48 years later, Star Wars exists in a unique cultural space. George Lucas’s creation has so woven its way into the fabric of American—and global—popular culture that the myths surrounding its making often sound as dense as the fictional mythology it inspired. The film’s impact has been so deep, its influence so strong, that it can be plausibly said cinema as a commercial art now exists in Star Wars’s shadow. The film’s technical innovations are well-known, and its Joseph Campbell-inspired storytelling approach became the template for much of Hollywood filmmaking going forward. Yet, for as watched and studied as Star Wars is, the question of what it is remains ever elusive, like any great art work. In the closing moments of Andor—a final scene so unexpected and moving it brought me to tears—I felt that what at work. It’s history.
A prequel to a prequel should not work. The machinery of Hollywood film production would suggest that any such project exists purely as crass profit-making, the strip mining of culture for the sake of commerciality. Why, then, is Andor not merely one of the best things to come out of Star Wars, but one of the best shows ever produced for American television? Until the show’s final three-episode arc, I think I’d fallen into the common wisdom about it: that Tony Gilroy had smuggled something into the world under the guise of Star Wars. Using the world Lucas created and inspired, Gilroy told a story of radicalization, insurrection, and revolution that might’ve been just as compelling without the Star Wars trappings. It was simply setting, though an admittedly cool setting. Andor separated itself from the rest of Star Wars in tone, and style, and its interest in the nitty gritty, approaching the world with a clarity, a sense of reality bolstered by allusion to real-world history. As an adult interested in adult things and not wanting to be confused for a child, Andor provided a context in which I could like a Star Wars thing respectably, “Because it’s not even really Star Wars, you see.”
Watching the season’s tenth, antepenultimate episode, all about Stellan Skarsgård’s spymaster Luthen Rael, I was hit with the realization that Andor is far from a rejection of Star Wars. That, in fact, the reason it’s so good is that it’s among the few post-Original Trilogy entries in the Star Wars canon to understand on a deep level George Lucas’s true innovation. It’s worth remembering that Star Wars didn’t start as Star Wars. Lucas had wanted to make a space fantasy adventure, thinking perhaps to adapt Flash Gordon early on. The influence of Buck Rogers is there in his first feature, THX-1138. Star Wars also took influence from other serials, Westerns, samurai films, and more, elevating the space fantasy, but also transforming it. Rather than mere cliffhanger-filled ride, Lucas built Star Wars from the ground up to reflect the vastness of the imagination, to make Flash Gordon into an epic in the poetic sense, to make it myth.
“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” There it is, before the title even appears onscreen. Lucas sets the context through which to understand the world and stories he’s about to present to the audience. This isn’t sci-fi, it’s not about the future. It’s history. It’s history so old and from a land so far away that it comes to us in legendary form, as myth. J.R.R. Tolkein took mythopoeia to admirable extremes, constructing every conceivable detail within his fictional Middle Earth, grounding his Lord of the Rings trilogy in a sense of historicity not present, for example, in the stories in his appendices and elsewhere that read more like rough sketches of stories, the way myths are handed down. Lucas went straight to the rough sketching. His application of a “used future” aesthetic kept things grounded, while archetypal characters and plotting were merged with fantastical creatures, names, and settings. But more than just ape the superficialities of mythic storytelling, Star Wars asks its audience to actually accept the film as being a real mythology, as it were, as though unearthed and being shared with us.
Lucas’s retconning of the original 1977 Star Wars as Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope in 1981, at least a decade before the prequel trilogy was a serious consideration, had mostly been read as a mission statement establishing the film as part of a theoretically ongoing film serial of old. It’s true, of course, but then consider what that means about how we’re supposed to understand Star Wars, at its core. These aren’t just movies, Lucas is telling us, they’re stories from a forgotten place and a forgotten time. They’ve always been there, but we’re only now accessing them, perhaps even haphazardly. They are presented in the form of an elevated serial where we missed the earlier chapters, but genre signifiers are not ultimately the heart of Star Wars. That heart is instead found in the original film’s mythological posture. These things happened. Like The Iliad, there’s real history in there somewhere, but across the broken telephone of time, we’ve arrived at a retelling that renders characters as archetypes, aggrandizes events, fictionalizing, romanticizing. Quite literally mythologizing. That’s Star Wars.
It’s also Andor. Because Andor dispenses with the romantic archetypes and swashbuckling movie serial trappings of the Original Trilogy, I think it became easy to view the series as somehow a twisting of the franchise’s essense into something fundamentally different and better. Except so much of the praise for the series has also noted its effect on perception of the rest of Star Wars. Never mind Rogue One now seeming like a better movie, its story and characters having been granted greater depth and detail in the prequel series. The 1977 film also somehow feels more weighty now. As do the prequels. Hell, I could make the case that some aspects of the sequel trilogy, like the sudden return of the Empire as the First Order, now appear more like reflections of the political reality Andor has established for the property as a whole. This isn’t some accident. It’s a product of Tony Gilroy’s understanding of what makes Star Wars click. It’s there in that relationship between history and myth, even when all of it is fictional.
Star Wars may have taken after Flash Gordon, The Searchers, and The Hidden Fortress, but those are mere packaging. Mythologizing comes in many forms. When Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows was vilified by leftist French critics, it’s because it was seen to be mythologizing the Gaullists, rewriting the history of the French Resistance in the form of a cracker jack thriller. In fact, those critics were right to be concerned. It’s likely impossible for most people in the modern day to envision the French Resistance without calling up images gleaned from Army of Shadows and other films like it or influenced by it. Indeed, Andor is very heavily influenced by Army of Shadows, with all its thrilling spycraft, heists, and escapes, along with its complex rendering of the tormented lives of the people who commit themselves to resistance. The show even goes so far as creating its own French-like planet in Ghorman, the setting for a French Resistance-style rebellion. So it’s not Flash Gordon, but it is Army of Shadows. It is The Battle of Algiers. It is The Day of the Jackal and Conspiracy and Three Days of the Condor. There’s some Michael Clayton in there, too, of course, but then, you can also see that movie’s influences. It’s all genre. It’s all myth.
Of all the incredible characters Gilroy and his team created or expanded upon in Andor, none is more compelling than Luthen Rael. Skarsgård’s performance is a large part of that, imbuing this difficult man with a depth of history that is always threatening to flood out of him. He contains it at all times, but it’s there, you see it boiling away under the surface, lending many of his scenes a palpable intensity. That history finally comes out in that tenth episode of the second season, which starts the show’s final arc of episodes. We learn that he was once a military sergeant, and while it’s unclear exactly which outfit he’s serving, they are at least Empire-aligned, committing terrible war crimes. He is overcome with the evil of his actions, his complicity, and then he comes across a little girl, the young Kleya. Together they set off, committing themselves to the cause of resistance, building up an antiques business to fund their actions, including personally carrying terrorist bombings against Imperial troops on Naboo. Here, in this prequel to Rogue One, the prequel to Star Wars, we get this prequel to itself, relating another story from the rich mythology of Lucas’s universe. This is yet another forgotten tale, of a forgotten man, who reached a crisis of moral clarity and helped birth a revolution. He operated in the margins, mostly invisible, his contributions to the cause often morally deplorable and effective beyond measure. Now his memory is rescued from the depths of history, via millennia of storytelling tradition, in new form, on television.
Andor is the best of Star Wars because it fundamentally is Star Wars. It is the imagining of a fictional history transmuted through time and space to arrive before us as a new mythology. And like the greatest myths, it offers us something of value, something grounded in the real experience of being human in the world, told with sweep and universality, as great entertainment that burrows into the mind and the soul. Watching Andor isn’t praxis, but it’s amazing how invigorating the show is, how optimistic it feels, given that it’s about a lot of characters who are mostly going to die and go through hell along the way. Army of Shadows is similar. As depicted, life in the Resistance seems like misery and worse, yet it has romance. One watches the film and imagines having the strength of character, the fortitude to be a part of the anti-fascist fight. This, too, is the effect of myth. The Nazis lost the war. The French Resistance were heroes. The Empire fell. The Rebels were the great heroes, the objects of our mythmaking.
“Rebellions are built on hope.” It’s a line gifted to Jyn Erso by Cassian Andor in Rogue One, who was in turn handed it by a concierge at a hotel on Ghorman, another nameless martyr to the cause. These reverberations from the past into the present, these echoes, are what Rogue One and Andor are all about. So was Star Wars. A kid on the fringes of the galaxy can be its saviour, but he exists in a lineage, not just familial, but historical. When Lucas threw in a reference to the so-called Clone Wars in the original film, that’s what he was doing. Suggesting to the audience that there were events prior to what you’re seeing, and events prior to those, and on, and on. The aliens and space battles and lightsabers were the fun stuff, but what captured the world’s cultural imagination was that mythic sense of history. Andor is the continuation of that tradition. Not merely content to dress up the typical Star Wars trappings in the cloth of different pulp progenitors—satisfying as the early episodes of The Mandalorian were, they aren’t much more than an exercise in “what if Star Wars was Lone Wolf and Cub?”—Andor pays forward the spiritual enrichment granted it by the 1977 film and the universe it birthed. You’ve heard all the myths and the legends of the Skywalkers and the Jedi, but there are heroes of the Rebellion you didn’t know about, the people in the shadows, the people who contributed in ways big and small, who paid the price. Andor is their legend, their myth. Andor is their Star Wars.
Lets not forget: there are no comic relief characters. It's Star Wars for adults. No bloody ewoks and irritating droids. I never liked the franchise and I loved Andor for not being like Star Wars at all. Great read nevertheless, thank you.