Have you seen season 2 of the Star Wars show Andor? I watched it and it’s a pretty fascinating take on what the early days of a rebellion against an evil empire looks like. Just to set the table here, Critical Drinker did a turnabout on season 2 of the show. After finding the first few episodes meandering and maybe even a bit boring, he concluded that the next few episodes were the best Star Wars produced since the original trilogy and probably the best thing on TV in several years. (His glowing review is below.)
I agree with his take, having seen the show myself. Andor season 2 really shows you a police state working at peak power. The stormtroopers still aren’t crack shots but people using them as cannon fodder really are scary in their ruthlessness and willingness to crush the opposition by any means necessary.
The show is more political than anything Star Wars had done before. The villains are all participants in a dictatorship and the heroes are all independent people who become victims of that dictatorship in various ways. There weren’t a lot of 4th wall breaking clunkers of the kind you see in most politically minded shows these days. They aren’t beating you over the head with the messasge.
And yet, as I was watching it I kept having the same thought: This is a show about China that thinks it’s a show about America.
So I was interested to read this interview with showrunner Tony Gilroy because NY Times columnist Ross Douthat isn’t shy about a) saying he loved the show and b) framing it as a left-wing show. What’s interesting is that Gilroy seems genuinely not to like this framing, as if admitting his own politics would be a failure of some kind.
Gilroy: I wanted to do a show all about the forgotten people who make a revolution like this happen — on both sides — and I want to take equal interest and spend as much time understanding the bureaucrats and the enforcers of the rebellion. I think one of the fascinating things about fascism is that, when it’s done coming after the people whose land it wants and who it wants to oppress and whoever it wants to control, by the time it gets rid of the courts and the justice and consolidates all its power in the center, it ultimately eats its young. It ultimately consumes its own proponents.
I was just reading about the last days of Mussolini a month ago. And it’s like right out of that — people get lost and get hung out to dry. So I want to pay as much attention to the authoritarian side of this, the people who’ve cast their lot with the empire, who get burned by it all.
Douthat: Is “Andor” a left-wing show? Because this is something that I’ve said a couple of times in my writing about it, using it literally as an example, as a conservative columnist, of a work of art that I think of as having different politics from my own that I really, really like. And I’ve had friends, especially on the right, come back to me and say: Oh, you know what, it’s not left wing or right wing; it’s just a TV show about resistance to tyranny. But I think you’ve made a left-wing work of art. What do you think?
Gilroy: I never think about it that way. I never think about it that way. It was never ——
Douthat: [Scoffs.]
Gilroy: I mean, I never do. I don’t ——
Douthat: But it’s a story, but it’s a political story about revolutionary ——
Gilroy: Do you identify with the Empire? Do you identify with the Empire?
Douthat: No, I don’t. But I don’t think that you have to be left-wing to resist authoritarianism. I see the Empire as you just described it: It’s presented as a fascist institution that doesn’t have any sort of communist pretense to solidarity or anything like that. It’s fascist and authoritarian. And you’re meditating on what revolutionary politics looks like in the shadow of that, right?
Gilroy: Yeah.
What’s interesting is that Gilroy really has created a show where even the empire characters seems like real people who aren’t just evil for the sake of evil. They are seduced and afraid and many of them gradually learn (too late) what they’ve become part of. It’s why this show doesn’t come off as one more hack or trite show about the current political moment. It’s good art.
But there’s really no denying that there is a message here. The way he reacts to Douthat’s suggesting the show is left-wing by interjecting “Do you identify with the Empire?” makes clear this is still very much a show about good and evil. And what does good look like? It’s ultimately a show about putting aside differences in order to form an effective and deadly resistance to the state. This is a show that makes the case for a justification of violence, even violence against your allies if they present a threat.
I’m all for that sort of thing in a place like Venezuela or China where you really do have a communist police state using every trick and technology to control people and silence any voice that would overthrow the dear leader. But the parallels to those places seem intentionally absent. The Empire isn’t a left-wing collectivism in action. The Empire never talks about equality for the poor and landless. Instead, the cultural touchstones here are to online misinformation and something like right-wing media, i.e. all the things progressives have been shouting about in the US while this show was in development.
Gilroy argues the politics are more basic than that.
Douthat: So this is a show — it’s a story — where you are rooting for revolutionaries against a fascist regime, right?
Gilroy: OK. All right, all right.
Douthat: As you said, you’re not rooting for the Empire in the end, right?
Gilroy: No, no, no.
Douthat: That to me is the political foundation of the work. And that’s why I use the term “left wing” — not because you have a 10-point list of revolutionary demands that you, Tony Gilroy, support, but you’re telling a story in which basically you’re on the side of the radicals and the revolutionaries…
Gilroy: …there’s never anybody, I don’t think, whoever espouses an actual ideology of what they want to achieve at the end, other than: Please leave us alone. Stop killing us. Stop destroying our communities. Don’t build the Death Star and kill us.
I never have a character, I don’t think, stand up and say: This is the galaxy that I am trying to build, and this is what I want to see.
Douthat: That’s fair. That is, in fact, literally the argument that some of my more libertarian friends who love the show have made to me, saying: This is ultimately a show about localism and leaving us alone against the depredations of tyranny.
It really is a good point. Because, having watched the show, it really is mercifully free of speeches with the exception of one speech denouncing the Emperor which is given by a Senator whose job is giving speeches. But apart from that, most of the people in the show just want to be free and not under the Empire’s boot. And that really is a message that can resonate with anyone, maybe especially with conservatives. This show is ultimately a warning about the dangers of big government, government so big that individuals don’t even begin to register as important.
And yet, while I think it’s a genuinely good show and a good message, I still see it as slightly off base. Andor is great as a warning about how to overthrow a police state like the very real one in China that recently absorbed Hong Kong and that threatens to do the same to Taiwan. It’s exactly the sort of piecemeal expansion and creeping state control that is the core plot of this show, which makes it really strange the China references are conspicuously absent.
At the end of the day, Andor was made for a mostly American audience by Hollywood progressives who think it’s a show about the American right wing in some sense. That’s how I see it, but of course your mileage may vary.
