The First (and Last) Jedi
Who is Luke in The Last Jedi? What has he become? Why is he so troubled and angry?
Why has he exiled himself away from the mainstream of the galaxy where the battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness still rages? Can he be the last hope for a dying rebellion? Or is he a battered prophet who holds only bitterness and rage in his heart?
From the very first Star Wars movie (”Star Wars - A New Hope”) Luke has been a stand-in for George Lucas.
(Lucas = Luke)
We first meet him as a young clueless boy living on a farm (the small town of Modesto, California) He dreams of interacting with the world and making his mark on a vast universe that seems so distant and unreachable to him from the vantage point of his isolated desert farm. His yearning for race car driving and his memories of racing at fairgrounds near Modesto are reflected in Luke’s ability with (and love for) his Landspeeder.
“the dusty Central Valley flatlands provided the model for Luke's home planet of Tatooine” (Steve Silberman)
A brush with death sends Lucas in a different direction (this is reflected in Luke by the murder of his uncle and aunt and his subsequent decision to leave his small town / planet and go out to conquer the world.)
(Luke’s “hidden father” / “shadow father” / “dark father” / Darth Vader is a projection borne from the not too uncommon feeling: “This is not right. I must come from somewhere else, someone else…” - the imaginary Father that waits in the shadows.)
Luke managed to change the history of the galaxy through the destruction of the Death Star.
George managed to overcome great obstacles to make his mark on the history of cinema through this very movie where he is the main character that changes the world. The story within the movie is not only the story of how the movie was made but it contains within itself a prediction of the effect it will have on the world around it – a much greater effect than anyone could have possibly anticipated (anyone except maybe for a dreamer small town boy looking up at the stars and imagining himself a mythological hero.)
That first movie created a mythology that took on a life of its own, it expanded all over the world and captured the minds of millions of fans, especially other young boys and men who took it into their hearts in a very intimate way that seemed almost too personal to share, almost too delicate to speak out loud.
At that very moment of innocent openness, an unresolvable dilemma was created:
For every young viewer there was an eternal first moment when the mythology first took hold of them. It probably happened at some point while watching the first movie, or a few days later dreaming about it or imagining it while still awake. That moment is a kind of secret religious conversion - a conversion into an imaginary religion, an ephemeral mythological structure passed on through movie screens and plastic toys.
That first eternal moment is, and will always remain, untouchable.
It is not contained in the movie - it is a surplus effect, an interaction that requires not only a movie but also a particular moment of innocence in a fan’s individual life story and a particular moment in social history, a certain level of collective innocence. It is all delicately perfect and it can’t ever be reproduced or duplicated.
And yet, there is a need for more movies, more stories, more characters, more, more, more.
Lucas wants to make more. The studio wants to make more money. The toy makers want to make more money.
And the fan wants more as well. The fan wants to relive that first moment of openness.
But nothing that comes out after that first movie will ever be as good and as perfect as that first eternal moment.
The first moment remains untouchable.
So the fan will always be necessarily dissatisfied with the new material that comes out, even as he keeps on buying it and demanding more. This growing dissatisfaction coupled with a yearning for a moment that cannot be reproduced leads to a growing anger and resentment. Something has gone wrong and the source for this anger must be located somewhere.
If you have watched “The People Against George Lucas” you have seen this dynamic in action.
The documentary is a crowdsourced document that presents the love-hate relationship that Star Wars fans have with George Lucas.
“The fan-fueled filmmaking process made it possible to connect with legions of fanboys and fangirls around the world, then stitch together a crazy-quilt indictment of Lucas’ handling of the Star Wars legacy.” (from WIRED)
“Is George the sole owner of it, or does it now belong to the ages? And what happens to your role as a creator when your audience claims it owns your art?” asks writer and director Alexandre O. Philippe.
The fan loves George Lucas for giving him Star Wars, for giving him the eternal moment that gives birth to a new mythology.
But the fan hates George Lucas for tampering with Star Wars, for doing more Star Wars that doesn’t live up to expectations, for the prequels that destroy the implied past that the first movie hinted at.
(Watch the first movie again and you will notice that the two pasts don’t fit together – they are two distinctly different stories – one much more mysterious than the other. A shadow dream image and its more pedestrian manifestation.)
“At first I laughed because it was so bad, then I cried for the same reason. Look what you had done to my beloved Star Wars.” (from an Open Letter to George)
“Watching any of those movies is like watching C-Span coverage of a Senate debate cut with 10 minute scenes of lightsaber fights. I still have no idea what’s going on half the time in those movies. I know the plot for Star Wars had a big political background, but it was in the background. Where it should have stayed.” (from Top 5 Reasons the Prequels Suck By PVGLTeam)
Lucas not only created a new past through the prequels but also inserted that new past into the original trilogy, distorting even the original source from which the mythology had emerged.
"With the Blu-ray release of Star Wars today comes more changes to the original trilogy: Ewoks now blink (yeah, cheers for that), Obi-Wan Kenobi's introduction has been tweaked and – most controversial of all – Darth Vader now has an added "no … noooo!" in the final scenes of Return Of The Jedi. The backlash has been biblical." (Stephen Kelly - Sun 18 Sep 2011)
The core problem was that the fans felt an implied ownership in this mythology that didn’t exist at a legal or mainstream level. It was a sense of ownership of a collective dream that didn’t emerge in your own mind. “I yearn to own my own dreams.” It just so happens that these particular dreams were only rental property - they could be modified or removed at any time.
“Does there comes a point where fans become so emotionally invested in your work, that it isn't yours anymore?”
(Stephen Kelly - Sun 18 Sep 2011)
Eventually this backlash led to Lucas becoming disenchanted with the world he brought into being, and specially disenchanted with the fans of this world that had turned against him.
“I'm moving away from the business ... From the company, from all this kind of stuff.” —George Lucas on his future career plans.
In 2015 Lucas compared his decision to sell Lucasfilm to a divorce and then went on to criticize the new films for being derivative, “retro” (as if there could be anything more “retro” than the original “Star Wars”)
Lucas declares: "I'm not happy that corporations have taken over the film industry, but now I find myself being the head of a corporation, so there's a certain irony there. I have become the very thing that I was trying to avoid. That is Darth Vader – he becomes the very thing he was trying to protect himself against."
So now we have “The Last Jedi” and the reappearance of Luke – in other words the reappearance of George Lucas.
The past in the form of the First Order is threatening to swallow the mythology – the past which is the movie’s own past, our historical past, our past as people, as fans, as kids. Can our original hero Luke save the imaginary universe from its own past?
But Luke has gone into self imposed exile – he has tried to save and/or destroy his own student, Kylo Ren, and he has turned against everything he once believed in.
George has sold off the franchise and sailed away – leaving the galaxy he created in foreign hands. The very fans who thought that Lucas had ruined the mythology with the prequels are now worried that someone else may ruin it further if Lucas is not involved. We must find Luke where he is hiding and bring him back.
He must help us to reconstruct the mythology he created from scratch. He is our only hope, our last hope.
Luke, the original innocent hero of Star Wars, is now an embittered old man who doesn’t want to have anything to do with anyone or anything.
The very fans that he created Star Wars for have turned against him, boys and girls just like he once was. He wants nothing to do with them.
And yet the Force remains and a young girl comes to him bringing back his original light saber and asking for help. He rejects the saber and refuses to help her or teach her.
Eventually he will help what remains of the rebellion, but only as a ghost – the disembodied presence of Lucas in the film will face off against the mighty power of the angry fan that is Kylo Ren.(A young entitled man of privilege who longs for the past and particularly for the presence of the Dark Father = Darth Vader.)
“You’re just a child with a mask.” – Supreme Leader Snoke to Kylo Ren
Kylo is the young boy disciple who turned against Luke and destroyed his own belief in what he was doing. All the energy and force of Kylo will attempt to destroy what is left of Luke – but George is not there, he is not in the movie, he hasn’t written it, he didn’t direct it, he is in a planet far away projecting his presence into the movie through the invisible network of living intelligence that is the Force.
It is through his very absence that Luke/Lucas confronts the past.
Luke’s distant presence takes onto itself all the fury of the disgruntled angry fan who demands vengeance. By taking all that aggression upon himself, George, the George that is not there, allows the remaining rebels to escape and create a new myth – a myth that kids can tell each other again – how the mighty rebel Luke faced off against an entire army and was able to survive. From these new kids a new boy emerges, a boy who has only been indirectly and distantly affected by Luke and Kylo, by George and the old school angry fan. This new boy has the force within him and there’s an entire universe to challenge, an entire universe full of new possibilities, an open world waiting for a new mythology to emerge, a new eternal moment to be invoked from nothingness.
George, by selling off the franchise, sacrificed himself at the altar of a myth that he created but which became too large for him to handle. (Yes, he wrote it originally, he created it, but once it became a dream mythology for millions of people all over the world, it was no longer truly his. Like all myths, it now belonged to everyone and to no one.)
The fans want to preserve the past at the expense of the present and future. They have created a religious dogma out of that first eternal moment of discovery - a complex network of known facts and limited possibilities. They are angry Kylo Ren wishing for Darth Vader (the dark father) to return in the old known form.
It is no wonder that old school fans hated this film so much – they are the villains of the story. By the end, they haven’t been defeated, only temporarily contained by Luke’s sacrifice.
Leave my past alone. Let my Father be what he was.
"I only know one truth: It's time for the Jedi to end." - Luke
In the new kid in the very last scene of the film is the same germ of an idea that was in the first movie: a young boy looks up at the sky and gets ready to face the universe. Luke’s/Lucas’ sacrifice has allowed a new door to open. The future will reveal what waits on the other side.
"Let the past die. Kill it if you have to…"
Why has he exiled himself away from the mainstream of the galaxy where the battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness still rages? Can he be the last hope for a dying rebellion? Or is he a battered prophet who holds only bitterness and rage in his heart?
(Lucas = Luke)
We first meet him as a young clueless boy living on a farm (the small town of Modesto, California) He dreams of interacting with the world and making his mark on a vast universe that seems so distant and unreachable to him from the vantage point of his isolated desert farm. His yearning for race car driving and his memories of racing at fairgrounds near Modesto are reflected in Luke’s ability with (and love for) his Landspeeder.
A brush with death sends Lucas in a different direction (this is reflected in Luke by the murder of his uncle and aunt and his subsequent decision to leave his small town / planet and go out to conquer the world.)
(Luke’s “hidden father” / “shadow father” / “dark father” / Darth Vader is a projection borne from the not too uncommon feeling: “This is not right. I must come from somewhere else, someone else…” - the imaginary Father that waits in the shadows.)
Luke managed to change the history of the galaxy through the destruction of the Death Star.
George managed to overcome great obstacles to make his mark on the history of cinema through this very movie where he is the main character that changes the world. The story within the movie is not only the story of how the movie was made but it contains within itself a prediction of the effect it will have on the world around it – a much greater effect than anyone could have possibly anticipated (anyone except maybe for a dreamer small town boy looking up at the stars and imagining himself a mythological hero.)
For every young viewer there was an eternal first moment when the mythology first took hold of them. It probably happened at some point while watching the first movie, or a few days later dreaming about it or imagining it while still awake. That moment is a kind of secret religious conversion - a conversion into an imaginary religion, an ephemeral mythological structure passed on through movie screens and plastic toys.
That first eternal moment is, and will always remain, untouchable.
It is not contained in the movie - it is a surplus effect, an interaction that requires not only a movie but also a particular moment of innocence in a fan’s individual life story and a particular moment in social history, a certain level of collective innocence. It is all delicately perfect and it can’t ever be reproduced or duplicated.
Lucas wants to make more. The studio wants to make more money. The toy makers want to make more money.
And the fan wants more as well. The fan wants to relive that first moment of openness.
But nothing that comes out after that first movie will ever be as good and as perfect as that first eternal moment.
The first moment remains untouchable.
So the fan will always be necessarily dissatisfied with the new material that comes out, even as he keeps on buying it and demanding more. This growing dissatisfaction coupled with a yearning for a moment that cannot be reproduced leads to a growing anger and resentment. Something has gone wrong and the source for this anger must be located somewhere.
The documentary is a crowdsourced document that presents the love-hate relationship that Star Wars fans have with George Lucas.
“The fan-fueled filmmaking process made it possible to connect with legions of fanboys and fangirls around the world, then stitch together a crazy-quilt indictment of Lucas’ handling of the Star Wars legacy.” (from WIRED)
“Is George the sole owner of it, or does it now belong to the ages? And what happens to your role as a creator when your audience claims it owns your art?” asks writer and director Alexandre O. Philippe.
But the fan hates George Lucas for tampering with Star Wars, for doing more Star Wars that doesn’t live up to expectations, for the prequels that destroy the implied past that the first movie hinted at.
(Watch the first movie again and you will notice that the two pasts don’t fit together – they are two distinctly different stories – one much more mysterious than the other. A shadow dream image and its more pedestrian manifestation.)
“At first I laughed because it was so bad, then I cried for the same reason. Look what you had done to my beloved Star Wars.” (from an Open Letter to George)
“Watching any of those movies is like watching C-Span coverage of a Senate debate cut with 10 minute scenes of lightsaber fights. I still have no idea what’s going on half the time in those movies. I know the plot for Star Wars had a big political background, but it was in the background. Where it should have stayed.” (from Top 5 Reasons the Prequels Suck By PVGLTeam)
Lucas not only created a new past through the prequels but also inserted that new past into the original trilogy, distorting even the original source from which the mythology had emerged.
"With the Blu-ray release of Star Wars today comes more changes to the original trilogy: Ewoks now blink (yeah, cheers for that), Obi-Wan Kenobi's introduction has been tweaked and – most controversial of all – Darth Vader now has an added "no … noooo!" in the final scenes of Return Of The Jedi. The backlash has been biblical." (Stephen Kelly - Sun 18 Sep 2011)
“Does there comes a point where fans become so emotionally invested in your work, that it isn't yours anymore?”
(Stephen Kelly - Sun 18 Sep 2011)
Eventually this backlash led to Lucas becoming disenchanted with the world he brought into being, and specially disenchanted with the fans of this world that had turned against him.
“I'm moving away from the business ... From the company, from all this kind of stuff.” —George Lucas on his future career plans.
Lucas declares: "I'm not happy that corporations have taken over the film industry, but now I find myself being the head of a corporation, so there's a certain irony there. I have become the very thing that I was trying to avoid. That is Darth Vader – he becomes the very thing he was trying to protect himself against."
The past in the form of the First Order is threatening to swallow the mythology – the past which is the movie’s own past, our historical past, our past as people, as fans, as kids. Can our original hero Luke save the imaginary universe from its own past?
But Luke has gone into self imposed exile – he has tried to save and/or destroy his own student, Kylo Ren, and he has turned against everything he once believed in.
George has sold off the franchise and sailed away – leaving the galaxy he created in foreign hands. The very fans who thought that Lucas had ruined the mythology with the prequels are now worried that someone else may ruin it further if Lucas is not involved. We must find Luke where he is hiding and bring him back.
He must help us to reconstruct the mythology he created from scratch. He is our only hope, our last hope.
The very fans that he created Star Wars for have turned against him, boys and girls just like he once was. He wants nothing to do with them.
And yet the Force remains and a young girl comes to him bringing back his original light saber and asking for help. He rejects the saber and refuses to help her or teach her.
Eventually he will help what remains of the rebellion, but only as a ghost – the disembodied presence of Lucas in the film will face off against the mighty power of the angry fan that is Kylo Ren.(A young entitled man of privilege who longs for the past and particularly for the presence of the Dark Father = Darth Vader.)
It is through his very absence that Luke/Lucas confronts the past.
Luke’s distant presence takes onto itself all the fury of the disgruntled angry fan who demands vengeance. By taking all that aggression upon himself, George, the George that is not there, allows the remaining rebels to escape and create a new myth – a myth that kids can tell each other again – how the mighty rebel Luke faced off against an entire army and was able to survive. From these new kids a new boy emerges, a boy who has only been indirectly and distantly affected by Luke and Kylo, by George and the old school angry fan. This new boy has the force within him and there’s an entire universe to challenge, an entire universe full of new possibilities, an open world waiting for a new mythology to emerge, a new eternal moment to be invoked from nothingness.
George, by selling off the franchise, sacrificed himself at the altar of a myth that he created but which became too large for him to handle. (Yes, he wrote it originally, he created it, but once it became a dream mythology for millions of people all over the world, it was no longer truly his. Like all myths, it now belonged to everyone and to no one.)
The fans want to preserve the past at the expense of the present and future. They have created a religious dogma out of that first eternal moment of discovery - a complex network of known facts and limited possibilities. They are angry Kylo Ren wishing for Darth Vader (the dark father) to return in the old known form.
It is no wonder that old school fans hated this film so much – they are the villains of the story. By the end, they haven’t been defeated, only temporarily contained by Luke’s sacrifice.
"I only know one truth: It's time for the Jedi to end." - Luke
In the new kid in the very last scene of the film is the same germ of an idea that was in the first movie: a young boy looks up at the sky and gets ready to face the universe. Luke’s/Lucas’ sacrifice has allowed a new door to open. The future will reveal what waits on the other side.
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