What Are We Talking About When We’re Talking About Star Wars?
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #187. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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Elsewhere, here.
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Andor is the best Star Wars since Star Wars, I am told, and this is because, sources agree, it doesn’t have the force or Jedi or the other franchise trappings bogged down in contradictory lore with a whiff of childishness that becomes difficult to adapt for a modern, adult audience without feeling a little sweaty. Andor is serious. It is often brutal, and incisive in its critiques, and impressive for the way in which it takes the vagueries of the original rebel alliance and thinks through what its shape and history might look like.
Removing the Jedi also shifts the genre from fantasy to science fiction, which Andor makes good use of. While fantasy works by expressing the poignant ache of the impossible, turning all its viewers into Luke Skywalker staring at the two setting suns of Tatooine and longing to be elsewhere, science fiction doubles our world through the discomfort or thrill of the maybe-possible – no matter how remote. It is the difference between wishes and extrapolation, and it lends itself well to highlighting the dangers of a present moment (although of course it does not only do this). The depiction of fascism in Andor – its annihilating possibilities, its pervasiveness, its seductions towards complicity – feel extrapolated from the present moment, terrifyingly. Its rebellion feels hopefully so.
This makes Andor very good science fiction, but the category shift also makes it less of a Star Wars story (as opposed to a Star Wars property). Frankly, you could swap out ties to the Star Wars universe and replace it with an original ecosystem and it could remain a powerful narrative without losing much of anything. To be clear, this is not a criticism for the show as a piece of fiction taken on its own merit. I am glad that it exists, and I am glad that Tony Gilroy gets to make the show that he wants. It is also, of course, easier to get a science fiction serial about organized rebellion greenlit if you connect it to a high-value franchise. There is, however, perhaps a problem in the ways the show is being discussed.
We love the off-format moment. Sometimes it’s because those moments are just stickier in our memories; it is easier to recall a great musical episode than it is a wonderful-but-sturdy monster of the week that mostly follows an established structure. Sometimes though, the desire for rupture begins to feel like a wish for a different type of thing altogether. “San Junipero” is – shocker! – my favorite episode of Black Mirror. I don’t think the show is generally very good. A lot of people cite “San Junipero” as their favorite episode too. It makes me wonder what they’re getting from the show most of the time. I like A24 horror but I understand the frustration real freaks feel when it gets touted as somehow inherently better than a flick with jump scares, only because it doesn’t have jump scares. Probably similarly to how I felt when a colleague who claimed they were obsessed with country music didn’t want to listen to Loretta Lynn because that was, “like, country-country.”
Liking Andor, even liking it the best of all Star Wars titles doesn’t mean you don’t like Star Wars, or even that you don’t like fantasy, but I do wonder if the near-critical consensus on this point stems somewhat from a still-common embarrassment around the genre, especially when it comes to children’s stories (an embarrassment that leads to unneeded over-explanations like midichlorians), and also from a critical tendency to read texts mostly for the social-political value of their narratives (something sci-fi lends itself towards) and less for the affectual value of feeling that fantasy is really good at providing. The political analogy of Star Wars (1977) is, like, whatever, and efforts towards a more concrete politic since then have been intermittently interesting and ambitious, but are ultimately all hampered by an unwillingness to specify an underlying ideology that the Empire is selling to its best servants. It doesn’t matter because, as re-watching the original should remind you, what Star Wars does best is to paint with shape, and color, and music, and beautiful actor’s faces, to hint towards a bigger, stranger and more magical world that we are only catching glimpse of sideways and through history.
There have been moments in many Star Wars titles that work in this register since the original, throughout its iterations as sequels, then prequels, then more sequels and television shows from ‘fore and aft’ and much else in other mediums that I’m less familiar with. Immediately there is Yoda, and Luke’s Freudian journey into the dream-jungles of Dagobah; the duel in Cloud City. Anakin and Padme romancing in a field that was flowers and now is mostly meme. Rey hardly believing the lush density of canopy on Takodana. Adam Driver’s smile. The puppetry of Baby Yoda. The film that seemed most interested in working in the register of myth and feeling was The Last Jedi, which is interesting in that the things it does least successfully are the parts thematically most similar to Andor, which has much more interesting and coherent political thoughts. At the time The Last Jedi came out though, I was more than willing to forgive that for the moments of red dust under salt, red throne rooms with red guards. This was a version of Star Wars that was not afraid of magic again, and when I remember it what I think of most are Rey and Kylo Ren speaking through the force, mirrors on mirrors, humans wanting things, fearing each other, themselves.
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Natasha Ochshorn is a PhD Candidate in English at CUNY, writing on fantasy texts and environmental grief. She’s lived in Brooklyn her whole life and makes music as Bunny Petite. Follow her on Instagram and Bluesky.
