This post contains all of the spoilers.
Rian Johnson has always seemed like an outlier in the roster of talent assembled by Lucasfilm for the refreshed Star Wars series that kicked off in 2015. JJ Abrams was already an established king-making, franchise-launching, blockbuster-building creative force before he got the call to make The Force Awakens. Colin Trevorrow (until recently scheduled to make Episode IX before he was replaced by JJ) was a disciple of men like Steven Spielberg and Brad Bird, with a billion-dollar juggernaut under his belt (and whether you like Jurassic World or not, that shit made alllllll of the money). Gareth Edwards, Josh Trank, Lord & Miller, all of these guys (obligatory and necessary reminder that these are all straight white dudes and the creative make-up of the new Star Wars is distressingly monochromatic) all came to Star Wars with histories as money-makers. And all of them have run into massive creative difficulties with Kathleen Kennedy and the other higher-ups at Lucasfilm. In some cases that meant a film being heavily re-shot and re-tooled, while Trevorrow and Trank were bounced from their respective gigs before rolling a single frame of film.
Rian Johnson never fit that bill, and he never seemed (seemed, being operative word) to run into any of those same creative problems (Disney and Lucasfilm, in fact, seem so endeared to Johnson that they’ve handed him his own, Skywalker-free trilogy to build on his own). Johnson’s probably the closest Lucasfilm has gotten to an honest-to-God auteur, thus far anyways, writing and directing all his own feature films and bringing a very specific aesthetic and voice from film-to-film. His closest brush to the mainstream was 2012’s Looper, a relatively low-budget high concept sci-fi thriller that drew critical raves but staunchly divided audiences with its abstract narrative logic, rotating sci-fi tropes/genres, and the shocking moral lapses of previously-sympathetic characters.
Gee, this is starting to sound familiar.
When Rian Johnson was announced for Star Wars, I remember being both excited to see a filmmaker so talented get an opportunity so auspicious, but also worrying that someone so talented, with such a distinctive voice, would be subsumed by the machinery of the studio system and the Star Wars mega-narrative. How would it be possible for a director, any director, to express any of their own personality and interests onto something that has reached such monolithic stature in popular culture?
Well, I’m still not sure how he managed to convince Disney to let him do it, but the fucking guy pulled it off.
Let’s run down some of the ways that The Last Jedi fits into the larger filmography of Mr. Johnson.
Bad Mentors
The characters in Rian Johnson movies are always seeking out or hoping for older/wiser/more well-known figures who can teach and guide them, only to run into the reality that these figures, once discovered, are not mythical beings of wisdom and light but flawed and in some cases fundamentally broken humans.
Johnson’s debut picture, Brick, is relatively devoid of parental figures, with the only true ‘adult’ presence in the film being The Pin (Lukas Haas), a baby-faced twentysomething who dresses like he’s attending a cosplay party at Anne Rice’s house and posits himself as a fearsome crime lord. Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) goes looking for a boogeyman and winds up with a creep who lives in their mother’s basement. The Pin clearly takes a shine to young Brendan as the film progresses, but the pubescent sleuth’s journey to avenging the death of his former girlfriend involves burning down everything The Pin has ever built.
A similar boogeyman haunts The Brothers Bloom, as we learn that the titular pair of conmen (played by Adrian Brody and Mark Ruffalo) were trained in their grafter craft by a fabled crook known as “The Diamond Dog.” When the Diamond Dog (Maximilian Schell) does finally make an appearance, he’s an eyepatch-wearing old man, revealed to have been physically (and, implied, sexually) abusive to the young Bloom. The closest thing the orphaned pair have to a father, the Dog ultimately betrays the pair and sets the tragedy of the film’s third act in motion.
But nowhere is this theme most pervasive than in Looper, a film entirely about lost boys desperate for someone, anyone, to love them. Both Joe (Gordon-Levitt again) and Kid Blue (Noah Segan) vie for attention and affection from Jeff Daniels’ Abe. By the end of the film, Abe will have condemned both Joe and Blue to death. That longing for familial comfort is felt elsewhere throughout the film, as Looper is populated with multiple timelines’ worth of the broken children of bad fathers searching for mothers to put things right.
You see this pervasively throughout The Last Jedi, with Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis). Both men have a mythic stature for both the characters in the film (who have heard the legends of Luke Skywalker, Jedi knight and redeemer of Darth Vader, and Snoke, an almost godly wielder of the Dark Side of the Force) and to us, the viewer (because we’ve watched Star Wars and spent the better part of two years fan-theory-ing it up over what secret history could have resulted in a Force-wielder so powerful as Snoke).
But Johnson deftly subverts our expectations with regard to both characters. Luke, powerful, brave, empathetic Luke, is discovered to be living in exile as self-imposed penance for his failures with Ben Solo/Kylo Ren. Luke fucked up, we learn, and has opted to pay for it by cutting himself off from the Force and whiling away his last years on an island in the ass-end of nowhere. He’s surly and bitter in most of his interactions with Rey (Daisy Ridley), and when he learns of her massive potential power, his reaction is to panic and bolt.
Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) mocks Rey’s attempts to turn men like Luke (and Han Solo in the previous film) into surrogate parents for the assholes who ditched her, but The Last Jedi exposes our villain as being every bit as needy. Kylo Ren’s first scene finds him being verbally eviscerated by Snoke (he even makes fun of Kylo’s mask!). Ren killed his biological father, and now finds that the replacement he found is close to rejecting him, which spurs the action that kicks off the main plot.
Johnson subverts Snoke’s role not by giving an established personality a new part to play, as with Luke, but by negating his role entirely. The new, terrifying monster waiting at the end of the galaxy gets halved by his own apprentice. The big bad was never as big or bad as you might have thought.
Where The Last Jedi goes beyond Johnson’s previous films is the consideration of a disappointing mentor-student relationship from the mentor’s point of view and offering a measure of redemption. Yoda shows up (in puppet form!) to remind Luke and the audience what a good teacher looks like, and Luke rallies to pull off one of the most awe-inspiring Force powers ever yet seen in any Star Wars film.
The people who inspire us may be fuck-ups underneath, but that doesn’t mean they have to stop inspiring us.
Killing Hitler
One of the most age-old questions asked when debating morality and quantum mechanics is, “Would you kill Hitler when he was a baby, if you had the chance?” Really what’s being asked is, “Would you hurt an innocent if you knew they would grow up to be guilty?”
Lots of filmmakers and writers have grappled with dramatizing this question (just as a for instance, discussion of this exact question powers the entire third act of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone), but both Looper and The Last Jedi find Johnson taking this hypothetical and bringing it to gruesome, horrifying life.
Looper is centered around Old Joe (Bruce Willis) attempting to hunt and find the child who will grow up to become The Rainmaker, an all-powerful psychic monster who rules the future with an iron fist and is responsible for the death of Old Joe’s wife. This means that we, the audience, are treated to Bruce Willis, one of the most beloved and well-known movie stars on the planet, murdering a child.
And trying to kill a couple others. It’s…disquieting, to say the least.
Yet it’s possible to make an ethical case that, at least in theory, what Willis as Old Joe is doing checks out. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and all that.
But where Johnson lands on the question is clearly expressed in the section of the film featuring Gordon-Levitt as the younger Joe. This Joe has unwittingly been spending time with the young Rainmaker, who he knows as the sweet and precocious Cid. When Joe discovers who the boy will be and what he is capable of (fucking child fucking evaporates a dude), his immediate instinct is to grab a gun, run the kid down, and end it.
But then he sees Cid, bloody and scared and just a child, and he can’t bring himself to do it. Instead, Joe chooses to give Cid a chance, a choice that he dies to see through.
(This also ties into the above theme, as Johnson loooooooves to reveal that seemingly-mythical beings of unlimited danger and power are actually weak/pathetic/vulnerable/human. The boogeyman is just a man, was once just a scared kid.)
Flashbacks throughout The Last Jedi reveal that Luke Skywalker faced a similar quandary. While training young Ben Solo, Luke sensed the rising darkness inside the boy. We get Rashomon-style flashbacks as to what exactly happened that night that Luke confronted the kid who would be Kylo. Luke says he went to talk and Ben Solo attacked him. Kylo claims that he woke up and discovered Luke poised to attack him and only defended himself.
The truth, we learn, in one of Mark Hamill’s greatest moments of live action acting, is that Luke Skywalker, one of the most beloved icons of cinema for the last 40 years, did consider murdering a child while he slept. He foresaw all the horror and ruin that this boy would visit upon all that Luke loved, and in that instant he considered taking a short cut and just ending it.
He thought better of it; the present Luke describes his murderous instinct as only an impulse that he immediately rejected, but just the thought is enough to kick off the tragedies that make up this new Star Wars saga.
Women Teaching Boys to be Men
Now, I haven’t invested too much energy into why the chinbeards are throwing tantrums over The Last Jedi. Life’s just too damn short to spend any of it listening to what those mouthbreathing fuck-nuggets have to say, but if I had to put it to a guess as to why this particular film is sticking in the craw of those particular throats, I would imagine it’s this element.
Women occupy places of power throughout the work of Rian Johnson, even if they don’t themselves realize it. In Brick, all of the murderous schemes and powerplays undertaken by characters like Brendan, The Pin, or dumb, lethal Tug (Noah Fleiss), are revealed as machinations by a femme fatale who knew where to apply only the slightest pressure to set off the various powder kegs.
A more charitable version of femininity is found in The Brothers Bloom. While the initial plot set-up would seem to be the conmen whisking Rachel Weisz’s reclusive heiress off her feet and teaching her how to live, the actual text of the film reveals Weisz’s Penelope to be the one who holds all the cards. She’s the only person in the film who seems to actually know what she wants, and she pursues it with confidence and bravado. She’s smarter, tougher, and craftier then any of the other characters planned on, and also she can juggle chainsaws like a fucking boss. In maybe the film’s best moment, Penelope lays claim to her dreams (or maybe delusions) as hard-won and honest, regardless of what anyone else thinks.
Looper, as with the other themes and tropes we’ve talked about here, really coalesces this concern into a concrete statement. Mothers are exalted as fathers are denigrated, none moreso than Emily Blunt’s Sara. And whereas the primary female characters in Brick and Bloom are figureheads of feminine evil and feminine good (albeit given greater depth thanks to strong writing and performances), Blunt’s Sara is wholly human. But what all these woman have in common is an understanding of the bigger picture that the men in their respective films lack. The boys chase their own tails and run aground, while the larger games get played without them. To the degree that any of the men succeed — and Johnson has yet to end any of his films with any of his male characters having claimed a conclusive victory — they succeed by rejecting the typical trappings of macho-heroism and coming over to a more feminine understanding (even if said understanding is only, ‘Holy shit, women can be just as fucking evil as men’, in the case of Brick).
And that, I suspect, is a good indicator as to why the fuckwits are having a fit. The Last Jedi is littered with women teaching boys how to be men, from Rey shaking Luke Skywalker loose to Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) almost literally dragging Finn (John Boyega) into heroism and then saving his stupid life when he opts for a suicide run.
But nowhere is this dynamic more expressed than in the Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) subplot. Poe Dameron was introduced to us in The Force Awakens as a high-flying, ass-kicking, super-mega-awesome fighter pilot badass, as uncomplicated a beacon of heroism as any that Star Wars has ever posited. Poe was every kid who ever dreamed of hopping in an X-wing and zipping around the galaxy vanquishing evil, and if the character was .5 dimensional and served no real narrative purpose, well, at least Oscar Isaac is one of the most charming and magnetic performers going these days, and he lent Poe presence through sheer force of will.
But Johnson does one better than that and actually engages in whether or not the whizz-bang spectacle that is Poe’s style would actually be worth the cost. Leia calls Poe out for this in the opening scenes, as Poe’s insistence on a risky bombing mission blows up a target but costs the Resistance fighters dearly. And the theme gets double-triple underlined during Poe’s interactions with Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern), who steps in for Leia when the general is injured and wastes no time cutting Dameron down to size.
While the film initially seems to be positioning Holdo as a meek and cowardly placeholder, who is just too meek and cowardly to understand that drastic action needs to be taken by riotous badasses like Poe Dameron to save the day, the climax reveals that actually, Holdo and her team had a terrific plan to save the Resistance the whole time, they just didn’t tell Poe. In fact, the plan that Poe came up with to compensate for what he saw as Holdo’s inaction ends up fucking everything up, as it results in the First Order discovering the evacuating Resistance fleet and opening fire.
Now, my initial read to this section of the film was that it represented something of a plot hole, or at least a weak bit of writing. If Holdo had this great plan, if the Resistance really wasn’t in as much danger as we thought the whole time, then why wouldn’t she just tell Poe what the plan is? Why the secrecy?
But looking back over those scenes, and with the full weight of the opening sequence where, again, Poe gets many many many people killed on an unnecessary glory run, the obvious answer is revealed: Why the fuck would anyone tell Poe anything? He’s a kid zipping around the galaxy, with no real thought as to what it means to organize, to lead. Women did that, and there wasn’t any time for hand holding.
There are many reasons why The Last Jedi is an almost awe-inspiring achievement in blockbuster filmmaking (not the least of which is that its spectacle is actually spectacular, with my IMAX theater ooh-ing and ahh-ing one sequence as if we were watching fireworks), but that it manages to be the ninth live action installment in one of the biggest franchises in film history, and yet feel so deeply specific and attuned to a singular voice, well, that takes it from just an impressive bit of craft and into the realm of out-and-out miracle.
Rian Johnson didn’t just make a Star Wars film, he made a Rian Johnson Star Wars film, something that could never be recaptured or recreated by anyone, even if they tried.
And for that, the galaxy should be a very grateful place.
