The Philosophy of The Last Jedi: Post-Modernism and Politics

Previously on this blog, I did an in-depth philosophical analysis of the past Star Wars films.

You can read them here:

The Philosophy of The Phantom Menace

The Philosophy of Attack of the Clones

The Philosophy of  Revenge of the Sith

The Philosophy of A New Hope

The Philosophy of The Empire Strikes Back

The Philosophy of Return of the Jedi

The Philosophy of The Force Awakens


Most Star Wars fans rank The Last Jedi towards the bottom of the Star Wars cannon.  There are many reasons for this, but one of them is that the philosophical underpinnings are so different from the rest of the Saga.

Star Wars, though it is a spectacle of modern storytelling in film, is built upon incredibly traditional philosophies.  The anthropology of Joseph Campbell and his Hero with a Thousand Faces was essential in the hero mythology we find here.  Campbell maintained that all human societies tell the same basic hero story because there are some universal truths about what human beings understand to be heroic.  This is true for all of the Saga films all the way up to The Force Awakens.  However, The Last Jedi decided to veer from this.

The most noticeable difference from this movie than any of the others is the frustration of expectations.  At every point that could be done, writer/director Rian Johnson presented a set up with an unexpected resolution.  This is not just unsatisfying storytelling.  It also speaks to a post-modern philosophy.

Post-modern philosophy is so labeled because it comes after the Ancient (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle), Medieval (St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas), and Modern (Descartes, Kant, Kierkegaard).  It is post-modern because it is a rejection of almost all that has come before it.  One of the hallmarks of the post-modern philosophy is that any search for higher meaning or purpose is fruitless.  There is no transcendent world above us.  There is only us.  As a result, philosophy deals only with how we talk about things in this world, not how things actually are.  Their metaphysics precludes any essential structures to the universe and their anthropology holds that humans are simply intelligent beasts.  This is why post-modern philosophers like Richard Rorty left his position in the Philosophy department of his school and entered the English department.  For him and other post-moderns, philsophy is only about language and how we say things, not about transcendental reality or immutable human nature.

Even in its darkest moments, Star Wars has always carried with it a sense of purpose or destiny.  Everything seemed part of a larger plan.  Even when Luke got his butt handed to him in The Empire Strikes Back, you could see the hand of destiny at play.  If Luke had not gone to Cloud City, then R2-D2 would not have been aboard the Millennium Falcon at the end to fix the hyperdrive and save them all.  In Revenge of the Sith, even though Anakin falls to the dark side, he survives to fulfill his destiny to bring balance to the Force in Return of the Jedi.

Most philosophers from Socrates through to Kant could see the Providence playing a role in human affairs.  Everything is guided by the unseen guidance of God or Fate or the Forms or something else larger than ourselves.  However, the post-modern philosophy, everything is random fate or chance, with no larger meaning behind it.

The Last Jedi turns its back on this traditional idea of Providence in its narrative form.  There are three story tracks in the movie:

A - Rey, Luke, and Kylo Ren
B - Finn and Rose
C - Poe and his mutiny.

I will return to the A story later, but the B and C stories are good examples of post modern writing.  Finn and Rose accomplish nothing in trying to destroy the tracking device.  In fact, they make things worse.  If they had not brought DJ with them, then he never would have betrayed them to the First Order and all those people on the escape ships would not have died.  Their story makes no impact on Rey's story, even though they are on the capital ship at the same time.  Poe's story is even worse in that not only is his mutiny unsuccessful, it has zero impact on the story in any way.  There is a strong sense of pointlessness to these story lines.  That is because if the post-modernist is correct, life is random and its results lead to nothing higher purpose.  Nothing can get better, only different.

It is a trademark of post-modern philosophy that while traditional metaphysics are jettisoned, there is a renewed emphasis on the political.  Human beings have a deep need to be connected to something higher than themselves, but the post-moderns reject a notion of any kind of transcendent reality.  So political action, with its emphasis on issues larger than the individual, often takes the place of religion.  This is one of the reason you see the influence Marxist philosophy in the 20th century and its presence in The Last Jedi.

Politics have been present in Star Wars films, before, particularly in the prequels.  Lucas' most political moments were in Revenge of the Sith with the rise of the Empire.  But even here, the applicability to universal truths was more palatable.  There is an almost mythological truth about human societies perpetual danger of descending into tyranny.

But The Last Jedi introduces the very Marxian theme of class conflict and warfare.  While there have been conflicts between different cultures in other Saga films (Naboo/Gungans, Humans/Tusken Raiders, etc), the movie makes the idiosyncratic introduction of conflict based on economic class.  The entire scene on Canto Bight is present to create a division between the rich and the poor and to place the wealthy as the evil masters who need to be overthrown by the proletariat.  Rose and Finn are not interested in saving the children who are enslaved.  They are interested in hurting the masters.  After the chase, Finn releases one of the racing animals into the wild saying that now his adventure on the casino planet was "worth it."  But what has he accomplished?  The children are still captive.  Sure the animal is no longer enslaved, but all this really does is injure the rich person who held it captive.  This is another trait that is common in Marxism: hate of the rich trumps love of the poor.

We can also see a radical egalitarianism at play which is common in post-modernism and Marxism.  Traditional philosophy holds that we are equal because we are all made in the image of God or that we share a common human nature with natural rights.  The post-moderns hold that we are all equal simply because we are all equally random and purposeless.

We see this when Luke tells Rey that the Force is something that belongs to all life and not the elite Jedi.  We see this again when Rey accepts the idea that there is nothing special about her parents.  She is a nobody like all the rest of us.  Visually, we can see this in the final shot of the film.  It is the only Star Wars film in the entire Saga that does not end with at least one of the main characters present.  Instead, we have a random slave child, gripping his broom in anticipation of him joining the revolution.  Rian Johnson is saying that this child has just as much right to his place in the narrative as Luke, Rey, or Leia.  Who is he?  It doesn't matter.

Sometimes to achieve this egalitarianism, those with perceived power have to be torn down.  Luke Skywalker should be the wise mentor who trains Rey in the ways of the Force as Yoda did to him.  And while this does happen a bit, she is the one who constantly points out his own moral short-comings.  Poe gets slapped by Leia and berated constantly by Admiral Holdo for being an arrogant man of action.  Holdo expects Poe to sit down and shut up simply because she is in charge.  Rather than intending this to paint Holdo in a negative light, it is clear that this is meant as a lesson in humility for Poe.  He needs to be torn down.  Kylo Ren even tears down (or tears apart) his own mentor Snoke in order to raise himself up.  And while Kylo is not interested in egalitarianism, he does follow the model of tearing down those who are perceived as superior.  He then replaces himself as the head.  This is also something common in all Marxist revolution: the purely egalitarian society never arrives.  It is only replaced by another tyranny.

The break with tradition is strongest in Kylo.  "Let the past die, kill it if you have to," is his mantra.  Post-modern philosophers say that 20,000 years of human civilization was all well and good until they arrived to fix everything.  Kylo sees the past as a prison that prevents real progress from occurring.

There are also more problems with the ethics.  In some cases, emotion trumps principles.  One of the strongest philosophical struggles in Attack of the Clones was the struggle between desire and duty.  Anakin and Padme choose to give in to their desires rather than live according to what is right and so tragedy occurs.  The Last Jedi makes the absolutely opposite philosophical point in the character of Rose Tico.  Finn prepares to sacrifice himself to save the last few dozen members of the Resistance.  Rose stops him and shares a romantic moment with him just as the First Order's giant laser breaks through the last defense for their friends.  In other words, she sacrificed the lives of others because she had a crush on a boy.  This is as bad as Anakin killing the younglings in order to get the power to save Padme.  What is frustrating is that it is clear that Johnson means for this moment between Rose and Finn to be moving and even inspiring rather than appalling.

From an artistic standpoint, this movie also has a big problem because of the post-modern point of view.  Another trademark of post-modern storytelling is the emphasis on message over story.  The plot and characters are simply vehicles for whatever message you want to send.  Notice how different this is than how JRR Tolkein or CS Lewis wrote their stories.  These men simply wanted to tell good, entertaining, and moving stories.  The themes presented themselves in the writing of the story as a natural outgrowth of the characters and the plot.  But post-moderns tend to see stories simply as delivery devices for ideas.  Their stories are not so much narratives but sermons.  There is a preachiness to them that is similar to the kind found in most (bad) Christian movies.  In the Original Trilogy, Yoda's teachings never felt cloying.  Instead, we found ourselves enlightened because we were enjoying a wonderful story.  But Johnson preaches at us through his characters and so good potions of the film fall flat.

So, is the philosophy of The Last Jedi irredeemable?

The short answer is no, but it is this for a very frustrating reason.

Another aspect of post-modern philosophy is that it lacks consistency.  We already mentioned how tyrannies rise in egalitarian revolutions.  In the name of love, people engage in hate.  Nothing is truly right, but their enemies are always wrong.  And when you point out their inconsistencies, they brush it off as just another example of the randomness of life.

Inside of The Last Jedi, some of the traditional Star Wars ethos and mythos survives.  "Let the past die, kill it if you have to," was a line stated by the main villain of the piece.  But the hero of the story, Rey, rejects this idea.  She holds the remnants of the broken past, symbolized by the lightsaber, and wants to rebuild.  Some people point to Yoda destroying the Jedi texts as a sign that the heroes all also accept Kylo's philosophy.  But the careful observers will note that Rey keeps the Jedi texts aboard the Millenium Falcon.  She plans to use them as some kind of restoration of the past wisdom.  Unlike Rose Tico, she rejects her emotional connection to Kylo in order to save others.  In other words, she accepts tradition and duty over post-modernism and emotion.

Luke's cynicism is often taken as his complete rejection of the old ways.  And there is a good portion of that there.  But Luke is a man broken by the past.  He is like Rick in Casablanca,  he needs someone to bring out the hero in him, which is what happens at the end.  He begins the movie wanting the Jedi to die with him.  But he ends with the statement "I will not be the last Jedi."  There is hope.  There is also a sense of inherent right and wrong.

Some suggest that despite this, Luke is a character of despair because he refuses to save Kylo the way he saved Vader.  My read on this is different.  Luke says "I can't save him."  This does not mean that Kylo is irredeemable.  It just means that it is not Luke's destiny to save him.  There is too much bad history between the two.  In the same way, Obi-Wan could not save Vader, it had to be Luke.  Perhaps I am wrong about this.  We will find out with The Rise of Skywalker.

Despite Rian Johnson's best attempts at burying the film in a post-modern graveyard, there is still enough of the traditional Star Wars philosophy that survives.  It makes for a very schizophrenic viewing experience where the films philosophies are in complete conflict with each other.  It is either a post-modern film that cannot pull the trigger on completely rejecting tradition or it is a Star Wars film that is poisoned by post-modern philosophy. 

Can the true light and wisdom of the Jedi overcome the shadow of the post-modern Disney empire?

I guess we will find out.