Hey Wisecrack, Michael here, ready to peer into the darkest abyss of all: arguments about
Star Wars.
The Rise of Skywalker burst into theaters and, perhaps unsurprisingly, left public opinion
more split than Darth Maul.
Like The Last Jedi before it, The Rise of Skywalker seems to be a “love it or hate
it” kind of film.
Regardless of which camp you fall into, though, there are probably some choices in the movie
that irk you.
Maybe it was the new narrative reveals, or maybe it was the way the film handled, or
mishandled, the choices of the previous installments.
But what if all of these arguments miss the real point?
What if the way to look at Star Wars is not as a series of good and bad choices designed
to make us eternally rage, but as part of a long storytelling tradition.
That is to say, what if we view Star Wars as... an Epic.
And could dusting off some King Arthur manuscripts help us all finally come to terms with the
Sequel trilogy as a whole?
Let’s find out in this Wisecrack Edition on The Rise of Skywalker.
And, heads up, spoiler alert for pretty much all of Star Wars ahead.
While the Sequels were generally better received than the Prequels, they’ve still attracted
an array of criticisms.
Fans and critics alike have been vocal about a lack of originality, an apparent disrespect
to what came before, an overabundance of fan service and a lack of character development
for friends, both old and new.
This ongoing discourse has manifested in increasingly less-impressive box office earnings for each
installment of the series.
With all that said, it’d be natural to have a somewhat pessimistic view for the future
of the Star Wars franchise.
With a warring fanbase, a burned-out audience, and sketchy corporate overlords, is Star Wars
doomed?
We’re gonna go ahead and say nah.
And not just because we’re reckless optimists.
That’s because the so-called problems that have, and likely will continue to plague,
Star Wars aren’t new at all.
It could even be argued that our biggest complaints about Star Wars aren’t flaws -- in fact,
they’re firmly established aspects of epic storytelling.
By epic, we not only mean the long narrative poems like Beowulf and the Odyssey, but the
other non-poem stories that resemble them and have a knack for being retold over and
over again.
First, let’s get the similarities between The Skywalker Saga and historical epics out
of the way.
Star Wars has captured our collective attention for more than forty years.
And there’s every reason to assume that it will continue to be passed down from generation
to generation, much like the tales of old.
The story and its characters are so thoroughly integrated into pop culture that everyone
knows what Darth Vader sounds like when he breathes, or what a lightsaber is, even if
you’ve never seen a Star Wars movie.
It’s kind of like how… even if you’ve never read Homer or Virgil, you know what
an Achille’s heel or trojan horse is.
But that’s not the only way The Skywalker Saga mirrors ancient epics.
It borrows classic epic storytelling techniques as well.
To understand how, let’s look to scholars Barbara Graziosi and Johannes Haubold, and
their analysis of Homer’s work.
As you may know, Homer was the author long-attributed to ancient Greek stories such as The Odyssey
and the Iliad.
We once thought that Homer was a single person, a one-man story machine churning out culture
defining works.
But now scholars mostly believe that Homer was in fact a pseudonym for a group of storytellers
who built upon, strengthened and further developed each other’s work.
Graziosi and Haubold developed a theory of resonance to describe the way these disparate
storytellers worked together.
They argue that, in order to maintain a consistent world and a single authorial voice, the various
storytellers employed specific narrative features in each new tale.
These techniques included: starting a story mid-scene or repeating specific phrases like
“high-hearted men,” and “swift-footed Achilles,” or using precise formulas to
introduce characters or speeches.
Even the precise way a hero undressed was ritualized and repeated from story to story.
The use of resonance told the audience that this story was part of the Homeric tradition,
and connected to past and future Homeric stories.
At the same time, it implicitly promised the audience a specific experience.
Like the Odyssey, Star Wars is a saga helmed by various authors, namely George Lucas, George
Lucas but worse -“I don’t like sand,” JJ Abrams, and Rian Johnson.
And like the Odyssey, Star Wars uses resonance to remain coherent.
This is instantly apparent the moment a Star Wars film begins, and the bright yellow text
scrolls inexplicably through space while the iconic score plays.
More examples of resonance are peppered throughout each film.
These range from scene transitions, to character archetypes like the tragic hero or the sage
mentor, to visual homages that deliberately evoke earlier films in the series.
First Lucas, and now his successors, deliberately use these resonances to establish Star Wars
as a modern epic playing out right before our eyes.
In fact, Abrams relies heavily on resonance in The Force Awakens, and even more so in
The Rise of Skywalker.
The Force Awakens hewed close to A New Hope.
Both Luke and Rey are orphans from a desert planet, both the Death Star and Starkiller
Base are destructive man-made planets, and both the Empire and the First Order are wanna-be
space fascists.
Similarly, The Rise of Skywalker mirrors Return of the Jedi.
Both feature a young Jedi training with a dying mentor, both begin with the Rebels struggling
after a crushing defeat, and both feature a Palpatine-concocted showdown between good
and evil.
Detractors might dismiss this as fan-service, or at best, an overreliance on nostalgia-driven
narrative.
But the way Abrams mirrors Lucas actually forges crucial thematic and structural links
between the two trilogies.
Abrams actually spoke to this during the promotion for The Force Awakens, stating “...we very
consciously tried to borrow familiar beats so the rest of the movie could hang on something
that we knew was ‘Star Wars.’”
Resonance also explains Abrams’ strategic repetition of everything from central themes
to incidental dialogue.
“I got a bad feeling about this.”
-“I got a bad feeling about this.”
But it doesn’t account for the second complaint lodged by Star Wars fans: Why so many inconsistencies?
Well for that, let’s jump forward in time to medieval England and visit a very different
epic.
Arthurian Legend, or Arthuriana, is what we call the total narrative surrounding King
Arthur and his fabled Knights of the Round Table.
Arthuriana is a particularly helpful epic for us because we can largely track its development
across the centuries.
And interestingly enough, it has a lot in common with the development and evolution
of Star Wars.
The first sustained depiction of the King Arthur legend appeared in the 12th century
when Geoffrey of Monmouth penned “The History of the Kings of Britain”.
For this, Geoff rounded up various fables and presented them as historical fact.
The TL;DR is Arthur gets a throne and kingly title, marries Guinevere, fights a whole bunch
of Saxons and chats it up with a wizard named Merlin.
Notice the glaring lack of magical swords, circular tables, heroic knights and extramarital
trysts.
Not long after, a rogue poet added the Round Table to Arthur’s story.
In this way, the first Arthurian canon was essentially set.
Think of this initial Arthurian canon, called the Matter of Britain, as Lucas-era Star Wars.
Both were chiefly guided by one person who crafted a unified canon, though in Monmouth’s
case he synthesized quite a bit of folksy miscellanea.
Disney even called the Lucas-era “immoveable stories” when they acquired Lucasfilm.
But obviously the Skywalker Saga didn’t end with Lucas, and Arthuriana was just getting
started with Geoff.
Over time, new storytellers added more and more to the Arthurian soup, their tales spreading
organically and influencing one another.
The more popular any new addition to the legend seemed, the more it was incorporated into
subsequent tales.
The best example of this was Chretien de Troyes’ introduction of the Holy Grail and the cuckolding
Lancelot.
In this way, a democratic process of storytelling crafted an updated Arthurian legend.
Different authors had various reasons for their additions to the canon.
Notably, de Troyes geared his work towards the taste of the French court, which fancied
itself quite chivalrous.
Thus, de Troyes’ stories upheld good knightly virtues like courtly love.
Authors like de Troyes and Thomas Malory memorialized the resulting canon in complete, coherent
manuscripts that were published widely.
Again, this mirrors the evolution of the Star Wars canon, and the way it’s expanded.
Though Lucas was historically hands off with the Star Wars Extended Universe that sprang
up after the Original trilogy, he did start to incorporate some of these new elements
into the prequels.
For example, Aayla Secura, Coruscant, and Dooku’s curved lightsaber hilt were all
developed by different authors but Lucas was a fan and, with permission, adopted them.
And just like post-Geoff King Arthur storytellers, die-hard franchise geeks, Abrams and Johnson,
creatively expanded the canon.
Whereas de Troyes imbued Arthuriana with courtly love, Abrams and Johnson made contributions
rooted in their individual philosophies about Star Wars..
Of course, they have VERY different philosophies.
Abrams is all about evoking the warm, fuzzy feeling that we all got when we watched our
first Star Wars film.
Johnson, on the other hand, seems more inclined to explore the complexities of both the characters
and the universe.
He wants to surprise us as much as that time Vader dropped the old paternity bomb on Luke.
It’s ultimately an issue of heart versus head, and each interpretation is as valid
or invalid as the other.
But combine them into one trilogy, and you get a series of conflicting interpretations
and clashing ideologies.
You can even sense a sort of jostling for power from film to film.
In particular, the last two films take previous plots and characters and either ignore, redirect
or straight up bisect them.
Arguably, this worked to the detriment of the trilogy as a whole.
With this in mind, let’s take a look at where Arthuriana and Star Wars start to diverge,
and what makes this whole thing tricky: intellectual property laws.
You know, those laws that let us buy and sell ideas.
These didn’t exist way back when.
Nobody ever received a strongly-worded cease and desist letter for writing a story about
King Arthur and his magical sword.
But today, Disney owns Star Wars, for better or worse.
The franchise is their property, and that makes them the gatekeepers.
That means they get to determine what stories do, or don’t, earn a permanent place in
the lore.
Consequently, they can de-canonize thousands of pages of stories with a simple press release.
At first, they were pretty laissez-faire - allowing Abrams and Johnson, respectively, to make
The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, on their terms.
The subsequent backlash compelled Disney to tighten their grip in Episode 9.
That led to some serious back-pedaling on previously introduced story elements and some
arguably-over-zealous course-correcting.
Now, this would be totally chill, if we were going by medieval standards of storytelling.
But thankfully, knights in smelly armor are no longer a thing, and these days, our society
is completely saturated with media.
As a result, we are a pretty savvy audience with more sophisticated standards when it
comes to worldbuilding and storytelling.
Hell, if we weren’t, then this channel probably wouldn’t even be a thing.
Sure, multiple interpretations could peacefully coexist in Arthuriana - but in Star Wars the
conflicts within the canon and the scenes of rebuttal create a storytelling discord
that is glaringly apparent to the audience.
That discord is compounded by the fact that we’re all consuming the exact same version
of Star Wars.
Instead of, you know, hitting up our favorite local bard for a new, possibly inconsistent,
retelling.
In the age of mass media, we’re not as willing to forgive inconsistencies as the great Homeric
fandom was.
So, while Star Wars suffers from the same repetitions and inconsistencies of your classic
epic, it does so in an extremely media-conscious society, where every decision is held up to
a Reddit-thread microscope.
Viewed in this light, is it really all that surprising that The Rise of Skywalker hasn’t
pleased everyone?
Star Wars is positioned as a modern myth, and uses the same storytelling techniques.
And yet, it’s judged by a completely different, more exacting standard than classic epics,
myths and legends ever were.
What’s more, contemporary storytelling idioms mean that Disney has to maintain a strict,
controlled canon for a franchise that seems destined to defy the concept.
The Rise of Skywalker, and JJ Abrams, worked within the confines of expectation and epic
structure in attempts to conclude a saga over forty years in the making, across nine movies,
while also trying to satisfy a passionate and outspoken fanbase.
Let’s see Chretien de Troyes give that a try.
But what do you guys think?
Do you want Star Wars to stay faithful to Lucas’s original vision, or is it more exciting
when new authors interject new ideas into the mythos?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
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Later.