#and none of that is to imply that del toro films are bad

[sarahbatistapereira]

Hi! So I read your post about The Last Jedi and I wanted to say something about Rose. (I'm a girl btw) I have a problem with her character, which is: I really liked her. She was tough, she had ideals, she was unafraid and committed. She was also just a really cool character. However, it seemed like her character didn't really give us anything - yes, she tased Finn and then she saved him, but what I mean is that there was not an arc that we could see her undergo. She just randomly says to Finn

(pt. 2) that she loves him, of which we saw no sign before. I disagree with the fact that if it was a male character - say, it was Finn who said it to her - people would think it’s ok. It would be still very random. they were great partners working together, but they were acting like friends the entire time. The confession of love is very random and OOC of Rose, who even at the end of the film admired her sister and her committment to the cause. It’s just a forced heterosexual relationship(pt 3)Sorry that it took me so long! But I wanted to show you my pov, because I wonder what you think of that. I feel that many people had a problem with Rose the same way as I did - she was amazing, Kelly is incredible, but her storyline didn’t exactly fit and suddenly changed 180 degrees at the end - she’s trying to teach Finn to save those he loves, which is literally what he was doing at the start of the film when they met. Hope you don’t mind my rant, and I’d love to hear your thoughts!

I appreciate your reaching out, and I am happy to share, because I do think your points seem to explain the reaction that I have seen. Particularly this one:

she’s trying to teach Finn to save those he loves, which is literally what he was doing at the start of the film when they met.

Respectfully though, this was not what Rose was trying to do. It is a part of what she said, but crucially only a very small part of the whole quote: 

That’s how we’re going to win. Not fighting what we hate–saving what we love. 

This is indeed a line that I suspect will end up being the beating heart of this trilogy, and even more indeedly, it’s a line that sums up Finn’s arc in this movie. You’re not wrong to pick up on it. 

However: both are only true I think if we actually look at it for what it means, and for that, we actually start at Rose’s arc (which I disagree that she does not have one). Rose’s arc is a variation of one of the film’s big themes: learning what it means to be a hero. It’s not a big one, or a complicated one. She’s not a lead like Finn and she’s meant to be in some ways a beacon for Finn, so she has to already have a pretty good picture of it. But she doesn’t know how to rely on herself for that picture, much like Rey actually. You can sum up a lot of what she learns in this film just from what she says at the start of it. Rose admires heroes, but she doesn’t think she herself as just a lowly backroom mechanic has anything to contribute. She can’t talk to them, she can’t step in and help make plans. She meets Finn, who to her is the definition of Big Damn Hero because all she’s heard are the stories, and she swings wildly from speechless to running so fast at mouth that he doesn’t know what to say. 

Then her worldview is shattered. 

Finn didn’t just stumble onto her part of the ship. Finn is deserting, which, I would also have to disagree here, with your statement that Finn was already saving people he loved. Abandoning a ship full of people who need you, who are in terrible shape and only getting worse, is not the same thing as saving Rey. Rey as they spoke was on a mission for the Resistance. Rey last movie when Finn was faced with this decision made it clear even then that she thought helping people when they are in need is more important than your personal desires, and this was a girl who sacrificed everything other than this just to wait for her family in misery for years. Finn was not saving anyone. He was running away from a fight he decided did not have to involve him or anyone he cares about, even though he has already shown he can contribute to the cause. He was still, as Maz said last film, a man who wants to run. And worse, he was stripping Rey of her choice to stay or go even when presented with ample information to know what she would want. 

None of this makes Finn evil, or bad, to be clear. But it is an established part of his character that Rose then helps him, through her arc, overcome. Finn runs, and Finn decides what is best for him and others based mostly on self-interest and fear. Both things are understandable given that he just left the Order and is running on survival instincts. However, just as Rose grows more comfortable with the idea that heroes are only people who make the right choices at the right time (as her sister implied and as Finn shows when he takes on the plan she figures out) so does Finn realize through Rose sharing her experiences that there’s more out there. His life is newly his own to do with as he pleases, but his actions still impact the lives of others–and there are so many more people in the world who are just as trapped as he was. Benicio Del Toro’s character later tells him, as the counterpoint, that to live free he can’t join, that it’s all just a machine and he can do nothing. But Finn knows that’s not true. He’s already done things that helped people. That made a huge impact. And he knows, from the stormtrooper life, that any person who tells him that it’s all just a machine that you don’t have to have any feeling for is wrong. The blood is still spilled; the crime is still yours. That’s why Finn ran in the first place, to not commit a crime.

By the time we get to the Rose line you describe, they both have come so incredibly far as characters. We’ve seen Rose go from a girl who could barely talk to a girl who confidently takes stock of supplies and reports to Poe what’s what, who goes into battle like her sister before her. We’ve seen Finn choose the Resistance proudly. However, picking a side, joining the fight–that doesn’t actually necessarily mean fighting the way it’s defined. It doesn’t mean aggression, destruction, murder, endless brutality. That’s a good way to make sure a war goes on forever, if you’re just constantly trying to get rid of things you don’t like. And that to me is the beautiful, salient truth of what Rose says. No one should be in a war because they’re there to fight what they hate. Finn joining the Resistance to make the First Order pay, no matter the cost to him or anyone he cares about, that’s just the flip side of what he first incorrectly thought. It’s just as self-focused, it’s just as harmful, and it has nothing to do with the lesson he needed to learn. Finn was never wrong to care about other people or even about his own life–but he needs to learn to fight for those things, because they are worth keeping alive and worth allowing to live freely.

(This is also why I would disagee that Rose said she was in love with Finn. Rose knows Finn only as well as Finn knows Rey, as Rey knows Finn, as anyone knows anyone in these movies honestly because guys look these movies take place consecutively in very short order–it’s just been one shitty space week in the galaxy really for everyone involved. But Rose does know she’s been through something with him, and that she’s seen him grow into the person she thought he could be. Arguably, she’s seen him grow into better than that person because he is real. There’s a lovely look she gives him, when he’s giving his speech to the rebels, that says it all–and she loves that. She loves who he’s becoming, she loves how kind he is and how strong and how capable of change. Allowing that to die now, when he probably would not really do anything against the FO in his sacrifice, would be a waste. Finn is worth saving–and hell, if she might die, she might as well admit she thinks he’s kind of cute too. It’s only a forced romance if there’s actually a romance. This was more like sending your crush a note: DO YOU LIKE ME CHECK YES OR NO ALSO I MIGHT BE DYING SO MAYBE CHECK FAST.)

#star wars #the last jedi #tlj spoilers #finnrose #rose tico #finn #film #rian johnson #disney #viii spoilers #these are not the spoilers you're looking for #Anonymous

[starwarsdc]

A Fandom Divided: a fractured fandom in the wake of The Last Jedi

This week in class, we discussed fandoms as a cultural group in general. We read and discussed the ways in which society’s views and attitudes towards fans have changed (or not) over the 20th and into the 21st century. We were asked to think about what it might mean for people create the distinction of “real fans” versus “casual fans” or “fake fans.”  We were also prompted to think more deeply about the relationship(s) a creator has with the created work and the people who experience that work. To what degree does a creator “own” their creation, and to what degree does a work belong to the fans? These are all questions I will be considering as we prepare to watch The People Versus George Lucas (There will probably be one or two blog posts on this film alone). On this blog, I am not going to offer my own thoughts as to what or who constitutes a “real fan” of Star Wars. Instead, I’ll look at the SW fandom’s various responses to TLJ. 

The negative backlash against The Last Jedi has been well documented. Many people are aware of the negative and complex response to this film, but do not understand why this backlash exists. I’ve heard fans say they like the film as a standalone movie, but not as a SW movie. I’ve heard them say they don’t like it, that they hate it, that they love it, that they didn’t understand it. Rather than link to a whole host of reviews and posts from individual tumblrs, I’m using this Vox article to summarize the different reasons for the negative response. (I’m only quoting portions of the article, not the entire thing, so if you’re interested in reading more about this topic, please follow the link to the full article) 

1. Too much progressivism: In the early going of the backlash, this was the easy culprit to point to. The broad strokes of the Last Jedi response sure looked like the broad strokes of Gamergate or the backlash to the all-female Ghostbusters remake. And there are lots and lots of tweets and user reviews and responses that focus on the idea that the film’s strongest characters are almost all women, who usually know the right thing to do, while its most evil characters are white men with complexes about being given what they think they deserve. . . . 

The Last Jedi is more or less a metaphorical depiction of the baby boomer generation (a generation that featured a lot of white dudes — good and bad — in positions of power) handing off leadership roles to younger generations, particularly millennials, who tend to be more racially diverse and to advocate having more women in positions of power. The series’ millennial good guys are a young white woman, a black man, a woman of Asian descent, and a Latino man, while its millennial bad guys are two white dudes.

But saying there’s a lot of cultural anxiety around this particular generational handoff is an understatement. And when you consider that Star Wars fandom has long been presided over by white guys, it’s natural this would lead to angry policing over what Star Wars is and isn’t. And that policing can be ugly and lead to toxic fandoms in which people who aren’t white men don’t feel comfortable.

2. The jokes are too jokey: Of the “nitpicky” complaints, this is the most nitpicky, in that plenty of fans don’t like The Last Jedi’s sense of humor. And to be sure, the film has its share of broad jokes, which seem to be written in comic idioms that are slightly more modern than the original trilogy’s more vaudevillian style. . . .  A lot of people who found Last Jedi too jokey also made subsequent tweets where they compared something in Last Jedi unfavorably to something in the prequel trilogy.

3. The movie is uninterested in fan theories: And even if you can get with the new trilogy’s ideas about how things ended up after Jedi, then The Last Jedi spends a lot of its running time telling you that a lot of the things fans have obsessed about since The Force Awakens was released just didn’t matter.The 2015 film was directed by J.J. Abrams, who never met a mystery he couldn’t tease. But Johnson immediately quashed many of those mysteries in Last Jedi. Who was Snoke? Who were Rey’s parents? Who cares, The Last Jedi ultimately concludes.Rey is impressive because of who she is, and Snoke is just a distraction from the real villain, who turns out to be Kylo Ren, who’s all the more terrifying because of his ultimate choice to embrace evil. But these storytelling choices weight the characters’ choices more heavily than their destiny, and if you spent a lot of time over the past two years trying to prove that, say, Rey is a Kenobi, well, you might find yourself disappointed at the casual disposal of something that seemed so important to the last film.

[note: I personally think the response of this kind is more serious than “uninterested in fan theories” would imply. Many fans, including myself, find fault in the film because it fails to follow the natural progression and plot arc established by its predecessor, The Force Awakens. Many of the issues, conflicts, and character arcs are simply ignored, openly contradicted, or not resolved.]

4. Individual plot lines/moments don’t make sense: How does Benicio Del Toro’s character know a very important piece of information late in the film? You can hand-wave this away, but it takes a couple of logic leaps to do so*.) This is especially true of the film’s pacing, with Rey’s Jedi training seeming to take months, while everything else in the movie takes place over a matter of hours.The most common complaint in this regard is that Finn and Rose’s journey to the casino planet of Canto Bight is a slow, pointless distraction from the more immediately involving plots involving Rey and Poe, one that gums up the middle of the movie and doesn’t amount to anything in terms of the plot. And I can certainly see this, since the Finn/Rose plot nearly lost me the first time I watched the film. . . . 

Ultimately, these sorts of plot holes and storytelling choices are of less interest to critics, who tend to focus more on a film’s craft and its themes, than fans, who like to pick apart the nitty-gritty details of a movie. And I’d argue that almost all of the so-called “plot holes” fans have brought up are ultimately explained away within the film, or justified by how they play into the movie’s overall storytelling structure. It’s rare in this film that a setup doesn’t have a payoff and vice versa. But they’re not always where you’re looking for them, and that can lead to confusion and consternation.

5. The characters’ journeys aren’t what was expected: This is probably the fan critique with the most meat to it. But it’s also, ultimately, the one that has the most personal spin on it. Do you think that Rey’s journey in the film shows the slow dawning of her realization that she has agency in and of herself and doesn’t need it to be given to her (as I do), or do you think it silos her off in the middle of a plot that takes her movie from her? Do you think that Luke Skywalker is an old man who learns a lesson about aging and wisdom, or a cranky cynic who never would have become what he is? Do you think the movie is optimistic about the future, or unable to compete with the wonders of the past? 

What’s interesting about the critiques of The Last Jedi is how often, when you talk about them, many of the above criticisms fall away, and you’re left with a distinct philosophical difference between people who love the film’s insistence that the future can be better if we make it and those who don’t like the way it forces us to grapple with the sins of the past, with the way it argues the Rebellion might have won at the end of Return of the Jedi, but it largely upheld the status quo.

Or consider the way that the film seems as if it’s largely left behind the central Force Awakens trio of Poe, Finn, and Rey — who are split up into three separate plot lines in Last Jedi — in favor of more focus on Kylo Ren’s journey through his own indecision toward something darker and more foreboding, as well as Luke’s journey from cynicism back to hope. I don’t think this is a terribly accurate read of the film, where all three characters get full, complicated character arcs and are tested in interesting ways, but if you really keyed in on, say, Finn and Rey’s interplay in Force Awakens, I get the disappointment.

This philosophical difference of opinion extends to none other than Mark Hamill, Luke Skywalker himself. While Hamill has turned into one of the film’s biggest boosters, he’s made no secret of the fact that he disagreed considerably with Johnson’s vision for the character. (For his part, Johnson took Hamill’s criticisms to heart and changed certain things about Luke’s arc — though we don’t know what.)

Van der Werff comes to the conclusion that “The Last Jedi is Act 2 of a story about letting go of the past and embracing the future. Maybe it was destined to be divisive.” He explains: 

The Last Jedi is about this tension, about the ways that generations uneasily give way to other generations and the ways we all learn to accept that our parents (or parental figures) sometimes have the right answers and sometimes don’t. It’s a big, bold, complex film, full of contradictory notes, a little like Empire was. I suspect, in time, it will age just as satisfactorily, but it’s also possible I’m wrong. Loving it means letting go, just a little bit, of some rosy past and embracing a future that might lead to disappointment.The people we were aren’t always the people we become, and that’s both a necessary lesson and a bitter disappointment, but you can’t become yourself without learning to live alongside that discomfort. And now there’s a Star Wars movie about that very dilemma, right when we all might need it most.

#fandom activity #star wars: the last jedi #the last jedi