And/or
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“There is more than one sort of prison, captain. I sense you carry yours wherever you go.”
– Chirrut Imwe, as written by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy, in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
(Spoilers on all things Star Wars related ahead.)
In “Narkina 5”, Episode 8 of Season 1 of Andor, Cassian arrives at an isolated prison surrounded by a lake, on a moon in the Outer Rim. He is greeted by boilersuit-clad guards, one of whom delivers a cold orientation to the facility. The guards, we hear, do not rely primarily on their weapons to keep order. Instead, they lean on routine and “minimally invasive enforcement techniques”, which include an environment capable of sending painful shockwaves through unshielded bodies. Self-policing and self-preservation are entrusted to be key motivators. The prisoners are told to use their time “productively” to avoid harsh punishment.
Cassian is then uniformed and taken to his “level”, a floor of the floating forced labor camp, and mini-factory where a cohort of prisoners is fighting against the clock to complete their tasks. He is given another shot of key messaging by the ‘floor manager’, Kino Loy, a prisoner closing in on his sentence’s conclusion. Institutionalized and assertive, Kino has been installed in the upper echelon of slave ranks, responsible for ensuring those under his purview stick to the script:
Kino: “Listen up. It’s a twelve-hour shift. Productivity is encouraged; evaluation is constant.”
“The seven tallies are the running shift totals of all the other rooms on this floor. You play against all the other tables in this room. I play against all the other rooms.”
Cassian: “Play?”
Kino: “Call it what you will – the point of this conversation is that you understand one thing most clearly. I have two hundred and forty-nine days left of my sentence. I have a free hand in how I run this room. I’m used to seeing my room in the top three on the level. You will want to keep that happening. I’m sensing you understand me.
Sick? Injured? Come and talk to me. Problems with another inmate? I will know before you do. Losing hope? Your mind? Keep it to yourself.”
Cassian is directed to his assigned table and meets the small group of prisoners who have to facilitate his assimilation into the Narkina 5 system. What follows is my favorite scene in the entire series.
After introducing himself with an alias, Cassian circles the group and watches them complete an assembly speedrun. A nondescript machine component emerges from the center of the table and the prisoners work furiously to use their hands, resting or dangling tools, and calculated bursts of concentration to further construct it. They chatter constantly, their minds half on the work and half contemplating aloud what their overseers are up to. They fret over how far behind the other tables they are, or the other floors. Not meeting the shifting standard will result in severe reprimand.
We have no idea what they are doing. They have no idea what they are doing. None of it matters as long as they finish it before the clock runs out. Cassian absorbs what he can, entranced and horrified at their robotic movements:
People remember the speeches, but the punctuating dialogue between characters also ushers Andor into the pantheon of great narratives. Dialogue suitable within a lunar prison in a galaxy far, far away that is readily adaptable to many modern labor contexts. Minor tweaks separating exchanges befitting imaginary dystopias from real ones.
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Crests and Troughs
Andor is a blip in the Star Wars cannon. A momentary realization of the potential inherent to the space opera. Sans lightsabers and alien dressings that saturate the other films, Andor’s characters and plots were able to expand into novel arenas without trying too hard to associate themselves with a larger mythology. While the callbacks and easter eggs are there, the creators seem almost unconcerned with writing a show beholden to family-friendly fantasy fare. Its ultimate strength derived from its human faces and their institutionally-influenced interactions; individual and collective roles played between public, private, corporate and anarchic spheres. This is a show closer to the literary science fiction nucleus – grounded in our own history, politics and economy, revealing their murky interplay.
A spinoff of a spinoff validly questioned upon its production announcement, the show that had no calls to existence ended up being the best thing from the Lucasfilm universe. Even this casual fan remembers watching A New Hope for the first time, decades after its release, lured in by its promise of cosmic exploration. Different planets, settings, civilizations and species draped in Western and Sci-Fi garb. Battles between good and evil, rebellion and empire, othered and ascendant. Allegories for real wars being fought in East Asia in the filmmaking language of Kurosawa and Tarkovsky. But the original 1977 film and its binaries carried on to its offshoots. They persisted in treading shallow waters. (Caveat: I am only speaking of the theatrically released, live-action films and the live-action television shows.) While technically masterful, the far away galaxy’s inhabitants and settings could never quite escape its mediocre plotlines.
That was always the problem with Star Wars: we only ever saw pulp entertainment or flawed attempts at weighty conceptualizations. Regarding the latter, the iconography of the original film is a great example – the Empire adorned with homages to Nazis and their stormtroopers, while our heroes are placed into shots lifted directly from Triumph of the Will during the final scene. Even the prequels, for all the hate they get, offered hints at deftly constructed realism. The scratched and beaten-up droids emerging from their carriers to face down the Gungan army in The Phantom Menace, clearly indicative of an imperial power in decline, and one about to pivot to an army of clone slaves. If only the rest of the film was not caked with unnecessary CGI and most other settings made to look squeaky clean for the sake of it; whatever happened to the lived-in spaceships of the original trilogy borrowed from Solaris, the ones resembling a broken down bus rather than a futuristic utopia?
Wonderful, surface level stuff. But we never had time to dwell into the corrupted good and evil filtering down from the nobility. Which is fine for a quick theatrical exhibition. Less excusable when you are decades into films and television shows, searching for sparks of originality.
Andor was the first and only time we saw a layered beginning, middle and end focused on personal battles within the interstellar conflicts, exemplars of wider social movements. You could engage with the complex narrative and go along for the thrill. Both were fleshed out and inviting; entertainment and depth. Here was the ground level of the banality of empire, creating a legion of self-described clinicians treating the cancer of the revolution (as Partagaz declares, “We are healthcare workers!”), coupled with the unsavory acts of rogue rebels with dubious moral codes (Cassian’s response to reluctant allies blaming him for their proposed interventions? “Don’t use me as an excuse!”).
The nub of the ideas introduced in A New Hope were finally expanded upon from the aristocracy down to kids orphaned and displaced by massacres. Lines like “It is a period of civil war” (from the film’s opening crawl) carried added weight and meaning. Andor was the best kind of sequel or prequel, one that heightens rather than diminishes its predecessors, not oversubscribing to nostalgia.
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The Capital Connection
Coming back to Narkina 5. The four-episode prison arc in the first season and the eight or so episode Ghorman story in the second season represent some of the best scripted television in the past few years. They elevated a silly space opera that at times is taken too seriously into a longer dialogue of capital and consumption.
In prisons, mining and many other contexts, oppression is mechanical. It is worth watching this show even if you are unfamiliar with the greater lore, simply for the exploration of exploitative and forced labor, coercive psychology, and self-policed behavior. The mundanity of evil that is present in streets, workplaces, prisons, and everywhere where people are employed by others who care only for power and capital, profiteering without ethical care or thought.
I knew Andor was different from the rest of Lucasfilm’s output when I saw the scene above. Cassian’s entry into the correctional factory and his wide-eyed stare at the brute mechanization of fellow human beings; everyone’s terse, mostly unfeeling communication; the metronomic actions and speech patterns; the white, sanitized conditions bereft of any color or warmth. All an effective, underhanded means of connecting with the viewer’s own whimseys of finding a way out of the doldrums of everyday labor alienated from meaning or purpose. As mentioned, the dialogue shown above may be familiar to messaging reiterated to many in their real professions. And the majority of us are indentured, not least by work or debt that must be accepted in exchange for a basic dignity in life.
A shoutout to Nicholas Britell’s score, an ideal underline to the entire series
Episode 8 begins and ends with these hellish visions. In the beginning, Cassian is just a witness. By its end, he is a busy factory bee, now an inductee into the imperial manufacturing infrastructure. It is eventually revealed that all this labor is in service of creating the Death Star. On one hand, a device that will be used to destroy planets and consolidate the Empire’s power over fomenting uprisings. On the other, state-sanctioned assurance of self-destruction. A circumstantial note on this depiction of slave labor: it is hardly unique to tyrannical political systems.
In a similar vein, Andor as a series begins and ends with mining at the core of its labor narratives. From Kenari to Ghorman, the backdrop of exploitative extraction is a recurring thread, tied to cultural and environmental destruction. But the show’s focus is not on the practices of mining itself, rather how it is sold to the citizenry. The Empire’s weaponization of information via propaganda and its dutiful stewards of covert misinformation/disinformation campaigns effectively replay what we go through on a daily basis, often at the hands of similarly inclined corporate or state entities. The fictional Kenari and Ghor have very real counterparts, who we ignore at our peril.
It is a great irony that this subversive series was produced and distributed by Disney. By all accounts, an organization that represents the exact antithesis of much of Andor’s messaging. I can only imagine that the show’s creators were able to slip their takedowns of corporate and state fascism through production censors by using its otherworldly tropes. Similar to how Cassian encourages his colleagues to don a uniform and walk into the Empire’s strongholds. No need to highlight in the pitches how political and economic elites establish accounts that sustain their power and bottom line. Just pretend like you belong and they will be none the wiser.
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A final comment, tangentially related, on the audience of these spectacles. (I do not distance myself in any way from the reflections below.)
Everyone watches their favorite cultural property and identifies with the persecuted. We in the privileged West witness the imagined slaughter and see ourselves in the Ghor and not the Empire. Our victim complexes need to be fed and nurtured, despite evidence that we are perfectly complacent with subjugating others, as long as there are a few layers of state and institutional structures between us and the trigger. We indulge in coffee, chocolate, fast fashion, smartphones – these are built on supply chains never free from child or slave labor. We choose to vote in those who sell arms to perpetrators of war crimes and genocide. We often choose not to boycott people, institutions or states partaking in cruelty. Who cares, right? Empires in all their forms demand the suffering of the innocent. Our very own Omelas, proudly upheld. We are all in on the Empire.
To the great chagrin of writers everywhere, the advocacy within these stories is never truly actioned.
Yes, propaganda overriding our ability to inform ourselves and think critically is a factor. Our corrupted online information systems (social media and the like) another complicating one. Our system-manufactured lack of energy for activism or personal pursuits sometimes a final nail in the coffin. The machinations of the imperial stooges on Andor so effectively illustrated how easily people removed direct impacts can be effortlessly swayed to certain narratives, especially when their livelihoods depend on it. And how old, tried and true all these techniques of social engineering are.
I think part of why I wanted to pause after finishing this show and dedicate some ramblings to it was a sense of hypersanity. The impulse that we as a collective are just getting it all wrong, that all of this is very plain to most of us, and yet we continue to double down on the absurd. Futures of interplanetary tyrannies, Death Stars and fractured socioeconomic/political dominance based on resource control are perfectly plausible. We do all of that on a smaller scale already.
But I still, however foolishly, hold onto optimism that we can do better. I know there are enough people out there observing with similar disdain in their eyes and pain in their hearts.
As Dan and Tony Gilroy put it, in the form of the revolutionary Karis Nemik:
“There will be times when struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy.
Remember this: freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause.
Remember that the frontier of the rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.
And remember this: the imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.
Remember that. And know this: the day will come when all of these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.
Remember this: Try.”
Image and video credits: Lucasfilm