As much as I thoroughly love bringing light to ye old fantasy and science fiction, sometimes it’s worth talking about what’s new or what’s come about in the scene of modern literature. Full disclosure; I don’t even really watch modern movies today (I will make an exception for the new Dune and that’s about it). The quality of writing in Hollywood today is nothing short of indigestible fertilizer—with a few notable exceptions of course.
Now I figured since it’s no longer the new and shiny thing being over two years old and I wouldn’t catch the annoying Disney fanboys (a despicable race of subhumans), it’s time to dissect everyone’s new favorite gunslinging psuedo-western spectacular; The Mandalorian, but more importantly its tribute to Star Wars as a whole.
And as I’ve been watching many spaghetti &/or Westerns as of late, it’s got my noggin joggin about the whole theme. I tip my hat to you partner, because you’re in for a rant.
Because let’s get one thing straight here; Star Wars isn’t just a bunch of movies about laser-swords and funny hairdos. Love it or hate it, the series is the literary manifestation of The Hero With a Thousand Faces — it is mythology. A great video that covers this extensively (albeit the creator’s political contentions with Campbell are childish) is below:
The Mandalorian however is not like the old movies or new movies at all—you’d be wrong to assume so, at least from the get-go. It is not just an anthology series about a gunslinger LARPing as spartan. It is attempting to metabolize and adapt the Western in the galaxy of Jedi and Sith—to completely overturn what you think on the “right and wrong” of the universe and let a out a drama unfold on the Fun Side of the Force; you know that ambiguous gray area where war crimes against the Empire are committed and blaster-pistol Mexican standoffs are the flavor of the day? The show delivered and it disappointed but it brings up an interesting
What Makes a Western?
Violence. That’s it. Next question. Pack it up.
In all reality I’m only half-kidding. No Western is without somebody shooting somebody else. Or, if you are like me and view samurai flicks as the same genre—lopping somebody’s favorite arm and leaving them only one to feed themselves with. Because the cowboy and the samurai are the same person in different clothes (or robes); the judge, jury, and executioner.
Without getting on a complete tangent, the samurai movies or チャンバラ (chanbara, aka sword-movie) inspired the Western genre, post WWII, focused on the warrior-class of professional blademasters who were ronin—samurai without lords (uncannily identical to the Anglo Saxon poem, The Wanderer). What is key to remember here is that the whole theme was underlined by the fact that these warriors were without purpose in a turbulent world…wait…do you hear that? I think I hear a Colt clearing leather just over the hill.
300 years of feudal Japan and 50 of the United States mirror each other insomuch that they share the same restlessness, conflict of justice, and a shift in power structures that result in chaotic fighting. The ultimate era for a man with Willpower and to live by the blade/gun (note that Conan is also such a story based in a time thematically identical). Many mistake these periods for lawlessness—utterly false! Both of these periods had ample laws if not too many—it’s that there were conflicting sources of laws that clashed (shoguns feuding / United States vs Indians vs Mexicans vs States). The “Wild West was just shooting all the time and no laws” is historical fabrication that people with pecans for brains think of when debating about gun laws or some other nonsense after they’ve replaced their windshield wiper oil. What actually happened in the latter half of the 19th century in America was that when all these legal/law systems clashed (tribal/federal/religious/etc.) it created a kind of violence limbo where all millions of rule lawyers cried out once because morality was reduced to a “he said she said” and all that really mattered was somebody was king of the hill at the end of the day. The smoking six-shooter became the true law—aka whoever had big enough balls or was too stubborn to lose.
The Western/Samurai theme is that no morality is worth anything if it can’t shoot, slash at, or outthink its opponent to win.
And so I wasn’t just being a hyperbolic jack-ass saying that the Western is violence—in many ways it is. A ronin is an outlaw on one side of the river and a savior on the other, all depending on who is the one watching him cross. A gunfighter sitting in an old shattered Spanish mission might have to duke it out with some marshals over some railway bonds he came across—innocent as he may be, to the marshals, he may as well be the train-robber instead of opportunist.
I could never figure out why my grandpa only watches Westerns. He hates horses. Until I realized that he could never believe those other movies and their fantastical black-and-white ideals. He likes the Westerns because most of them are believable. By god he was right.
Rando on Twitter
He’s No Good To Me Dead
What’s so funny about the very concept of this discussion and the fact the Mandalorian TV series was even produced all hinges on a throwaway character who totally upended the Star Wars dramatica; Boba Fett.
I will profess; as a child, teenager, and even into my adult years I still adore the character of Boba Fett. A cold and ruthless bounty hunter — killing or incarcerating everybody and anybody for money, spurs and all. His appearance in Empire Strikes Back was iconic; one, he wasn’t a coloring-book bad guy but a mercenary—one of a handful who even The Bad Guy (Vader) loathed and cut deals to get the dirty deed done, two he operated under the same moral parameters that his quarry and the anti-hero (Han Solo) also worked from (money, greed), and three well…hell how hard was it not to kneejerk and say “Hey this isn’t the Dollar series” with that cape and spurs—telling the audience “there’s another world of Hans and Bobas and it was filmed by those Italians again.”
Because nobody saw Boba and said “huh another cut and paste guy in black clothing, must be a bad dude”—no, they saw the green-armored head-hunter and said “damn Clint Eastwood has a brother who lives in the Outer Rim and he is a bad dude!” You never wondered whether Vader was really the sword-swinging sociopath for using Han and Leia to get to Luke but you did scratch your head because Han did really owe that greasy and autonomous pile of blubber money (George Lucas really did get away with so many racial stereotypes), so was Boba justified in taking the bounty?
Remember what I said about Westerns being stories of violence but of conflicting but equally justifiable morals?
Seeing the bounty hunter strut around, spurs a’clinkin, saying those lines and throwing Han onto his metaphorical horse (best ship name) was like watching a World War I movie where during a standstill between artillery bombardment and routing of the British it throws you a curveball and suddenly the antagonist German general is seen hiring Turkish mercenaries to hold a competition on who can kidnap the British general’s wife, sending them to Saudi Arabia on a harrowing journey into the remote reaches of the desert where they have to fight off Bedouin and bring back the screaming woman so they can goad the British general to surrender, while the wife is actually a prostitute who slept with a Turkish warlord once and has a whole harem of connections and shady background story and the whores that try to hide her from the Turkish bounty hunters—including her very hairy sidekick with a gimp slung over her back named Slutbacca—but are captured by the German who suddenly appears (and subsequently freed in the sequel where the whores and the British general invade the compound of the Turkish warlord, including several musical numbers and a whole wardrobe of golden bikinis) eventually culminating into a sword duel where the British general loses his arm and finds out the German is his uncle! Well hot damn what a plot!
This is where Star Wars indulged a little mythological twist—and people loved it. They didn’t care if Boba was sitting on Team Bad. They wanted to see Space Western—not for the affectations and trappings (as cool as they were) but to see a world of ronin and outlaws that sat outside the mythological circle of Light and Dark, a very historical and intriguing world of grime and mortal coils. No award ceremonies or dancing teddy bears but some honest-to-God Mos Eisley cantina fights—cut out all the bullshit, we want to see a Tusken Raiders robbing Imperial trains and blue-skinned slug-head damsels in distress, and we want it today, George.
Did It Deliver?
We were promised tumbleweeds and blaster quickdraws. Anecdotally and across the internet, I think it’s safe to say The Mandalorian was generally received as positive and liked among its audience. Now it’s probably worth mentioning that the audience itself was exhibiting the signs of battered-wife syndrome after being subjected to the psychological torture that was the atrocity of The Last Jedi, etc so The Mandalorian was definitely aimed as a nostalgia-fix to keep the mobs from torching down Kathleen Kennedy’s house.
But did it stick the landing?
Yes…and then definitely no. I’m not going to do an episode-by-episode breakdown but rather explain my logic as one lump sum.
Opening up with a cantina brawl-turned-ugly bounty hunt where the gloves came off was a hell of a start and also where it went wrong. Your first impression of this character and the setting was identical to the ruthlessness of Boba Fett, a soft-spoken and cold killer. But really after the first couple episodes you don’t get a glimpse of this hard-ass until perhaps the very end—even then it is diminished. Obviously they were trying to set up him up as a “redeemed anti-hero” but what I must point out is there really isn’t a point in which Mando (who cares what his real name is) has a character-defining change of heart. When he becomes ‘Outlaw Single Father’ it’s like he puts on a duster and immediately settles into this inexplicable “well I’ll guess I won’t be that hard-ass anymore”. For the remainder of the show this slow descent into domesticated gunslinger really put a bad taste in my mouth and reminded me why I avoid Disney as a principle. We get it. He’s not Boba Fett. But why did you bait us into thinking he was with that initial carbon-freezing, bandit-halving, serial murderer?
Sure, there’s no shortage of heart-racing scenes of blaster showdowns, encounters with every flavor of villain, breakneck dogfighting montages, or the contractually-obligated pile of smoking Stormtrooper bodies—this was a baseline expectation of the series. To name a few spectacular moments in the show, I think the prison-break on the ship was a particularly well-done bit of cinema and really stands on its own, the first episode of the second season hunting down a giant worm/dragon was a real hat-tip to the Western genre as a whole, and who didn’t enjoy seeing Boba Fett play wack-a-mole with a Space-Taliban stick in one of the most anticipated resurrections in modern cinema? There were iconic new locations (albeit Tattooine needs to be forgotten about) that were really beautifully designed and I must hand it to the storyboard crew, because they did one hell of a job. It was immersive and iconic…at least on the surface.
But what about the theme of the plot—the meta of the Mando?
“No Mr Dickhead McBlogger, this was all about redeeeeemptsshuunnn! Don’t you get it? Baby Yoda wasn’t just a marketing gimmick but an instrument in the plot to make the Mando reallllizeee he’s a good guy after all!”
Is he? That was a rhetorical question.
I’m Altering the Deal, Pray I Do Not Alter It Further
In an identical Western, Outlaw Jose Wales, there’s a redemption arc where the main character is a definitive anti-hero—a former Confederal Rebel cavalryman who escapes a butchery into the West only to find that his past plagues him like a mystery rash after a romp in the brothel. In his violent journey he encounters several weak and helpless characters who he could very easily slot and continue on—instead he uses them like tools (trait of a sociopath) and eventually learns empathy from his companions which later pays off in his ride to confront Ten-Bears and the Comanche, then with his former enemies who try to hunt them down. It’s a morally and mytholologically complex story and one of the best damn Westerns you can get your hands on. And it’s relevant because in many ways, Jose and the Mando are the same protagonist, only one actually fills the boots he’s in.
My biggest gripe with the Mandalorian isn’t that it’s a bad story—for Disney, it’s exceeding expectations and it was generally entertaining, give or take a few throwaway episodes—but that it’s trying to tell two stories and it just came off as oil and water.
One story (thematically) is what I’ve already penned down; blaster-spinning, dusty starports, scum and villainy. Learning how life in the underworld works. What does the Black Sun charge for protection against the Hutts? Who are the real space banditos amigo? Comprende?
The other was the one that clearly some executive at Disney wanted; a family friendly and morally limpdicked story about compassion and empathy. About how the Empire (despite their command structure being obliterated and their fleets annihilated) aren’t just local warlords but *gasp* they’re actually still in power and growing stronger again (maybe because space democracy doesn’t work?). That the Jedi are benevolent space monks that just “do good” and even in the eyes of a headhunter and serial bodybagger, they’re not just wizards with swords but “the good guys”. Yeah I couldn’t yawn harder throughout this show people, honest. Oh and don’t forget the only other Mandalorians you see are either one-liner guys or sassy girlbosses in jetpacks who smirk and backsass Boba Fett like we’re on the set of Mean Girls—that entire episode I wanted to take all the insufferable writers and their shallow projections of “strong females” and stuff them into a giant Iron Maiden. Dear Lord Almighty was that some hamhanded writing.
It’s not that I hated Baby Yoda or that I expected Disney to try to approach the Rebel v Empire moral story different—it was that it lit a giant sign during my viewing experience in bold neon red; the conflict ain’t over, hint hint, wink wink! It was like a Western where the Civil War had been over for a decade and all of the sudden the main gunslinger is recruited to go fight Confederates again because apparently they’ve been holding out in Mexico, except the Confederates are cartoonish stereotypes and can’t do a single thing without evil-laughing. It was unbelievably and overtly dumb how they were trying to tie it in to the trainwrecks of the official franchise movies.
Oh and let me get this off my chest; Dear Mandalorian writers, if you had one more episode where Baby Goblin is in trouble because some baddy monster wants to eat him, I’m going to bring a nailgun into the writer’s rooms at Lucasfilm and **** *** down and **** *** *** *** ** **** **** you and give the walls a makeover as I ******** **** **** *****, savvy?
Riding Into the Double Sunset
The legacy of the Mandalorians before the Mando wasn’t just that they had their own version of anti-Jedi MMA, or that they really like freeze-drying people—it was that they were the Tucos of the Star Wars universe and fueled by their greed. Mercenaries without a cause. They lived and breathed in the Space Western. That was what made them stand out. The Mandalorian show promised to explain their society, how it worked, where the armor came from, and why Boba and Jango were so renowned across the galaxy. Did we get that?
Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, not really.
Was the show well costumed, well designed, and well-acted? Except for the Imperials, those godawful Mandalorian women, and Squidface Fisherman #8, yeah it was a bullseye. They left no stone unturned with the aesthetics and really nailed that classic Star Wars feel. I want to be fair and give credit where credit is due.
But as far as the morality of Westerns in Star Wars are concerned or an actual dive into the beating heart of the Mandalorian mythos, I’d say that the show really didn’t do either justice. You don’t need fancy costumes and sets to tell that story by the way—the Italians managed to do it in the 70s with virtually no budget, a few prop pistols, and a couple talented musicians. Disney could have done that; they just chose not to because they suffer from greed-itis and hire single cat-women to write their scripts.
Will we get a space Western from the Book of Boba? Only time can tell. But I’ll say this much; if you’re an aspiring writer who understands what I’ve put down, do yourself a favor and go watch some Westerns. Quentin Tarantino did and by god can that man make a movie. Imagine what he would have done if given the Mandalorian project?
Ah but we can all dream!
LAW WITHOUT SEA 
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