Passing the Badge

“I don’t know what’s out there beyond those hills,” revealed sheriff Wylie Burp to his protege Fievel, gazing out at the sun as it set behind Monument Valley. “But if you ride yonder, head up, eyes steady, heart open, I think one day you’ll find that you’re the hero you’ve been looking for.”

Much of the sequel trilogy revolves around young people in search of old heroes to save them, only to realize in the end that they themselves were the heroes all along. It’s about passing the torch on to the next generation, making peace with the past, taking the best of it with you, and then moving on.

And just as neoliberalism in the real world created a new wave of fascism that young people today now have to fight, the sins and mistakes of the previous generation in Star Wars also weigh heavily on the next. The Sith have returned and a new empire rises; but to the credit of characters like Luke, Han, and Leia, they are willing to give up their lives in order that the kids of the Resistance stand a chance. In contrast, the First and Final Order are led by the likes of Palpatine and Pryde, relics of old wars that refuse to die and who’ll exploit every last bit of (and extract every last drop of) youth they can in order to stay in power forever themselves.

When Finn reveals that BB-8 is carrying a map to Luke Skywalker himself, the Force themes plays in the background while the camera then focuses on Rey’s face. She quickly turns back to look at Finn, eyes widening, excitedly and innocently whispering “Luke Skywalker? I thought he was a myth!”

She has grown up enamoured with his, Leia, Han, and Lando’s stories from decades before, and is thrilled to discover that, as Solo later reveals, it’s “All true”. It underlines the importance of these characters for the downtrodden of the galaxy far, far away; providing hope to those in despair. Indeed, as is often stated, hope is one of Star Wars’ most important themes, maybe the most important for some. But one might ask, what is the point of hope if everything just falls apart in the end? If characters die from one trilogy to the next and others go off-the-rails, or if republics fall and empires rise once more, why bother getting out of bed in the morning? Why bother holding onto hope?

Apparently, the original ending of The Shawshank Redemption was on the bus with Red whispering “I feel like a free man at a start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.” Later a ‘happy ending’ was tacked-on where he actually meets Andy Dufrense on the beach, underming the central theme of the film which was, indeed, hope. Hope is, as Leia once claimed, something you have to believe in even when you can’t see it. We had to believe that Red would meet Andy again, we didn’t necessarily need to see their embrace on the beach of Zihuatanejo. It’s hope and the possibility of escape that keeps Andy alive in prison, and it’s hope that gets Red on the bus instead of ending up like Brooks. Maybe he won’t meet Andy again, but it doesn’t matter. He inspired Red not to allow himself to become institutionalized, explaining that you either “Get busy living” or “Get busy dying”.

This might be a lesson that Star Wars can articulate better today than it could back in the 70s and 80s due to there simply being more movies now. The lesson that conflict is cyclical, that wars aren’t bloodless, that life is ephemeral, but that hope is a thing needed to inspire new generations to rise up and try to finally break the loop, that the GFFA itself might one day escape ‘star wars’ in the same way Rey escaped Jakku; and that another thousand years of peace is possible. Hope is what keeps people chugging along everyday, dreaming of a new and better world that may or may not arrive. It’s the thing that encourages people to ‘get busy living’ whatever happens. It is, as Andy Dufresne says, the best of things.

After gaining possession of the saber, Rey presses forward in order to find the man whose adventures provided an escape for years on Jakku. But when Rey offers Luke the saber, attempting to pass it back up a generation, she’s dumbfounded when the old Jedi master throws it over his shoulder and almost into the sea before walking away in the opposite direction. This wasn’t something she’d planned for. Even worse, he’s reluctant to train her. Having lost all of his students and with the temple now gone, he has apparently retired to the island. Importantly, though, he doesn’t completely destroy his sunken X-wing, which might suggest a secret hope equally submerged inside of him that he would still somehow, one day, leave the place. However, as far as Rey is concerned, he’s not the hero of those old stories she loved as a child. At least, not anymore. He’s ‘busy dying’.

While war is at the forefront of it, to best understand Star Wars characters I think you have to read it primarily as a Western. Yes, a lot of other genres are thrown in there, too, but it often goes back to its roots. Luke in The Last Jedi then is the drunken old sheriff that’s made mistakes, fought one fight too many, and has had enough. Rey is the young gun that’s sent across the frontier in search of the legendary gunslinger, only to find him flat out in the front of the saloon. This is a common trope. In True Grit, young Mattie Ross finds and tries to employ deputy marshal Rooster Cogburn to hunt down and bring in the man that killed her father. He’s old, surly, half-blind, and it’s hard to get him to agree to help.

It’s fascinating, too, how similar the plot of Mad Max: Fury Road and The Last Jedi are. Both feature a long chase, with the war rig in Mad Max being hunted by Immortan Joe and his war boys, while in Last Jedi it’s the Resistance fleet being hounded by Snoke and his ‘war boys’. But they also both feature a mythic hero from the late 70s that is unkempt, lost their hope, and exiled themselves to the wasteland, mentally cutting out the voices of the ones they let down. But they remember their true selves again by the end of the tale, their name and legend, and gain some sort of redemption.

Even in random old cartoons like the sequel to An American Tale, Fievel Goes West, the titular character reads dime store novels on Wylie Burp, apparently the greatest ‘law dog’ in the West. He wears a cowboy hat like Wylie, much like Rey with the X-wing helmet. But when both actually meet their heroes, they don’t turn out to be quite what they had in mind. Their disappointment matches the audience’s disappointment. They’re fallible like the rest of us.

When Luke Skywalker appeared at the end of season two of The Mandalorian, many stated that “This is the real Luke” as opposed to the person that appears for much of The Last Jedi. Many were as disappointed in real life at the way Luke was written as much as Rey in-universe was with the antics and behavior of the same man who once saved the galaxy. But it could be argued that Luke had to be that character —the legend — in The Mandalorian before he could fall and build himself back up again. But some didn’t need confirmation of his heroism and struggle to accept that Luke would ignite a blade against his sleeping nephew, or would have just left the fight against Snoke to others.

If anything, it asks fundamental questions again of our relationship with ‘heroes’ and why we seemingly need them to remain as a kind of pure abstraction, or an unblemished thought in our heads. On some level, we see ourselves in them. Other times, we like to believe we are them. And when they don’t turn out to be what we wanted or needed, the rage can be destructive.

But if we ignore or remove the tortured side of a Luke or a Rey, does the whole thing just become a power fantasy, and our heroes, action figures? Did Luke so believe in the fantasy in the end that he was incapable of dealing with the fallout when his powers failed him? But should people even need heroes like him to begin with? In a better world, probably not. We often want them to come to the rescue, when maybe we can only save ourselves.

Or perhaps it really is all about those cool Gucci boots.

In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ranse Stoddard takes credit for killing a surly cur terrorizing the town and becomes a US senator off the back of said fame, even though it’s Tom Doniphon that secretly cut him down. Stoddard isn’t happy resorting to violence to get things done as he’s a laywer and believes the courts should decide. He wants to ‘civilize’ the frontier despite it being won through bloodshed. Stoddard later confesses all to a journalist who then proceeds to throw the confession into the fire, explaining that “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”. When asked if he agreed with this sentiment, director John Ford replied in the affirmative, adding that “People need heroes”. But it’s a fairly reactionary idea that the only way to keep a society running or to instill hope in people is to lie to them. Others might argue that, sometimes, you have to lie in order to tell a certain truth.

In a key deleted scene from The Last Jedi, Luke leads Rey to believe that the caretaker’s village is under attack, causing her to go rushing across the island with saber in hand, only to then realize she’s been had. She confronts Luke afterwards and admonishes him, adding “That old legend of Luke Skywalker that you hate so much, I believed in it. I was wrong!” Close to tears, Rey storms away, blindsiding Luke. She’s disappointed even further when she learns that he might have helped push Ben Solo to the dark side. They fight, and when he won’t take the saber again, she leaves him behind; deciding to take matters into her own hands instead. Luke laments to Yoda shortly afterwards that he can’t be what “she needs me to be.” But the old Jedi isn’t keen on losing her, dismisses his failures, informs him that he should still pass on what he has learned, and that “We are what they grow beyond, that is the true burden of all masters.”

How and when we first become acquainted with characters in stories can forever colour our perception of them and how we think they should appear in other media. Indeed, if the prequels had somehow been released first and the originals second, would we be as receptive to Obi-Wan just dying in A New Hope after a short saber duel with Vader considering everything we saw on Mustafar, or of Yoda’s portrayal in Empire Strikes Back? Like Obi-Wan, he failed and went into exile, too. And while his departure is explained at the end of Revenge of the Sith, would people accept that he just stayed on a planet for twenty years and never tried to fight the emperor a second time? In fact, he never physically leaves Dagaobah at all, and doesn’t even have one last lightsaber battle. But because the originals came first, and we had no idea who Yoda was beforehand, we just see it as part of the story. Yet because we met Luke as a young hero first, and an exiled, broken down master in The Last Jedi second, it’s more jarring. If it’d been the other way around, we’d likely just accept him as given in Episode VIII. That’s maybe why the version that appears in The Mandalorian is more readily accepted. He’s more in keeping with the hero Luke we have in our heads from the original trilogy than old man Luke in the sequels who made mistakes decades later and ran away. We want and need him to be the former, but he himself worries that he can’t be that to us anymore.

But after he viewed Leia’s message to Obi-Wan aboard the Falcon, there is a lingering sense that he must contribute something. It’s only then that he decides to start training Rey. He has, in a fashion, become the Obi-Wan of this tale now; and when he goes back to Leia, he kisses her on the forehead, being the only one who answered her and the Resistance’s call for help.

Much like Rooster with Mattie, just when Rey had lost faith in him, Luke returns and faces the music. Both heroines searched for a man with “true grit”, and found them. But unlike Rooster, Luke doesn’t want to lay a finger on his adversary, so finds a work-around. He goes out and faces Kylo Ren to give the Resistance time to escape on the Falcon just as Obi-Wan fought Vader long enough to give Luke and co. a chance to flee from the Death Star in A New Hope.

In that moment, however, there are two Luke Skywalkers in the galaxy. There’s the one who never left the island and dies while watching the twin suns set, and then there’s the Luke who actually took the blue saber from Rey at the start of the movie when she offered it, and did indeed ride to the rescue much like he does at the end of season two of The Mandalorian. The man perishes, but the myth lives on to inspire hope in the galaxy again.

Burkowski wrote in The Laughing Heart that “You can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes.” In Star Wars, as we witness characters like an Anakin or Luke Skywalker, or even a Ben Solo, die yet become one with the Force, we realize that they found personal redemption and hope again, and, while not cheating death itself, managed to cheat death in life.

When we see the kids on Canto Bight playing with makeshift action figures and recreating the battle on Crait, we realize the story has spread across space; yet we’re left wondering if they or the denizens of the galaxy know the full story or have learned all the lessons contained within. Yes, Luke helped save the Resistance, but do they know that he helped create Kylo Ren, too? That he failed once? That he was afraid? That he was exiled on the island? That he wouldn’t return even after hearing the Republic was destroyed? That he once wanted the Jedi to end? That he wasn’t physically there on the Crait?

Maybe the storytellers in the GFFA are just ‘printing the legend’ because they, too, feel that people need heroes no matter what. Perhaps if one of them told the whole truth, someone in the audience listening might say “That’s not my Luke Skywalker!” in response. Whatever’s the case, the person who has learned the lessons in-universe and has a more rounded view of Luke’s life is also — luckily enough — the same one that’s supposedly going to train the next generation of Jedi.

The galaxy surely knows that Rey is the one that actually got the Resistance off Crait. Zorii Bliss reveals that she’s heard of her, and adds that she’s “OK” in her book, while her droidmsith Babu Frik sends a message to Kef Bir referring to Rey (and perhaps her comrades) as the “last hope”, with the mantle now beginning to shift from Luke to her. But when Rey feels that she’s repeating some of the same blunders as Luke and suffers the same existential crisis as he on top of her own identity issues, Luke appears as a Force ghost on Ahch-To. This time, he gives the saber back down a generation, prevents her from making the mistake of going into exile, and passes on what he has learned. The saber itself was not something she had to earn; it belonged to her ever since it called out on Takodana. This is her fight.

When Luke pulls Red Five out of the water and sends Rey on her way to Exegol, the Resistance (and eventually the galaxy) follow in her and her predecessor’s footsteps as she drops breadcrumbs behind the starfighter. When the day is done, and the skies clear over Exegol, she’s celebrated and returns to Ajan Kloss to embrace Finn and Poe. They had become the heroes they were looking for, and had saved themselves. Heroes that will, we hope, not fall in love with their own legend.

If one of the most important themes of the saga is, indeed, hope, then it’s right to end it with a character staring out onto the horizon. It’s right to have them on the bus, and not on Zihuatanejo. We have to believe that things will work out for them in the future, and that they might still make it to the beach some day. But we don’t need to see it. At least, not yet. It all signals that Luke’s time has come to an end and another era has begun, with the title of ‘last jedi’ truly passing to Rey. A Skywalker in spirit, burying old sabers and building new ones. Maybe she, too, will struggle to be a symbol of hope to the galaxy just as Luke did at times. However, if Yoda is right, and she grows beyond, she might avoid the same pitfalls. But that is, as Maz Kanata might say, a story for another time.

“I want you to have one of these” said Wiley Burp, handing his badge over to Fievel. “I can’t” he replied, “I’m not a hero like you! Well, not really”. “Ah, maybe not” Burp continued “Maybe a real hero is the last one to hear about it. But you pulled me out of the gutter, and for that I owe you some thanks. Just remember, Fievel: one man’s sunset is another man’s dawn.”