Onion Watch: Done; The Boot, Day 12

[pameladean]

The Onion Watch is over. Both Cassie and Saffron are fine.

I am very tired of this boot, and yet two weeks is really a very short time to be wearing one of these. It's better since I got the shoe balancer. But that can't be worn outside at this time of year. I ventured out yesterday sans shoe balancer, but with a lot of help from Eric. Fortunately, my winter boots have slightly thicker soles than my regular walking shoes, so the imbalance was less. But my hips, back, and knees set up a huge complaint all the same.

We saw "The Last Jedi" so we could stop avoiding spoilers all over; went grocery shopping; had a late dinner at Pizza Luce, splitting an order of roasted Brussels sprouts and a small spinach salad and then going our own way for the entrees; and went back to his house and conversed and cuddled the cat.

We enjoyed the movie a lot, though the sound balance was such that we missed some dialogue, including, almost certainly, some punch lines. It is thoroughly and unabashedly a "Star Wars" movie; not one of the prequels, but harking back in ways great and small to the first trilogy only with a lot more different kinds of people in it. Of course we had a lot of quibbles. I am gobsmacked, however, at the reactions of a certain group who hated the movie. What they are objecting to is so mild, so nearly anodyne, and yet they can't stand it.  If anybody is moved to discuss any aspect of the movie in the comments, please clearly mark any spoilers. And I'm very short on patience with certain lines of argument.

Being outside was fine while the temperature was above freezing, but when things started to ice up I became a paranoid mass of apprehension.

On Wednesday morning, I will get up, and I will not have to put on the boot. The clinic says that if I have no residual swelling or pain, I'm good to go; otherwise they will refer me to physical therapy.  I am hoping very hard for the former outcome. The swelling is almost gone now, but there is still some twinginess right around the ankle bone.

I'm still reading Anthony Price, and wanted to note down one place where history caught him up, through no fault of his own. In an earlier book, Our Man in Camelot, a bunch of younger agents in Price's imaginary intelligence department, Research and Development, are arguing with David Audley about, well, everything; but Frances Fitzgibbon, my single favorite character in the entire series, refers to "the rot at the top" of the Nixon Administration. Audley shuts her down by saying that it was the rot at the top that brought the boys home from Viet Nam.

This line never did sit well with me, but this time, I thought, "Wait, wait, wait, didn't Nixon act to delay the negotiations that would end the war so that his anti-war presidential campaign would not have the wind taken out of its sails, and so that he could get the credit?"  Yes. Yes he did. The tapes were released in 2013. Lyndon Johnson knew what Nixon was doing, but he figured that Hubert Humphrey would win the election, so he didn't do anything. STOP WITH THAT NONSENSE YOU SELF-SATISFIED BLUNDERING POLITICIANS; IT NEVER WORKS OUT THE WAY YOU THINK.

I want to grab David Audley through the page of the book and give him this information. More than that, I want to give it to Frances.

Pamela

Edited to make an errant sentence have some sense in it.

Comments

[graydon]

I will be offended if they try to redeem Kylo Ren AGAIN. I want Finn to get the hero's defeated/learn/victory arc and trisect him.

(My biggest beef with TLJ is that Leia didn't shoot Poe Dameron dead.)

The problem with JJ is their habitual confusion between complexity and nuance, and Star Wars can't survive much complexity and requires nuance. (Because the ostensible plot is right up there for nuance with A RAIN OF LARGE HAMMERS; the presentation has to sneak the nuance in.)

[rj_anderson]

Much as I love and adore Finn, he is not going to get the victory arc. The reason is that "Sam" (as he was originally called) was only ever supposed to be a sidekick to Rey in the first movie, and then largely or completely disappear afterward. (Poe, meanwhile, was supposed to die in the first film and never be seen again, only Oscar Isaac talked JJ Abrams out of it.) However, when it became clear that the fans loved Finn and Poe and were eager to see more of them, there was a fair bit of scrambling to add B-plots into the script of TLJ to accommodate them. If the Canto Bight and Poe-becoming-a-Leader subplots feel less well developed than Rey and Kylo's, that's why. (And I agree with you about Poe, although I think he should have been court-marshalled for mutiny and treason instead. He's just lucky he's pretty, I guess?)

You are also not likely to see Kylo trisected by Finn, or indeed any significant clash between them, because the tension between the Last Jedi aka Rey and the "Jedi Killer" aka Ben Solo has always been the intended A-plot of the movies. Indeed it's likely that in Kylo we're seeing Anakin's story in reverse: from Darth Vader-wannabe to tortured antihero to true hero in the final film. The reason Kylo is still positioned as the villain who has rejected every chance given to him is because no one can save Ben until he recognizes the hollowness of the Dark Side and chooses the Light for himself, instead of merely being torn apart by his inability to commit and his obsession with his own family legacy. Getting rid of Snoke, who has been manipulating and bullying Ben Solo literally since before he was born (that's not in the movies, but it's hinted at in Leia's dialogue in TFA and confirmed in the Aftermath novels) is a good start, but there's still a way to go.

I know that doesn't make a lot of people happy because they believe Kylo is irredeemable and deserves nothing but death, but I think TLJ was pretty blatant that a guy who slippy-slides down the corridor in his socks and gets shy being caught with his shirt off is not someone the filmmakers want us to regard as a hardened villain. Even at the end when he's unhinged by Rey's rejection and Luke's Force-appearance on Crait, he comes off as pathetic and hysterical, more like a teenaged boy having a tantrum than a cold-blooded killer who's going to be the Big Bad of the third film.

It's still possible that Kylo will die, I guess, but if so it will probably be sacrificial in some way and won't be painted as anything to cheer about. We've spent far too much time being reminded of who Ben Solo was and could have been for that.

[graydon]

Thing is, I don't believe in redemption. I think there's a general possibility of atonement, but not arbitrarily many such moments in which it can be grasped. Even granting the implausible case that Kylo could yet atone, there isn't any atonement for the patricide, would-be matricide, and genocide that leaves them with a name or fame. I cannot imagine any movie in the Star Wars franchise doing that, so I wind up hoping that Kylo Ren gets trisected by someone of humble origins.

It's not like they don't have to seriously rethink the whole narrative arc; let them have a rush of sense to the head and push the whole humility and deeds-as-the-basis-of-judgement thing.

[rj_anderson]

The patricide definitely happened: Kylo straight-up murdered Han, and there are going to be consequences to that, some of which we're already beginning to see ("The deed split your soul to the bone," etc.).

Not sure about the "would-be matricide" as TLJ showed us Kylo didn't take the shot on Leia because he'd sensed her in the Force and couldn't do it, teary eyes and trembling lips and all. And up to the point where he sensed her, it's most likely that Kylo believed Leia was already dead -- that she'd died in the destruction of Hosnian Prime by Starkiller, a move which the script tells us Kylo didn't want at all and tried to talk Snoke and Hux out of. (That's why he wasn't at the big First Order rally when Hux gave his speech and fired the weapon, and why we see him watching the beam streak toward Hosnian Prime from the bridge of the Finalizer instead.) It was the TIE fighters behind Kylo that fired on Leia -- and Kylo then turned on them and shot them down in return, which is hardly the reaction of a guy who thinks killing his mom is a fine idea. But that incident left Kylo once again believing his mother dead, so his order to take no prisoners on Crait wasn't attempted matricide either.

"Genocide" would be either the Hosnian system or Tuanul, I suppose? The former wasn't Kylo's decision and he had no power to stop it, but the latter was definitely at his command. The destruction of a religious enclave inhabited solely by adults, all of whom belonged to the Church of the Force (i.e. pro-Jedi freedom fighters), were well armed and had just killed a number of Stormtroopers during the battle. Ordering them executed after they'd been subdued and captured was certainly ruthless, but it wasn't a case of wiping out an undefended village full of families and children either.

I'd still like to see some consequences and fallout from the Tuanul incident for Kylo, over and above Finn's defection. Even if he repents he'll never be able to join the Resistance as though nothing happened, or at least it would ring hollow and false if he did; he is a murderer and a war criminal, after all. But even with Han and Tuanul to account for, Kylo's a long way from the kinds of cold-blooded mass murders that Darth Vader committed over his decades of service to the Emperor. I suspect that if Ben turns he's going to be spending the rest of his life in some kind of exile doing penance, rather than being touted as a hero while everybody pretends Kylo Ren never happened. But I don't think he's so far gone that death by execution is the only possible outcome.

[graydon]

Kylo didn't take the shot, but didn't do anything about it ahead of time, either. If Kylo can get away with blue-on-bluing wingmen after, certainly before is an option. So is the Force, and so is the space radio. All of the subsequent "kill it if you have to" about your past, well, I think the distress is at his own weakness for not being able to do it.

"I was so upset" is not exculpatory about planetary scale genocide, and Kylo perfectly well could have killed Snoke and Hux and prevented the order from being given. (And even if I'm wrong about the "perfectly well", it's the sort of occasion where one might legitimately be expected to try. Especially if you think you have family at the target.) (Any view of Tuanul other than "blatant atrocity" supposes that the First Order has legitimacy as a governing power. Which they clearly don't themselves believe.)

I think there's a very basic error in thinking that it's appropriate to structure any story about this one special person and it doesn't really matter who dies, it matters how Special Person feels about it. It's just possible that The Last Jedi is a recognition that the Star Wars franchise has figured this out. I hope so.

[rj_anderson]

He couldn't have killed Snoke because Snoke wasn't physically present when the decision was made to fire the weapon, he was only there as a hologram. And the order to fire Starkiller came not on Hux's authority but from Snoke as the Supreme Leader, so if Kylo had killed Hux then some other First Order officer would have taken over and fired the weapon on Snoke's orders instead. Given that it took the Resistance's best pilot and several X-Wing squadrons to destroy Starkiller, and that they could only do that because Han and Chewie and Finn had infiltrated the base to take down the shields and plant bombs everywhere, I'm finding it hard to imagine any scenario in which Kylo working independently could have stopped the weapon.

And Kylo does believe the First Order has legitimacy as a governing power. He's wrong, of course, and entirely deluded to think that they can bring peace to the galaxy by military force, but he bangs on at tedious length about his political views in Alan Dean Foster's novelization (although those clunky bits of dialogue were mercifully excised from the movie). He's a twisted idealist and a religious fanatic, not a cynic.

We both agree he's on the wrong side and has done a lot of horrible things that can't (and shouldn't) be swept under the carpet. But I believe the filmmakers have left way too much questions open about Kylo's agency and culpability and spent too much time showing his inner struggles and doubts for the third movie to simply go, "Oh, he's really just a stock villain that Rey's going to chop in half so we can all cheer and go home." Like I said, he may still die but it's not going to be treated as a ding-dong-the-Sith-is-dead moment. (Especially since Kylo isn't a Sith. Even at his most rage-filled moments we've never seen so much of a flash of the yellow Dark Side eyes we saw on Palpatine and Anakin, which I find interesting.)

[graydon]

I think "Sith" and "Jedi" are customary labels for preferences in interacting with the Force, they're not really things-as-things even as much as a concept like "Earth tones" can be said to be. Someone like Mace Windu was pretty obviously sith by inclination, even though serving as a cultural-institution jedi. (Leia, too, is pretty obviously much more sith than not in their approach to the Force; passion, intuition, and honesty, rather than composure, perception, and compassion.) The historical jedi were hopelessly corrupt through expediency; right-action turned into "what does the Senate want?", rather than what your perception and intuition show you from a state of detachment. The historical sith were hopelessly corrupt through ambition toward control; right-action turns into "my passion is of supreme importance". I don't think that makes being a sith-inclined Force user inherently corrupt; there's presumably a lot of ways to be passionate, honest, and intuitive and an OK space wizard.

Kylo is totally making the "my passion is of supreme importance" error, which is an interesting parallel to Luke (who is doing the same thing, only the passion is self-loathing about error and the possibility of further error). (I think that's an intentional parallel.) So, no, no "turning to the Dark Side" eye-effects, but I think it's legitimately being coded as a Sith way to fail. It's certainly not the jedi error of trying to generalize compassion to the statistical mass.