Fighting Trumpian fascism in the Star Wars universe! That was the angle taken by James Poniewozik, chief TV critic for the New York Times, to mark the second and final season of the Star Wars streaming spinoff Andor, on the front page of Thursday’s Arts section: “Building a Resistance, Brick by Brick.”
The online headline deck: “‘Andor’ Shows How a Resistance Is Built, One Brick at a Time -- In the best of the Disney+ “Star Wars” series, returning for its final season, fighting fascism is more than just a joyride.”
Poniewozik got political at the beginning:
Like many “Star Wars” stories, the series is about a battle against a fascistic empire….
After a Jar Jar Binks joke and discussion of the difficulty maintaining “dramatic tension” in prequels, the lecture, er review turned to (ugh) “revolutionary praxis.” It’s a sophisticated version of the “[Insert classic television show] was always woke” trope.
Freed from the “what happened” of the rebellion, Andor becomes a space-opera entertainment about revolutionary praxis. What radicalizes people? (The loss of loved ones; the loss of agency and hope; the loss of anything further to lose.) How does a rebellion form and spread? How do you build a movement that unites establishmentarians and militants? What -- and who -- is an acceptable sacrifice?
The critic didn’t mention Trump by name, too pseudo-clever for that, but the loaded descriptions of scenes from Andor seem curated to fulfill the fan-service needs of the Trump “resistance.”
The conflicts too may seem familiar, even more so as the second season unfolds. Imperial troops search for the “undocumented” amid a security panic that is manufactured -- and amplified by media outlets -- to justify a crackdown. The Empire disappears people to prison gulags with no hope of return. It bullies a small territory, undermining its autonomy to gain control of valuable natural resources. Senators weigh whether it is safe to speak out against the growing civil-liberties violations.
You could see this as Gilroy and company importing current events into the “Star Wars” galaxy. But you could also see it as current events repeating historical patterns that -- swashbuckling and adorably memeable aliens aside -- “Star Wars” has been concerned with since its beginning.
A New Hope hit theaters in 1977, a popcorn blend of Bicentennial rebel spirit and post-1960s antiauthoritarianism, about a feathered-haired farm boy flooring the pedal on his space hot rod and sticking it to the Man right in the exhaust port. As George Lucas said in a 2005 interview, he conceived his films in the Nixon and Vietnam years as a way of wrestling with the question, “How do democracies get turned into dictatorships?”
At the Times, it's good when Hollywood goes after warmongering Republicans and injecting lefty slant into their programming, but bad when conservatives notice and object.
But politics never really let go of Star Wars. The Last Jedi became another front in the conservative campaign against representational “wokeness” and was targeted by troll farms.
