When the Discourse No Longer Runs
I love talking about Star Wars. Offline, or with friends, in safe chats and spaces where discourse is respected, I love talking about Star Wars. I keep these conversations purposefully siloed, something that, with other topics (politics, spirituality, ethics, etc) would be ill-advised. I am precious with Star Wars, which might be childish and strange, because it is precious to me; but also because while I love to talk about it, I hate when Star Wars becomes the topic of conversation online.
The most recent storm was set over the recently completed first (and now only) season of The Acolyte, the most recent live action Star Wars television show. For some, the cancellation of The Acolyte was the smart move, as the show didn’t deserve to be made in the first place, as it was (at best) poorly executed at every level and (at worst) an exercise in diversity, equity, and inclusion that cared more about hiring people of color and queer representation than it did respecting canon.
On the other side, The Acolyte was a show that deserved more time, that reflected experiences not yet seen in Star Wars, and that the decision to cancel was (at best) a sign of suits making safe bets and (at worst) acquiescing to the former group; the racist and misogynist mob who used online anonymity and the presumption of expertise to call the show garbage before the first frame had aired.
Note that nothing so far mentions what the show was about, or what it did, what it meant to Star Wars as a greater body of storytelling. Since the middle of the season I’ve wanted to write about The Acolyte — how it was an exploration of good intentions gone bad, how its four Jedi masters handled their shared original sin in different ways — but I couldn’t, because as much as I wanted to, even I was sucked into the discourse that wasn’t really discourse; scrolling endlessly down a feed of petty vitriol before refreshing the page and scrolling down a feed mocking said vitriol, on and on forever.
It is 2024, and we are all very stressed out. I don’t know a single person who hasn’t felt every day like a little bit of themselves has been pruned away every day; like a tree pared back to its trunk. For some this is quite literal, with the loss of economic security, civil liberties, mobility, families, opportunity. For others — they feel a breeze through their leaves and imagine shears all the same.
Valid or not, traumatic or petty, this is an era defined by anxiety, which here we can define as a sense of insecurity, the belief that something you have will be taken from you at any time. Economic anxiety, for example, the feeling that anything that you can only hold onto with money (rent, belongings, healthcare, food, we are a bad country) was a common term in 2016, though the remedy of right-wing populism was sorely misplaced. For any minoritized person, there is anxiety over your rights being taken from you — whether this is citizenship, the freedom to marry, to vote, to control your body, to live as yourself.
The anxiety can be crippling, but it can be a great motivator for action; if what you fear to lose is worth fighting for. As you might have noted, this is an essay about Star Wars discourse.
The theory itself is decades old: the white men who classify themselves as “nerds” appoint themselves as gatekeepers of a fandom, only to become enraged when the gates are not, in fact, real, and the thing they enjoy is also enjoyed by women, people of color, people who are not like them. The white men begin to hate the people in their sacred spaces, are courted by the fascists who offer an easy answer: that space is sacred to you, those women and people of color and queer people have invaded and must be cast out, Star Wars (or wherever they are) must be purified. Mix on high until you have stiff white peaks of Reddit meringue.
The notion that enjoying a film franchise is a scarce enough commodity that it needs to be defended is silly enough on its own. The only actual gates blocking the access of potential fans are economic ones, not social. And yet the understanding of the thing is held aloft like some academic rite; anyone else doesn’t “get it,” they’re “fake fans” trying to “take away” the “real Star Wars.” The core problems of the Disney acquisition are (again) economic ones, not social, but Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy and anyone she works with are out to destroy Star Wars by making it diverse.
They call it woke, a term appropriated from Black culture, not meaning that it is aware of racial prejudice and discrimination, but that it is attempting to appeal to a non-existent SJW zeitgeist that only cares about diverse representation at the expense of good storytelling. To believe this requires finding evidence to support the conclusion, an unscientific approach, to act emotionally … you get my drift.
To feed their anxiety, to hold onto what they fear to lose, something so ephemeral it may not really exist, they must win in the most ephemeral of places: they must be correct on Twitter. If they have the time, they can make a YouTube video about how right they are, ramble on for minutes upon minutes of hyperbole: trash, garbage, worst, ruined. If they cannot call out something in the storytelling — which they often cannot, as this is not about proving that they are media literate, just that they are right — they call out something from their sacred canon, which they must own, they were there when it was written. A character doesn’t seem like they’re the right age. There is fire in space. A laser sword is now a laser whip.
Canon is a term that has also evolved. The Western Canon, for example, is inclusive of “high culture” works of art — literature, philosophy, art, theater, music, etc — that exemplify the history and culture of the Western world. This has changed over time, as have understandings of the West and its culture, but one things remains the same: the canon is a collection of works that can loosely define the narrative of a broad sense of culture, and they are often in conversation with each other.
Canon also refers to works written by a single author, i.e. “the canonical work of William Shakespeare” (also a mainstay in the Western Canon), but it is only recently, with the advent of shared universes that have multiple authors in pop culture, that the idea of a “canon” now means something much more limited: a timeline of events that did happen, character traits, the descriptions of cities or spaceships or animal sidekicks, who is dead and who is not and who has come back to life.
Adherence to this canon — for creators and for fans alike — has turned the enjoyment of these stories into something literally trivial, where the aforementioned age of a character becomes the core of whether or not the story has quality. Was Ki-Adi Mundi ever so important that his existence 100 years before The Phantom Menace would mean a betrayal of everything that made Star Wars good? Even the person I’m criticizing would say that sounds trivial, but then I’m missing the point. Because it was the cavalier treatment of canon — like including a character whose age only exists as a fact in a magazine from 1999 — that indicated how creator Leslye Headland didn’t know what she was doing.
Over and over, the question was begged — about Star Wars, Kennedy, “wokeness”, The Acolyte, and so on. Everyone knows that it’s bad now, so the next show will be bad. Women and people of color and queer people are only hired for diversity, so the quality of what they produce will not be relevant.
A better discourse requires addressing both of these issues, circling within each other like interlocking rings: first, a strict, dogmatic adherence to canon. Second, the association of “good storytelling” with a certain identity — that of a white, straight, cisgender, able-bodied man — and any other identity, whether before or behind the camera.
I want to go back to the previous definition of canon: a series of works that can define the meaning of a culture, that are often in conversation with each other. As fans, it can be fun to remember trivia, but again, it is trivial — I didn’t fall in love with Star Wars because of the specific call signs in Red Squadron and other factoids; enriching though they may be. I doubt that anyone really has, and as I said before, the love of a franchise is not a finite resource, nor is it one that can be stamped, owned, or traded. It’s ours, and it is no-one’s, and to define it with anything feels disingenuous; which is part of why I have, in the last couple years of toxic discourse, reexamined whether or not canon needs to be respected at all.
I am not suggesting that authors or creators start hacking and slashing their way through Star Wars and doing whatever they like with it; making Han Solo blonde or Anakin Skywalker into a cowardly octopus or Tatooine into an icy snowball of a planet. Rather, instead of stories being seen as “filling in the gap” of a timeline, they might instead tell us more about what that creator thinks Star Wars is. What, for example, would make a person fall to the dark side? How could the Jedi, the guardians of peace in the galaxy, become corrupted and insular?
This is what The Acolyte does, and why, despite some flaws, I felt it succeed. The Acolyte was the expression “the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” set in Star Wars. It told this story with original characters but echoing other stories and imagery from the saga, challenging, enriching, and re-contextualizing the galaxy all the while. The Last Jedi, another divisive story from the current era, does this too; asking how heroes cope with failure: of themselves, the narratives they believe in, the dreams they follow, the torches they carry. These stories are not just in conversation with the greater narrative, but with us, the audience — they ask us to be engaged, to think, to wonder at our own reactions. This is not the complex storytelling that is so obtuse as to obscure meaning; we are still talking about popular art, after all. If we allow ourselves to care less about the continuity-canon of every Star Wars story and pay more attention to the relational-canon, then our conversations will be less about whose brain has the most information, and more about interpretations and ideas, things that have little to do with being correct.
As for the issue of storytelling and identity politics — there might not be much left to say. The conversation about “going woke” has been beaten to death by now, and the conclusion is the same every time: diversity of experience at every level of creation is good, if you disagree, get the fuck over it.
I do want to talk about “good storytelling” though, because that phrase is bandied about without much definition. Like most statements, it is subjective. For me, a good story changes depending on its elements; a good horror story is not the same as a good romance, a good space opera is not the same as a good historical drama. In Star Wars, the stories were originally rooted in Campbell’s Hero’s Journey: a protagonist starts at home, receives a call to action, has a series of adventures, and returns a changed person. This was not true of every movie; the prequel trilogy was meant to show the downfall of Anakin Skywalker as well as the Republic, even Lucas couldn’t fit that into Campbell’s circle perfectly.
Often it seems that when someone says “good storytelling” they are vaguely telegraphing whether or not they liked it, which comes from a combination of several things: there are plenty of films with poor storytelling that I still enjoy because of their visuals, performances, soundtrack, etc. For some reason, perhaps because of the last few years of “reviews” and “commentary” becoming a miniature economy online, its language has become flattened and ubiquitous. “Storytelling,” “tone,” “theme” or “writing” can mean the same thing (or nothing) depending on who is using the words; and though I encourage everyone to take the time to learn about film structure and storytelling if and when they can, I also think it is fine to say “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it” without further comment — and while we are here, to not fall into the social media trap of using hyperbolic language to describe a television show (a practice that, I think, should go in both directions).
Still, though, a lot of people said they didn’t like The Acolyte, and said it was a combination of focusing on diversity and not “good storytelling.” But why would one exclude the other?
After all, some well-meaning detractors would say, look at Andor.
Andor is the critical darling of the Star Wars Disney+ shows, lauded as the rare truly great show of the flock that is, at time of writing, mostly The Mandalorian and its sister shows in the “Filoniverse” and the two one-season Jedi stories of Obi-Wan Kenobi and The Acolyte. It’s Star Wars for people who don’t like Star Wars, it’s grounded and human, etc. And its protagonist is Diego Luna, a Mexican actor, the second person of color to lead a Star Wars show (of course, your mileage may vary on how much of a “lead” Pedro Pascal really is in The Mandalorian). Andor’s politics were central to the story, but far less challenging to the status quo of Star Wars morality than The Acolyte would be: Andor is brilliant in showing how the Rebel Alliance was not a pure movement, that the idealism of freedom often came at the cost of violent insurgency. But we never stop and question whether or not the Rebels are right: in Andor, the Empire is the Empire, evil is evil, banal or otherwise.
I have love for Andor, I rewatch it often, but I wanted to touch on it here not only because it is compared to nearly everything else that Lucasfilm makes, but because I have seen it brought up specifically as an example of a diversity “win” when discussing The Acolyte. But the thing is — Andor was created by Tony Gilroy, he and the three other writers for the show are all white men. With one exception, the rousing speeches the show is so known for are placed in the mouths of white male characters. There are female characters, there are characters of color, there is a “they’re roommates” level of queer representation, but this is such a masculine story that the first season almost perfectly fits into Campbell’s Hero’s Journey arc. Andor may be brilliant, but it did not subvert or renew or even challenge Star Wars at its core. In its own way, it reinforced the status quo, just with better dialogue and cinematography.
I would not compare the writing or cinematography of The Acolyte to Andor (that’s like comparing The Mummy to Munich), but I would give both merit where it is due; Andor has eloquence and statesmanship and wounded heroics against brutalist landscapes, and The Acolyte is full of the longing of its characters to be whole again, of wrongs to be made right, of a moral system slowly losing its own way with the best fight choreography since the prequels. Neither are perfect, but both are what Star Wars can and should do with its next generation of storytelling: continue to flesh out and expand upon the stories we know while also introducing more characters, stories, and themes that don’t fit into the Skywalker Saga or the Age of Rebellion.
I wanted to write about The Acolyte for so long. I wanted to talk about Lee Jung-Jae’s heartbreaking performance, about an actually good portrayal of moral ambiguity, whether or not it actually does “make the Jedi look like bad guys” (it doesn’t). The reason I didn’t was because the damn discourse has bored a hole in my brain that whistles, continuously, to consider both sides, to think of the diversity angle, to talk about the detractors, the bullying, the experience of being online.
But that’s not what watching The Acolyte was like. For me, it was going out with friends to Drag Bingo across the street until it was dark and cool enough to come back to my apartment, watch the show, experience it together. It was in one of those silos I made for myself, true, and it felt precious. After I would fill in whatever sort of trivial facts they might have a question about, or we would just say “Ugh, dammit,” knowing that we would have to wait another week to see what would happen next. Watching The Acolyte was good, and talking about The Acolyte was good too, even in a controlled environment away from the feed. It enriched my brain, I learned from others, if a change was made to presumed canon we discussed why, with the benefit of the doubt always given.
I liked being that person, in those conversations, even if I didn’t agree with someone. I liked it more than scrolling past hateful comments or comments owning the haters, even if I agreed with them.
A discourse is not a debate, a competition, or a thing you can win. A fandom is not a sacred space that you own the keys to — again, the gate being kept doesn’t exist. Anyone can, I guess, pretend that’s true: to say that they are the keepers of sacred knowledge of what is canon, what is good storytelling, whatever. But even that is a silo far too isolating. If nothing else, a discourse can’t happen if you’re all alone.
