In the Last Jedi, were shown a critical scene from three different perspectives.
Luke's lie about what happened, Kylo's version of the events, and then what we assume is the truth.
These characters can't agree on the basic facts of what happened.
There's a similar problem between the people who liked this movie and the ones who hated it, who often feel like they have seen
completely different films. And it's weird that art is like this. Today I want to look at why.
I got a lot of comments on my last video where I argued that the film had a basic level of dramatic
competency and many of the comments said: that's all well and good but
ticking boxes does not a good story make. The real problem with The Last Jedi is in the
execution. And in case it wasn't clear in that video: yes, I agree that simply answering the 7 questions
I brought up in that video doesn't automatically mean you have a great story. Those questions are a starting point.
It's more like if you don't answer any of them your story will lack energy. If you do answer them, great!
There's a thousand more steps to go before you're done.
My channel wouldn't exist if it was otherwise. But as to the notion that this film has a bad execution
That is the question of this video because how do we determine what constitutes well executed?
How do viewers form an opinion of a film when they like some parts of it
but hate others? How do they choose what to value and prioritize and when do they make those choices?
These are our big questions that I will not fully answer by the end of the video
but if we're even to begin to investigate them, we have to talk about something called Reader-Response Theory.
Which means I'll have to stop using my theory textbook as a mic stand and actually do some reading.
So what is Reader-Response Theory? Well, it's a type of a literary theory. Literary
theories are a bunch of different ways of analyzing literature or in this case
we can extend it to film or art in general. Think of them as lenses
you can look through that will reveal different meanings in the text. Now these may seem pretty dry and...
they are but it's also what gets you beyond merely saying that a story is good or bad.
So, this handy little diagram is a nice summation of how these theories operate and interrelate. Some analyze the text
relationship to the context of its creation and what it says about the world, while others analyze the work by what it says about the
artist. But today we're looking at how audiences interact with a piece of fiction and to do that
we'll need the help of Stanley fish...sorry, no, Stanley Fish.
He's a literary critic at the forefront of the Reader-Response Theory movement in large part because of his
1976 paper
Interpreting the Variorum where he argues that we can't be sure about what a text is saying because
everything we think it's saying is a result of our own interpretations.
And since we make decisions while interpreting a text filling in its ambiguities,
we are writing the text while we read it. As a result, meaning is different for every person or
is it?
The biggest critique against Reader-Response Theory is that if we're saying that every single person's reading of a text is valid, then it's impossible
to have any sort of conversation about art. Because you can say that The Iliad is really about man's anxiety over
extraterrestrial invasion or whatever you like because according to Reader-Response Theory, whatever you get out of the text is the text. But
Mr. Fish has an answer which he explains in an expansion to his original article. People usually don't have entirely unique
readings of a text.
We're more likely to fall into camps with other people who have come to the same conclusions. Fish calls these camps
interpretive communities
He says that an interpretive community is made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading in the conventional sense
but for writing a text for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions.
So, basically an interpretive community is
predisposed to come to the same conclusions about a text because they've used the same methods to analyze it. Since its introduction in the
1960s and 70s, Reader-Response Theory has been used not just for academic
readings, but to study the ways general audiences and niche and fan
cultures consume media. For example, in her book, Reading the Romance, Janice Radway studied the reading practices of
42 lower-middle-class women who primarily read romance novels.
She observed that these readers read rapidly, often skipping to the end, paying no attention to literary style, identify strongly with
characters, especially heroines, and care most about story and plotline.
They share strong dislikes, which is to say that they have prescriptive criteria.
No
violent heroes, weak heroines, pornography, unhappy or ambiguous
endings. Essentially, anything that got in the way of the core fantasy of being
vicariously swept up in an epic romance was just plain bad writing for these readers. For readers outside of that group
those books hold almost no meaning at all.
But for readers inside of that group, a book with the most beautiful prose
imaginable could still be bad if it failed to serve their need for escapist fantasy. Ahem, now,
I've read hundreds of your comments from my last video and watched hours of fan-made reviews of The Last Jedi and it's amazing how
consistent the complaints are. The Star Wars fandom is a very strong interpretive community with extremely specific
prescriptive criteria for what makes a good film and more importantly what makes a good Star Wars film. And I think that the most
significant criteria that The Last Jedi failed to meet according to this community, its
unforgivable sin, Is that it quote
"Disrespected the franchise" and I think what that phrase really means is that this movie screwed up the core fantasy of Star Wars.
So, when Luke Skywalker says, "I think what? I'm gonna walk out with a laser sword and face down the whole first order? A
sizeable portion of the audience is like yes, that is exactly what I want you to do!
It is literally the only reason I'm here!
Star Wars is supposed to be about feeling like you're living the life of an epic hero on a whimsical
adventure through space that's supposed to be fun and exciting. It can get pretty dark at times, but the heroes are always
heroes. The Last Jedi, on the other hand, was about guilt, trauma,
disappointment, failure,
child slavery,
disappointment, murder,
disappointment and
Pokemon? Like, I understand why fans said what the hell is all this depressing stuff doing in my whiz-bang Flash Gordon
fanfic?
I can sympathize with that. At some point in the film, whether it's the
introduction of Luke as a curmudgeon who would casually throw away a lightsaber or later when Rey learns her parents are no one, there is
a breaking point where fans turn against the movie because it has actively, even deliberately,
violated their list of prescriptive criteria. And that's okay.
I'm not making this video to tell you how to feel about this movie. Every method of interpretation
conceals as much as it reveals, mine included.
I'm making this video to
Hopefully help you
understand why you feel the way you do about this movie and about movies in general and the extent to which other people and their
methods of interpretation have influenced what you feel is a gut reaction.
It's fine to dislike a film because it did not meet your pre-existing standards
but it may also be useful to you to recognize that that's the case, to be aware of the
context in which you're viewing something because it's never the only
context. That's what makes writing so
difficult, because as much as we like to develop principles that will help make a story good, those goal posts are always
changing, based on the audience and are never universal to begin with. So, to return to the critique of: it was badly executed
the questions I'd ask are: which parts? These ones? Okay,
well, why does that matter to you more than everything else?
The answers will tell you more about yourself than they will about the movie. But to end things here,
I want to offer my own reading of the film, specifically on the one part of it that I think is most
responsible for creating the division among fans: the death of Luke Skywalker.
Because if Luke had gone down in a blaze of glory, I think many people would have overlooked the film's other shortcomings.
But he didn't and I'm happy that he didn't. Here's why...
How do we find the courage to fight when everything good we accomplish is undone?
That's the issue at the core of Luke's
character in this film. Just as the galaxy has been taken again by the forces of evil
so too has he by the
temptation to do evil. These things are cyclical in the Star Wars universe
and if the game is rigged, Luke wants out. And yet he returns and in doing so
overcomes the only force in the galaxy he hasn't already conquered,
himself, his fears guilts and anxieties.
I can think of no better visual
representation of overcoming depression
than seeing Luke walk out of the darkness through a field of fire to face his past mistakes in the bright light of day.
There is one shot in the original Star Wars film that cemented a generation's connection to Luke Skywalker...
you know the one. This one. Consider the cinematic language on display here.
We're looking across the frame from left to right which in film evokes the idea of looking towards the future
And what does he see? Death.
We're in a desolate desert where nothing can grow especially Luke who just found out
he's stuck here for another year. And what's more, he's watching the sun set.
What little light and hope he has for a bright future is swiftly sliding away
It's a brilliant and moving little moment and like so much of the Star Wars myth The Last Jedi
inverts it to create a moment of equal resonance.
He's on a mountaintop now, a landscape symbolic of enlightenment in contrast to his earlier innocence.
He's looking from right to left, looking back at the meaning of his life.
And what does he see now? Rebirth. For a moment in what has to be some sort of hallucination,
he sees the twin suns of Tatooine explicitly calling back to this moment
but they're rising now, not setting. And in that moment,
he has peace and purpose because in a single action
he has facilitated the rebirth of the rebellion. And not him
exactly
but the image of him. The fact that he is a living legend, the literal embodiment of the story of Star Wars
itself that stops evil in its tracks. The story of him, of the original trilogy
reignites the rebellion, not anything he destroyed. The film denies us the catharsis of violence in this moment
even if that would have appeased us.
Rose's line about saving what you love instead of destroying what you hate, as misplaced as it may feel in the moment, may as well
be a eulogy for Luke. In overcoming himself,
Luke gives the rebellion and us what he was always promised to provide: a new hope.
But one of the complaints about The Last Jedi I do
share is that Rey did learn how to use the force a little too quickly. Learning new skills takes time
but if you want to accelerate that process then I recommend signing up for Skillshare.
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Try the course by Emily Gould for some more tips. A premier membership will give you unlimited access to all of their classes
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sharing them and commenting on them. If you want to help ensure that I can keep making new videos go to patreon.com/justwrite and pitch in as little as $1 a video. Keep writing everyone!