Andor
Andor is the best show I saw this year, a revitalization and redefinition for a franchise tackling a different sort of genre work. I only hope the second season is finished before marketing executives can hatchet this beautiful piece of art. Set five years before the original Star Wars, it follows one of the supporting characters of the close-preceding prequel Rogue One as he transitions from drifting thief-mercenary to anti-Imperial operative.
It’s uncanny to go to sleep and wake up in a world where someone at Disney decided Star Wars is allowed to be good. not vaguely good, or relatively good, but specifically good by way of addressing the nuances of familial and romantic relationships, revulsion and attraction, community values, the contrasting implications of tradition, revolutionary political theory, and the closing grasp of fascism’s hand around society’s throat. This is the kind of story that could only happen when a show is conceived by a man who spent his life writing legal, crime, espionage, and political thrillers, who studies history in his spare time. The kind of show I didn’t think was possible in Star Wars.
Like anything interesting set in A Galaxy Far, Far Away, it set off dumb, bad, and strange discourse on Twitter. What was different was that even the caustic internet exchanges were at once and for once aimed at a valuable target beyond merely [the admittedly valuable but run into the ground concern of] whether good art is possible under the increasingly calcifying and consolidating new studio system. It turns out it can. So, the question moved into the realm of whether art made under these conditions had any revolutionary potential at all or whether its subsumption under and by capital meant something darker. I found it immediately exhausting because, not for nothing, movies with implicitly and explicitly anti-fascist messages have been made under capital beforehand. And concern over people conflating consumption with praxis seemed unfounded to me.
But I’ve seen a thousand different ways not to do that, so someone must have. And of course the real problem with the show as a piece of political art with explicit aims is that – perhaps as a result of being a Disney product – capitalism is never explicated even as exploitative work conditions to feed the market are alluded to and aristocrats looking down on black markets they feed into are shown. Perhaps, therefore, fascism in type is never as explicit as fascism in vibe – the uniformity, the militarism, the surveillance.
Even as the vague evil authoritarianism of the Star Wars Galactic Empire gets demonstrated in a manner that shows the inner workings, the banal evil, the turnkey mechanisms of oppression, there is still a way for people on the political right in its audience to read this art as protesting the Democratic “brand” of “big government.” These things are in quotes because of the neo-liberal austerity that has gone on most of my life and preceded it and the fact that most of the “big government” spending is for weapons and militarized police, things that we don’t look to as left-leaning projects and which the show does indeed remark on in its words and deeds. But I digress.
Watching Andor gave me hope in myriad ways. it’s not praxis to consume media that makes you feel good, but a TV series intent on explicitly demonstrating the ways that power works in imperial settler-colonial contexts, the way that police act in the 21st century and have in the 20th, the way businesses see people, the way military and law enforcement occupy spaces, felt good. And even if no Star Wars fan that watches it decides to read Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Mao or Fanon or Gramsci or Kropotkin or etc., at least they will have experienced a good piece of art that makes the Star Wars universe, its people, and their struggles – their kin and communities, their triumphs and failures – feel real. In the lead up to the sequel trilogy, there was a lot of marketing aimed at presenting the films as having the lived-in feel of the originals that the prequels lacked. But they didn’t have it; they had the veneer of dirt, but spaces were not related to us in a way that made them readable to us as experiential. They felt like sets, and moreover they largely felt like imitations of what had come before. Andor feels new inside Star Wars, even as it draws on things such as The Battle of Algiers and the history of occupation in Ireland, Palestine, and clashes between civilian populations and police in the U.S., as well as the labor exploitation of incarcerated people – what could be called here the exception of the 13th Amendment.
The writing (done by Tony Gilroy, his brother Dan, Stephen Schiff, and Beau Wilmon) and direction (Toby Haynes, Susanna White, and Benjamin Caron) was stupendous. The twelve-episode show was split into four arcs and a solo transition episode. Succession composer Nicholas Britell crafted an incredible score, showcasing his affinity for distinct derivation and iteration on a couple of themes. His ability to draw the soul of a moment out of strings and wind and synthesizer were on full display. There are no shortage of actors delivering phenomenal performances for which they deserve plaudits – Diego Luna, Stellan Skarsgård, Genevieve O’Reilly, Denise Gough, Varada Sethu, Faye Marsay, Anton Lesser, Alex Kearns, Fiona Shaw, Forest Whitaker, Adria Arjona, Joplin Sibtain, Alastair Mackenzie, Bronte Carmichael, Elizabeth Dulau, puppeteer Dave Chapman. I go on, and I could keep going on, because there are no bad performances, there is no fat on the dialogue or in the plot. It is terse, it is tight, its humor is earned rather than overwhelming and out of left field. It’s such a smart show. Masterful work that made me glad that beauty and justice in the galaxy could still be made to feel real, cloaked and smuggled under the boot of monopoly capitalism with a reminder to wake up and fight.
Agree, but I feel it could have used some droid humor to lighten the mood occasionally.