Lately I have been thinking about “Yoda”. The strange little man from Star Wars. I have been contemplating Yoda. Based off my general impression with absolutely no collected evidence of any kind, I feel like people are sort of turning on Yoda. More people online are being mean to Yoda than ever before. Don’t look this up in case I’m wrong. I’m sure you’ve felt it too…I see memes and jokes about Yoda all the time- people joking about feeding yoda chocolate, yoda smoking weed, etc. I could go on. I have a theory as to why this is happening. I think the canon is buckling under Yoda.
I think this ironic perspective on Yoda could be blamed on the Star Wars Prequels, and their current cultural reappraisal- all the kids who grew up with them are adults now, and they’re trying to Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius-style manifest into our reality a secret, good version of those movies that might even be better than the originals. And it’s only gotten worse with the massive success of The Mandalorian on Disney Plus, a whole tv show that was shot inside the holodeck from Star Trek and has a Precious Moments-looking ass adorable baby version of Yoda. Not sure why I’m describing this part. Do you not know about Baby Yoda?? Whatever, it’s important for my point.
I think Star Wars (and our entire culture) is reaching sort of a breaking point with all of its shared-universe internal consistency stuff. Honestly I think the whole thing is inherently inside the breaking point. I’ve always been generally opposed to the codification of fictional settings and our culture’s eagerness to apply enlightenment-era liberal scientific reality to america’s biggest fairytale franchise (STAR WARS!) has always rankled me- despite my own delight at seeing Things I Recognize. Sincerely: the magic is often contained inside the mystery.
Expanding a narrative world -into a sequel, a spinoff, whatever- necessitates taking a bit of mystery or novelty out of your original work. Doing anything like that is Repeating Yourself, and often a little repetition is good for rhythm! Ultimately, I just dont think fiction and our modern conception of scientific reality are meant to intersect quite so much as they currently do, no matter how fun it can be to explain that the guy the guy from Cloud City carrying the ice cream maker was actually doing a super important mission.
I think Yoda is the biggest victim of this contradiction in the Star Wars setting. Lucas introduced him as a sly little elf: a kung-fu master in the Shaw Brothers tradition, dispensing platitudes and pulling silly pranks. And he was beloved in that role. People LOVED that little freak. He was perfect as a freak! He is in every respect, a little Tom Bombadil silly guy. Then, the cultural revolution of the 60’s and 70’s fizzled out, Reagan ushered in a new era of evil, and George Lucas’ wife left him for the artist who designed the giant stained-glass window at Skywalker Ranch.
Then came Desert Storm and Bush II, and eventually, after Attack of the Clones was already out the door, 9/11. It seems that Lucas returned to his massive career-defining franchise with a newfound cynicism and calcified creative instincts- the Prequels are, suffice it to say, “not good”. But in many ways, they are his most personal movies: The “Star Wars” are a toxic force that drives our hero apart from his great love, the heroic Jedi are dogmatic assholes, and the US is a fascist dictatorship (he made some points!). Yoda has been transformed into a septic Donald Rumsfeld-type guy who does CGI wuxia backflips and has a tiny green lightsaber. “Around the survivors a perimeter create.”
Like so many things in the Prequels, the Yoda of this story makes no god-damned SENSE compared to the Yoda of the originals-and honestly, that’s fine- George doesn’t care, he calls the lightsabers “laser swords”, and he’s right to do it. He can fuck around with his story as much as he wants. He clearly had a lot to work out about his hopes for the future of digital filmmaking, America, and his complicated relationship with his life’s work. So why SHOULD it be compatible with the source material? Those were different movies (they were also better movies, but thats beside the point).
Well, to the modern nerd, that is unacceptable. The Yoda of the prequels IS the Yoda of the originals, after all. He is a real guy, and he went from one movie over to the other movie. Perhaps he also met like 50 other guys you’ve never heard of while he was at it. So why is he so different? I guess losing a fight to a 70-year-old pervert evidently drove him insane and made him into a goblin, somehow, or, he was just inexplicably lying in the original movies. Whatever it is, it has to make just enough sense to justify everything that came before. There is a real, incontrovertible history here. Nobody MADE these movies, no decisions went into them, they are simply historical documents.
This is the approach Disney has taken. They have teams of guys determining if Han Solo has ever eaten pizza so some person writing a comic book can pull the trigger on the Han Solo Pizza Arc. I can’t fault them- it’s nice to have consistency, and people love exploring the margins of a compelling setting. But making Yoda a coherent figure is a bit too much to ask. He’s too silly in the first place. Making him such a dramatic character in the prequels was already wayyy too much to ask. Watching that guy bounce around elicits a similar feeling to when your edible hits a bit too hard.
I mean, Yoda is an important FIGURE in the Star Wars universe- he has big arcs in the Clone Wars cartoon where he’s like, idk, getting space Colombia to open up its Lithium trade and so on. And he’s a little FREAK! And now there’s a baby version of him, or his ‘species’, in The Mandalorian. His species?? Answer me, before The Mandalorian (and Yaddle), did you ever seriously wonder about Yoda’s “species”?? My impression of Star Wars aliens as a kid was that aliens were all completely different, that “Alien” was a type of guy you could be, like if a bug alien and a blue alien had a kid, it might come out as a Chewbacca. They were just “Aliens”.
Because why would you ever want to see a guy you’ve seen before, when you could see a NEW guy? They’re not FROM anywhere- or if they are, we’re not going there. Just like the blue milk or the fact that there’s no written text, zippers, buttons, or wheels anywhere, that the ships don't look like rockets,- it’s all meant to evoke a feeling of intuitive magic and wonder. Everything that could be mundane is exciting. Even the MILK. There was never any underlying logic beyond that instinct.
Now, we are being forced to examine things about this setting that were never mean to be investigated. The only answers are utterly ridiculous. Are we seriously going to eventually get an emotional scene in The Mandalorian season 5 where Din Djarin hands Grogu off to his fellow Yodas on the fucking Yoda Planet?? Yodatopia? Little Yodas flying around in Jetsons cars and shit? Yoda taxonomy? Blue Yodas? Where does it end?? If you think I’m being too harsh on The Mandalorian, remember that the last season had a cgi neural-net-voiced Luke Skywalker rescue Grogu from a bunch of Bionicles that were going to use his magical eugenics-blood to bring Sheev Palpatine back to life so he could appear in The Rise of Skywalker, a Star Wars movie so universally hated that it united the entire political spectrum (that had just been viciously Culture-Warring over The Last Jedi) in glorious concord over how fucking appalling it was. All this for TROS! Dave Filoni would GLADLY take you to the Yoda Planet. I bet he thinks about its social structure at night.
My point is, we made Yoda too real. We made everything in Star Wars too Real. It used to be Hyperreal -the ideal realm of the fairytale- now base liberal conceptions of “Reality” intrude into our cultural imagination: morality is good vs evil- not a holistic and spiritual relationship with the self and the universe, material concerns do not motivate action-only being Good or being Bad, and the world is full of concrete scientific answers- magic is a list of easily reproducible scientific equations reliant on your genealogy, and it comes from a Magic Planet that is half Good and half Evil. And some beings are just Not ever going to be connected to the flow of all life. Star Wars is (unwittingly) saying that your slaves won’t go to heaven. There’s a distressing trend in our culture of every long-running franchise eventually bending towards Eugenics in one way or another.
I think people might be, on some level, rebelling against the demands that they take Yoda seriously in the same vein that our entire culture sort of immediately agreed that Thanos from The Avengers movies was a very stupid character. Once he started taking center stage, Thanos became the focus of thousands of increasingly ironic and self-referential memes. Thanos can’t sustain the scrutiny of being transformed from a bombastic maniac into an underwritten ecofascist Johnny Cash’s-cover-of-Hurt dad who BRUTALLY massacres the entire cast. He’s a big purple guy who casts spells. He’s not cerebral, and certainly not the type of cerebral that the Russo Brothers were trying to evoke. It’s just stupid. Its stupid!
There is a creative void underneath Yoda and Thanos. The teams in charge of these characters necessarily cannot acknowledge the real problem with them- that they just fundamentally don’t make sense as consistent or credible characters in the sort of story they are trying to tell. They stretched him too thin, fitting this character into contexts he's tonally incompatible with for whatever reason. That contradiction grows like a tumor into the entire work, with every new appearance trying to paper over another bizarre contradiction, forever.
As these Brands try to expand, searching for more and more narrative territory to exploit, they start making weirder and weirder bets while still trying to smooth those choices over for mass-market appeal- or they back themselves into a corner like they have with Yoda. But there are some things so indelibly stupid that you can’t really smooth them out- the weirdness WAS the point. The audience can sense the void, and they are going to fill it with whatever their instincts lead them to. Once, Yoda delighted us by being a little freak- now he torments us, and we punish him for it.
Pong Krell was a Besalisk male Jedi Master who, during the Clone Wars, served as a Jedi General in the Grand Army of the Republic.