“the last jedi” has a message nerds need to hear
but will they acknowledge it?
WARNING: major spoilers for The Last Jedi and major contempt for Ready Player One starts below.
When I went to see The Last Jedi, one of the trailers before the movie was for Ready Player One. As soon as the voiceover says his name is Splinter Ledzep or Falco Speedrunnerson or Artoo Atari or whatever, multiple people in the audience start hooting and hollering in approval. The message of that atrocious book and upcoming movie is: all that nostalgia you have for those old things? Good. All the constant references and constant quotes? Extremely good. There there, nerds, let Ready Player One warm you in the embrace of what you already love, like a child’s blanket.
The Last Jedi was a slap in the face to those nostalgia-loving people. It wasn’t that it ignored all the things they loved and remembered about Star Wars. No, it acknowledged the viewers’ nostalgia and some of the classic cliches of the series, and openly said they suck. It’s the difference between, in a conversation, slyly changing the topic when someone says something really ignorant, and telling them to shut up because they don’t know what they’re talking about. The ways it thumbs the nose at previous films have been pretty well detailed at this point, but I still have to mention Luke calling a lightsaber a “laser sword” just for how funny that is.
But the one example that sticks with me most is the Kylo Ren line that summarizes the entire film: “let the past die.” It’s notable first for how it’s the first time in a Star Wars movie that the bad guy says something that the audience is supposed to understand or agree with. (Star Wars might have scary and memorable villains, but it certainly doesn’t have ones where you think “well shit, maybe the guy has a point.”) It comes right after Kylo cuts the epitome of Generic Star Wars Villain in half; I’m glad I didn’t have to suffer through that garbage characterization of “I want to rule the planet because evil is great” any more in the movie.
There’s lots of different subjects that critics have interpreted as the target for that line (and theme): George Lucas, for not giving up creative control despite making three atrocious films. JJ Abrams, for making a film that relied so heavily on recreating things from the first Star Wars. Star Wars fans, for devoting themselves so heavily to a franchise that hadn’t even made a movie they liked between 1983 and 2015, and caring deeply about “canon” written by a series of hack writers, and a million other obnoxious things.
That last one is the most thought-provoking. But all the things that The Last Jedi is telling those fans apply just as much, if not more, to the broader ~nerd culture~. The film is specifically rejecting the Ready Player Ones, those waste products of pop culture that coagulate from the remnants of earlier things.
Sure, Luke tells Rey, you can be inspired by older things, by old legends. Sometimes, that’s what a group of people needs. But you should be inspired by the ideas behind them, the broad strokes that led to their creation, rather than worshipping everything about them and every detail of how they operated. You don’t need to re-make the Jedi Academy and teach lessons in the same way to a new generation, just like you don’t need to remake old movies with the same themes and message as the originals. The memory of those old things should create something new with the same sort of energy that went into making that old thing, when the old thing was new.
The worst crime that can be done to something old, whether it’s real-life history or a creative work, is lionize it so much as to gloss over all the flaws. Guess what? A lot of things about Star Wars don’t hold up to modern standards. (Even Lucas seems to know this, by how often he goes in and re-edits the first trilogy and discards the actual films that came out from 1977–1983.) The acting by pretty much everyone other than Harrison Ford was wooden. A lot of it was just plain cheesy. Acknowledging that doesn’t take anything away from the monumental influence it’s had on the culture.
It’s even worse when the thing getting remade was garbage the first time around. My jaw was absolutely on the floor when I went to a different film and saw Bruce Willis in a trailer, avenging his beautiful blonde wife and daughter. Immediately I go, “wait, that plot is Death Wish. Why are they making a movie that’s just Death Wish?” Then the title card comes on and they’re actually remaking Death Wish, in this, the era of George Zimmerman and “traditionalists” trying to secure an existence for their white children. Our culture has sunk so low, so fearful of new ideas, that we return to old ones even if they provide justification for right-wing violence.
When all the major cultural creations from this period are the 9th film in a series, or a remake of something from at least 20 years ago, or a bullshit nostalgia parade like Ready Player One, we’re not going to leave anything new or unique for our kids to be nostalgic for. I’m just as sick of people who can’t get over The Beatles and other 60s music as I am of people who can’t get over Lord of the Rings, but imagine what would have happened if all that great music was instead just trying to remind people of music from the 1930s or 40s. Imagine if the “year zero” of punk in 1977 hadn’t happened, and people just kept making 50s retreads like Grease and American Graffiti.
Be inspired by old things, then burn them down. Let the past die.
