What Is Remembered: Some Thoughts on The Last Jedi

(This post discusses the plot of The Last Jedi in detail.)

I still remember watching the ending of "The Force Awakens" for the first time. Crying until salt tracks dried on my face as Rey (Daisy Ridley) held out the lightsaber to long missing Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and the camera began to circle and the music swelled and the film cut to credits. I'd lost my father at the beginning of that year, and I knew he would have loved the film too. I spent the next two years when I thought about "The Force Awakens" wondering what the conclusion of that scene would be. I pictured Luke's eyes gleaming with tears as he gently told Rey he was not the hero she was looking for. That the lightsaber belonged to her now, that she would have to find her own way. I pictured Rey having to cajole him back into the fight and succeeding on her terms. What I did not expect was that in December of 2017 when I sat down to watch "The Last Jedi" the scene would conclude with Luke taking the lightsaber, looking at it like an unwanted Life Day present, tossing it over his shoulder like a cheap dollar store "light sword" toy, and snarling "Go away" before stalking off. Whether that moment made you laugh out loud or get enraged was a good cue on how willing you were going to be to roll with director Rian Johnson effectively setting the game board on fire. "The Last Jedi" was not at all the film I was expecting, and that's why I'm still thinking about it days later.

Ignoring the constituency of howling man-children there are those whose dislike of the film is understandable. "The Last Jedi's" tone and pace is ragged. And if you thought "The Force Awakens" sprinted a goodly distance from "Return of the Jedi's" happily ever after ending, this entry leaves it several star systems behind. But I've grown increasingly wary of happily ever afters. 2017 was an object lesson in how quickly things get lost. I very much need stories that tell me you can lose, and lose badly, but as long as you pick yourself back up you and look out for one another you have a fighting chance.

But I keep going back to the conclusion of Rey finding Luke. The messiness of the idealized memory, nostalgia, meeting the much more complicated face of lived reality. It's how grieving goes too. I'm going to be entering my third year of watching movies without being able to talk to my dad about them. And what could have been unbearable pain has become a settled melancholy that occasionally rubs against the psyche like a pebble in a shoe. But I'm remembering more too about how difficult my father could be. His stormy Irish temper, how I'd have to go weeks without calling him because I was at my end of being able to handle him. But I loved him too, and miss him every day. Contradictions rule our selves and our lives, and that's another theme that runs like a fraying ribbon through "The Last Jedi". Things are not going to go according to plan. You can love someone and be no good for them or they for you. You can sacrifice yourself and that's a victory, or you can flee and your living another day is a victory. The fan theory you've built for a movie, or for yourself, is going to prove to have no relation to what actually happens. And what you do in the fallout of that reveals who you are.

The mythic cliffhanger of "The Force Awakens" is what I needed in 2015 at the end of a brutal year. The grumpy, startling conclusion of that cliffhanger is what I needed in 2017. Stories, lives don't end neatly or go the way you want. How you react to that is how you make a life and leave a legacy in turn. I keep thinking of this exchange from "Rio Bravo" in relationship to this film. "A game legged old man, a kid and drunk, that's all you've got?" "That's what I've got." And I remember how I groaned when I was little when my father spotted a western channel surfing and I knew we were going to be stuck watching that. How it wasn't until it was too late to tell him that I finally clicked with watching westerns. And how it's always too late in the end, but you keep going anyway.

There's an echo of that "Rio Bravo" line in the end of "The Last Jedi" too. Rey sorrowfully looks at Luke's lightsaber now split in half. She wonders how she and the handful of Resistance survivors are going to be able to rebuild from their devastating losses. And Leia (Carrie Fisher) tells her kindly, "You've got everything you need right here." And Rey looks around at all the other survivors on the ship and smiles. It made me smile too. I don't know what will happen in 2018, or what will happen to me, but I can make a life from what I have. And I can survive another day, and I can hope, but with the wisdom to not get too attached to the outcome. Because hope and survival never look like what you're expecting either. And that's what I've got.

What I Wrote 2017

 "In this entry, it would appear the jig is up for Frankenstein; he’s been sent to an asylum. When the younger protagonist succeeds in finding out where he’s being held, he gets there to discover, what else, that Frankenstein is secretly running the place."

"We all hope to be the kind of heroic protagonist who can save the world and bring down a corrupt system. But fantasies of swooping in to save the day meet the brick wall of how frustratingly slow progress is, how precarious it is." 

"If everyone has something to hide, if everything is a facade, why wouldn’t that apply to reality itself? Why wouldn’t signs, portents and omens of great change start bleeding through every picket fence?"

"Apocalypse is the traveling companion of Resurrection and they both lurk where you least expect to find them. They exist in moments as small as cup of coffee on a chilly day."

"But it’s that very disinterest in villains that underlines what makes the film so unusual and satisfying as a superhero story. Jenkins is much more interested in kindness and compassion."

"That resentment of women is literally killing us is what gives the film teeth. Sarah’s ideas and orders are constantly overridden by the other men. Often leading to devastating consequences."

"In an entertainment climate where you have seen almost every new movie before, and can see its plot twists coming from the trailer, the idea of a movie actually surprising you starts to look appealing."

"The reason we cherish those special seasons in our lives is because they end. It’s awful to grow up, but it’s liberating too."

"The idea that we might not need to be perfect, that we can be prickly and lose our tempers and still be worthy of love and a family is beautiful resistance to the idea life is a pass/fail test."

"And it would be nice if, going forward, blockbusters realized how much is to be gained by letting women in them be as full of contradictions, flaws, and life as they are."

And if you've liked my writing this year, tips are always appreciated. 

Films More Folks Need To Know About: Lifeforce (1985)

Tobe Hooper left behind a nightmare landscape that tracked uncomfortably well to the American one. From remote farmhouses in Texas to southern Californian suburbia there was death lurking just behind the door. Families could become monsters and children could come back as vampires. America is a haunted country, constantly on the run from its own past, and Hooper’s work showed an acute understanding of the truths we can’t bring ourselves to say. He found horror lurking everywhere on Earth, and in one of his most startling works he found it lurking in outer space too.

In 1985 B movie studio Cannon was looking to go A list. Their attempt at that was an adaptation of Colin Wilson’s The Space Vampires. Forgoing their usual practice of shaving away a promised budget to finance several additional pictures they laid out money for big names. The special effects were handled by Star Wars alum John Dykstra. Henry Mancini traded the cocktail swing of his The Pink Panther score for a very good John Barry impression. Dan O'Bannon (Alien) did the script. It was a decision only Cannon could make.The film wildly veers from a locked room mystery to a serial killer who can hop bodies to a zombie apocalypse climax, while taking time for memorable moments such as Sir Patrick Stewart vomiting a geyser of blood and exploding. If the plan was for Cannon producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus to pretend to be major studio producers, and for Tobe Hooper to pretend to be Ridley Scott, I’m happy to say it did not work. Lifeforce’s failure at the box office is not much of a surprise but its failure to find an enthusiastic cult in the years since is.

The story seems tailor made for people who pre-order the latest Scream Factory blu-ray. It starts with a spaceship coming back to Earth with all but one of its crew dead. In the ship’s hold a mysterious woman is in some kind of hibernation. The story ends with a pile of zombie corpses in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral. But Lifeforce’s chilly reception hinges on the film’s unapologetically baroque tone and a narrative incoherence that wings the viewer from Point A to Point Zombie Apocalypse without resolving many of its subplots. And yet the overall effect of Lifeforce is closest to my memories of looking at lurid sci-fi and horror paperback covers before I was old enough to read them. The places my imagination taking me based on those strange, ominous images were often miles away from the story inside. In an entertainment climate where you have seen almost every new movie before, and can see its plot twists coming from the trailer, the idea of a movie actually surprising you starts to look appealing. If you’re willing to watch it knowing you honestly will have no idea where the film is going next, Lifeforce is often exhausting but not easily forgotten.

Lifeforce’s cast is a collection stalwart British character actors, the kind who wear turtlenecks and smoke when calmly discussing what to do about an alien, shapeshifting killer on the loose. This is perhaps another reason for the film’s difficulty in picking up admirers. The film’s scientists and government officials do not quip or load shotguns with a single shake of the arm. They’re simply adults who are good at their jobs. And adults who are good at their jobs were about to go extinct as blockbuster heroes in 1985. The entire film feels curiously like a raucous wake for strains of entertainment and types of stories that were on the way out. Drawing on disparate threads like the Quatermass movies (a British series about a scientist constantly tangling with extraterrestrial threats), and the delirium soaked sci-fi art of Jean “Moebius” Giraud and Philippe Druillet the film creates a tactile world of naked vampire women and sinewy corpses that was about to be brushed away for CGI and the PG-13 rating.

Tobe Hooper had a knack for digging out the horror in the breakdown of systems, from how families could fail to protect us from harm, to the collapse of communities who fail to repel an invading evil. In Lifeforce everything is breaking down, from common sense to cities, to the very fabric of space. There is no center and nothing holds. It was an impossible sell to audiences in 1985, but in that curious way movies have of finding their moment it’s very much ripe for rediscovery right now. In this time that feels like a carnival ride that slipped its brakes, where nothing appears to have meaning and outrage is topped by outrageousness and then all swept away by the next howling fiasco, Lifeforce was a sci-fi horror film that saw our inability to save ourselves, to avoid readily obvious danger. Like Steve Railsback’s astronaut, we opened our arms to our own destruction for the sheer novelty of it. Hooper’s death feels so acute, because he saw so clearly where we were going.

Films More Folks Need To Know About: Day of the Dead (1985)

“Day of the Dead is okay” seems to be the inevitable thing to say about Romero’s third zombie film. Its reputation as an also ran, a minor player to the major league hitters of the first two has not improved much in the ensuing years. It was hamstrung by a budget that ended up much smaller than what Romero intended for the story. And it’s a bitter, bleak film, with very little of the black humor of Dawn of Dead or the quiet tragedy of Night of the Living Dead to leaven it. It’s targets seem both too small and too large, “people are awful” not a particularly new, or radical statement. But what felt weirdly apolitical in 1985 feels a great deal different in 2016 and what came after.

In the baked Florida heat a helicopter pilot John (Terry Alexander) surveys the ruin that was Miami. While back at an underground military base Sarah (Lori Cardille) is troubled by bad dreams. She’s nominally working with a group of military men on a solution to the zombie outbreak. But the officer in charge, Rhodes (Joseph Pilato), acts more like he’s looking forward to they day when he can finally stop pretending to listen to her and just start sexuality assaulting her.

That resentment of women is literally killing us is what gives the film teeth. Sarah’s ideas and orders are constantly overridden by the other men. Often leading to devastating consequences. The apocalypse that feels strangely small on the outside, heightens the chamber piece going on inside the base. They are some of the last humans left on Earth and they act as beastial as the groaning horde clawing at the perimeter fence trying to get in. The zombies are muted in their threat, you know what they’ll do and you know if you can stay out of their reach you’ll be safe. There are no such guarantees with the humans you’re trapped with.

The zombies have become in the third film the inevitability of death. They are dangerous but the real test is in how we carry ourselves in the face of certain destruction. And in Day of the Dead and in real life people failed that test of character spectacularly. Things only fall apart in the film when paranoia and resentment take control of most of the human cast’s abilities to reason and live with another. That is why Day’s reputation deserves to come out of the shadow of the first two Dead films. It’s the Romero film for the cracking up of 2016 and the long march of Trump’s first year in office. The characters mad rush to kill each other before the zombies do eerily prefigures Americans turning on each other rather than deal with existential threats like climate change.

Romero’s zombie films do not offer solutions. They usually do not even offer an ending of finding a place of relative safety for their characters. So it’s interesting that the closest Romero gets to a Hollywood ending of Sarah and John escaping to an island feels like a last sip of whiskey as the plane barrels toward the earth. There will be no zombie cure. There will be no recovery of civilization. There will only be two people telling each other stories by a fire as the world ends. And that lands especially heavy now. As even Romero couldn’t foresee us ensuring all our islands will be underwater.