A Lukewarm Defence of Rian Johnson

 I have never seen "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" and likely never will. I feel I abstained with good reason, and that reason being I saw "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" meaning I fell into the demographic "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" was created for.

There is so much content on Youtube that basically attributes the derailing of Disney's Star Wars to Rian Johnson that it could be classified as a genre of "subverting-expectations-bukkake" (nsfw) however, I for one, tire of how often Rian Johnson's film is credited, angrily or dismissively, as the franchise turning point. Some revisionist history is going on, something significant is being erased.

I present a transitional fossil:

I see him and “I'm like dude force awakens I loved it.” he goes “I hated it

and then we fought for three hours. Like everything he said I had an answer to; he's like “well the plot felt too familiar” and I'm like “familiar like comfort food? like mashed potatoes? You dumb dick yeah that sounds terrible.”

People seem to have forgotten "The Force Awakens" was divisive. This forgotten fact presents Rian Johnson's "subversion of expectations" as a symptom, rather than a cause. If we walk upstream, the underlying cause is that Disney bought Lucasfilm because it was paying undue attention to Star Wars' fanbase. 

This was not a purchase based on artistic vision. It was the purchase of hogs to grind out sausage. The underlying problem was that Disney was not a visionary, but a pollster. 

The Force Awakens is exactly the movie you get from listening to the chatter of fandom. What did the fans want? They basically wanted an apology for the prequal trilogy. They wanted words to be unsaid, words like "midi-chlorians" they wanted Jar-Jar Binks to be erased.

So Disney hired minimally creative and quite competent JJ Abrams to create a soft reboot. 

Sometimes, a band radically changes direction. Bob Dylan plugs in, David Bowie does dance music, Ice-T starts rapping, Beasties Boys start rapping, Green Day add synths, Radiohead go ambient noise, Succubus and Red Hot Chilli Peppers take sedatives, Guns and Roses go Nu Metal. Inevitably this creates "I Like Your Old Stuff Better Than Your New Stuff" fans who don't want to go with the artists, a reaction so predictable Regurgitator could write a song about it for the album Unit where they dramatically switched from Alt-Rock-Grunge to Synth-Pop. 

I have this friend Tommi that had a retort to these kinds of fans which is "you can still listen to the old stuff." which made an impression because it is profoundly wise. 

sequelitis (uncountable)

(informal, derogatory) The tendency of a well-received work to spawn many inferior sequels. ~ from wiktionary

Sequelitis is an ailment not found in the work, but in the fan. It is a form of mental retardation, in the most literal interpretation of those words. A failure to recognize a pattern - as Gabor Mate describes addiction "it isn't the having, it's the getting." We can see sequelitis exhibited amongst the user and consumer base of Nijijourney as they generate a relentless torrent of "anime style" illustrations. These are people that want familiar-novelty. 

AI has much promise for scratching the consumer itch of sequalitis with its incredibly low production costs, the perfect solution however would be a form of selective inability to form memories, so people could watch a movie they love like Star Wars: A New Hope, endlessly without tiring of it. Warren Buffet has asserted that the reason Cola's outsell virtually all the other soft drinks combined is because it has no taste-memory. Something my own practical experimentation found to be true (I haven't drunk Coke in any significant quantity for over a decade) it cleanses the pallet as you drink it, compared to say, parmesan cheese. You can't just keep chowing down on parmesan, you'll get sick of it. 

This happens with Fanta, but not with Colas. Such that, Buffet alleges, if someone drinks 2L of Fanta today, they probably won't drink 2L of Fanta tomorrow. They've scratched that itch. But someone who drinks 2L of Coke today, will drink 2L of Coke tomorrow, because you don't get sick of something that you can only experience the taste of while you are drinking it.

As yet, there is no Cola of imagery, or Audio. 

Fans wanted to see Star Wars original trilogy again for the first time. They wanted a new experience they were guaranteed to enjoy. That's what sequalitis is. And they got it, from JJ Abrams. The problem is you can't please everybody. 

There is going to be a frontier of points a line going from Star Wars IV to Space Balls where something is recognizably Star Wars but also novel. For example, you could remark Star Wars IV shot for shot, but recast every human role with Asian actors, or you could bring back every living actor of the original cast and put them in the same wardrobe and setting but write a whole new story, like Luke's partner leaves him and he enlists Han to fly him around the Galaxy to meet up with all his exes and find out what's wrong with him. 

JJ Abram's took a point on that frontier that is more similar to my former solution - Female Luke, Black Stormtrooper, Lady Stormtrooper, Electro-Baton, Angsty Darth Vader, Bigger Death Star that can destroy a Solar System instead of just a planet. 

This solution scratched some people's sequalitis. Most people's sequalitis. People who don't want a new story in a familiar setting. This is what Disney produces by listening to fan chatter.

However, fan chatter is lose-lose. Fans want an Itchy and Scratchy that is realistic and down to earth, while teeming with robots and magic powers ("Adventure Time"). 

The problem is, that fans of "The Force Awakens" didn't need "The Force Awakens" they could just go watch the original Star Wars again. Sure, some fans of "The Force Awakens" will be activists, who like it for its demographics and so there's going to be some tiny minority that prefer it to the original Star Wars, for reasons nothing to do with entertainment. But for the demographic represented by Brian Posehn, I defy any of them to say "The Force Awakens" is superior to the orginal film. I'm sure, with the tide out, "The Force Awakens" just scratched their sequalitis.

Alas, Disney had a formula, and they stuck to it. Just as they had listened to chatter, thrown out Lucas' outlines for the new trilogy, and given the fans their undeserved apology for the prequals, they now listened to the fans demanding an apology for "The Force Awakens" lack of originality. They hoped to win me back, and rightly. People who enjoyed "The Force Awakens" evidently went to see "The Last Jedi". Whereas, people like me, who just felt Disney's hand in my pocket taking my money for a new coat of paint on a rusted chasis, needed something new story wise.

My brother has sequalitis, and he really enjoyed "The Last Jedi" where I by that stage, resolutely didn't care. My brother illustrates that just as "The Force Awakens" was divisive, people seem to forget that "The Last Jedi" was divisive also. There are people who like what Rian Johnson did. 

Here are 1 star reviews of "The Force Awakens"

And here are 10 star reviews of "The Last Jedi"

Disney, forked themselves. This explains the disaster of "The Rise of Skywalker", the whole problem is that Disney try to give fans what they want. They were fucked, because they did this twice. They gave the fans who wanted something familiar, something familiar, then they gave the fans who wanted something novel, something novel.

What is JJ Abram's best work? One of his reboots? Lost? Super 8? Cloverfield? 

Rian Johnson has made great films. Brick is great. Looper is great. Knives Out was great, Glass Onion...sequalitis. I don't hold Johnson responsible for a character like Rose Tycho, I think perhaps the best defence of Rian Johnson is the character of Rose Tycho. 

Rose Tycho exists because of intersectionality. Because Disney listened to fans who demanded of JJ Abrams an Asian in Star Wars. Disney gave them Zatoichi in Rogue One, and then killed two birds with one stone (intersectionality) by putting in body positive Rose Tycho into Last Jedi. 

Conclusion

Fans are out of control and they need to be put back in their fucking place. They seem to have been encouraged to adopt this misguided notion that they in fact own the Intellectual Property (IP) rights, and furthermore that they own the Intellectuals too. That someone, for the crime of making something they like, needs to keep making things they like. 

Fandom is an issue analogous to gun control. There's this libertarian streak that drives the regulating of a prisoners dilemma.

By this I mean, fans want more. But what is good for fans, is less. Fans had all the entertainment calories they needed with 3 Star Wars films. They already were oversaturated with 6 Star Wars films. George Lucas was wisely regulating them by not producing any more films. Then he sold Lucasfilm to Disney.

Maybe Rogue One is good, I don't care. Maybe the Mandalorian is good. I don't care. Maybe Andor is good. I don't care. I never needed any of them to be made. I don't have sequalitis. To be honest, one Star Wars movie is probably sufficient for me. 3 certainly were satisfying. 

Fans need to be told to eat their fucking vegetables. There is, I'm confident, a silent majority analogous to the majority of adults that see a parent who lets their toddler eat only pizza and chicken nuggets because "that's all he likes" and judge them harshly, that watch the movie industry let grown-toddlers watch nothing but DCMCU, Star Wars and Anime and know it isn't fucking good for them. (The pinnacle of this sad state we live through, is Oscar winning movie "The Joker", where nerds had to be tricked into seeing a Scorsese movie by arranging Broccoli into a clown face.)

Forget a writers strike. There needs to be a producers strike, where Cinema chains and Streaming services alike say "we are going to have Nerd-free months. where no nerd-shit can premier, and you have to watch grown up stories about grown up adults."