Are We Still Doing This?

Well then, onto Attack of the Clones. Again, not a comprehensive takedown or review or anything like that - I am not a critic, and everyone and their dog has mocked this film to bits (and then some people have tried to reconstruct its reputation a little - amazingly). No, I apparently just want to force myself to watch all the Star Wars, good and bad, as punishment for my sins.

As the crawl announces, we’ve gone from turmoil in the Galactic Republic to “unrest in the Senate.” At this rate, the saga will probably end on a mild disagreement about phrasing on a non-binding subcommittee resolution. Although if they got Sorkin to write it, I would eat that up.

A question that first appeared in Episode I now becomes even more salient - what precisely does it mean for the Jedi to be “the guardians of peace and order throughout the galaxy”? How precisely do they achieve this? Personally, I find it deeply suspicious that our heroes need a massive army in order to force systems to remain in the republic. I get that the confederacy are called “the confederacy” and are the bad rebels, but if anything the Republic is just as bad, deploying a slave army to force systems to remain in a polity that can’t even be bothered to protect rights within its theoretical boundaries.

At any rate, the Jedi’s close relationship to the chancery and the military leadership raises one of two troublesome possibilities. Either the Jedi are merely enforcers for an oligarchic Senate, or the Senate is an empty pawn of the Jedi, and the Republic is an extremely badly-run theocracy – or perhaps just the demesne of a particularly well-off monastery. It’s additionally suspicious that Anakin can play off chopping someone’s arm off as “Jedi business, go back to your drinks,” and that the Jedi all immediately assume generalships in an army - did they study tactics and grand strategy? What kind of religion is this?

Speaking of the Senate, my head-canon is that Boss Nass appointed Jar-Jar simply to get him off the planet. And oh yeah, this movie reveals that Naboo senators are appointed. In other words, the person who has the most to say in defense of freedom and democracy in this movie was herself appointed by an (elected) monarch - but yet a monarch who sometimes is simply a child and theoretically is a figurehead. I think their democracy has about as much legitimacy as the ham sandwich that Ian McDiarmid is devouring in every scene.

As if to confirm this, there’s a scene where Obi-wan begins lecturing Anakin about the massive influence of money on Senatorial politics, and Anakin shuts him down as if this were a boring subject. But I wish we got more space politics, instead of the ‘romance’ this film tries to serve up. Though the problem there isn’t conceptual, it’s that no one involved acts like a human being. Anakin is incredibly creepy, and yet apparently this works.

I guess Padme does charge at red flags like an enraged bull.

Honestly, maybe she feels she’s obligated to after creeping on child Anakin in the last movie - maybe following through with this is another crooked turn of her strange mind. But it’s seriously weird how she goes for the person who stares at her creepily and won’t stop when asked to, who bosses her around, who openly advocates fascism, and who slaughters children. Their relationship is the biggest leap of science fiction in the whole saga. At least Padme has the excuse of only finally succumbing when she thinks she’s going to die anyway - another great fictional example of people making snap decisions in the face of death, only to live to regret them.

I’d also like to know how Padme changes her hairstyle up in the absence of any maids or salons.

Does Threepio do it? I’m impressed.

At least while this is going on, we have a decent Detective Obi-wan movie, guest starring Temuera Morrison, which I would greatly prefer to watch instead of the rest of this movie. Especially since they shot the Kamino scenes on location in my hometown of Seattle.

I’ll say this for the movie - the factory scene very effectively contributed to my fear complex about assembly lines as a child. Between this and the trash compactor, Star Wars played an outsize role in my childhood fear of heavy industry. But speaking of the factory scene, are we not going to ever talk about how R2 straight up tries to murder C-3P0 by knocking him into the machinery? Couldn’t he have asked him to move?

American Roads

I love American roads, but I don’t always love the other people on them.

I love that American roads go everywhere, but I don’t love that they don’t necessarily have warning labels to tell people like me not to drive just anywhere on them. Google suggested I could make it from Portland to Nampa in eight hours even if I left I-84 and struck out through the badlands of Eastern Oregon. I thought that sounded fun. Well, it took more like thirteen hours, because it turns out there’s no way forward from John Day other than taking several high mountain passes in a row, in the dark, with snow coming down. I had chains - but it turned out the ones I had didn’t work. Always practice with your chains before you actually need them. I later replaced them with better chains. I still haven’t practiced with those either.

At any rate, I got over, at about three miles an hour, coming down icy grades at a crawl.

I also don’t like it when I’m driving more slowly than usual because it’s a six percent downhill grade and I don’t know if there will be a spot of ice or not, so I’d just as soon not go sixty-five, thank you, but the three-trailer truck (!!!) behind me is in a hurry, and I feel the pressure of being judged by everyone else on the road. So it’s anxiety either way, the constant tug between the anxiety of going too fast to be safe if I hit ice, and the anxiety of being judged by the angry people behind me.

Driving through the Wasatch in Utah, I was saved from angst solely by the frequency and length of passing lanes, further reinforcing my stereotype of Utah being competently-run. In Colorado I was constantly stressed, because everyone wanted to go ludicrously fast, and I wanted to go painstakingly slow, just in case I ran into a patch of ice. I never did, but I wonder how everyone else was so confident there wouldn’t be any. I mean, sure, some of them had 4WD vehicles, but there were also sedans and minivans, and we all had the same sort of tires. Did they just know something I didn’t?

Worrying about how the other cars would perceive me bedeviled me. My chief terror in Telluride was not slipping and falling on the ice, or spending all of my money on books (a very real danger), but that when it came time to unpark my car and drive away, I might slide into something and be mortally embarrassed. I already imagined I was being judged a foolish amateur tourist for arriving in a beat up Camry in a town where everyone else drove Subarus and SUVs. But then, I kind of am a foolish amateur tourist in denial, so…

Only one person actually honked at me or was in any way rude on this entire trip, despite all the large pickups I’ve held up going slowly over mountain passes. But being me, of course even before someone came along to confirm my projections, I had already decided that all of these drivers held me in contempt, and in return for this imagined slight I felt personally rebuked and slighted, and harbored a certain kind of irrational resentment. This is, of course, extremely silly, and no way to drive or live well, even if the supposition did turn out to be true in some cases.

Still, I wish there were a way to feel less pressure to drive fast or be judged, when conditions are at all adverse. But my idea of adverse conditions is Colorado’s idea of a nice day, so maybe that’s asking too much.

What’s really interesting to me is how my projections of unwelcomeness mapped the concerns about driving speed and type of car so closely onto political and social divides. I have a certain kind of insecurity whenever I go to a place I do not live, that someone will tell me I’m doing something wrong, or that someone will spot that I am out of place and think “oh no, another tourist.” This is not helped by carrying a camera everywhere I go. But as someone from the coastal suburbs, I tend to feel this anticipated unwelcomeness less when traveling in a foreign country, and more keenly when in the very urban or very rural parts of America. This is despite me not particularly liking the suburbs, aesthetically. I think it has to do with the visibility of class and political differences in these spaces - or rather, with my own stereotypes about them. Because this isn’t an objective phenomenon I’m reporting on and observing about our country - rather, this says some unfortunate things about the state of my own psyche, and how prone I am to prejudging and reducing others in my mind - so naturally I imagine they will do the same to me.

I think I used to be more empathetic and less judgmental when I was a child, but I’m not sure if that’s even true. I would like for it to be true again, though, if it ever was.

I’ve been on the other side of things as well. A year and a half ago when moving across the country in midsummer, I became increasingly impatient to arrive on the West coast, and drove faster and faster as my confidence grew each day. I remember tearing over the speedways of Montana, leaping up and down the hills by the Clark Fork at ninety miles an hour. And in Connecticut I was perfectly comfortable driving in the winter, because everyone just seemed used to it, and I figured they can’t all be wrong. Maybe it’s just that I’m rusty.

Star Wars Episode I: Why Am I Doing This?

The Rationale

So, I’ve just set up my own website and started a new blog on it (who starts a blog in 2020, by the way?), and dedicated a section of that blog to film. I opened a Letterboxd, years late to that party, and created a watchlist of 1,226 intriguing, sophisticated, canonical and obscure films to see.

And then, like a hack, I decided to start with Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

Why would anyone who hopes to be taken seriously in the year of Our Lord 2020 begin their film commentary on one of the most over-analyzed, mocked-to-death, and tiresome films of all time? Isn’t the internet littered with every conceivable form of comment, parody, imitation, and, more recently, sincere defense of this relatively harmless movie from twenty-one years ago?

Well, in my defense, I just wanted what everybody in July 2020 wants: to watch Hamilton (and yes, I drafted this in July – how’s that for showing one’s process?).

A younger, more shameless (and more broke) Andrew would have sailed the high seas, but I’ve been trying to turn over a new leaf, and I also realized that if I was going to spend $15 on doughnuts and coffee every few days, then I could certainly afford to pay for my entertainment. So I signed up for Disney+.

Actually, I still didn’t plan on spending a cent – the Mouse already owns the theater-going billfold of my wallet, and they really don’t need any more. No, I was going to avail myself of the free trial, and then cancel my subscription before it ended, having seen what I came to see.

The wrinkle, though, is that the free trial lasts for a whole month. It only takes two hours to watch Hamilton. A day later, and you can get through Free Solo as well. But what then?

There it was, staring at me on the home page: The Star Wars Collection. All of Star Wars, in one place. Well, except for the Holiday Special (however much you wish it, George, we won’t forget it!). And suddenly I had an urge to watch them all, in order, just to see how it played out. I’ve seen every Star Wars main saga film many times, with the exception of The Rise of Skywalker, which I pointedly only saw in theaters once – an aberration when it comes to Star Wars films. But we’ll get to that one.

So here I am, blogging my way through all nine main saga Star Wars films. Let’s see what I’m in for.

The Film

Disney+ loves to remind you that they now own Star Wars, and they love to put Star Wars content right in your face on the home screen. But, as if in shame, I had to scroll all the way to the right end of the list of Star Wars films to find Episode I – the least intuitive place for the first film of a saga to be, on the far right, offscreen. Of course, Episode I isn’t really the first film, so I suppose that makes some sense. Now, I haven’t sat through this movie in years – in fact, my memories of all of the takedowns, commentaries, parodies, and critical reviews I absorbed in my misspent youth are all more recently in mind than the unmediated film itself. My impressions may not be original, but I hope to be honest.

Let’s begin.

The first thing I notice is that the first sentence of the opening crawl.

“Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic.”

Now this is good Star Wars material. But then the second sentence slides onscreen:

“The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.”

Oh. Ok.

Five minutes into the film, two thoughts predominate. First, perhaps I was wrong about the Rise of Skywalker (I’m not). After all, at least it wasn’t the cinematic equivalent of watching paint dry. The second is that the Nemoidians are so much worse than I realized when I was a kid. Wow. At least they have fun hats. Seriously, they’re hats are sillier than an archbishop’s.

Jar-Jar

I want to talk about Jar-Jar, but I’m not going to repeat all the criticisms lobbed at him for the past two decades. In fact, I’m not here to criticize Jar-Jar at all, who seems to have committed no crime other than being an idiot. I want to talk about the way the Jedi, specifically Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan, treat him throughout the movie.

It is true - Qui-Gon does begin the relationship by saving Jar-Jar’s life, tackling him to the ground in classic meet-cute fashion. You would be forgiven for mistaking this as the altruistic act of a selfless warrior monk - but what comes next has me wondering if perhaps Jar-Jar was just in Qui-Gon’s way.

Having been informed that Jar-Jar owes him a life-debt and will serve him, Qui-Gon initially sees no use for the Gungan - but as soon as he gains utility for the Jedi, suggesting that they go to Otoh Gunga, Qui-Gon insists that Jar-Jar take them. Of course, our hapless froggy friend avers that he cannot safely return since he was banished (presumably for being a nuisance). This is an obviously correct point to make, and since Jar-Jar has already told the Jedi that they should go to the city, without which they would presumably spend the entire movie wandering around the woods and eating shrooms, they really ought to say thank you and swim off to the city already. After all, if it’s close enough to swim to, surely they could find it if Jar-Jar just points them in the right direction.

Of course, this is not what they do. Instead, the jedi heroically coerce Jar-Jar into going with them as their guide, with Obi-Wan joyfully relishing painting Jar-Jar a picture of his torture and dismemberment at the hands of the droids, should he not help them. As an aside, Obi-Wan is much better and more emotive in this movie than I remembered - just maybe not always in the right ways.

But once poor old Jar Jar has done his part, and, against his better judgment, taken the Jedi to the undersea city, the Jedi completely abandon him. After conferring with the Bosses, they walk right past the manacled Jar Jar and make as if to leave, without a second thought. When Jar Jar addresses them, Obi-wan actually urges Qui-Gon to not stop and listen, because they have little time. Only after realizing Jar Jar’s potential utility as a navigator does Qui-Gon inquire what will happen to Jar Jar. While Boss Nass only says that Jar Jar will be “punished,” Jar Jar declares that he’d rather be dead in Otoh Gunga than dead in the Core, suggesting that he may have been facing execution. In point of fact, it doesn’t matter if he was just going to be given community service - the Jedi knowingly placed him in a situation where he would be punished, and then didn’t even care to find out what would happen to him when they decided to leave.

I was still thinking about this when Jar Jar tries to jump off the bridge with the jedi, only to remember halfway out the window that they’re jedi and he’s not, so then he flails and grabs onto the railing. Honestly it’s incredible he survives the movie. Qui-Gon doesn’t care if he dies, Obi-Wan relishes his fear, and Jar-Jar himself seems like he’s competing with all his might for a Darwin award. I recall that at a certain point on Tattooine, Jar-Jar is being choked violently, and Qui-Gon, the mighty Jedi, just sort of stands there looking on until a child intervenes to stop the attack. That pretty much says it all.

Space Politics!

The other thing I really want to talk about in this movie is space politics. George got a lot of flak for putting so much space politics in this movie, but personally, I love space politics. I think the problem is more that he didn’t explain the space politics enough for anyone to really feel like there were stakes, and the characters are all way too chill for us to take it seriously.

But speaking of chilling out, can anyone tell me what the Republic even does? Let’s see:

- no army

-different local laws in every system, and even on the same planet

- no human rights enforcement

- no social services

- no external threat to defend against

- no serious attempt to maintain internal order

- no standardized trade policy

- relies entirely on a police force of several hundred volunteer monks who aren’t even good at what they do.

Is the Senate a governing body, or an elite social club? What if Palpatine is right that centralization is needed? The movie doesn’t give us much reason to disagree. For the record, this is not a the-Empire-was-right take. I mean, do those people remember Alderaan?

Maybe the Galactic Republic is a libertarian’s paradise, and if Ayn Rand were writing Star Wars the Nemoidians would be the heroes? I guess that last clause is less of a question and more of a given.

Oh, and one more thing, why does the queen have actual political power to sign or not sign a treaty, if she’s 14? I thought she was a figurehead? To be fair, she’s clearly the most competent figure in her government, but I suppose that’s the real problem.

Addenda

To wrap things up, here are some random observations:

When Jar-Jar first starts talking to Padme, her face instantly freezes into a rictus of horror.

“Don’t want to attract attention” - cuts to the chrome-plated space yacht

At this point the main thing I feel about Anakin is sympathy for Jake Lloyd. That’s really all I have to say about the the character in this film. That I can get away with saying so little about the nominal protagonist (?) does not speak well of the script.

Bubble (yes that is the character’s name) tells them that the death toll is catastrophic, and the room immediately dismisses this as a trick and doesn’t react at all. But what if he was telling the truth?

The only people more bored than the viewers are the characters in the film. They are all just totally checked out, especially Qui-Gon. I think the Republic secretly wanted to collapse, if only to relieve its monotonous decadence.

Maul’s ship honks. I bet he’s got a gym in there. The movie would be massively improved by a Maul workout montage.

How is Watto so rotund if he has to constantly flap to stay up? What’s his caloric intake?

I love how the film stops dead to just show off all the goofy racers and their pods - it knows this movie isn’t worth missing any of the race for.

The noise the guy makes before he hits the cave wall and explodes is exactly what I imagine a frog being stepped on sounds like.

The guy Sebulba grenades literally just says “rawr” in a scooby doo voice.

How did Jabba sleep through the most engaging part of the movie?

The invention of prequel memes has massively improved the viewing experience.

Why are treaties under duress even valid? The Republic really is useless.

My conclusion is that the Trade Federation should stick to trade, because they are hilariously bad at war.

The dramatic irony of the joyous tone, knowing where the trilogy goes, actually enhances the finale. What is NOT improved by dramatic irony is Padme’s creepy-in-hindsight smile at Anakin.

Finally, I just can’t believe they tried to set up a cinematic universe with a film that doesn’t even have a single post-credits scene.

Beginning Again, Again

Why am I starting a blog for the fourth or fifth time (I actually lost track) in the year of Our Lord twenty-twenty? Conventional wisdom says the age of blogging ended over a decade ago; personal experience suggests I will fail to complete any creative project not driven by institutional deadlines. Then there’s the matter of content: as I’ve gotten older my views have, if anything, become less interesting and idiosyncratic, especially as I now have a greater appreciation for the wisdom of general consensus. So if I’m just going to give the same hot takes that most people already agree with, and am going to publish them years late, on an irregular schedule, where I blog about something weeks after it happened, then why is this a good idea?

Well, I never said it was. But I’ve never let that stop me before.

This, this right here is the slough that gets me every time - I finished a paragraph, I felt all right about it, and I didn’t feel like doing the work of thinking of something to say next. And that’s usually where writing projects stop with me. This is especially a problem since I combine the unfortunate traits of having high standards while also being too lazy to try to reach them. But I’m going to ignore that and keep going even if the work is slipshod and lazy.

So, why do this? Well, to be perfectly honest, I feel that blogging offers the maximum scope for obnoxious exposition. You know how children commonly love to show their parents what they have found, to repeat what they are learning, as if the hearer were a complete naif? Well, I never grew out of that. My whole career in education was stumbled into not because I sought it or was especially good at it, but because I can’t learn any fact without immediately wanting to tell someone else about it, to vicariously relearn it through them - usually much to their annoyance! (This, by the way, is the great advantage of a classroom and a teaching sinecure - it provides one with a captive audience upon which to inflict one’s exuberance).

It’s not just facts, of course. As I’ve gotten older my taste in aesthetics of all kinds - art, music, film, literature, even the geography of the planet - has continued to broaden in variety and deepen in appreciation. And as I read or watch or go, almost always alone, I can’t stop myself refracting everything through the fantasy of another person also coming to see how great and beautiful it is. (Is this entire project an elaborate cry for help about being lonely? Let’s not investigate that too closely).

So that’s what I’m about. I honestly don’t know if anyone will read this, and I hope no one feels obligated to pretend to do so out of friendship - in an age when everyone has about five or six different personal entrepreneurial gigs going that all have to be self-promoted on social media, I think we all just tune each other out to some degree, even when we do love each other. I won’t pretend to be indifferent to the idea of having readers - I don’t want to hide behind the arrogant fiction of “just writing this for myself.” But ultimately, I am going to try to write this more because I want to than because I know anyone will read it. Actually maybe it’s better if they don’t - after all, the more honest I am about what I think, the more faults and points of potential disagreement or embarrassment are exposed.

So, what am I going to try to write about? Well, that depends largely on whether or not I even get around to writing at all, which as I’ve shown earlier, is very far from a given. Even if I do, is it that likely that I’d write often enough to cover all the topics I’m setting my sights on. Still, a statement of purpose is usually helpful. So, without limiting myself or excluding anything, I’d chiefly like to talk about my feelings - about what I find interesting, yes, but especially about what I find beautiful or moving, whether that be a place to travel, a film, a poem, or a song. I’m also leaving the possibility of giving my bad opinions on global politics on the table, as well as sharing any random nerdy tidbits of history I find fascinating. But my main interest is in chasing the tail of my own artistic taste down the rabbit hole of obsessively curating what things I love and want to share with others. That, and badly mixed metaphors.

Of course, I also hope to talk about my faith. After all, the impulse to glorify and to evangelize - to rush to get others to share in the joy we get when weeping at a symphony or biting into a delicious cinnamon roll, is the same energy that makes the rocks cry out to the glory of their maker, or that drives missionaries to estrange themselves from their lands and lives. But I’m not sure how that will go for me. I worry, because I often feel more positively motivated to spread the good news of earthly beauty than to point back to the eternal. I mention this because I am trying to be more honest, more transparent, about my struggles and true feelings as I get older - there is simply not time to waste on pretense. I also don’t think I can avoid it - one of the things I’ll have to negotiate as I write about art and culture, is the degree to which my artistic tastes feel like they’re at times in tension with my convictions. I might even be in error to write about some of this - perhaps discretion would be wiser. But this is the ditch I’ve chosen to err in, if indeed that’s what I’m doing. And if I embarrass myself on the way, you’re welcome to laugh with me at myself.