Why The Last Jedi Seems So Familiar

Source: Vanity Fair

There is, by now, a fairly universal consensus that The Force Awakens was more than anything else a polished-up redo of A New Hope, but then that’s what you’d expect once Disney acquired the property. Disney have a long history of buying up and adapting other franchises – Cinderella, Winnie-the-Pooh, and so on – and have almost invariably started off by redoing those stories their way, by which I mean throwing millions of dollars at it.

But if The Force Awakens was just A New Hope updated and remastered for the teenies, is The Last Jedi just Empire Strikes Back come again? You could make the argument, and doubtless many, many op-eds already have. A big chunk of the narrative involves the good guys being pursued cat-and-mouse style by an enemy fleet, all while the most protagonisty of the protagonists is off elsewhere learning the Jedi ways. Some of the other main characters pay a visit to a highly developed planet and meet a charming scoundrel who betrays them. There’s a set-piece battle between an entrenched rebel position and advancing AT-AT walkers – albeit that it’s at the end of the film, not the start.

I could go on, you probably could too. Pretty much anyone could slap together a list of largely cosmetic similarities between the two films, and claim that one is for all intents and purposes ripping off the other. Frankly I regard that sort of article as hack-work – low-grade juvenile mockery of a beloved franchise, which has no place coming off my keyboard. So instead, I’m going to be revealing where The Last Jedi really drew its thematic cues and inspiration from – Mel Brooks’s 1987 parody Spaceballs.

 

Halls of Mirrors

Having a character stare at themselves in a mirror can be a good way to show they’re a self-absorbed type, as in American Psycho or the myth of Narcissus. For a certain type of director, it’s also an easy way to have them go through the motions of soul-searching without actually saying anything or doing anything.

Of course, that’s not exactly what happens with Rey in TLJ – when she explores the hole at the bottom of Luke’s island, instead of fighting an astral projection of Kylo Ren as you might expect, she instead ends up in a long string of reflections of herself. Given her quest for a solid identity (and more on that later), there is some resonance to that, though the film mishandles it. You have to admit that when they’ve got her abruptly speaking over it in voiceover, and still not really managing to explain what’s going on, they are at best treading water.

It suddenly makes far more sense if you take it to be a homage to the classic Spaceballs scene where the bad guys – trying to find out where the goodies are hiding – pop in a pirated VHS of the Spaceballs movie, film technology having become so advanced they can have it on the shelves before it’s even finished. When they accidentally fast-forward to the bit they’re actually living out, Dark Helmet finds himself waving a hand, and watching an endless string of his own images waving their hands too – literally what Rey does in TLJ.

You could say that this is merely a similar-looking scene, but you’d be wrong and a fool. In both cases, for the characters who experience these insane visions, it prefigures major crises of identity. In Rey’s case, Kylo Ren tears down her dreams of a plot-significant self-identity by asserting that her parents weren’t anyone important, weren’t even named characters. And Dark Helmet, having discovered he’s a character in a film, later screws up bad during the climactic lightsaber fight when he accidentally kills a member of the film crew.

 

Ring of Fire

After presenting himself as the image of the wise old master ever since about halfway through Empire, in TLJ Yoda finally returns to his giggling menace form when he torches the mystic Jedi tree and (apparently) the ancient Jedi texts. Granted, he does it by causing a lightning strike – the traditional vehicle by which gods smite people, so Luke may have had a point about the Jedi’s hubris – but then again, he’s clearly enjoying it so much that it can only possibly be to mess with Luke. Something else which he’s also been doing ever since Empire.

The Spaceballs parallel here is obvious. That film’s Yoda-analogue, Yogurt, was less concerned with vague, quasi-Eastern theology and mysticism, far preferring to focus on ‘moichandising’. You had all the usual tie-in tat, t-shirts, beach towels, and Yogurt’s favourite, a doll of himself, but the item that was the runaway winner with the all-important children’s market was something you don’t see much in film merchandise any more – ‘Spaceballs: the flamethrower’.

‘So what?’ you might ask, ‘both Yodas are pyromaniacs on the sly, fine – what does it mean, though?’ Well, their mutual love of burning things was never the point. Remember what Yoda does after burning the texts – he sasses Luke for not even having read them. In particular, he notes that they’re not exactly page-turners, using that very phrase.

The existence of the texts is more momentous within the Star Wars universe than you might think. Up until now, none of the films had depicted anyone using paper – or even very much use of written words as we understand them. For this reason there’s a pervasive theory that everyone in the Star Wars universe is illiterate.

Either way, we can say fairly safely Yoda isn’t exactly going to be an expert in publishing. He is perhaps more likely to know about the ancient Jedi texts than most, but he’s unlikely to be putting out a new print run of them with Rey looking all fluttery on the cover for the autumn market. Given the scarcity of paper in this universe, an expression like page-turner is, if not something Yoda coined on the spot, probably antiquated and rarely used. And yet despite all this, he leaps instantly to the idea of a book being a page-turner, and can tell that a long, dry religious text is not one of those. Clearly Yogurt isn’t the only one with an instinctual, bone-deep grasp of the principles of moichandising.

 

Gone to Plaid

Going to lightspeed has always carried a bit of spectacle in Star Wars – it only takes a second, but all the stars extending into bright white lines is a visual shorthand for the ages. In TLJ, they gear it up a notch when lightspeed is used as an offensive weapon – perhaps monochrome ultra-slow-mo stretched over a minute or so feels self-indulgent, like the kind of thing you’d get in an anime about awesome power, but it’s following in an established tradition.

Spaceballs did something similar, but threw the black-and-white visuals out the window in favour of leaving a streak of plaid across the sky. When Spaceball 1 discovers, to their horror, that light speed would be too slow for a pursuit, they’re forced to breach the credulity barrier and go to ludicrous speed. And this, too, functions in some regards as a weapon, although mainly on the ship’s hapless crew. Dark Helmet in particular takes a severe blow to the head – likely only surviving because the extreme speeds had already caused his brains to slip down into his feet, safely out of the way.

If you were of a mind to be poetic about it, you might liken it to Kylo Ren, who is like Dark Helmet a crude and high-pitched parody of Darth Vader, eternally banging his head against any number of barriers as a moth does against a bulb. This new trilogy does seem to have ramped up the comedy, and Kylo’s combination of villainy and haplessness does in this light fly very close to Dark Helmet territory. Hux, too, has his moments, like when Poe screws with him by pretending he’s on mute – and as such comes off not a million miles away from Helmet’s minion Colonel Sandurz.

 

Bigger is Better

To say nothing of where he’s holding his lightsaber, you didn’t think Mel Brooks made a tie like that by accident, did you?

One of the most iconic shots from the original trilogy is that opening sequence in A New Hope – Leia’s comparatively tiny ship being chased down by the vast, menacing bulk of Vader’s star destroyer. Even not knowing that one of them’s literally called a star destroyer, it is once again supremely effective visual shorthand, communicating to any viewer which of these guys is the evil galactic empire and which is the plucky underdog. Spaceballs parodied this by presenting the comically oversized Spaceball 1 crawling past the camera over the course of about two minutes – possibly the ur-example of a joke that goes on long enough to become funny again.

Come TLJ, that joke isn’t funny anymore. Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi did feature an even larger star destroyer, but didn’t present it in such drooling detail as TLJ showcases the First Order’s ‘dreadnought’ (literally just the name of a kind of battleship, not even prefixed with ‘space’ or ‘star’ or anything) and then, later, Supreme Leader Snoke’s absurdly vast flagship. This last is in the shape of a stealth bomber, which is ironic, because you’d have to be blind, deaf, and not paying attention to miss it.

Spaceballs made it fairly blunt that the Spaceballs were, with their gigantic ships and phallic fashion choices, compensating for some perceived inadequacies. While TLJ would never depict a penis tie onscreen – it’s still a kid’s film, after all – it’s hardly a reach to imagine emo Kylo Ren or squawking General Hux nervously looking over their shoulder before buying a huge off-road vehicle, or bludgeoning someone to death in a fit of sexual confusion. Even Snoke, despite being perfectly comfortable with his unfortunate appearance, has a tendency to only appear publicly as a huge projection of himself, not unlike the Wizard of Oz. And given as he only lasted one and a bit films as main baddy, versus Emperor Palpatine’s track record of being large and in charge for the best part of two trilogies, he has plenty to try and make up for.

 

Family matters

As mentioned above, TLJ sees the revelation that – contra a lot of speculation about Rey being Luke’s daughter, or possibly Chewie’s – Rey’s parents weren’t anyone of consequence and abandoned her because they were awful. This is revealed via Kylo, who immediately tries to use her humble origins to manipulate her, attempting to leap straight from ‘had a moment’ to ‘abusive boyfriend’ without even closing the deal first.

At first glance, there is no obvious parallel with Spaceballs here. That film parodies the famous ‘I am your father’ scene exquisitely with Dark Helmet’s revelation to Lone Starr that ‘I am your father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate’, and later, takes a second bite at that apple when Yogurt reveals ‘Your father was a king, and your mother was a queen – which makes you an honorary prince’. It is this second revelation that gives Lone Starr the impetus (and social rank) to go back and elope with Princess Vespa.

So what on earth can this possibly have to do with Rey’s common-as-muck origins? (Common-as-muck, incidentally, being an apt phrase when talking about the same film where Finn proudly declares himself ‘rebel scum’.) Well, this is a reach, but not by much compared to a lot of fan theories – notice how Yogurt provides precisely dip to prove what he’s saying about Lone Starr’s parentage. Could it be true? Hell, it’s a fantasy story, those are chock-a-block with secret royal heirs. A more important question, though, might be: does it matter if it’s true?

It would be hardly beyond the pale for a cynical zen master like Yogurt to tell Lone Starr a vague, unprovable lie to give him the kick up the arse required to get him behaving like a protagonist again. And at that point, any question of his actual background – royal or otherwise – becomes secondary to him taking charge of the situation. It is that unbridled, Promethean spirit which provides the parallel here. Despite having dreamed of having powerful, plot-important parents, Rey does not let the truth destroy her, she continues to act like a protagonist – or, dare I say it, a hero.

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