The Metamodernity of THE LAST JEDI
Note: This piece was originally published on my Patreon, several weeks ago. Go become a Patron for $1 per month get access to weekly writing and audio rambles.
Recently, my YouTube buddy Thomas Flight posted an excellent video essay analysis of three movements in film throughout the last several decades, going from modernism to postmodernism to metamodernism. If you'd like to watch that video to get a far more well-educated understanding of the groundwork of what we're discussing, it's on YouTube here!
I've been following Thomas's work a while now. He's on the increasingly short list of 'video essayists' that I still engage regularly these days, mainly because he examines film from an aesthetic perspective but also (more appealingly to me) from a cultural and philosophical one.
As you'll see in the video, Thomas's articulation of metamodernism argues that a key part of its DNA is 'oscillation' between the traits of modernism and the traits of postmodernism, which can look in the moment like a pendulum swinging back and forth between a sense of inherent meaning and a sense of inherent meaninglessness, optimism and nihilism, or objectivity and subjectivity. Everything Everywhere All at Once is that movie that Thomas (I think very rightly) uses as a poster boy for the metamodern storytelling mindset; it's a film bathed in nihilism, irony, absurdity, and genre deconstruction - but it also ends with some semblance of meaning and sincerity in spite of it all.
To elaborate on the idea, let's try another movie for kicks. Thomas doesn't use it as an example in the video, but I'm a firm believer that Greta Gerwig's Little Women (2019) is an excellent example of metamodernism, particularly because the changes in how it adapts the classic source material can be easily identified and distinguished from previous iterations.
Gerwig's Little Women is, in many ways, a lovingly-faithful adaptation of the source material, albeit with some major restructuring to the narrative that allows the "past" and "present" to exist side-by-side through uniquely cinematic language. Especially toward the end, though, things start to branch off significantly: Gerwig's version introduces the meta element of Jo March becoming a writer and penning a story based on her childhood, titled Little Women. The choice intentionally blurs the lines between the fictional Jo March and the book's real author, Louisa May Alcott, but it also allows Gerwig to deconstruct Little Women's original ending; Jo's engagement to Professor Bhaer is intercut with a scene where her publisher demands a more conventionally romantic ending, implying that what we're seeing might be more fiction than fact. As the dreamlike sequence continues, Jo is shown happily married with Bhaer and starting the school with her sisters just as the original ending describes...but through the magic of editing, the real climax of the film comes as she watches Little Women being printed for the first time, leaving us uncertain of what "really happened" but satisfied that Jo has achieved her dream.
In my eyes, this is the epitome of a metamodernist ending. Gerwig deconstructs the conventional happy resolution of Little Women (historically claimed as unsatisfyingly tidy by readers) - but rather than leaving the viewer with empty cynicism, she still plays that ending with full emotional sincerity...and then imagines new (and independently self-given) meaning outside its walls. She deconstructs and reconstructs.
And that's exact what The Last Jedi does, too. Yeah, that's right, this piece has been about Star Wars all along. How disappointing!
Seriously, though: after diving into the subject of metamodernism in film, it's been fascinating to me to observe that The Last Jedi tangibly represents the gap between modernism, postmodernism, and metamodernism...and that's exactly what has made it so controversial.
I'm not smart enough to tell you whether the original Star Wars trilogy is definitively a modernist or postmodernist story; it might be somewhere in between, or it might even be premodernist. The OT certainly came out near the precipice between modernism and emerging postmodernism, and there are elements you could argue are postmodern, like Lucas's fondness of pastiche and genre-blending. But even so, I think the trilogy's strong and unclouded sense of good and evil, wrestle with right and wrong choices, total lack of irony or cynicism, value of knightly moral code over subjective feelings, and mythic orchestral qualities might put it closer to modern/premodern than otherwise. In 1977, when lots of Hollywood science fiction was slow and contemplative and rarely pure escapism, the unabashedly cheesy pulpiness and sincerity of Star Wars made it feel like water in the desert.
Since the release of the original Star Wars, each installment has provoked its own controversies, criticisms, and eventual die-hard defenders - but as anyone reading this probably knows, The Last Jedi puts the mere label of "controversial" to shame. Talking about your opinion about it at parties sometimes feels more like a hot-button issue than talking about politics. Every now and then, I think about that tweet that said something like "once upon a time, Rian Johnson made the first good Star Wars movie in years and it destroyed American culture forever."
But The Last Jedi didn't merely spark controversy among crazed Star Wars superfans; it was the genesis, the firstfruit, of a larger culture war that snowballed into the "XYZ has GONE WOKE!!!!" YouTube industrial complex, with ripple effects not only on future Star Wars installments but on blockbuster pop culture as a whole. It was The Last Jedi's daring attempt to turn Luke Skywalker into a complex, flawed, mistake-making hero (and the subsequent backlash to this characterization) that left many other classic Hollywood heroes in a catatonic state of safe and unchanging badassery, from Michael Keaton's Batman in The Flash to Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters: Afterlife and even Luke himself (or the wax figure recreation of him) in The Mandalorian. The backlash to The Last Jedi taught Hollywood many, many lessons - and one of them was that evolving or significantly changing classic "legacy heroes" was a recipe for boycotts and internet trolling. Best to keep them sentimentally static.
It may be entirely subconscious and unarticulated, but among the people who hated The Last Jedi, I think there's an underlying sentiment that the film represents a postmodern departure from Star Wars' more modernist roots. There's a real sense in which the original Star Wars trilogy is imagined to represent the "good old days" of storytelling, when good and evil were clear, endings were satisfying, and ideas were original - regardless of how entirely accurate that perception might be. Comments sections since 2017 have been littered with paragraph-long rants about how Rian Johnson "betrayed" the series by "slandering" its icons and "disrespecting" its established lore. For haters, this was exemplified by Kylo Ren's line, "Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to." In their eyes, this is the thesis statement of The Last Jedi and the clearest indicator of its destructive cynicism and lack of reverence for the Star Wars lore.
And just look at the movie! Luke Skywalker is a washed-up loner who throws away his legendary lightsaber and wastes away on an island drinking green milk without rescuing his friends. The Jedi Order is criticized for being outdated and complicit in The Emperor's rise to power. Yoda encourages the burning of the sacred Jedi texts. The Resistance is said to be buying their weapons from the same corrupt source as The First Order. The film includes homages to classic Star Wars typescenes (like the Emperor's Throne Room showdown) but then subverts them in ways that leave more questions than answers. And after a big mystery box surrounding Rey's parentage (with many speculating she could be a Kenobi or a Skywalker) the film reveals that she was "nobody" all along. Even the sacred idea of lineage and bloodline is deconstructed and abandoned.
The character of DJ in The Last Jedi perfectly encapsulates the postmodern worldview, telling Finn about the First Order and the Resistance: "Good guys, bad guys, made-up words. It's all a machine, partner. Live free, don't join." This stands in stark contrast to the perception of the original Star Wars trilogy as a world where good and evil are clear and uncomplicated. It feels almost uncomfortable to hear.
Despite the rage and sense of betrayal among fans, though: DJ is not the hero of The Last Jedi. Finn does not heed his subjectivist words of advice. The movie does not end with a dejected Luke Skywalker wasting away on an island.
By the end of The Last Jedi, Luke Skywalker does arrive to save his friends in an unconventional way, projecting his consciousness to nonviolently challenge Kylo Ren and distract him long enough that the Resistance can get away. Despite his cynicism about The Jedi Order and the idol of "Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master," he chooses to embrace the legend and willingly become the myth that everyone believes that he is, overcoming his shortcomings and his doubts. Defying DJ's advice to stay out of the good/evil dichotomy entirely, Finn firmly commits to being "rebel scum," recognizing that complexity and corruption of the world around him but deciding that there's something worth fighting for anyway. And though Rey is initially shattered to know that she "has no place in this story" and her lineage "comes from nothing," this realization ultimately expands the limitations of The Force and demonstrates that the heart of a true Jedi can come from anywhere. Even Yoda's decision encouragement of Luke to burn the sacred Jedi texts is reversed when we find out that Rey took them with her before they were burned!
It's this "oscillation" between deconstruction and reconstruction that may explain why The Last Jedi was so widely interpreted and misinterpreted in a myriad of ways. Defying the traditions of a black & white antagonist, the deconstruction present in The Last Jedi is never built entirely on lies; Luke's cynicism toward the Jedi, Finn and DJ's doubts about the integrity of the "good guys," even Kylo Ren's desire to "let the past die" and burn down the old ways of doing things...they're all warranted and reasonable points of conflict, full of truth and insight about the dysfunction of the broken systems at play in the universe. The movie does not repudiate these criticisms fully. Luke was right that the Jedi were wrong. This may be uncomfortable for audiences to accept. But Luke was wrong to think that he could simply stop at deconstructing the faults in the old order of things.
Any postmodern film would have been perfectly content landing on these unresolved tensions. Postmodernism would be Luke Skywalker staying on the island fully accepting that the labels of "Jedi" and "Sith" are meaningless. But being that The Last Jedi is metamodern, it ultimately must oscillate toward more meaning than that.
The Last Jedi is not a cynical deconstruction of Star Wars. It is a metamodern deconstruction and reconstruction, like a phoenix rising from the ashes.
To me, this is the clearest evidence I've deciphered yet for why the movie was so controversial, with the divide partially down generational lines, too. For an audience raised on modernism, The Last Jedi's willful oscillation toward postmodernism (even if it doesn't land there) is traitorous to the ethos of Star Wars. For an audience raised on postmodernism, its trend toward modernism could be almost sappy or cheesy. But for an audience accustomed to metamodernism, it feels contemporary and meditative, unpacking the tropes and metatextual assumptions of the Star Wars saga while also celebrating and affirming them in equal measure. I'm sure you can guess which audience I'm in.
More than anything, I don't want anyone to walk away from this piece thinking that I'm arguing that metamodern stories are the only ones worth telling. I do think, however, that a film which intuitively speaks into the contemporary cultural moment is always going to be far more interesting than one which is desperately trying to capture the magic of a bygone era. But then again - isn't that what Star Wars was in the first place?