Getting Meta on Star Wars for the Love of It, with Professor T

To say that I was excited about Star Wars… well, the word understatement is an understatement. I had a couple dreams about it. As I’m sure most of you also felt, waking up on Star Wars day was like waking up on Christmas morning, except if you had been waiting for Christmas for like… most of your life.

And yet when I try to articulate why, I run into trouble. Am I an uber-Star-Wars nerd?? No, not really. I am a fan, for sure. But I can’t name every single character and planet in the expanded universe, or even most of them. In fact, I had to Google that term. (Expanded universe… is that right?? Extended universe? No, expanded. Cool. Apt, considering the universe is always expanding both literally and metaphorically, amiright?? Anyway…)

But I was SO excited to see the movie. And I am so excited even now that I HAVE seen it, now that it’s out in the world and this franchise is continuing for the next generation. Do I think The Force Awakens is a perfect movie?? NOPE. Not even close. It is a good movie, even a very good movie, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and both the craft behind and our enjoyment of a movie are influenced in every way by the world from which it is born—in this case, America, 2015.

I’ll attempt to articulate further. S and I had ENORMOUS problems with Jurassic World (because we have taste, duh), but mostly because it felt to us like it either a) exhibited a stunning lack of self-awareness, or b) was nowhere near ironic enough. Think about that film and the franchise tradition it comes from. A theme park, designed to harness dangerous creative genetic power goes awry, and a mega-disaster occurs. Meanwhile, in real life, Spielberg invents—or rather, “stands on the shoulders of geniuses”, just like John Hammond in the movie—some incredible new technology, taps into a monster-hungry early 90’s market (there's a whole blog post in here or probably more like a book about why the market was what it was, but I'll skip it for now, sounds boring), and spawns such a mega-blockbuster series even he doesn’t know what to do with it. Literally and metaphorically, the monsters get loose and out of control— and we can see the ripple effects in Jurassic Parks II, III, and, I don’t know, like every other movie since then.

Fast forward a couple decades, and, in the Jurassic world, the park reopens. Now it is 2015, and we supposedly have better control over this genetic power and we have made it commercially viable again. Supposedly. But because the suits that run this park are so hungry for MORE money, MORE commercial potential, the latest and greatest thing, they have engineered a new, hybrid dinosaur. Do you get where I’m going with this?

You brought this on yourself, America. You're like the guy in Jurassic Park that gets eaten off the toilet because you wanted to have a coupon day or something.

I don’t want to say Jurassic World was always going to be a disaster—I don’t really think that. But in a way the movie places the blame for how bad it is on us, the audience. “Hey,” it seems to say. “You saw what happened last time. You know what happens when studio suits get their hands on the awesome creative power of a blockbuster-mega-franchise. They ‘wield it like a kid who’s found his dad’s gun.’ But if you want another Jurassic, okay. That’s on you.”

As B.D. Wong basically screams at all of us in Jurassic World, “You didn’t want reality, you wanted more teeth!” (Does Colin Trevorrow realize any of this about his own movie??? He must, right? I can’t tell if there used to be more obviously meta stuff in it and they made him take it out or if he really doesn’t know. Anyway, you’re here for the Star Wars…)

Which brings me to… How to Make a Movie Chapter in Possibly the Biggest Franchise in Modern Film History, 202, with Professor J.J. Abrams. (It’s 202 because Star Trek was 101, obvs; it’s a pre-rec for this class.)

And the secret is to make your movie with LOVE. SO. MUCH. LOVE. So much love that you risk your entire career on it. So much love that you insist on final cut. (This is a legend, admittedly.) So much love that you cast non-mega-stars in the lead roles. So much love that you PUT A FEMALE PROTAGONIST IN IT (which, according to the suits means box-office death). SO MUCH GODDAMN LOVE THAT YOU END UP BASICALLY MAKING EPISODE IV OVER AGAIN BUT WHO CARES BECAUSE STAR WARS.

Look, if you look real close you can see J.J. in there!!!

In The Force Awakens, Abrams IS Finn and Rey and Poe, all three. He is young. He is reckless. He has made some mistakes. But he is willing to climb into the most daunting cockpit in the world—the cockpit of the crashed “garbage” Millennium Falcon Star Wars machine and try to get it back off the ground. Fly it right out of the graveyard of downed Star Destroyers and Episodes I, II, and III. Don’t think that imagery is in there for no reason. Sure, you’re gonna hit a few bumps along the way, but J.J. understands all too well that this is America, 2015, and what we want now is just something to remind us why we love movies in the first place. Not even Star Wars, just movies in general. Just give us back our first love. And that’s The Force Awakens.

In the movie Ratatouille, the rat, Remy, is trying to figure out what the hell to serve the hateful critic Anton Ego. He could make anything. He could try to be new, impressive, cutting-edge. But what he makes, instead, is the title dish, ratatouille—a humble, peasant’s dish of vegetables and herbs. And he is able to touch even Ego, the most hardened critic, because when Ego bites into the dish, he is transported back to his own mother’s kitchen, to when he fell in love with food in the first place.

I don’t think The Force Awakens is sacred. I think we can dissect if you want, and maybe I will—later. Right now I’m too busy seeing rebirth happening right in front of me, and just too damn busy loving movies.

On killing and The Killing

THIS POST IS FULL OF SPOILERS.
It is also not well-researched. It's like the kind of thing I would say to you at a party.
Ahem.

S is the least political person I know—including myself, and I would say I'm not very political either. If I had to explain it, I'd say we try not to have strong opinions about things until we have all the facts... and where politics are concerned, who could possibly have all the facts??? We don't trust the media, or anyone with a microphone, really, and the country and world are so enormous and full of so much shit that politics seems like a war no one could ever, ever win. We try to make art, instead, and if that seems like a cop-out it's because it definitely is.

So current events don't get discussed much in our house. Sometimes one of us will say to the other, "Hey, have you noticed this thing is happening?" and the other will say something like, "Yes, it's crazy, the world is crazy," and that will be about all. But yesterday, S came home, flopped wearily onto the couch and said of the San Bernardino mass shooting: "Oof. This really just... opens up the existential gulf between you and... everyone. It just reminds you that people can't ever really know each other."

Full disclosure: after that, he also said something about gun control, but that's not what this post is about. This is about The Killing. 

Yes, the TV show. This morning I found myself once again mentally walking around in the too-short-lived AMC/Netflix series, walking with detectives Linden and Holder beside me, opening the cupboards of memory and taking down each episode of this show one by one, as though I was looking for something. (Do you ever do this? Our stories comfort us, and they sit around on our literal or metaphorical bookshelves until we need them.)

As I wandered around in that show again, I realized that it a show firmly placed IN the existential gulf S mentioned, and I appreciated it even more. To be succinct, The Killing did not save us. In the first season, the honest politician was corrupted, the grieving father was drawn back into violence, and even Holder betrayed us. Later, the show did not save Kallie or Bullet or Ray Seward or Kyle's sisters or Linden's relationship with her son, and it did NOT STOP RAINING, not even once. In fact, the only thing it did save was Skinner's reputation, and it turns out he'd murdered 19 teenage girls.

Of course, The Killing is fiction. Because in real life, it does stop raining, at least here and there. But when you really settle into that gap, that universe-wide tear between you and everyone else, then you realize that it isn't outside of you at all, but that it is made by you, and as much as part of your fabric as your blood and bones. When, at the very end of season 4, we realize that it really was Kyle the whole time—that this teenage kid really DID crack and brutally murder his entire family, including his eight-year-old sister—we only realize this as Kyle does, too. He didn't know. He didn't remember. After all, the point of The Killing is that you can't out-clever darkness. You can't logic it. You can look around all you want to in the daylight, but ultimately all is concealed from us. Darkness doesn't have to be clever. It just waits in the corners to envelop you when you can't see it or stop it or even know about it.

According to True Detective season 1, "the light's winning." But according to The Killing, the light is NOT winning. It may some day, but at the moment, it doesn't have a prayer if we live in a world where it's possible for you to have murdered your entire family and not even remember it.

Or where a couple of gunmen can end your life like that —bang—for no reason.

In season 2 of the show, it is revealed that "bad guy" who killed Rosie Larsen, ultimately, was her aunt, who loved her, and who has been grieving for her and helping to put the family back together. In real life, this is often the case: that the bad guy is, in fact, not a bad guy, but a person. And that's something to remember.

None of this probably makes you feel less scared, but it actually does comfort me, did comfort me, this morning. In the final scene of the show, Linden's blue scarf comforts me. No, The Killing doesn't save us, it bravely doesn't save us, but we do survive it, and we pick ourselves up and survive all kinds of things, and we wait out each night until dawn again, and collectively we survived yesterday. And that's also something to remember.