This is Stuff You Like, it’s Carrie Fisher’s 60th birthday,
happy birthday Carrie Fisher!
And old and new is a major, major theme in The Force Awakens.
Indeed, one could hardly avoid it as a theme, considering how much of the original trilogy
cast returned to be important.
The plot of the Force Awakens goeth thusly:
A lot of people want this droid, whose name is BB8, because he has a map to Luke Skywalker.
Or at least part of one.
Resistance pilot Poe has him, but then he’s captured by the First Order.
Luckily for him, Stormtrooper FN-2187 has broken programming and needs to get away,
and so stages a jailbreak with him.
The droid meets up with scavenger Rey, and after a bunch of...chasing, FN-2187, now Finn,
and Rey meet Han Solo, and go get help from Maz Kanata.
But then Rey gets captured and so Finn and Han break into Starkiller base to get her
back (and also to blow things up).
In the process, Han is killed by his seduced to the Dark Side emo teen son, Rey and Finn
fight said son (and live by a combination of dumb luck, prior
skill, prior injury and Actual Force Use), Scarier than the Death Star Base is blown
up, the Resistance return home, the map is complete, Rey goes to find Luke and dramatically
holds a lightsaber in his direction, roll credits.
It’s a lot like A New Hope.
Which I guess means that Luke Skywalker is now Yoda.
But it’s not JUST a rehash of A New Hope.
Because not only do they do things somewhat differently, there are some distinctly new
themes going on.
And boy, if you’re an Original Trilogy fan some parts of The Force Awakens that will
really strike you in terms of their thematic...pointiness regarding old vs. new.
First, there’s the obvious fact that you are seeing the characters you grew up with
thirty years on.
It’s...it provokes emotions.
There’s a poem about Sherlock Holmes called 221B which begins,
Here dwell together still two men of note Who never lived and so can never die
Fictional characters don’t have to age.
You can watch A New Hope today, tomorrow, next year, and Leia will always hide the Death
Star plans in R2-D2, Luke will always find R2 on Tatooine, Han will always turn up in
the nick of time during the Death Star trench run.
But The Force Awakens disrupts this a little bit with the reality of time.
It forces us to acknowledge that while characters in movies don’t need to age, people do.
My Mum, who also turned 60 this year- Happy belated birthday mum, sorry for outing
your age to the entire internet- used to do this thing when I was growing up
that made me SO MAD.
But now that I am older I also do it.
Sorry mum.
Basically, she would come in when I was watching a movie that was...say, 10 or 15 years old,
starring someone relatively famous, and she would say,
‘Oh!
Don’t they look YOUNG!’
Of course they look young, it was 15 years ago!
But I get it now.
Because every time you see someone looking younger than they are right now, it reminds
you that time is passing, and that we are going with it, and while the character is
frozen in time, we are not.
We have to move on.
This is why it’s so perfect that we start with Rey, who has spent goodness knows how
long trying to stay in place.
She has learned all these skills related to ships and scavenging and self defence, because
she needs them to be able to survive in this very harsh environment, she needs them just
to be able to stay in place.
Maz, who the oldest character in the movie, tells Rey that the belonging she seeks is
not behind her; it is ahead.
Rey has been clinging to the past, staying on Jakku, waiting for her family.
But it’s pointless, and part of her knows that.
Getting her to move on, getting her to realise there’s nothing left for her, is a big moment.
The belonging all of them seek is ahead of them.
Poe (our Leia allegory) probably has plenty of belonging in his life already, but Finn?
Well, Finn’s is ahead of him too.
Maybe even Kylo Ren’s.
Though he had some belonging.
Presumably shunned it, and went to find some other, darker kind.
Kylo Ren represents a lot of things, and you can draw parallels between him and quite a
lot of other modern movie villains; because in the 2010s Angry White Boys seem to be the
thing that we are most afraid of.
And a huge part of his character is his...violent regressive disdain.
Look how old you’ve become, he says.
Something far worse has happened to you, comes the voice of the film via Lor San Tekka.
You’re not just stuck in the past, you’re actively going the wrong way.
The rest of us want peace and justice and all that good stuff: you’re just being a
whiny emo fanboy with delusions of badassery and/or grandeur.
But The Force Awakens has no truck with this approach.
The belonging we seek is not behind us; it is ahead.
The world has moved on and so must we, but that doesn’t mean giving up on belonging
to this beautiful shiny Star Wars collective; it just means there are going to be more people
to join in.
And the various characters’ approaches to belonging tell us something about the kind
of people that they are.
Kylo Ren clings to Vader as a bad guy and forgets his redemption.
His status quo worship runs so deep that he wants to go back to a time before he was even
born.
Rey clings to the idea that her family are coming back...but must eventually accept that
they aren’t, and that time has moved on and so must she.
Finn clings to Rey.
Out of all the characters his moments of change are the sharpest: one minute he’s a Stormtrooper,
the next he’s breaking out; one moment he’s running and hiding from the First Order and
thinking of basically nothing else; the next he’s breaking into Starkiller Base to rescue
his second-ever friend.
Han starts off as a Grumpy Old Man who has gone back to what he thinks he’s good at
(jury’s out on that one, pal) But...
Han gets the best job in the film, in my opinion.
He gets to be the veteran who imparts to the kids, the truth.
He gets to be the one to tell Rey, all hope and wide-eyed wonder, that yeah, magic is
real.
And even if it’s also true that magic is hard and dangerous, that’s still a pretty
good feeling.
And Leia?
Well.
Leia clings to the things to which she has always clung.
Peace and justice and progress and a better galaxy.
And the thing about clinging to progress is that it kind of carries you along with it.
So she doesn’t need to be the crotchety old lady who isn’t down with the kids of
today; General Organa has been inducting people into this world forever.
She never stopped.
Han is the one who retreated into what he used to do, the one who packed up and shipped
out with Chewie and the Falcon, the one who has tried to forget.
He tells Leia that he knows he reminds her of Ben, but Leia isn’t the one who wants
to forget: he is.
And Finn and Rey’s aforementioned wide-eyed wonder?
That’s a big part of what brings him back to his better self.
Appropriate, no?
It’s easy to get jaded about the stuff that was once important to us, and maybe that’s
what Han represents.
It’s easy to forget that wonder that we first felt when we first entered a new world
and found that yes, here magic is real and things are dangerous, but they’re also beyond
your wildest dreams.
But Leia never forgot.
‘To me she is royalty.’
It’s ok to remember the past, says The Force Awakens.
Heck, it’s even ok to reference the past, we do it all the time!
But it’s not ok to live there.
Look how old we’ve become.
Kylo Ren may disdain us for it.
But I don’t think it’s a bad thing.
After all, we can’t go back.
That feeling we got when Star Wars was brand new to us, we’ve done that, it’s passed.
But we can still be there when new people take their first step into a larger world.
So happy birthday, Carrie Fisher.
And thank you.
Princess Leia was the character who drew me into the world of Star Wars the first time
around.
She was who I wanted to be when I got older, even if the hair buns were ridiculously unflattering.
And you know what?
I think I still want to be General Organa when I grow up.
So clearly you’re doing something right.
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