Since the first paragraph
of most every blog often appears in links, I am going to ramble a second just
in case some not wanting spoilers can be sure to avoid the remainder of this
post. That said, if you’ve seen the movie, or if for some reason you don’t plan
to and don’t care about spoilers, feel free to read ahead!
First of all, no matter
what else is said here, I want to be clear: I loved the movie. As far as being a Star Wars fan or feeling like
I got my money’s worth in a Sci-Fi picture, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” (SWTFA)
worked. There’s enough of a “tribute” feel toward the first films, mixed in
with plenty of action, so seriously – What’s not to love?!?
Well, for me personally,
it was the trope of a disintegrated family system, so common in our era of
hero-making that was again presented for thousandth time with seemingly no
thought of how prevalent it is in our culture.
I have read enough Joseph
Campbell to know how the “hero’s journey” works. Our protagonists must endure
some degree of personal tragedy, find a way to overcome that tragedy, and
emerge victorious on the other side. If they don’t do this, they feel less “hero-like”
to us (as if any of us from healthy family systems with living, loving parents
are incapable of making the trip).
Still, here’s how it works
if you are new to the idea: Batman loses his parents, Superman his home planet.
Spiderman loses his uncle. Catniss loses her father, her freedom, and her
friends. Captain America loses Bucky and General Maximus loses his wife and
child. Bambi and Nemo lose their mom and Cinderella loses both her parents; so does Harry Potter. We
could go on for pages. From Snow White to William Wallace to the Divergent
series, the Maze Runner series, the Walking Dead, or even yet-to-be-named man
or woman you create to play in Bethesda’s new Fallout IV game – the trope is
alive and well in our story-telling today, and perhaps for all time.
So why would it bother me
in Star Wars? More specifically, why would it bother me so much in “The Force
Awakens,” when:
·
Anakin’s mom is
tortured and murdered by sand-people
·
Luke’s aunt and
uncle get torched by Stormtroopers
·
Alderan gets
blown to bits by Tarkin (killing Leia’s adopted parents & home world)
I think it’s because (and
here come the SPOILERS), Han and Leia represented what may have been the “only
hope” for a potential unbroken family unit in six straight films. Alas, this
wasn’t to be as not only do we learn that one of the great romances of our
generation was a bust, they also managed to create an angry, crazy, “all kinds
of messed up” kid to give the galaxy as a parting gift.
For me, watching Kylo Ren struggle
with the light side of force in that gut-wrenching scene on the platform had a
lot less feeling attached to good old Han getting sabered (which was emotional,
no doubt), but rather left me with an even more hollow feeling of ridiculous
it is to hope that true love and healthy families can exist in the Star Wars universe.
Gail Simone’s now infamous
phrase “women in refrigerators” was once employed to raise awareness in us
about how the deaths and injuries of many women in comic books serve the nearly
solitary purpose of raising our emotional investment in the male protagonist…
as the trope would have it anyway. The phrase refers back to the killing of Green
Lantern’s girlfriend, Alexandra Dewitt, by the villain Major Force who later
stuffed her remains in a refrigerator for our “hero” to find.
What we seem to have in
the Star Wars universe is (thankfully) much different than the woman-killing trope (although look at all the dead mothers). We have in SWTFA a female lead,
which is both welcoming and refreshing. But we still have the trope and in Star
Wars, it’s the corpse of a healthy family that gets employed over and over
again… Newcomer to the force, Rey, is apparently orphaned and comes from a broken
family. Finn, our other newcomer to the SWTFA universe apparently has been kidnapped
from his family and robbed of growing up in a family unit. Just like Darth Vader,
Luke, and Leia all emerged from a broken families with dead mothers, absent or psychopathic fathers,
and what seems to be a galaxy-wide orphaning of children where this beautiful
thing called “the Force” is concerned.
I think one of the things
that made Han and Leia’s relationship so meaningful in the Star Wars universe before
SWTFA was that despite their differences, we had a feeling that love was going
to prevail. The constant “dislodging” we felt for our protagonists was finding
a warmer place to settle down and find health in the two of them. The idea of a
real home, a couple that could fight honestly with each other and yet remain together, and maybe even a glimmer of a miracle in
a happy family all seemed to finally be shaping up in our “happy
ending” in the original films.
But alas at the end of the
day, the TROPE is really the strongest “FORCE” in the galaxy and this hope we
sensed didn’t stand a chance. Han and Leia split, ending one of greatest screen
romances in divorce (or at least separation); Kylo Ren commits patricide (talk
about killing a family unit, there you go), and our two other young would-be
heroes are as they have always been in the Star Wars universe, galaxy wandering
orphans carrying around the scars of their respective broken families.
History repeats itself in
SWTFA, and not all of it in the right ways.
Sometimes I wonder if
1,000 years from now historians won’t look back at our idyllic fascination with
disintegrated families and see it as more than just a literary device. I wonder
if they’ll see it in ways that we don’t even see it now – as a perfect
representation of where we are as a culture, met head-on with all the resolve
that popcorn and Coca-Cola can muster.
