#and relating to finn and rose in equal measures in the canto bight arc

[permian-tropos]

Thought about how Finn and Poe are depicted in TLJ: 

I don’t think Johnson was deeply racially biased in the way people think, though I think he might have a racial bias that’s not malicious, but also worth pointing out, since I always butt heads with that bias as a white writer. 

I think Johnson wanted to give Finn and Poe solid character arcs to fit with the theme of overcoming failure, and I don’t think he wrote them as if they were Other, because I do feel somewhat familiar with what it feels like when characters are Other. I’m very alert to women being framed as Other, and in SW most droids and aliens are framed like that. also, old mentor figures can be Other, definitely maternal figures, most villains, expendable side characters, NPC-type folks in the plot who help the story along.

Stories have to be full of Others of one sort or another, and you can be Other in a sympathetic light or a negative light. You can be revered or reviled or ignored. You can be reduced to a stereotype or an archetype. And some stereotypes are more harmful than others because of their connection to real world structural oppression. 

The only characters in a story who aren’t Other are characters who get POV time -- that’s just how it works, if the movie makes you see through a character’s eyes, they want you to project onto that character for those scenes. Finn and Poe are POV characters, so they’re not fully othered. Something else is probably going on. 

I think Finn and Poe are written in ways that white men would comfortably project onto, if the characters were white men. Take Finn and his running away. It’s not as if male characters who have to learn to care about the cause are deeply disliked. Han Solo is a scoundrel with a heart of gold who spends a lot of time in ANH being reluctant to help the heroes, and then he finally shows his true goodness and saves the day. Finn being a bit jittery and focused on saving a girl he likes might seem less flattering, but think about all the awkward, foolish white male protagonists who get dunked on a bit for their flaws, but ultimately win girls’ hearts and save the day. I’m thinking Emmett from the Lego Movie as a key archetype. That’s... clearly something that white guys find relatable and enjoyable to project onto. Self-deprecating, but ultimately a power fantasy. Part of the power fantasy is watching someone who’s a bit of a loser become a hero through adversity, it makes you feel like you too could take adversity and turn it into positive change as well. And Finn isn’t even such an overstated example, but he does have a lovable-loser thing going on in TFA and TLJ. And then of course he gets to be fantastically heroic and good and brave, because we (lovable losers in the audience) would like to be that way as well.

Poe’s behavior in TLJ gives me very... uncooked Captain Kirk dough vibes. I love me some Kirk, and he’s such a passionate guy who breaks rules and defies authority whenever he thinks it’s right. And sometimes he gets it wrong, and misjudges the situation, but the narrative usually doesn’t punish him too much. And the reason for this is because Kirk has Spock and McCoy and the rest of his crew with him and he deeply trusts their advice and expertise. Spock will almost always tell Kirk to cool his tits, so Kirk feels safe getting hot-titted when he thinks it’s called for. He knows he has a limiter. That’s what makes him a good leader, he knows his shortcomings and surrounds himself with close friends who can balance those shortcomings out. He’s also a seasoned captain, wiser from having dealt with a lot of messy situations. But (forget the reboot movies lol cause I do) if you imagine a younger Kirk, you can imagine him getting all riled up about injustice and hatching one of his daring million-to-one gambits to save everyone -- and it turns out to be a bad move. It turns out he was wrong. And he gets a lesson about that, and this helps him grow into the good Kirkboy we love and respect. 

The fact that Poe wants to rush out and save the day, but needs to learn patience, is something white men can find relatable and sympathetic.

But the thing is, I can understand people seeing Finn and Poe being written in this way, and understandably perceiving it as race-blind. Johnson put all these bits of character into them, but because he’s a white male writer who does in fact want to write Finn and Poe as likable and dynamic and engaging, he seems to have written things for them that are endearing when a white male does them. 

People see the expressed interiority of Finn and Poe in The Last Jedi and get White Male vibes from it, not because they were written to be disposable or Other, but because they were given White Male interiority.

Now, arguably, Star Wars seems not to discern human races, and since so much of White Male interiority involves seeing yourself as the default and not ever questioning that status, while existing in an industrialized Westernized capitalist society, the idea that Finn and Poe would at least reflect some of that attitude kind of isn’t... entirely unrealistic? 

I say this as a woman who had a lot of weirdly externalized misogyny and mistrust of feminism as a kid because I grew up in a bubble where I was free to express my gender however I liked, and adult women made all the decisions, and had status and value, and men were kind of just there also. I didn’t actually understand the feeling of not being default, of being Other, of being secondary, and when I was first exposed to feminism I was angry because I didn’t like to be told that I was oppressed. I didn’t want to be oppressed, so don’t you dare imply it could happen! I grew up without a lot of the social pressures women get, and now I actually recognize male-privileged attitudes ingrained in myself. I feel like aspects of masculinity (but certainly not all of them!) are just the gendered appropriation of Human Default, which women would default to if they weren’t pressed out of it (and aspects of femininity are extremely Human Default too and denying them to men is very damaging to them). So Finn and Poe being written by a white man trying to make them Human Default (or at least Male Default since gender disparities do exist in SW), could come across as infused with whiteness. Also humans in SW have heavy privilege over aliens and droids so they probably would act like privileged people when you think about it......

Still, I don’t and can’t begrudge anyone (particular a person of color) who doesn’t like that, because it’s probably not relatable and it’s missing a lot of nuance and perspicacity that a writer of color would infuse the situation with, in portraying a fictional fantasy world that’s relatively blind to race to an audience in a racialized society. You have to balance both fiction and reality.

White writers sort of have to learn that. A writer wants to engage with their audience authentically, and writers can’t get that if they pretend their audience won’t be hyperalert to racial dynamics. “But I didn’t know people would have that reaction” yes you did, or you should. “But I want to live in a world where people don’t have to have that reaction since it’s coming from so much suffering and injustice” me too buddy, but one movie can’t change everything overnight. Obviously if you care about marginalized people, what you want to do is make them feel appreciated and comfortable for the space of time your movie is playing. But I understand you do also want to write in your style. All the characters you write will be coming out of your own heart, that’s inevitable. 

It feels like the “why didn’t Johnson listen to the actors” anger is because people kind of wanted to see the actors’ takes on the characters, so they didn’t have to see Rian Johnson interiority throughout all of them. Except... the thing is. If Lucasfilm really begged Johnson to write and direct their movie, he’s allowed to put Rian Johnson interiority into it. Even the characters of marginalized identities -- ultimately, wanting to project onto and empathize with characters of color is not at all bad. Johnson feels like Rose is his self insert. She’s a woman of color, and he specifically wanted KMT for the role. He felt like he could deeply relate to this character. It’s not that he identifies as an Asian-American woman, it’s that he did actually think that distinction wasn’t a barrier to relatability. (On top of that, I think Rose is written to have some backstory elements that strongly parallel her actress’s Vietnamese heritage, and I think it’s a pretty big deal and I wish more people cared about that but we’ve been brainwashed to forget the Vietnam War I guess.)

White writers do need to take care not to project too much of their own interiority onto characters of color, to the point where audiences feel like they’ve been pushed out, like they’re seeing someone who looks like them but clearly is not like them on the inside (an uncanny, unnerving effect). But at the same time, I can’t imagine writing that doesn’t come from the writer. And white writers absolutely need to project onto and relate to characters of color. It’s always going to be a mess and there’s a lot of work to do to get it right but the alternative where you’re convinced you could never relate is not at all better. 

TL;DR: Rian Johnson did indeed fall into a white male writer pitfall, but I think it’s not malicious and it’s also both problematic and potentially a good thing. Also JJ Abrams basically did the same thing it’s just that he didn’t have to write “overcome my fatal flaw” arcs for Finn and Poe.

Johnson also definitely put a lot of work into prioritizing female perspectives and female fantasies and female wish fulfillment and female POV, and I think (as a Female... or. something approximating female lol) the film is a lot better about it than any other Star Wars movie to date. Or that may be because he sat down with Carrie Fisher for hours and hours brainstorming ideas and took her suggestions seriously enough to have notebooks full of them. I imagine he should have done the same with non-white script doctor but when it came to script doctoring and a deep connection to SW, Carrie was kind of without equal.