Academedia: The Rise of Skywalker, part 2 – nostalgia baiting, the hard work of character integrity, story-showing vs story-telling & the solution that causes more problems

It is an interesting question - because I can see the danger.  There is the danger that we don't open our minds up to allow the stories to dance in the wind - flutter and change.  There is the danger that we make our heroes out to be infallible, out to be unreasonably above reproach.  That we viciously try to protect their image in fear of admitting that they are as weak and terrified as the rest of us.  But there is also the danger of simply denying how good a thing is based on the childish cynicism that things that look good on the outside must obviously be too good to be true.  

That thinking is often a superficial appreciation of things and beings.  Just because something seems easy doesn't mean that it is easy.

The creative mind, charged with continuing a story that they haven't any passion for and didn't create themselves, comes to the crossroads.   There are characters that are plants - with arcs and stories still to be told.  And there are characters that are rocks - formed and mostly fashioned with only the smallest room for dramatic change.

Ben Kenobi was a rock.  Daenerys Targaryen was a plant.

Rian Johnson seems to be of the mind that 60 year old Luke Skywalker is more like 18 year old Daenerys Targaryen than like Ben Kenobi.

Is that fair?

This was the issue that I had with "The Dark Knight Rises". Ultimately it is a simple matter of opinion:  could someone who could be broken by the death of a friend become Batman in the first place?  

Or could someone live their life the way Ferris Bueler did and then reach their middle years and look back on their life with regret and dispair?

I think many people would like to think the answer is yes.  But from what I know of people who live life at these extremes on a regular basis, the answer is usually no.  I think that someone like Ferris Bueller, who is kind and charming and smart and has perspective, and sees the big picture of what matters (a person that is willing to ditch school to have fun with his friends) is someone who might get knocked on his butt, might over reach and fall short.  But a person with that outlook will never wake up one day and say "What's the point?"  They'll never say that because too many good things will always accompany the bad things.

I think someone who has enough ego and pain to try and single handedly take on the criminal underworld and expose themselves to those risks without any material reward, someone who literally gets beat up every night to see something through, is no longer making decisions about their life.  This is his life - his life is service to Gotham.  They are a rock.  Until Gotham is a normal city, his work isn't done.  Every new tragedy is nothing more than a log on the fire - fuel to further his obsession.

So then someone comes along and says - Boring!  I don't want to see the story of someone who makes everyone around them feel happy being happy.  I want to tell the story of how someone who wins big deals with being a loser.  I don't want to tell the story of the Batman who wins - pushes forward through anything.  I want to tell the story of the Batman that is broken - the Batman that loses.  That's how I'll be different.

But, here's the thing: loser is isn't a fact.  Loser, winner - those are mindsets.  People who lose a lot - people who are unaccustomed to good things - expect bad things and their expectation snowballs with circumstance and chance to affect their choices.  People who win a lot expect good things and expect good things to replace bad things with hard work and time.  There are very, very few losses and very, very few wins big enough that they can on their own fundamentally change the mindset of one who has lost much or one who has won much.

Or, as a Jedi master once said, "Your focus determines your reality."

Mind you, none of this is helped by the fundamental simillitude between the stories - Ben Kenobi - the old Jedi master that went into hiding and exile actually "killed" his best friend, who'd he'd spent the better part of 10 years training as a mentor before fighting side by side with him as a brother.  Yet still he had hope for the future watching over Luke - he wasn't broken, merely biding.  Luke - the old Jedi master that went into hiding and exile after making the same mistake as his father, pursuing the quick and easy path, nearly killing his nephew; Luke - who actually triumphed in reaching his father where Ben failed - gives up on everything.

So the urge to be different for the sake of being different isn't just childish and egotistical.  It is also at odds with simple, demonstrable principles of characterization.  I think it is very easy to try and be subversive and claim the mantle of "edgy/daring" by simply writing characters out of character in this way and then saying that you are deepening the character.  But without showing the specifics of that process, it would be like seeing Sansa Stark at the beginning of ASOIAF and then seeing her again sentencing Littlefinger to death and saying that it was somehow congruent.  No - for those two people to be congruent would require a massive amount of obstacles and trauma and situations that would warp and forge that person to be someone so dramatically different.  Game of Thrones did that and only by seeing the process can the product be believed.

And so the transformation of Bruce from 'I'll save Gotham by myself if need be - I'll be the bad guy if need be" to "I've lost Rachel I have nothing worth fighting for" when Rachel wasn't the thing that he wanted most in the first place and of Luke from "I have faith that there's love inside of my father who wears all black and chops people in half with his laser sword and thus there is love inside of everyone" to "I tried to kill my nephew before he turned rotten, but it was a mistake and I've lost everything so I should get out of here before I make even more of a mess" - they are so jarring that everything else that follows seems to follow off of a faulty premise. 

The wonder of seeing Luke passing through the flames to face the First Order alone - a redemption of a sort for having left the fight, a triumphant overcoming of his demons - could be beautiful.  As constructed however, in this artificial ham-fisted way, a shoehorned story of Luke’s self-betrayal, disillusionment and redemption all in the span of one movie, it becomes offensive and banal.  It’s overcrafted – it’s a moment that Rian Johnson wants you to see as beautiful.  But it could only be beautiful by ignoring that he left the fight in the first place - by ignoring everything that we know about the character before Rian Johnson got hold of him.   The person who 'stayed on target' during the trench run, seeing it through to the very end.  The person that rushed into the lion's den on Bespin to save his friends - contrary to the urgings of two Jedi Masters.  

We know what Luke’s greatest fear is.  We saw it put on screen in 1981.  His greatest fear is becoming Vader – falling to the dark side.  Taking the quick and easy path.

Johnson wants us to take him at face value that the person who had his hand cut off and chose falling to his death over falling to the Dark Side could one day raise his lightsaber to slice his nephew in half.  He wants us to believe that the person who left no one behind and went back to Tatooine - the place in the Universe he hated most - to save the man that saved his life at Yavin, could go this entire movie without a moment's reflection on the death of his friend at his student's hand.  Johnson demands we believe that Luke is who he says he is when we have so much evidence to the contrary.  And, as a result, his effort at 'redeeming' Luke can't be seen on its own merits.  It can only be regarded as a self-serving ploy by Johnson - a convoluted play for sophistication made off the heels of a baseless demand that we accept this version of the character rather than a thoughtful organic reflection on who the character actually is.

Simply put, considering Rian Johnson thinks himself a storyteller, the chasm between Luke Skywalker and 'Jake' Skywalker seems like a tall tale - perhaps even a tale worth telling.  But he doesn't actually tell that tale.  He tells us about one night that was apparently so momentous that every other moment - everything that we saw of him on screen previous to this movie - was more or less insignificant.

That's easy to believe in a simple life.  It's a much harder sell to believe that any one moment could be so momentous in a life full of momentous moments.

Maybe it is possible to make it seem as though Luke could be utterly broken and defeated.  But it would always be a tall order to make it believable that Luke, a person that grew up without a family, without parents of his own, could turn his back on his family, in a time of need, when he created the need through his own actions.

So the question is: could someone who could turn their back on Leia, and Han, and Chewie and Ben, also be the person who risked his life and his soul against the Emperor and Vader to protect them?  The person who could walk, unarmed, into the clutches of pure evil?

That's a story that I'd be interested in seeing.  But Rian Johnson isn't interested in that story.  He just wants to benefit from suggesting that it happened.