She’s Gotta Be a Skywalker!

30 May 2015:

Well, the second and fuller-length teaser trailer to the new Star Wars movie (Episode VII: The Force Awakens) has been released and it’s so full of goodies and (appropriately-named) teasers, I couldn’t help but weigh in.

In an interview with Paris Match, director J.J. Abrams has made clear that he intends to dodge the unfortunate fate of the prequel trilogy. “La clé est de retourner aux racines des premiers films, d’essayer d’être davantage dans l’émotion que dans l’explication.” Wikipedia translates this as “He said the key for the film was to return to the roots of the first Star Wars film and be based more on emotion than explanation,” but I think any astute member of the fan-base will ‘translate’ this as a political version of his admission that he has put spectacle back into the service of narrative (as was the case with the first trilogy), rather than the other way around, a prequel trilogy decision that led to such disastrous results as the horrible racial-slur embedded in the character of Jar-Jar Binks and the mythology-devastating introduction of “midichlorians” -- an unsatisfying narrative shortcut to explain the extent of young Anakin’s powers. The trailer alone is rich with melodramatic emotion and narrative nostalgia.

The trailer begins with the melodramatic music we all remember from Luke gazing wistfully towards the horizon, lit by the twilight of a twin sunset on Tattooine. The haunting horns under John Williams' conducting glide over a wide-shot of a new (to viewers but in the mise-en-scene obviously quite well-worn) sandspeeder traversing the frame in front of the ghostly images of long derelict remains of a downed X-Wing and a monolithic Imperial Star Destroyer. At about one second in, I’m already heaving with nostalgia.

The scene cuts to black, and a familiar, but long-missed voice, gently pierces the darkness. In an interview before an audience of thousands celebrating the release of the trailer, Mark Hamill stated that the voice-over was a techno-conflation of the same speech from Jedi and a newly recorded version, a brilliant way to marry the nostalgia for young Luke and the older Luke character, now separated by some thirty years in both the narrative and reality.

Repeating the enigmatic speech he offered to Leia in the Ewok village at the moment he revealed to her that they were siblings and that Vader was their father, he begins by noting “The Force is strong in my family.” The scene fades into an image of Vader’s helmet, badly melted from the funeral pyre burning of his corpse at the end of Jedi, and somehow now recovered, accompanied by an echo of the iconic raspy breathing of the iron lung mechanism over which Luke continues, “My father has it…” The moment not only recalls the final events of Jedi, but establishes a link between visual signifiers on the screen and the character to whom Luke refers.

The scene changes to a darkling image of a kneeling, shadowy figure, concealed beneath the immediately recognizable Jedi cloak, who reaches up and slides a bionic hand over R2-D2’s dome. Although the character’s identity remains hidden under the hood of the cloak, it simply has to be Luke. The cybernetic hand, Luke’s long-time association with R2 (as opposed to Rey’s now familiar association to BB-8), and the narration that succinctly states “I have it,” all make it pretty clear that it must be Luke. From the details of the image, brief as they are, it would appear that R2 has been dispatched on a mission to locate Luke, now living in some sort of self-inflicted banishment reminiscent of Yoda’s homestead on Dagobah. The way the hand caresses R2’s dome is just too personal, too intimate, not to be that of a character recognizing a long-lost deep affinity for the robot.

The next bit of the memorable speech is the one most exciting. As Luke states “My sister has it…” the scene depicts the hand of what looks like an older female handing the hilt of a lightsabre (that looks very much like Vader’s) to what looks like the hand of a young woman like a baton in a relay race. The scene recalls the moment Obi-Wan presented Luke with his father’s lightsabre in Episode IV, the moment at which a younger Skywalker inherits a patriarchal lightsabre from an absent elder Skywalker via an interlocutor. This says a lot! Considering Luke’s voice over identifies his sister (Leia), in order to maintain the continuity established in the trailer thus far, it must be Leia handing what I’m guessing is Luke’s lightsabre to who I’m guessing is Rey, in Luke’s absence. That means, for all those speculating along with me, that she is a Skywalker! Luke’s daughter with Mara Jade? Han and Leia’s daughter? I think perhaps the former. (In fact, I hope).

To complete the cycle, connecting the receiver of the lightsabre to the narrative, Luke’s voice-over finally adds a new segment to the familiar speech: “You have that power, too.” If I am right about any of my previous analysis, this last statement can only strengthen my suspicion that Rey is a Skywalker, the last member of a family chain Luke has just articulated. The music crescendos into a full-orchestra ritornello of the iconic theme and we are notified via Star Wars logo font letters across the screen that “This Christmas …”

The trailer then resolves into the requisite action-pilot-explosion puffery that we have all come to expect from a Star Wars trailer; new X-Wing fighters, masked villains brandishing red lightsabres, Third-Reich-like rows of faceless stormtroopers, new tiefighters, scattered laser fire, and terrified teenagers – oooooh, it’s all here. (I’m not disparaging this aspect of the Star Wars aesthetic, which I love just as much as you do, I’m simply glossing over it as it adds little to the melodramatic narrative side of my analysis with which I am concerned.)

But the nostalgia isn’t over yet. Yes, … Can it be? … OMG, … IT IS! The Millennium Falcon roars across the screen in as much spectacular glory as we all remember it from as long ago as 1983, looking almost identical save for a sportier rectangular deflector dish where the circular one (damaged and possibly lost in the battle against the second Deathstar when the Falcon penetrated the bowels of the unfinished space station) used to be.

The Falcon manoeuvres through a derelict Star Destroyer in a scene visually identical to its penetration of the second Deathstar, and the screen again cuts to black. But who can be piloting it? We don’t know for certain, but what follows is the familiar raspy voice of a now elderly rogue-hero talking to his apparently unaged “walking-carpet” companion. Holding his blaster aloft in iconic fashion in the corduroy hallway-shaft of the Millennium Falcon, Han Solo says, “Chewie, we’re home.” Apparently Solo had lost possession of the ultra-iconic ship at some point in the last 30 years, and for some time. Now annexing it back into his own possession in true smuggler fashion, we are, indeed, home.

If you’re like me, you’re pretty excited. For all you might condemn about the corporate evil of Disney, they seem to have hit all the right marks here. I love J.J. Abrams’ other work, and I think he was just the right choice to bring my fondest childhood memories back to life. At the very least, I don’t think he screwed it up as fiercely as Lucas himself did with the prequels. (Don’t screw it up, Abrams!) Episode VII hits theatres in advanced screenings on December 17, pretty much entirely sold out by now. The rest of us will see it on the 18th. See you there… and “May the f…, well, you know.