Most images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi celebrated its first birthday last Saturday, though it feels like we’ve been living under its shadow for ages – time moves strangely in the era of American fascism.
Criticism of the film exists at a complicated and troubling intersection of grand artistic ambition, valid criticism, fan entitlement and zit-faced urchins who don’t want women or brown people in their movies or country. There have been several attempts to lay out the various aspects of this intersection, and this piece is going to lean heavily on the work of others, but with a year’s hindsight, I want to at least try and put everything in the same place.
The story of audience response to The Last Jedi is a story that transcends this individual film and several different groups of films. This is a story about how our culture processes media in the late ‘10s and how the political divisions most prominent in this era cross over into other facets of American identity. Let’s get started.
Reel Entropy 