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Rogue One: A Meditation —Book View Cafe Blog “This is not the story we’re looking for. Rogue One left me disquieted for a reason that has nothing to do with the quality of the movie: It perpetuates myths about how to fight evil.”
Rogue One: A Meditation | Book View Cafe Blog
This is not the story we're looking for. Rogue One left me disquieted for a reason that has nothing to do with the quality of the movie: It perpetuates myths about how to fight evil.
bookviewcafe.com
Rogue One: A Meditation —Book View Cafe Blog
“This is not the story we’re looking for. Rogue One left me disquieted for a reason that has nothing to do with the quality of the movie: It perpetuates myths about how to fight evil.”




They have some really good points about the life/art imitation question, and I've also thought the same thing, that we need more stories that glorify the REAL ways that problems get solved in the real world: through cooperation and collaboration and compromise and all those other nasty "c" words.
That said, I think that Rogue One and the Star Wars movies aren't working within that framework and in some ways CAN'T work within that framework. The Empire is not going to compromise. They are not going to collaborate. They are set up as an all-powerful totalitarian regime ruled by an autocrat, with murder and violence and oppression all the way down. How do you collaborate with that? How do you compromise when the enemy doesn't respect anything even resembling human/being's rights? They--from the stormtroopers to the generals to the Emperor--will murder you if you try, as they've been shown to do with anyone who stands in their way. So...I get the point, but Star Wars is not going to be the place to find that, I don't think. The closest you get to that issue was the explanation of how things got so bad in Ep1-3, and Padme's observation that "this is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause."
Sure, but ... I absolutely take the point that Star Wars is more likely than most to revert to violence/confrontation between totalitarian good & evil (and 4 of the movies have led to specific later events, so they have less choice about how to resolve things!) but... How do you resist this? How does the empire construct itself? I'll buy that the emperor is a terrible autocrat, but turning storm troopers into people who can execute those orders takes work and ideology. Which TFA sorta nods to without engaging much. And Rogue One similarly nods at the idea of both someone so horrified they defect and a bureaucrat acting as the loyal opposition but again without engaging. Hell, the whole prequel trilogy's nominally an examination of how an autocrat seizes power in a democracy, and yet (again), there's no institution-building, community-building, or any opposition other than things shooting at similarly-sized things.
It's not that you couldn't tell these stories in the Star Wars universe, or even that the universe is necessarily much more inimical to them (yes, it's incredibly simplistically dualistic, but plenty of other things like the uncritical white-maleness have been interrogated later), it's that these are the stories the creators chose to tell.
They're stories lots and lots of creators (the vast majority of those who get big budgets and marketing), choose to tell, and those that the folks handing out $ choose to support.
I do need to see Arrival, though.
True, the Star Wars movies do tell the story the director and writers choose to tell. And they chose it largely for economic purposes. The writers are bound not just by the existing lore of the fictional universe but by the expectations of the fans. It's hard to make such a large change in an existing franchise (especially one you paid $4 billion for). Star Wars has always been about space battles and laser swordfights between psychic warrior monks. That's why it's called Star Wars and not Star Negotiations (cue "aggressive negotiations" joke).
We definitely could use more stories like Arrival with a more nuanced and grounded approach to problem solving and conflict resolution. It's unfortunate that such stories are often hard to sell.
I wonder what the author would think of the film "Arrival", which also came out this year. In that film, the conflict is resolved through communication and cooperation rather than through violence.
If you want nuance and peaceful settlement out of a Star Wars film, you're going to be disappointed. It's an explicitly Manichean universe with a "light" and "dark" side.
I think the message of that movie was not supposed to be taken literally. I took away the idea that "Rebellions are based on hope" and that change happens because people do selfless things under the hope that other people will be able to use the opportunities they created.
The best explanation of this is the ending monologue of Church to Red vs Blue season 13... anyone see that?
The blog > iOS Imzy share seems to have cut my comments, but I really like the ways this focuses on the narratives that we value, and those we ignore.
I have an initial knee-jerk "it's a movie, of course it needs explosions and fighting and whatnot" reaction, which I'm pretty sure is more a comment on my own imagination than on the medium of movies.
What other stories can we tell? Why does that question matter?