The (Star) War on Nostalgia

Your childhood is the most profitable real estate in the mass media market.

It’s one of those strange tricks of the mind that we think the world was simpler when we were children, because our lives were simpler. This cognitive dissonance is universal, and it makes every generation equally nostalgic for their childhoods. This feeling has been exacerbated by the rise of technology, which makes the pre-internet world feel like a safe place to retreat to. That boat beating back into the past is peaceful. It’s quiet down there.

This feeling — and, more importantly, the desire to feel this feeling — is so powerful, it is being marketed to you. It’s the driving force of the reboots and remakes saturating the pop culture landscape. The past is comforting because it is static — it’s not going to change in the way the world changes, in the way you have changed. Because you were a part of the past, it is a part of you, and it will always be somewhere you belong.

So nostalgia is addictive. It is not, however, always good. And if you’re making a movie or a television show that revolves around nostalgia, it’s nearly impossible not to fall into the black hole of becoming derivative. It’s assumed that the audience will be so charmed, and a little touched, by the warm feeling of nostalgia that they will forgive any flaws in what they’re watching.

Stranger Things does this well. Stranger Things is commercialising the 1980’s for Netflix so thoroughly that they’re selling New Coke again in supermarkets. The creators of Stranger Things, the Duffer Brothers, call Stranger Things an homage to the 80’s. But it’s an homage to a 1980’s that never really existed, an undiscovered country patched together by the Duffer Brothers (born 1984) from things they themselves loved in their childhood. Stranger Things is so determined to create this unreal place that it doesn’t want to confront the actual decade it’s set in. But we forgive it for this, because it played Africa by Toto that one time, and who doesn’t want Eleven to have a shopping montage at the mall?

And people love this show. Even people who weren’t alive in the 80’s love Stranger Things, because it is driven purely by nostalgia, and it is unchallenging, and sometimes you just want to watch a show that doesn’t ask you to think. This is the path of least resistance.

But then there’s that other path. That contentious and rocky path that leans out of nostalgia and dismantles the rose coloured lens with which we view the past. American Crime Story: The People vs OJ Simpson did this to frighteningly thorough effect. What, you thought the 90’s weren’t sexist and depressing as hell? You thought it was like Clueless? The past was a nightmare! It was as messy and complex as the mud you’re wading through now!

So we have pure nostalgia and anti nostalgia, both seeking to manipulate our view of the past. Our current media climate is being shaped by nostalgia — you saw how many soulless live action Disney remakes came out this year. Which is what makes it even more refreshing when we see a narrative that’s specifically designed to challenge it, especially from a franchise whose popularity is powered by nostalgia itself.

I’m talking about Star Wars. Yeah, I know, talking about Star Wars on the internet in 2019? Like taking your life in your hands. And yes, Star Wars is one of the ever expanding intellectual property brands owned by that nostalgia beast, Disney. I’m also talking about Kylo Ren, which in the realm of things to talk about when talking about Star Wars in 2019 is probably the most volatile choice. But there is a reason for that, and the reason is that Kylo Ren was specifically crafted to ruin all your warm childhood memories about Star Wars. And that is a good thing.

The hero’s journey is literally the oldest story in the book. It’s neat in a way that real life is never neat — it has a beginning, a middle, and a definitive end, with the journey of personal growth (often from child to adult) underpinning it. This is the journey Luke Skywalker takes in the original Star Wars films. It’s also the journey Anakin Skywalker takes, in a dark mirror sort of way, if we talked about the prequels. The hero’s journey is complete and audiences don’t want to hear about anything after that, thank you. It’s why things like the Harry Potter epilogue feel unnecessary and twee, because when a hero’s story ends the audience’s journey with them ends too, and the concept that their lives continue in a normal human way without us is distasteful. They are not people, they are characters, and they belong to us. They are proprietary.

Here is the strange gossamer line that separates reality from fiction . Reality is messy. Fiction is neat. Any attempts to make fiction messy — to make it more like life — will be met with unhappiness and confusion. What do you mean, the hero got old? What do you mean, he changed?

Here comes The Force Awakens. A film brimming with nostalgia, a film that takes nearly all its narrative beats from A New Hope, a film that has taken those heroes you grew up with, that Han and Leia and Luke, and folded them into the rich tapestry of history and lore that makes the Star Wars universe so irresistible. In the same way that Star Wars has become pop culture legend in our world, the original heroes have become legends in their world — to the point where our new protagonists have been brought up on stories of them and are shocked to learn that they are actually real.

But to its credit, The Force Awakens embraces the fact that its old guard have aged thirty years since we last saw them in Return of the Jedi. And it also embraces a messy, real-world truth: when you get older, the invincibility of youth starts to fade and it begins to occur to you that you are going to die. Mortality becomes something you begin to think about. You build things. Maybe you have children. And you become someone who has more things to lose, or maybe just more aware that there are things you could lose. And this truth brings fear.

This is boring, daunting, real world stuff. It doesn’t make for good entertainment. But the fact that it is real is what makes it impactful, the way that emotional truths always underpin the best comedy and the best drama. Han and Leia and Luke grew up and they got old and they made some good choices and some bad ones. Some pretty big bad ones, actually. And all their bad choices manifest in one character, that child of legacy, the one and only Ben Kylo Solo Ren.

You know that song from that musical that goes, ‘Legacy? What is a legacy?’ At last, the answer: Legacy is a 6'2' guy with a crossblade lightsaber. In the audio commentary for The Force Awakens, director JJ Abrams says:

“The character of Kylo Ren was one of the most challenging characters because he sort of embodied what this movie was. It was a new story, a new personality created from the DNA of what had come before, but because he was the villain it meant he was in the shadow of Darth Vader, one of the great villains in cinema history.”

There are two threads here: the impact of the characters within the Star Wars universe, and the impact of Star Wars on our universe — two separate but intertwined things. The trick, then, is to make a character who can embody the legacy of the characters in-universe — make him their son — and the legacy of Star Wars to those of us who were raised with it — make him the antagonist using the iconic imagery that made Darth Vader the greatest villain in cinematic history. And dear god, give him a mask!

‘A new personality created from the DNA of what had come before.’ And here is the true genius of making the sequel series with Kylo Ren — he’s Leia and Han’s son, and Luke’s nephew, and if he was just those things then he would be a protagonist. But he is also their failures made manifest, and that’s part of the reason why he is the antagonist. The mistakes of the old heroes have helped to make the new villain — the way that the Jedi helped to make Darth Vader, if we talked about the prequels.

You’re playing with live ammo here. People love Star Wars. You know how much people love Star Wars. It’s a part of their lives — a part of their childhood. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies. Childhood is the place where Peter Pan isn’t allowed to get old. It is immovable. You don’t pluck a part of someone’s childhood into the present and show how flawed it is — how adult it is. And you don’t have Han Solo’s kid run Han Solo through with his lightsaber.

But that’s exactly what Star Wars did. Force Awakens and The Last Jedi took Han and Leia and Luke, our heroes, our heroes, and said, they saved the galaxy but they couldn’t save this child.

So here’s the story: Han and Leia have a son. They love him, but the boy is powerful — he is a Skywalker — and the boy has darkness inside him — he is a Skywalker. Han and Leia don’t know what to do, so they send him to Luke to be trained as a Jedi. There’s ambiguity enough here that people can (and certainly have) speculated as to whether this counts as abandonment, or simply two people overwhelmed with a troubled child. Either way, the impact on that child is the same, and in considering Han and Leia from this new angle, we reach an uncomfortable truth: just because you are a good person doesn’t mean you will be a good parent.

And Luke, who is still the son who saw some good in his father when no one else could, sees a child who is younger than him, and maybe stronger than him, and who holds a great potential for evil, and thinks about killing him. Luke doesn’t — that internal goodness stops him — but the child sees that this person who was meant to protect him was going to hurt him, and it tips the balance. And now we have a little devil who was crafted by the hands of angels.

You were there. You know that The Last Jedi made people angry. Hell, The Last Jedi is still making people angry. There are a lot of criticisms of the film but a big one, maybe the biggest one, was ‘that’s not my Luke’. But it was. It is, and was, and ever shall be Luke Skywalker, and you must reconcile the wide eyed hero you loved with the weary, embittered man you don’t understand. The Last Jedi did more to make Luke a fully fleshed out character than ever before, and that has made him too human.

Luke was always King Arthur. A gifted boy is raised humbly, unaware of his royal birthright, then guided by a knowledgable wizard to discover a magical sword that will help him become a hero of legend. There’s even a weird relationship with his sister (though of course there is only one woman in the original Star Wars, so Leia must be both Guinevere and Morgan le Fay), a Lancelot, a villainous father.

The good news is, Luke is still Arthur. The bad news is, Arthur dies. He’s felled by his own hubris in seeking the Holy Grail and is eventually murdered by…. his own son and nephew, Mordred. Le Morte d’Arthur. Le Morte de Luke.

No one wants this story. To think that the Luke, our Luke, who saved the galaxy with the power of compassion, was capable of cruelty too? It confronts something inside people that they don’t want to face — that love, that attachment, that nostalgia that they have for these characters. Characters are allowed to be two dimensional, the sum of their parts, symbols. They can just be symbols of good or of our own innocence and that’s fine. This human complexity doesn’t fit the narrative of the hero’s journey. But in The Last Jedi, Luke is no longer the protagonist, and this time the story does not want to cosset you or your nostalgia.

Not the story anyone wants — but maybe the one they need? You always knew the new Star Wars movies were going to incorporate the characters from the first films, but you didn’t expect them to bring your own feelings about those characters into the equation and say, the way you feel doesn’t matter more than the story we are telling. Not what you should reasonably expect from a mass market blockbuster like Star Wars.

There’s a great white elephant of franchise sequels and it is called Harry Potter: the Cursed Child. Did I like The Cursed Child? No. Did I think it was good, or even necessary? Again, no. But it is playing in the same sandpit as the new Star Wars films, examining the effect of Harry’s fame on his children (mostly Albus Severus), the transformation of heroes into flawed parents and mentors, intergenerational trauma. Star Wars does this better not only because it doesn’t involve a subplot where someone goes back in time and suddenly Cedric Diggory is a Death Eater. It’s because Cursed Child is still about Harry — it’s he who is the Cursed Child, the titular role! — whereas Star Wars was gutsy enough to shift focus to the new generation.

I confess, I’m one of those people who love Kylo Ren. Mea culpa. And sure, part of it because I think Adam Driver is that Easter Island statue wunderkind everyone says he is. But it’s also because of what the character represents in the Star Wars universe. Kylo is defined by legacy, was literally crafted by it in-universe and meta textually. He can’t escape this, and yet he desperately wants to. It is, indeed, a trap. And maybe that would have been okay, if he had gotten the support he thought he didn’t get from his parents or his uncle. But he didn’t. You can see the appeal of this story — the clear stakes, the fractured family, the Greek drama of it all. Lucifer cast out of heaven.

But this is all villain stuff. Surely our protagonist, our new Luke, isn’t caught up in this war on nostalgia? Surely she is the inheritor of all that was good in the first films, if only in spirit? A Galahad to seek the Grail. And Rey is a Jedi — but she is not a Skywalker. She is, we’ve been told and told, nobody. ‘You come from nothing.’ She’s defined by her lack of legacy. She sprung out of nowhere like little Anakin magically manifesting, if we talked about… you know, you know. A clean slate. An attempt by the Force, that power of the universe, to reset the clock and shift the balance of power from those messy, chaotic Skywalkers.

So Rey wants a family and looks for it everywhere — even in Han and Leia and Luke. Kylo Ren wants to be free of that same family and all the grief it gave him. Both wants to be the other. This is a conflict that on its broader level is about the very nature of Star Wars in our world — Disney needs Star Wars to keep perpetuating, to churn out more and more content, and it’s not going to shackle the story to the Skywalkers any longer. It’s all Mandalorians and Baby Yodas from here.

Before, being a Skywalker was about being chosen by destiny. Now, it’s about how that destiny corrupts. The burden of the past is a toxic one, and it’s got to go. Disney is the Force. Disney is the Force now.

‘Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to.’

If you’re one of those people that believe films have a thesis, and that a thesis can be contained in one line, here it is writ large: let the past die. Coming from the mouth of Han and Leia’s child, a character moulded by Luke Skywalker, who has specifically styled himself after Darth Vader. A character burdened with legacy. Who points out to the protagonist how unconnected Rey is to the mess of it all — the Skywalkers, Darth Vader, saving the galaxy. No legacy to live up to or be saddled with. A kind of freedom.

The Rise of Skywalker could undo it all. I’m aware and wary of this. I mean, it’s in the name, right? The Rise of Skywalker. And maybe the film will reveal that Rey was secretly Obi Wan’s love child or Sheev Palpatine’s clone all along, as interwoven into the Star Wars legacy as Kylo himself. But the first two films in this sequel series have given me a confidence in the story that’s being told. I never expected to feel this for Disney intellectual property, which I tend to approach with the cynicism such soulless cash grabbing warrants.

Maybe it’s the gravitas of Star Wars. It’s a brand that considers itself above your Marvels and your Fantastic Beasts. Or maybe it’s that the people making Star Wars grew up with Star Wars, too. No one is free from the connection to their past here.

I read an article once theorising about why Star Wars doesn’t do well at the box office in China. This is a massive franchise and yet the second largest film market in the world isn’t going to see it? The article theorised that this unenthusiasm was because film audiences in China didn’t grow up with Star Wars — the original films never made an impact there. There’s no nostalgia for Luke or Leia, Vader, the Millennium Falcon. And it made me think — is there enough substance to the new films, if you could some how divorce them of their nostalgia, to make them compelling? I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I think that in undertaking the mammoth task of making new Star Wars films, Force Awakens and Last Jedi have been more daring than they needed to be. They could have coasted on nostalgia like Solo, or only equaled the sum of their parts like Rogue One. It’s a sense of self awareness I didn’t expect from these films, and it’s the thing I appreciate most about them. Would that we had more franchises willing to take gambles with their source material the way The Last Jedi did.

Is it possible to have a nuanced narrative about the unreality of nostalgia from a corporation that feeds itself on the stuff the way Disney does? Probably not. But in a way, maybe a Disney franchise is the perfect place to have a story like this. And the more you think about it, the more you see that this is a gambit that only Star Wars could pull off. This is the franchise that invented franchises, that has shaped fan culture and pop culture on a level perhaps unparalleled. Disney has applied its sleek, efficient nostalgia exploitation model to the franchise and repackaged our own passion to sell back to us, but someone along the way stopped and said, let’s make them think about it.

Look, it’s Star Wars. At the end of the day, it’s not that serious. This a franchise of fun, silly movies that on some level I’m always going to enjoy. I even like, yes, the prequels. I like to consider myself someone not overly swayed by nostalgia — but then I hear the Star Wars theme, and the opening crawl starts, and maybe there’s a part of me that does feel that wonder of being a kid again. But I like that the new films challenge this feeling. That they want to say, you can be a creature of nostalgia and embrace that to craft a new story. In a mass media climate that is pumping out more and more remakes, reboots, and reflections, we need franchises that are willing to engage with their own legacy, and that encourage us to engage with that legacy too.

Search your feelings. You know it to be true.