Boba Fett has always been defined more by what we don't know about him than by what we do. Even when we are introduced to his father figure, Jango, in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, the young Boba hovers around the edges of scenes. We learn that Boba is not Jango's son in the traditional sense of the word, but rather a clone of the elder Fett, one of many such clones who are being grown to establish a galactic army. Boba is different only in that he has been personally raised by his genetic forebear, his largest moment of character development arriving when he picks his slain dad's helmet from the battlefield on Geonosis.
We don't see him again until he is enlisted as one of several bounty hunters tasked with capturing Han Solo in the original Star Wars trilogy. After Han is captured and encased in a block of carbonite, he travels to the desert planet of Tatooine, delivers the frozen Han to Jabba the Hutt, then gets swallowed by a Sarlacc (a species of gigantic tentacled monsters that live under the sand). Various Star Wars encyclopedias inform us that nobody can survive such a fate.
Nearly 40 years later (we speak not of the accursed Star Wars Holiday Special), The Book of Boba Fett asks, what if someone could, though? More accurately, if we think in the salamander-brained logic of Disney executives, it asks, "What if George Lucas hadn't killed off one of our most valuable characters decades before we owned the franchise and could make boatloads of money with him?"
It was a question many thought had been answered with the much better and more successful show The Mandalorian. You want a story about a mysterious bounty hunter dressed in cool armor who fights real good? Here you go, and here's a Baby Yoda to boot! (No, I will not call it Grogu.) The genius of The Mandalorian was on several levels. First, it gave fans a Fett-like character who didn't require demystifying Boba Fett to tell a good story with. If the show hadn't worked out the way it did, Disney could have scrapped the character of Din-Djarin with no damage done to that all-important IP. Loathe though I am to bring the logic of the market to bear on art, one thinks it would be something Disney keeps in mind.
Moreover, The Mandalorian was able to break away from the same wells Disney and Lucas both kept returning to: Skywalkers, Palpatines, C-3PO. Not being tied to established characters gave it the freedom to experiment in new directions. Failure would not sink the entire Star Wars ship, rickety as it was in the wake of the abysmal Episode IX: Rise of Skywalker, and showrunner Jon Favreau took full advantage of that leeway, introducing new characters, locations, and perspectives to the universe. For the first time since the original film in 1977, Star Wars felt like a galaxy full of potential rather than the thespian backdrop for a bunch of magic people all improbably and incestuously related to each other.
The problem, of course, is that The Mandalorian was incredibly successful beyond the wildest dreams of anyone involved. When the show's first season was running and Baby Yoda hype was at its peak, it was the most saturated our culture has been with Star Wars enthusiasm since the original trilogy. I shit you not, one nauseatingly trendy nightclub I frequented at the time commissioned three-story-tall graphics of Baby Yoda dancing in time with the beat. The Mandalorian was inescapable, and with its popularity among both the general public and the Academy, it inevitably became yet another tightly managed property in Mickey Mouse's iron grip on the Star Wars franchise.
Toward the end of The Mandalorian season 2, Boba Fett jetted in with his signature spaceship to team up with Din Djarin, and the show's hard-won sense of endless cosmic exploration immediately shrunk around his faded green armor. And who should show up to take custody of Baby Yoda in the final episode but Luke Skywalker himself (as a CGI abomination), functioning as an in-world representation of Disney, as if to say, "Thank you for making another billion-dollar piece of IP. We'll be taking that, now." Like the phenomenon of carcinization, in which everything eventually evolves into a crab with enough time, everything in Star Wars, given enough money, evolves into a Skywalker.
By the end of its second season, The Mandalorian was stuffed to the gills with sights familiar to Star Wars nerds. Much of the wonder and magic that had made the first season so impactful was replaced with a series of callbacks to stuff we'd seen plenty of times before. "Here's something you've never imagined," gave way to, "Hey, remember that?"
And now we have The Book of Boba Fett. After four episodes, I've seen enough. The show is spineless and fundamentally devoid of meaning. It is hours of advertisement for action figures and Lego sets disguised as plot, interested in nothing more than zooming in on creatures and objects that have previously been set dressing for more interesting Star Wars fare in better movies, books, comics, and series.
Say what you will about George Lucas's prequel trilogy, which was so thoroughly mocked by fans that it led the director to pawn his most successful creation off to Disney wholesale, partially to rid himself of the increasingly toxic fanbase. But however weighed down those films were by bad dialogue, burdensome space politics, and Jar Jar Binks, at least they were an attempt to make some kind of statement.
The prequels told the story of a pointless forever war manufactured for profit by a circle of rich elites during a time when exactly that was taking place in the United States. The third film, Revenge of the Sith, debuted at the height of the Iraq war and was especially caustic. Anakin Skywalker's final turn to the dark side as he takes the mantle of Darth Vader is complete when he tells his former teacher, "If you're not with me, you're my enemy," echoing a near-identical statement by George W. Bush in a speech to Congress after 9/11 that remains one of the most chilling displays of rabid nationalism and imperialist warmongering ever to have oozed from the mouth of an American president.
As a child of that time, I vividly recall the vitriolic response to the film by the right-wing, who tried to have Star Wars boycotted along with the Dixie Chicks, Susan Sarandon, and anyone else who dared stand against the criminal war profiteering of the American empire. The NYT lamented how "quickly politicized" Revenge of the Sith was, letting the incredibly political text of the film whip right by them with no sense of irony.
Ten years after being acquired by Disney, political controversy is something the company avoids at all costs. Any edge of cultural poignance once held by the aging Star Wars franchise is now watered down by constant attempts to reproduce its own fading relevance, regurgitating the symbols it once coined. Mandalorians, Hutts, and lightsabers flash before our eyes with all the earnestness of a Toys R Us commercial. In the semiotic sense, The Book of Boba Fett is a signifier of a signifier, meaningless in and of itself without the context of almost fifty years of history. Star Wars has nothing left to offer but the hollowness of our own nostalgia for what it once represented.
In his seminal work of cultural and literary analysis on the logic of postmodern late capitalism, Marxist critic Fredric Jameson describes a genre of film he terms "the nostalgia mode." These films, he writes, occur "in a world where stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum." In such a world, nostalgia "imprisons the past."
Originally, Boba Fett's armor attracted audiences because it was unique. Was that a jet pack he was wearing? Neato! The Book of Boba Fett wants badly for you to remember that feeling of novelty, to look at an object you've seen a thousand times and summon the dwindling resonant power of seeing it for the first. If people cheer for this show, it is because they, too, are desperate to recreate that feeling of wonder, even if only to huff its nostalgic fumes.
It is no coincidence that Jameson pointed to George Lucas as the prime example of "nostalgia film." His initial example is Lucas's 1973 film, American Graffiti, a coming-of-age story set in the early '60s, the tagline for which was, "Where were you in '62?" Yet that film would pale in the scope of its nostalgia-colored glasses next to the Star Wars trilogy.
Star Wars and George Lucas fascinated Jameson. Lucas is often hailed as an auteur, one of a group of filmmakers who would become known as the "New Wave" of American cinema, and part of what makes a New Wave auteur is a willingness to broadcast one's creative influences in neon letters. Star Wars is Buck Rogers by way of Akira Kurosawa, both influences Lucas cited excitedly in interviews, cultural touchstones of the 1950s. Jameson writes, "Star Wars, far from being a pointless satire of such now dead forms, satisfies a deep (might I even say repressed?) longing to experience them again."
As if to prove Jameson right, season 2 of The Mandalorian featured a more direct homage to Kurosawa than any other in the franchise's history with "The Jedi," an episode which finds its eponymous hero Ahsoka Tano facing off against a ruthless Imperial magistrate, culminating in a showdown. Ahsoka wields a lightsaber against the magistrate's beskar pole weapon. It is, I believe, among the most sublime—and telling—pieces of media in the Star Wars canon. The beautiful, meditative cinematography of the episode lingers on the art of swordsmanship, the clashing of two determined and diametrically opposed fighters, and is in some instances a frame-for-frame recreation of Kurosawa's work in The Hidden Fortress and Seven Samurai.
Star Wars aping the great works of bygone eras is one thing. Homage may serve to imbue old images and styles with new, culturally current meanings, mapping echoes of the past onto the contours of the present and future. But now, after 45 years, something more bizarre has occurred: Star Wars seeks only to recreate and reproduce itself. When, in The Last Jedi, director Rian Johnson attempted a repudiation of this fetishization of the past, many vocal fanboys (and I use the gendered language pointedly) pushed back against the film so apoplectically that Disney reversed course, pumping the final installment in their trilogy full of retreads from Star Wars' past with all the grace of a toddler on a treadmill.
If Jameson found the nostalgic mode interesting, even in some ways admirable, he also found it indicative of the windowless casino that is postmodern capitalism, in which our sense of historical scope is flattened into one, unending present. He writes:
It seems to me exceedingly symptomatic to find the very style of nostalgia films invading and colonizing even those movies today which have contemporary settings: as though, for some reason, we were unable today to focus on our own present, as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience. But if that is so, then it is a terrible indictment of consumer capitalism itself—or, at the very least, an alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history.
Even in a galaxy far away, Star Wars informs us from the title crawl that it takes place “a long time ago,” placing nostalgia as a central feature of the film from the jump.
In Jameson's conception of the postmodern, capitalism reproduces itself by cutting off the historical horizons of cultural imagination. Since we cannot fathom the depth of the past or the significance of the present, we are forced to forget our place in history; the fog of collapsing time obscures the fact that capitalism is a continuous choice and not an external, immortal force.
This often manifests itself in more sinister ways. Consider the number of films released to this day in which America is the heroic dragon slayer of Naziism—countless World War II movies about all-American heroes shooting Germans, even as the white supremacy which inspired Hitler's "final solution" sees a deadly resurgence within our borders. The message these movies send to audiences is deliberately muddled by nostalgia. The War is a part of our glorious past, but it is also our never-ending present. Because we once acted as heroes, we have always acted as heroes and always will.
At this point you may be asking whether I’m comparing Star Wars to white supremacy, so to be clear, I am not. But it is important to consider the function of nostalgia in perpetuating systems of oppression. The yearning for 1950s-era culture reflected in the early Star Wars films is a yearning for the past to be a simple and easy story of heroes and villains, Rebel Alliances and evil Empires. The genius of The Last Jedi was Johnson's willingness to disturb that neatness, to point out that true good and pure evil are never entirely separable. He was roundly rebuked for that attempt, and The Book of Boba Fett seeks to flatten the perspective once again.
What makes The Book of Boba Fett so remarkable to me is that it seems to be—and hopefully you’ll understand my meaning here—nostalgic for the nostalgic. Like an aging empire or Rey in the cave of mirrors, it looks recursively into its own mythologized past to find a way forward. A smarter franchise can do this cleverly, wink at the viewer and dissect its own success. In fact, other Disney mega-franchises have done so quite recently. Loki was on some level a show about the Marvel Cinematic Universe looking back over its decade-long rise to domination of the Hollywood landscape and grappling with its own legacy, a metacommentary on how to move forward when your only rival is yourself and the only records left to shatter are your own.
Star Wars, meanwhile, seems terrified of losing its revered place in our culture, and so it spirals endlessly into itself like a binary star.
What has taken place in a sense is that Star Wars has ceased to operate in the nostalgic mode and has instead progressed a step further to become a pastiche of itself.
Jameson notes that within postmodern capitalism, "pastiche eclipses parody." Parody has something to say with its mimicry. Pastiche, by contrast, is that which Jameson terms "mimicry without parody's ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what being imitated is rather comic." More plainly, pastiche is imitation without meaning. It is to its audience as a picture of bread is to a starving man.
We keep wanting Star Wars to be good, the same way we want to believe the past was good. We want to preserve our childhood innocence in amber, to summon on demand the thrill we felt when a lightsaber first hummed to life before our eyes. We want to believe that nostalgia can be more than a weak echo of that excitement, that we can subsist on empty calories of pastiche when the sustenance of originality is long gone. It is time, at long last, to admit otherwise.
And yet, I know I will find myself hoping once again for something more when Obi-Wan Kenobi comes out, and then again when Ahsoka does. This cycle will repeat until the end of time, all because these movies made me feel something a long time ago, in a past that now seems far, far away.