Disney Star Wars
[Trivia: Can you name the subtitles of the three Disney Star Wars sequels?]
For decades, Disney carved out quite the niche for itself by adapting fairy tales, folklore, and beloved cultural stories for a mainstream American audience. The Brothers Grimm’s tale of Snow White was turned into the first feature-length animated film in 1937, even though its style earned detractors. “There was bad originality in the bloated, drunken, low comedy faces of the dwarfs. Neither the wisdom, the avarice, nor the earthiness of true dwarfs were there, but an imbecility of arbitrary invention,” wrote literary critic C.S. Lewis at the time, objecting to the American cutesiness injected into the severe Grimm tale.
Other touchstones from around the world got similar treatment. Chinese folk hero Fa Mulan was turned into a singing role model for young American girls, complete with a wisecracking dragon voiced by Eddie Murphy. Tales from the Arabian Nights were remixed into a story that was going to be set in Baghdad until the Gulf War happened, at which point “Agrabah” was invented, a place in the Arabian desert with Indian architecture. Inside of four years, Disney created two different films in which Native Americans are magically transformed into animals in order to learn lessons. All of these smorgasbords of foreign imagery serviced charming stories where the bad end unhappily and our heroes lived happily ever after. Eponymous words like “Disneyfied” were coined.
This was met with a lukewarm reception around the world. One Greek newspaper called Hercules "another case of foreigners distorting our history and culture just to suit their commercial interests." Many were unhappy when cherished cultural symbols or hallmarks suddenly appeared ripped of all their significance to service roles in quintessentially American media.
I laughed. I thought this was a silly complaint to voice.
But Disney realized that the one culture they hadn’t yet Disneyfied—was America.
And so they bought and paid for America’s cultural heritage—not stories about Washington throwing a silver dollar across the Potomac, which no one ever believes anymore, but Star Wars, George Lucas’ space opera.
I don’t need to tell you that Star Wars is not merely iconic but great. Lucas took the heroic archetypes explored by Joseph Campbell, framed that distilled fairy tale in the visual medium of Akira Kurosawa and WWII films, rounded up uncannily good acting talent (from James Earl Jones to Anthony Daniels), worked with sound fx wizard Ben Burtt and orchestral maestro John Williams, pushed the limits of what was possible with industrial light “and magic”—and created a sensation.
Even if you think you know it’s great, you must re-watch these movies. These days, they veer perilously close to Mark Twain’s “a classic is a book which people praise and don’t read” territory. Re-live the magic of the crisp characters, the elaborate tautness of the plot, and the complete masterwork of story, sound, music, and visuals assembling into one single work of art. People used to say that “opera” was the final form of art, since it incorporated all the known creative media into one project. Those people were benighted fools living in a dark age who had no idea what George Lucas and friends were capable of.
Disney looked at this priceless cultural heritage and naturally saw dollar signs. Just like they had done so many times before, with Robin Hood and with Quasimodo and with The Song of the South, they bought it and started making their own, Disneyfied version of it. In a move reminiscent of the moral credibility that Pocahontas bought by featuring Lakota activist Russell Means in a leading role, Disney brought back original cast members like Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, and Mark Hamill.
Disney then produced their own version of Star Wars, a trilogy of films outfitted with so many of the iconic imagery, set pieces, sound effects, motifs, and helmet designs from the original movie.
And yet, something felt profoundly wrong.
Where the original films had tight and sophisticated plotting, these movies present illogical mayhem under the guise that it’s sophisticated. Emperor Palpatine—who “returned”, “somehow”—has adopted the MO of standing knowingly over whatever is happening and acting like it was his plan all along, regardless of how nonsensical that would have been.
Where the original movies had subtlety that became better the more you mulled it over, these movies went through the narrative motions in ways that seemed completely disconnected from the plot axioms and mechanics they’d adopted. There’s a new “big bad” in Snoke, a villain who arose from nowhere because the story needs a villain. The Republic is five planets, that perish instantly because the story needs to threaten them. An eldritch fleet of Star Destroyers gets demolished by a spontaneously-gathered (and hardly well-regulated) militia from all corners from no known communications system because it’s the end and it’s time for the heroes to win.
In the original, consequences and danger abounded. In the Disneyfied Star Wars, everyone who matters is protected by magical plot armor. Their survival is a foregone conclusion, and their skills and luck are unreasonable. The only people who suffer extinction are the villains and the legacy characters, perpetuating the well-worn Disney trope of orphan protagonists.
The original saga was about a prophecy of a Chosen One bringing balance to the Force. How that was incomplete at the end of the legacy films, or how it was supposed to be reconciled with any of the events of the Disney movies, is left as an exercise to the viewer. I know now what it feels like to be a Frenchman and watch a movie where Esmerelda lives to the end, happily ever after. The character is robbed of all her dramatic meaning and significance. “Somehow, Esmerelda lived.”
Disney Star Wars is not “woke” because they put gay characters in the movie. It is woke because Disney decided, in the name of cosmic fairness, to subject its own American culture to the disorienting and heart-wrenching experience of being plundered in service of a twee and sloppy narrative. Because for once, they weren’t exploiting cultural cache for the money; they were exploiting it right before the very eyes of the people whose culture it was in order to hurt them. The franchise is so self-critical and hyper-aware that, rather than ineffectually lecturing (telling) the audience about cultural values, it presented the audience with a fait accompli (showing) so potent that the audience couldn’t even interpret for what it was. The entire project of this franchise was a psyop.
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I don’t believe this, of course. Rather, like Kant’s re-reading of the Garden of Eden in his “Speculative Beginning of Human History”, it seems a worthwhile thought experiment to take this Rorschach blot of a film series and see just how far the analogy could be carried.
It carries pretty far, which is not a diagnostic on the literal history behind the filmmaking. (I am fully sold on a different theory with only a passing resemblance to this one.) Incidentally, though, that fact is a poor reflection on the quality of the Disney movies.
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Answer: The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker.