Imaginary Worlds - The Canon Revisited

Episode Date: December 28, 2017

The Last Jedi may be the most controversial film in the Star Wars series. While the movie has been critically acclaimed, many Star Wars fans have argued that the film violated canon in a number of ways, especially how it depicted Luke Skywalker. This week, I revisit my 2014 episode "The Canon," and I have a follow-up conversation with Rabbi Ben Newman about the state of the Star Wars canon. Until now, Ben and I had been on the same page about the new films, but like many fans, we found ourselves at odds when evaluating The Last Jedi. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH balancing minerals and crafted with skin conditioning oils. Hey everybody, I hope you're having a good holiday break. The new season of Imaginary World is going to launch on January 24th with a mini-series about Doctor Who, which I'm really excited about.

I've been working on it for a while. But for the next two episodes, I'm going to play you other stuff that I think you're going to enjoy. This week, I'm revisiting an old episode from 2014 because it speaks to a debate which has been raging in fandom this month around The Last Jedi, the new Star Wars movie. And by the way, if you haven't seen The Last Jedi, this episode will be full of spoilers. Now, I loved the movie. I mean, when the opening crawl came on, I was just giddy and I enjoyed every single minute of it.

and I enjoyed every single minute of it. And then when I got home, I was surprised to discover how many fans were furious, were venting on social media that they felt betrayed by the film. Now, of course, there are a lot of trolls out there who just can't stand the fact that the new trilogy features so many women and people of color. But putting them aside, I've watched a lot of YouTube videos from fans in the US,

the UK, and Australia who have legitimate gripes about the story and how it violates canon. So issue number one is that Rian Johnson, who wrote and directed The Last Jedi, was not really interested in the answers to all the mysteries that J.J. Abrams had set up in the previous film, The Force Awakens. Again, spoiler alert. Abrams had set up in the previous film, The Force Awakens. Again, spoiler alert. Back in 2015, there was a ton of fan speculation about who Supreme Leader Snoke was. But we never learn his identity in this film. In fact, he gets killed halfway through. The Knights of Ren were alluded to in the previous film as Kylo Ren's powerful mini army. They're barely mentioned.

And Rey's parentage turned out to be a red herring. And I got caught up in all that too. I mean, I falsely predicted on my podcast two years ago that Luke would turn out to be Rey's father. But the fact that I was wrong, and that a lot of these mysteries weren't resolved, just didn't bother me that much. But the main sticking point for the fans

is the characterization of Luke Skywalker. In this movie, Luke admits that he considered killing his nephew Ben Solo while Ben was sleeping because he realized that his nephew was turning to the dark side. And now Luke has given up on being a Jedi. In fact, he doesn't think the Jedi should even exist anymore. And in fact, there's actually a petition on change.org to convince Disney to strike The Last Jedi from the official Star Wars canon. And as of this recording, that petition has about 70,000 signatures,

and it's climbing by the second. And I sympathize with their predicament. I mean, I know what it's like to feel like your favorite character has been distorted beyond recognition. But if it's Batman or Superman, I mean, there's so many versions to choose from and the franchises get rebooted a lot. There is only one Luke Skywalker. And that's why I thought this would be a good time to revisit my 2014 episode about sci-fi canons, which I produced in anticipation of this new Star Wars trilogy.

Back then, we didn't know much about the films, except that Disney had bought Lucas and J.J. Abrams was going to direct the first movie. So in this episode, I focused instead on the conflicts within the Star Trek canon. And I talked with my friend Ben Newman about how sci-fi canons are similar to religious canons. After the break, I will play a new interview I did with Ben, where we discuss

The Last Jedi. He did not like it. But first, here's my 2014 episode, The Canon. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Con, you've got Genesis, but you don't have me. Probably the most beloved film in the Star Trek franchise is Star Trek II, Wrath of Khan. The characters are, you know, at their best. There's a fill-in that really gets Kirk's blood boiling.

They're all quoting Moby Dick. It's really great. But here's the weird thing about Wrath of Khan. Gene Roddenberry, you know, the creator of the Star Trek series, was booted by Paramount before that movie was made. Now, Roddenberry was on the outs because the first Star Trek movie from 1979 was ponderous and confusing, and it was a box office disappointment, and this was supposed to be Paramount's answer to Star Wars. So he was allowed to be a consultant on Star Trek II, although his notes were ignored. And then throughout the 80s, he got more and more upset because he felt Star Trek was becoming

militaristic, you know, fitting in with the rest of the Reagan era. Eventually, Paramount let him develop a new show. I think we shall end up with a fine crew, if we avoid temptation. So he created the next generation. And the tone of the TV show was supposed to be a counterweight to the movies. It was more peaceful, philosophical. Do you consider yourself superior to us? I am superior, sir, in many ways.

But I would gladly give it up to be human. When Roddenberry passed away, most people admit Star Trek The Next Generation got better. Derek McCaw runs the website Fanboy Planet. He had this mandate that there could be no inter-crew conflict, Star Trek The Next Generation got better. Derek McCaw runs the website Fanboy Planet. He had this mandate that there could be no inter-crew conflict, that they would have moved past that. But even the most diehard fans realize that in storytelling, if everybody's getting along perfectly, then there's no story.

It's not interesting. It might be great in a way of saying, that's wonderful. I'd like to believe that we could move to that point, but that's not worth an hour of television. So this is why I find this so fascinating. We have these huge disagreements among creative people about which direction the Star Trek franchise should go. But for fans, the wrath of Khan and The Next Generation are all taking place in the same timeline, in the same world. And they're very protective of this timeline, which is called the canon. Of course, every fantasy franchise is a canon, but the Star Trek canon is amazingly vast,

covering 12 movies, six TV shows, including a cartoon show from the 70s, which Star Trek fans argue is in canon, and all of the novels that were written in between. Even William Shatner, when he was directing Star Trek V, got into an argument with George Takei about the canon and their own characters. Takei wanted Sulu to get his own command because of the books he had. And he wanted to get his own command because in the books, the books he had, and he wanted to get his own command of the movies. And Shatner was arguing with him and said, but if you do that, then you can't be in the movies. You're not on the Enterprise anymore. Actually, even Derek McCaw thought that Shatner

was not properly respecting the canon in Star Trek 5. I was really irritated that Kirk never referenced his brother. He talked about having a brother, and he means Spock, but he actually had a brother who was killed in an episode of the TV series. And I was really mad, but I thought, I get it. For a movie, they can't bog down explaining to an audience who probably haven't watched the series as obsessively as we have to know that, yeah, there was that episode where there's these little plasma things, these butterflies of flesh, like, you know, went into his back and killed his brother and his nephew with pain. I think the nephew survived.

And then they don't reference that family again. So I was bugged that the movies broke that continuity. But most people just kind of went, eh, and accepted it and moved on. I have mixed feelings about canons in general. On the one hand, they can be very inclusive. If you're a serious fan, you know, you feel like you're part of a community that's taking this epic ride together. But if a canon is really dense, bogged down with a lot of mythology and exposition, casual fans will just drift away, or they feel like they're not welcome.

So in 2009, when J.J. Abrams rebooted Star Trek, I was all for it. I thought, you know, this is great. Let's have this new generation have their own Kirk and their own Spock. And, you know, when I watched the movie, I thought he was being respectful because he sets up that there's this time travel snafu so that everything that has happened in the canon still happened just in a different timeline. Leonard Nimoy is in the movie to sort of hand the baton to Zachary Quinto, playing Spock as a young man. Since my customary farewell would appear oddly self-serving, I shall simply say, good luck.

These new movies are really unpopular with Star Trek fans, for a lot of reasons, but the main one being, J.J. Abrams just smashed the canon to pieces. For Derek McCaw, the point of the canon is not script continuity. It's about having faith in the progress of humanity. One of the things that matters to me about Star Trek is it's a very hopeful vision of the future.

Star Wars is a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away that may not be us. Star Trek says, say like right now, when I'm scared about where the world is and what's going to happen for my kids, Star Trek tells me whether it's true or not, you know, that, you know, because it's fiction, but it tells me that we could work together and we can solve it and we can get past these problems. When the first space shuttle was built, the prototype, I always think it was a mistake on our part as fans to get super excited and say, name the prototype that can't fly, the Enterprise. Wait until one can actually go into space and name that the Enterprise but I can remember

I guess it was 1976 where they rolled it out and they played the Star Trek theme and it was like you know and all the cast was there it was like yes this is gonna happen we're gonna make it over the years a lot of people have compared sci-fi fandom to religion or they'll say the canon for Star Trek or Star Wars is like, you know, the Bible for fans. And they may not be totally wrong about that. Good afternoon, Harshalom. This is Gretchen. Yeah, can I have Rabbi Ben Newman, please? Sure, just a minute.

Thanks. Ben Newman is a rabbi at Congregation Har Shalom in Colorado. Hey, Eric, how are you? Good. Do you have the iPhone out? All right. Okay. Ben is also a full-fledged geek. A few days before we talked, he ran a Sunday school class where he broke the students into groups based on Disney properties. Marvel, Muppets, Princesses, and Star Wars. The Star Wars group used this idea of the Force and being like God. I didn't actually tell them about that, but that's something that I had thought when I was that young too. So it was pretty cool.

So the Old Testament, which Jews call the Torah, is kind of like the original canon. And a long time ago, rabbis started to wonder about the gaps between the stories, what happened to the characters when, you know, they're not appearing in the Torah. And so they started making up their own explanations to fill in these gaps. And those stories are called midrash, or the plural would be midrashim. There's a whole bunch of Midrashim written about Abraham because the story of Abraham basically begins with Abraham being told by God to leave his home.

But it doesn't say anything about his childhood. So they come up with all these stories about Abraham's childhood and how he rebelled against his father. Oh my God, this is fan fiction. Oh, totally. Rabbinic Midrash is kind of like fan fiction. Right. And they become part of canon, right? If they feel true enough, if they're good enough, they become, they stick. You know, they become part of the story.

In fact, this is my favorite example of a sci-fi canon acting like a religious canon. It was 1996. Digital effects were still pretty new. And the writers of Star Trek Deep Space Nine realized that they could do a time travel episode where they digitally paste their characters into the original show. So they're standing next to the young Captain Kirk. I have guards around the Klingons. I can't believe you don't at least want to meet Captain Kirk. That's the last thing on my mind. Oh, come on, Benjamin. Are you telling me you're not the tiniest bit interested in... But then they came across a problem because in the original show,

the Klingons just looked like people with goatees and heavy eyebrows. And then in the movies and the later TV shows, they got a bigger makeup budget and better technology. And so they gave the Klingons these very alien-looking prosthetic ridges on their foreheads. So how do they explain the difference when these two Klingons from different TV shows and different time periods are standing next to each other? They are Klingons. And it is a long story. What happened? Some kind of genetic engineering? A viral mutation? Would you not discuss it with outsiders? That's Midrash. You know, that's exactly what Midrash is.

It's a way of looking at the stories and explaining the discrepancies. Okay, so if it was a biblical story, right, you would say, oh, in Genesis 2, the Klingons had no ridges on their foreheads, but in Genesis 3, they did have ridges on their foreheads. But in Genesis three, they did have ridges on their foreheads. You know, what's the deal? So why does the Old Testament have so many contradictions and inconsistencies? Well, because it wasn't written by a single person. And this is something that religious scholars agree on. They identify four distinct authors with different styles and different agendas and different philosophies.

Supposedly, according to scholars, they were written at different time periods and they were collected together and probably presented to the Jewish people around 400 BCE. Now, at this point in history, the Jews are scattered across the Middle East, and there's a movement to bring them back to Israel, to unite them as a culture. They brought this document, the Torah, to the people, and they read it publicly. Scholars say that's probably when it was first written down, first collected. So their leaders are basically saying, we have to stick together as a people because these are our stories. They define who we are and what we believe.

But the authors of the Torah still disagreed in what the stories meant and what people were supposed to take away from them. Sound familiar? Each of the different authors has their own kind of formulaic way about them. So, for example, there's one author called the Deuteronomic author who probably wrote the book of Deuteronomy and several other passages throughout the Torah. And the Deuteronomic author, his whole formula is basically, his or her whole formula is basically, you do good things, you'll be blessed. You do bad things, you'll be cursed.

you do good things, you'll be blessed. You do bad things, you'll be cursed. Basically, every time you see that in the Torah, it's an indication that that's probably written by that particular author. The book of Job comes along, and the book of Job basically takes the genre of the Deuteronomic author and smashes it to pieces and basically says, no, you do good things, and it doesn't necessarily mean that good things are gonna happen to you you bad things and it doesn't necessarily mean that bad things are gonna happen to you and so there is kind of a there's a response even within the genres I think you see that also in in you know modern sci-fi also at least when you have different directors or whatever they're they're responding each other, responding to their different interpretations of the character.

In 2014 AD, a council of scholars met to decide the fate of another canon. Disney, which of course bought Lucasfilm, is about to crank out a ton of Star Wars sequels and spin-offs. But first they had to grapple with the fact that all these novels had been written that took place after Return of the Jedi, told the story of how Princess Leia and Han Solo got married and had children and etc. So Disney came out with a statement saying that those books are now invalid. None of that stuff happened. We're going to invent a whole new history for these characters when we get to episode seven. And so fans who believe that those stories were in canon are really upset.

And J.J. Abrams, amazingly enough, has managed to piss off a group of fans from an entirely different franchise. But this is what we do as humans. We come up with stories, we fall in love with the characters, and then we fight over them. And loving and fighting is what makes a good story. Does he dance too in his books?

What? Oh, and if you are J.J. Abrams and Lawrence Kasten and you're actually listening to this podcast, which I'm sure you're not, but just in case you are, my cousins Ruby, Polly, and Sloane are total Star Wars fans and they have a ton of questions that need to be answered.

What does Leia do with her Bausch costume? What happened to the Stormtroopers after Return of the Jedi? Well, why don't they brainwash them to be loyal to the Jedi? Like, why don't in the seventh movie? That's a good question. Did any bad guys break

her wedding? Did they crash it? The secret? Yeah. This foot. Can you say, Luke, I am your father? Street Dino Father. After the break, we'll look at whether today we have a crisis of canon in the Star Wars universe. So after I got home from seeing The Last Jedi

and I noticed this big split among fans, I checked in with my friends to see where they stood. Ben Newman sent me a flurry of instant messages about everything that he thought was wrong with the movie. And I was surprised because he and I were on the same page when we talked about The Force Awakens in my 2015 episode, which was called The Expanded Universe. So I called Ben to ask him why the film bothered him so much. And I knew that he had gotten really caught up in the sort of, quote, mystery box storytelling that J.J. Abrams is known for.

And J.J. Abrams did leave some wiggle room for the next director to decide what was inside those proverbial boxes. But he also signaled to the audience that certain things were going to be important, like who Rey's parents are. Rey has a force vision when she touches Anakin Skywalker's lightsaber. And in that vision, she sees a bunch of different things. One is Luke touching R2-D2,

which we saw in this new movie. But other things were like her being taken away, or her being separated from her parents. And, you know, it would seem from that force vision that it was a big deal, her parentage, you know, that who her parents were. And it gave rise to all of these fan theories. But then in the end, Rian Johnson decided to make it so that her parents, at least according to what Kylo Ren said to Rey, that her parents were nobodies and just scavengers who sold her off. I don't know if it's a break with the canon, but I think it's a break with the direction that Abrams seemed to be taking the story. The mystery box is sort of interesting because, you know, we're talking in the original piece

about Midrash and Talmudic, you know, discussions to sort of fill in the blanks between things. Do you feel like the fan fiction theories in the last two years around Ray's parentage and about who Snoke is, which got some of these videos got millions of hits on YouTube about people presenting their theories. Do you think the fans are reading more into it than than they should have? And is there and can you continue to draw parallels between, you know, the sort of the religious canon and the commentaries around those canons? Well, I wouldn't make a value judgment to say that they were drawing more theories, you know, drawing more out of it than they should have. I think that's just human nature. And I mean, I think that that's what

gives rise to Midrash are the holes in the stories and the sort of mystery of a story and the ambiguity of a story and the vagueness of a story. And that's sort of the fun of it. The problem is when you open the box, right? I mean, it ends up that it's something. And so, I mean, I guess if you were to associate it with Midrash, that would be, you know, somebody actually deciding that this was what the story actually meant. And this is the one true meaning for the story. And, you know, when that happens, people are upset. Yeah, I mean, to me, it's so interesting because, you know, everyone loves the original trilogy. And then everybody was so, or most people, I should say, there's definitely the prequels have their defenders.

But a lot of people are really upset. And this sense of betrayal of how could the very same George Lucas have created these. betrayal of how could the very same george lucas have created these and then when jj abrams and casting came along it was this another sense of like okay this is good but it's too much of an impersonation of the early lucas like the sense of like the voice of star wars and this is a great impersonation of the voice of star wars but we still haven't found it yet and then this guy ryan johnson comes along and is like no this is the story um this is now canon i mean i feel like the star wars fans there seems to be this frustration out there is that they've been wondering for for now decades who is the true voice of star wars i don't feel like they that johnson really even cared very much about you know whether what he

was doing was canonical or or not because for me, the most compelling thing about the movie, even though I was upset with a lot of the storytelling and sort of the canon and getting rid of Snoke and the Rey's parentage thing, I really loved the characters. I really loved the way the characters interacted. I loved the actors. I loved the chemistry between Rey and Luke. But it seems to

me like part of what Johnson was doing was just basically saying, yeah, you know, that sort of history, canon, not canon stuff doesn't really matter all that much. You know, what matters is that I'm telling a story with compelling characters. It's funny, you're way more measured right now than you were when we were IMing earlier today. Is it because you're being recorded? Or have you had second thoughts about the movie? You know, I mean, I'm still upset about many of the things that we were talking about,

but I've sort of come around on the raised parentage thing. And I think in a way, that's a sort of return to the original A New Hope, you know? Because Luke originally, like, he was sort of a nobody. And this is why I'm sort of starting to like it now. It's sort of the opposite of what happens in Empire Strikes Back. Because in Empire Strikes Back, you know, we find out that Luke has this lineage and he's the son of Darth Vader. But in the second movie of this series, we find out that Rey doesn't have a lineage and she's not connected to anybody important. That I think I'm starting to come around on.

This doesn't really have to do with canon, but I'm upset with his storytelling. Basically nothing happens in the entire film. Like, it's a spaceship chase that goes on for the entire film. And they're just like looking for gas. At least my feeling was he sort of wrote himself into a corner. And then he has this deus ex machina where Luke projects himself all the way to the other side of the galaxy and then dies because of the effort of projecting himself to the other side of the galaxy. That sort of, to me, felt like sloppy storytelling, number one. And number two, like, why didn't Luke just go physically to the other side of the galaxy if he knew it was going to kill him anyway?

My question for you, though, again, again, it feels really it's an interesting question of authorship to me. You know, he said when he pitches to Kathleen Kennedy and the rest of the team at Disney, he thought they were going to say no way. And they said, we love it. And he was very pleasantly surprised. Mark Hamill read the script, said, you know, I disagree with every single thing you're having my character do. They had a big discussion about it, and finally he was on board and said, okay, I'll do my best. You're paying me to do a job. I'll do the job. It's just so interesting to me that this one guy's vision of like,

no, this is what Luke has done. This is where Luke is, feels so wrong to so many people and feels so right to so many people. I think that's a fascinating issue of canon and authorship. I mean, I think it's hard to make that comparison in Judaism, but the thing that comes to mind is the development of Christianity. When Christianity was first formed, there were so many gospels. There were so many different ways of telling the story of Jesus. There were so many different ways of telling the story of Jesus. But then there was the Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicaea, and they basically decided on Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as the authoritative Gospels.

And those were what became the accepted story. And I mean, for generations, that's had an effect. There are people today who still look at the Gnostic Gospels, for example, and want to take those as part of the canon of Jesus, of the story of Jesus. I would say the same in many other religions. When Islam comes about and Muhammad basically says, yes, I'm the next storyteller in this line of the Abrahamic tradition. And I'm going to say that all of these stories are true, but I have the next chapter in the story, the next authoritative chapter. When a new storyteller comes along who is the new authority

on the story, it causes a split within people, fans, for want of a better word, of the story of what's the authoritative story there and whether they're going to accept that or not. all right, now I'm going to create my own Star Wars trilogy that is in place of the J.J. Abrams, Rian Johnson trilogy because we're not allowed to. A lot of people are really saying that Luke is a Jedi. It is against the history of this whole franchise. It's against canon. It's not in the spirit of Luke as a character to have given up like this, to have

had this moment of weakness where he thought of killing his nephew and then going in the sense of this sort of shame spiral that eventually leads to him deciding that really the problem is with the Jedi itself. What was your reaction to that? I agree, you know, because the character of Luke sort of already went through a transformation with his father, right? With Darth Vader, who is this really dark character. He ends up having compassion on his father. That's sort of the whole point of the original series, right? That at the end of Return of the Jedi, the Emperor wants him to strike down Darth Vader. And he has this opportunity to strike down Darth Vader, and he chooses to not strike down Darth Vader. And then Darth Vader ends up killing the Emperor. The whole original three movies really hinged on

that character transition with Luke, where he decides to not choose the dark side. And so, yeah, it's very unusual given the original series that Luke, his next move would be when he sees this dark character to think that they're completely irredeemable and to want to try and strike them down. It's funny. It didn't bother me as much because he, I guess what I was connecting it to was how I've seen people change through aging, how I've seen people become distorted versions of themselves as they get much, much older. And also with Luke, you know, there's sort of two things. Number one, he never really finished his training. I sort of never quite bought the it's only been a couple of months since Empire Strikes Back.

And I'm now suddenly this really zen like uh jedi and i think that maybe that led to you know the line where he says to ray about how you know he was luke skywalker he was a legend and how that kind of ate away at him and i he had this sort of imposter syndrome that that i think also sort of may have affected his judgment. You're creating Midrash now, Eric. Yeah. Right? Like, you're making explanations for why this drastic change occurred.

I mean, I think fans are just saying, hey, there's this big change. You can create Midrash. And I mean, maybe that's the fun of it. You know, maybe that's actually, in the end, why it's good storytelling, because it opens up sort of another mystery box for us us where we can sit around and speculate what happened to Luke to make him just sense darkness in somebody and want to kill them. But we're talking the original in the original piece that we did that this is all over the Torah anyway, this kind of new authors coming in and totally contradicting the previous ones. Completely. And I'm sure there's going to

be so much fan fiction that's written to explain why all of these changes happened. As you just did yourself, Eric, when you were saying, well, Luke got older and he sort of became a little embittered and he changed his character. You know, that's sort of a soft way of creating a midrash around Luke to say why he transformed in that way. Yeah, I mean, in the same way that we have these canonical books that come out that people have to make sense between each other with stories, it's the same thing with Star Wars and the movies.

That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. If you want to hear more Star Wars episodes in this podcast, you can look back through the archives at a five-part series from 2015 on Star Wars and then another one last year about the Death Star. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinski.

And my website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.