A New Testament of the New Gospel

Or You Should (NOT) Watch EVANGELION

In which I go over the show that everyone has already (re)gone over and over and over

ALL ABOUT EVA

If you hadn't heard, Neon Genesis Evangelion is back. Netflix just licensed it and even commissioned a new dub and translation to boot. While it is an important, it isn't just the show that is returning. It's everything that comes with it.

You can't talk about Evangelion without talking about the baggage-- all twenty-five years of it*-- that comes with. It's a show that can't escape its own gravity. Neither can pop culture.

Evangelion is a show that has been speculated about, denigrated, lamented, and imitated, and for years almost all of this has been afrom a distance. A conversation that is as much informed by nostalgia as anything else. Now it's back, fully accessible to anyone with a Netflix password and, at long last, we can re-litigate on of the greatest Japanese animes of all time.

Now that I’ve rewatched Evangelion for the first time in nineteen years, I’ve realized a lot of things. The first is that all of the critics of this show are right. It's a show that's aged remarkably well, if only because the things it fucks up-- the roughshod ending, the lack of focus, the abject sexism-- were all known to suck in 1996. The second thing that struck me is just how enjoyable it still is.

Austin Walker** often speaks of the Gundam series in a similar tone. Even the good Gundam it's still a series rife with bullshit. Fan service, stories that drag on, monsters of the week ad nauseam, and so forth. Despite that, he is a fan and that is because he knows that the worth of a work is more than one or two things. It isn't arithmatic. It's still art and it is still something that has to be reckoned with-- even the dumb robot shows.

To love Evangelion is to accept that it's a mess. It's an rough canvas, unfinished. And despite that, it's also one of the coolest giant robot shows ever made and that it has a great soundtrack and also has a giant penguin that just hangs out in the background of scenes for no real reason other than it's a giant penguin.

That’s what the show is. It’s beautiful. It’s terrible. It’s motherfucking Eva, baby.

I feel like I saved this picture because I was going to make a joke,
and now it's gone, so instead, here's a depressed teenager.

POR QUE, EVA?

Evangelion is worth seeing because there isn’t anything quite like it. For better or worse, Evangelion still feels like a singular work of art. While its origins are well documented, it still manages to stand apart from its predecessors by what it emphasizes. Its design, its use of body-horror, its emphasis on the inner-lives of its main characters, its increasingly preposterous and glorious battle scenes-- all of this add up to a show that is greater than the sum of its parts. As much as it is a show that draws on external works, it stands a singular work of art, one worth experiencing for its own sake.

What I'm saying is that Evangelion has styyyyyyyyyyle.

There's another version of this essay where I discussed how
Nausicaa relates to Evangelion, but I'm annoyed and tired,
so let's just pretend I did, okay?

Secondly, do it for the culture. Neon Genesis Evangelion it’s one of the most influential TV shows of all time***. As a cultural artifact you should take it in. An entire generation of would-be weebs who watched this show in the early 2000s, on VHS tapes or on fan-translated DVDs are all making their own cartoons or their own movies. Like, watch Evangelion and tell me that the Kong: Skull Island guy didn’t watch this show from front to back. Or Guillermo del Toro for that matter. Or Rebecca Sugar or a whole lot of other creators.

I recently watched Pulp Fiction with my teenage niece and nephew and they left the viewing being less than entirely impressed. While a good bit of that can be chalked up to them being dumb teenagers and poor sound quality of the stream, I think a good part of it is just the fact that Pulp Fiction, to them, is not a unique artifact. So many movies and TV shows have played off of what Pulp Fiction did (which was to copy a lot of other movies) that to see it in its original form isn’t very impressive. It’s like listening to the Sex Pistols. If you don’t have disco and Barry Manilow and prog rock to compare it to, it’s just four dickheads playing instruments poorly. 

Neon Genesis Evangelion, like Pulp Fiction, has the same kind of legacy. It’s the genre work that escaped its enclosure. It’s a work that came into being as a sort of fan letter to other works in the genre (Ultraman, Gundam, Toho monster movies, etc etc etc), but it ended up having an influence larger than the works it was derived from. In short, it’s fairly similar to what happens when people with talent and discipline listen to punk and decide to start their own bands.

Hey, kids, let me tell you about the first
guy to rip off Old Testament imagery,
that's right, Hyper-Jesus.

Third, Neon Genesis Evangelion is a master class in messy storytelling. Not that you need a second ironic reason to watch the show, but the ending(s) aside, Evangelion is broken on a fundamental level. Budget problems (allegedly), production delays (definitely), and the auteur at the center of it calling audibles half of the way through the run of the show are but three reasons as to why it's such a patchy show.

Is it a good mystery? Is it deliberate storytelling? Or did they just forget and get bored? Is it ambiguous or did they fail to follow up on a plot point? Both? Neither? Does it matter?

Frankly, if somebody sane and with a healthy respect for production made Evangelion it might be better, but it wouldn’t be Eva. From a critical point of view, the cracks in the foundation are the foundation.

Lastly, Neon Genesis Evangelion is actually a kind of good robot show?****

Despite its odious lows, Evangelion still hits some incredible high points. When it fires on all cylinders, it's one of the best giant robot shows ever made. I mean, there's an episode where they have to use a giant sniper rifle to shoot one of the Angels and in order to get it running, they have to use the power of the entire island of Japan. It's awesome.

Sure, the last two episodes suck ass drudges and the movie is, uh, of similarly cut cloth, but in between its moments of shoe-gazing and its male gaze, it manages to be a neat and unique TV.

There are my four reasons. It’s unique. It’s influential. It’s important as an artifact of storytelling. And Shinji punches those monsters good.

But also fuck this dumb show.

Brilliant, stupid, or just plain awesome? The answer is: Yes.

THE EVA-PHANT IN THE ROOM

There is no rationalizing, there's no getting around it: Neon Genesis Evangelion has a problem with women.

God almighty, does it have a problem with women. It both doesn't know how to write female characters nor does it seem to have any sort of affection for them. When it does have affection for them, it's for their bodies. It is a show that, at best, has some deeply unpleasant opinions about women.

And before I get into it into it, I want to point out that this is an abridged sally against this show's deeply weird brand of misogyny.

It's a show that doesn't quite know how to handle its female characters, except when it does and it's a pile of vitriolic, Stone Age-sexism. This is made all the more depressing by the fact that Anno-- and presumably his team of collaborators-- are aiming for profundity when it explores the inner lives of its characters. This makes its fumbling portrayals all the more striking. Instead of original and interesting statements about its female characters, what we get instead are Psych 101 level course notes. It's shallow, sad, and lame. It's a show about teenagers with the understanding of a teenager.

While there are stand-out moments (like when Asuka kicks ass or any time Misato is forced to jerry-rig a plan together), these moments are undercut by reducing these women to their most basic constituent parts (if you're a dullard): Mother and/or Lover. They can't be pilots or scientists or, uh, giant robots (which is literally just a giant mom in this case, but anyways), they are Mothers and/or Lovers first (and ultimately). Any attempt to stray from this path results in failure, torture, and death. Or all three. Or you turn into a giant space god. I don't know, anime.

Beyond that, you have the arcs of Rei (who Anno admitted stopped developing after episode six, when her arc is literally "You should smile more," which is probably less of a gross trope in Japan, but boy howdy, does this show not deserve a generous reading when it comes to women) and the arc of Ritsuko (who is a scorned women, like her mom) and Misato ("Slut, slut, sluuuuuut!") and Asuka (who tries hard and kicks ass, but can only try so hard and kick so much ass, because at the end of the day, she is there to be gawked at). Sure, Shinji gets his ass kicked quite a lot, but his entire purpose in the show is to be told that he matters. His arc is the one that matters. His story is the one that needs to be told. In the end (of Evangelion), all women are ultimately accessories to this dumb, shitty boy's journey (and, indeed to the audience's journey).

Women. Lover. That's it. Those are your options.

Then there's the T and A. Ugh. Alright-- I wanted this to be a quick segment, because I hate talking about this shit and I'm sure you don't want to read it, but it would be dishonest to blow past it-- but this show loves to sexualize its underage girl cast.

How it treats its adult female characters isn't much better (but at least it isn't a crime). It reduces them to basic traditional roles-- mother and wife (or, well, giant robot, but is that not just a type of a mother? A giant, berserk mother built of bone and steel? Think about it). And then, as a kicker, after it reduces them to these roles, it then judges them for being in these roles. Misato is a slut. Ritsuko is a jilted lover (ditto her mom, who has literally been reduced to these roles via the Magi computer system).

So, not only is it juvenile and reductive, it's also hypocritical.

And that isn't to say that featuring teenage sexuality is a total non-starter. It is possible to have your cake and to eat it too-- or at the very least there is a way to titillate and to talk about teenage sexuality without undercutting your characters. Without being a pervert. Without being a generally unpleasant weirdo.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High is a movie that manages to do both. It's a movie that features nudity, that celebrates (responsible) sexual activity and desire, and it also makes fun of and judges when people use sex irresponsibly or to hurt other people. In short, it uses a visual medium to portray an aspect of humanity in a complex light.

(There's also Karate Kid, which is a really chaste portrayal of high school romance and, I don't now, Lolita which manages to make a comedy out of pederasty. There's also TV shows like Riverdale, which are dumber than dogshit twice run over, and it still doesn't ever become creepy. What I'm saying is get it together Anno. Jesus.)

On my rewatch of Eva, I was struck by how obvious this problem is from the very beginning. And then I remembered that even at the age of thirteen I was always slightly embarassed and creeped out.

As I said earlier, some things age well because we knew it sucked them.

LET'S GET OUT OF HERE ALREADY

If you hate it, I get it. There’s enough wrong with it to fuel a thousand hours to forward facing You Tube rants. It’s not like Tom Petty. It’s not like if you don’t like Evangelion it makes you a bad person. I mean, Shinji Ikari would hate this show and he’s on this show.

It’s also fun to go back and realize just how much this show has shaped my taste in things. The music. The terror of the aliens. The body horror. The gore. The fetishistic attention to mechanical details. The computer screen insert shots—name one show that has better insert shots of computer screens. You can’t because Eva has the best shots of screens and displays, and you know it. All of those things have stuck with me.

Evangelion is a show that I love and hate. To engage with it is to understand engage with both of these concepts and to understand that these are not mutually exclusive ideas. Evangelion is (not) a good show and that's what I love it.

In general this has been a season of realizations for me. I’m glad that Eva is at least one thing that I can put to bed.

FOOTNOTES:

* That many? Really? When the fuck did that happen? Also, how is this show still coming out? Why is it still coming out for that matter. I guess I agree with this take on Evangelion, elucidated by one of the writers of the film Mandy: That Anno himself cannot help but go back to the well. Because he is compelled enough by the material that he can't escape it. There's something about this show, how messy it is, how appealing it is, that keeps him from going back-- or at least escaped.On a more cynical level, I'm sure the money helps.

** If I were a better essay writer, I would have found the time and the space to talk about this tweet specifically. I like how Walker frames Evangelion as both a seminal work of art that he loves, but also a show that he knows is fundamentally fucked-up and problematic. I like even erudite and politically aware cultural critics still have room in their heart for screwy robot shows. I also like that guys like Walker and his crew at Waypoint/Vice Gaming are out there doing the heavy-lifting so I can keep these essays short.

*** Maybe“infamous” would do better. I touched on it briefly above, but Evangelion, like a lot of Japanese animation, has attracted the worst sorts of people. Perverts. Weirdos. Would-be pederasts. Generally unpleasant dickheads. Which wouldn't be a problem if the show didn't encourage a lot of these people. Over and over again Evangelion (and thereby Anno and the production company, Gainax), sexualize the children. Ugh. I don't even want to get into it, but it's bad. It's bad that the show did it and it's bad that it attracts people that, you know, have very specific feelings about how cartoon child pornography are peachy keen (I can't find the specific article, but apparently the current translator of Evangelion apparently holds such opinions). Plus, also maybe Anno himself gave one of the cast members some real creeptastic directions once. Blech.

**** On that note, if you want to see a straight-up monster movie, Hideaki Anno's Shin Godzilla is a hell of a movie. Very different from the 2014 Godzilla. It is also a movie worth your time even if you hate Evangelion.

***** In that way GoT can also join an even more odious group of series finales that I keep: Shows I wasn't disappointed with because I already knew they were going to suck. It's one of the hollow victories where I never get let down because I never had any expectations. Way to go me.

James Kislingbury is a writer, podcaster, and will not get in the EVA. Must be losing his touch. You can listen to him here and here. You can shovel piles of lucre at him here and here.

KONG, VIET KONG

KONG, VIET KONG
Or "I Lost a Lot of Friends in That Ape Movie"

I’ve been thinking about Vietnam lately.

Not that it’s ever far from my mind, but I’ve really been thinking about it recently. I put my iPod on shuffle and Johnny Cash’s “Drive On” came on and all of the sudden, a well-spring of memories popped back up for me. I remembered Platoon. I remembered that Ken Burns has a documentary coming out this year. I remembered the first two years of college where everything seemed to somehow point back to the 1960's (even though most of our heroes from that era seemed hell-bent on escaping their current time frame). And I remembered Kong: Skull Island. And I remembered that Kong is an opportunity to talk about war, art, and movies. In short, Johnny Cash reminded me of something that was never far beneath the surface.

It’s been a long while since a Vietnam War movie has been in the theaters. The last movie I can even remember mentioning Nam by name was No Country For Old Men and that was only in passing and ten years ago (and even then I might be confusing that with the book). We’re overdue for a Vietnam War movie. We’re also overdue to talk about the damn thing. I’m glad Skull Island came along. It’s a reason for me to talk about Nam and it’s also a reason for Nam to surface in the culture, again.

Jordan Vogt-Robers wears his movie nerd credentials on his sleeves. Mark Kermode mentions it in his review of the film. Hell, Vogt-Roberts says as much in this interview (which I highly recommend that everybody read, because, man, that boy is a nerd). Even a cursory view of the trailer and its Huey choppers choppers silhoutted by the sun summon up memories of Apocalypse Now (or at least its poster). Beyond film allusions (beyond it just being a reboot of a remake of a remake), the film directly quotes from the Vietnam War. Brie Larson's character is an amalgamation of Catherine Leroy and Dickey Chapelle. If Vogt-Roberts is willing to bring Pokemon into the text of his film, then I believe he is also willing to put the work into discussions about the actual war he's making a movie about.

  

The director chose Nam for a reason. He had something to say. Yes, Skull Island is a monster movie, but even the loweliest genre film can say something about our society at large (example: Godzilla, Monsters, every single really bad and really good zombie movie). It matters because it speaks to our wider culture, our wider society. 

Giant Monster Movies have always existed to speak to something larger and more important that the existential threat of giant monsters. The original Godzilla spoke to the trauma of nuclear war and the two most recent Godzilla's spoke to environmental disasters and government inaction (or both).

Skull Island is mostly about a giant ape wrecking shit, but it also isn't a coincidence that it is centered around one of the great clusterfucks in American history-- one that we still haven't learned the right lessons from. I mean, look around you. Look at the news. You think we've learned a goddamn thing about dropping bombs on places that we don't understand in the past sixty years?

It also indicates that we’re officially at the point where we can just throw giant apes and space people at this tragedy and nobody is going to cry foul. Kong goes a step further in that it isn’t Vietnam War imagery, it is literally the Vietnam War (or, you know, a film version of it. Let’s not split hairs here, Borges). More than that, as rich as the art design of Rogue One (another film that took cues from 'Nam), it doesn't quite work. There is a dissonance there. Kong: Skull Island succeeds where Rogue One misfires, because Vietnam War imagery and symbolism is succinct, meaningful, and perfectly applied to the story that it is trying to tell.

  

It’s not only a morally grey war (with a morally grey conclusion), it means everything. Kong does a good job reminding us of the fact that Vietnam War comes with a lot of cultural baggage above and beyond the actual war itself. It literally blares the subtext out of loudspeakers at the audience.* It blares "THIS IS A FILM ABOUT FILMS ABOUT VIETNAM. ALSO IT IS ABOUT VIETNAM. KIND OF A HEADFUCK, ISN'T IT? BUT YOU'RE JUST LISTENING TO BLACK SABBATH, SO FUCK IT."

Vietnam isn’t Vietnam. It’s The Beatles. It’s Bob Dylan. It’s Richard Nixon. It’s Hunter S. Thompson. It’s MLK. It’s RFK. It’s Indian’s Rights and Women’s Rights and Jane Fonda posing on an AA gun. It’s John McCain being captured (and coming back and running for president). It’s Donald Trump dodging the draft. It’s The Wonder Years. It’s Jimmy Carter forgiving our draft dodgers. It's the Things They Carried. It's the things they carried. It’s my alcoholic uncle that didn’t see 60 because of what he saw over there.  It's forgetting and remembering and rediscovering these things. And it's a metaphor. And it's in our bones whether we know it or not.

Vietnam is a choice and it’s a choice that is reflected in the substance Kong: Skull Island. In that film, as in Vietnam, there are very few actual good guys. There are bad guys with problems, problems that might be good guys, a bad guy that becomes a good guy (off screen), and people that have bad things happen to them. There are also natives that, thankfully, aren’t bizarre caricatures. Like Vietnam, there are no winners, only survivors.

It’s why seeing Vietnam War imagery in Rogue One struck me as being so dissonant. Star Wars has always been a tale of black and white morality, with big, clear lessons to be learned. Good Versus Evil. A fantasy. Vietnam is about nobody being the good guy. Nobody being the winner. It’s a signifier that is at odds with the foundations of Star Wars.

Kong has no such baggage. It’s a property that exists in a genre that was specifically created to serve as a metaphor. It would be more uncharacteristic to be about how awesome giant monsters are than it would be for it to be about Vietnam. Metaphors and metatext and all of that jazz are what these movies were meant to be. They’re the pill wrapped in a piece of cheese. The message is hidden in the medium, but also the medium is the message.

I saw a Marx quote from one of my good commie friends on twitter. Marx says:

And by the same token the whole principle of socialism is concerned only with one side, namely the reality of the true existence of man. We also have a concern with the other wise, i.e. with man's theoretical existence, and make his religion and science, etc, into the object of our criticism.

What Marx is saying is that when you look at society, when you try to work on what it is and how it works, it isn’t enough to just change the economy or the politics. It’s important to talk about the underlying factors. In this case, art. More specifically: Monster movies. All of these things are there. It's the movies that help us remember. They're our myths. They're what sparks old memories inside of our heads and helps us remember. Sometimes a giant ape is what it takes for us to talk about something that we haven't ever bothered putting into words.

 * With the added bonus of allowing some really good diabetic music to entertain us. Because, I don’t care if it’s cliché at this point, hearing CCR blast out of a Huey gunship is always going to get my heart pumping, and, as Bruce Dern said to me recently, “I’d call that rock n’ roll”).

James Kislingbury is a writer and a podcaster. He does a movie show called "A Quality Interruption." He does a "news" show called "World's a Mess." Both require funding, which you can help out with. He also has a series of stupid tumblrs, which are all linked on the right hand side of this page. So that's fun.

Thoughts on Rogue One Part 1 (of Whatever)

(For the next few weeks, I'm going to be pumping out articles on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Originally this was going to be one, big essay, dropped all at once, but as time went on, it became unwieldy. This is what happens when you don't have an editor. Or deadlines. Anyways, here is a portion of my thoughts. It's also one of the more important points that needs to be made about Rogue One, as well. Not that anybody asked me. . . )

CARVE HER NAME WITH LASERS:
Resistance, the Empire, and the DNA of Star Wars

The core of the Original Trilogy of Star Wars is based around the Second World War. As many other influences creep in (Flash Gordon, Akira Kurosawa, Sergio Leone, and Joseph Campbell, to name but a few), the iconography is clear. The language is clear. Star Wars is not just a war story, it's a World War II story.

Rogue One carries on that basic concept. It also, more importantly, moves it forward in several specific ways. Namely, Rogue One is based around a very specific kind of WWII movie. This is done deliberately and understanding where Rogue One comes from is to better understand what it's trying to say. At the very least, it can give you a better appreciation for the kinds of WWII movies that don't involve John Wayne hucking grenades at the Japanese (though, those are a lot of fun, too).

As David Edelstein mentions in his review at Vulture:

Instead, it rehashes the plots of about a thousand World War II and/or Western films in which a brave squadron — a Magnificent Seven, a Dirty Dozen, a Force Five — prepares to sacrifice itself in the name of a greater cause.

From the Imperial uniforms to the use of the word "stormtroopers" to ripping off shots wholesale from The Dam Busters and Triumph of the Will, the Big One is embedded in the DNA of Star Wars. What I find interesting about Rogue One is that it continues the legacy of Star Wars beings about WWII, but it also shifts that theme forwards in two ways.

One is the specific kind of WWII movie that Rogue One is drawing from. The second is that Rogue One is still about war, but it's moved forward into a different war (which is a point that I'll get into in a future entry. . . hopefully). Rogue One is a resistance movie. Even though it's science fiction, even though it belongs to a mythological saga, and even though it was created to pad out Disney's cash reserves, it belongs in the same pantheon as Army of Shadows and Carve Her Name With Pride* (though, admittedly, somewhere towards the back).

A New Hope draws from much louder and more bombastic World War II movies and events. It is as much The Battle of Briton as it is A Hero of a Thousand Faces. It even stars Alex Guinness who would probably be best known for his role in Bridge Over the River Kwai if it wasn't for George Lucas (to Guinness' chagrin).** It's a film that's much more rooted in more fun, more comforting war movies. That is in stark contrast to the kind of film that Rogue One is. By the nature of the genre that Gareth Edwards and his crack team of writers and producers chose, Rogue One has to be a different kind of film, even if it does share a common lineage.

Instead of pilots or soldiers, Rogue One is about resistance agents. Just as you could switch out most of Gold Squadron with anyone from 12 O'Clock High, you could pretty much swap out anyone in the eponymous Rogue One with anyone from Army of Shadows (except for the robot and Saw Gerrera, who is a character that I'll get to in the future, as well. . . ).

So, let's take a look at what makes a WWII movie into a resistance movie, and then let's see how Rogue One compares. Come on. Don't be shy. It'll be fun.

The protagonists aren't professionals.

First and foremost, resistance movies aren't about citizen soldiers. They're about people with their backs to the wall. It's about people that are either out to survive or people that are forced into a fight (which parallels films about collaborators, which is a whole other article).

That's exactly what Jyn Erso is. She doesn't have a choice. While the rest of her team kind of does, none of them are in a position to do the right thing. They have to do it or they'll die. Or somebody else will die. A lot of somebody elses. . . Even Rick in Casablanca fits this mold. None of these people want to be here. The drama comes from the fact that, unlike the American GI in WWII, there is no rear to fall back to. They have to be here, because:

The film takes place in occupied territory.

The enemy's ascendancy is a fait accompli. There's no stopping the invasion. It already happened. This is true of movies about Denmark, France, and Czechoslovakia (you could also get into Eastern Europe, but at that point, you're talking about partisans, which is slightly different. . . I'm getting off topic again. Sorry).

In A New Hope, as much as it takes place within the Empire, the main battle is on Rebel territory (Yavin IV, which appears in Rogue One, along with the B-roll of A New Hope). It also takes place on the frontier, which has Imperial soldiers, but you never get the sense that Tatooine is owned by the Empire. This never happens in Rogue One. They're under the Empire's flag from minute one. The Empire dominates every scene. Which leads to the fact that:

The deck is stacked.

Of course the deck is always stacked. Dramatically it has to be. It also has to be as a matter of course. The bad guys hold all of the cards. They can kidnap your dad, blow up a planet, put you to work in a slave labor camp. They're the Empire, fuck you. We have Darth Vader and a Dracula (we used to have two, but anyways. . . ). What do you have? That's right. Nothing. Fuck you.

The resistance (in this case the Rebel Alliance, not to be confused with the Resistance of The Force Awakens) doesn't have their shit together enough to put up an actual fight. As a result they have to chip around the edges. They have to recruit fighters. Assassinate important Imperial personnel. And when they do fight-- if they do fight-- it's an all-or-nothing proposition. This is true of both the command structure of the Rebels, as well as the individuals that have to go and do the actual dying and fighting.

And, speaking of fighting and dying:

People are going to die.

This isn't always true (I already mentioned Casablanca). But, it's usually true. Resistance members die. It's what they do. You can't build a cause without martyrs and you can't have martyrs without bloodshed.***

There is a lack of romance to a lot of these films. This is perhaps because many of these stories are based on real events. Carve Her Name With Pride is the most obvious example that I can think of. It's the real-life story of Violette Szabo, a British widow that was married to a French soldier. After her husband was killed in combat, she was recruited by the Special Operations Executive to help, as Churchill put it "Set Europe ablaze." She was caught in occupied France and summarily executed by the Germans. Not exactly blockbuster material.

The same goes for other resistance heroes (and secret agents) like Noor Inayat Khan (who doesn't have a movie. Guess why that might be).

In Rogue One-- spoilers-- everybody dies. That's because of who they are. They aren't Star Wars heroes. They're resistance members. You can't beat city hall. And you sure as shit can't beat the Death Star. But that's hardly the point. Which, leads me to the last qualification:

Sorry, but the good guys don't win.

Rogue One is firmly planted in the tradition of Army of Shadows, Uprising, and Carve Her Name With Pride. It takes its influence from those that fought the good fight and lost. In these movies, our heroes don’t end up killing Hitler (usually). They die and not just the veteran on his last tour or the machine-gun loader with a heart of gold or the guy with a girl back home. The heroes will die. All of them. Hard.

Again, this reflects reality (or, at least, the reality of film). For a lot of the resistance, victory wasn't something that they got to see. While equating Star fuckin' Wars with the real-life sacrifices of the men and women of various resistance organizations is glib, it does at least show that the writers behind Rogue One know what they're doing. Violette Szabo was killed. Noor Inayat Khan was killed. So were many others that don't have books or movies based on them.

These people died in the hope that others would outlive them and see their wishes fulfilled. They took risks and died so that somebody else could finish the fight. Rogue One isn't about victory. It's about hope. If there is an untapped vein of WWII sentiment it is that even in the darkest night, at some point dawn will arrive.

Another quote from Winston Churchill, that speaks to the end of Rogue One (and the beginning of Star Wars):

"This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end, but perhaps it is the end of the beginning."

There is only glory in death. In myth. They don't build legends around people that stick around long enough to disappoint you. The real heroes are dead. In that way Rogue One ties in with Joseph Campbell even more than the Original Trilogy. It's a film that is not only about the legends that Campbell talked about. It's a film that is about the myths that we've built up around WWII. . . It might even be a film that's based around the myths that we've built up around George Lucas.

So, go watch some of these old movies (and some of the new ones) and let me know what you think. Or just skip over me and go watch Rogue One with a slightly new appreciation of the movie. Or, you know, the biggest war ever fought for human liberty.

There's another quote I saw today. It doesn't quite fit into all of this. Maybe it's the wrong place for it, but I couldn't pass it up. Because it has to do with how fiction can give us a key into wider experiences. We'll never fight in WWII, but maybe watching movies-- even fantasy films like Star Wars-- can help us understand what that's like. Even a little. That's important. That, arguably, is what art is about.

So, here it is, from President Barack Hussein Obama:

"I found myself better able to imagine what was going on in the lives of people throughout my presidency because of, not just a specific novel, but the act of reading fiction."

FOOTNOTES:

*Fun fact: Carve Her Name With Pride is one of Michael Caine's first screen roles. He plays a POW. He has no lines.

**I'm not sure what the cinematic parallels are for The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi, but I'm sure I won't have to dig for long to find something. Funnily enough, the first movie I can think of that compares to the events in Empire is Dunkirk, which isn't even out yet. Huh. Then again, we also have Atonement, which features the Dunkirk Evacuation and that of course starred-- that's right-- Queen Amadala's stunt double. IT'S EVERYWHERE YOU JUST HAVE TO LOOK FOR IT!

***Strangely enough, this made me think of the Zealots. Resistance movies are almost always WWII movies. This is a result of the fact that rarely in the past two-thousand years have white people (or white-adjacent, like the Jews) ever been in the position of being an underdog except in the case of WWII.

They were a resistance to an evil empire. And the more I think about it, the more badass I think the Zealots were. . . Not that anyone should get carried away about that sort of a thing.

OTHER THOUGHTS:
Also, there's a lot of crossover between movies about resistance and movies about spies. There are also a whole of differences that goes beyond what I want to talk about here. The one main difference that I'll make-- and this might not matter with Rogue One-- is that movies about resistance are almost all

Where as spy movies can take place during any era (and just about any era can involve spies), you don't often

Speaking of related sub-genres, I mentioned movies about collaborators and movies about partisans. Again, there's a lot of similarities and saying that one isn't the other is what the Dutch would call "ant fucking." It's almost too granular of a point, even for me. Even right now. But, since we're here, I think it's important to say why these films are different (if not how). This is simply because WWII, as being one of the most dramatic events in all of world history, is a rich and complex series of world events. To lump movies about the French resistance with movies about French collaborators and to then lump it in with Danish royalists and lump them in with Belorussian partisans is to run roughshod over the actual real-world events that these people went through. As important (or self-important) as films can be, they're often our view into a world that we don't understand. So, even though most people aren't ever going to see Lacombe, Lucien or Come and See, if they do, they can see them knowing that there's a lot more to world history and the human experience than The Guns of the Navarone (which, incidentally, is boring as shit).

Hold on, I’m looking something up. . .

Yup, some asshole used the phrase “Rogue One puts the WARS in Star Wars.” Fuck that guy. And fuck his editor. The weaklings.

James Kislingbury is a writer, a podcaster, and a collector of very specific arms and armor from 1941-1945. If you like this and want to support things like this, take a stroll on over to his Patreon. It supports his podcast and, in turn, supports him. Think about it, why don't you?