The Last Jedi and the Future of Storytelling

Apparently this is my life now. Posting countless think pieces about a movie that I only kinda like. Why do I do this? Because the controversy that emerged around this film provides a fascinating case study of this moment in culture. And how the chips fall will have a huge impact on my future goals and ambitions. For context, you can see my grand scheme here, https://breathoflifeart.com/works/tft-concept/ or for the TL:DR version: I want to create a media empire that makes the world more loving with stories. What I see happening in the controversy over The Last Jedi is a conflict between two impulses in culture. One is tradition/privilege/entitlement. The other is expanded empathy/compassion. Here’s your giant dumb caveat because at this point in history it’s necessary:

>>>>NOT EVERYONE WHO DISLIKES THIS MOVIE DISLIKES IT BECAUSE THEY ARE ENTITLED, PRIVILEGED TRADITIONALISTS WHO LACK EMPATHY AND COMPASSION. <<<<

In fact, let me just get this out of the way. The Last Jedi is FULL of flaws. Logical, tonal, and tactical flaws abound. Unfortunately there are people who think that it’s appropriate to apply criteria for judging Sci-fi storytelling to what has always been (in the movie incarnations) mythical fantasy storytelling. Some of the movies stand up to that kind of inappropriate scrutiny better than others. Besides the prequels, TLJ might be the worst “offender” at being illogical when examined through a sci-fi logistical lens. If you’re reading this, chances are you are smart enough to disambiguate the logical, tonal and tactical flaws from the mythical and cultural themes. It’s on THAT battlefield that I want to focus. The one where people are angry, disappointed, or otherwise upset by the mythical/cultural themes and how they were played.

Oh, and let’s do caveat number two:

>>>> SUBVERTING EXPECTATIONS IS NOT AUTOMATICALLY GOOD OR BRILLIANT, IT’S JUST DOING THE OPPOSITE OF SOMETHING. <<<<<

Rather than reiterate what was said in the following video, please just watch it, pretend I’m the one saying it. And then continue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWqVJZMh6-w

If you absolutely can’t watch that, read this perfect summation in the comments by Nick on Planet Ripple:

“This film basically confronts some dudes with the notion, if not realization that yes, maybe their mother WAS right to send them to their room as a kid, that she does know better, not unlike Poe's two space moms. And there is nothing they hate having to hear more than that.”

So. While I don’t care if anyone likes or dislikes this movie, I do find this interpretation of the backlash convincing. Storytelling has its tropes and archetypes and those come about because they reflect the culture that produces them. Some of these are close to meaningless, and thus ‘safe’ to subvert. But to the extent that a storyteller subverts tropes and archetypes that are rooted in deeply held VALUES that a culture (or subculture) embraces, the more the story will upset people. The Male Action Hero On An Arc is one of those archetypes that DOES pull heavily from cultural values, and as such, the fact that TLJ so bluntly runs counter to it, is actively attacking the deeply held values of many people. Especially men. Especially men who see themselves as the hero. Speaking for myself and most others in my demographic, I’ve been fed this Archetype my entire life. I’ve been encouraged through watching, playing with action figures, dressing up as, and playing characters in games as… The Male Action Hero On An Arc, to put myself in that role. It’s an emotional slap in the face to be told that’s fantasy. Or even more painful: my fantasy has done unintended harm to others!

OK, now I’m sensing the need for yet another caveat, because there are plenty of non white male people who found the movie upsetting:

>>>> JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT A WHITE-MALE-WITH-ALL-THE-PRIVILAGES DOESN’T MEAN YOUR EXPECTATIONS FOR WHAT “PROPER” STORYTELLING SHOULD LOOK LIKE HASN’T BEEN SHAPED BY THE SAME FORCES. THE FACT THAT YOU FOUND THE SUBVERSIONS UPSETTING DOES NOTHING TO DISPROVE THE THEORY I’M PUTTING FORWARD. <<<<

Getting back to speaking for my demographic. I’ve been shown all my life that I, as The Male Action Hero On An Arc, intuitively do what is right and good and just. And opposition to my intuitions come from evil sources. Authority acting in bad faith. Bullies. Cowards. Evil Step Moms, Etc. How much this narrative has seeped into my real life and affected my relationships, career, and such is a great topic for another time. But for now, let’s just say that The Last Jedi is ruthless in beating those suppositions out of the male protagonists. Hey guess what? Just because you have an intuition doesn’t make it automatically right and righteous. (Sorry Ralph Waldo Emerson) And now me: white-male-with-tons-of-privilege, (Or other demographic who was also raised with all these expectations) is confronted with a story that is deeply uncomfortable to my moral foundations, because it implicitly reminds me that maybe my interpretation of myself as The Male Action Hero On An Arc could be wrong. And not just wrong. But damaging.

What’s a boy to do in this situation? Well, a tried and true method for quashing uncomfortable subversions of previously unquestioned social norms is to retreat to Tradition. (Hey look who just showed up pretending to be traditional: the “alt right”!) Traditionalists say that a thing is bad because it breaks what traditionally has been shown to work. Yoda burning down the Jedi Temple (and ostensibly the holy books inside) is just salt on that wound in the context of this movie.

That’s where things get personal for me. Back to my ambition to “make the world more loving with stories”. That’s a fundamentally subversive ambition. It is to declare the current state of the world worse than what I think it could be. And then to work to actively undermine the value structures that hold the current culture in the place it is. Though I also think that great care needs to be taken in the process. Because I have a conservative half that sees merit and value in much of Tradition. I think overturning everything at the same time would be catastrophic. Some institutions need a complete overhaul because they are actively opposed to a more loving and just world. But most just need tweaks. The kind that naturally come about when the hearts of the people who run those institutions change. That’s why Hearts are my target. Not institutions or political structures.

Here’s a quote from this blog back in 2005 when I laid out my theory of cultural change.

“Who has the power to shape the culture? Politicians in government? A little. But rules never change hearts. Religion? Most of it is fake, and the stuff that isn't has been marginalized. The media? Sure, they have a big impact. They show us the world through their own distorted lens. But I think the real big culture-shaping forces are the story tellers. The artists, musicians and movie-makers. They don't convert people. They seldom convince people. But they lay the foundation for those who do. Stories impart value, often so subtly that you can't notice. And it's an accumulative effect. But the values they impart are like a tsunami: in the deep ocean they appear to be no more than a ripple, but by the time they reach the shore, the momentum and compression creates unstoppable mountains of water. ”

That’s why I want to approach my story telling very carefully. And why I’m paying close attention to the controversy around The Last Jedi. I see it as a canary in a coal mine. Here’s a demonstration of what happens when you challenge millions of boy’s who grew up thinking they were The Male Action Hero On An Arc. Of course “Here’s what happened” includes massive box office returns. But I’m much more interested in the cultural ripples. Specifically the ones that can be measured. (That’s the Availability Bias in case you’re keeping track.) There’s a lot that I could say about what TLJ may have done to the culture as a whole, but it would be a LOT more speculative.

But I’m looking for lessons I can take from this little cultural event and use to build the framework for my hopefully world-changing work. Here are some thoughts on that.

1. Nudges often work better than shoves. I think that Rian Johnson was in a difficult position because he had a lot he wanted to say, and a very constrained context in which to say it. (A middle movie in a trilogy in a much larger universe with a lot of rules and expectations) I believe this led to an error of over-correcting. I think he could have reached more hearts and minds of the Spoiled Core of Star Wars fans had he pulled SOME of his punches. While I personally LOVED how brutally his story tackled these tropes and archetypes, I also recognize that I’m on the tail end of a bell curve when it comes to Openness To New Experience, as well as being socially/politically in a similar camp as him.

2. The quality of an IP is strongly tied to a consistent vision. Star Wars is built on the mythical framework theory of Campbell, custom designed to rest on archetypes. This is a context that all Star Wars stories live in to some degree or another. Though a lot of Expanded Universe storytellers did their darndest to drag it into sci-fi proper. Probably because, like me, they were drawn to the external aesthetics more than the story structure. But my takeaway is this: Be clear about the boundaries and of what the stories in my IP are about. My IP is kind of the inverse of Star Wars. It has the aesthetic externals of fantasy, but the core is sci-fi. I think I intuitively did this because sci-fi has always been the genre of choice for cultural analysis, critique, and change. Going all the way back to the first: Frankenstein, continuing up through classics like The Time Machine, Brave New World, 1984, Star Trek, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ender’s Game, etc. Whereas fantasy story structure tends to be a bulwark of tradition embedded in myth and archetypes. Nowadays the genres are often so interwoven that it’s hard to tease these historical antecedents out of current works, but the momentum is still there. What this means to me is that as I work with collaborators I need to be clear about the social/cultural direction of the work. So that fans will have a consistent set of elements that they can expect from a Tales From Talifar story. I want huge diversity in STYLE, and it’s going to be important to make that clear from the start as well. Our first story (The Scarred King novel trilogy) is an action adventure quest story. So I’ll want to make sure our second output is not also an action adventure quest story. We’ve got 11 books in production so far, so this shouldn’t be a problem. Ideally, in the future, a huge Talifar fan is not going to watch the next Talifar Netflix series, read the next Talifar graphic novel, or read the next Talifar book BECAUSE they expect to get the exact same style of experience they had in Talifar before. That’s the trap that Star Wars built for itself. Instead, a Talifar fan will be drawn to deep themes of cultural critique that facilitate empathy, compassion and justice, that will, in the best case, leak out into the real world through the inspiration it provides.

On that list of two items, (You forgot you were reading a list, didn’t you?) the first demonstrates what happens when a storyteller pushes too far, too fast, in an IP that was fundamentally built for a different purpose. Rian Johnson was trying to do too much cultural critique in a fantasy world that was built for traditional reinforcement of current cultural values.

The second item is my proposal for avoiding that pitfall altogether. I’m not building my IP for traditional reinforcement of current cultural values. (Although reinforcement of many of them –murder and stealing are bad, mmmkay?- are implicit in almost all storytelling.) My IP is built from the ground up to challenge specific problems in the human condition that make the world worse than it could be. I want THAT to be a consistent theme in the output from Breath Of Life. I want fans to connect with that and expect it. (and call me out if we’re failing on that mission) And I want to find collaborators who are on board with that vision.

I’m really glad that Rian Johnson got to do his thing in the Star Wars universe. Besides kicking the franchise into a new realm, I think he provided some fascinating lessons for those of us working on the next generation of fictional universes. To get back to my original question; the reason I spend so much time and digital ink advocating for a film I just kinda like, is that I don’t want to live in a culture where a minority of the loudest entitled fans get to dictate the future vision for a franchise. I don’t care what happens to Star Wars. I care that I’M able to create and sustain MY vision for MY franchise so that it can accomplish the most good possible. And right now, internet outrage mobs are the biggest threat to that. So I’m poking at that threat. Trying to see what it’s actually made of. I can’t tell yet if it’s an ephemeral knock-on effect of this particular time in history dealing with an emerging technology that we haven’t had time to culturally digest, or if it’s going to be a permanent feature going forward. Either way, the phenomenon is fascinating and it’s fun to poke.