The Last Jedi: The First Anti-Star Wars, Star Wars Movie

Having fallen in love with Star Wars from the time that I first saw it in the late 1970s, it brings this 45 year-old no pleasure to concede that, for various reasons, the latest installment in the SW saga is simply not a good film.

Much has already been written about The Last Jedi’s poor story-telling, sorely underdeveloped and misused characters, and rampant Political Correctness. Most of the commentary has been spot-on in these respects. However, little to no attention has been drawn to that which is most disturbing about TLJ:

The classic tale of the perennial battle between Good and Evil collapses in on itself, here being revealed as an epic delusion begotten by the monumental arrogance of those—the Jedi—who thought themselves heroes.By insisting upon a hard and fast distinction between the dark and light sides of the Force—by insisting that morality is an objective feature of the universe—and positioning themselves as guardians of the Light, the Jedi, in their “hubris,” as Luke Skywalker says, gave rise to all that had gone wrong in the galaxy.

In other words, it is the Jedi Order that is the “root cause” of evil (if we can even coherently speak of evil in connection with TLJ). To put it more exactly, it is civilization, its traditions and institutions, from which all corruption springs.

Freedom, Equality, and every other virtue can come about only after the old civilization has been razed, burnt to the ground along with its literature, those Jedi texts to which Yoda takes the proverbial match in TLJ.

This idea that civilization is corruptive of nature extends back centuries in Western thought. Its most prominent representative is the 18^th century French philosopher, Jean Jacques Rousseau. It was Rousseau who famously remarked that “man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.” Civilization enslaves. Specifically, the institution of private property, the cornerstone of civilization, is the origin of all cruelty, vice, and horror. Rousseau’s remarks on this subject say it all:

“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said ‘This is mine’, and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by…crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

Private property engenders material inequalities and hierarchies, the “chains” that enslave. The Jedi, to hear TLJ’s Luke Skywalker tell it, created and perpetuated hierarchy and inequality vis-à-vis the Force inasmuch as they were either delusional or deceptive enough to presume that they alone had the right to protect it, as if it somehow belonged to them.

And herein lay the true significance of Daisy Ridley’s “Rey,” the chief protagonist of Disney’s trilogy:

She is a Rousseauian Hero, the Great Leveler, the quintessential champion of Equality.

Rey is the most sagacious, potent, and capable of Force users, exceeding in these virtues even Yoda; yet she is no Jedi—at least she is not a Jedi in any traditional sense of this term. The criteria that aspiring Jedi were expected to satisfy before they could be recognized as “masters” by guardians of the old order have not only been relegated to the dustbin of history, but that history itself both the heroes and villains of TLJ agree also needs to be erased.

Rey herself has no history or, what amounts to the same thing, no history worth talking about. This trilogy’s main villain, “Kylo Ren,” wayward son to Leia and Han Solo, nephew and former student of Luke, and grandson of Darth Vader, has a history; but, as far he is concerned, it is inconsequential, a thing to be unequivocally repudiated. As he tells Rey: “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.

The little green Socrates of SW, Yoda, emerges for one brief scene in TLJ to beat Luke to the punch by destroying all of the ancient Jedi Scriptures.Yoda tells Luke that all that Rey needs to know regarding the Force she already knows. “We are what they [students] grow beyond.”

In The Last Jedi, Light and Darkness, the Jedi and the Sith—these are for all practical purposes dismissed as relics of a bigoted past. The Resistance indeed promises to continue fighting against the First Order, but unlike the misguided Rebellion and, before it, the Jedi Order, it is not concerned with restoring balance to the Force or the freedom that existed during the days of the Republic.

No, the Resistance is about as interested in conserving the past as is Kylo Ren. It would appear that its point in fighting is to hit the reset button, to wipe the slate clean and write anew.

This is no slight deviation from the SW mythos. The Jedi and all of the heroes of the Old Republic were akin to the men of the American founding generation inasmuch as they fought for the sake of conserving an inherited way of life. In glaring contrast, the Resistors are more like the French Revolutionaries, radical egalitarians inspired by Rousseau and against whom Edmund Burke defined what would become known as conservatism.

The radicals of the French Revolution were zealots who, for the sake of leveling the inequalities and hierarchies that were the legacy of the past, fiercely and indiscriminately used the guillotine against the members of the Ancien Regime that they sought to purge from their midst.

Most decent folks today, regardless of their politics or religion, share Burke’s assessment of the French Revolution. The radicals were many things, but they were not good.

This, then, is another respect in which The Last Jedi underscores the arbitrary, the arguably artificial, character of our conceptions of right and wrong, good and evil:

The Rebels did win. But it’s a big galaxy. George talked about it some when he was still planning on making the next trilogy, and then it slid into the books when he gave them the bible. The Empire was an efficiency machine, lots of bureaucrats, lots of people doing their job, the Emperor just defined their job some. Hitchcock used to joke that a movie would get made just fine without a director because everybody on set knows what they’re doing, all the director does is make sure questions get answered with a single vision. That’s kind of the Empire, Emperor dies, but all the folks who do stuff still know what they’re doing, they just don’t have the single vision.

Peace was restored for a while, there’s a 30 year gap in there, but eventually problems will come up. Again that’s how life works, WWI set the pieces for WWII, which gave us the Cold War, which immanentized the War on Terror.

Jumping further would have been good, but you still wind up with a lot of the same stuff. One way or the other bad guys must rear their head and threaten the galaxy, otherwise you don’t have a story to tell. That’s epilogues, no matter how far they jump forward the first thing they have to do is undo the win. 30 years, 100 years, 1000 years, step one for the story to continue is “turns out that win wasn’t so awesome”.

I’m not one to state what The Last Jedi is like (It’s probably better than The Force Awakens, but then again, even the Prequel Trilogy or, heck, even the Holiday Special’s probably better than The Force Awakens at this point), but I do think some statements need to be made.

First of all, regarding the whole “good and evil” bits you alluded to, the first Star Wars film might have had that (though even there, it’s a bit hazy since Obi-Wan did essentially brainwash a Stormtrooper, which does technically violate someone’s free will and thus is usually considered a villainous act), and possibly the second film, but the third film and the prequel trilogy definitely started entering gray areas the moment Obi Wan essentially claimed that truth is relative to a point of view (plus his, you know, lying to Luke about Vader’s dad and even telling him to commit patricide). Plus, in the Prequel Trilogy, there’s barely even any real difference between the Jedi and the Sith, with it even being implied that the Jedi dabble in nihilism and relativism with Obi-Wan’s infamous “Only a Sith Deals in Absolutes” retort. The novelization even implied that, for all their talk against having selfish elements, the Jedi Order’s reason for even “recruiting” Anakin to spy on the Chancellor, an explicitly borderline treasonous act, WERE inherently selfish ones in terms of ulterior motives, since Mace Windu basically made a comment that implied that sabotaging Anakin’s friendship with the chancellor was the exact reason why he was right for the job, wanting to keep Anakin under the firm grip of the Jedi Order.

As far as Lucas and the whole Rebels being Minutemen and the Empire being the Jacobins, funny you should mention that, because it turns out the Minutemen weren’t really high on Luca’s inspirations for the “heroes”, they were based on the Vietcong. The Empire, if anything, WAS based on America. And in the Prequel Trilogy, Palpatine actually took control of the Republic and turned it into an Empire via elections, and legal ones at that (if you know your history, you’d know the French Revolutionaries didn’t take power via elections, they did it by murdering the king). And speaking of which, when Lucas explained the Old Republic’s basis on history, he actually specifically stated that he based them among others on of all things Robespierre’s France (I believe his exact words were, when discussing his views on democracy and dictatorships, “Why did France after they got rid of the king and that whole system turn around and give it to Napoleon?”). On a similar note, in one of the books, Children of the Jedi, Leia flashes back to when the Rebels took the Imperial Palace and, well, let’s just say that the Rebels in the flashback come across as acting a LOT like the Jacobins, such as looting and shelling the Imperial Palace and slaughtering the servants regardless of race, sex, age, heck, even whether they even committed ANY crimes besides obviously having loyalty to the Empire (and what’s even WORSE is that the Imperial Palace used to be the Presidential Palace, meaning their actions meant they DESECRATED an image of the Old Republic). Don’t believe me? Read these:

http://thedailychrenk.com/2017/12/19/star-wars-always-leftie-fantasy/

https://otnesse.tumblr.com/post/162081709399/this-is-from-george-lucas-1973-notes-for-star

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/sith-invites-bush-comparisons/2/

And as far as Rousseau, didn’t the Jedi basically advocate not owning anything, a whole anti-possessions clause of the Jedi Code that somehow extended to even holding any loyalty to your family due to it going down the path to the Dark Side, even advocating they should basically not even CARE if their loved one dies and not make any attempt to save them, have them die even a painful death (honestly, if you ask me, that comes across as even MORE cold and heinous. If you care for someone, you should at least make an effort to save their life from an exceedingly painful death.)? That even having sentimental feelings for family members is indicative to turning to the dark side? Yeah, last I checked, the Jedi, or at least the Prequel Trilogy Jedi, came across as being far closer to Rousseauians than the Sith/Empire, who actually said that they should be a government of LAWS instead of politicians (the Jacobins believed the exact opposite).

So far as the actual film, while I’m at times glad that it’s NOT an Empire Strikes Back clone and that they did develop Rey to have at least some degree of vulnerabilities to her character from what I’ve heard of it, I do think the story from what I heard was very poorly thought out (I’d even argue that Lucas had far more of a firm grasp on Star Wars than this did). Plus, I’m not fond of the dig against Capitalism/Free Markets made with the Canto Bight scene from what I heard, or the SJW elements which were arguably even WORSE than in The Last Jedi. And that’s not getting into how the First Order was made to be grossly incompetent a few times or the violation of the various laws of physics even by Star Wars standards (Poe’s infamous bombing run comes to mind), at least from what I heard.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.