Ahsokafication

What modern Star Wars tells us about diminishing creative returns

Note: If you care about such things, this piece will contain mild spoilers for the second season of “The Mandalorian.

Quick! What’s the worst scene in a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie?

Depending on your level of fandom, there are a lot of choices. There’s the scene in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” where Starlord unironically plays space catch with his long-lost dad, or the entirety of “Thor: The Dark World.” However, my choice is between a couple of moments in two of the Avengers flicks that have nothing to do with advancing those films’ narratives.

The most famous is probably the vision quest that grinds “Avengers: Age of Ultron” to a halt in the middle, in which Thor essentially stops the movie to wade shirtless into some underground pool to tell the viewer, “These are Infinity Stones; remember that a few years from now.” MCU movies are rarely subtle, but this is a particularly shrugged-off version of storytelling (and in hindsight, understandably so, as director Joss Whedon has said his corporate masters required the scene to be inserted).

As shoehorned as that scene is, however, one could argue that it’s clumsily setting up future films like “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1” and subsequent Avengers both “Infinity War” and “Endgame.” Perhaps even less excusable is the series of interludes that pockmark the latter half of “Endgame,” small character vignettes which point not only toward future MCU films but also to multiple miniseries that will be exclusive to streamer Disney+, like “Loki” and “Winter Soldier and Falcon.”

Recurserpentine

Look, I’m not a total snob. I like comic books, and I liked “Endgame” a lot when I saw it; I “oohed” and “ahhed” along with everyone else when Captain America picked up Thor’s hammer. But come on: don’t end your big blockbuster film with a commercial for a streaming service! 

I was going to type “Let me be immersed” after that last sentence, but I realize that that mode of storytelling is some people’s preferred form of immersion. A complaint I sometimes heard about the (mostly bad, with some exceptions) Netflix MCU shows was that they seemed to exist in their own little Marvel bubble: occasionally referencing the films in an oblique way, but never referenced BY them. When reviewing Marvel movies in the past, I’ve reflected on the comfort of thinking of each film as a long episode in a 10-year TV show, and perhaps these in-film nods to the Disney+ roster are just a step in the process of making that more literally true.

The problem is that it seems like this line of thought is part of a larger way of thinking about movies and TV, especially as it relates to blockbuster entertainment, that seems to have become the dominant mode of storytelling across Hollywood. There are two big reasons for this.

Machina ex deo

The first reason is that Hollywood has become increasingly more risk-averse, conservative, consolidated and dependent on brand synergy and algorithm-influenced entertainment over the last 20 years. Buried in the third hour of the Blank Check podcast’s recent episode on Robert Zemeckis’s “Used Cars,” hosts Griffin Newman and David Sims have a great conversation with guests Jason Mantzoukas and Paul Scheer about the death of the pure comedy film. Their conclusions and anecdotes are depressing: tales of action stars and social media influencers tapped to lead comedies, and of action comedies operating as the primary driver of the genre these days (the biggest comedy franchise in the world right now, Sims notes, is Jumanji). 

Gone are the days of the comedy made for a few million dollars, like “Used Cars,” not to mention the potboiler A-list thrillers like Zemeckis’s “What Lies Beneath” and the blockbuster adult dramas like his “Contact” or “Castaway.” Instead, it’s all the biggest possible swings of spectacle, usually superhero or rebooted action franchise or young adult adaptation, and the indie circuit, which serves as the former’s farm system.

With fewer fish in the pond, the entertainment conglomerates become more and more conscious of brand management. They repackage and reboot and become more averse to letting a different or challenging take on the material get through unscathed, and they seek whenever possible to create feedback loops that shunt you back into the product, rather than allowing you to process what you’ve consumed as an individual work. 

And so: Marvel movies setting up Marvel TV shows, which set up future Marvel movies. Warner moving the (stolen) Watchmen characters into the DC superhero comics universe. “The Hobbit” being split into three movies. The Harry Potter franchise spawning a spin-off book masquerading as an in-fiction encyclopedia that then spawns its own five-movie series. They’re splitting the atom, over and over and over again, and the consumer is left with fewer and fewer alternatives while dining out on a thinner and thinner meal.

Superhero, arrest thyself

The second reason, however, is more depressing: That shit works! If I do one Google search for the name of a popular property, my phone’s news alerts will be forever dogged with variations on the same stories about it: repackaged quotes taken out of context with huge lumps of conjecture, headlines that talk about “furious fans'' and reference exactly two tweets, and, perhaps most onerous, the “here’s how this new plot development mind-blowingly recontextualizes the entire franchise” listicles. These sites exist, however, because this is what fans are reading, and presumably this is what they want to read (if you want proof, just look at the graveyard of sites that used to write about comics and were forced to either go out of business or pivot to repackaging comic book movie PR to survive.).

Fan culture only reinforces corporations’ decisions to double down on iterating their existing properties. When HBO brought a “Watchmen” miniseries to the screen and the showrunner publicly told the comic’s co-creator, Alan Moore, to get fucked, people didn’t bat an eye and proceeded to praise the show’s progressive politics (because nothing’s more progressive than siding with a megacorporation over an aggrieved laborer!). When Disney bought Fox, the main reaction was to get excited that Wolverine and the Fantastic Four could be in Marvel movies now, rather than lamenting the further erosion of entertainment options -- and, as it turns out, the slow death of repertory screenings and blatant recutting and censorship of old films. 

Most chilling and braindead are the folks who actually root for corporations like they’re sports teams, posting memes about how some franchise acquisition or another will finally crush the terrible competition, which is different only because it happens to own different franchises. These people believe it is their job to support and protect these conglomerates that don’t give a fuck about them -- harassing critics who give a movie a bad review, celebrating when “Endgame” breaks box office records, or freaking out when Martin Scorsese calls superhero movies “amusement parks.” It is the property that is ascendant, not the method by which it was obtained or manufactured and certainly not whether it is good.

All of this reaches its apotheosis in Disney’s acquisition and subsequent shepherding of Star Wars.

Exhibit A(nakin)

Though Star Wars is probably the single most profitable media property in history, it’s worth remembering that for much of its lifespan, it was also, oddly enough, one of the largest scale auteur projects and indie film apparatuses. Like his decisions or not, George Lucas supervised the story for all six of the original theatrical movies, he wrote and directed four of them himself, and he largely funded the prequel films independently. The result was a multimedia empire that was strangely idiosyncratic and had a much stronger point of view than most blockbuster properties, one that interjected meaningful political statements and used its clout to push forward new film technologies. Of course, there were book series and the occasional TV show and even a couple of knock-off TV movies, but they were clearly subservient side stories, only for the superfans, not part of a latticework of must-watch content (in other words, you weren’t getting months-long rollouts and Entertainment Weekly covers for the Ewok films). The closest anything like that ever came to being necessary was the excellent “Clone Wars” cartoon, which was created and supervised by Lucas and continued the series’ focus on treading new creative ground and using the Star Wars universe for political allegory.

Then Disney bought him out and decided that every year should contain a new Star Wars movie -- most of which, to use a technical term, have sucked shit. Once a creative engine that made every new movie feel like an event and treaded new ground with each release (even if you didn’t like it, and a lot of folks didn’t like the prequels), Star Wars became the breeding ground for the worst kinds of cinematic recycling. Episodes VII and VIII (especially the former, “The Force Awakens”) are close to beat-for-beat remakes of the first two Star Wars movies, reusing plot points, aesthetics, and characters to gin up Pavlovian audience responses instead of creating compelling new stories. “Solo” was billed as an origin story for one of the franchise’s most popular characters but was really a film-long setup to explain a single line of dialogue from the original movie (complete with an answer for how he got his name, a development so ludicrous it still sounds like a joke when you describe what happens). Even the best of the bunch, “Rogue One,” hinges on a fanboyish, Cinemasins-esque explanation of a “mistake” from “A New Hope.”

The fanbase has only made things more intolerable. First, it was divided over sexism and racism, where one faction threw a tantrum that women and people of color would be acting as the main characters. That faction was joined by an even wider swath of entitled assholes when “Episode VIII: The Last Jedi” came out, angry at the increased gender parity, director Rian Johnson’s refusal to play ball with the boring puzzle box mysteries of the previous installment, and a host of other complaints.

Whiny fans are one thing, but worse still, Disney started listening to them. When it brought back “The Force Awakens” director J.J. Abrams to direct the final film in the sequel trilogy, “Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker,” he seemed to panic, writing out characters and plot points from “The Last Jedi,” resurrecting an old villain and steadfastly refusing to rule out any narrative possibilities that couldn’t be explored in a future TV show or comic book. The whole exercise felt like the most expensive, banal piece of macaroni art, held aloft by Disney with a trembling lip to its disaffected fanbase. “Do you like it?” the execs cajoled. “Do you like it?” Meanwhile, the brand synergy continued, with an important piece of dialogue cut from the film and debuting in “Fortnite,” instead.

To lightspeed and beyond

I started writing this piece earlier this week, before the news broke on Thursday. I was going to end the essay talking about “The Clone Wars” and “Rebels,” how these cartoons quietly carried on the spirit of creation of the first six films while creating their own insular continuity. I was going to write about “The Mandalorian,” how I loved the first season for that same spirit of insular creation, and how the best thing to come out of the Disney Star Wars deal is slowly being flattened in its second season as it ties into “Clone Wars” stuff that you must have watched 12 prior seasons of TV to understand, all the while relitigating plot points from the original films and “The Rise of Skywalker.”

But then, yesterday, Disney made my point for me, doubling down on what journalist Leon Neyfahk described as the “cat eating its own vomit model” across its entire line: announcing a score TV shows and movies that are almost all based on iterating existing properties, some of them so puzzling that you wonder how much nostalgic goodwill will actually carry over. A fifth Indiana Jones movie without either of the other films’ two guiding creatives. A Buzz Lightyear origin movie (based on the in-universe fictional Buzz Lightyear character the toy character from the Toy Story movies is supposed to be based on, not the toy character himself!). Funniest to me, two dog-based shows: one rebooting the 1989 comedy classic (?) “Turner and Hooch,” the other following the dog from “Up.”

And, of course, it announced 10 new Star Wars shows debuting on Disney+ over the next few years. At least two of them are spin-offs from “The Mandalorian” Season 2, confirming that yes, that narrative dull spot or rabbitrail you spotted in one episode or another was just setting up another thing for you to consume, not contributing to the story you thought you’d signed up to watch. Adding insult to injury, one of those shows is a live-action tale about Ahsoka, a fan favorite character from the cartoons who was brought to life by voice actor Ashley Eckstein for 10 seasons of TV. When it came time to bring Ahsoka to the live-action world, however, Eckstein, who also works in live action, was jettisoned in favor of Rosario Dawson -- another example of “take the product, creative talent be damned.”

Mindopoly

Before I go, let me be clear: I’m not innocent of what I lament here. I have a Star Trek podcast. I love the original Star Wars movies, and I’ve watched “Clone Wars” and “Rebels” and “The Mandalorian” and even the new sequel movies, complaining all the way even as I forked over the money for my ticket (you see kids, long ago there were these places called “movie theaters”...). I used to watch the old Marvel TV shows until I realized that I was being sold a bill of goods. I’ll probably watch some of the new shows, though I kind of feel like I shouldn’t, and some of them will probably be good.

But my point isn’t that media should never do tie-ins, or that further elaborating on a world is always bad. It’s that when the ouroboros of more and more content and deeper and deeper dives on continuity and fanservice is all that’s on offer, we become poorer for it.

I don’t have a solution for it. I’m just tired.

What else is good on the internet?

The Blank Check podcast is in the tail end of a miniseries about Robert Zemeckis movies, and it’s been really great. Zemeckis has made some not great movies, but he’s almost never boring, and the range of subjects he’s tackled makes for fun viewing. Listen to the podcast episodes in any order (or dive into the show’s other series about directors who were granted a blank check to make crazy passion projects), and follow me on Letterboxd @mrchumbles, where I write capsule reviews for all the movies I watch.

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What else have you been up to?

Honestly, nothing. The only writing I’ve been doing lately is on the burncycle book, which is still in progress.

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From the vault

Since I talked about Star Wars a lot, here’s the review I wrote last year of “The Rise of Skywalker.”

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Follow me on Twitter @RTHowitzer, listen to my Star Trek podcast at outofcontreks.podbean.com, or email me at outofcontreks@gmail.com.