Last Jedi - final thoughts

 Not at all untenable.  Just not rigorous.  As a long-time EU consumer, I think I can add perspective to why the 'novel' interpretation of the Force as 'agnostic' is problematic and why TLJ is seen as a good movie but a bad SW movie by people like myself.

I got a little long winded.

TLDR: Rian Johnson's mantra of letting the past die seems like an appropriate emo-juvenile protest for Kylo Ren, wildly uncharacteristic for Luke (and a meta-tongue-in-cheek burn to old fogeys like me) but in trying to change the Star Wars paradigm and shake things up it raises the simple questions of how much actually changed and why no one in the Star Wars universe thought to shake things up that way before.

If there is a thesis to TLJ, I would think that RJ makes it pretty clear that it is to let the past die.  Luke flipping his saber over his shoulder, Kylo actually saying the words, Yoda burning down the tree.  But anyone who's read the EU knows that all sort of Jedi have tried to break out of the dichotomy of light and dark and all sorts of people have tried to make the Force to be like a dispassionate tool rather than an all-consuming devotion leading to the creation of these "religious sects" called the Jedi and the Sith.  Some call this the path of the 'Grey Jedi' (Qui-Gon Jinn being representative of this line of thinking via the 'Living Force'), but of course putting 'Jedi' in the term is somewhat self-defeating.

The Force has had many, many interpretations but one of the core interpretations (one that I think even RJ doesn't really dismiss) is that it is like the Super Soldier Serum in Captain America.  It makes the good really good in proportion to what you do for others and it makes the bad really bad in proportion to what you do for yourself and your own satisfaction and there is a fundamental asymmetry to how you progress.  Just by its nature, gaining a "well-developed command of the Force" by using the Force in a dispassionate way is very difficult and time-consuming while gaining that same command using it in a passionate way allows you to accomplish things faster, easier, feeds into your passion and makes it easier to go to that well the next time.  It becomes an addiction and feedback loop - power as a solution that leads to power the problem leading to a need for more power.

By its nature then, or at least every major interpretation of it (including the Original Trilogy) the dark side of Force doesn't lend itself to moderation.  It isn't something that you can safely dabble in.  The spiritual offset necessary to balance yourself again after even one use of the dark side is severe.  It's like a drug that hooks you.  And so it is that while the so-called Grey Jedi could sometimes make morally ambiguous decisions, they never made outright immoral decisions because, again, using the Force is a lot easier and more seductive when it is driven by your anger, rage, selfishness, etc.

But anger, rage, selfishness ... these are things that normal people feel and act on all the time.  So if you are one of the first students of the Force, and understand this dynamic, what is the solution to the problem of normal people of varying Force-sensitivity emerging all throughout the galaxy?  Kill them the moment they are detected?  Just hope that some of them won't realize that with focus and concentration they can move things with their minds & put thoughts into other people's heads?  Hope that if they do figure that out that they never move things with their minds or put thoughts into other people's heads when angry?  That's just wishful thinking.  Left to its own accords, 99/100 people would come to believe that their Force power came from anger and rage, and pursuing that power would lead them to become ever more angry and rageful.  Now you have 99/100 crazed wizards running around.

No - after enough disasters - there would slowly and surely come a consensus that the risk of leaving these people out in the wild is too much of a danger to the communities around them.  Appeals for individual freedoms would start to wage a losing battle against the need to curtail the constant emergence of these supernatural threats.  From early on in life, these people would need training and direction and to adopt a very specific type of lifestyle, an almost paradoxical balancing act - one that was both devoted to the service of others and yet dispassionate enough to avoid the temptations of the dark side.  And in contrast to that there would rise another consensus.  An antagonistic consensus.  One that reflexively objected not just to the institutionalization of the Force but also to the implicit mission of eradicating the Dark Side in all its forms.  But the catch-22 is: anyone with considerable ability and familiarity with the Dark Side would not only see the Jedi as a threat.  

Driven continually by the need for power, their own alliances with each other would be laughably short-lived - establishing a separate paradigm where there would only dependably be two Sith Lords: one with the most knowledge and ability in using the Dark side and another highly talented disciple who craved the teachings, devoted to the teachings, but had neither the ability nor the experience to kill his master.  The Jedi would always be in a symbiotic relationship with each other and the Republic and so would always have numbers on their side and the Sith would have a parasitic relationship with every person that ever learned about the Dark Side, and hence always work via subterfuge, deceit and deception.  Throughout the galaxy there were other people that used the Force, called it other names.  But the division in how it was used was always there, because that is the nature of the Force.  That is to say, the Jedi and Sith were not formed as an opinion as to how things should be.  They are the natural consequence of how things are - and everyone that tried to deny it eventually understood the hard way why things had to be that way.

There is a logic to all of that and this is the problem with TLJ.  It confidently posits that Kylo Ren discovered that you can just shove history (like the EU) in the dustbin and start from scratch.  It confidently posits that Luke would have gone through the simple thought exercise above and come to the same conclusion.  That history just an old book full of mistakes that were made. That the past is an anchor weighing you down.    Kylo is supposedly the first person in the "10,000 generations of Jedi" to think that we can move past from the past and towards a future that has no connnection to the past.  And Luke happened to become the character that sees the past the same way.  It confidently posits that if you let the Jedi and the Sith die, and then fast forwarded 1,000 years you wouldn't just have an order of warrior-monks called the Bopy who zealously followed the North teachings of the Gift and the shadowy Diru who maniacally followed the South teachings of the Gift.

But there are only two types of people who believe that the past is full of ignoramuses, that this all could have been avoided, and that they know better.  The first are the people who have no knowledge of the past.  And the second are they people who do know the past but don't want to admit that the past has power over them - they see the past as a prison that they try to escape from.  Rian Johnson - in trying to reconceptualize the entire Star Wars paradigm - is willfully the first type of person and Kylo, as a character battling his own identity and his misgivings of the path he's chosen, is the second.  Luke is conveniently characterized as a person that has lost faith in the Jedi when he was literally the New Hope for the Galaxy and redeemed the Jedi's biggest failure.

Then Yoda appears and, in the most confusing scene in the movie, tells Luke that the past is supposed to be a teacher that you learn from and improve upon rather that a post-mortem of mistakes (a lesson that one would think Luke learned quite pointedly from the example of his own father)...before literally burning the past to the ground.   Luke who by all accounts is hoping and expecting to be the Last Jedi, is for some reason pained that the Books are being destroyed...even when the end of the Jedi is his endgame?!?

And for all Kylo's advocacy for letting the past die and killing it if need be, where do we find them at the end of the movie?  Negotiating a truce with his master...walking peaceably away?  No - he chopped him in half, just like a good Sith would.  Rey choosing to confront and kill Kylo rather than saving her friends?  No, her love for the Resistance was greater than any hate she feels towards Kylo for threatening them - like a good Jedi.  Even by the end of the movie you have to ask - what's changed other than Luke and Snoke being gone?

It's a good movie.  At times thoughtful, at times daring and in every moment extremely confident.  If you never read something about Star Wars before, it would strike you as really provocative, especially if you had misgivings of the 'crazy, laser-sword wielding, warrior-monk sect that steals children from their families'.  

But to anyone that has any history with the EU and the work that had gone before to flesh out the Force, it's a textbook case of someone coming late to the party and suggesting that they know better.  That we can get to space in a hot air balloon.  Kepler and Newton and all those who created math for orbital mechanics didn't do so because they hadn't thought of hot air balloons.  They did all that because they knew hot air balloons wouldn't get it done.  Orbital mechanics might be hard to understand but if you want to go to space, the hardest work or all - creating the math in the first place - has already been done for you.  Unfortunately Disney threw out all that work and is offering hot air balloon rides to space but plenty of us know that hot air balloons don't make any sense in this context.  It's not so much gatekeeping as it is...well, this new thing that RJ made isn't as thoughtful as what has already been done.

Probably a moot point now though, as Star Wars appears to exists only to sell merchandise.