Andor

I did not like Andor.

Andor has received rapturous applause, especially from people inspired by its commentary about how fascism establishes itself, and how it can be resisted. Certainly the depiction of cynical provocation in order to label groups “terrorists” and then crush them, seems especially timely.

What Andor lacks, is hope. Precisely the thing that was a key theme of the movie it is a prequel to.

The reason Andor doesn’t work for me is the context, the universe in which it is set. This universe was created for the original 1977 movie for just one purpose: to be fun. It is a boys own adventure playground, exotic locales full of exciting dangers. The deserts are full of ruthless bedouin. The jungles are full of wild hunters. The frozen wastes are full of huge beasts. And in this world we fight exciting wars, copied shot-for-shot from a 1940s movie. All of this stuff made sense in the 30s and the 40s. None of it made sense in the 70s.

And so the movie commits to anachronism. Aesthetically a lot of the sets adopt the look of the 70s. But the people fulfill roles that were already obsolete when the movie was released. Naval sequences show rows of technicians pressing buttons and relaying information by voice. Commanders watch tokens being pushed around maps while surrounded by grease-pencil tactical diagrams. All of this stuff is automatable. But in the real world 1940s it had not yet been automated, so in the movies it can’t be either. And yet… these people don’t just have computers, they have artifical general intelligence. They don’t just have wireless communications, they have faster-than-light wireless communications. They don’t just have automotive vehicles, they have hovering automotive vehicles. The bridge on a star destroyer makes less sense than the steering wheel on Fred Flintstone’s car.

In other words: where is the technological progress in the Star Wars universe? They seem to have all of this technology. But they never actually use any of it, and they never develop anything new.

You could argue that this is the insidiousness of totalitarianism, and I agree! But in the Star Wars universe, the Empire was preceded by thousands of years of the Republic. The good part. How much progress was made then, while the good guys were in charge? Apparently, none at all. All the same hyperdrives and lightsabres were available all that time.

So all of this fighting, all of this bloodshed, is for what? To restore the ancien régime. But not to make life materially better for anyone. You can’t have the “primitive tribe” moving into a village with sanitation and primary education. That would ruin the story.

The Galactic Republic, the good part, the bit we’re supposed to be returning to… sucks. Man. Because it’s the 30s. This is deliberately reinforced in the prequel trilogy, with its art deco styling. But in real life this was the era of gunpowder empires. Most of the world was utterly subjugated for resource extraction, and most of the “free” world was subject to strict social norms. Only a handful of pampered elites were transgendering in caberets. Most people worked in agriculture, and the work was back-breaking and pitiless. In cities, men worked in factories in even worse conditions. This was still a world in the Malthusian trap, with children going hungry even in rich countries. This was still a world where cities required constant immigration because they killed more people than they raised.

And Star Wars shows this. Luke’s family runs a moisture farm. It’s hard work! The humans are working 80 hour weeks, and Luke can’t be allowed to leave because his labour is required. This is a common story… in the 30s. It’s not a story that made sense in the 70s. More widely, we see this everywhere. People are working in fields and factories. Slavery is common and tolerated. Men with clipboards demand checkins. Leaders are surrounded by clouds of clerks. This is how the past looks to us, but in Star Wars it’s also the best hope for the future.

I mean, a moisture farm. That should be the closest thing in the world to free money. Capital-intensive maybe. The machines sometimes need repairing I guess? But we see that the droids can do that. The family is prosperous enough that the droid market coming by is just routine, and they buy two this time. Like, how often do you buy a washing machine? How often do you buy two? These people shouldn’t be salt-of-the-earth poor farmers, they should be middle-class millionaires, and their kid should be on a lacrosse scholarship at college. But… that’s not the setting.

So in this setting, Luke goes off to fight. For what, exactly? For that matter, what were the recent “No Kings” protests fighting for? What is Ukraine fighting for? What are the Tigrayans fighting for? What is the point of any of this?

The standard approved answers are something like, democracy. Freedom. Human rights.

These are terrible things to fight for.

You can’t eat democracy, and human rights won’t keep the rain off. These are abstract, intangible things that are not at all worth really and palpably having your legs blown off for. Nor is it worth watching through your gunsights as the bodies collapse for the sake of any of these things.

What’s worth fighting for, is a full belly. A comfortable home to live in. Medical care you can rely on. Being able to hang out with your friends without being scared. Democracy is worthless unless it can deliver those things.

But democracy can indeed deliver those things. Democracy isn’t the most efficient way to choose the best leaders. Rather it’s a way to get rid of old leaders without the need for a violent revolution. Violent revolutions are what cause the hunger and the disease and the insecurity. Get rid of that threat, and the natural human tendency to build things can take over, delivering the actual improvements to quality of life.

Similarly, we talk about “freedom”, but in the modern industrial context this means the liberal tradition. This says that each individual should make their own way, question every tradition, build their own life principles, decide their own life path. And of course this is the dumbest idea ever. How on earth is a 19-year-old supposed to figure out all of this stuff? When the elders are right there! Just do everything the elders tell you to do. That’s the obvious path to success.

The only way that might not be the best option is if you happen to live in a period of sustained rapid technological change. Only then can you reasonably say that your parents’ experience has nothing to teach you. But if you adopt an attitude of questioning everything, trying out new things, evaluating what’s good and what’s bad on your own criteria, then you can be part of technological change yourself! Then you can profit immensely, benefit the whole of society, and lay a trail for a new generation of innovators all at the same time.

Chants of “democracy” and “freedom” are really shorthand for all of this. We fight for those things because we understand, somehow, that they are necessary tools for the prosperity that we really want.

Or, uh, I think that’s what they are? I think that’s what people are chanting about? Maybe?

Because in the Star Wars universe, that’s not what’s happening. The “freedom” they fight for is the freedom to slavishly occupy your allocated role in society. The democracy they fight for is a system built to keep things always exactly the same. No-one has any hope for material improvement in the future. That would spoil the setting. So what are they fighting for?

In the real world, there is something else that people commonly fight for. National pride.

The new series of Andor largely focuses on the Space French, and there is a particularly climactic and important sequence where the Space French are massacred while singing the Space Marseillaise. This intentionally invokes the famous scene from the, guess what, 1940s movie, Casablanca, in which the real French sing down the real Nazis. The Casablanca scene is the most important and moving scene in an incredibly important and moving story. And yet…

What are the French fighting for in Casablanca? Democracy and human rights? I hate to break it to you but Casablanca, is, like, set in… fucking Casablanca. You guys. At no point in that movie, or the real war in which it was set, was the idea that Moroccans deserved freedom or democracy ever on the table. And the French people had no particular reason to believe that life under Germany would be materially worse than life under the Third Republic. These people weren’t singing the Marseillaise because they believed in democracy. They were singing the Marseillaise because they believed in France.

Or at least, that’s what I’m seeing.

The problem there being, of course, that national pride is also what the Germans are singing about. This is not a promising emotional framework on which to hang our plan for future peace and prosperity. But why the fuck should the Star Wars universe care about that? War is right there in the name.

Every time we get this gorgeous Space Paris set design, with its green and brown Pullman coach aesthetic, that’s what’s being glorified. Empire, resource extraction, stagnation, drudgery, and painful preventable death. Punctuated occasionally by total brutal war.

Even on its own terms, the characters fight against The Empire and then… they lose. Every time. This is where I checked out of the Star Wars franchise forever. We come back to these characters after 20 years to find that The Empire is still there. Wait, what? I thought you got rid of those guys? But no, there they are, same uniforms, same spaceships, and still building Death Stars like it’s no big deal. (Andor goes into some detail that while in unquestioned control of the entire galaxy, Palpatine had to almost destroy everything in his effort to build just one Death Star. But apparently the next two were much easier.) And I’m thinking, well OK, perhaps this is a new thing that just rhymes. That’s what the movie seems to be saying. But then apparently Palpatine survived being thrown down the reactor shaft. Like, he expected that. So none of it, not the Battle of Yavin, not the Battle of Endor, it didn’t achieve anything. Those weren’t victories, they were defeats. Even Han Solo apparently just went straight back to being a space bum.

What’s the point of all of this?

And if we’re supposed to apply the lessons of Andor to our current moment in history, I have to ask, what actually is the point of any of this? Like, maybe Liberalism’s time is just over. Clearly technological progress has stalled. The best thing you can point to is renewable energy like wind turbines and solar cells. But these won’t deliver unlimited energy too cheap to meter, so they won’t result in material improvements to our lives (with the one exception of, perhaps, allowing life to continue at all.) Medicine? Cancer is somewhat less deadly, and we got ARVs against HIV. But we still allowed an entire decile of our working population to be wiped out by a new disease, living with the same terror as our forefathers. Mostly we’re just assigning more people to the job. Phones are faster, but don’t do anything that wasn’t possible 20 years ago. Nuclear power went backwards. Space travel went backwards. Let’s not even talk about the NVidia trifecta of the Metaverse, Bitcoin, and LLMs. Maybe we just ran out of easy technological wins. And if we can no longer count on technology radically reshaping our lives, perhaps we should just give in and tell kids to obey their elders instead of going to school.

Certainly the characters of Andor would probably have all been much better off if they’d just done that.

Of course, Star Wars is not science fiction, it’s fantasy. And this is a problem common to the entire field of fantasy. It’s always reactionary. Usually this is pretty blatant, with its worship of “good kings” and it’s neat division of people into “races”. It’s also implicit in the absurdly elongated timelines, ensuring that technological change is completely ruled out. Notice how Game Of Thrones pushed its Norman Conquest six thousand years before its War of the Roses, instead of the few hundred years in the real world. Even the middle ages produced change too uncomfortably rapid for the story Game of Thrones wanted to tell.

Andor might be the record for anachronism stew, a 2020s remake of a 1970s remake of a 1940s movie, but set in the far future which is also the far past somehow don’t think about it. But it’s rivalled by another extremely popular reactionary fantasy story: Harry Potter. That’s because it’s based on the same 1930s boys own stories as Star Wars, just with a focus on the school story subgenre. And so we get the same Pullman coach aesthetic here – literally, in the case of the Hogwarts Express. But with the modern part of the setting based in the 2000s rather than the 1970s, the fundamental problem is in sharper relief. What exactly is so great about being a wizard? Like, why the fuck would anyone want to communicate by owl if they had a mobile phone? Why is everyone wearing itchy, over-complicated woolen uniforms? Why is everything dark and made of stone? Because the setting demands it. More disturbingly, why are the teachers allowed to treat students that way? Fans didn’t invent Snape/Harry slashfic. You copy the setting from real life, well, real life contains lots of other stuff too you know. But unlike real life, the Potterverse contains no prospect of ever improving. It can’t ever not be the 30s, so it’s stuck in the 30s forever. And it’s grim there.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Contrast She-Ra and the Princesses of Power – surely the greatest work of fiction of any kind, ever. It has two big advantages. One is that it’s a kids show, so it doesn’t have to resemble real life. Second, it’s not really an epic war story, it’s fundamentally a love story. The net result is that the society it depicts, unlike in Star Wars or Harry Potter, does not suck. It portrays a Sylvan idyll. Characters work, but not hard, and they naturally get everything they need. Here we actually do have an old order worth fighting to restore! And the threat is also clear. It’s not just about who occupies the throne at the top. The big bad really is planning to eliminate happiness, and in the case of the characters’ home world that means destroying it completely. No-one’s fighting for food security or medicaid, but they are fighting for the right to love each other. Whereas Andor goes to great lengths to show our heroes sacrificing love for The Cause.

Or look at The Dark Crystal (including the sadly cancelled prequel series). They are explicitly fighting to restore a system of equlibrium and balance, an ecological ideology. The invaders really do not belong on the world, and in the end are happy to leave. This is a story that can end in a satisfying way. I don’t see the Rebel Alliance buying carbon credits for all those X-Wings.

These are great stories, but they’re also not very instructive for this political moment. If we’re stuck with Andor, that’s quite sad. Because the present moment is really kinda complicated, and it’s hard to find a cause to rally around. The obvious candidate is “democracy”, but that’s not actually useful for anything on its own. “Peace” would be great, but what we really need at this historical moment is robust military action to defend human rights and international law, not peace at any cost. “Nationalism” is the other side’s territory. Racial equality is more promising, and BLM was the greatest rallying point during the last Trump presidency. But that’s apparently not quite enough to win a majority. Climate change should be the kicker, but the danger is apparently still too far off for people to appreciate. So we’re basically stuck with stagflation. We’re fighting for economic growth and reasonable prices! Probably not a bad strategy. But if there’s a writer out there capable of tying that into a neat storyline, they don’t work for Disney.