• she/they

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sche
@sche

I’ve been thinking a lot about Andor recently and more specifically how much I love the many, many answers it’s given to the question of “how is this whole rebellion thing going to work.” I’ve been wanting to get (some of) my thoughts down on it for a while, and (worse!) promising it to people and then not delivering, so, here we go—long awaited, slightly belated, twice as long as it needs to be.

Before we get into it, I want to do a brief aside and a wholehearted recommendation: I would not be thinking with Star Wars in the way I am if it wasn’t for the work of the folks at A More Civilized Age over the course of the last two years. Their mode of commentary is a breath of fresh air in an ecosystem of easter eggs and surface-level thought, and everybody who reads this should give them a listen.

More specifically, I want to start with something the folks at AMCA (particularly Rob Zacny) have noted over their Andor coverage: the significance of water, especially flowing and flooding water, as a recurring symbol through Cassian’s journey. Cassian (among other things) is captured by the seaside, bursts a waterline to fry the electric floor, must swim to escape from prison, and hears of his mother’s death by the water—Zacny points out that we can place these events in contrast to the repeated symbols of classic Star Wars movies: the two suns and dry desert of Tatooine, and the broad thesis of leaving home to find adventure (the heroic core of Luke’s story) are substantially different from Andor, with its emphasis on the community-first calls for revolution anywhere, everywhere.

I want to read this conversation with Marva’s eulogy, where she says (among other stuff) that: “There is a wound that won't heal at the center of the galaxy. There is a darkness reaching like rust into everything around us. We let it grow, and now it's here. It's here and it's not visiting anymore. It wants to stay. The Empire is a disease that thrives in darkness, it is never more alive than when we sleep. It's easy for the dead to tell you to fight, and maybe it's true, maybe fighting is useless. Perhaps it's too late. But I'll tell you this, if I could do it again, I'd wake up early and be fighting those bastards from the start!”

And this part of Nemik’s manifesto: “Remember this, Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.”

Flooding water is Cassian’s personal symbol, but it is also a helpful metaphor for the rebellion as Nemik advocates it. In such a spontaneous, irrepressible rebellion, fought on all fronts and by all hands, we are all only drops in a larger sea. Marva, too, calls for us to fight, though fighting may seem useless, and to wake up and realize that we are powerful—we might even imagine that the “rust” of Imperial control is to be washed away by the water of our forgotten strength. In this sense, water takes on a purifying—almost baptismal—significance: we join in the flood and are swept away, washed clean, and awoken.

The folks at AMCA have rightly pointed out that, through Nemik and Marva’s respective recorded voices, Andor echoes the thematic resonance—the meaning—of the appearance of force-ghosts, giving us an understanding of the powers of teachers, ancestors, and memories without relying on the metaphysical discoveries of a late stage republican super cop (admittedly one of the coolest late stage republican super cops). One of the show’s strengths, I think, is its willingness to hold this resonance with prior material without making those connections diegetic. Nemik and Marva are, for all thematic intents and purposes, tapping into the Force—and the story is all the better because they do not do so narratively. More importantly for our discussion, by putting Nemik and Marva in the position traditionally held by Force users, they are given the legitimacy given to the Force. Nemik and Marva are proven right. There are whole battalions who do not yet realize they’ve enlisted in the cause—Cassian is a part of one, awakening to a fight he has always been fighting. He already knows everything he needs to know—he does, and is (more or less) victorious at the end of the season. But lets talk about Cassian.

Cassian Andor is placed in special relationship to both our thinkers—son and ideal reader—before he has a hand in either the Narkina 5 or Rix Road uprisings. In both these cases, Cassian’s actions directly contribute to the revolt, but it will be someone else who takes the true lead. Throughout season one, in fact, Cassian serves as a kind of an ultimate protagonist—a plot-mover who interacts directly with every major character outside of Coruscant—and makes personal decisions which seem to reflect and anticipate social shifts that he has only an individual’s part in. When Cassian decides to buy-in to the Aldhani heist, the others grow more confident and pull it off. When Cassian decides to rise up on Narkina 5, the other prisoners rise too. When Cassian takes direct, unmitigated action against the Empire and then to commit himself wholeheartedly to the Rebellion, so do the people of Ferrix. This is critically different from Luke killing the Emperor or blowing up the Death Star—there, the hero’s actions trigger change. Throughout Andor’s first season, we see instead a broad portrait of how people come to bring about change in their own lives—Cassian is just one representative sample. When Cassian first meets Luthen, he is offered a more complicated choice than his mercenary antecedents in Han Solo and Lando Calrissian. Whereas historically the question has been Are you in this for the money, or are you in this for real? (which invites us to imagine a kind of fringe class of apolitical actors—mercenaries, thieves, and bounty hunters—who, though operating outside the law, are nonetheless not actively anti-Imperial, Andor’s first season is about showing us that Cassian was in for real from the moment the Republic landed on Kenari, engaged in what we might understand as political resistance by virtue of his survival alone. Rather than being given the opportunity to decide, Cassian must come to the realization that there is no getting out of this fight, no cutting and running—only standing up and pushing back or laying down and taking the hits. This is both Marva and Nemik’s fundamental stance—that we have been sleeping, thinking that they’ll go away, or that everyone is in the war, on one side or another, whether they realize it or not. It is no surprise, then, that Nemik comes to the conclusion that mercenaries, too, have a role to play in the breaking of Imperial control. Mercenaries exist, and, by virtue of their existence, are involved in the ongoing battle for one side or the other.

What does it mean, though, for Nemik to call Cassian his ideal reader? What does Cassian represent to Nemik? For that, we have to come back to water: healing, purifying, rust-removing water. Water is a life-giving substance (a contrast to the desert sands of Tatooine) and water is a purifying substance (to wash away the rust of Imperial control) and water is an overpowering, uncountable, collective substance (which, made from many pieces, becomes something much, much larger than the sum of its parts). Through all that runs, in my reading, a trait:

Water is virile.

Consider Luke Skywalker, who must try and fail and try and fail and try and fail to become a master of the Force. From early in the first movie he knows what he wants—his journey is one of personal growth to be able to reach it. On the other hand it is remarkable that in a show like Andor, so concerned with how the revolution will take place, that there is little to no conversation over whether or not the revolution could take place. Part of this comes from Nemik’s philosophy—the revolution will take place and will succeed because it is natural and tyranny is not—but consider also that, throughout the first season, Cassian Andor almost never fails. Once he puts his mind to something (escaping Ferrix, the heist on Aldhani, the prison break, the rescue attempt) Cassian succeeds—not without cost, but to great effect. He can do it—he just has to say he’s going to. He just has to try. This is the lesson of Andor, delivered through Nemik and Marva: to try is to succeed, to wake up and fight is to wake up and win. We (Cassian, but also the people like Cassian—the listless oppressed, the undirected proletariat) have all the knowledge we need, all the power we could ever want, all the strength to break our bonds. You just have to do it. Andor season one is the story of getting people to wake up, to see who their enemies are, and to try, and Cassian is a prophet of this kind of awakening.

(This absolutely rules, incidentally, because it means that the battleground of Andor is not one of ability but of commitment—not can you but will you. In a franchise which has spent decades preaching detachment—because attachment will lead you down the path to fear, anger, hate, suffering, and so on—Andor rightly says that getting your skin in the game is the only way to ever start to win.)

With this in mind, Nemik calling Cassian his perfect reader can be read as a comment on Cassian’s great potential—his great potency—and his lack of formal ideological training. Cassian is, as I said, one representative sample of a group of people who Nemik hopes to win to the cause—the bottled up power of the proletariat, the force which cannot be truly eliminated and so is diluted by the many opiates of the masses (if y’all know me, you know I think religion gets an unfairly high billing in this one—lots of things serve to keep us from exercising our full capability for liberation, from schools and prisons to peezos and revnog). Andor might not be doing explicit mythopoesis in the Joseph Campbell, Hero’s Journey, go fight your psychosexual demons sort of a way that the “Skywalker Saga” did, but I do think there is something mythic in Cassian Andor’s awakening. If we understand him to be a kind of “proletarian protagonist,” standing in for narrative purposes as a token of the untapped power of the people, it is no wonder that so much of this season is made up of people trying to control him.

Andor is full of people saying they understand Cassian, from Luthen’s first conversation with him to Skeen’s attempt to get him to cut and run to Marva’s last blessing as conveyed by Brasso. Reading Cassian’s mythic meaning into this, we can see these claims (as well as in the violent attempts to control him: Kleya’s commitment that he must be eliminated, Dedra’s manhunt, the prison on Narkina 5) as an effort to control this font of productive power—economic and political—from which the people cannot be isolated. This power at the core of both Nemik and Marva’s last speeches, and in the water-symbolism. The power of the people is a wave waiting to be unleashed (how interesting that the heist on Aldhani took place at a dam, how interesting that Cassian liberates the water from Imperial pipes to start the prison riot). Nemik and Marva are confident in the ability of this flood to self-direct—it is just their job to wake it up and give it something like a direction, and then to join in it (take the plunge, try to swim) and see where the water takes them.

Luthen, on the other hand, has a different approach. At his most effective a clever player of a game of chess, Luthen seems to handle his whole network as resources in a project only he (and Kleya) can grasp in entirety. In this model, the power of individual pieces is only permissible so long as that piece can be steered and managed. When it slips from his grasp—cuts and runs after seeing too much, for instance—it must be eliminated. The piece must be destroyed. I want to make one thing perfectly clear: sometimes Kleya might be right. It may, in fact be, that some operatives—mercenaries of questionable commitment, for instance—must be destroyed before they can pose a security threat. The problem is that these decisions are being unilaterally made by Kleya and Luthen, not by the people on the ground—if you want to read a really good book, this is one of the big themes in China Mieville’s Iron Council, which expresses what I’m trying to say better and more specifically than I’m going to be able to do here. There is a tyranny to Luthen’s decision making, but also a severe ego. If, as Nemik suggests and the show seems to believe, the revolution is being pushed forward by uncountable hands across uncountable star systems—battalions who don’t yet know they’re in this fight—imagine the self-confidence it takes to believe that you are the one and only individual who, sitting at the core of the spider’s web, can make all the right decisions, all the time. This is the pride of kings and emperors. The folks at AMCA have been joking about Luthen being a Jedi for a while, now—ironically enough, Luthen is making the same mistake as Yoda, believing that if he has no true investments, if he is really untouchable, he can see clearly enough to make all the right calls and play the game to completion. This Jedi realpolitik contributes directly to the Sith takeover, as they refuse to play the game messily and do what’s right—take a stand against chattel slavery, for instance—constrained by an aloofness that they believe will save them. It is also the same call made by the Empire, who milk their subjects for productive value (in prisons or scrapyards or Coruscant office-blocks; in cells or relay stations or as a mole in the ISB), and then, when they are no longer productive, to eliminate them. I don’t want to get too much into thinking about Rogue One until we’ve seen the rest of Andor, but—this criticism will, to some degree, also become true of Cassian Andor. This approach might be helpful in some places and times, but it will never bring about the final victory of the rebellion. It can’t commit in that way. Luthen Rael calls himself a coward. He’s right. There comes a moment when you have to buy all the way in.

The scary part about all of this is that Nemik is wrong. Maybe not in the universe of Star Wars, with the Force moving things behind the scenes—but it must be said, out loud, that there is no reason Cassian should have ended up making the right call, or that the power of the people of Ferrix will necessarily become unshackled. The people can just as easily be bridled and controlled, transformed into a force for economic production or—worse—a gun, a Syril or a Dedra, pointed and fired by the Imperial system. This is the risk of Luthen’s approach—he is turning people into guns and saying that he knows that he’ll aim right. This was the downfall of the Republic—they made a gun and then handed it to Palpatine.

This is the benefit of Marva and Nemik’s approach, even if we disagree with their belief that the universe is on their side. They call for full buy-in, right now, right here, and damn the consequences—for teaching people how to point and fire themselves, rather than forging them into a gun which can be aimed from afar. This is a chaotic view of liberation—undirected, uncontrollable, necessarily coalitional—but it is the shift from order (in space, thought, control) to chaos which marks the two most substantial uprisings in Andor: the jailbreak and Rix Road. In both cases the lines of behavior (the riot cop captain calls “Placement” to have his soldiers deploy shields as the crowd surges forward: he might as well have said “On program”) are broken, the people seize control, and what will rise in their place is not entirely clear. It is not that these movements are entirely without structure—One way out and Wake up early are incredibly powerful political directives—but neither are they motivated by a centralized hand (Luthen, critically, flees from Rix Road). It is in these moments of chaos, rather, that not only is the nose of the Empire bloodied but the power of the people is given room to stretch, breathe, and test it’s strength.

We haven’t reached any kind of revolutionary utopia (and I have no doubt we’ll see repercussions for Rix Road next season—but then, the Empire was already cracking down, that’s how empires work). Still, Andor is clear: You cannot win a war without risking yourself completely, over and over again. This frightens Luthen. It should. It is exactly the commitment he shies away from every time—the moment, to use Andor’s language, when the one way out is to swim. I’m interested to see how Luthen reckons with the need, sooner or later, to go all in, and how Cassian comes to hold the position he will in the Rebellion. So far he has been one drop in the bucket—but he will become the fulcrum, to, I think, his own detriment.


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in reply to @sche's post:

Lovely piece, the rising tide metaphor works very well as a stand in for revolution. I'll need to rewatch Andor and relisten to this last stretch of AMCA episodes, we are blessed by excellent drama and analysis.