Consider the Tulip: Why Star Wars Might Just Be Bad
I promise we will get to the tulips. Star Wars is really bad and we have lot to talk about.
The Mandalorian is really bad. I can’t stop watching it. I don’t watch it every as soon as it drops, but whenever I have two episodes to watch I get excited. Perhaps a little too excited, because The Mandalorian is bad. Like, really bad. The one I watched today features cameos from Jack Black, Lizzo, and Christopher Lloyd. They’re in extravagant costumes but they are just playing themselves. There’s also a fish-alien Romeo and Juliet in the B plot. Actually, maybe Star Wars is generally bad.
There’s this old joke about Star Wars fans:
Star Wars Fans be like: Star Wars would be so good if it was good.
The critique is so cutting that part of me wants to deflect and search for a redeeming quality in Star Wars. I want to type one right now about the world building and the characters and how we really can just ignore George Lucas and everything he thought was good. I do think that Star Wars would be really good if it was good. The thing is though, Star Wars is bad.
If you ignore the original trilogy (which I think we should—even if we try, no one is able to remove the rose-tinted glasses and have an honest conversation about how they’re just alright), then there are three pieces of Star Wars media that we all agree are good: Rogue One, The Clone Wars, and Andor. Maybe in exploring what makes them so good, I’ll discover why I love a franchise that consistently releases sub-par content.
Rogue one is a little cheesy. The whole movie exists for the last ten minutes. Rogue One is 120 minutes of decent (but not amazing) action movie followed by ten minutes of fan service. It knew exactly what it was doing and it did it very well.
Now we turn to The Clone Wars. Here’s the thing about The Clone Wars: this show is 66 and a half hours long. I can say that maybe six hours of that is good. The majority of this show is so bad that it took me almost six years to watch it. You might think that means that over the course of seven seasons the show gets better; this is not the case. The bad episodes stay just as bad—they might look a lot prettier because of the better technology and budget, but they are still bad episodes. Instead, the good episodes get amazing.
The final season consists of three arcs. The first is pretty good, the second is very bad. But the third arc. The third arc is “The Siege of Mandalore.” The third arc runs parallel to The Revenge of the Sith. The Third Arc is the best hour and thirty minutes of Star Wars I have ever seen. It might even be an Objectively Good Story. But here’s the problem: the rest of the show is soul-suckingly boring. You should not watch it. After 65 hours of bad tv you will be rewarded and you might even feel like it was worth it. But this show is bad. The Siege of Mandalore cannot fix that.
Andor. Andor is good. Andor is mind-bogglingly good. It is a wonderful piece of anti-fascist media masterfully telling a grounded story that is still high-stakes. It is full of silly looking aliens. I can maybe rationalize the rose-tinted glasses with which I view the rest of Star Wars and concede that everything else bad, but if Andor is bad I will never trust my critical thinking and media literacy skills again. If you watch it, you will feel the cognitive dissonance of a Star Wars story being good. But if you can get past this it’s genuinely amazing.
I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about Kenobi. Just like Gen X can’t ever be honest about whether or not the original trilogy is good, I can’t be honest about Kenobi. I enjoyed every second of it. No one could convince me it was bad. They could show me every little thing wrong to me and it would never change anything. I may be a little scared to rewatch it, but I will always love it.
If it’s so bad, then why do I watch every single piece of Star Wars media? I could tell you about my love of All Things Camp. I know Star Wars is camp and that it has always been camp. It may be camp, but I don’t enjoy it like I do camp. I love things like Riverdale or High School Musical the Musical the Series—shows that live and breath camp. It’s not that I don’t want Star Wars to be camp because I don’t like camp. I can’t admit that it’s camp because the way I love it isn’t post-ironic-in-on-the-joke love. It’s genuine i-get-the-joke-and-im-unironically-in-on-it love. I cannot and will not let myself admit that Star War is camp because, at least for me, it isn’t.
But here’s the thing: I’m a Star Wars fan who just wrote 800 words of “Star Wars would be so good if it were good”. What if Star Wars is just bad? Star Wars can just be bad! I am allowed to enjoy it for being bad. I don’t have to have these deep intellectual reasons to enjoy it—it can be bad! I’m allowed to like Star Wars unabashedly. I don’t need a reason to enjoy a thing; I’m allowed to like star wars without an articulate defense of its merits! That’s it—that’s the reason I’m allowed to like it!
I’ve done it again.
On the other hand, perhaps there’s fruit in looking at the things that make me feel warm. I’ve been feeling the cold-distance between myself and the world more often lately. Despite its many flaws, Star Wars makes me feel warmer. Maybe if I understood why I like it I could find that elsewhere. But also maybe I should just let it be the way that it is. Maybe it can just be bad and I can like it anyway. Maybe there’s a world out there where I don’t have to have an opinion on Star Wars. I may not live in that world right now but I would like to.
Can I be honest about something? This whole “let’s explore star wars and see what we can find” business? It’s fake. I went on this journey earlier. I wrote more than I intended, and I got lost in the writing in a way that I didn’t expect, but I didn’t “discover” anything in real time. Those last two paragraphs? They were largely copied from a text I wrote an hour ago. The honesty isn’t manufactured, but the real-time discovery certainly is. I knew the outline of this piece when I sat down to write it. I knew the whole thing, and I know how it ends.
If I know the ending, why would I lie? Why not present the cold-hard facts I discovered on my journey? Simple: it made for better writing. I wanted to take you on the journey I walk every time I try to rationalize my love of Star Wars.
Does that undermine what I’ve written? Does it make it feel less genuine? Would it help to know that I knew I was going to write that question? That this whole thing is manufactured? That I know the beats I’m going to hit and I’m letting myself be honest within that framework? Does it make it the art less genuine if you can feel the form bulging out like this?
Wow. That got dark. Star Wars isn’t supposed to be deep. I’m doing it again, aren’t I? I do genuinely think I’m allowed to like Star Wars without a reason. But still, a part of me really wants to have a reason. I want to be able to explore the nuances of the things that make me feel warm. I want that exploration to not be a bad thing. There’s a difference, however, between exploring my love of something and a cold, intellectual dissection of its merits. My love of Star Wars is too insecure for that genuine exploration; the moment I try to explore it I become defensive of would-be attacks against a franchise that I’ve loved my whole life—for some reason I don’t know how to let the flaws be.
I was honest about knowing the framework of this piece. I may not have known the journey I was going to take to get here but I knew this was the destination. You have too; it was the title of this essay: The Tulip. I’m not quite sure how the Tulip relates to Star Wars. I can try to explain it but for some reason I don’t want to. Maybe if I can look at the tulip like this, I will one day be able to look at other things this way.
On the Tulip:
I’ve had tulips tattooed on my arm for three years now. We don’t really have tulips in California. They’re not absent from our floral vocabulary but they aren’t around in the same way they are in the Midwest. Here, they are everywhere. Anywhere you look you see these beautiful, strange dots of color. When I first saw the red tulips next door, I didn’t recognize them as tulips. I recognized all of the other tulips with their egg-shaped bulb but these red flowers were completely open and looked almost like a hollow rose. It turns out that that’s what tulips are supposed to look like. When they are fully bloomed and open for the day they don’t look like the ones everyone thinks of.
Maybe you knew that. Maybe this whole time you’ve known that the flowers on my tattoo didn’t look like that in real life. Maybe my artist knew and chose to draw them closed because that’s how we want to think of them. Do you think the tulips like that?
I really want to make a metaphor out of the tulips. It’s right there. It would be an amazing central metaphor for a piece looking at the way I see myself. Maybe that’s what I wrote today. Here’s the thing though: I don’t care. I don’t want to analyze the tulip. I’m perfectly content to let the tulip be both the picturesque, slightly shy flower and the bold, hollow rose. I spent the last week trying to outline an essay about them before I realized that I would much rather just look at them. Then I started looking at the tulips. You can find a selection of my favorites (along with other wildflowers) below.
