The Empire Cannot Save The Rebel Alliance

...and why it really doesn't matter, anymore...

[Editor’s note: spoilers, obviously. Also, after writing this I did see the season 2 finale and--while it was a little boring getting there (now star wars has Cylons. Woohoo exciting)--i can't deny the ending was pretty satisfying. doesn't change any of the following, though.]

TheMandalorianSeason 2 is currently airing on Disney Plus. Rosario Dawson just played Ahsoka Tano, the fan favorite character who came up in the Clone Wars cartoon series. I think it was a wonderful casting. Fucking Boba Fett has returned—perhaps the thing fans have been awaiting the most, since before the Prequel Trilogy. But, despite all the attempts at fan-service, The Mandalorian is already turning into another piece of crap.

Horrible dialogue. Every episode. Just. Fucking. Shite. I mean, seriously, what is this? Ahsoka, a Jedi servant of the Peace, refuses to care for a vulnerable innocent child Grogu, instead insisting he was safer planet-hopping with a galactic bounty hunter? Such a brilliant invention of a plot device! What writing! Then we find out Boba Fett survived the digestive tract of the sarlacc, and then apparently feared a local scarecrow sherriff—of a slighter build than Walton Goggins (and just as friendly)—andso badly that he didn’t try to retrieve his gear from him, but instead pursued a genuine Mandalorian across hyperspace to claim the gear from him, after he’d taken it from the Sherriff?

It just doesn’t track, guys, and I could have told you that at fucking age 12. Aren’t you all ashamed of yourselves, for what you’ve done? Didn’t you get into this industry because of an Artistic impulse?

Honestly, it’s disturbing. Since the undeniable critical success of the Mandalorian Season 1, Longtime Lucasfilm veteran Dave Filoni has been rightfully elevated into greater proximity to the nucleus of Star Wars creative control. He’s been a part of it since the Clone Wars, and likely came up with a lot of the same feelings as have I, regarding the franchise. He’s the dude that did the work to become part of it all, though, while I was busy sidelining my artistic aspirations to do some earnestly-needed deep living with Psychedelics, Rock and Roll and a bunch of dreadlocked chicken-heads.

I did actually send in an application for an Internship with ILM, back in 2002. I’d done a couple animations, which were fairly successful first attempts, at college, but I’d not developed my craft enough at that point in any medium to have earned such an honor. And in truth it resonated deeply in me when my animation professor at Evergreen, Ruth Hayes, told us on the first day, “If you’re trying to tell your original story in animation, you need to learn to write.” So the wild living was a good choice, in that regard—it’s helped me develop a broader cultural vocabulary from which to draw in my creative work.

But if you’re interested in Star Wars, on any level, and you don’t know who Dave Filoni is—Here's a video that demonstrates his value to the franchise (its also in one of the BTS Mandalorian featurettes on Disney Plus). Filoni has a deep thematic awareness of the Star Wars storyline, and in fact seems to have evolved into an off-the-books spiritual progeny of Lucas. The Right Hand he should have always had, if instead he had to make do with the mechanical prosthetics of Kathleen Kennedy’s brand of imagination (or lack thereof). This woman, after being involved with Lucas since Raiders of The lost Ark, preferred Han Solo to Luke. So she elevated Solo’s narrative gravity by taking and nailing him to a cheap Neon Cross, and then just pushed Luke Skywalker off a cliff (Arthur, become Merlin), while he was focused on something important in the distant horizon.

I’m sorry but I’ve needed to say this for a while—that was my fucking hero, bitch.

I’m sure I’m not the only one of my generation that can say this, but I grew up with Star Wars as the platform for my understanding of Spirituality (capital S), which ultimately makes it my native Religion. My mother was a refugee from a Catholic Reform School for Girls, and an avid researcher and experimenter into various expressions of Occult Knowledge. She taught me, as a child, that if the Way of the Jedi made sense to me, then I should follow the Way of the Jedi. Believe me when I say I took her at her word.

Without a doubt Star Wars was the most inspiring and liberating thing happening in my world, as a child. It was a pathway to cosmic beauty, wisdom and achievement. I remember it was in reading through the lovely production notebook from Return of the Jedi, looking at the concept art that made up the movie’s design, that I first became seriously interested in becoming an artist. There was a universally appealing quality to it, a humanistic platform of Common Ground on which the story was told. That’s why Comparative Mythologist Joseph Campbell made such a common cause with Lucas, before he departed the Earth. It presented a fictional metaphor of such significant cultural impact that it forever changed the world to follow, and it defined (along with Tupac and Kurdt Cobain, as we matured) the moral landscape for an entire generation—of young men, if not as much young women, in the case of the first trilogy’s Era; there were some girl Star Wars fans but the action figure-oriented properties were always aimed at boys, both in marketing and social culture. And let’s be honest, there’s been an aspect of Tokenism to the casting since Lando sold out Han and Luke to the Empire. I think it’s great that John Boyega has made such a point of being out front about it. So maybe It is a bit of a stretch to call it ‘Universal’.

Anyway, the fact that Dave Filoni is becoming more involved with the Mandalorian, and then that the show seems to be getting shittier in parallel motion to that, leads me to worry that Filoni’s heart is probably needlessly breaking right now—and just in case I’m right I want him to know he should conserve his tears—for the oppressive years of Imperial Domination yet in store for Humanity.

You see, the thing is, Star Wars can’t be saved. It’s been corrupted, by the Empire. Sure, there’s still some good in it, but it’s more machine now, than art—twisted and evil.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone saw where this was all headed, back when George Lucas originally sold Lucasfilm to Disney for 4 Billion dollars. Their South Park episode, ‘Let Go Let Gov’, in which China had rigged the 2012 election in Obama’s favor, as quid pro quo for brokering their nation’s purchase of the Star Wars franchise—specifically because they knew Disney was going to fuck it up!—it read a bit like a sequel to the episode they did about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. You remember, the one where George Lucas and Steve Spielberg anally raped Indiana Jones on screen, having tricked every American into buying tickets and watching it who grew up idolizing or adoring his adventures. They knew where this shit was heading. ‘Member?

Seriously, just indulge me a little bit here. This is far more important than it appears, at first glance.

I’m not talking about the manufactured self-importance of the overabundant Youtube consumer commentary culture currently being made available on the subject of Star Wars. Most of these folks seem to think they’re going to be called up into Disney for their loyal independent syco-fanatic promotions of the Corporate narrative. “It looks like things are about to get really, really good in the Star Wars universe, y’all,” Mike Zeroh tells you, every time. Then you go and watch the fucking new Mandalorian episode and its like they barely even phone it in, except for the mechanical aspects—the wardrobe, practical effects, makeup and CGI—the dialogue continues to hobble on with an intensifying limp, second fiddle to a vague and contrived, half-felt nostalgia for the influences on which Lucas drew in his original construction of the narrative. These are now telltale signs, of the structural failings inherent to Corporate Creative Culture.

There’s a lot of recent talk about Lucas, himself, returning to the Franchise—which could end up sort of entertaining. We’ll see. It’s not my central interest in the property, but it is an interesting side note that Lucas’s relationship to his audience became so fraught with complications over the story’s successive releases. People loved Star Wars so much, it meant so much to them personally—it’s like they forgot that George Lucas gave it to them in the first place.

You could see it happening, over the years, as his relationship to it became less and less enthusiastic. Fans acted like it was a really good thing, when the announcement of Disney’s purchase was made public. Mostly because there was finally going to be more Star Wars to watch, but also because they stupidly assumed that Disney was interested in it for the same reasons they were.

But as soon as Disney’s hands were on it a couple things changed in the Extended Universe Canon, which had been profusely developed by a wide variety of talented writers and artists. This began the fan exodus away from the franchise—in heart and soul, if not in the pocketbook yet.

In George Lucas’s version, post-Jedi, Luke fell in love. He got fucking laid! It’s one of the significant things in the Disney revamp, that they threw Mara Jade out. Disney instead preferred to portray the spiritual seeker as a bitter sexless loser. Why do structures of authority always seek to enforce this idea, that a life invested in Spirituality is a life spent alone? It’s a disgusting lie, the end result of which is to turn us away from the greater existential truths which could guide our global civilization into a more sustainable and peaceable version of itself.

Disney’s Luke Skywalker got to spend his years after saving the universe nursing a bad case of blue balls, attempting to murder one of his students, abandoning all the people he loved, and drinking blue milk straight from the alien’s tit. Irreversible damage has been done, to my most cherished world of escape, but ultimately it’s served to put a crack in the Idolatrous Monolith that is the Entertainment industry. And it’s brought to my mind a sort of final gauntlet of thoughts regarding the properties in the Disney-owned Star Wars Franchise. I’ve been keen on writing out my thoughts and feelings about them, since the Force Awakens. It’s been hard to put a finger on it, though, as there are so many moving parts. And I’m so personally attached to the storyline at this point, both consciously and unconsciously.

I think the only people who are going to really feel what I’m talking about are the people that grew up watching the original Star Wars films, in their own era. That’s not to say that youth is stupid—it’s just the only gain you achieve from aging, Perspective. I remember the absolute revelatory elation I felt when, upon picking me up from my friend Keith Jensen’s house at age 4 or 5, my mom presented me with a fresh packaged R2D2 action figure. Another time, we were both so desperate for our parents to buy one of us an AT-AT Walker toy, we ended up making one out of cardboard. I was born in 1977, the year A New Hope was released. Looking back, it was like a new era of Magic had descended upon the imaginations of human beings, and very specifically the imaginations of my generation.

It related to so many things going on in the world, too. Lucas, of course, wrote the original Star Wars as the world was recoiling into itself from the trauma of the United States’ failed and irreversibly disastrous War in Vietnam. It was an era of confusion, and disassociation. Crime began to increase significantly in our country, following the war. Drugs became dirtier, and violence between people became more brutal. It was an era of loss, after the innocence and idealism of the youth had been stress-tested past the point of structural integrity, by the forces of Domination who controlled our world.

What is Darth Vader, exactly? ‘Vader’, or maybe ‘Invader’? And this Invader works for the Empire, which dominates the galaxy into submission, as if in sublime ritualized reconstruction of reality’s material components—into a salt and pepper Mandala, so to speak, celebrating and memorializing the act of Domination by one force over another. Ask yourself, where does this rule of Dominance originate, in the world of the Living? Again, I put forth that these rites are learned and begin to be observed in society long before any civilization’s invention of fire.

Darth Vader represents the corruptive force that this principle of Domination exerts over its devotees throughout a lifespan (or, perhaps, a span of lives). His story arc speaks to the ultimate futility of sacrificing one’s nature to such synthetic impersonations of Power, of natural Order. In the end (spoiler alert), Vader elects to rise up against the roots of his own evil, all the same—In his final moments he forsakes his relationship of submission to the Emperor, the embodiment of the ‘Vader’s lifelong sublimation of dominant Force.

And so the story of Star Wars, as it was originally delivered by George Lucas—at least so far as I see it—was about the question of Force. And, in this case, I’m not talking about levitating shit with your mind. You see, George Lucas called it ‘The Force’ for a reason. At what point is it appropriate to use your personal power to fight back against an oppressor? It’s a perplexing riddle, to which we only have subjective solutions. In the interest of the present moment, it makes sense to capitulate to mild forms of Domination. In the long term, capitulation to mild forms of Domination sets a precedent for more drastic and vile expressions of the Dominating Impulse, in society. Just in case it had not yet occurred to you about the films, Lucas was actually talking about our world.

A large portion of the Baby Boomers had been traumatized by the acts perpetrated by their parents’ era of governmental foreign military policy. Lucas was one of the legion youth who were impassioned by the uprising of resistance that sprouted out of their generations’ Moral opposition to the hypocrisy of our nation. We were the Land of the Free, flying napalm over another peoples’ land to burn out the Homes of the Brave nationalists who fought against Imperial Military Occupation there—an Occupation that stretched, depending on your historical perspective on Colonial Imperialism, back to either 1945 or to 1887.

Star Wars begins with a young idealist. He’s trapped in a dead-end life, on a nowhere planet, in a galaxy dominated by fucking bastards. But he makes what he can of his reality, and he has a good heart. Thats clear from the start. But why did Lucas name him ‘Luke Skywalker’? Well, consider this: “Look, Sky Walker,” Lucas pleads with us —this was less than a decade after humans first achieved a lunar landing, remember. ‘Sky Walker’ was an emblematic moniker to choose, for this Western protagonist. I’ve been writing at least three epic science fiction/fantasy stories, since my early twenties. They might never see an audience, those older ones, as they’ve become morass-like in their dangling ends and grey areas—but I’m entirely acquainted with this type of wordplay in the invention of fantasy character names. It’s obvious, if you look at Lucas’s work. The names meant a lot to him. It was one of the ways he delivered his narrative.

And what really starts tripping you out, about art and writing (really the creative act, in general), when you commit the space in your life to truly journey into the reflective depths of these crafts and disciplines—whether or not you’re makin’ them Disney bucks for your troubles—what begins to happen is you get a little distance, and some perspective on your works, and in revisiting them with your regard you sometimes notice patterns or themes, or seeds of such things, which you didn’t even realize you were working with at the time. So, just to put to rest any suspicion in the reader that I might be assuming some sort of impossible extrasensory knowledge of Lucas’s actual intentions, allow me to explain once for the sake of mechanical efficiency that I am expressing what I feel Lucas must have intended, or if not that then what I feel the sum effect was on the culture into which his work was delivered.

So what George Lucas was telling us, with the original Star Wars trilogy, was this: “Look, Sky-Walker. Your forbears have brought you to an amazing place in the world. Through technology you have achieved what mankind previously couldn’t have even dreamed was possible. But the mechanisms by which you’ve arrived at this place are going to turn you away from the light, just like they did your father, who has become an Invader, by means of the choice he made to invest his life—ultimately, his faith—in this Empire of Domination.”

This was all being prophesied to us, essentially—in metaphor, yes, and on the Silver Screen—as most (if not all) of the Hippies, who had crashed with their bright and optimistic ideals onto the barnacled, stone fangs of American Imperialism, ended up throwing in with Reagan in the end. And why, ultimately, did these Flower Power Revolutionaries give up the fight? Well, for one, because of the country’s collective shame that the Paternal Figurehead of Jimmy Carter hadn’t proved to be a more adequate arbiter of Global Domination. And, perhaps even moreso, because of the seductive promise of wealth and security the Reagan Era politicians proclaimed was our due entitlement.

And so my parents’ generation regressed from their pathway to enlightenment. Don’t be too hard on them, though —I mean, for fuck’s sake, their kids had to be raised! If you’ve ever met a family who grew up completely off the grid, you’ll understand what I mean when I express compassion for the Boomer generation, and their crucial failure to carry the baton of Progress much at all past their college years. You kind of have to walk a Razor’s Edge, if you’re going to live a psychedelic life, and relying on drugs to do the work of personal evolution tends to end you up deeper and deeper into drugs—which often have the sum effect of leading one away from that for which one originally approached them, in the first place. The film Forrest Gump also sums it up rather nicely, in the story arc of Jenny.

Now, I don’t mean to make this essay all about wordplay, but another word choice that weighs heavily on me is the title change that Return of the Jedi underwent just before its release. Shortly enough before its theatrical debut that there was a version of the official promotional art that featured it, a word in the title of the movie had been changed.

The word ‘Return’ had originally been ‘Revenge’. Revenge of the Jedi.

I remember hearing that as a kid, that it originally was going to be called ‘Revenge of the Jedi’, and that either Lucas or the studio had made the decision to change it. It might have actually been an MPAA-related thing. At the time, aged 6, I thought it was a chickenshit move. Revenge sounded way cooler; had way more teeth—I mean, these are Star Warriors we’re talking about, right?! But the fact that the word ‘Revenge’ was replaced with a softer, morally innocuous ‘Return’ has achieved greater significance to me, lately.

And I have my neighborhood Barista to thank, for it.

Marc, at the Beacon Hill Victrola in Seattle, made a comment to me one day back in January or February, right before the Pandemic started. I can’t remember the genesis of our conversation but at some point he made a comment—really, sort of cynical and out-of-character for him—that pretty much everything on TV and Movies is just one big Revenge Fantasy. It kind of took me by surprise, again because he’s normally so optimistic and intentionally positive in his choice of expression when communicating with people. But also because I simply hadn’t thought of it in those terms, before.

Revenge Fantasy? We chatted on it a little further but I left the coffee shop somewhat unconvinced. Or anyway, it simply seemed to me to be an avenue of perception that was available to him—a lens through which he’d been able to perceive the world. But I’ve been considering it, ever since, and I’m in pretty firm agreement with him, now. I think we’re sublimating a primitive urge for revenge, in our lives and in our culture. I think it stems from that original primitive state of humanity, more ancient than our ability to create fire—in a time when there was yet no adequate language by which to appeal to another person’s reason, compassion or self-interest. From a people who lived under an immediate law of Domination—by nature, or by the brutality of others—acting, in dubious fear, to secure their entitlements of shelter, food and sex.

It’s expressed in the stories we lift up, and in the ways we tell them to one another. God, every Schwarzenegger movie I ever saw growing up (“If it bleeds, we can kill it”)—really, every action film—is a revenge fantasy. Tarantino has built his entire career on a genuinely disturbing knack for exploiting an audience into a state of complete moral oblivion, based on the hyperbolic devices of evil against which he juxtaposes his protagonists. Seriously, spend a few minutes and think about what Quentin gets you to feel every time you watch his movies. His fetishism of consciencelessness is an addictive opiate. His sole purpose as an artist in our society is to see how much violence you will accept as just, given the right contextual information.

See, the thing is, In a world that sublimates the act of Domination, everybody is a victim. Really, all but the Apex predators are a combination of Dominator and Dominated. It’s why passive agression has become such a popular social dysfunction—we are a people who feel impotent to change this worsening world we live in, so to varying extents we all walk around trying to figure out a solution to our tragedies, a balm for our pains. And we use the masters’ tools in order to seek out our own feeling of dominance. But if we can’t threaten physically, then we can exploit the reluctance in others to express physical anger, and dominate them socially. It’s our means of getting revenge, for our perceived Victimhood.

So why was it not ‘Revenge of the Jedi’? From the moment he returns to the family Moisture Farm, to find his Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru’s smoldering corpses—carnage left by the very forces embodied in the father he didn’t even know he had; the paternal force of Authority, mysteriously moving the machine of the world around him: the Vader— as soon as he finds this devastated landscape, where once resided the home and dreams of his childhood, Luke Skywalker is compelled to Revenge; Capital R. It’s what drives him to abandon his pastoral life of business-as-usual, and run off on his Hero’s Journey with Obi-Wan Kenobi. Princess Leia is also out for revenge—against the Empire, for having blown up her entire home planet of Alderaan. I think George Lucas suddenly realized there was an inherent hypocrisy to the idea of a lightsaber, which sort of undermined the potency of his overall Spiritual message about Morality. I think he ran up against the limits of his metaphor, and realized something didn’t sync up in the final cut.

As I mentioned earlier, there’s a degree of potency in most significant artwork of which the artist will remain unaware in the moment of its creation. I’m not going to waste time speculating as to the locus from whence these deeper layers emanate, but I think if there is a God it is one of the most audible ways in which It speaks to us.

And I’m sort of realizing, as I’m processing all these thoughts about this cherished story from my childhood, that it doesn’t really matter that this ritual dismemberment, that was the Disney Skywalker Trilogy, ended up about as meaningful as an Awesome-O 3000 production. I’m realizing that the story of Star Wars has been sacrificed on the altar of Corporate Imperialism—it’s become a cultural Martyr, of which example had to be made.

And that’s how it felt, watching Luke Skywalker die (A man in such athletic shape he’d only minutes earlier speared a marlin from 30 feet up)—he died, essentially, from meditating too hard.

Seriously, what the fuck?? It’s just like the image of Jesus nailed to a Cross—the fundamental symbolic message it delivers to the audience is “This could happen to you!”. Honestly, there’s a superficiality—an almost intrinsically materialistic preoccupation—evident in the expression of the Force as a Spiritual concept, which makes itself more and more present in the progression of the Disney Skywalker trilogy. And I think that’s the point.

‘Member Reagan’s Star Wars? ‘Member how fucked up it seemed, that the Empire was appropriating the name of this extremely anti-Imperial property, to create its own space-born weapon system—Its own Death Star, ultimately? Now I’m not saying that there’s an evil human being, sitting in a plush leather chair at Disney, making decisions on how to dismantle the culture of Resistance that makes itself perennially manifest in our Popular Entertainment Culture. I don’t believe that the Devil is an individual. It’s in the unfortunate byproducts of our bad decisions. It’s the things that happen in the wake we leave behind us, as we move through the world. And there’s an influence in the Entertainment Industry that’s made itself known, again and again. A force within this Corporate Empire which definitely does not want us to band together on Common Ground, and rise up against the Dominators who oppress the many diverse Peoples of our world.

But the fact that Disney would risk its own Financial well-being, in its effort (be it conscious or subliminal) to corrupt the inspiring message of Star Wars—the idea of the Force, and the principles of Community which extend out from that idea—that should give us hope. Of course it’s not what Disney Corporate set out to do, to ruin Star Wars. The fault lies in the arrogance of industrialists, who mistake Production for Creation. They’re impersonating art, now. Thats why they’re spending all their money creating fleshy simulacra of the hits from their Golden Era. It’s all part of this unfeeling Force in our culture, that likes us right where we are. It has been present in our lives since the first Humans. We have evolved to such a great extent, though, that it seems almost certain to me—we’re only playing this game because it was taught to us by the people who brought us here.

So I now look at the Disney Star Wars travesty as a bright revelation. A weak spot in the armor of Empire. And, to conclude, that reminds me of another story—one which you might recall enjoyed a similarly phenomenal sort of universal regard and wonder, in the 20th Century. J.R.R. Tolkien’s the Hobbit.

In the Hobbit we have Smaug (sic), the gold-hoarding Serpentine Beast who has displaced the Industrious Dwarves of the Lonely Mountain from their home. He lay for years upon years, delighting as he rolled around in all the riches that were the product of these small peoples’ long and arduous devotion, to an earnest life of work and civility. When the heroes finally return to the Lonely Mountain, and find the secret door that allows them to enter and confront Smaug, they awaken the Dragon and unleash his terrible destruction on the innocent people of Laketown.

It is ‘Bard’ who slays Smaug. He is just a normal man, and he has but one Arrow; One chance, to fell this massive beast—the living embodiment of Greed and Destruction, itself. And lo, but he spies a missing scale in the Dragon’s breast, and he sends his arrow forth, and the Terror that was Smaug falls into ruin and ceases to exist. That’s all he needed, The Bard, was one shot. One weakness that he could exploit.

I’ve always thought that was a weird name choice, Bard. I’d played Dungeons and Dragons as a kid, so I always thought of a ‘bard’ as a troubador or minstrel. I remember wondering about it, when I read the book at age 11 or 12. But it occured to me recently that J.R.R. Tolkien was British, and in the English Language there is but one figure to whom we refer as ‘The Bard’, and he’s regarded by many as the greatest writer of all time—William Shakespeare, whose works were coded messages to the masses; intentionally crafted devices by which he could covertly disseminate his ideas regarding power and authority, evil and corruption.

We’ve been passing this baton across generations, stacking metaphorical revelations upon one another in unconscious code, sending messages to each other through the centuries. But Smaug is in the air now, all around us. We know its terrible shape, intimately. It’s the Corporate Leviathan, that’s threatening to destroy the world. And Disney’s unconscious desperation to dismantle the Spiritual message of George Lucas’s Star Wars was little more than a careless miscalculation, born of a deep-rooted hubris and ultimately revealing the weakness of this monstrous amalgam—this psychic embodiment of our refusal to evolve as a Civilization; the Force of Capitalistic Domination that exploits the working people of our World.

It fears our power to create, and to imagine. It fears our power to communicate with one another, through art. That is the point through which we may send our arrow home. Disney’s bleeding money, now; not even a Hulk Vs. Wolverine movie is gonna save it.

And if it bleeds, we can kill it.