“The Dead Speak!” What RISE OF SKYWALKER Shares With Jewish American Fiction

Episode IX of the Star Wars series has been bitterly divisive, with fairly clear lines drawn between aficionados of Rian Johnson‘s Last Jedi and those who prefer J.J. Abrams’ far more traditional riff on the franchise. The Last Jedi was praise by many for its rejection of the themes that had traditionally driven its predecessors. That film sought a rather radical break with the past, going so far as to have Kylo Ren state “Let the past die; kill it if you have to.”

Perhaps because of sloppy planning under Disney’s leadership, Abrams took the reins back for the third episode of the trilogy and immediately re-connected that which Johnson had broken, opening with the line “The Dead Speak!” in the narrative crawl.

Many have accused Abrams of pandering to nostalgic fans (and worse), and many have applauded the move. Here, I don’t necessarily want to get into which side of this argument is more correct, and I’m not willing to tell people who like either film that their judgment is flawed. Mostly, I’d like to pull Abrams’ work here into a larger conversation about Jewish American storytelling.

Patterns in Jewish American Fiction

American literature has a rich history of Jewish writers, and those writers made a powerful contribution to American’s storytelling traditions. It is perhaps overly simplistic but for the sake of this conversation we can roughly divide Jewish literature into three major phases.

First, there was the immigrant era, filled with classic stories of hopeful, tragic journeys to America, followed by deprivation, success, failure, death, marriage, and, of course, anti-semitism. These stories, by such luminaries as Anzia Yezierska, Abraham Cahan, and Mary Antin, were largely about the quest not only “to make it” in America, but to become accepted as Americans. These writers’ works not only documented the Jewish experience in America, they also set the pattern for what Jewish writing was in America. Star Wars traffics heavily in the tropes of “the hero’s journey,” and it has a rather neat analog in the patterns of Jewish immigrant literature.

The generation of writers that immediately followed were born as Americans and thus their storytelling would be more radical and far less respectful of tradition. Saul Bellow’s seminal The Adventures of Augie March, famously opens with the words “I am an American, Chicago born.” This line and the novel itself is an ostentatious Declaration of Independence from the narrative traditions of the previous generation. This is typical of the second wave of Jewish American writers. This was a creatively explosive generation seeking independence from the strictures of the past, having much in common with Kylo Ren. Writers like Bellow and Philip Roth almost violently fought against the label “Jewish writer.” They were certainly still Jewish, but they were primarily writers seeking to create art free from the narrative tropes of the past, to the point of intense controversy within the Jewish community (especially for Roth).

The generation of Bellow and Roth cast enormous shadows over all Jewish writers who followed them and the response of the third wave is perhaps unexpected.

Writers like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Rebecca Goldstein, and a host of others oddly embraced the traditional concerns of Jewish literature just as enthusiastically as their predecessors had abandoned them. The first line from the opening crawl of Rise of Skywalker might stand as a theme for the whole era: “The Dead Speak!”

This generation’s re-engagement with the themes of the Jewish past is somewhat surprising given that postmodern aesthetics permeate much of their work. Yet the point of this postmodernism seems to be a sincere search for meaning. An over-arching question these writer’s ask is “how does the Jewish past come to bear on the Jewish present?” The past is therefore less a burden than it is a creative resource.

The second generation titans largely avoided issues like immigration, assimilation, and the Holocaust (Bernard Malamud is an obvious exception here), but the third wave writers enthusiastically excavated them. Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union imagines a universe where the world’s Jews are sequestered in Alaska. This becomes an avenue to contemplate Zionism, the Holocaust, and family.  Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated goes back to the old Eastern European shtetl to find answers about identity in the present. And in Rebecca Goldstein’s Mazel, we find a modern Jewish woman finding a soul mate in here outrageous immigrant grandmother (more on this later).

The point I want to emphasize here is that these writers re-connected with past not simply to regurgitate it, but rather to use it as material for a meditation about the present.

Which Side Are You On?

Just to step this back a moment, I am not elevating J.J. Abrams or his films to the artistic ground of this literary tradition. I also am offering no opinion about which filmmaker took the more appropriate route. I do think, however, that it has become too conventional among the savvy, Extremely Online crowd to dismiss Rise of Skywalker on the grounds that it has “no original ideas.” I personally have very little patience for the ant-Last Jedi argument of “my Luke Skywalker would never say those things!” That film set out to smash the confines of the George Lucas universe and it did so with much success. But Abrams nonetheless approached the past from a different perspective, and there is merit to his choices. Whether one likes the artistic decisions or not, the very point of Abrams’ contributions to the sequel trilogy is to use the past as a resource to understand a more complicated present.

Rian Johnson’s ambitious and fascinating contribution to the trilogy uses the narrative patterns of Star Wars as a burden to dismantle, something irrelevant to the here and now which must be shed in order to move forward. In this way, it represents a radical break from the past akin to Bellow and Roth, fine company to be sure.

Yet Abrams’ contribution, clunky and haphazard as Rise of Skywalker can sometimes be (seriously, writing Rose basically out of the movie is an unconscionable self-own), is also interesting in the way it mines the narrative structures of the ghosts of Star Wars‘ past and reforms them for our current moment.

“The Dead Speak!”

So at long last, let me point to some elements of Rise of Skywalker that flesh out the link between it and third generation Jewish American literature. And for a specific comparison, I’ll discuss Rebecca Goldstein’s 1995 National Jewish Book Award winning novel Mazel.

Rise of Skywalker, like The Force Awakens before it, draws heavily on the established tropes of the original Star Wars trilogy.

For one, the plots run rather parallel. There is a small band of virtuous resistance fighters hopelessly over-powered by a quasi-fascist totalitarian state. The evil empire possesses a weapon that spells sure defeat for the heroes. The climax of each film is a desperate, all-or-nothing raid on the empire’s primary weapon. These epic battles are inter-cut with an central individual’s existential  struggle with choosing good over evil.

The characters also seem familiar: the reckless adventurer forced by circumstance into a position of responsibility for others; the virtuous “uncivilized” partner that represents indigenous peoples and the heroes’ partnership with the “natural” world; the wise, elderly sage who serves (even beyond death) as a support and guide to the hero; and the individual who is both cursed and blessed by their bloodline, which makes them the center of a universal struggle between the light and dark sides of the Force.

Rise of Skywalker works in many of these tropes, often by employing various forms of resurrection (Palpatine, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, etc…). Certainly these films depend on the forms of their predecessors.

But let’s consider how (and, more importantly, why) the film tweaks the formula.

First, there is some work in righting certain wrongs from the original trilogy. For instance, here Chewbacca at last receives the medal for heroism he was was absurdly denied at the end of the original film.

Second, while it is true that every commercial on television prioritizes diversity as part of the sales pitch now, the diversity of this trilogy is an important part of its revision of the past. In addition to Rey, a strong, independent woman, as the series lead (and ultimate Jedi), the series goes out of its way to correct the uncomfortable racial politics of the previous films (particularly the prequel trilogy’s blatantly racist and anti-Semitic characterizations). Finn is not only black, but his subplot as a runaway Stormtrooper suggests a theme of slave rebellion and emancipation. This idea is further developed when Finn meets another escapee late in Rise of Skywalker.

Finally, the film alters one of the previous assumptions of the Star Wars cinematic universe: that one’s identity is baked-in and ordained by destiny. Anakin was destined to be the chosen one/Darth Vader. Luke was similarly destined for galactic importance simply by birthright. The only choice either figure from the original trilogies had was the ethical system they would wield power with. They were always going to be aristocratic Skywalkers.

This assumption of individual destiny seems out of step with our times and was in dire need of revision. The Last Jedi’s approach was to simply toss it out. Rey was a nobody and anybody who wanted force sensitivity could have it.

I have to say that this feel like a cop out to me. To flippantly deny that the past indeed has a lumbering presence over our present and future is a fantasy of the meritocracy and comes from a place of immense privilege. If you are a self-made person whose lineage isn’t either a powerful resource or a profound obstacle, you are a rare bird. Congratulations.

Rise of Skywalker, for all its flaws, at least understands that we can’t simply whisk the past away. This is what drives the climax of the film, with dueling dynasties, Skywalker and Palpatine, battling over Rey’s very identity. For those who hate the film, its last line, in which Rey declares her self “Rey Skywalker” is the object of derision and many clever jokes on Twitter. Yet it is a moment of self-assertion, in which the self is constructed from the better parts of the past.

The dead will always speak, but we can speak back.

Conclusion: Mazel and the Rise of Skywalker

The familiarity, indeed the very quaintness of Rise of Skywalker resembles, in approach at least, third-generation Jewish writing. One book in particular that comes to mind is Rebecca Goldstein’s Mazel.

The book, from near the very end of the Twentieth Century, is structured like Yiddish folktales of old. It follows three generations of Jewish women, Phoebe, a mathematician and all-around modern woman who comes to embrace her Jewish heritage, her free-thinking, academic mother Chloe, and the grandmother, the irascible, feisty actress Sasha, who had escaped the tragic life of her East European Shtetl after the suicide of her sister. (In the women, we can see microcosms of the generational approach to the past I’m discussing).

Sasha’s Yiddish folktale adventure is framed by her descendants’ lives in modern New Jersey and the experience of the past is absolutely meant to inform our insight about the Jewish present and its direction into the future. The book ends with Phoebe annoying her mother and grandmother by choosing a more traditional life in the modern world. (Hopefully the parallels between Rise of Skywalker’s reception are clear here).

Sasha’s disappointment gives way, however, to joy as the book ends with a beautiful, traditional Jewish wedding and the best parts of the past are brought forth into the Jewish American future.

Using the old (some might say worn out) form of Yiddish folktales to tell the story of a modern American Jewish woman, the book is highly representative of a third wave of Jewish storytelling. Sasha’s past is not just rehashed like stories we’ve already heard. It becomes a template upon which to understand the present.

Using old forms to tell new stories is not as simple as “pandering to toxic fans” as many of Rise of Skywalker’s critics dismissively contend. Listening to the dead can give us more important perspective on the present.