“Left with No Choice” – by Left, with No Choice

Greetings to the People’s Republic of the Internet! This is Left Thumb reporting for duty. It’s been far too long, I know, I know. As I wander back into the hypothetical and strictly mental office space of the Thumbs—remember, we were always pressed for funding because SOMEONE never donated*—a few thoughts pop into my head.

First, it’s really dusty around here. Seriously, it’s about as dusty as the part of Ayn Rand’s brain where thought occurs—that’s how long since we’ve really poked around in here, aside from some of Right Thumb’s self-styled “solo projects.”

Speaking of those solo projects—that was the second thought. It happens to be the Christmas season presently, which means I recently watched the incomparable classic It’s a Wonderful Life. And when I look back at all the recent Star Wars posts I can’t help but think:  this is like Clarence giving me a glimpse of what the blog would look like if I had never been born. Don’t get me wrong—Right Thumb is an indispensable half of the greatest dynamic duo ever to grace the planet.** But without both halves, the cozy, all-American Bedford Falls that is Two Thumbs Sideways shrinks into something more like Pottersville, a pale and perverted imitation of itself where everyone ends up kind of cranky.

With that in mind, here’s what I don’t have to offer you: 1) a good excuse for my three-year absence; 2) a joint post, which is really what this blog needs so desperately; or 3) a satisfying explanation for why monkeys do not ride goats off into the sunset. 

But here’s what I do have to give, in increasing order of importance: 1) a bite-size reflection on the greatest movie of the season, It’s a Wonderful Life; 2) a respite from Right Thumb’s sanctimonious slashing of subpar Star Wars films; and lastly, 3) your long-awaited dose of classic Left Thumb wit, whimsy, and wonder. I promise the rest of this post won’t be quite so self-referential and self-reverential. At least, I’ll try.

Question posed: Why do we love George Bailey so much?

Admit it: you love George Bailey. If you don’t, just stop reading. There’s no point in continuing because too many of our basic conceptions concerning reality are so out-of-sync that we can have no meaningful conversation whatsoever. Everyone loves George Bailey. If you don’t, you’re officially not part of “everyone.”

There are the obvious reasons, of course. He’s likeable, he’s funny, and he can apparently dance the Charleston pretty well. And of course, he’s Jimmy-freaking-Stewart, which always helps. Even when our man Jimmy plays an obsessive acrophobic stalker in Vertigo, we still like him. He’d probably even be likeable if Michael Bay had directed every single one of his movies, and the entirety of his screen time consisted of him slowly walking away from massive explosions—without looking back. (Actually, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but that’d be pretty awesome.) Still, in the case of George Bailey, there are deeper reasons at work, of which I’d like to point out just two.  

Numero eins: George is someone to whom virtue does not come easily. He drags his feet all the way to his own sainthood, and we drag our feet with him. We feel his pain as his dream of attending college dies—not once, but twice.  We feel the guilt-tinged disappointment when he and Mary skip their own honeymoon to keep the Building and Loan afloat. Opportunity after opportunity for escape eludes him and it eludes us. The pain of sacrifice is palpable even as we know exactly what needs to be done—and even though we know it will end up better in the long run. It still hurts, and that rings true. George’s reluctant heroism is in contrast even to some of Stewart’s other most notable characters on screen. Mr. Smith, the hero of the “other” Capra/Stewart classic, is such a good guy through and through that he feels somewhat saccharine—the conflict is purely external, between Smith and the corruption in D.C. The drama comes from how out of place he is, not from any real internal struggle or journey. Kind of like if there were a movie about Right Thumb calmly becoming a lumberjack and growing a big bushy Bunyon-beard. Please, dearest internet—someone make that movie.

Number deux: George is constantly taking one step forward and two steps back. In his early twenties he rightly calls out Potter for his nefarious scheming, but later in life is almost willing to take a job from him. He seems fairly happy at points with his marriage, children, and friends, but when the excrement hits the proverbial air-conditioner, all the old demons come back, and he starts wondering if his life has amounted to anything at all. The promise of the “other life” he (and we) could be living never fully leaves him alone despite knowing it to be a fantasy. George has no great momentous conversion experience that settles his doubts once and for all, never to return. (At least, not until the end of the story, but that is more or less due to divine intervention which is kind of the whole point.) Again—it rings true to reality. For example, I used to operate under the illusion that when a person committed their life to prayer—say, oh I don’t know, in a Carthusian monastery—they become holy and never looked back. They certainly would no longer be the kind of people who were preoccupied with washbasins and things like that. But then I watched Into Great Silence and I realized that during our time on this side of the grave (which, if you're a Trappist, may not be long if the Carthusians have anything to say about it), we will always be fighting our own foibles and flaws. Right Thumb and I will always have to struggle with pride based on our superior intellects, and our blog cover models will have similar issues with their delirious good looks. It’s just the way it is, and George Bailey helpfully reminds us of such important things.

So, that about sums it up. Are these groundbreaking thoughts? Surely not. But remember that It’s a Wonderful Life does not require groundbreaking thoughts. It is that which we break ground in order to reach.***

Yours in peace, love, and Battlestar Galactica,

<<  L % E /\ F + T -<>- T * H {} U ~ M # B  >>

* That someone is you. Just in case you were wondering. If you’d like to repent of your miserliness at this late hour, feel free to send a check our way. Send it MY way, actually, as Right Thumb actually has what they tell me is called a Paying Job™ and seems to add a few inches to his plasma screen every week or so. I, on the other hand, subsist on mozzarella sticks and hopeless dreams. Anyway, just be sure to put “Left Thumb’s Corner Office Fund” in the check memo. Alternatively, “Search for the True Academician” still works.

** Condolences to the following runners-up: Batman and Robin, Han and Chewie, BCATSK (Right Thumb might disagree with that one…heh), Mario and Luigi, Michael Jordan and Scotty Pippin (it’s always amusing to see how many family members faint when I use a sports reference), Sherlock and Watson, KD and Russell Westbrook (for those still standing), peanut butter and jelly, and Calvin and Hobbes. Sorry, not sorry.  

*** I thought this line was a pretty profound ending for such a sapient piece of prose, but Right Thumb sadly informed me that it’s only a step above the great tragedy of Miracle on 34^th Street: “Which is worse: a lie that draws a smile, or a truth that draws a tear?” For that, friends, I am truly repentant. 

Rogue One Was Weird.

 

 

Warning: there are as many spoilers in this post as I could fit.  I tried to put a few more in, but the internet started to crash so I left it as is.   

One year ago, I was working on a merger involving two health care-related businesses, and I left an office Christmas party early to go watch a new Star Wars movie.  This year, I am working on a merger involving two health-care related businesses, and I left an office Christmas party early to go watch a new Star Wars movie. The merger is quite a bit higher-profile than last year’s merger, but the Star Wars movie is quite a bit lower-profile than last year’s. Otherwise, my life is apparently on a merry-go-round.

Rogue One is obviously a big, tentpole, blockbuster extravaganza, etc., but there was minimal anxiety. When The Force Awakens came out, there was a sense of hope but also fear that J.J. Abrams would totally screw it up—which, you know, he likes to do. By contrast, Rogue One was mostly upside.  If it was spectacular, cool. If it stunk, well it doesn’t even have a number! Begone you blacksheep illegitimate weirdo stepchild imposter.

Unsurprisingly, Rogue One was neither spectacular nor smelly. Somewhat surprisingly, the overwhelming sentiment—at least pour moi—was how weird it was.  Grand Moff Tarkin, played by Peter Cushing—who is, you know, dead—had a starring role.  Back in the cockpit were Gold Leader and Jek Porkins and all of the Rebel pilots who we first met at the Battle of Yavin.  Princess Leia, who hasn’t been young in a long time, was suddenly young again. Darth Vader, who hadn’t done much more than shout “Noooooooo!” in the past thirty-three years on screen, was again a presence.  The film interlaced these characters into the story as best as it probably could, but after having memorized every inch of the Original Trilogy over the course of hundreds of viewings, there was no way to hear (and see!) Gold Leader, Red Leader, etc., without being wrenched out of the in-film universe.  

And it was probably not a good sign for the movie that the things I remember most are the things the movie did not create—i.e., Vader, Tarkin, the Rebel pilots, Leia, etc.  The “new” characters were unmemorable (with one exception, see below), and the story dragged out of the gate and then limped through its grand finale at an uncomfortably slow speed.  For the first time in my Star Wars viewing experience (which is… pretty extensive), I was, at times, bored.

To be sure, there were some cool moments.  I liked the Star Destroyer floating over Jedha City.  Le Chiffre played Galen Erso well.  Mon Mothma was great.  And Gareth Edwards should be the only person allowed to introduce monsters, villains, giant space stations, or really anything, in silhouette behind a cloud of smoke. 

But there were too many unforced narrative errors.  For instance, it had a nice opening scene that set up the main protagonist and antagonist with aplomb.  But then it jumped all over the galaxy showing you things that it was about to explain to you anyway.  There were at least three disconnected scenes with characters we don’t know, doing things we don’t understand, before the Rebel Command explains everything to Jynn Erso.  Why did we have those earlier scenes? What was the point?

There was also the continued compression of time and space that makes the universe small and uninteresting.  In A New Hope, there were scenes on the Millennium Falcon where the characters literally played board games because they were traveling and nothing was happening.  In The Force Awakens and Rogue One, every journey is essentially instantaneous.  There is no sense of the vastness of the galaxy. 

The final battle was interminably long, and very little of it made sense.  I won’t go into the nitpicking here, but from a story perspective, there was no clear goal.  We were promised a Star Wars heist movie, but the movie failed to set up its heist.  Any good heist movie establishes the target, explains the security problems, and then unveils its solutions in clever fashion.  This heist was muddled, at best.  There were obstacles here and there, but they came out of nowhere and their solutions generally involved running back and forth across a beach.  Moreover, the goal kept changing.  First they wanted to steal the plans, then they wanted to transmit the plans, then they did transmit the plans but apparently only one ship got them?  Heists provide a ready-made formula; you shouldn’t need to be asking these types of questions.

More importantly, the movie failed to make me care that all of the characters died.  The problem, of course, is that none of the characters had personalities; none of them even had heist movie personalities.  In most heist movies, you have a planner, a grifter, a technical wiz, an explosives expert, an inside man, etc. Rogue One didn't even get that far. Let’s look at our lineup.  

 

Jyn Erso: sort of the leader?  She is generally bitter about life, and she starts to care about the Rebellion, but she has not a drop of humor or interest to her.

Cassian Andor: the Rebel spy. I have no more to say about him because I searched for a personality and now I'm sleeping.

Imperial Pilot Defector: you’d think he could be the Inside Man, but instead, this “cargo pilot” apparently becomes, in a pinch, a communications expert, a moral authority, and a miraculously cured mental patient.  His only character trait, besides being a plot resolution device, is being weirdly wimpy for a defector.

 Chirrut Imwe: his role is to (1) be blind, (2) mumble a nonsensical mantra about the Force that makes you want to clog your ears with the first thing you can find and if it turns out to have been a half chewed sour patch kid fine just make it stop, and (3) contribute to further ruining any internal universe coherence by using martial arts and a stick to incapacitate armored soldiers holding actual weapons (and did I mention he’s blind?). At least he had a good joke, though.

Baze Malbus: his role is to be large and shoot at things.  A heist movie needs a guy like that.  If anyone else had a personality, his role would be more acceptable.

K-2S0: the comic relief, reprogrammed Imperial security droid. He was hilarious. He did his job. When K-2S0 “died,” I was saddened. There was sadness. It was a moment lacking in mirth.  I don’t think it’s a good thing that the character I cared about the most was the droid.

 

And on the villain side, did someone forget to create an actual character for Director Krennic?  His role in any scene was to be as evil and angry and deluded as possible.  Krennic randomly shot ten Imperial engineers because… that’s what Evil People do!  Of course, the Original Trilogy understood that evil is more insidious and more terrifying when it isn’t irrational, but that kind of nuance has no place in the new millennium, I guess.  If anything, all Krennic did was reveal how much more interesting Grand Moff Tarkin is. 

And that was a general problem: the only characters and moments that meant anything were either pulled directly from the Original Trilogy or had meaningful ties to it.  When Red 5 got shot down in the space battle, that was cool only because we knew that Red 5 had to get shot down because otherwise there is no Red 5 available for a far more interesting character to pilot in a far more interesting battle soon thereafter.  When Bail Organa says he is choosing someone he would “trust with his life,” it’s a great moment, but only because we already know about Princess Leia.  Similarly, when Bail returns to Alderaan, it is a poignant moment, because we know that he and millions of others will soon die there. 

All that said, where the characters failed, the imagery did not.  (In hindsight, I suppose it was predictable that the guy who directed Godzilla would be visually talented but unable to craft a character or weave a meaningful story line.)  There were Star Destroyers, there were AT-ATs, there was the Death Star being constructed, there were shots of the Death Star coming over the horizon, there were awesome shots of the Death Star blowing things up, there was that awesome arrival of the Devastator at the end when it wipes out the Rebel fleet, and then there was:

The Darth Vader scene.  I am wildly conflicted about this scene. On the one hand, it was utterly gratuitous and entirely out of character.  Vader doesn’t concern himself with random Rebel troopers.  His Stormtroopers would have taken care of boarding a Rebel ship, which we know because that’s what they'll do in roughly ten minutes at the beginning of A New Hope.  Moreover, it was previously well understood that Vader’s physical prowess had deteriorated in the many years between Revenge of the Sith and the Original Trilogy.  His duel with Obi-Wan on the Death Star is stilted and decidedly non-acrobatic because Vader had no reason to keep up his skills; he thought all the Jedi were dead, he didn’t know he had a son, and he had a literal Imperial Army to do his fighting for him.  The drastic improvement in Vader’s combative arts between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back was a result of him reapplying himself over the course of years, as he realized that Luke was out there.

On the other hand, holy @#$%!. I mean, holy %#$$@$#^%$&%*%*#$@^%^$%&%^#*%*#%!

And that more or less sums up the experience.  It was weird, mostly gratuitous, choppy, often boring, and it did not make much sense, but holy—

~Right Thumb~     

The Noble Futility of Lightsaber Duels

I rarely (never?) spend an entire post responding to a single article, but this article was about Star Wars, more specifically the lightsaber duels, more specifically their comparative quality, more specifically the way they reflect (or fail to reflect) the moral themes of the films. To say that such an article is in my wheelhouse would be useless, because I don’t know what a wheelhouse is or why it would be relevant, but longtime readers (all six of you) will know that the linked article addresses points that comprise 95% of my Two Thumbs Sideways posts.  To top it all off, the article is good (what were the odds!). But I think he misses one key point. This will be fun.

The article is spot-on in its diagnosis of the thematic impact of the Original Trilogy duels. To be sure, it fails to give the ESB and ROTJ duels the credit they deserve as sumptuous visual feasts.  The ESB duel, in particular, is the closest that Star Wars comes to surrealism (the carbon-chamber platform is more of a dreamscape than an actual physical location), which is pitch-perfect because the duel—as is true of all Star Wars duels—is an expression of a battle of wills, not a mere physical exercise. Nevertheless, the point remains: the OT duels are superb because they mirror and catalyze the character arcs and central moral dilemma: how does one respond to evil? The Original Trilogy’s answer was, of course, love, i.e., sacrifice, self-gift. In A New Hope, Obi-Wan sacrifices himself not only to save the younger heroes but to show Luke—and, to some extent, Vader—that physical dominance is not the path to salvation.  In ESB, Luke refuses to let his friends sacrifice themselves for the Cause; accordingly, he winds up in a disastrous, damaging conflict that, in a stroke of poetic justice, puts his friends in greater danger by requiring them to reverse throttle and rescue him.  Finally, in ROTJ, Luke is willing to sacrifice himself for his friends and his cause, only to be goaded into a violent frenzy—but then, he controls himself and, as acknowledged by the hyperlinked raison d’être for this blog post, he can finally, accurately, name himself a Jedi. And that sacrificial act saves his father and brings down an empire.

The article is also generally correct on the prequel duels, in terms of their failure as thematic points, but the author misses the mark when he suggests the failure owes to the duels’ incorrect themes as opposed to their poor execution.  The author argues that the prequel duels are discordant because they valorize war-like strength and triumph in a saga that, at its core, is about rejecting a might-makes-right worldview. 

But the prequel duels were meant to play directly into those themes.  The leitmotif of the prequels, poorly executed but perceptible in their better moments, was simply an inversion of the Original Trilogy: if self-sacrifice and a rejection of the eternal Jedi-Sith war leads to salvation (OT), selfishness and an attempt to win that war through force of arms leads to destruction (prequels). The most obvious example here is Anakin’s fall, but the more interesting (and lesser developed) failure of the prequels is that of the Jedi. They see the Sith as a violent threat that requires a truculent response. They even hide their own inadequacies from the Senate, the public (and their own members) rather than show “weakness.”  Accordingly, the prequels should show the futility of the flashy, attractive, hyper-violent, and aggressive duels in which the Jedi engage.   

The prequel duels fail to achieve that purpose, but it is a failure of execution, not intent. The most obvious illustration is the utter failure of the climactic Episode I Duel of the Fates.  This is a horrible, rotten, no-good, dumb, disastrous lightsaber conflict.  It is interminable for no reason; has not one word of dialogue (well, okay, it has one: "Noooooo!"); and pits unfamiliar characters against each other.  (I fail to understand even why people think it is visually arresting—the choreography is clunky, the sets are silly and unmemorable, everything is too bright, the whole thing is absurdly contrived—but I digress.)  At the same time, the idea is present that anger, aggression, a will to win at all costs, etc. are, in fact, advantages in a Jedi-Sith duel.  Obi-Wan triumphs only because he gets pissy.

It is easy to take that point—Obi-Wan “wins”—and draw the conclusion that the duel mistakenly grants honor to a might-makes-right aesthetic. But the failure was one of execution, not concept.  For instance, in ROTJ, Luke also  triumphs over Vader due to a sudden fit of sibling-protective belligerence. Yet few viewers would come away from that duel thinking "gee whiz, good thing Luke got all riled up!" Luke's subsequent introspection and rejection of violence, Vader's suddenly pitiable countenance, the Emperor's goading, etc., make clear that Luke's outburst was a mistake, or at the very least, futile. By contrast, Episode I fails to establish adequately that Obi-Wan’s “triumph” over Darth Maul was a pyrrhic victory; if anything, Obi-Wan's aggression in Episode I is accidentally lauded. The ending of Episode I is “happy”—there’s literally a parade—even though later films would reveal that, in actuality, the Jedi, Amidala, the Senate, etc., played directly into Palpatine’s hands. The denouement of Episode I was a triumph for the Sith, not the Jedi. That the movie fails to make this apparent is a fault but not a fault particularly attributable to the duel.

The lightsaber duels at the conclusion of Episode II suffer similar failures.  Obi-Wan’s attempt to tangle with Dooku is a somewhat stilted affair, but if it is seen as a misguided-yet-noble attempt to eliminate the Sith, it has a kind of tragic aspect to it. Obi-Wan loses because he will never win this battle. He is, in a sense, too virtuous to triumph. Unlike the impetuous, emotional Obi-Wan of Episode I, the mature Obi-Wan has control of his emotions; but he cannot overpower Dooku’s sadism and years of darkly festering self-aggrandizement. Obi-Wan has not—yet—discovered the key to defeating the Sith, and so he fails, plain and simple.

Anakin’s attempt to meet Dooku’s aggression with his own is an interesting parallel to Luke on Cloud City. Both father and son hope to “save” their friends, both rely on emotion and physical prowess in combat, and both lose appendages. Each has given in to a Hobbesian, might-makes-right, amoral landscape, and each, being weak, is irreparably damaged. (Both get a second attempt, and their responses are diametrically opposed, but we’ll get back to those.)

These two Dooku duels would probably look better on reflection if not for the disaster that follows them. There is perhaps no more disturbing non-Jar-Jar sequence in Star Wars than that of a ridiculous, two-foot-tall CGI whirlwind out-maneuvering Dooku.  I have no defense for the practicalities of this duel.  Yoda never should have had to duel. His strength in the Force is such that Dooku should have trembled in his wake and never been able to move.

But if we set aside the logical incoherence, the duel is another example of a Jedi in the prequels failing to achieve anything through physical combat.  Yoda is the superior swordsman, but what does that fact accomplish? Dooku escapes, the Clone Wars commence, etc. The major failing of the duel on screen is that it lionizes this failure in its celebration of the “coolness” of seeing Yoda do something other than limp. And for those who wonder why anyone ever thought this was cool, remember that people burst into applause during the original theatrical run. The audience, too, was suckered into the notion that the satisfying and efficacious response to evil is superior physical power.

Returning to Anakin’s parallels with Luke, in Episode III Anakin obtains a rematch with the man who owes him a limb—much as his son would decades later.  Anakin, like his son, is now stronger and more experienced.  Anakin, like his son, deprives his antagonist of a limb(s) in a duel before Palpatine. Of course, the major difference is that Anakin goes where his son refused to go and murders Dooku. This is not exactly subtle stuff, but it is thematically correct. But this duel fails, too, because the trappings are so light as to blow away. The set is obnoxiously fake, the duel arises so early in the film that no stakes of any kind have set in, the score is so unmemorable I barely even remember if there was a score--and, most hideously, Dooku, formerly a scion of elegant, oily, evil nobility, is ruined forever by his entirely unnecessary introduction through a CGI somersault that I wish I could unsee.

The prequel duel that comes the closest to achieving its intended themes is the Anakin vs. Obi-Wan contest on Mustafar. There remains the deeply tragic aspect in that Obi-Wan, paragon of virtue though he is, can never win this duel. He “wins,” but in doing so accomplishes little more than unleashing Darth Vader on the galaxy. Moreover, this duel does a serviceable job of establishing the absurdity of what Obi-Wan is doing. The duel is chock-full of the same acrobatic, whirling, choreographed, samurai-esque skills as the other prequel duels, but on this occasion they are revealed, rightfully, to be pointless. The duel choreographers tried to make it look like the two combatants were essentially mirroring each other—they knew every move, jink, and juke the other had, and no one would ever get anywhere. Reasonable minds can differ, but the heavily-stylized Anakin/Obi-Wan dance number plays that tune for me.

When Obi-Wan and Vader duel on the Death Star almost two decades later, they are still locked in the same never-ending combat that they began on Mustafar and that no one will ever win.  But at this point Obi-Wan finally breaks the standoff by giving his own life, saving the young heroes and proving that he did learn the lessons of the last war. To physically challenge the Sith is, in some sense, to lose. The Sith made conflict their weapon and conquered the galaxy. Obi-Wan, Yoda, and through them, Luke, were only victorious via a rejection of power-plays; it was in giving up material power that they restored the potential for peace.

No doubt, some of the prequel duels are simply indefensible on any level (let’s pretend the Obi-Wan/Grievous thing just never happened), and none of them perfectly strike the nails they were meant to strike. But the seeds are there. As with everything prequel-oriented, it could have worked, which makes it all the more frustrating that it did not.

~Right Thumb~

The Blog Awakens

(Warning: There Be Spoilers Ahead. And Possibly Ravenous Piranhas.)

It’s been a year or three since anyone updated this blog, but the re-release of Star Wars: A New Hope in theaters seems like as good a time as any to get back in the game. They even brushed A New Hope up a bit with a new name and new actors, and I daresay the TIE-Fighters look slightly different. (Okay, cheap joke, but what can I say? Left Thumb is off doing Important Medical Things, and he’s the one who brings the funny to this blog. Except the jokes about closed captioning. Those are all mine, baby.)

My style is more “amateur theological sanctimony applied to pop culture,” but I won’t bother you with any of that nonsense here. For one thing, given how late I am getting around to writing anything down, others have already written interesting things about how Kylo Ren is a (distressing) villain for the modern era, how The Force Awakens is a sign of the decline of civilization, etc. For another, The Force Awakens is more of a beginning than a full story, and it is hard to draw too many moral narratives out of it. (Similarly, twas not A New Hope but The Empire Strikes Back that provided the artistic and moral center of the Original Trilogy.)

All that is left, then, are my thoughts on the movie. Normally I wouldn’t assume those were worth writing about, but so many people have asked me, it is easier to write them down once and link people here.

As a subjective matter, my movie-going experience was incredible. When I sat down in the theater, I could not stop smiling. The possibilities were endless. Even though I fully expected the movie to disappoint me, it hadn’t yet, and it was the first truly new Star Wars movie in my lifetime. The prequels were exciting, but they were a story that we (more or less) already knew. Moreover, I knew I would never have this feeling again: the first truly new Star Wars movie I will ever see. Even if Rian Johnson makes Episode VIII into a masterpiece worthy of a Klingon Opera, it will still not be the first. I'll never again have the feeling of watching those beautiful trailers with X-Wings and TIE-Fighters for the first time. So, disappointment or not, the trailers and opening scrawl made everything worth it entirely on their own.

And then something weird happened. The movie was not disappointing me. The opening scrawl was perfect. “Luke Skywalker has vanished.” Bang. The early scenes focused on what Star Wars has always been about: backwoods, middle-of-nowhere, almost forgotten areas of the galaxy. Star Wars isn’t about sprawling metropolises, even though we know that the galaxy has those. It’s a story about heroes from unlikely beginnings and unlikely places, where the rich and powerful never bothered to look.

Tatooine—err, I mean, Jakku—was a perfect nod back to the original movies. Bombed out Star Destroyer hulks and AT-AT carcasses, without explanation or context, gave a sense of the transformation of the original stories into myths for a new generation. Rey’s daily routine grounded us in the notion that her life was real and probably tedious and not conjured up out of thin air to provide the basis for a cool story. Though there were lots of characters to (re)-introduce, each one was given attention and detail, so the passage of time had actual weight to it. Against all odds, J.J. Abrams—he of the endless smash cuts, frenetic pacing, lens flares, and heavy-handed effects—actually had the feel of Star Wars down.

About halfway through the movie, everything was rolling. The old characters’ place in the universe made sense, and Han Solo’s wisecracks never go out of style. It wasn't quite clear where the story was headed, but that was a good thing. Abrams had said something about how he wanted to return the movies to emotional stories about characters, instead of intellectual explanations of massive social forces, like what (mostly) happened in the prequels. He was succeeding. Halfway through, I was starting to believe that I would exit the theater with all my dreams having come true. (And yes, Star Wars is way, way too important to me.)

Then the First Order blew up the “Republic” with a “Starkiller” and the movie was no longer perfect. Abrams’ inability to tell a story with a sense of time crept back in, as a million things happened at once, in numerous different star systems. Plus, the story stopped making any sense: why is there a Republic and a Resistance? Wait, is the Republic gone now? How do you blow up a Republic that stretches across the entire galaxy…? How did the First Order build an entire solar system-destroying weapon without anyone, umm, noticing? And how come the “Resistance” only started thinking about destroying this weapon now? Mightn’t they have tried a few days earlier and stopped the massacre of all those people on all those planets that were apparently important somehow though it is not clear how? Why does the entire military force opposed to the First Order apparently consist of ten X-Wings?

 

One of the great things about the Original Trilogy is that it left a lot of things unexplained, which gave a sense of breadth and depth to the universe. But there is a huge difference between declining to explain certain details and telling a story that is simply nonsensical. In its first half, The Force Awakens did the former, and it was awesome; in the second half, The Force Awakens dove toward the latter, and it was not awesome.  

Abrams’ need to rush everything particularly weakened what should have been the central moment of the movie. The Han death scene, though decent, should have been … better. It should have been less pre-ordained, less obvious, less catwalk-y. And it definitely should have been dwelt upon for longer than it takes to sum up Donald Trump’s policy positions. When the heroes return to Leia after the battle, there should have been at least a ten minute funeral. Instead, Leia kind of shrugs.

This is Han Solo. He has literally saved the galaxy on multiple occasions. His death deserved more.

And finally, the last scene, I just don’t understand. The story was complete. Imperfect and derivative of A New Hope though it was, the story was enjoyable, it was satisfying, and the next movie still had the biggest poker chip to play: the revelation of Luke Skywalker. The Force Awakens should have ended with Rey and Chewbacca going off to hunt for Luke, not find him. Why would you waste that moment?

Of course, it could be that it all works out. If Rian Johnson does turn Episode VIII into a worthy descendant of The Empire Strikes Back, most of the errors in The Force Awakens will be (basically) forgiven. As I’ve written before--and in fact, linked to before, in this very post--it was Empire, not, the original Star Wars, that made Darth Vader into Darth Vader and bestowed on the Original Trilogy every last bit of gravitas that it has. If Empire had stunk, I highly doubt anyone would remember A New Hope as anything more interesting than Jaws or E.T.—a momentary cultural phenomenon, but nothing that a 26-year-old who wasn’t even born at the time of its release would spend thousands of hours obsessing over.

(…way, way too much.)

So here’s to Rian Johnson. He hasn’t made a bad movie yet and he’s made at least one great one. If he parks Episode VIII, I’ll remember Episode VII as an imperfect but engrossing story that started us afresh and gave us another mid-trilogy masterpiece. Otherwise, The Force Awakens was a fleeting but unique moment of anticipation, anxiety, thrills, irrepressible smiling, and not-quite-but-almostism. Either way, I walked into the theater a jittery mess, and walked out a jittery mess, and it was awesome.

~Right Thumb~

Of Planes, Trains, Automobiles, and the Human Experience

The following is an editorial written by Left Thumb and printed in that noble, Shakespearean paragon of literary beauty that is his student newspaper. This is the original form of the article. What was actually printed was a bastardized truncation of Left Thumb's thought that removed all sublimity, humor, profundity and all other such qualities that are expected of Two Thumbs Sideways. The editors of said newspaper are now decidedly on Left Thumb's "bad side." *

Last week I had the opportunity to visit the city of Boston for a couple of nights. The cause for this visit really doesn’t matter, because I have very little to say about what I did there or what the city is like. Instead, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I got there and how I got around the city. In the course of this trip, I drove my own car to and from Dayton International Airport, flew on four separate airplanes, took various shuttle buses at my connecting airports, and used Boston’s subway system several times.

OK, so what? All of this is about as unusual as an explosion in a Michael Bay movie. Transportation is something we use every day. It’s boring, pedestrian, like brushing one’s teeth or making breakfast.

Or is it? How often do we actually stop to think about how we get around and what it might say about us, either individually or collectively? If I myself am any indication, the answer is almost never.

Driving in a car is often unavoidable, particularly in cities in the Midwest. And indeed I do enjoy the simple pleasure of driving. But isn’t there something about driving a car that can promote self-centeredness, if we are not careful? What matters is only our destination. We choose our own path. We boil with rage when traffic slows us down, or when another driver cuts us off. Again—driving is necessary, and I do it as often as anyone else. But my visit to Boston, a city with an extensive public transportation system, prompted me to think more carefully about the way I get from Point A to Point B.

It is often argued that public transportation is the most efficient and responsible way of getting around. Fewer carbon emissions and a more economical use of resources are often cited in this regard. While these are certainly worthy reasons, I would offer an additional, less tangible benefit to public transit. Taking a bus or subway through a city can shake us from complacent, privileged individualism and allow us to enter into the very lifeblood of our community.

Public transit forces us into a situation where our choices are limited. We cannot choose when the train arrives. We cannot choose our exact path and our exact destination. And perhaps most importantly, we cannot choose what kinds of people travel with us, who sits down next to us and who gets off at our stop. The rest of the day we may play at being rugged individualists, masters of our own destinies, but for this brief period we must sit and wait with everyone else. We actually become part of “everyone else.”

There’s no doubt that this can be alienating. Traveling alone on a New York City subway, for example, can be an exceedingly lonely experience—I am but one among millions. But isn’t this a realization that is worth having every now and then? We recognize that our own lives do not constitute the sum total of reality, and that we live in an enormous human community that does not simply answer to our own private desires. Rather, we are in large part answerable to that community.

Indeed, I think public transit represents a way of truly getting to know one’s fellow human beings. Even without direct conversation, the mere exposure to people from all walks of life—excepting perhaps corporate CEOs in their posh limos, but who cares about them?—can go a long way towards broadening our horizons. We see a cross-section of the diversity that forms our individual communities. A bus ride in Boston is completely different from one in Chicago, which is completely different from one in Berlin.

The point here is not to feel guilty about driving. The point here is certainly not that we are all hopelessly self-centered, nasty, no-good people. I will leave those items to other commentators. My point is this:  maybe it is worth stopping to think about these everyday things that we do, and what they might say about our basic assumptions in life. Maybe, just maybe, it’s worth realizing that the world does not revolve around us. Whether you travel by plane, train, boat, car, horse, spaceship, or unicycle, that’s an important thing to recognize.

> Left Thumb <

* As RT could tell you, that is a very, very bad place to be.**

** RT note: I didn't actually say that. LT is just trying to make himself sound intimidating. 

Jellyfish in the City: Creation, Wonder, and the Beauty of Details

Hey there cyberspace, it's me, Left Thumb. It’s been a long time. How about we sit back, have a root beer and reminisce about old times? You know, back when Right Thumb and I collaborated on great works of art and this blog was a bastion of culture, erudite witticisms, and insightful societal critique rather than a soapbox for RT’s supercilious cinematic pretentiousness and high-minded haughtiness? Remember way back then?

I know, it’s hard.

It may, in fact, seem like an eternity ago. Rest assured, that is a common feeling after reading a RT movie review (or about thirteen of them). And I know you’ve been hearing all kinds of claptrap about my lethargy, insubordination, perfidiousness, treachery, infidelity, buffoonery and all sorts of other nasty nouns of the RT variety. But please, do recognize that in my absence you’ve only been getting one side of the story.* Yes, I may have taken an extended leave. Yes, I may have abandoned you to the clutches of a pedantic Thumb desperate for a captive audience. And I apologize sincerely. Really I do. Please realize, however, that working conditions are not always the best around here.

Take our last post, just for starters. The so-called “editor’s note”? Hogwash. Utter hogwash. You could stick a bunch of pigs in a bathtub and dump soap all over them and the situation would not be nearly so hogwashy as that editor’s note. Imagine a situation where someone sends you a blog post that is essentially complete unto itself and asks you to write your half of it. Hard to do, for starters, because it’s already fully written and you weren’t there in the initial stages of the thought process. You also haven’t watched the TNG episode in question in years. But you do your best because you always do, and add as many charming jokes as you can in addition to some of your own thoughts about the topic. Then imagine that the original author takes a bunch of your bits out without telling you and changes a bunch of other bits, and then posts it with a snarky note about how you really did almost nothing. How would you feel? And that’s but the last of a long list of such incidents, folks.

Although, in the final analysis, I guess I should be fair. If I was under threat of death (If, say, Michael Bay angled a camera at my head.**) I would have to admit that this blog would be… well… dead if it had two Left Thumbs. Very, very dead. So I will stop railing about this and talk about something constructive and wholesome. You know, something totally unlike Ayn Rand’s birth.

I took a recent trip to a large city where Right Thumb is supposedly gainfully employed with one of those new-fangled things they call “fellowships”.*** This city happens to be home to some of the best museums in the world, containing some of the most marvelous art, artifacts, and artifice to be found this side of a Nicolas Cage historical action movie with a title vaguely similar to Country’s Bounty. (I wouldn’t want to name names.) Two in particular had great impact on me: the art gallery and the natural history museum.

The art gallery was home to some very well-known works, the kind to which tourists flock and take teen-ish photos in front of, complete with “rock on” gestures and can-all-of-you-out-there-on-Facebook-believe-I-was-actually-right-here smiles. These few superstar paintings tend to funnel all the museum traffic and detract attention from, well, everything else. It struck me that this is something of a tragedy. Don’t get me wrong – I am as impressed by the A-team of Western art as anyone else. I won’t deny there’s a particular sublimity to be found in the Alba Madonna that’s not found in just any paint thrown on a canvas. And truthfully I’m as much of a culprit as anyone. (Why yes, I will trample old ladies in motorized wheel chairs if it gets me a better view of Starry Night…) But the tragedy occurs when these highlights seem to edge out and reduce to irrelevance all other works in the museum. It would be like picking out the six or seven best episodes of Star Trek and then acting like none of the others are worth even one of Michael Dorn’s nosehairs. For example, there are a number of Renaissance statues in the portico on the way to the Alba Madonna, mostly by unknown artists, but each possessing a unique beauty as envisioned by its respective creator. How many people actually stop to look at these “lesser” works, and notice the care and dedication embodied within? I know I usually don’t. But this time, breaking my usual pattern of star-sighting, I focused on a particular statue tucked away in a corner, and reflected on the great complexity of its design. At some earlier date, its sculptor had to think about every last detail I was taking for granted as I observed it; every last fold of the drape, every curl in the hair. It all mattered. It all counted.

A similar phenomenon takes place in nature, I think; or so it occurred to me at the natural history museum. Everybody loves elephants and dinosaurs. Everybody loves gigantic diamonds. These things are big, they are eminently noticeable, and they are exceptional. But what about deep ocean marine life? It’s buried under thousands of feet of water, largely unnoticed. And yet to my mind the comb jelly (pictured above) is as interesting and remarkable a creature as any. Much like Right Thumb’s heart whenever you put on something directed by the Coens, it actually lights up. It glows. It can eat ten times its weight in a day. There are untold scores of these creatures that are just down there, all the time, unnoticed, indifferent to the world – but no less astounding. Other marvels include the brittle star, the nautilus, or just any old coral for that matter. I would go so far as to venture that even grass becomes interesting if you actually look at it instead of just looking past it. When you take a step back to soak in the “whole” of nature, a splendid symphony will invariably reveal itself to you. But to witness this, you have to be willing to notice the humblest of creatures in addition to the celebrities. Velociraptors, woolly mammoths, and precious gems are a few singular sparks of interest in nature, admittedly sparks that burn particularly brightly; but if we focus exclusively on them, we miss the rest of the fireworks show.

This feeling of wonder followed me out of the museums. I couldn’t escape it! No longer could I look at a staircase and see a simple staircase; instead, it was a something that someone, somewhere, sometime had planned, preferred to other designs, and executed. Raphael shared the genius of nature; the Alba Madonna mirrors the comb jelly in its beauty, design, and sheer interestingness. But so too do we all share in the genius of Raphael every time we build something, plan something, decide on the look and make of something – even if it is a forgotten staircase in a dusty corner of a deserted cafeteria in the basement of a train station.**** One is given center stage at a premier art gallery; the other is tread upon but ignored. Does that negate its beauty? Indeed, upon inspection, it was a well-designed staircase with attractive rails and flowing contours. The fact that nobody ever notices that at a conscious level does nothing to change the effort poured into its creation.

In a city this effect is blown up to epic proportions. Now, Right Thumb may think himself a neat-necked city-slicker and look down his cold Roman nose at old-fashioned country bumpkins like myself, but I think that urban life may often have the regrettable side effect of inuring us to the beauty of the ordinary. When you encounter forty-five different staircases on the way to work, of course you aren’t going to stop and notice any of them. Heaven forbid you stop to notice a flower. But there is a particular grace that comes from the ordinary, the unnoticed – that which is made with care but is so little cared for, that which sprung from a form of creative love, but is so often unloved.

Many people acknowledge the rose is beautiful, although few enough actually stop to think about it, no matter how many times they may quote the trite truism about stopping to smell them. But even the rose is an exceptional case; it is the Alba Madonna of nature. We should not forget the simple blade of grass, the forgotten rock – or on the human level, the unnoticed sculpture in the corner of the gallery portico. The exceptionally beautiful is just that – exceptional. And if that’s the only place we can find beauty, love, and the work of God, then we are quite simply missing the forest for the tree.

Creation stems from love. God loved the world into being, loved the grass and the roses and even us into being. And in creating things we too participate in that love. What this means is that all we need to do is open our eyes and hearts to see it everywhere – not just in the usual hangouts.

> Left Thumb <

Final disclaimer: My taxonomic conscience is plaguing me, so I must confess, comb jellies are technically not jellyfish but instead belong to the clade Ctenophora. Totally different. But "Jellyfish in the City" just seemed like a better title than "Ctenophores in the City". I know. Bring out the torches and pitchforks.

* TTS only guarantees absolute truth when BOTH of us are around.

** Everything he does this to inevitably explodes.

*** I am somewhat suspicious as to what this word actually means. I think in Right Thumb’s case it may very well refer to a situation in which well-dressed men stand around in an office slapping each other on the shoulder and telling each other what “good fellows” they all are. Also prevalent is the use of the word “jolly”. Customary birthday songs only make the whole affair more jovial.

**** Why this cafeteria was deserted, I will never know. They had very very good chicken sandwiches.

In Defense of III

Every once in a while, I like to challenge myself. Normally, these challenges are simple, like getting an A+ in a pass/fail course, detecting the time dilation from moving sixty miles an hour, or staying continuously upright on a rollercoaster with six inversions. But today, I take on a writing challenge, and perhaps one more difficult than the previously mentioned baubles. I aim to defend Revenge of the Sith, which shall be affectionately referred to in this piece as ‘III’. It is a thankless task, and one that might end with me curled up in the fetal position in a dark corner of a room somewhere, whispering about CGI like it was the One Ring, or with a Montana-sized double chin where the alien parasite resides. Nevertheless, the task is at hand.


It should first be noted that, unlike my other movie reviews, this one will not be in a segmented style where I make note of those aspects of a film which possessed a particular interest regarding cinema, morality, pop culture, or me. III demands more of a narrative, because to understand my defense of III, you have to understand how we got there.


Before the first dollar was spent, III was perhaps the most thematically constrained movie of all time (this seems like hyperbole, but I challenge you to come up with a better example). It was neither the end nor the beginning of the story, it was not a happy ending, everyone knew what was going to happen, and everyone knew what had already happened. In general, I am of the opinion that the middle movie of a trilogy has the greatest narrative advantages. It doesn’t have to wrap anything up, and it doesn’t have to get anything going because all the characters were already established in the first movie. But in III’s case, the movie had both the disadvantages of being in the middle—you can’t really wrap things up, and you didn’t really get a chance to start them—with none of the advantages. III couldn’t leave you hanging like Empire Strikes Back, because there was no more movie coming. The creative loop was closing. At the same time, thanks to the putridity of what had come before it, III couldn’t really rely on the characters having been already set up. They weren’t. III had to be the first, second and third part of a trilogy almost entirely on its own, and it had to do it even while we already knew the ending.


Yet I would suggest that this last point is the saving grace of III, indeed, the whole reason I can’t just throw it in the trash-heap with II or the basically-pointless-heap with I. I do not believe that George Lucas really had his story planned out all that well back in 1976, when they were creating the first Star Wars. In fact, if you have read The Book, you know that he did not. Yet, looking back on it, if you had to tell this story again, this is how you would tell it. You would start in the middle, get to the end, and then work your way back to the beginning.


The Original Trilogy is a salvation story. It is a triumph. It is a bringing back from the dead. Particularly in V, the stark reality of Good vs. Evil, love vs. hate, sacrifice vs. selfishness, Rebellion vs. Empire comes alive. You know the stakes and you meet the characters and by the end of the trilogy, Luke converting Vader is the Right Thing. But you can’t, and were never going to be able to, truly love Vader/Anakin. You love Luke, Han, Leia, Chewie, etc. And you cry when Anakin saves Luke and then dies, not so much because you know anything about him but because you know what it took the heroes to bring this about. They sacrificed, they lost arms, they got frozen, they got shot in the arm (conveniently, with the weakest blaster of all time…), they got cut in half by lightsabers, died in their old age practically alone on distant Dagobah, and their sacrifice brought down the Evil Empire.


The Prequel Trilogy, by contrast, is obviously the tragedy. And tragedies are always more tragic when you see what’s coming. You want to reach through the screen and twist somebody’s arm until they recognize what is so plainly obvious to you, the viewer. And in this case, Anakin’s eventual fall into evil is obvious because we, the viewers, already know it is going to happen. And this is where III shines.


Anakin’s descent into darkness, and the tragedy which follows, is easily the highpoint of the film. Aided by John Williams’ haunting score (say what you will about him copying other composers and even himself, his Star Wars music is always fantastic, and it is best in V and III), Anakin marches into the Jedi Temple and starts killing people left and right, and thousands of Jedi meet their deaths in a montage with more fatalities than your average Godfather sequence, you cannot possibly feel okay about this. You have seen this coming, and now it is happening, and you couldn’t stop it. The Jedi all die. The Republic dies. Anakin walks into a room full of children and turns his lightsaber on.

III accomplishes this feat of tragedy despite the fact that the set-up was unmitigatedly terrible. Though often castigated for the wrong reasons, I does basically nothing to shepherd the Anakin story along. The only important part of the story is that he loves his mother. Surely, that could have been accomplished in less time than an entire movie. II, although it gives Anakin his love interest, makes him such a whiny brat, and completely aloof from Obi-Wan, that III had to spend an hour artificially—and, of course, badly—attempting to brainwash us into believing that Anakin and Obi-Wan like each other. Sure. Suuuure they do.

While the crapitude of II was entirely George Lucas’ fault, if we take II’s crapitude as a given, I’m not sure what else he could have done to save III, then what he did: throw away the first half of the movie trying to pretend I and II never happened, and then hit us with the big emotional guns, bring in the swelling music, and roll curtains. In some sense, Order 66 was the prequels. The Prequel Trilogy was the Fall to the Original’s Salvation, and Order 66 was the Fall in a nutshell. Everything goes wrong at once. Anakin lets everyone down at once. Vader’s selfishness tears a galaxy asunder, and it does so not only with the score haunting us, but with the memory of the Original Trilogy crystallizing in front of us. The Vader/Anakin pain and suffering which will be released in VI's emotional finale looms large over everything.

In a reversal of the Original Trilogy, Anakin does exactly what Luke did not do. In V, Luke, against the wishes of his betters, runs off to Cloud City to save his friends, and there confronts a more powerful Sith Lord. Luke gets in over his head, and finds himself down an arm. But he doesn’t take that last step toward Hell; he would rather die than do that. Similarly, Anakin, against the wishes of his betters, runs off to the Chancellor’s office in an attempt to save his wife, and there confronts a more powerful Sith Lord. He gets in over his head, but instead of refusing that final step toward evil, he chooses himself over others, and Mace Windu ends up down a hand. Order 66 follows, and the tragedy ensues.

The weaknesses of III are copious, but I think they all stem from elsewhere. Anakin’s sudden reversal is often criticized as being too quick, and unbelievable. I think this is not the result of Anakin being too quick to change, but too slow. The transformation seems weird because it is an odd time to do something so dumb. Oh, now you decide to turn on the Jedi? Now you decide that they’re all evil? I and II spent so much time trying to make Anakin a fear-ridden, angsty, wreck of a human being that his “Fall” ends up seeming too much in character. A fall should be a FALL, all caps. The strangely crappy personal interactions between Anakin and Obi-Wan, Anakin and Palpatine—these are also products of the fact that III is too late to be doing this. The first two movies should have been making Anakin out to be the Wonder Boy who can do no wrong, feared by bad guys, admired by good guys, and lusted after by Palpatine. Instead, the first two movies did… none of that.

The signature awful moment of III, Vader’s comical “NOOOOOO!!!” near the end, is also a product of bad preparation. We never believed in Anakin and Padme’s love for each other, because it was, for lack of a better term, stupid. How could Padme be surprised by anything this guy does? She knows him better than us and even we know he’s a puerile loose cannon who would just as well wipe out a camp of sentient beings if he felt like it or if the script called for it. And she’s surprised when he goes Sith crazy…? Meanwhile, Anakin’s “love” for Padme is completely disingenuous. He even uses words like “intoxicating” to describe his attitude towards her. Padme to him is a drug to quench his appetite for companionship, and a spectator for his braggadocio. After killing Jedi kids, it seems like “finding a new muse” wouldn’t be that big a deal to him. So, to make us think that Vader really cares about her, we get the gratuitous scream. Notice how Leia didn’t need to scream when Han got frozen because… ummm… we believed that she loved him?

Again, though, these faults are faults that III was saddled with, and did not entirely overcome. They aren’t of III’s own making. Even then, for at least a few minutes, during Order 66, III did overcome them. Darth Vader is a tragedy. The horrors that the Original heroes will one day sacrifice life and limb for are the result of a deep, dark shadow cast by this terrible moment. If III can do that, even with all its failings, and even while having to make up for all the failings of I and II, it is doing something right. I think it does. I think the helplessness and inevitability (and did I mention the score?) make the purge of the Jedi about as well done as it could have been.

Of course, III did a lot wrong. A non-exhaustive list: Natalie Portman’s "acting." That ridiculous lightsaber duel between Yoda and Sidious. General Greivous. That ridiculous lightsaber duel between Palpatine and Mace Windu. The completely pointless Kashyyk battle. That ridiculous scene where Palpatine kills three Jedi without any of them so much as bothering to resist. (I think the moral here is: don’t give Palpatine a lightsaber).

I think my defense of III, then, is that it has the soul of what the Prequels were supposed to be, even in spite of all the multitudinous failings. The grandeur, the epic catastrophe, the horrible pit that develops in your stomach—ever so briefly, this all happens. It could very well be a testament to the Original Trilogy’s greatness. Maybe it is our leftover sense of wonder at what we know comes next that imbues III with tragedy. Maybe it is really a faint shadow of what III could have been that makes what III was worth watching. I’m not sure I would argue with that.

Until he turns his lightsaber on. Then I am utterly convinced that for at least twenty minutes, the alien parasite in his chin fell asleep, and George Lucas remembered how to make a movie.

~Right Thumb~