Poker Face and the Spiritual Reboot

Poker Face had me at Rian Johnson. But had I not known it was his brainchild, the show would have had me at the title font.

That yellow font on the title card, the year represented by Roman numerals. What decade are we in? Well, the headspace of creator Rian Johnson was the 1970s and 1980s with shows like Colombo and The Rockford Files. I suspect he gets nostalgically triggered when he sees the title cards of those shows and others and wanted to bring sensibility forward to the 2020s.

What sensibility is that? A traditional crime-of-the-week series. But not just that: a new crime every week with a whole new cast. Which brings me to another 1970s TV it reminds me of: The Incredible Hulk. Both feature a lead who is being chased across the country, meeting new people every week.

Now I know what you’re thinking: there are plenty of crime-of-the-week shows from Law and Order to Castle to all those shows on CBS I don’t watch. That’s not new. No, it’s not, but the laid-back aesthetic is a refreshing return to a modern TV landscape full of season-long streaming shows to modernized takes on old tropes.

Both of those things are fine, and I enjoy them, but I also appreciate the slower paced TV shows that used to dominate networks with stakes that are not really that high. And I very much applaud Johnson for channeling that vibe into something new rather than a modern reboot of an old franchise.

He could just have acquired the rights to, say, Colombo (the obvious ancestor to Natasha Lyonne’s Charlie Cale) and created a story around Colombo’s grandkid who is a rumpled detective just like Peter Faulk. I’d watch that and chances are, you would, too. But we’d constantly be comparing the new actor/actress to Faulk, much to the detriment of the new show. Also, we’d probably have the admittedly fun “sequel” to some random episode that no one remembers save the dedicate Colombo fans.

No, what Johnson did was take all those elements and, crucially, made something new, unique, and his own. That last bit is probably the key factor for Johnson. Given the opportunity, he’d probably make a Colombo sequel or adapt some Agatha Christie novel in to a movie, but with Poker Face and Knives Out and Glass Onion, he gets to revel in all the stuff he loves while playing in his own sandbox.

The Epilogue of The Last Jedi: Was It All We Needed?

I did something the other night I rarely do with Star Wars movies: dropped the remote.

As part of the inaugural Star Wars generation, I have lived with these films since 1977. I have watched the films countless times. When I do, however, I tend to watch them all in one go, that is, from beginning to end. I rarely watch just pieces of the various movies. No matter the film, I take them as a whole.

But I saw The Last Jedi on cable the other day and, with it being one of my all-time favorite Star Wars film, I stopped just long enough to see where everything was. Turned out, it was the beginning of the throne room scene with Kylo Ren, Snoke, and the captured Rey. Which meant it was also near the time when Finn fully accepts his "Rebel Scum" label. And Rose was still the integral part of the story. And it was minutes from the Holdo maneuver.

If you take all ten movies as a whole and made a list of great moments, two from this sequence in The Last Jedi would make my list: Rey and Kylo fighting together and the Holdo maneuver. That moment when Rey realizes what Kylo had done by killing Snoke, held for more than a few seconds, is so, so good.

Watching to the End

I ended up watching the rest of the film. Man, that visual of Luke Skywalker standing alone up against the First Order's weaponry is still one of the most incredible visuals of the entire franchise.

But it is the epilogue I'm focusing on today. That, and the final words of the film, spoken by Leia.

The Last Jedi Epilogue as The Best Final Scene of the Franchise?

As the Millennium Falcon soars away from Crait, the last few survivors of the Resistance are aboard. Rey and Leia talk about Luke, specifically him being the spark of a new hope to fight against the First Order.

The last words of the film--and the last words uttered by Carrie Fisher as Leia--are "We have all we need." Powerful words, especially considering the character has experienced and seen decades worth of fighting and striving to bring and keep peace in the galaxy. She knows this isn't the end. It never ends. There will always been the need for people to stand up to evil, to be the spark of hope in the face of darkness.

From there, we instantly cut back to Canto Bight and the young kids enslaved in those stables. One of them is telling the story of Luke Skywalker at Crait [leading credence that this is a flash forward]. When their owner/handler breaks up the group, another boy walks off alone. Using the Force, he brings a broom to his hand, but then stops. He stares up at the stars (just like Luke did) and dreams. You see the Resistance ring Rose gave him, a beacon of hope, despite his situation. He holds the broom like a lightsaber and, as a space ship or falling star streaks across the sky, we fade to black and John Williams' music takes over.

Look, we were always going to get Episode IX. We all wanted it. I wanted it. We wanted answers to questions. It was always going to end well. Our heroes were always going to prevail. I enjoyed The Rise of Skywalker, got emotional both times I've seen it (more so the second time, specifically with Kylo standing alone on the husk of the second Death Star), and am perfectly fine with it being the last of the nine films.

But, in some ways, Leia said it best: we had the best ending we needed. The spark of resistance always lives on, in the generations that come after our main characters. That kid is Force sensitive. So is Finn, by the way. It doesn't matter that he's a slave. Just like Rey in The Last Jedi, he was a nobody. The spark of good, the ray of light, always lives on.

Maybe The Last Jedi's ending was all we needed.

That Epilogue on The Rise of Skywalker

I've spent a lot of words on this and you might come to conclusion that I don't even want The Rise of Skywalker. That would be wrong. I enjoyed it. I'll be reading the novelization later this spring and buying and re-watching the movie. And it ended wonderfully with Rey and BB-8 staring off into the same twin suns that Luke did 42 years before. Goosebumps and tears came in equal measure both times I saw the movie.

But maybe, just maybe, you could imagine that the epilogue of The Last Jedi spliced on the end of The Rise of Skywalker. Still have Rey do her thing, but flash back to Canto Bight [or the natives on Pasaana, the planet Rey and company went to and met Lando]. The kids [or native Pasaanas] still tell the story of Luke on Crait [or Rey and her battle with the Emperor]. The boy still looks up to the sky, broom welded as a lightsaber, and dreams.

Now, the spark of hope is galaxy-wide.

Now, Leia's last line is even more powerful: "We have all we need."

Subverting Expectations AKA A Writer's Defense of The Last Jedi

By
Scott D. Parker

While Star Wars: The Last Jedi might not be a mystery or crime film, there is something we storytellers can learn from the kerfuffle that has arisen since the film’s release last week.

No matter the medium—books, TV, movies, comics—we consumers enjoy stories. And if the stories are serial in nature, many of us enjoy dissecting every detail to discern some greater meaning. One of my favorite things about watching the TV show “Lost” in real time was the water cooler chats the day after each episode aired. Me and my office pals discussed in great length every shred of evidence from the episode, crafting in our minds what a shot of a book might mean. Then, the following week or later in the series, we might get answers. Sometimes those answers matched our expectations; other times the answer were not what we had crafted in our minds.

But we were not the storytellers. We were the consumers. We read or watch what the creators create.
When it comes to genre, certain tropes come along for the ride. If you’re reading an Agatha Christie mystery, you know you’ll get interesting characters, all the clues, all the evidence, and a chance to solve the mystery before or alongside her detective, be it Poirot or Marple. If you are reading an Elmore Leonard novel, you know you’ll get snappy dialogue and criminals who are self-aware. If you’re reading a western, you’re going to get a gunslinger, a corrupt cattle baron, a beautiful woman, and a horse with some character. If you’re watching a rom-com, you know you’ll get the charming leads, their funny fiends, and a situation that’ll put them together.

Creators of these kinds of stories know this and plan accordingly. As a beginning writer, we are all instructed to know the genre in which we’re writing and put in the tropes readers expect. We call them obligatory scenes. Take romance. Here are the must-have scenes in any romance: the leads are introduced separately, the leads meet, the leads solve a problem together, a situation arises in which one lead questions the relationship, the break-up scene, the realization scene, and the getting-back-together scene. It’s a roadmap readers and viewers come to expect, but it’s a gifted creator who can play with those tropes and present them in a fresh way, maybe even subverting audience expectations along the way.

Star Wars is not only a science fiction series (with all of those tropes) but it brings in its own set of tropes unique to the franchise. All those tropes were in the first movie, now forty years old. You know them because you’ve absorbed them for four decades. Farm boy with dreams of adventure has adventure land in his lap. Evil galactic empire after a small band of rebels personified in a princess. Lovable rogues who help the farm boy. Wise mentor who sacrifices himself so farm boy can escape. The plucky band of rebels attacks the “small moon” of the Empire’s base and destroys it. And, taking a cue from the second film, a big revelation that the bad guy is actually the farm boy’s dad.

What?!

Back in the early 80s, we spent three years wondering if Vader spoke the truth. Some of my friends didn’t think it was possible; others thought it was the truth. Either way, when Return of the Jedi debuted, we got our answers directly from George Lucas’s movie. I suspect there was some grousing from a certain sector of fandom, but there it was, out in the open.

Up until 2017, we had seven numbered Star Wars movies and one off-shoot. All but one (Empire) arguably played from the exact playbook. Every movie showed a big thing to destroy, a lightsaber battle, lovable rogues, earnest heroes, bad villains, and robots that made us laugh. Like almost every Perry Mason TV show episode, the Star Wars movies all but lulled us into a routine. As good as Erle Stanley Gardner was as a writer, when you picked up a Perry Mason novel or tuned in to the TV show, you knew exactly what was going to happen. There is a certain comfort in that knowledge. I understand it, but every now and then, isn’t it more interesting to have a creator take a left turn when you were convinced, through repetition and constant reinforcement, the creator was going to take a right turn?

Now comes Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Viewers have had two years to ruminate over all the details of The Force Awakens. I think most of us did exactly the same thing when we saw that 2015 film: put the new characters into the positions of the legacy characters. Rey was the new Luke, Poe was the new Han, Finn was the new Leia (more or less), Snoke was the new Emperor, and Ren was the new Vader. After watching that movie, we were convinced we knew exactly how The Last Jedi was going to play out because we had seen it all before.

But writer/director Rian Johnson did something we writer/creators should have the guts to do every now and then: show us something different.

(Spoilers start here, by the way.)

If Johnson had simply remade The Empire Strikes Back with The Last Jedi, complete with a bunch of shots we fans had been conditioned to expect, most of us might have been happy, or at least comforted. Oh, there’s Luke’s X-Wing under water? Well, then, we expect to see Luke lift the craft out of the water just like he couldn’t do in Empire. Johnson likely considered it and then made a different choice and likely for a specific reason: Luke’s a Jedi Master. Of course he can lift an X-Wing. Why do we need to see it? Much speculation was made about Rey’s parentage. Based on the past movies and the internal Star Wars tropes, she just had to be Luke’s daughter or Kenobi’s granddaughter or something like that. Johnson likely thought long and hard and realized there was a better choice to be made. He made it.

And, lest we forget, Disney signed off on it. Disney: one of the biggest trope machines on the planet, but a company who is willing to change things up every now and then (Wall-E, Up, Inside Out, Ratatouille).

So Star Wars fans are up in arms that the latest movie didn’t go along with the established Star Wars pattern. What did they get instead?

Well, they got a story that did not conform to established patterns. Isn’t that a good thing? Wouldn’t you have liked to have seen Perry Mason lose, at least once? We got a movie from a gifted writer who made the conscious choice to go against expectations and not service every whim of the fans. We got a refreshing film from a director with a certain point of view. Arguably, we got the most unique Star Wars film since Empire.

In short, Rian Johnson subverted viewers’ expectations.

And I loved it.

I have always contended that the best time to be a Star Wars fan was from 1977-1980. You see, up until Vader revealed himself to be Luke’s father, the Star Wars galaxy was wide open with thousands of stories to tell. Afterwards, it’s merely a family saga. The galaxy got very, very small.

Luke Skywalker goes to great lengths to liken the Force as not belonging to just the Jedi but to everyone in the galaxy. I think the negative reactions to the film are largely from a cadre of fans who think Star Wars is theirs and theirs alone. Every movie since the original trilogy has been made for the die-hard Star Wars fan, complete with callbacks that only we’d know.

The Last Jedi, with writer/director Rian Johnson, has gone to great lengths to shed the franchise from many of the shackles it has carried through the decades. It was a brave choice he made to write a movie that went against almost all the audience expectations, but how neat is it to leave the theater not really knowing how Episode IX will play out.

It’s refreshing.

The galaxy is, once again, wide open.


As is our tradition here at Do Some Damage, we are taking some time off. New posts resume on 2 January 2018. Thank y’all for coming back day after day and reading what we have to say, and have a fantastic holiday season!