How do you portray evil in media? Very often, in movies and shows where there’s
clearly defined bad guys and clearly defined good guys, the bad guys become tropes. The distinction
between the two sides are dramatically opposed, sometimes in a laughable way,
so that the audience can clearly identify with the protagonist of the story. The Star Wars universe,
at least on the surface, shows the battle between darkness and light… There’s nothing
more evil than the “dark side of the force” and the aesthetic of evil of the Empire.
I’ll be honest, I’m not a huge Star Wars fan and what I’ll be talking about might have been present
in other Star Wars products, but, when I watched Andor, I was fascinated by its portrayal of evil.
I didn’t know if I should make a video about it, but after watching a video Thomas Flight made,
I decided I’d go at it as well. Oh and there will be spoilers.
In a nutshell, Andor follows its protagonist, Cassian Andor,
through the beginning of The Galactic Civil War or the Revolution. Importantly,
it shows the loss and sacrifice required during revolutions,
but also shows the consequences of inaction in the face of an increasingly authoritarian regime.
But the main take-away of this series was, at least to me, its portrayal of evil. For so
much of it, this evil isn’t moustache-twirling evil. It’s bureaucratic evil. It’s banal evil.
In it’s portrayal of evil, Andor offers a developed view of evil in
the unambiguous black and white Star Wars universe.
Let’s talk about the banality of evil. In 1960, Adolf Eichmann,
one of the engineers of the holocaust, the nazi in charge of the logistics of the genocide,
was arrested and put on trial for his crimes. The trial was to be heavily covered by the media and a
lot of anticipation was built around the Nazi who was to appear in front of the public. Eichmann’s
face was to be public and televised, people would be able to stare at evil through their television.
Philosopher Hannah Arendt, a Holocaust survivor, attended the trial to report for the New Yorker.
While many expected to see the face of a fanatic monster, they were met with the
face of a most boring bureaucrat. “Terribly and terrifyingly normal” is how Arendt described him.
The reason why this normality was terrifying is because it means that anyone can commit evil,
because evil isn’t an inherent essential trait of someone as we might intuitively think.
There are reasons for evil, there are circumstances through which normal
people can commit evil. When evil can be institutionalized as it was in Nazi Germany,
you need normal people to work these institutions and commit evil.
Without excusing Eichmann, Arendt said that his intentions weren’t malicious. The man was
just doing his job, following orders, trying to climb a professional ladder.
In a way, the man was just a bureaucrat working for the wrong government.
Ordinary people can do ordinary evil through ordinary means,
these ordinary means being a highly regimented and organized bureaucratic
structure with bureaucrats doing their jobs and instructing cops to also do their jobs.
So to go back to Andor, we’re not shown evil characters who are inherently evil, but characters
who are evil through, very often, a bureaucratic and authoritarian process. And what I love about
this series is that we’re shown this authoritarian process through different characters.
Dedra Meero and Blevin, two lieutenants at the ISB, the Imperial Security Bureau,
display competition amongst officers to impress their superior, Major Partagaz. Noticeably,
this increases Meero’s zeal when it comes to tracking down rebellious activities.
Her dedication and commitment to her work and to her duties are celebrated.
She won’t shy away from using coercive powers inside and outside the ISB to accomplish her tasks
and this commitment, one might argue, doesn’t stem from a personal history against the rebellion,
or a personal commitment to the Empire and its values, but a personal dedication to her work.
Her job is to secure the Empire and she won’t shy away from accusing some of
her colleagues of being more interested in securing their jobs than the Empire itself.
This, though it might sound like she’s defending the Empire, can be interpreted as her defending
her duties which is in line with the banality of evil. She’s evil because she’s a dedicated
employee who doesn’t think about the implications of the actions necessary to complete her tasks.
However, Syril Karn is the most obvious candidate to represent the banality of evil. He is a banal
man, someone dedicated to his work, defending the values which he signed up to defend: order,
discipline and justice. His zeal would be of great use to him if it didn’t threaten the
stability of the institution he worked for. When he is told that the death of his two colleagues
weren’t going to be looked into, Karn is right in believing that it should be investigated. It is,
after all, his duty to look into it. The way he goes about it is evil,
he does it through an occupying force, but again, these are all people just doing their jobs.
What’s most telling here is the speech Karn gives to his soldiers. He doesn’t believe in
what he’s saying, his footmen aren’t believing in it either. Their dedication isn’t to an
abstract sens of justice, but to their job and their need for approval from authority.
Karn is evil, he works for the Empire, he’s loyal to the Empire, he holds authoritarian values and
shows no hesitation to use authoritarian power to complete his work. But Karn is an ordinary
man. Nothing demonstrates this better than when we see him return to his mother’s apartment. It
humanizes him, shows a facet of him outside of his duty. His mother’s own authoritarian,
controlling nature can also explain Karn’s need for control and approval from an authority.
The Empire is fuelled by the banality of evil. Every engineer, foot soldier, pilot, ensign are
all doing their job, probably not thinking about the moral implication of their work.
The judge who condemned Cassian to six years in prison was only doing her job. The guards taking
Cassian away were only doing their jobs. The prison guards were also only doing their jobs.
Institutions have this habit of posing themselves as natural, as unbiased and apolitical. Karn’s job
was to “preserve order” and, naturally, the opposite of that would be enabling disorder.
Who would want that? Karn’s job therefore becomes a civic duty,
a necessary component of society, rather than something political.
Andor portrays the banality of evil and shows how it is enabled by institutions
that hide their political purpose in order to justify themselves and justify their actions.
The institutions Eichmann worked for didn’t pose themselves as political, they posed themselves as
a necessary component of society which justified the work he did. The institutions Karn, Meero,
the judge, and the riot police worked for didn’t pose themselves as political,
they posed themselves as a necessary component of society which justified the work they did.
Look out for political institutions that claim to be unbiased, apolitical and necessary.
These are the type of institutions that enable ordinary people to no
think of the political implications of their work and commit ordinary evil.