The Maximizer Abroad

In most aspects of life, I like to think of myself as more of a satisficer -- someone who makes decisions quickly and decisively.  In jobs, housing, friendships, I typically make a choice and then move forward.  The opposite of a satisficer is a maximizer -- someone who deliberates over many options before making a decision to ensure they're choosing the best.  According to the research, satisficers may make less money in life, but they are happier with their choices. 

So it was characteristic of me to agree to take my brother on a European trip right after he and my parents asked.  The destination was an easy choice: Italy, birthplace of Democracy, the Renaissance, and pizza.  I had never been before, so I was especially excited about an excuse to purchase and read books set in Italy--of which there are many. 

Attempted pano from the top of the Duomo in Florence

I settled on an itinerary fairly quickly: Rome, Florence, and Venice, three cities that kept popping up in my Instagram feed.  Beginner locales, easily accessible for the English speaker. Within days, I had booked some Airbnbs (a little too quickly it later turned out—most did not have air conditioning), flights and Trenitalia tickets.   Armed with a few borrowed guidebooks and loads of recommendations from worldly friends, I figured that I had enough information for a fun, stress-free trip.  My friend Michelle’s itinerary from her 2015 trip even pointed me towards prebooking options for must-sees like the Colosseum and the Vatican Museums (home of the Sistine Chapel). After doing what I thought was a considerable amount of diligence, I was prepared for a relaxing trip.  This view turned out to be too optimistic.

My struggle began when my Italy-oriented books arrived.  The first book I read was Elizabeth Von Arnim’s Enchanted April, a British novel from the early 20th Century about a group of women who journey to Portofino.  A comedy of manners, the novel shows how the four women come to see themselves, each other, and their significant others in a different light in this new location. Enchanted April made me wistful for a visit to the Italian coast, which was not on the agenda.

One of my most memorable parts of the trip was a trek through Cinque Terre

Next up was Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter.  This was a big beach read hit a few years back, so I was eager to see what the fuss was about.  Plus it features an oversaturated image of the Italian coastal town of Manarola on the cover. The novel is only partially set there, but I enjoyed the interwoven stories of an American actress, an Italian innkeeper, and an aspiring Hollywood producer.  The descriptions of Manarola and the surrounding towns of the Cinque Terre ignited a strong desire to go there. Maybe next time, I thought. But then, what if there was no next time?  Google informed me that Cinque Terre was actually within driving distance from Florence, so I knew I had to go.

Hours into planning how to fit Cinque Terre into our otherwise full itinerary (tour group or not? hike or train? Thursday or Friday?), I had to admit that I was not being relaxed about this trip.  Instead, I was maximizing.  Maximizing my time, and and maximizing how far our dollars would go.

I eventually settled on a tour group for Cinque Terre.  A week later, we were on our way.  But once my brother and I arrived in Italy, the maximizing tendencies that began to fester before we left only grew.

Bernini's fountain at the Piazza Navona hides its face from Borromini's architecture

I’ll spare you the details of every church, ruin, painting we saw on the trip.  This is partly because most of my knowledge of the sights we saw comes from notebook jottings, receipts in my email, and pictures I took instead of actual memory.  It’s difficult to conjure up original thoughts or emotion from visiting the Piazza de Navona, Boticelli’s Venus, St. Mark’s Basilica etc. because I was hardly present during our visits.  I’ve complained about the effects of taking too many pictures while traveling before.  This time, I was plagued by an incessant urge to maximize the day. 

So instead of enjoying the rushing green waters of the Trevi Fountain, I was thinking about where we should have dinner; instead of basking in the wonder of St. Peter’s Basilica, I was lamenting the time we stood in line, and checking my watch to get to the next place on time. Indeed, my most memorable day of the trip ended up being the day hike in Cinque Terre because we booked a day trip with a tour company. Freed from thinking about lunch or our itinerary, I could finally take in the view of the five towns.  

One day, to minimize the amount of time we stood in line for St. Peter’s Basilica, I set the alarm for 6 AM.  I was determined to get to the cathedral by 7 AM, when it opened.  We were successful, and were even the first to make it up to the Cupola for the day.  But after, we struggled to make it to the Vatican Museums by our 8:30 scheduled tickets.  In our rush, I even fell prey to a tourist trap/scam of hiring a tour guide to get through the line faster.

I realized the extent of the problem after the trip. On the flight back, I read Robert Hughes’ Rome: A Cultural, Visual and Personal History to try to learn some things about the city I was just in.  After a particularly interesting passage, I exclaimed to my brother, “Did you know that the fountain at the Piazza Navona designed by Bernini has a lot of jokes built in to it to make fun of his competitor, Borromini? Like one of the figures is shielding his eyes so he doesn’t have to see the Borromini architecture in the square.”

My brother gave me a strange look, “Yes.  The tour guide told us that. Do you listen to anything?” I shrugged. The answer was mostly no.

Of course, I still had a lot of fun, and am happy I went.  It was especially nice to spend some time with my brother.  But I also learned that sometimes, it’s better to just chill.  How to chill…well I’ll keep you posted if I ever figure it out. 

Why Recession Culture is Dominated by Stories of White Men

It’s been nearly eight years since Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 19, 2008.  As a college senior at the time, I saw the immediate effects of the collapse in the diminished size of our school paper.  The pages of the Daily Princetonian--once bulging with full-page ads from Bear Stearns, J.P. Morgan, Goldman-- quickly deflated overnight as Wall Street closed its doors to thirsty Ivy League grads.  I knew the recession would be big--after all, it was all Barack Obama could talk about in his 2008 campaign, but I still thought about it in terms how it would affect Wall Street, and the aspiring I-bankers I knew.  I thought the Great Recession would be the Plight of the Highly Educated.

I was naive--even self-centered.  In September 2008, barely days after Lehman collapsed, I wrote a column in The Daily Princetonian in which I declared that a silver lining of the financial crisis was that it would force highly educated elites like my classmates and I to consider alternative careers to investment banking.  Because the recession was all about us.  But as time passed, most of my friends who sought a job in finance found one.  I was unsuccessful in my search for a media job after college, but easily secured a consulting gig in D.C. Indeed, five years later, the recovery has been uneven.  Many high income earners are even better off than they were prior to the recession; the number of households worth $1 million or more have increased, while “most workers’ wages have fallen.” 

While I was short-sighted in my 2008 #hottake, I’ve since turned to wiser commentators and writers to process the lingering effects of the recession. As with any generational-defining event, it has taken several years for creators to digest the significance of the recession. Now, in 2016, we appear to have reached peak recession culture.  The list of plays, books, and films I’ve loved over the past year that tell the stories of individual struggles in the aftermath of the downturn--either directly or indirectly--is long. Some favorites include: The Humans, a Broadway play about a family’s financial struggles after the father loses his job and pension; Hir, an off-Broadway play about a young Afghanistan vet's return home; 99 Homes, a movie where Andrew Garfield is an evicted construction worker; and Magic Mike XXL, a buddy movie about a bunch of semi-retired male strippers.

One thing all these narratives shares is that each features a straight white male central character. Hir--the most diverse one that also features a transgender character, still stars a male soldier (Cameron Scoggins) returning from Afghanistan as its audience stand-in.  Yet, this focus on people who look nothing like me doesn’t bother me at all. I was drawn to each of these stories as illuminating a contemporary America that I have been too sheltered to experience first hand.

The most affecting fictional depictions to come out of the recession are the stories of straight white men because the story of the past seven years is the story of the dissipation of white male privilege.  Perhaps for the first time in our country’s history, non-college educated white men are at a relative disadvantage on the job market, and are the most dissatisfied with the state of the economy as a whole. While other groups--women, African-Americans, immigrants, the LGBTQ community--have endured even greater strife in American history, it’s the first time that the non-college educated white male has found himself on a permanent downward trajectory.  It’s not surprising then that artists have chosen their stories to stand in for a national narrative.

A scene from Hir

This isn’t to say that all the fictions coming out of the recession are homogenous. On the contrary, there is a lot of diversity in geography, tone, and message. One of the most ambitious of the works, Hir, is written by Taylor Mac, who uses “judy” as a gender pronoun.  Judy’s play is a dramatization of 2015 identity politics. Twentysomething Isaac comes home from a stint in Afghanistan to find his house in disarray and his dad dressed as a clown.  It turns out that while he was gone, his father lost his job, had a stroke, and now relies on his wife to take care of him. Isaac’s father’s debilitated state is of course a metaphor for the debilitated state of his demographic.  Meanwhile, Isaac learns that his sister Maxine is now his brother Max.  Max goes by the pronoun “hir,” (pronounced here). These changes compel Isaac to confront his own male identity. Who is he if the father he always looked up to is no longer the provider?

In contrast, the lighthearted Magic Mike XXL provides a more hopeful depiction of masculinity.  Here, several down on their luck--perhaps past their prime--former male strippers go on a road trip for one last hurrah at the a national competition. Along the way, they meet up with ex lovers and show off their routines.  Many critics have lauded the Magic Mike sequel as an homage to female pleasure.  The movie suggests that in a world where traditional masculinity has been eroded, men can still preserve their masculinity by focusing on female pleasure.

Andrew Garfield in the aftermath of his eviction

The moralizing 99 Homes asks whether desperate straits justifies sketchy actions.  When  Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) and his family get evicted from their home after a foreclosure, Dennis reluctantly accepts a job with the real estate broker (Michael Shannon) who orchestrated the foreclosure.  Dennis quickly learns the shady tricks of the trade, including cash-for-keys, deed forgery, and stealing appliances from abandoned homes.  When he is asked to evict a friend, Dennis has to decide if it’s worth it.  

The Humans is the most emotionally resonant play I’ve seen in the past year.  It takes the straightforward premise of a family gathered around Thanksgiving Dinner and turns it into a thoughtful exploration of upward mobility--or the lack thereof--for middle class Americans. Brigid, an aspiring composer, hosts Thanksgiving in her rickety Chinatown apartment for her parents, grandma, and sister.  The parents, Erik (the white male in this story) and Deirdre, are proud that they’ve put their kids through college.  Now that their kids are grown, they want to bask in successfully giving their children the freedom to follow their passions.  But the celebratory occasion is dampered by revelations that neither Brigid, her sister, nor their father are as stable as they appear.   The Humans was a well-deserved 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist for drama. I hope its Broadway run continues.

These four works are only a sampling of recent recession culture featuring the stories of white folks (see also, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Hungry at the Public Theater). Of course, the recession has affected Americans across the country, regardless of gender or race. (For some of their stories, check out There Goes the Neighborhood, or Evicted). But fictional depictions do appear to overrepresent white men. For once, I don’t have an axe to grind.

Greatness v. Family: A False Dichotomy

Ambition is a dirty word. In pop culture, ambitious people are often portrayed as misanthropic villains--or worse--as sad losers.  Think Pete Campbell in Mad Men. No matter how much ass he kissed, or how many late nights he stayed at the office, Pete never made it as a copywriter, forever relegated to the numbers side of the ad business. Meanwhile Don Draper has three martinis at lunch, takes a nap, and--boom--comes up with a brilliant idea. While Pete has to carefully plan each move, Don finds himself taking spontaneous--yet wildly successful--career moves in the name of his artistic independence. The Pete Campbells of the world play a pathetic contrast to the Don Drapers--an often singular genius whose brilliance comes naturally. Ambition is for untalented strivers. The true genius doesn't even need to be ambitious--he just needs to tap into his brilliance.

But three recent, well-received works across three different media cast new light on the ambition theme by portraying ambition as a necessary--and even desirable--trait for getting things done. The musical Hamilton, the Showtime series The Affair and the Danny Boyle movie Steve Jobs each seriously considers what it means to be an ambitious person by focusing on the story of someone who is not successful at first, but makes it through hard work and overt striving.

Lin Manuel Miranda depicts an openly ambitious Alexander Hamilton.

For instance, Alexander Hamilton (Lin Manuel Miranda) wears his ambition on his sleeve. Upon meeting fellow orphan Aaron Burr, Hamilton says, “God I wish there was a war/then we could prove that we’re more than anyone bargained for.”  Hamilton constantly repeats the refrain “I’m not throwing my shot” whenever opportunities come his way.  Though we are told of his pure writing talent, we see that he only becomes Washington’s right hand man, author of the Federalist Papers, and the country’s first Secretary of the Treasury through careful positioning. While we are shown the sacrifices Hamilton makes along the way--foregone vacations, political enemies--the message is still that Hamilton’s naked ambition shaped his identity, and the identity of the United States.

Steve Jobs portrays the titular character as someone who became successful despite his lack of innate talent.  We see Jobs (Michael Fassbender) fail multiple times: both during the unsuccessful launch of the NeXT Cube, and when he gets ousted from the Apple Board.  Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogan) at one point even asks Jobs, “What do you do?”  But like Hamilton, Jobs is portrayed as a confident man who openly parades his ambition.  The film argues that talent without ambition is a waste.  As Jobs notes in the movie, without him, Wozniak would have had to settle for the best professor at UCLA instead of one of the world’s wealthiest man.

On a smaller scale, The Affair features a fictional writer who only becomes successful after years of juggling a public school teaching job with his writing.  In The Affair, we see a seldom told story of a struggling artist finding middle-aged success.  Even as Noah Solloway (Dominic West) becomes-–spoiler alert—a hit author, we still see him grapple with writer’s block, missed deadlines, and angry agents.  The hard work only begins once others expect more of him.

But as much as I found these portrayals of ambition refreshing, I was disappointed by the all too familiar trope that seeps through each narrative: the trope of a man being forced to choose between greatness and family.  Again and again, we see Hamilton, Jobs and Solloway wreak havoc on their personal lives by prioritizing their work.  Noah’s constant networking amongst the glitterati leads him to miss the birth of his youngest daughter; Hamilton’s absence from his family vacation leads to an affair; Jobs’ rejects his daughter again and again to focus on Apple. Should I be great, or should I have a relationship with my child?

Can a true genius like Steve Jobs have a great relationship with his children?

Sure, these works openly judge their protagonists for being dicks. In a therapy session, Noah Solloway gets scolded by his shrink for even voicing the question of whether a man can be a great artist and a good person at the same time. Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), Steve Jobs’ marketing person, chews him out for being a poor father.  But even though none of these works advocates that one should be a dick, the assumptions behind the dichotomy presented show that we still have a long way to go.  By asking the question, there’s still an assumption that being a good person, or being involved with one’s family, is somehow inconsistent with being successful. And of course, only men are allowed to make this decision.  Buried behind this assumption is also the implication that women, who can’t simply choose to ignore their children, are less likely to be successful.

The irony is that there are many successful women behind these projects.  The showrunner behind The Affair is a woman. The female actors in Hamilton and Steve Jobs have garnered as much attention as the men. Lin Manuel himself projects a family man sort of image. Surely many of these individuals know from personal experience that one doesn’t need to alienate one’s family to be successful.  In 2016, I would like to see some portrayals of ambitious individuals--maybe even a woman or two--who are both ambitious and family-oriented. Hopefully we can have it all, at least in culture.

Jessica Jones: Reshaping the Rape Narrative

Editor's Note: This week I'm excited to feature a review by my friend Avi Appel.  The topic of Jessica Jones is especially fitting because Avi studies the concept of reasons as part of his Ph.D. candidacy.  Enjoy!

In a behind-the-scenes documentary about the movie Alien, screenwriter Dan O’Bannon explained that “One thing that people are all disturbed about is sex... I said 'That's how I'm going to attack the audience; I'm going to attack them sexually. And I'm not going to go after the women in the audience, I'm going to attack the men. I am going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs. Homosexual oral rape, birth. The thing lays its eggs down your throat, the whole number.”

And O’Bannon delivered: in the most gut-wrenching scenes of the movie, an alien violently forces its reproductive matter down a man’s throat and soon thereafter a new alien bloodily bursts out of its host’s chest, killing the host in the process.

In the sparsely populated world of science fiction works that attempt to communicate the horror of rape to a mainstream audience, I think Alien may now have to cede the throne to Netflix’s recently released show, Jessica Jones (2015). Jessica Jones accomplishes this feat in a surprising and, prima facie, self-handicapping way: without any actual depictions of rape. Instead of focusing on the physical aspects of rape (as Alien does) Jessica Jones focuses on the psychological, including the traumatic and long-lasting aftermath. What Jessica Jones astutely suggests is that the trauma of rape goes beyond the mere moment of sexual penetration: it includes ongoing mental stress, self-doubt, and denial by society.  

Jessica Jones confronts Kilgrave

Here’s the basic gist of the show: everyone knows about “gifted people” or “mutants” because of some vague event in the city’s (New York City) recent past, but most such persons hide their abilities from the public and blend in. In fact, only three superhumans are featured in this season (although others are alluded to, including the title character of Netflix’s concurrent show Daredevil). Jessica Jones (played by Krysten Ritter of Breaking Bad fame) is a private investigator that uses but keeps secret her super-strength. In an early episode, Jessica effortlessly leaps from the sidewalk to the second floor fire-escape in order to get a better angle for photographing her mark across the street. Other uses include: opening locked doors by twisting the doorknob really hard and, of course, knocking people out with one’s fists. Her antagonist is Kilgrave (played by David Tennant of Doctor Who fame) who has the ability to control people’s minds. Kilgrave is a psychopath who uses his talents for evil. So far, this is standard comic book fair: evil mind-controller has been done before, for example with Emma Frost aka The White Queen in the “The Dark Phoenix Saga” run of the comic book series The Uncanny X-Men (1980, worth reading if you are into comic books).

But two aspects of Kilgrave’s character stand out to me as a new and refreshing take on the theme. First, Kilgrave’s ability controls what people want to do, not merely what their body does do. This makes his ability especially scary and philosophically interesting – more on this point below. Second, Kilgrave is incredibly petty. The villains of X-Men and the recent Netflix superhero shows Daredevil (2015-, worth watching although I rank this towards the bottom of my list of shows whose first season I enjoyed enough to complete) and Arrow (2012-, not worth watching), participate in vast elaborate, criminal conspiracies. Kilgrave is refreshingly realistic in his worldly desires: fancy clothing (e.g. purple suit-jackets) and one-off acts of sadism / dyadic exertions of power (a vendor rebukes him for stealing magazines: he commands the vendor to splash burning hot coffee in the vendor’s own face). Now I don’t mean to suggest that rape is petty, but it’s certainly not on the cliché grand scale of recent superhero films.

I mentioned that Kilgrave’s unique brand of mind-control offers a new take on the motif. First, let’s start with body control: I control my knees and nobody other than me controls my knees. But when we say “body control” we mean the unusual situation in which the typical or historical controller of the body is usurped in this role. For example, I go to the doctor, the doctor hits my knee with a hammer to provoke a knee-jerk reaction. In this scenario, the doctor is controlling my body (although he does so with my consent). Then there are body-controllers that seem to use the host’s brain while pushing aside the host’s conscious mind such as in the children’s book series Animorphs (1996-2001, worth reading if you are a child), in which the recurring villains are a slug-like alien species (called Yeerks) that controls its host by “shoving aside” the host’s conscious mind. Next we move to mind-control in which a person’s motivational set is influenced. “Motivational set” (a term coined by the famous ethicist Bernard Williams in his book Moral Luck (1981, worth reading if you are into philosophy of ethics)) refers to desires, intentions, preferences, dispositions, etc.; those key components that connect a thinking mind to action via motivation (as opposed to, e.g., neuro-chemical explanations of action). Again, starting with the mundane: when Matthew Murdock (of Daredevil) holds a bad guy off the edge of a building and threatens to drop him unless he tells Matthew where Wilson Fisk is, Matthew is attempting to “control” the bad guy’s actions via coercion. But this coercive form of mind-control hardly deserves the label since it works with your motivational set instead of against or without it. And then there is Kilgrave’s power.

Kilgrave directly chooses what you want to do. He does not bypass your conscious mind like the Yeerk in Animorphs, nor does he offer lop-sided options for you to choose from like Matthew hanging someone over the edge of a building. When Kilgrave tells the show’s primary damsel in distress, Hope Shlottman, to wait in bed for him, she therefore wants to wait in bed for him. Paradoxically, she wants to wait in bed for him against her will. Her conscious mind is aware that her desire to wait in bed was not produced from her own motivational set; she is aware that this desire is not of her own making, that it was implanted there by Kilgrave, like a plague of rabbits invading Australia’s ecosystem: the species is just as much a part of the causal system as any other animal, yet its origin and effects are alien and invasive respectively. Kilgrave’s victims are left feeling instinctually guilty for their actions despite knowing, on a more rational level, that they bear no personal responsibility. (Guilt without guiltworthiness…perhaps the most common form of guilt in our Judeo-Christian culture?)

Part way through the season, Jessica accuses Kilgrave of having raped her (the rape-event occurs before the timeline of the show begins) and Kilgrave attempts to defend himself against the accusation by arguing that Jessica wanted to have sex with him. This is another point where Jessica Jones surpasses Alien in communicating the horror of rape. In Alien, the social context that contributes to the problem of rape is absent. Part of the horror of real life rape is that rapists deny wrongdoing by arguing that their victims wanted to have sex. And further, the denial of rape (e.g. because of the delusion that if sex occurs the woman must have wanted) is shared, often preemptively, by others (cops, husbands, etc.) This aspect of rape – that victims are generally disbelieved and rapists are exonerated - is a recurrent theme in Jessica Jones, albeit by analogy: even though everyone is aware that the city is inhabited by superhumans, nobody believes Jessica when she tells them that Kilgrave has the power to control people’s minds. Even another superhuman (one with impenetrable skin) scoffs at the notion. (Although, once Kilgrave’s powers are acknowledged, at least nobody doubts that Jessica did not want to have sex with him.)

You should watch Jessica Jones, but be forewarned: it is not uplifting and repeatedly so. Many episodes left me feeling sad. Not only do bad things frequently happen to good characters, but the emotional effect is doubled by the believability and relatability of those characters. The believability of the characters deserves further emphasis – I am not recommending this show solely on presence of feminist themes (although these are ample) but also because of how real and multidimensional the characters are. 

The Force Awakens: Predictable Formula or Deliberate Indictment of Conformist Autocracy?

First FB guest post, by the Conductor of the Oscar Isaac Hype Train

Warning: if you haven’t seen Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, an entire legion of my best spoilers awaits you.

This past December, a month peppered with many notable films, I--and apparently a legion of moviegoers--looked forward to one release above all: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. It didn't take me long to realize that The Force Awakens borrows heavily from 1977’s A New Hope. 1

Rey is bae

Indeed, the main military and political struggle at issue in each is exactly the same. During the movie, I thought, we’ve had thirty-two years to come up with a follow up to Return of the Jedi and the best we can do is a remake of the first movie (albeit with the welcome addition of Rey, Finn, and my most passionate man-crush)? 2

Many fans have criticized the creative team (which includes more people than just JJ Abrams, namely Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt but I will refer to them all collectively as JJ for brevity’s sake) for their complete lack of creativity. Here’s the cynical explanation. JJ faced a daunting task: (1) make a commercially successful movie that would please fans, critics, and casuals alike, (2) live up to unbelievable hype, (3) overcome the sins of Episodes I-III, all the while (4) taking the story into (relatively) uncharted waters. 3 I can’t stress the third factor enough. The prequels sucked. They dumbed down the original Star Wars universe, pumped it full of pointless action sequences, CGI, “kid friendly” characters, and truly awful screenwriting and acting, leaving us with 418 minutes of insulting, Disney-fied garbage. Indeed, for that reason more than any other, The Force Awakens had a lot to overcome.

We can all agree that JJ followed a predictable Star Wars formula: the evil “First Order” have constructed a planet-destroying superweapon. A rag-tag crew of rebellious underdogs, including an innately powerful hero from a backwater desert planet, get some inside information about how to destroy the superweapon. The rebels attack, while the weapon is about to fire at the rebel base, and, through luck and skill, exploit the superweapon’s exposed weakness to blow it up.

Yet, this traditional formula actually adds new information about the Star Wars universe. In contrast to something like the perennially re-booted Spiderman franchise, The Force Awakens doesn’t simply recycle the same formula without advancing the a established franchise as well. By emphasizing the marked incomptence of the autocratic antagonists of the Star Wars universe, JJ made a deliberate, thematic choice to reveal the ultimate weakness of the Star Wars villains: that they are boring drones who lack imagination. The repetitive construction and destruction of Death Stars plot is a deliberate takedown of hierarchical, autocratic organizations.

The Galactic Empire, the antagonists in Episodes IV-VI, and The Force Awakens’s First Order (together the “Bad Guys”) display the following characteristics: decisionmaking and leadership is concentrated in one, supremely evil dude (Emperor Palpatine in the original trilogy and Supreme Leader Snoke in The Force Awakens); everyone is either an indistinguishable white-uniformed stormtrooper or black-uniformed TIE fighter pilot or a similarly homogeneous, vaguely British, drab-uniformed officer; they value unquestioning loyalty and discipline; they have seemingly vast resources myopically focused on destroying the Rebel Alliance (protagonists in the original trilogy) or the Resistance (protagonists in The Force Awakens). Moreover, they have a penchant for putting these resources to use building intimidating, spherical battle stations with uncannily easily-exploit weaknesses. Star Wars Bad Guys lack diversity and, apparently, creativity. They are conformists lead by an autocratic madman. Indeed, precisely because they stifle contrary viewpoints and vest all decisionmaking in one, supremely evil dude (who is probably surrounded by terrified yes-men) they lack the ingenuity--even after the rebels destroyed two death stars using essentially the same tactics--to do anything but try it again, but, like, bigger. By contrast, they face a ragtag fleet of scrappy, swaggering, Wedge Antilles Poe Dameron types who outthink, outfly, outshoot their way to victory against every Death Star the Bad Guys can throw at them.

On this view, JJ’s Starkiller Base in The Force Awakens arguably represents more than conservative, formulaic filmmaking; it continues a core theme from the original trilogy and even adds nuance to the Good v. Evil theme at the core of Star Wars. The Bad Guys aren’t just mass murdering megalomaniacs. They’re also deeply incompetent and doomed to repeat their failures because of their conformist ways and total reliance on fear to keep the local systems in line. 4 It may be too soon to tell whether The Force Awakens truly triumphs as a standalone film but for now it offers an interesting perspective on the nature of the original trilogy’s main antagonists.

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1. Attentive fans will also note some cute and almost certainly intentional allusions to Empire. E.g., the scene where luke’s saber is in the snow and Kylo Ren tries to force grab it, just like Luke had to do when he was upside down and about to become a wampa’s breakfast. It’s even the same lightsaber. The Han/Ren showdown on a narrow walkway in some kind of giant metal chasm also parallels the Luke Vader showdown in a similarly narrow, similarly inexplicable giant metal chasm somewhere in Cloud City. Admiral Ackbar and Nien Nunb make cameos in a nod to Jedi as well. ↩

2. Newly-minted Oscar Isaac fans should check out A Most Dangerous Year. ↩

3. The vast, vast collective lore of the “Expanded Universe” notwithstanding, there isn’t really anything guiding where the post-Jedi movies “have to” go because they happen after the original trilogy. The prequels had something of a playbook because the original trilogy dictated the key events that had to have transpired earlier. ↩

4. This theory has the added benefit of pandering to the stereotypical Star Wars fan, whom I (snarkily!) picture as a 20-40 year-old quasi-libertarian dude who probably works somewhere in “tech,” likes the idea of meritocracy, and dislikes big institutions. ↩