Random Gushing about Andor
Nov. 19th, 2022 04:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiI am loving Andor. It is the best show I have seen in a very long time. My silence about it on DW is largely due to my having next to "no notes." This is a random splat of Star Warsian thoughts inspired by Andor. Light spoilers through Andor ep. 7. Note: I wrote this post just after ep. 7 but didn't post due to life/overwork/chronic pain. I'll write more after the series ends.
Language and Culture
Cassian is a survivor of genocide, including what seems to be linguistic genocide. It would appear that he and possibly his sister are the last surviving speakers of their native language, which makes his relationship with language very interesting.
One question I have is to what extent he and his sister would remember their native language. For real-world reference, I adopted my kids when they were four and seven and fluent in their first language. Despite our halting efforts to keep some words in our household, both had lost comprehension of all but a tiny set of vocab words within a year or two—and that's with each other to talk to. Cassian looks to be about thirteen when his people are killed (was his age specified?), which I take to be developmentally right around the time that native language(s) solidify and new languages will not quite be picked up as native. This is borne out by his lingering non-native accent (more on this later). However, this may also mean he does retain some active knowledge of his language, though, with no one to talk to, my guess would be it's quite atrophied. Unless his sister managed to survive along with other speakers from their people, I suspect she would have lost all her native comprehension, as my kids did. This suggests that, even if they meet up again, they probably won't be able to recover much of their language as a living entity, which is tragic because language is a carrier of culture and of self.
It also strikes me that it's very unusual for a "human" in the Star Wars universe to natively speak any language other than their standard (represented by English). This is loosely but consistently represented, in part, by routinely casting native speakers of various dialects of English. Commonly represented accents include American, English, Scottish, and a whole clone army of New Zealanders. :-) However, it seems to me rare that they cast (or direct) anyone to sound like a non-native speaker, which makes Cassian's accent highly unusual. I would suspect that this makes him a target for racism, and one very tiny "note" I might have for the series is to call this out a little more, just to have people notice his accent and interrogate him about it. Not a big deal if they never do, but in my head canon, it's one of the things that contributes to his feeling so hunted (not that there aren't enough others).
Loss of Home
Another consequence of Cassian's narrow escape from genocide is that he loses his childhood home, the place itself, in addition to the people. Maarva mentions, if I recall correctly, that Kenari itself is largely destroyed.
This is personal for me—apologies if it feels like comparing oppressions unfairly. I have not been a victim of genocide, and I have the privilege of physically being able to go home again, but the destruction of my home by fire in 2017 is an ongoing experience of loss. Year by year, it becomes more evident that the ecosystem I grew up in is simply gone; it will not return in my lifetime and probably never. The house is gone too, along with forty years of memories, though that is trivial in comparison to the ecosystem. I cannot express how it hurts. It is a loss of safety, a loss of self I am progressively learning the depth of. I can go back to the place, but I can't go home. I can never go home. My whole life I went home at least twice a year, spring and summer, to recharge for at least a handful of days. I can't go home anymore; it's been five years—five years of no real rest, no chance to stop, to fold my wings and recover from the constant treadmill of twenty-first century dystopia. It's exhausting. It's like being the Red Queen unable to stop running. Everywhere I try to rest I am always operating as some sort of guest: guest at my mother's, guest in those rare moments I have my own house myself (it's not home), guest visiting the tenants on the grounds of my old home, guest in a hotel in my hometown, guest of a friend in the next town over, guest on vacation, always, always, always a guest.
This gives me a great deal of sympathy and perhaps a faint sense of understanding for how profoundly unmoored someone like Cassian is, even given stable adoptive parents and his mom's apartment, which he clearly lands at as a sort of home. It isn't home. There is no going home; there is only constant running. And, of course, for him the running is literally from danger in a way it isn't for me, at least not at our present stage of climate disaster. I can only assume this wound is exacerbated by the concomitant loss of culture. The Kenari people read as indigenous, even if they're not literally indigenous in the sense of being the first humans ever on that planet. They've clearly been there long enough to develop their own language and culture at a complex and unique level. That means place is nation and place is self. Losing that is an ongoing trauma; it's a trauma one carries every day for life, not in the past, in the present. I think the series depicts this very well in the sheer uprootedness of Cassian's existence.
Representing Trauma
This show is amazing at depicting a protagonist has lived (at least) over half his life in persistently traumatic circumstances, even if mitigated by nice adoptive parents, neighbors, and stretches of relative calm. We see his trauma baked into his behavior at every turn. He's constantly in a state of near fight or flight, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and this manifests in his quick movements, furtive glances, carefully low affect expressions and utterances, in his outsized objection when one person touches his belongings, his sharp attention on the people he sussing out, and at the same time the way he only listens to 15% of what his girlfriend is saying because his mind racing elsewhere. He is constantly calculating the relative safety of his surroundings, and his default experience of life is feeling hunted, whether he is literally being hunted or not. It's a tour de force of acting and directing, simultaneously very restrained (as one has to be in hiding) and yet pervasive.
Reaction at the Speed of Thought
Related to representing trauma, Andor does a narrative move I can't remember having seen anywhere else, and it does it to perfection: it represents complex, split second moral decision making (like whether or not to shoot someone) at the actual speed of thought—or at least very close to the speed of my thought. Now, I'm an armchair observer with nothing at stake. If I were in those situations, I'd probably just freeze or run and get shot. That this doesn't happen to Cassian is an illustration of his finely honed survival instincts and his high cortisol readiness to spring into action. But my armchair reasoning through his situations tends to clock in at almost exactly the same length of time it takes him to make his decision.
This is very skillful writing. It requires fully representing a thought process that is running too fast to exist in words. It manifests in oblique comments and hesitations. We see it in episode 1 when Cassian has to decide if he's going to kill the second man after accidentally killing the first. I can feel him weighing the options, not wanting to kill him but then concluding that any other scenario will promptly lead to his death or arrest. He obviously can't just let the man go. He could maybe lock him up somewhere, but the man would likely escape pretty quick, and then the alarm is given. And then Cassian makes his decision.
The end of episode 6 has a more complex situation when one character (whose name I'm too tired to look up) invites Cassian to split the money with him and run. My first thought—and I fancy maybe Cassian's too—was that it might be a test. After all, this guy has been expressing distrust in him consistently. But then as this guy's story goes on and on, it becomes less likely it's a test. If it is, it's a bizarrely ill-conceived one that, at best, would result in permanent distrust between them. No, he seems to be serious about wanting to take the money. And if that's the case, he can't let Cassian go, for the same reasons Cassian could not spare the man in ep 1; if he lets him go, the alarm is given. And then Cassian makes his decision. If he's like me, he didn't make it with 100% certainty, but probably 80% or 90%, and he couldn't afford to wait. It all happened almost exactly at the speed of (my) thought. That's some very damn psychologically realistic writing, and it's excellent character-building for Cassian, as it walks the line between his being a hare trigger shot and a moral decision maker. In effect, he's a rapid but thorough moral decision maker, which might define one of his signal strengths as a rebel, all the way to Rogue One.
Gender
Star Wars writers have been trying for a long time to figure out whether they want to present "human" civilization as patriarchal or egalitarian. The original trilogy was very patriarchal, but one could wink and put that down the 1970s-80s. Later canon works seem to have striven for egalitarian, giving both the Rebels and Empire with more female characters. Once in a while, though, a text will engage directly with gender politics. I believe some of the Expanded Universe stuff explicitly discussed the Empire as limiting women's participation?
I think Andor signals that patriarchy is an in-universe thing, at least in the Empire, and it does this through Dedra. She is one of only two women we see among her peers in Empire intelligence, and in ep. 7, her underling has a fierce struggle with figuring out whether to call her "sir" or "ma'am," which broadcasts that women are not typically in these roles (and also that men and women traditionally have different enough roles for different honorifics). Another data point is the Rebel heist, in which all the men impersonate soldiers while the women infiltrate the facility unseen. One of the women does later impersonate a soldier, but it seems clear the troops are intended to be mostly men, not an equal opportunity army. Personally, I prefer the patriarchy reading to pretending evidence of patriarchy is just happenstance. (I'll give Star Trek a pass for that one because Star Trek has always explicitly said egalitarianism is its aim. Stars Wars, not so much.) Anyway, I like this touch in Andor.
Language and Culture
Cassian is a survivor of genocide, including what seems to be linguistic genocide. It would appear that he and possibly his sister are the last surviving speakers of their native language, which makes his relationship with language very interesting.
One question I have is to what extent he and his sister would remember their native language. For real-world reference, I adopted my kids when they were four and seven and fluent in their first language. Despite our halting efforts to keep some words in our household, both had lost comprehension of all but a tiny set of vocab words within a year or two—and that's with each other to talk to. Cassian looks to be about thirteen when his people are killed (was his age specified?), which I take to be developmentally right around the time that native language(s) solidify and new languages will not quite be picked up as native. This is borne out by his lingering non-native accent (more on this later). However, this may also mean he does retain some active knowledge of his language, though, with no one to talk to, my guess would be it's quite atrophied. Unless his sister managed to survive along with other speakers from their people, I suspect she would have lost all her native comprehension, as my kids did. This suggests that, even if they meet up again, they probably won't be able to recover much of their language as a living entity, which is tragic because language is a carrier of culture and of self.
It also strikes me that it's very unusual for a "human" in the Star Wars universe to natively speak any language other than their standard (represented by English). This is loosely but consistently represented, in part, by routinely casting native speakers of various dialects of English. Commonly represented accents include American, English, Scottish, and a whole clone army of New Zealanders. :-) However, it seems to me rare that they cast (or direct) anyone to sound like a non-native speaker, which makes Cassian's accent highly unusual. I would suspect that this makes him a target for racism, and one very tiny "note" I might have for the series is to call this out a little more, just to have people notice his accent and interrogate him about it. Not a big deal if they never do, but in my head canon, it's one of the things that contributes to his feeling so hunted (not that there aren't enough others).
Loss of Home
Another consequence of Cassian's narrow escape from genocide is that he loses his childhood home, the place itself, in addition to the people. Maarva mentions, if I recall correctly, that Kenari itself is largely destroyed.
This is personal for me—apologies if it feels like comparing oppressions unfairly. I have not been a victim of genocide, and I have the privilege of physically being able to go home again, but the destruction of my home by fire in 2017 is an ongoing experience of loss. Year by year, it becomes more evident that the ecosystem I grew up in is simply gone; it will not return in my lifetime and probably never. The house is gone too, along with forty years of memories, though that is trivial in comparison to the ecosystem. I cannot express how it hurts. It is a loss of safety, a loss of self I am progressively learning the depth of. I can go back to the place, but I can't go home. I can never go home. My whole life I went home at least twice a year, spring and summer, to recharge for at least a handful of days. I can't go home anymore; it's been five years—five years of no real rest, no chance to stop, to fold my wings and recover from the constant treadmill of twenty-first century dystopia. It's exhausting. It's like being the Red Queen unable to stop running. Everywhere I try to rest I am always operating as some sort of guest: guest at my mother's, guest in those rare moments I have my own house myself (it's not home), guest visiting the tenants on the grounds of my old home, guest in a hotel in my hometown, guest of a friend in the next town over, guest on vacation, always, always, always a guest.
This gives me a great deal of sympathy and perhaps a faint sense of understanding for how profoundly unmoored someone like Cassian is, even given stable adoptive parents and his mom's apartment, which he clearly lands at as a sort of home. It isn't home. There is no going home; there is only constant running. And, of course, for him the running is literally from danger in a way it isn't for me, at least not at our present stage of climate disaster. I can only assume this wound is exacerbated by the concomitant loss of culture. The Kenari people read as indigenous, even if they're not literally indigenous in the sense of being the first humans ever on that planet. They've clearly been there long enough to develop their own language and culture at a complex and unique level. That means place is nation and place is self. Losing that is an ongoing trauma; it's a trauma one carries every day for life, not in the past, in the present. I think the series depicts this very well in the sheer uprootedness of Cassian's existence.
Representing Trauma
This show is amazing at depicting a protagonist has lived (at least) over half his life in persistently traumatic circumstances, even if mitigated by nice adoptive parents, neighbors, and stretches of relative calm. We see his trauma baked into his behavior at every turn. He's constantly in a state of near fight or flight, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and this manifests in his quick movements, furtive glances, carefully low affect expressions and utterances, in his outsized objection when one person touches his belongings, his sharp attention on the people he sussing out, and at the same time the way he only listens to 15% of what his girlfriend is saying because his mind racing elsewhere. He is constantly calculating the relative safety of his surroundings, and his default experience of life is feeling hunted, whether he is literally being hunted or not. It's a tour de force of acting and directing, simultaneously very restrained (as one has to be in hiding) and yet pervasive.
Reaction at the Speed of Thought
Related to representing trauma, Andor does a narrative move I can't remember having seen anywhere else, and it does it to perfection: it represents complex, split second moral decision making (like whether or not to shoot someone) at the actual speed of thought—or at least very close to the speed of my thought. Now, I'm an armchair observer with nothing at stake. If I were in those situations, I'd probably just freeze or run and get shot. That this doesn't happen to Cassian is an illustration of his finely honed survival instincts and his high cortisol readiness to spring into action. But my armchair reasoning through his situations tends to clock in at almost exactly the same length of time it takes him to make his decision.
This is very skillful writing. It requires fully representing a thought process that is running too fast to exist in words. It manifests in oblique comments and hesitations. We see it in episode 1 when Cassian has to decide if he's going to kill the second man after accidentally killing the first. I can feel him weighing the options, not wanting to kill him but then concluding that any other scenario will promptly lead to his death or arrest. He obviously can't just let the man go. He could maybe lock him up somewhere, but the man would likely escape pretty quick, and then the alarm is given. And then Cassian makes his decision.
The end of episode 6 has a more complex situation when one character (whose name I'm too tired to look up) invites Cassian to split the money with him and run. My first thought—and I fancy maybe Cassian's too—was that it might be a test. After all, this guy has been expressing distrust in him consistently. But then as this guy's story goes on and on, it becomes less likely it's a test. If it is, it's a bizarrely ill-conceived one that, at best, would result in permanent distrust between them. No, he seems to be serious about wanting to take the money. And if that's the case, he can't let Cassian go, for the same reasons Cassian could not spare the man in ep 1; if he lets him go, the alarm is given. And then Cassian makes his decision. If he's like me, he didn't make it with 100% certainty, but probably 80% or 90%, and he couldn't afford to wait. It all happened almost exactly at the speed of (my) thought. That's some very damn psychologically realistic writing, and it's excellent character-building for Cassian, as it walks the line between his being a hare trigger shot and a moral decision maker. In effect, he's a rapid but thorough moral decision maker, which might define one of his signal strengths as a rebel, all the way to Rogue One.
Gender
Star Wars writers have been trying for a long time to figure out whether they want to present "human" civilization as patriarchal or egalitarian. The original trilogy was very patriarchal, but one could wink and put that down the 1970s-80s. Later canon works seem to have striven for egalitarian, giving both the Rebels and Empire with more female characters. Once in a while, though, a text will engage directly with gender politics. I believe some of the Expanded Universe stuff explicitly discussed the Empire as limiting women's participation?
I think Andor signals that patriarchy is an in-universe thing, at least in the Empire, and it does this through Dedra. She is one of only two women we see among her peers in Empire intelligence, and in ep. 7, her underling has a fierce struggle with figuring out whether to call her "sir" or "ma'am," which broadcasts that women are not typically in these roles (and also that men and women traditionally have different enough roles for different honorifics). Another data point is the Rebel heist, in which all the men impersonate soldiers while the women infiltrate the facility unseen. One of the women does later impersonate a soldier, but it seems clear the troops are intended to be mostly men, not an equal opportunity army. Personally, I prefer the patriarchy reading to pretending evidence of patriarchy is just happenstance. (I'll give Star Trek a pass for that one because Star Trek has always explicitly said egalitarianism is its aim. Stars Wars, not so much.) Anyway, I like this touch in Andor.
