How Philosophies can affect Genre Expectations

In the previous review, I referred to Maz Kanata as the Anti-Yoda. This was somewhat hyperbolic, but I didn’t just make the comparison because she is clearly a knock-off of Yoda. The reason I made the statement is because Maz’s introduction marks a dramatic turn for The Force Awakens and for the Sequel Trilogy as a whole.

So, before moving on with the review, I want to explain in some detail why this affected the audience’s overall enjoyment of the films.

There’s been a lot of talk about Rey over the years, different variations of “She’s overpowered,” followed by accusations of sexism, followed by denials and clarifications. I believe that beneath this back and forth is an unarticulated problem.

Many people feel something is wrong, but, because films are not typically discussed in these terms, they’ve been unable to put their finger on the precise nature of the problem. It’s another case of Mr. Plinkett’s saying: “You may not have noticed, but your brain did.”

As we’ve discussed in other contexts, people do not watch films in a void. They remember backstory, the soft and hard magic systems, which have been discussed in other reviews; the character traits of the protagonists and antagonists, and so on.

But there’s another level to this broader context, a philosophical level. For example, take any writing class and you’re likely to hear some lecturer scream his or her head off about the dangers of paragons. There can be no greater sin than portraying a character as too good or too bad. Everyone must be a little of both because that’s “realistic.” Is it?

Right or wrong, that’s a philosophical position. It’s also a philosophical position to assume that a story’s goal should be to portray events as realistic. Once upon a time, some stories were meant to present a model of behaviour. But the philosophy of writing has gradually changed.

Whether that’s a good or bad thing will depend on if one agrees with the premise. The fact is genres carry a philosophical worldview. They can’t help it. For example, depending on who dies and in what order, a slasher film can vary from flat-out nihilism to stating that some bizarre form of dark karma guides the universe, sometimes in the form of a zombie with a machete.

One can also ask what the philosophical worldview of a romance is. Couples who never experience a great deal of emotion for each other but simply marry because they’re comfortable with one another and spend their days reading newspapers on a porch while having neither serious arguments nor sudden bursts of passion exist in reality, but such a couple’s relationship would make for a lousy rom-com.

So, what is a rom-com teaching about love? Do the writers of rom-coms typically consider that kind of relationship healthy? And more to the point, would the audience who enjoys rom-coms consider that relationship healthy?

Whether the audience would approve or not, they do tend to expect the tropes associated with a genre. In a rom-com’s case, this might be the couple hating each other at first, only to find out that they have more in common than they first supposed.

They might expect a dramatic breakup in the second act and a heartwarming reconciliation in the third. The underlying idea behind all this being the greater the tension, the greater the passion. That’s a philosophy. Whether that philosophy is healthy is another question.

Previously, I stated that Star Wars isn’t science fiction so much as it is fantasy. Traditional Star Wars treats its morality as fixed. It appeals to ideals, like compassion, and rejects things like greed.

There’s no debate about these subjects. One is right, the other is wrong. This is important because in the prior review I discussed how the sequel trilogy distorts the word balance. It defines balance as good and evil acting as competing causal forces forever fighting for dominance.

This is a form of ethical dualism. In Lucas’ saga, balance meant overcoming the pull of emotions such as greed and anger. To achieve balance was to win the battle against oneself. And to bring balance to the Force meant ending the Sith who embodied the negative emotions.

This is a form of privation theory, the idea that evil is not a causal competing force but a distortion of the good. This was a change in philosophies, and this change altered the expected tropes within the fantasy.

Take The Lord of the Rings, for example. Saruman is not Gandalf’s alter ego. He is a good being who’s gone rogue, and Gandalf is literally sent back to deal with him. He says: “Yes. I am white now. Indeed, I am Saruman, one might almost say, Saruman as he should have been.”

So, Saruman had another path, but he made the wrong choice. Compare that with Anakin. He starts out as the chosen one for a Jedi prophecy and turns to the dark side. And just as Gandalf makes a final plea for Saruman to make the right choice, so too does Luke make a final appeal to his father.

Vader and Saruman make different choices in the end, but the trope, the hero’s final offer of redemption, is still there. These tropes act as story beats. They give the audience a sense of where they’re at in the plot.

The bad breakup tells rom-com fans that they are somewhere around the second act. The hero’s first attempt at stopping the villain in a fantasy does the same. And the hero’s final plea tells the audience that this is the last confrontation.

But what happens when the writers trade out the core philosophy holding up these tropes? Because that’s the thing, the tropes are usually the manifestation of the philosophy. The hero must undergo training because the propensity for evil exists in the protagonist as well as the antagonist.

Think Luke’s failure at the cave. One of the members of the couple in a rom-com must do something crazy and dramatic because love and logic don’t mix . . . supposedly. The inner philosophy in some measure steers what the characters will do.

So, what happens when the philosophy changes, but the genre stays the same? The answer is simple: confusion followed by irritation.

If Rey is the new protagonist for the story and that story is structured like a typical fantasy, then she must first achieve balance in herself before she can bring balance to the Force. But this doesn’t happen because the meaning of balance has changed, and the audience hasn’t been made aware.

Rey suddenly understands the Force. She suddenly beats Kylo Ren. Then, at the end, instead of making a final plea to Kylo to help her kill the Emperor, Kylo’s redemption happens much earlier and has nothing to do with Rey.

Then Kylo is thrown into a crevasse, allowing Rey to beat the Emperor on her own. Then Kylo climbs out of the crack to find Rey dead, then they essentially trade lives through a kiss.

That’s more akin to a “taming your inner dragon” motif than it is a final plea for the villain’s redemption. And the whole time, some of the audience is thinking: “Wait? The training with Leia was it? She’d already beaten Kylo by then. Why did they kiss? And why is the Emperor back? What is happening?”

This is a much deeper problem than Rey being too powerful. The audience trained by the previous Star Wars films is waiting for the familiar story beats and tropes that help them follow what’s happening.

They didn’t get many of those beats, and what they did get was out of order, so they eventually lost track of where the character arcs were going. The plot itself might’ve ended, but the overall story feels incomplete. That is what I mean by genre expectations. They help with pacing and understanding the kind of story the writers are trying to tell.

And the sad thing is that some of this could’ve been prevented with a little signalling, some sort of exposition in the title crawl like: “The Force is changing.” Or: “A new kind of Force user is arising. Leia senses it.”

Anything like that would’ve clued the audience into the fact that the rules have changed. It wouldn’t have fixed everything by a long shot, but it would’ve helped. I’ll point out the specific examples of this issue as the reviews continue.