So what are you going to do about it?
How are you going to resist? Will you push back? Keep your head down and hope the flood passes over your head? Say something, risking your well-being when they sweep everyone up in one of their raids? Or fight, knowing what you decide, at this harrowing moment, shapes the rest of your life? Of course, I’m talking about “Star Wars.” Specifically, the fascinating Disney series “Andor,” beginning its second season on April 22. Why — what did you think I was talking about?
Oh.
Understandable: “Andor” tells the story of how a disorganized Rebellion took shape even as the Empire tightened its grip over every living thing in the galaxy and every corner of their lives. The second season is a lot like the first. Meaning, it’s the most vital, resonant political parable being made right now, all the more remarkable for coming out of the House of Mouse. Chicago, naturally, doesn’t factor into this galaxy, and yet, it’s hard not to watch it in Chicago without seeing it aligned with every Midwesterner who ever flipped a bird to an overzealous bootlicker. People here don’t want to scrap, but don’t go quietly. There are Sanctuary Cities in this galaxy and as the second season of its fascist nightmare begins, that’s exactly where resistance emerges.
Again… I’m talking about “Star Wars.”
Wait — what did you think I meant?
“Andor,” written and shaped by Tony Gilroy, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of “Michael Clayton” and much of the “Bourne Identity” thrillers, is a very different “Star Wars.” It’s a grown-up portrait of guerrilla training alongside institutional rot, full of moral choices and adult consequences. There are no Jedi or Wookies or lightsabers. John Williams is nowhere to be heard. Humans outnumber aliens, and though this new season begins with an action sequence as rousing as anything in the big-screen versions, there’s not much action. There is, rather, skulking and spying and decline.
If John Le Carré wrote “Star Wars” — well, here you go. Conversations happen in the shadows between clenched teeth at minimal volumes. The best special effect is the cast’s ability to hold a pleasant mask for certain people, then shift imperceptibly to faces of worry. No one whispers “The Force is with you.” But Rebel martyrs leave stark calls to action: “There is a darkness reaching like rust into everything around us. We let it grow, and now it’s here. It is here and it is not visiting anymore. It wants to stay.”
More than a few culture critics have spotted hints of “The Wire” in the construction and complexity of “Andor.” That’s not a bad model. The narrative alternates between the everyday people suffering everyday intimidations and cruelties, and the (mostly) low-level government civil servants and foot soldiers tasked with carrying out a suffocating, hypocritical regime. Really, this is a portrait of the slow creep of fascism and the hard choices that everyone from careerist strivers to wealthy socialites are forced to make.
There’s no Dark Side magic here that draws working-class people into serving the Empire, just ambition without a moral compass. You’ve heard of “the banality of evil”? Here, it’s intricately shown — we see Imperial number-pushers return home to their mothers, middle management ignoring compassion for efficiency and ladder-climbers angling for promotions. In fact, other than Ben Mendelsohn’s Officer Krennic (the chief bad guy in the 2016 film “Rogue One”), nearly all of the Imperials here work at desks.
Their role, as they see it, is to supply “order.”
It’s as if the humanist intellectual Hannah Arendt and not George Lucas had created “Star Wars” almost 50 years ago, though remarkably, it’s never preachy — it’s all show, no tell. The first season was mostly about convincing a handful of potential leaders to assemble a coherent resistance. This season, they’re fully committed, but unorganized and unable to agree on how to do this. Again, “Andor” is savvy about both how fascism works and revolutions can fail. During the second season, Imperial officers worry quietly, in memos, that the Empire is overreaching, arresting too many innocents, fostering cracks in its armor. Gilroy is too smart a writer to contrast that with some brave, humble activists: Without explicitly describing the many ways revolutions take shape, his activists fight each other, debate small things while bigger things (a Death Star, for instance) loom.
What they can’t agree on is pretty much what real-world revolutionaries debate: Do we turn the weapons of the enemy against themselves, or create a new day from scratch?
The leaders in the Rebellion even smartly echo what actual revolutions tend to need: Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) is a ruthless operative from a poor family exploited by the enemy; Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) is an elite politician willing to launder money and move weapons; Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgard) is a wealthy antique dealer quietly attempting to build a rigorous network of the likeminded who are not naive; Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) is the hotheaded guerrilla faction leader maybe too reactionary to be effective. But all accept a certain amount of collateral loss in the service of rebellion.
Depending on where you stand, they’re future leaders or current terrorists. It’s the universe of “Star Wars,” with heroes in white and villains in black, but “Andor” is never so clean. Heroes here are probably doomed in one way or another: As Skarsgard’s Luthen says, “I burn my life to make a sunrise I know I’ll never see.” Meanwhile, no joke, the Empire is auditing communities. They have even hired disinformation marketing teams that aim to “plant the right ideas in the right market in the right sequence,” weaponizing opinion.
The Rebels are stuck arguing ground rules and tactics, but the Empire is all big picture.
The roots of “Star Wars,” as most fans can tell you, sprang out of a loosely plotted parable about colonialism that Lucas wanted to tell, intentionally reminiscent of an American empire that runs into fierce resistance in Vietnam. It was a byproduct of ‘60s counterculture, albeit buried beneath the influence of old Westerns and samurai movies.
Gilroy works in that original inspiration, laying out the methods of fascism, tacking on “The Battle of Algiers” for good measure. He can be a terrific, often thrilling writer who seems to be speaking to contemporary America in real time: His bad guys are eager to identify the good guys who “can be relied on to do the wrong thing.” One resistance leader pleads to another: “Aren’t you tired of fighting with people who agree with you?” In the first season, Cassian Andor, not quite committed to losing his life for a naive rebellion, nonetheless zeroes in on the enemy’s true weakness: “They’re so proud of themselves, they don’t even care. They’re so fat and satisfied they can’t even imagine it, that someone like me could get into their house and spit in their food.” Throughout the second season (and I have seen much of it), he’s whittling rage with subterfuge.
“Andor,” startlingly, is the resistance culture much of the resistance culture of the past decade — the satirical statues surreptitiously placed in public squares, the crafting accessories at protests, the TikTok rants — hoped to be. It’s never disposable and, in the tradition of 1950s sci-fi paranoia flicks like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and “The Thing,” it captures its times without ever needing to spell out what it’s actually saying. The art world needs a model of 21st-century protest art right now. Here you go. It’s powerful, unsettling, then step outside, and it’s too real.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com