On STAR WARS Fatigue, ANDOR, And How Modern Consumption Is The Enemy Of Art
I can’t miss you if you never go away. And for me, that was never more true than my relationship with STAR WARS.
This last weekend, I was on a panel with other writers at Comicpalooza about STAR WARS. We all came at it from different places; I was the oldest on the panel, and the only one who saw the original film in a theater in 1977 - the others weren’t born yet, or were too little. I was geared up for some hostility. That’s just the nature of fandom these days; it begins, lately, with anger and rarely leaves it. At least, that’s the online experience, and due to these past years of isolation and technology, the primary experience. The mechanics of this world seem to fight against us gathering in any real places, and so without these social cues and interactions, we become more brash, more rude, more abrupt, and we mistakenly think that’s how we’re supposed to behave in real life.
But there’s something to being in a room with those who share your passions, and we remember (or at least I hope we do) that when you’re staring at a real person across from you, you temper what you say and how you react because those biological forces kick in and all the negativity is put on the back burner. It’s easy to remember, when you’re around those who share your passions, that we came at this with love. Love is the first feelings that these universes brought to us, and we struggle to sustain that level, even though familiarity makes that impossible. I don’t love STAR WARS any less - but I can’t get to the highs of it if I’m on it all the time.
So you have to take breaks. Disney/Lucasfilm certainly isn’t helpful in that regard - there’s something new every month. The anger and bitterness of fandom isn’t helpful either because it’s the only kind of interaction available to us. Sometimes it feels like we never left high school - we just found different cliques. I’d like to think that I am more than my love of STAR WARS - I have many interests and while STAR WARS is a big one it’s hardly the only one. for the last few months I’ve gotten big back into STAR TREK - both STRANGE NEW WORLDS and PICARD Season 3 were fantastic and it was easy to fall back into that world. This started with getting the original films in 4K last year and seeing William Shatner live in January, and it was nice enjoying STAR TREK again because I had been away from it for several years, so it practically played as new to me. I even loved revisiting STAR TREK V and STAR TREK INSURRECTION again. Those are better movies than I had originally believed, when I was younger and now having some distance from them. They play now like terrific episodes of their respective shows instead of building them up to definitive franchise entries.
When I said on the panel that I hadn’t seen ANDOR yet, someone asked, “What are you doing here?! Go watch right now!” I laughed and said, “I’m a busy guy. I can’t see everything.” And then I paused, and said, “And I don’t want to. I love STAR WARS, and I don’t want to see everything.” I’m not sure how that sat with the people at the panel, but saying that, I realized, felt incredibly liberating.
Now, I’ve watched ANDOR since, and I’ll get into why it’s so great, but this idea that we have to consume, without critical assessment or thought, everything that these studios give us is antithetical to appreciating these stories on the level that they demand. For these stories to have the impact that the writers, artists, actors, and directors hope that they do, they are not meant to pass the time, to fill the spaces until the next thing arrives. They are not “content,” no matter how much the corporate heads would like them to be. For art to truly resonate, it has to be given the space to breathe in your heart and in your head, and not just something that passes the time. Even bad art. It deserves your thoughts and your considerations. It took a lot of time and a lot of effort to create - the least, the very least, you can do as the audience is to let these things grow in your mind and to give them the time to change you, even if only by inches. We are under constant bombardment, and I find it a rebellious act these days to allow these stories their space. I am not eager to jump into the next thing, not before giving the present thing its due. That’s respectful. That’s impactful. That’s appreciation. I would rather stare at one picture in an art gallery than run down the halls trying to see everything in the gallery and have it all become a meaningless blur.
And I don’t want to grow numb to the things I love. I realize that, at least in STAR WARS’ case, it won’t have the same impact on me as it did when I was 7, or 10, or 13. That’s the way of things. But I do want it to have the most impact possible that it can have, and that’s why I waited for ANDOR. There were a lot of variables involved - the aforementioned fatigue, my loathing of 2019’s THE RISE OF SKYWALKER, my frustrations at how it felt that Lucasfilm wasn’t growing past these seemingly never-ending tropes. STAR WARS isn’t a genre. It’s a place. If it were a genre, it could only stay trapped in the genre. It can’t grow. It can only repeat. As a place, you can fill it with anything. That’s how I prefer to think about STAR WARS. It’s a setting, like the Old West, or Middle-earth, or George Miller’s Wasteland. And, as a place, I don’t have to live there. It’s nice to visit from time to time though, but at my own leisure and pace. So, with ANDOR, I waited, until I was ready to visit again.
I’m so glad I waited. ANDOR is one of the finest STAR WARS stories yet. Of everything we’ve gotten since the original trilogy, ANDOR felt the most like George Lucas, even though it didn’t come from him. The best aspect of the Prequels, and one that Lucas is not given nearly enough credit for, is his depiction of the slow descent into fascism, and how Palpatine wasn’t just the catalyst, but how he was inevitable. How the machine was slowly built, cog by cog, cage bar by cage bar, and when it was finished how it was far too late to do anything about it because every single person in the Galaxy had helped build it, either through inaction, a mistaken sense of loyalty, greed, or a simple unwillingness to believe it could happen, a feeling of superiority and righteousness so overwhelming as to blind one to the truth of things. What’s great about what Lucas did is that he never pointed fingers, he never accentuated anything, he lets the audience make the connection. It’s subtle work, and maybe it was too subtle for those who didn’t like the Prequels or were distracted by other things. Maybe people needed it to be obvious. Regardless, Lucas did an excellent job of building that world, and while ANDOR is very much reminiscent of the original trilogy, I don’t think it’s possible without the work Lucas did in the Prequels.
It’s also not possible without the stories Lucas created outside of STAR WARS, especially THX-1138, an amazing science fiction film that, judging from the Twitter reactions of my ANDOR poses, not enough STAR WARS fans have seen. People forget that Lucas did things other than STAR WARS. It was Lucas that was a huge creative facet to APOCALYPSE NOW, and I imagine that feeling of inevitability to chaos that feels like such a spiritual center to that movie comes from a lot of his story input. Similarly, the dystopian world of THX-1138 is very prevalent in ANDOR, especially the Narkina 5 Prison, all white and stripped of any kind of hope. Or Syril Karn’s cubicle on Coruscant, one among hundreds. The bureaucracy of the Empire, and the mundanity of evil. Even AMERICAN GRAFFITI plays a role - the youth of GRAFFITI slowly gives way to the turbulence of the 1960s, and in ANDOR we see the awakening of a young man concerned only for himself and his mother to someone who is given a purpose and a mission.
One of my favorite characters is Mon Mothma, and the way she is portrayed by Genevieve O’Reilly gives us something we’ve never seen in STAR WARS before. Trapped in a loveless marriage, and forced to compromise her family’s needs for her ideals, Mon Mothma is a complicated, multifaceted character, and perhaps its most tragic. We know where she ends up - she is a leader of the Rebellion but it’s telling that when we see her later in the story her husband and daughter are not there. It isn’t hard to imagine what happened, either, and for STAR WARS to examine just what the Rebellion costs those who take part in it gives this story real moral weight and a sense of foreboding that is difficult to shake.
The same goes for Luthen, played by Stellan Skarsgård. His monologue about what he has sacrificed for the Rebellion, how he put his soul aside to do what needed to be done, is one of the best speeches in all of STAR WARS. We don’t know much about Luthen’s past, but it is easy to imagine that he was one of the silent many who did nothing but watch as the Republic slipped away from him. I’m sure there will be those who will say he’s probably a Jedi in hiding, but I’m hoping that’s not the case. In fact, the absence of the Jedi is one of the factors that makes ANDOR so compelling. The Force cannot save these people. Only they can save themselves.
Then there is the work of one Andy Serkis, as Kino Loy, a prison floor manager who truly believes that his work will result in his freedom. When he learns otherwise, the transformation his character undergoes is one of the greatest character arcs in all of STAR WARS. It’s the kind of performance that should be garnishing an Emmy nomination, and Serkis completely owns and dominates every moment he is onscreen. Even his final line of dialogue is full of sadness and longing. Serkis is masterful in the three episodes we get of him, and while I hope to see him again in Season 2, you can’t ask for a better arc than the one he got in this one.
If anyone suffers, it’s Diego Luna, who is fine and does good work, he’s just overpowered by others. I have no complaints about Luna. He’s good. But the way the other characters are used to put the mortar between the bricks that help build this story are more compelling. But Cassian Andor is a great character, and seeing his arc progress pays off in the final episode, when the Rebellion becomes something more than the sum of the people that become a part of it. I am very curious to see how ANDOR Season 2 lines up with ROGUE ONE, and I’m pleased that the showrunners have an end in sight, and aren’t interested in maintaining a story jjust to keep up with the content needs of their corporate overlords.
STAR WARS, in context, was George Lucas’s artistic response to the Vietnam War, and even though he probably wouldn’t talk about it much, you can’t really have STAR WARS without it. Similarly, ANDOR informs and is informed by our current politics, especially this idea that the fight against fascism is a constant struggle and in that struggle there will be those who cannot handle the losses. There will also be those who fall into it as easily as they do a warm bath, and discover that being good at their job is more important than their moral stance. The machinery of fascism is very prevalent in ANDOR, and it’s not difficult to juxtapose what we see into our modern day life. The enemy of good in ANDOR isn’t just evil, it’s also indifference.
I know many of us STAR WARS fans love the mythology. But ANDOR eschews that mythology and because of that it succeeds on a level we haven’t seen since the original trilogy. The first two STAR WARS films never felt like they were selling toys, although that was definitely a byproduct. They were selling ideas, themes, a morality. The same can be said of ANDOR. It’s subversive in all the best ways; it’s hard to believe that this is a product of Disney because this does not feel corporate made. It feels…rebellious. It’s slow at times, and there are entire episodes that only lay groundwork, but the showrunners are patient and confident in their story, as well as their audience. ANDOR excited me the same way the original films excited me, but this was different, mature, adult. There are a great many in the fandom that confuse dark for adult, and violence for maturity. ANDOR is complicated, and messy, and not afraid to let audiences make up their own minds. That is adult, not seeing lightsabers cut into children and innocent people. And while I will always love certain aspects of STAR WARS, what I love the most is when it surprises me, because it doesn’t happen often. ANDOR surprised me.
I realize I haven’t written in my Substack for a while. Life’s caught up with me and my free time is somewhat limited now. But I will try, in the coming weeks, to give you all something. As always, thanks for reading.