock Sioux.  Their concerns are valid, of course, but the point remains…nobody is actually planning to poison their damn water supply as this meme suggests.

3.) The travel ban wasn’t meant to be permanent.  It was also not applicable to all Muslims.

4.) Nobody is planning to take away anyone’s health insurance.  The plan is to try to make it so that the government can’t steal money from people who elect not to buy health insurance.  That doesn’t have to mean taking away anyone’s insurance, and the president has said repeatedly that he doesn’t want anyone to lose their insurance.

One last thought, regarding the Travel Ban.  Let’s say you live alone.  You’re a woman.  A man you don’t know comes to your door looking for a place to live.  Do you let him in?  Maybe you’re a parent, you have small children.  Do you let strangers in?  Or do you try to find another way to help the person in need?  This isn’t unreasonable.

“What, the bag? Nah, I’m, uh…I’m saving up to buy a face.”

Do you lock your doors at night?  Or do you leave them unlocked and wide open, for people to wander in, take what they want, and kill you if they want to?

There’s a difference between voluntarily letting someone in, and letting them barge in unchecked.  There’s also a difference between not caring about someone, and choosing to protecting yourself.  Indeed, it’s not unchristian to understand that you need to have your own house in order before you are able to truly help others.

Again, Matthew 7, this time verses 3-5:

3 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4 How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t accept refugees, really.  But I do think there’s a reasonable case to be made for exercising care and judgment in selecting whom we choose to accept, just as we would when inviting strangers into our home.  After all, this land is our home too; and national security is squarely the responsibility of the Federal Government.

Anyway, I don’t know if this was useful to anybody, but I thought I would try to illuminate the thought process a little, in case it would indeed help.

Miserable Failure Day

I’ve always hated this stupid damn holiday.  There was one year, I’m pretty sure, seventeen years ago, that I actually was in a relationship when this day rolled around, but even then, it was a long-distance relationship, so my then-girlfriend and I couldn’t even celebrate it together, just chat on AIM like we did every night until we both felt like we were permanently tethered to our computers.

I know that’s part of why that relationship ended.  Another part was that I depended on her for my happiness, and that wasn’t a burden that she, or anyone else, should ever have to bear.  Laura – that was her name – went on to get married and get a boring job and have, I hope, a perfectly happy life.  Me, well…it’s been seventeen years, there’ve been a few other women, and, here I am, single as usual on this stupid damn holiday.

That thing, that unfair burden I placed on Laura seventeen years ago?  Well, that’s my burden and my own personal curse.  I struggle with sadness and loneliness, and I have for as long as I can remember.  I go up and down like a very slow tide.  For a while I’m happy, I see clearly, I am friendly and gregarious, I make people laugh, they wonder who the hell this guy is.  But I start sliding back down, almost imperceptibly at first, until, a week or two later, I’m quiet and sullen and mostly uncommunicative.  I can fake it for social interactions, I’m good at that, I’ve been good at it all my life.  Coworkers often tell me that my smile is what they think of when they think of me.  I found that weird, until I remembered that whenever I see somebody, I reflexively smile, say hey, and pass a brief greeting.  No wonder people think I’m a happy guy.  They don’t know me.

For a guy who struggles with these emotions on a regular basis, Valentine’s Day is the absolute worst thing.  It’s like socially-mandated emotional abuse.  In case I wasn’t feeling sad or lonely enough, here’s a day just for the entire world to remind me how much better than me they are!  It’s cool, I know how to take punches.  I’m a regular Rocky Balboa when it comes to taking punches.  When I get down, I tend to introspect, worrying at knots, which is dangerous because you can loose some threads ‘t’were better left not rent.  There are dark places there, and I do not recommend poking around in them.

When I was little I was typically content, but as I got older, the experiences my friends were having took on a different tone, one I wasn’t comfortable with, and I tried to cling to the things I knew I liked.  I refused to grow up.  Of course clinging to stuff like that has a law of diminishing returns; I was a big kid who was refusing to face the future, and doing the things I liked was eventually just a form of pretending to be happy.  This is a prison of my own making.

I was friends with a lot of girls when I was little.  There were playdates and many afternoons spent at each others houses.  But as I grew up, all of those friendships dried up and fell away.  I don’t know why.  Some of the girls moved away.  Some of them just started hanging out with other people.  One by one they all went away, and I did not get to have the experience of growing up with even one girl as a constant presence in my life.  Not with any sort of closeness.  Some of them I missed for many, many years.

Then one day I found myself a teenager, with no lady friends.  I went to a small high school, we all knew each other, many of us had known each other since Kindergarten.  None of the young ladies in my school were strangers to me, really; but neither were they people that I really felt like I knew.  And of course I was shy.  Teenagers think about sex a lot.  I mean, a LOT.  But my Peter Pan ass wasn’t ready to deal with all of that, because it meant being a grownup, and I had no plan for my future.  I wasn’t going to do anything that would force me to grow up any quicker than I had to.  At that age it’s difficult to think about relationships through any other filter.

Women, therefore, were admired from afar.  Torches were carried until only handfuls of ash remained.  My first girlfriend was somebody I met in college.  My senior year in college.  I was twenty-one.  That didn’t last long.  I think I was mostly just glad I finally was in a relationship.  But it all kind of…we were better as friends.  I became kind of a jackass.  We had very little in common, and I didn’t know how to handle it.

I’ve had a long series of relationship failures.  About half of them were failures to even BE in a relationship.  But I can honestly say that I have tried to learn and grow, and become a better man through every experience.  So that’s where I find myself focusing this Valentine’s Day: on life’s lessons.  I’ll try to talk briefly here about the things I’ve learned over the years, in case any of these may prove useful to anyone out there.  I realize of course that most likely they won’t.  The average person has learned these much earlier in life than I did, and in any case most of us need to bumble around and step on all of our own rakes.  It’s nothing to be ashamed of.  It’s life.

With that said, here goes:

  • Just because you can be in a relationship, doesn’t mean you ought to be.  You lose some good friends that way.  And sometimes you end up doing more harm than good.
  • Long-distance relationships don’t work.
  • If she makes you chase her, tread lightly.  Most likely she just enjoys the attention and does not take you seriously.
  • Long-distance relationships don’t work.  That’s not a typo, it’s just a thing I had to learn more than once and it bears repeating.
  • No matter how much you love someone, you can’t make them love you.
  • If she breaks up with you and says she wants to be friends, she doesn’t mean it, in first place; in the second place if she does, she’s wrong.  Neither of you want to remain friends.  Trust me on that.  You both need room to heal.
  • If there’s an ex in the picture, run like hell.  If she hasn’t let go of him she hasn’t moved on, and if she hasn’t moved on, you’re screwed.  And not in the way you want.
  • Long-distance relationships DO NOT WORK.
  • Sometimes the supposed ex isn’t even really an ex, in which case you’re about to be weaponized for the woman’s own purposes.  You don’t want this, either, even if you think you do.  Run.  Run very, very far.
  • If you aren’t interested in her when you meet her, you aren’t going to be interested in her later.  At least that’s my experience.  They say love takes time to build, and that’s true.  I’ve experienced it.  But only when there was interest from the start.  If I’m not interested, I’m not interested.  I once dated a girl for a few months hoping that I’d get interested at some point; I’d recently been through a breakup and was trying to get right.  She seemed to like me well enough and that was a nice feeling.  But eventually I had to face the fact that I just wasn’t into her and I was wasting her time and mine.  It wasn’t fair to either of us and by the time I finally broke it off, I felt like a total piece of crap and I know she didn’t understand.
  • Which I guess brings me to the age-old favorite; don’t rebound date.  Ever.
  • If you get mixed signals, you’re likely on the other side of the aforementioned “gauging interest level” scenario.  She likes that you’re interested and isn’t sure what she wants.  Most likely this isn’t going anywhere for you.  If it’s important to you, you can stick it out, but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t go your way.
  • If she keeps referencing this guy friend of hers, and how he’s a doofus and she’d never date him, yet she can’t seem to stop bringing him up…yeah, you’re screwed.  Again, not in the fun adult way.
  • If she breaks up with you, and you truly care for her…stay out of her way.  If you don’t, she will end up hating you, and it will be the worst you’ve ever felt.  Worse, even.  You’ll keep finding new sub-levels of Hell.  Eventually you’re just curled up in the fetal position crying in the storage room where the devil keeps his winter sports equipment.  For the love of God, let her have her space.

I’m no expert, but these things probably still apply if you reverse the genders, or make them both the same, in either direction.  Anyway, happy Valentine’s Day, everybody.  Or as I’m calling it this year: Tuesday.

The Bozos Local 415: Adventures in Storytelling

What do Jar Jar Binks, Yoda, and Gollum have in common?  It’s not what you think.

Now, I know I write a lot about the Star Wars Prequels, which is funny because they’re pretty unpopular as Star Wars movies go.  The reason I write about them so much, though, is because there’s so much in them, both good and bad, that they are excellent things to dissect for the purpose of studying storytelling.  Whether you love or hate them, there’s an incredible amount of stuff to get into.  That makes them more teachable in many ways than, say, Lord of the Rings, which gets almost everything right.  So the subject of this analysis will be about annoying characters, and how to make them work for a story and not against it.

We’ve all heard the complaints about Jar Jar Binks: he’s annoying, he talks funny, he does stupid things, he doesn’t add anything to the movie, he’s for kids, etc.  Those are all true, except, arguably, the one about him not adding anything to the movie.  But that is also where the problem occurred.  The role of Jar Jar Binks in Episode I: The Phantom Menace, was actually central to what George Lucas was trying to do.  And it’s obvious in the way his joining their team, mirrors Anakin’s joining as well.

This is where I’ll get into Yoda for a second.  Yoda, when he was introduced in The Empire Strikes Back, was being sort of git too.  Of course it was a test of Luke’s character; Yoda was sort of a Buddhist Jedi at that point, and his behavior was much like that of the Dalai Lama or any Buddhist priest, finding joy in simple things, delighting in nature, and in games, and in being open to experiences.  He tests Luke, not telling Luke that he is, in fact, the Jedi Master he’s come searching for, and Luke fails repeatedly, missing every opportunity to show the bizarre little guy some basic warmth, empathy, and compassion, instead being frustrated, closed off, and antagonistic,

The joy of the Dagobah sequences in Empire is in the way that it demonstrates the nature of choice: Yoda, in remaining upbeat and positive, is enjoying himself, while Luke, being combative and impatient, sulks his way through the entire experience, makes an ass of himself, bangs his head, and nearly loses his chance at training with this great Jedi Master.  All because he’s turned too far inward to see what’s right in front of him.  One of Mark Hamill’s finest moments in the trilogy comes at the instant Luke realizes the little guy he’s been fussing at all evening is Yoda: you can actually see the veil of stupidity lift from Luke’s face.

When you watch all of this for the first time, as a kid, not knowing who Yoda is beforehand, you actually side with Luke.  If you’re anything like I was, though, you figure it out before Luke does, and then you start wanting to smack the crap out of him.  Upon repeat viewings, you have fun, viewing it from Yoda’s side, knowing Luke is being an idiot.  Well, the lesson of Yoda, the lesson that you shouldn’t judge someone by their appearance, that the unlikely person is sometimes exactly the person you want to meet, is also the lesson of Smeagol / Gollum.

Gollum was a villain of course, but JRR Tolkien knew, when he wrote Lord of the Rings, that he believed in the value of all life.  Gandalf says this to Frodo in one of the most beautiful ways I can imagine.  Frodo says it’s a pity that Bilbo didn’t kill Gollum when he had the chance.

“It was pity that stayed Bilbo’s hand!  Many that live deserve death.  And some that die, deserve life.  Can you give it to them, Frodo?  Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment; for even the very wise cannot see all ends.  My heart tells me that Gollum has some part still to play, for good or ill, before all this is over.  The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of Men.”

Gollum of course went on to be a truly invaluable guide for Frodo and Sam… and an immeasurable pain in the ass.  Only at the end, however, when all hope was lost, did Gollum’s true place in the tale reveal itself.  And in case you are the one person in the Western Hemisphere who hasn’t seen the movies or read the books, I shall not spoil it here, but I will say only that if not for Gollum, the quest would have failed after all.

This theme, present in both LOTR and SW, is in fact a major theme in much of the fantasy genre.  It is also a deeply Christian theme.  Jesus, after all, associated with not just fishermen, but tax collectors and whores.  He saw the value in people, saw beyond the work they did or the attitudes others had about them.  And even Judas Iscariot, that betrayer, had to play his role in getting Jesus to the cross.  Judas didn’t know he was just playing his part; the other Disciples were shocked and dismayed, but Jesus knew it was all part of the plan.

So, let’s talk Jar Jar.  Jar Jar is unique among these examples in that he isn’t as compelling or mercurial as Yoda, he isn’t a villain like Gollum, nor pitiable like Gollum; Jar Jar is just plain old annoying.  But I believe with a few storytelling tricks, he could have worked just fine as written and performed.

As with my earlier article about Anakin being a creeper on purpose, I think the main problem with Jar Jar is that George Lucas forgot to give the audience permission to be annoyed with the character.  Now, I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right:  you didn’t need permission to be annoyed with Jar Jar, you were annoyed with him anyway.  However, here’s the thing about permission from the storyteller.  It tells you that you’re SUPPOSED to have the reaction that you have, and that it’s part of the storyteller’s plan, and when you know that, you know that by being annoyed with the orange frog man, you’re still engaged with the movie.  When you don’t feel that you have permission to be annoyed, being annoyed takes you out of the movie as you assume you’re just supposed to like this floppy, derpy, spaz of a character, and you rightly feel insulted by that presumption.

Obi-Wan: “I’m not wearing a wig for this scene.” Qui-Gon: “I am.” Jar Jar: “Meesa not even HERE.”

So, where did Tio Jorge go wrong?  It’s simple, really.  He wrote himself into a bit of a corner.  Jar Jar first interacts with Qui-Gon Jinn, who, as a seasoned Jedi Knight, and follower of the Living Force, recognizes potential usefulness in Jar Jar fairly early on.  I think George knew he had a problem, because Jar Jar’s first interaction with Qui-Gon was grabbing him and nearly getting them killed, and then, amidst his goofy thank you, Qui-Gon shuts him down by saying, “you almost got us killed, are you brainless?”

“I speak!”

“The ability to speak does not make you intelligent.  Now get out of here.”

It’s funny, but it’s not enough, because Qui-Gon, as the wise mentor character, is only allowed to get a little bit cross.  He can’t show the level of annoyance with the character that some of the audience is feeling.  The other side of that is, if you show characters hating on Jar Jar enough, he will become a sympathetic figure.  It’s a win-win.  But Jedi don’t hate.  Obi-Wan comes along moments later followed by a few battle droids riding STAPs, and Jar Jar starts gushing all over again as Qui-Gon easily dispatches them.  Here Obi-Wan, ignoring him, asks Qui-Gon, “What’s this?”

“A local.”

For the rest of the film’s first act, Obi-Wan is obviously having to work to put up with Jar Jar, while Qui-Gon, if slightly vexed, does a better job of maintaining his cool.  But, Obi-Wan, though still a Padawan Learner, is, like Qui-Gon, a Jedi – and Jedi are to be defined by their compassion and understanding.  To that end neither of them gets to really speak for the audience – because the audience, mostly, is not made up of monks.

And that’s the problem in a nutshell.  The audience needs a character who speaks for them.  More than one is fine, but a minimum of one is required, and the Prequels don’t have any.  I think the beauty of the classic characters from the OT is that they all speak for us at various times.  Luke, in ANH, is any teenager on a journey into the unknown.  Han Solo is the skeptic, acerbic rogue, questioning everything and basically assuming the rest of the characters are pretty full of crap.  And then Princess Leia, wittier still, takes charge because although Han Solo thinks Luke is a bozo, Leia knows they’re BOTH bozos, and they need her to kick their butts in the right direction at any time.  Which I think is the basic nature of Han and Luke’s friendship: the bozos unionized.

“I don’t just make an ass of myself for free ya know.” “I do.”

I actually like the prequel characters.  I quote Qui-Gon Jinn as often as I quote anyone.  He basically never says anything that isn’t resoundingly true.  Anakin and Padme, as discussed in the aforementioned article, are actually fairly layered characters who never really get the chance to shine, and much like Jar Jar, it’s because we don’t have a way to access them fully.  They are knights and politicians, dignified, reserved, formal in speech and general demeanor.  While Jar Jar, in TPM, was a counterpoint to this, he doesn’t speak for the audience at all and therefore isn’t much help.  Anakin in TPM, as a kid, probably works for the younger children in the audience.  He likely is very accessible to them.  For the rest of us, he’s just some kid, and that again hangs us out to dry.

I think in some way, Obi-Wan is supposed to be the skeptic, but he doesn’t really fit in that role as written, and Lucas knew it.  Jar Jar is supposed to make the point about the Jedi putting up with his crap because he’s there for a reason, but although Qui-Gon expresses this in some fashion to Obi-Wan, what passes for conflict is never particularly engaging, and Qui-Gon’s teaching on the matter never more than perfunctory.

The whole device mostly occurs just so that Qui-Gon can bring Anakin into the fold and we don’t think it’s as weird as we otherwise might: which is to say it tells us who Qui-Gon is and how he sees people he meets.  Without a way in for the audience, though, most viewers simply won’t care.

“What, ah, Gates is saying here — can I call you Gates? Sure I can, I’m me and you’re you. Anyway, the point our tragically unhip friend is making is that people like to have an asshole on their side. It can be me, or Chris Pratt, it doesn’t really matter. Pratt’s gonna wiggle his ass and make inappropriately tacky jokes. I think you want me. My inappropriate jokes are never tacky. But what you never, ever want, is to have to deal with a brain-damaged orange tranny frog without a guy like me in your back pocket. I’ll hate him for you. I’ll enjoy it. And, my bank account will enjoy it too. Is that too on the nose? No. Maybe? Yes. The point is, I love me. I mean you love me. I mean, hell, we both love me.  Who wouldn’t?”

What the story needed, was a Han Solo.  Not an actual Han Solo, but the archetype.  The rogue.  A character who can question Jar Jar’s usefulness much more aggressively; a character who can question Anakin more meangingfully than Obi-Wan’s “why do I sense we’ve picked up another useless life form?”  A character who can delight in actively trying to damage Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan’s calm.  This would do wonders for the film regardless of whether this character is a modification of an existing character (for instance, a less-disciplined Obi-Wan) a replacement for an existing character (in place of Jar Jar, for instance) or in addition to the existing characters.

I’d make a “Phantom Menace: Special Edition” joke here, but Lucas is retired.

Stop Defending Scrooge. Sort of.

Recently I saw an article posted by the Mises Institute defending Ebenezer Scrooge’s character.  In point of fact there are at least two.  I find the notion of defending Scrooge to be kind of disgusting, but I had to understand their point, and I appreciate Misesian Economic theory, so I had to look at what they were saying.  The premise goes something like this:  Scrooge himself has committed no act of violence against anyone, nor has he been guilty of any legal infractions.  What he does with his money is entirely his business, and by being a successful businessman he has helped to strengthen the economy of his country.

That’s all true.  From a libertarian perspective, they’re totally right.  In fact I think that any reading of “A Christmas Carol” that sees Scrooge purely as a villain is missing the point, as the story is one of redemption.  Scrooge is not meant to be hated, but rather pitied.  He is a poor, miserable creature, who is capable of being, and indeed who is worth, so much more.  “A Christmas Carol” is really a character study of Ebenezer Scrooge, and a deconstruction of an archetype.  Were Scrooge a truly bad man, there’d be nothing to redeem.  I have always felt that a proper reading of that classic tale is that Scrooge is lost, and in need of recovery.  It is not his wealth that has led him astray, it is his disconnection from other people, but as we will discover in a little bit, his disconnection is a product of his upbringing, and isn’t purely his fault.  This is why his friend Marley comes to offer him a chance at redemption.  Because Marley knows Scrooge isn’t such a bad guy, as surely as he knows that Scrooge is on a bad road.

Charles Dickens, in fact, sets up Scrooge as a nasty man but as we follow his journey with the three spirits, we see the layers pulled back and learn the depth of Ebenezer Scrooge’s character.  He is wholly and fundamentally human.  He is sad, and lonely, and has shut out all emotion as much as he possibly can in order not to face the consequences of his life choices, and the point of the journey with the three is to replay those life choices and to see the man that he truly is, and the sum of those experiences which have so fundamentally structured his being.

One of the fundamental levels upon which I judge any adaptation of “A Christmas Carol” is the success they have in building Scrooge as a complex and compelling character.  Full disclosure, I have read the book many, many times since childhood and have watched numerous adaptations, but the one I gravitate towards (and the only one I own) is the 1984 TV movie starring George C. Scott.  In fact it is one of my favorite films, which seems an odd thing to say about a made for TV picture, but I consider it the definitive adaptation and find all others to be terribly substandard in every respect.

“As soon as the loan goes through, Uncle, I am going to buy a bar in Boston and put Kirstie Alley in charge of it.”

So, we are told at the outset, by Dickens, that Scrooge is basically unbothered by heat and cold, that foul weather has no effect upon him, and that he has no great love of mirth.  He doesn’t celebrate Christmas (or likely any holidays at all) and finds the whole business to be a farce.  This is where the nastiness of Scrooge’s character is brought to bear, though, because Scrooge’s nephew Fred Holywell stops by to wish him a Merry Christmas, and Scrooge tells him where he can go.

No, really.  Per Dickens:

“Don’t be angry, uncle.  Come!  Dine with us tomorrow.”
Scrooge said that he would see him – Yes, indeed, he did.  He went the whole length of the expression, and said that he would see him in that extremity first.

The 1984 adaptation is the only one I’ve encountered that actually played that out:

“Come!  Dine with us tomorrow.”
“I’ll see you in Hell first, Fred.”

Then the two men collecting for the poor come to the office.  In the film they catch up to Scrooge at the stock exchange, which was just the film’s way of getting out of the office as quickly as possible for the sake of pacing.  In any case, they ask for donations and Scrooge tells them his tax dollars go to pay for various government programs – which of course are things like prison and workhouses, nothing that actually does any good.  Here the libertarian will probably tell you that the government shouldn’t take Scrooge’s tax dollars to fund these misguided programs, and I agree.  However, this is where we get into the fundamental flaw in Scrooge’s character.  If the government did not take Scrooge’s money, he would not have that excuse to deny contribution to the collection the two gentlemen are taking up.  But we have no reason to believe that Scrooge would treat them any differently, or give a substantively different answer.

“It’s vichyssoise, sir. It’s SUPPOSED to be cold.”

After all, he treats his clerk pretty badly, he told his own nephew to go to hell, and he has just uttered the line, “if they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

That is NOT a nice man.  Which again, is no crime.  But this is the point of A Christmas Carol.  Scrooge is not a criminal, but he is a man who is lost, who is foundering, and if we care about him as a person, then we should want him to know kindness and love for his fellow man.  Dickens in fact makes a point of contrasting the clerk, Bob Cratchit’s journey home, with Scrooge’s own:

The office was closed in a twinkling, and the clerk, with the long ends of his white comforter dangling below his waist (for he boasted no greatcoat), went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, twenty times, in honor of its being Christmas Eve, and then ran home to Camden Town, as hard as he could pelt, to play at blindman’s bluff.

Cratchit seems a fairly young man, in the prime of his life, and he still knows how to enjoy himself.  Now for his employer:

Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, and beguiled the rest of the evening with his banker’s book, went home to bed.  He lived in chambers which had once belonged to his deceased partner.  They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and have forgotten the way out again.  It was old enough now, and dreary enough, for nobody lived in it but Scrooge, the other rooms being all let out as offices.  The yard was so dark that even Scrooge, who knew its every stone, was fain to grope with his hands.  The fog and frost so hung about the black old gateway of the house, that it seemed as if the Genius of the Weather sat in mournful meditation on the threshold.

In his surprisingly humorous and playful way, Dickens has made Scrooge’s house a metaphor for Scrooge himself: once playful and young, it got lost and is in now in a dark and forbidding place, and most of it is now devoted to business, save for the small suite that Scrooge himself lives in.  Think about the power of that metaphor.  That’s why Dickens is regarded as a master.  All work and no play have made Scrooge a very dull boy, his presence as dour and forbidding as the “black old gateway” of his house.

It suddenly occurred to Ebenezer Scrooge that he could probably afford to live… NOT in a craphole.

Of course Dickens has another motive, as well, because the creepy old “pile of building up a yard” is the perfect setting for a ghostly encounter – or two or three – Marley’s face on the door knocker, the hearse on the broad stair, and finally Marley’s full apparition in the apartment above.  But Marley speaks, in somewhat evasive language, of having brokered this opportunity for Scrooge:  “I am here tonight to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate.  A chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer.”  Again proving that Dickens does not consider Scrooge a villain as such, for Jacob Marley, his friend, cares deeply enough for him to barter on behalf of Scrooge’s soul.

The journey that follows with the three spirits, tracks Scrooge’s path, like the metaphor of the anthropomorphic house, from playful child to morose adult, and the story is a sad one.  With the Ghost of Christmas Past, we learn that Ebenezer was sent away to boarding school as a child and spent his holidays there, unwelcome at his father’s house, alone with his books and his imagination as all his friends were gone home.  We also learn that, years later, as he stands on the cusp of manhood, that his father sends for him at last.  In the book he doesn’t come himself, though, he sends Scrooge’s younger sister, Fan, to fetch him in a coach and bring him home.  She tells her brother:

“Father is much kinder than he used to be, that home’s like Heaven!  He spoke so gently to me one dear night when I was going to bed that I was not afraid to ask him once more if you might come home; and he said Yes, you should; and sent me in a coach to bring you.”

That picture is rather bleak.  Ebenezer’s father clearly is none too fond of the boy, and one wonders why; and just beneath Fan’s talk of their father’s kindness is the fact that she had to ask him if Ebenezer should come home.  If she had not, perhaps the poor fellow would have been left at that school to rot.  The 1984 adaptation I hold in such high regard, elaborates on that just a bit, saying that Scrooge’s mother had died in childbirth and that his father blamed him.  This would make Fan a half-sister, but I like where it takes Scrooge because it puts an exclamation point on his father’s disdain for him, and why their relationship is broken.  And that broken relationship is so important to who Scrooge is.  The film then goes a step further, in having the father waiting in the coach when Fan fetches Ebenezer, so the moment of hope and joy is immediately trampled by his father emasculating him and telling him he isn’t coming home for long, but is to go off to apprentice straightaway.

Three Scrooges: Old Ebenezer, Young Ebenezer, and their emotionally abusive father, Silas.

Later, in another flashback, newly-minted businessman Scrooge sits talking to his fiancée, Belle.  She breaks off the engagement, saying that “another idol has displaced me; […] a golden one.”

Ebenezer emplores her:

“This is the even-handed dealing of the world!  There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!”

She rebukes him:

“You fear the world too much.  All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach.  I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master passion, Gain, engrosses you.”

Or, to put it perhaps more plainly: Ebenezer was a good kid but he had a tough childhood, and as he has grown up he has been running from that childhood, from his fear of failure, from the specter of his father’s wrath.  And as we now know is so often the case with abusive relationships, the victim became like the abuser, slowly, over time; Ebenezer’s goodness was supplanted by his father’s cruelty.  Without this foundation, the journey with the spirits of Christmas Present and Future (or Yet-to-Come!) would be meaningless.

At least one of the Mises Institute articles used a quote from Fred Holywell during the Christmas Present sequence to set up its argument:  “His wealth is of no use to him.  He doesn’t do any good with it.”  However they left out the next sentence:  “He doesn’t make himself comfortable with it.”

Indeed, Fred repeatedly says that he bears Scrooge no ill will, that “his offenses carry their own punishment.”  And so they do.  Throughout his visit with the Ghost of Christmas Present, Ebenezer experiences three basic lessons.  The first is, he sees the Cratchits at home, and how happy they are despite not having much, and how one of their children is sick and lame, and Scrooge notes that he could possibly help this child with the means he has at his disposal.  Secondly, he sees other examples of this throughout England, with people he doesn’t know, doing kindness to one another, or making merry in difficult situations, understanding that happiness is not strictly tied to wealth.  And then he sees Fred and Janet, and their friends, and sees what he is missing out on by not accepting his nephew’s invitation.  He also sees that his nephew genuinely wishes him well, and that his invitations are not a trick nor an insult but a genuine desire to share the warmth and love of family.  He is also reminded that Fred bears a strong resemblance to Fan.  As it was Fan who brought him home from school, Fan who interceded on his behalf with their father, so it is Fan’s son who constantly reaches out to him.

Now here’s a guy who knows how to throw a party.

Then, of course, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come guides him through the remains of his life after he has died, if his course remains unchanged: Scrooge’s only legacy being that people joke about him and sell his personal belongings on the black market; that the Cratchits’ son has died and a gloom has settled over their once happy home, and the strain it has placed on their marriage.  In other words, despite his success, Ebenezer Scrooge’s only legacy was one of failure, of squandered potential.  It’s that realization that changes his heart; he is, after all, not such a bad man, down deep inside.  He is merely frightened, and lonely, and how he has seen that the price of fear, is death.  Scrooge, after his redemption, doesn’t give away his riches and go live in a commune or anything.  He just realizes that he can’t take his wealth him, so he might as well enjoy it, and be a blessing to others where he can, and let happiness, rather than emptiness, rule his life.

In effect, “A Christmal Carol” was never intended to be an indictment of wealth, but rather an indictment of fear and separation.  Scrooge’s offenses do carry their own punishment.  And thus the story is not about sparing the world of Scrooge’s offenses, but sparing Scrooge of their consequences, and this can only be done by changing his heart, by awakening the basic goodness and humanity in his broken heart.

“If the phrase ‘tight as’ should be thrown about, the answer is, ‘I am about to be if you’ll direct me to the punch-bowl.'”

If you don’t agree on that count, you need to revisit the book.  Or watch a better adaptation.  I can recommend one.

Not A Princess, but Always a Custodian of Hope

I don’t usually get upset over celebrity deaths.  It isn’t that they don’t matter, it’s just it seems selfish and presumptive to mourn someone you don’t really know, when they have actual friends and family who will miss them on a day-to-day basis.  We just watch them perform and act like we know them, when in truth we don’t.  Often we don’t know much about them at all, and that’s as it should be.

So it’s strange to me, how deeply the death of Carrie Fisher has touched me, today.  But then again, it isn’t really that strange at all.  In 1977, with the release of “Star Wars,” retroactively sub-titled “Episode IV: A New Hope,” Ms. Fisher, along with her co-stars Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill, became not only household names but unavoidable faces almost overnight.  People my age grew up with those three faces, and names, on our walls, on our shirts, on our TV’s, on our lunchboxes.  We had action figures modeled after them.  They literally were part of the everyday stuff in our lives.

For a lot of people my age, Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia represents a first crush, but to reduce the character to that does her a disservice; she was one of the first examples I can recall of how strong and brave a woman can be, and that more than anything is the true legacy of the character Princess Leia Organa.

It’s a common thing, when a beloved celebrity dies, to canonize them, to talk about how great they were and when we do that it’s obviously done out of a desire to celebrate the legacy of their work, and their public persona.  This is, after all, what they leave behind.  I won’t try to canonize Carrie Fisher.  I don’t believe she’d have much use for that sort of thing anyway.  You can’t gloss over all her problems, because to do so is to undermine much of what she accomplished in her life.

Ms. Fisher struggled with mental illness and addiction.  She and Harrison Ford had an affair during the filming of the original Star Wars: I could be wrong, not yet having read “The Princess Diarist,” but I suspect on some level she was looking to get hurt when that happened.  Three years later, the two were drinking buddies during the filming of The Empire Strikes Back, and were pretty much permanently hungover during working hours.

By the time they were making Return of the Jedi, she was a full-blown coke addict.  When you know it, you can see it all over her.  Her glow is gone, her eyes dull and flat.  She’s much more subdued than in previous films, barely present at all.  Very little of her trademark wit and strength are to be found here.  And indeed, in the previous two, Leia’s smartassery is due to Fisher herself reworking dialogue — a role she would take on for a great number of Hollywood films throughout her career.  She was in high demand as a script doctor, and was a successful author of novels and autobiographies — a line that is often blurred as her novels were mostly thinly-veiled autobiographies themselves.

The thing is, in writing about her struggles, she was able to not only take them on directly, but in doing so she was also shining a light on some awful things that a huge number of people deal with on a daily basis.  She was able to advocate for people struggling with mental illness, she was able to lead conversations about addiction.  That took real courage, and strength.  It shows that while the heroic Princess Leia Organa may have just been a role she played, Carrie Fisher could be heroic, too.  Her struggles were real and she was real in how she talked about them and dealt with them.

So, while I cannot say that I knew Carrie Fisher, I can absolutely say that I think she deserves credit for fighting the good fight, and for being an advocate for the everyday people who deal with issues just like hers. Carrie Fisher’s wit, humility, and strength are the things I will always remember her by.

But I’d also like to thank her for teaching an entire generation of men that we love gun-toting, butt-kicking, scoundrel-loving smart-mouthed princesses.

And we always will.

Persuasion and Propaganda in Journalism: or “Is All News Fake News?”

There’s a lot of talk these days about fake news.  And it’s a legitimate truth that there are a number of satirical and flat-out tabloid-style websites and services that provide totally made up news, and much of it gets passed around on Facebook as though it were real.  That’s a problem in itself, but it’s worse when the “legitimate” news sources use them as a scapegoat to draw attention away from their own fakeness.

I know, there I go, sounding like a crazy person again.  Look, the reality of modern life is that journalism is dead.  As Denzel Washington pointed out recently, the media has become more focused on being first than on being right.  I’ll carry that a little farther, though.  They’re focused on being first, and they’re all about sensationalism, and the first outlet to break the stories gets all the attention.  The reason being first and being sensational matter is because it’s a ratings game.  Nobody pays attention anymore unless the news is dramatic, shocking, spectacular.  We watched the World Trade Towers fall live on national television.  We watched the bombing of Baghdad live on television.  Twice.  Everybody has a camera in their pocket now, and a platform to share what they see.  The media is competing with social media.  They’re competing with us.  It’s hard to get our attention because we’re so saturated with sensory input from around the world on a constant basis.  Truth doesn’t sell anymore.  Narratives do.

True journalism is supposed to be objective, just reporting facts and allowing the reader, listener, or viewer, to draw their own conclusions based on the evidence presented.  A really great piece of investigative journalism would gather lots of pertinent facts from various sources, including some which spoke on the condition of anonymity, and would connect the dots without fabricating connective tissue that isn’t there.

But most reporting these days, even from reputable, “legitimate” news sources, isn’t like that.  Most of what passes for journalism these days is written from an emotional point of view, where the reporter leads the audience to subjective conclusions based on an emotional reading of the facts, assuming they bother with any facts at all.

You want an example?  How about the fact that Buzzfeed and CNN just spent the day claiming that Reince Priebus compared Donald Trump to Jesus?  What happened was they took this statement from the RNC:

If he floats, he’s a Nazi.

And decided that Priebus was talking about Donald Trump because…why?  Why would anyone assume that?  Because the Republicans just won the presidency and in a few weeks Trump will be sworn in as Commander-in-Chief?  Nowhere in that message does Priebus mention Trump, or the presidency, or the election, or our nation really at all.  He talks about Jesus, and he talks about worshiping Jesus in 2016 as the Magi did circa 6 BC.  The only reason to read anything else into that is because of your personal feelings, and that has no place in journalism.  That’s nothing but actual, naked fearmongering.

CNN has become no better than Glenn Beck, crying in front of a blackboard with a demented, Kafka-esque flow-chart linking Barack Obama to everything from Satan to tooth decay.

OBAMA ARE BAD ME WEEP

Here’s another example.  The Dakota Access Pipeline.  Though I have usually commented on the major news stories of the last year or two, I didn’t say anything about the Dakota Access Pipeline.  The main reason for that was that it was nearly impossible to gather any facts, and once I did, I was honestly afraid I was going to get ripped into for speaking the truth.

Most of the media coverage of DAPL was emotionally-charged, talking about how the Standing Rock Sioux’s land was being desecrated by the white man and his oil, how the pipeline was crossing the reservation and the protesters were peaceful and the law enforcement and military were being called upon to intimidate, harass, and attack them.

All of this is awful, and got me a little irate, but I took a deep breath and asked myself, “is any of this pipeline reporting objective?”  When the answer was no, I Googled and Googled and eventually found one or two pieces of reporting that cited sources and facts, and remained unemotional about the entire thing, and the conclusion I drew is that the entire thing was fairly complex, that both sides had legitimate concerns, and there was a whole mess of confusion in the middle caused by third parties.

As near as I can tell, the pipeline’s proposed route doesn’t enter the reservation at all, though it does cross the Missouri river at the site of an existing natural gas pipeline crossing.  The Army Corps of Engineers (who are very thorough and never do anything without checking and re-checking carefully) worked with a team of archaeologists and met repeatedly with various tribal leaders in order to choose a path that was clear of sacred and historically significant sites.

Of course, the Natives had concerns about the river crossing, because it was only a few miles from the reservation, and should the pipeline leak at the crossing, it would pollute the river and would be devastating for the reservation.  I’d call that a reasonable concern on their part, without need of embellishment.  However, various environmental activist groups got involved, and that’s where things get tricky.  It seems that the environmentalists escalated the protests, which led to escalation by government and law enforcement.  Construction workers felt so scared and intimidated that they started packing heat, and even then protesters succeeded in running them off the road, even sometimes dragging them from their vehicles.

I consider that a strategic move on the part of the environmentalists as it led to greater media coverage by making for more dramatic, sensational news stories.  That’s just good political strategy.  Finally the Army Corps of Engineers backed down, and they did it because the whole thing had become so ugly, dangerous, and, frankly, a circus; so that strategy by the organizers in the environmental groups certainly paid off.

So why didn’t the media report it objectively?  Well, because the narrative created by the activists was sexier.  Opposing the pipeline is in line with fighting climate change; it’s part of a larger narrative that is important to many journalists and by crusading on the pipeline issue, they are crusading for the planet.  If they can package that under a veil of half-truths about Natives getting screwed, it’s even sexier.  Hit ‘em right in the White Guilt.  Works every time.

Journalists have always been crusaders.  That’s nothing new.  What’s new is that many of them no longer crusade for the truth, they crusade for political causes.  They’re telling you fairytales and horror stories, in service of what they think is the greater good.  I’ve referenced this before, but a lie in service of the greater good is still a lie.

So let’s come back to the “fake news” discussion for a moment.  As Elbert Hubbard once said, “responsibility is the price of freedom.” I brought that concept up when talking about gun control.  If you’re going to be truly free, you have to be responsible for yourself and your actions; and if you’re going to give up responsibility then you also give up freedom.  Responsibility must be taught, by parents to children, or else learned through a series of comprehensive and potentially cataclysmic failures.  If children don’t understand the concept of personal responsibility, they grow up, turn to the government and say, “take care of me.”  And that’s where freedom dies.

What has this got to do with fake news, you ask?  In the words of Jacob Marley:  “Much.”

After all, who gets to decide what is fake news?  See the First Amendment:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Freedom of the press.  If the press is free, and the price of freedom is responsibility, then the press is responsible for what they print.  Any attempt by the government to regulate it, and the press is no longer free.  The second that happens, it becomes nothing more than government propaganda which is the exact antithesis of what it was created to be.  Which is why it’s so telling that the media finally jumps on the “ fake news” train the moment their candidate loses out.  Meanwhile CNN wants you to believe that Reince Priebus thinks Donald Trump is Jesus Christ.

Ultimately, we have to accept that the first amendment protects all of this garbage, at least to a degree, and that changing the first amendment would be too dangerous to even consider.  So instead, we must ask ourselves, what can we do?

Well, the first thing is we can remember that every single media outlet is a business.  And because they are businesses, what we spend money on is what we support.  And in the online world, sometimes what you click on is what you support.  What you “like” on Facebook is what you support.  What you share, is what you support.  So if you don’t like it, drop it like it’s hot.  Basic economics, right there.

The second thing, which pairs nicely with that, is when you see a news story, fact-check it, sure, but not only that; ask yourself, “is this fact-based journalism, or are my emotions being played?”  And if the answer to that is, “no, and yes,” then regardless of the masthead at the top of the page, or whose face it’s coming out of, what you have is not news.  Journalism may be persuasive, but it ought not be propaganda.  Which is to say that a journalist may gather and report the facts, and then use those to draw certain conclusions, and while there is a subjectivity inherent there, you get to look at all the same facts and decide if you agree with the reporter’s conclusions or not.  Ideally, the reporter is intelligent and objective enough to draw reasonable conclusions, and change their own point of view if necessary as facts are discovered.  The propagandist, on the other hand, twists the facts or outright fabricates information in order to promote a specific viewpoint.

I don’t need a journalist to tell me how I ought to feel about a given thing, and neither, I suspect, do you.  Don’t get me wrong, everybody’s free to have an opinion.  But by that same token, everyone is responsible for forming their own.  Which really only happens if we can get our hands on true and accurate information.  In the digital age, that’s surprisingly damned difficult.  It’s a jungle out there.

Little Pieces of Paradise

One of the joys of streaming television is being able to revisit old shows from my childhood and find out if they’re any good.  One of these shows is “Magnum, p.i.,” a Donald P. Belisario production based out of Hawaii.  The show ran for eight seasons from 1980-88, and famously starred Tom Selleck, a bright red Ferrari 308 GTS, and the island of Oahu.

When I was a kid, my Dad was a huge fan of this show.  He’s the same age as Tom Selleck, and could be found throughout the 1980’s wearing khaki shorts, ballcaps, golf shirts and deck shoes with no socks.  He even had an Aloha shirt or two, and aviator sunglasses.  And anyone who knows my dad knows that he’s had a moustache since the 1970’s, so there was that, too.  He and Magnum also have the same wristwatch.

“You just HAD to park next to me at the supermarket. Don’t lie, I know it was you, I traced the paint in the door ding to that Pinto you’re driving.”

Back in the early 80’s the only color TV in my parents’ house was on a cart in their bedroom, and at night my dad would sit in his VMI rocking chair and watch TV.  My mom would sit on the bed, her back to the headboard, and I would sit on the floor at the foot of the bed, beside the rocking chair.  But not when Magnum was on.  When Magnum was on, my mom usually sat in the rocking chair, and Dad laid on the bed, with his feet up by the headboard and his head at the foot of the bed, a pillow doubled over under his chest, behind his crossed arms, and I’d sit or lay next to him.  I didn’t necessarily follow the storylines back then, but I loved the car, the helicopter, the colorful shirts, the tropical guest house, and all of the Hawaii.  Like all little boys, I also just liked whatever my dad liked.

These days I get teased by some of my friends for being “nostalgic,” and it would be easy to say that revisiting my old favorite TV shows was some kind of way to recapture my childhood.  Maybe it would even be true, I’m not sure.  But a lot of the shows I liked back then are actually pretty awful, and after an episode or two I can’t continue watching them.  Magnum, though, I’ve had a long-standing appreciation for.  Being able to watch it straight through, no missing episodes, has been a treat.

It’s a tendency we see a lot of in the modern world, to judge earlier time periods by modern standards.  I think it’s funny that Magnum is remembered mostly for the car and, these days, for his shorts being very short.  The thing is… the car didn’t belong to Magnum, and in the 80’s, men’s shorts just WERE that short.  Boys’ shorts, too.  That’s just what we looked like.

Actual 80’s people. You laugh now, but we weren’t laughing then. Mostly we cried. Especially when we sat down.

So, how did the show come about?  CBS television had just ended production on the original “Hawaii Five-O” and they wanted to make use of their assets in Hawaii, so that was the genesis of “Magnum, p.i.”  When Don Belisario, Glen A. Larson and Chas. Floyd Johnson created the show, they had actually intended Magnum to be an American James Bond, a suave, dashing ladies’ man with a visiting stewardess on each arm.  Tom Selleck, however, was tired of being cast in this type of role, and he told the producers he wanted to do something different.

“I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. In ten years I had aged maybe half an hour, and in reverse. It’s best not to think about it too hard.”

Around this time, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were casting for “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”  Spielberg was adamant that he wanted Harrison Ford for the role of Indiana Jones, but Lucas, having worked with Ford on his last two films (“American Graffiti” and “Star Wars,”) was determined not to be the guy who only makes movies with Harrison Ford.  Selleck read for the role of Indiana Jones, screen tested, and was actually close to getting the role.  But Magnum was another potentially lucrative project, and the producers of the show had him in mind.  So Selleck told them, “I’m tired of playing what I look like,” and said they should either change the character of Thomas Magnum, or he’d go do “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”  Not wanting to give up their leading man, the producers relented.

As for those famous shorts, they can actually be chalked up to the wardrobe department doing a bang-up job.  Magnum’s backstory is that he’s a former Navy SEAL, who operated in Vietnam out of Da Nang, and in the late 70’s, after the war, he was stationed at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii as a Naval Intelligence Officer.  Lieutenant Thomas Sullivan Magnum woke up one day in 1978, and realized he was 33 years old and had never had a chance to be 23.  He resigned his commission from the United States Navy, and went into business as a private investigator, operating out of a crummy second-floor office in Honolulu, and driving a rusted out old VW Beetle.

Then, sometime around ’79 or ’80, before the start of the show, he was hired by best-selling author Robin Masters, to work security on his Hawaiian estate, Robin’s Nest.  Robin doesn’t live at Robin’s Nest, opting to spend most of his time in one of his other estates around the world, but he keeps Robin’s Nest as a resort for his friends, and for hosting various parties and charitable functions.  In exchange for his services, Magnum is quartered in the Guest House on the Estate, and has access to the tennis courts, the private beach with tidal pool, the wine cellar, and the garage – including a luxury sedan, a GMC Jimmy (later a Jeep Cherokee) and the Ferrari 308.  This is where we find Magnum, a 33-year old man in an Aloha shirt and his khaki, Navy-issue swim trunks, deck shoes with no socks, and a Detroit Tigers cap, living in a tropical bungalow surrounded by the few items collected from his life so far – a duffel bag, his handgun, a lot of empty beer bottles and pizza boxes, a gorilla mask, and a rubber chicken.

Yeah, you read that right.

Other visual reminders of Magnum’s service can be found in his wardrobe.  In the earlier seasons he frequently wears sailor dungarees and work shirts, and throughout the entire series he can be seen wearing a Navy-issue web belt with a Navy SEAL buckle, a navy blue ballcap with a VMO-2 Da Nang insignia, and a ring with a French Croix de Lorraine, the symbol of his old unit from ‘Nam.

He is not alone on the estate, however.  The estate is managed by a fussy little British majordomo, a retired Sergeant-Major named Jonathan Quayle Higgins III (John Hillerman), who served in the British Army in Africa, and in the Pacific Theater in WWII, where as a POW he helped build the famously ill-fated Bridge on the River Kwai.  Like Magnum, Higgins returned from his own war to go into intelligence, serving in MI-6.  Short, stocky, sporting a receding hairline and a not insignificant paunch, Higgins cuts a comical figure who takes himself, and everything else, far too seriously for Magnum’s tastes.  He rambles on in his posh accent about boring old war stories, fusses over his Dobermans, Zeus and Apollo, and hacks away at his memoirs in Robin’s study.

Although he lives in the lap of luxury, Magnum is perpetually broke and frequently enlists the help of his two best friends, also members of his old unit: retired Marine Corps helicopter pilot Theodore “TC” Calvin, and his diminutive old door gunner turned night club manager, Orville “Rick” Wright.  TC (Roger E. Mosley) is a hulking man with a kind disposition and the build of a heavyweight fighter.  He now runs a charter helicopter service called Island Hoppers. Rick (Larry Manetti)  can best be described as Joe Pesci wearing a Ray Liotta mask, and although in the pilot he runs a club called Rick’s Place, modeled on the club from Casablanca (hence his moniker), by the second episode he ends up managing the King Kamehameha Club, on the board of directors of which Higgins sits.

I hope I did my job well enough that you can tell who’s who.

Magnum’s needing favors from his friends leads to some friction between them, as TC and Rick are perpetually putting themselves in harm’s way and expending resources in order to help Magnum run down leads, but they never see a penny from him, despite the fuel costs and frequent damages to TC’s Hughes 500D, and the fact that Magnum insists on meeting his clients in the King Kamehameha Club and has run up an extensive tab.  In addition, in the early seasons, Magnum is constantly having to barter with Higgins, using as currency his access to the tennis courts and wine cellar, and even, in desperate times, the Ferrari.

So does it still work?  Mostly, yes it does.  Although the production value is not always superb, what saves the show is its refusal to take itself too seriously.  Tom Selleck plays Magnum as a laid-back guy with a goofy sense of humor, who has seen and done enough rough things to know how and when to put on a hard face and put a bullet in a bad guy, but his narration, his dialogue, and his mannerisms are pretty quirky.  He also frequently breaks the fourth wall, looking directly into the camera with a self-deprecating grin when things don’t go his way – which is often.  At its best, the show is either very funny, or surprisingly dark.  As all of the main characters are veterans, mainly of Vietnam, and as it was the 1980’s, they used that to tell some very compelling stories (and made use of the  beautiful Hawaiian landscape to recreate southeast Asia).

I’m also at a point in my life where I find Magnum’s storyline compelling.  Not a womanizer, Magnum has been in love a couple of times and has lost his loves.  He is kind and respectful towards the women in his life, frequently charming but never smarmy, and always shows genuine compassion and tenderness.  Instead he is a grown-ass man living like a kid, not haunted by much of anything, but always searching for something that he can’t name.  As the series progresses he grapples with the dissonance between his age and his lifestyle, and the character begins to take on a deeper melancholy that he continually masks with his quirks.   Maybe I do cling a little too much to the past.  Maybe I constantly wrestle with the distance between where I am and where I’d like to be.  I don’t know where to find it.  I sure can’t afford to look for it on Oahu.  But the sunrises, the blue waters, the flowery shirts, the red Italian car and the flying Easter egg of a chopper all buoy my spirits just as they once did.

It’s not a solution, and my little voice won’t let me forget it, but for the time being it’s a coping mechanism, and until I find the way forward, I guess it’ll have to do.  I’ll carve off little pieces of paradise, 45 minutes at a time.  I mean what the hell.  They still make beer and pizza.

Analysis: What Works in the Prequels, or “I’m a creeper and my name is Anakin.”

George Lucas knew what he was doing with the prequels.  Don’t get me wrong, he made a lot of mistakes, which are mostly owed to the fact that he rushed through the scripts and didn’t take time to fully develop the ideas he was putting into them.  It’s no secret that he didn’t write Empire or Jedi.  What you may not know is that he wrote at least four drafts of A New Hope, and probably had some uncredited assistance from others, including his wife at the time, Marcia.  Not only that but Harrison Ford, and, if my instincts do not deceive me, Carrie Fisher, re-wrote much of their own dialogue.

But the prequels are largely unfiltered Lucas, and not properly polished, so the issues that the scripts have live in that realm.  However, I want to talk about Anakin Skywalker, and his arc, and why it’s actually very cleverly conceived, despite not being well-executed.  Especially, people complain about Anakin being a creeper towards Padme in Episode II: Attack of the Clones.  I can’t believe I have to float this out there, but did you ever consider that Anakin is SUPPOSED to be a creeper?  He’s Darth friggin’ VADER.

“I am Jack’s creeping existential dread.”

Oh, I know, he wasn’t Vader at that point, but a turn to the Dark Side can’t be a snap decision.  It has to be built around a character flaw, a flaw which sinister forces (no pun intended, although…) can exploit in order to compromise him.  Lucas spent a lot of time discussing this in interviews, particularly as the prequel years went on and criticism of his choices continued to mount, but he laid a lot of it out there from the start.

With “The Phantom Menace,” he said that he made Anakin a young boy because it was important to the story that he should be at an age where being taken away from his mother would cause trauma.  So old enough to feel the pain, young enough not to handle it effectively.  And although we didn’t see much of what it meant to Anakin to be a slave, this was significant, too.

We are given to understand that the Jedi take force-sensitive children from their parents as soon as they are born, before bonds have formed between them.  This sucks for the parents but makes life easier for the kids, who are raised in a temple, essentially as monks, right from the start.  They are indoctrinated.  And if you think that sounds like a bad idea, well, good, you’re catching on to what ol’ Tio Jorge was up to.

So Anakin demonstrates his deep compassion and unselfish love towards others, does so repeatedly, and also has a pretty much instantaneous crush on teenage Natalie Portman.  What little boy wouldn’t?  Little boys always catch feelings for their teenage babysitters, which was basically her role in much of that movie.  Anakin also has a good relationship with his mother, and so he knows how to behave towards women at this point.  But it’s all about to go wrong.

I have a purse, and it’s MADE of LEAD.

It turns out that Shmi conceived him without partaking in any kind of horizontal dance party, and she has no idea how to explain it.  Qui-Gon reports to the Jedi Council that he “may have been conceived by the midichlorians.”  He manages to convince Shmi to let him take Anakin away from her, away from his life of slavery, and train him to be a Jedi because he believes that Anakin is the figure spoken of in an old prophecy about the Chosen One who will “bring balance to the Force.”

So now, Anakin’s one good relationship in life is taken from him, and he is dragged out into a galaxy full of ulterior motives and killer robots, paraded before a council who is skeptical that he belongs there.  His presence creates a rift between Qui-Gon, his newfound father figure, and Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon’s Padawan learner.  Then Qui-Gon is killed in battle with a Sith Lord and Obi-Wan promises he will train Anakin.  The council reluctantly agrees and promotes Obi-Wan to the level of Jedi Knight.

So flash-forward a decade.  Padme, no longer serving as Queen of Naboo, is instead serving as Naboo’s senator, and is in her mid-20’s.  Somebody is trying to kill her and the Supreme Chancellor asks the Jedi Council to assign Obi-Wan and Anakin to look after Padme, as they are familiar faces and will likely put her at ease.  Seems like a reasonable request, but of course it’s the first time Anakin has seen Padme in a decade, and he not only is carrying brokenness from his severed relationship with his mom, but he never fully made peace with his feelings for Padme, and now here she is, grown up, more mature and more beautiful, and he is now himself a man.

“…at night I wake up with the sheets soakin’ wet and a freight train running through the middle of my head. Only you can cool my desire.” “Anakin, what the hell is a freight train?”

Add to that his growing frustration with the Jedi Order: he was not indoctrinated from birth.  He was a slave, and now he’s a monk; he owns no property other than his clothes and his lightsaber; he goes where he is told and does as he is commanded.  He is a student, essentially feeling his manhood challenged by the fatherly guidance of his big brother / mentor, Obi-Wan.  A nineteen year-old man still being told what to do, his heart is full of rebellion and his hormones are going nuts, and his life experience is that the people he loves he is always forced to abandon, or they are killed in battle.

Padme being back in his life is, for him, like a gift; she’s water to a man dying of thirst.  But for her, life has gone on and she has lived it, fully, and well; Anakin is just a fond memory and an unsettling presence, lecherous and a little too solicitous.  His heart is clearly somewhere hers is not, and she has no wish to hurt him but he does make her uncomfortable.

Sadly, much of her line of reasoning was cut out in the final edit, though the deleted scenes do exist on some of the various home video releases.  Some of it, however, in still in the film: Padme says she has been serving her world since she was fourteen; while not the youngest queen ever elected she does believe now that she was too young.  Hers has been a life of service, and she too is restless, hungry.  Though Anakin’s advances are not encouraged, and though she’s not sure she likes the tone of them, nor does she believe it appropriate, part of her does at least appreciate the possibilities.

“I am going to do NASTY things to this universe. I mean to your daughter. I mean…can we start over?”

The deleted scenes show that she has an older sister, who has children, and she watches wistfully while her sister’s kids play in the yard at their parents’ homestead, thinking how much she has given up in service of her world.  And her sister points out that Anakin is a very handsome young man who clearly is into her.  She does, after all, have options.

Anakin’s dreams about his mother’s suffering lead him back to Tattooine, with Padme in tow, but he is too late.  Shmi has been taken by Tuskens and, it’s a Star Wars movie so we don’t know what they did to her, but the parallels to “The Searchers” should be enough to telegraph it to anyone who knows that movie.  One thinks of John Wayne saying, “don’t ever ask me that again.”  Now Anakin has lost his mother twice, and forever.  His anger, then, is about the repeated pattern of loss in his life.  The loss of everyone who loves him, his having in effect nobody to love.  That his love is somehow a force of destruction when it ought to be a force for good.

As he and Padme face almost certain death at the end of the movie, Padme confesses a love for Anakin that may or may not be genuine; her life might be about to end and she is aware of all that she has never had.  When they do survive, she decides to throw caution to the wind.  There are a million reasons why they shouldn’t be together, but they almost died and all either of them can think about is what it would mean to die without having known love.

George Lucas said in an interview around this time how that was Anakin’s character flaw, that his inability to let go was what would be his undoing.  He talked about how true love is unconditional, and when you can’t let go, that’s selfishness, it’s a kind of greed; and that leads down a dark path.

So in Revenge of the Sith, Anakin begins having dreams about Padme’s death as he once did about his mother, and he knows how that story ended.  He can’t countenance letting the same thing happen to Padme.  Note how carefully the Chancellor has escalated the tension between Anakin and the Council, stroking Skywalker’s ego and making political moves that piss off the other Jedi and encroach on their authority.  Finally, in a quiet moment at the opera, Palpatine tells Anakin that he knows of a possible way to stop people from dying using the Dark Side of the Force.  Notice that in that speech, as Palpatine tells the story of Darth Plagueis the Wise, he tells Anakin that “it is said he could even influence the Midichlorians to…create…life…” and the pregnant pause and meaningful look the Chancellor throws in Anakin’s direction.

“My dear boy, you really are something of a simpleton, aren’t you?” “Master…what’s a simpleton?”

The implication being that perhaps Anakin was created by the Sith in the first place.  You can’t trust Palpatine, of course; he’s evil.  He talks out both sides of his mouth and his schemes, from TPM on down, have always been about playing two sides against each other to weaken them both and strengthen his own position.  But he’s exploiting Anakin’s love for Padme, pushing him to hold onto her ever tighter, to compromise himself and all that he holds dear.  For fifteen years, Anakin has been serving the Jedi Council.  Before that he was a slave of a junk dealer named Watto.  His whole life he has been doing the bidding of others, never allowed to have anything for his own.  Now, if he has to choose between Padme and the Jedi Order, the fogies in the monk robes are going to lose.

In making this choice, of course, he unknowingly signs her death warrant; it is his treachery that breaks her heart, and her own sense of loss that weakens her to the point of death during childbirth.  The battle with Obi-Wan is Anakin’s final rejection of the last fifteen years of his life.  No more Jedi, no more giving away what is precious to him; no more letting go.  Except when Padme dies, he’s permanently gutted: he’s lost it all anyway, and now it’s his own fault and there is nothing left for him to do but help his new master force the galaxy into some kind of order that he can understand.  Gathering power unto himself.

“You burned my junk and left me for dead. Consider us even.”

That’s a lot of anger for a person to carry around inside, and it’s the kind of anger that burns cold, the kind that would totally fuel a guy to do the things we saw in Rogue One…or across the Original Trilogy.  The anger of a perpetual loser who never learned humility from defeat.  There’s a lot of things in the Prequels that are not done well, but Anakin being a creeper isn’t bad writing.  It’s emblematic of the real problem with the prequels:  it’s a clever idea, poorly executed.

REVIEW: Rogue WIN!

My complicated relationship with last year’s Episode VII: The Force Awakens is well-chronicled on this site.  I use that to open with so that if you didn’t already know, I can tell you that my Star Wars fandom isn’t the blind kind.  It isn’t the kind that accepts whatever comes out with the brand name on it.  And I absolutely loved Rogue One.  It is everything I hoped for.

I think at this point it’s fair to say that, no matter how Episodes VIII and IX turn out, the future of Star Wars is with the anthology movies, and what a kickoff Gareth Edwards has given them.  There’s so much to love here, and I don’t want to spoil anybody, which is going to be hard.  From the opening shot, the film is both different from everything we’ve seen before, and yet perfectly, entirely, Star Wars.

The same is true of Michael Giacchino’s score.  No great blasting brass to start this film, no opening crawl, but a brassy accent over a passing spacecraft and a long, slow pan across the rings of a planet we’ve never seen before, a soft trilling underlining the tension and mystery of the cosmic scene.  It at once fits with the great John Williams’ extensive work on the franchise, and announces that this is a different kind of Star Wars movie.

It had been a long seventeen centuries or so, but finally Thranduil had to admit it; he was lost, and his moose wasn’t coming back.

The production design is gorgeous.  Set shortly before the original 1977 Star Wars, this film perfectly captures the look of that iconic galaxy far, far away.  The juxtaposition between the natural world and the high-tech, and the way the technology appears worn and battered, well-used, like an old car or the registers at your local supermarket.  Part of the charm of the original trilogy was the way the vehicles and the tools and weapons all blended seamlessly into the world Lucas had created, the slapdash repair jobs on the backwater desert planet, the rebel fighters hangared in a jungle temple, a fleet of ships repaired with mismatched parts and never repainted.  Rogue One nails that, and every frame of it is packed with that kind of detail.

There’s also the tendency of architects in the Star Wars galaxy to design workspaces in the most impractical, most dangerous way possible.  It wouldn’t be Star Wars if somebody didn’t have to walk across a gantry with no railing hanging out over a bottomless pit in order to turn on a light switch.  The Imperial bases in this movie feel true to the Original Trilogy, true to the cartoons, and true to the video games dating clear back to the 1990’s.  Not for nothing, but the machinations our heroes have to go through to come up with those data tapes is like something the level designers would have made you do in Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast.  It’s as Star Wars as a thing can possibly be.

[WARNING: Mild Spoilers follow]

Then there’s the story.  You already know what the movie’s about, in broad strokes, I hope.  It’s the commando mission to steal the Death Star plans.  But it’s also a story about a woman named Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), the daughter of the man who designed the Death Star.  Her father, Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen) is forced by the Empire to help them construct their technological terror.  He does it knowing that as long as he’s cooperating, his daughter is safe, and the weakness, the exhaust port to the reactor core, he leaves intentionally vulnerable so that the rebels have a way to fight back against the station.

He sends a message with a defecting shuttle pilot, Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed) to deliver to the harsh leader of an extremist rebel cell, Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker).  When the Alliance gets word of the defector and his message, they break Jyn Erso out of a labor camp and draft her to help them get Gerrera’s ear and a meeting with the pilot.  But everything goes pear-shaped and soon Erso and her team are caught between the complicated internal politics of the Alliance to the Restore the Republic, and the iron hand of the First Galactic Empire, culminating in a desperate, last-ditch effort to secure the Death Star plans and give hope a fighting chance for survival.

All the performances are solid.  Felicity Jones is a wonderful lead, and Diego Luna is excellent in his supporting role as the morally complex rebel spy, Cassian Andor.  Both characters have compelling arcs, Jones as a survivor, drifting through the prison system, until she finds her purpose in life, and Luna as a kind of Star Wars black flag operative, jaded and cynical, nothing left to lose, but who clings to hope in spite of the darkness all around him.

Alan Tudyk hilariously voices a hulking, reprogrammed Imperial droid named K-2S0, who seems to owe more than a little of his being to Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  Jiang Wen and Donny Yen are Baze and Chirrut, a big badass with a big gun, and a Zatoichi-inspired blind martial artist who believes in the Force, although he is not a Jedi.

Mothma’s Angels

The characters come together through shared peril, in the classic Star Wars style, and have to build trust as they go crashing through constant adversity.  I have read a few complaints that the characters weren’t engaging, but this was not my experience.  I found them to be plenty engaging.  Apart from Jyn we didn’t learn their backstories, but we did see them interact with each other enough for them to show the kind of people that they are, and for us to decide if we like them.  In the end that’s all we really got from Han, Luke, and Leia in the original Star Wars.

Rogue One is a war movie, but it’s also very much a heist movie, and I think invoking “The Dirty Dozen” and “Where Eagles Dare” gives you the right idea.  It’s also chock full of references to “Star Wars” (or “A New Hope,” as it is called to differentiate the movie from the brand) and “Revenge of the Sith.”  It also breaks out some unused ideas from earlier drafts of “Empire” and “Jedi,” and eagle-eyed viewers will notice The Ghost from Disney XD’s “Rebels” in at least one shot.  A number of characters from the other movies show up here, though I won’t spoil who or how.  Since the TV spots and trailers have given away Darth Vader’s presence, I will tell you this:

Darth Vader has basically two scenes in this movie, and both are relatively brief, but the first one… the first one is perfect, and then the second one…is, unbelievably, impossibly…better.  It’s the best Vader has been since The Empire Strikes Back.  His screentime is small, but he is larger than life, presented like a horror movie character, part Dracula, part Jason Voorhees.

“You look strong enough to pull the ears off a gundark.” “Gundarks don’t have ears.” “That’s what I’m saying, you look like hell.”

I can clearly see why George Lucas loves this movie: it’s a love letter to everything he ever made, it stands apart from his beloved Skywalker Saga, thus not encroaching on his legacy even as it builds perfectly, and respectfully, upon it.  It’s as perfect a Star Wars movie as anyone could hope for.  “The Force Awakens” left me cold, but “Rogue One” left me full of emotion.  It’s the bleakest Star Wars film, in many ways, bleaker in its way than even “Empire”.  But like the best dark films, it offers a message about hope.  That when things seem at their worst, when you’re at your lowest point, that’s when you need to take a stand.  To kick against the encroaching shadow, to cling to hope, fight for it if you must, because amidst the dark of night your light shines all the brighter, if you let it.

Without Jedi Knights, without any religious or philosophical trappings, this is still Star Wars.  This is the world of the rebel soldiers, weathered, battered, broken; standing in the shadows, looking for A New Hope.