SPOILERS, THEY’RE JUST LIKE US
In 2019, I attended Star Wars Celebration. I sat in on a session that raised up young women who liked to cosplay as stormtroopers. It was a fun, gentle celebration of empowerment. Stormtroopers aren’t just for boys anymore. Star Wars is for Everyone. Female stormtroopers welcome here!
When asked what it was that they liked about stormtroopers, the young women answered things like “they work as a team!” “They have cool outfits!” The whole thing was well-intentioned, just like the incredibly well-intentioned and charitable 501st.
It occurred to me, while watching this, that the bumbling white-glad enforcers of the Empire’s will are largely portrayed as lovable buffoons. They seem to be work for hire schlubs who gossip, trip over things, miss their targets. Even when they’re wearing cool outfits and trying to shoot our heroes, they seem pretty harmless.
Of course, they are an army of fascists. Star Wars fandom doesn’t really think of them that way. If we did, would we have collectively cheered the notion that girls liked to dress up like them too? Gender-neutral stormtroopers! Hooray teamwork?
This came to my mind as I watched “The Eye,” Andor’s sixth episode. In it, Cassian and Co. finally heist-it-up with some subterfuge, shouting, stand-offs, stiff upper lips, and two members of the team playing Metal Gear Solid. It’s cinematic, it’s gritty, it’s Andor. It’s the episode that the Aldhani-arc has been leading to, complete with the deaths you probably expected and payoffs aplenty. Just like the first three episodes of Andor lead up to action-filled “The Reckoning,” the second three episodes culminate here. (We’ll see if parts seven through nine follow that pattern, or if they flip the script.)
Rogue One seemed intent on painting the Rebel Alliance as less pure of heart than previously shown. More than anyone, Cassian Andor represented and represents that moral gray area. In “The Eye,” we continue to see his tragic flaw: when cornered, Andor shoots first. He’s haunted by his own actions as much as he’s haunted by his painful past.
“The Eye” flips the coin. It seems intent on humanizing the Empire. No one who works for the Empire is haunted, they just seem bored and frustrated. The result is an Empire that seems less dark and a Rebel Alliance that seems less light.
Star Wars largely keeps its villainy villainous - militaristic, sneering, Halloween-mask scary. Darth Vader isn’t just a villain, he’s barely human, a hulking monster. The Emperor is a campy, wicked Nosferatu. Count Dooku is basically Dracula. Darth Maul looks like a demon. Snoke a desiccated husk in a gold robe.
Even so, their evil is abstract. In Episode I, we’ll hear Sio Bibble tell Queen Amidala that the “death toll is catastrophic” on Naboo during the Trade Federation’s occupation of the planet. If there’s mass death on Naboo, we certainly never actually see it. (It might just be a trick!) The Empire has a big gun, and a maniacal laugh, they threaten the people we like, but they’re not shown to be complicated. They’re the bad guys. Their complexity is a reveal, it’s meant to be a surprise. It’s not an assumption we’re meant to make as viewers.
Andor’s Empire is made up of people who basically just… work for the Empire. They’re focused on promotion, title and ease. They depersonalize those they occupy in order to justify their work and to please their superiors. You get a sense that their suppression of the Aldhani tribes is less a matter of Sith-level darkness and more a matter of annoyance. The tribes get in the way of the tasks they’ve been assigned, so, the Aldhani are a bother.
It’s not a new thought, but it’s a rare one in Star Wars. This is the Banality of Evil.
Commandant Jayhold Beehaz (what a name!), played by Irish actor extraordinaire Stanley Townsend, is shown as a whole person. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he’s played sympathetically, but we see his family, his bluster, his biases. In a scene written with lines like “he’ll see the back of my hand,” Townsend lends Beehaz softer eyes and pleading glances. He doesn’t command his family, he entreats them. We see how someone might love him despite his otherwise contemptible nature. When he doubles over with a heart attack, it feels less like the result of him being ‘fat and satisfied’ and more of a man pushed to his limits.
And who is pushing him to these limits? Our heroes. The Rebels are not casual or cruel: they are driven, self-serious, and dangerous. The Rebel cell in Andor is the opposite of the stormtroopers of the Lucasfilm galaxy: they care, they’re full of feelings, and they want something. We watch the Rebels act desperately, turning on each other, cold-eyed, unrelenting. When they act with grace, it doesn’t feel certain that’s the choice they will make. While we know the Empire has held its boot on the neck of the Aldhani people in general, it’s the Rebels we see point a gun at a child’s head.
By contrast, “The Eye” shows Imperial Colonel Petigar demanding the Rebels “let the boy go.” When Corporal Kimzi arrives to discover the Rebels in the middle of robbing the vault, it’s played like he’s discovered a nefarious plot and has arrived to save the day.
Even the titular and spectacular Eye, a blue-green celestial display that gives this episode splendor and the characters cover for a daring escape, is shown awing Imperial officers and the tribes they are oppressing side-by-side. Authoritarian colonizers, it turns out, can appreciate beauty.
That’s not to say that “The Eye” makes the Empire seem heroic or good. Not at all. The Imperials act and speak with racism, disdain and callousness. They revel in the idea of disrupting a cultural ritual. They’re casually cruel and destructive.
But they are relatable in their awfulness, in their selfishness, in their myopia. They seem more like regular people than the Rebels, who are exceptional in their rage, their actions, their drive. Fascists, it seems, are just like us.
Of course, we’re learning that all over again all over the world, aren’t we? We’re watching Americans who otherwise just go to work at Target or run local businesses cheer on Hungarian authoritarians and Italian Neo-fascists. In the US, we had a President ask “What so wrong about being a nationalist?” Evil can look like a voting booth, it can look like your Aunt. The people with the worst ideas don’t always look like devils. Sometimes, they’re meandering in the halls of the State House wearing a blue tie, sporting an Ivy League law degree.
Stormtroopers seem quaint by comparison. Doofuses of the Dark Side. There’s a sweetness and naivete to their villainy. The Imperial middle men and governors of Andor are something else, more akin to the British colonizers of India. Officious and strategic.
No one would dress as an Andor Imperial for Halloween. There’s nothing gentle and dorky about them. Their action figures come with clipboards and belts that don’t fit.
There’s another note that’s played near the end of the episode that I think relates to how Andor stands in conscious contrast with the Lucas/Filoni/Favreau mode of Star Wars.
“Luck,” says Arvel Skeen before his untimely end, “drives the whole damn galaxy.” Luck is the subject of a seminal scene in A New Hope. How is it discussed there?
“I call it luck,” says Han Solo.
“In my experience,” says Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, “There’s no such thing as luck.”
Arvel Skeen is identifying that the universe seems to have a kind of underlying logic, a guiding hand. In Andor, not one character would think to call that guiding hand The Force.
This is a galaxy where hands do the work, people are the problem and solution. Luck is just luck. Things are driven by need and chance, not fate.
Nothing in the Andor galaxy would be light enough to levitate.
Not even the Rebellion.