Andor’s Message of Hope and Persistence
If we want to fight tyranny effectively, we have to adopt the altruism of a hope not bounded by our own personal benefit. Andor isn’t a perfect show, but it gets that part right.
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At least Donald Trump isn’t being subtle about his intentions. From the start, he wanted to sign his big, beautiful bill on the Fourth of July. One of the signature elements was a massive increase in the budget to manage immigration and police the citizenry—especially when combined with actions like creating a national database of citizen info managed by Peter Thiel’s company Palantir. It’s hard not to see this as an effort to create a police state like something from the cold war. It is a dawning dystopia.
As the push to create this law was unfolding, Sally and I were watching the Star Wars TV show Andor, and we capped it off last night by watching Rogue One, which neither of us had seen (we had already abandoned the SWCU). In case you missed the whole thing, Andor follows the story of a pivotal but low-level member of the rebellion in the years preceding the events of the first Star Wars. In Rogue One, that character, Cassian Andor, helps secure the schematics to the Death Star that Luke and the rebels use to destroy it in the 1977 movie.
It’s a good television show (with notable flaws), and Rogue One is the first of the movies in the Lucas-sphere I didn’t actively despise since the early 1980s. But more than that, the whole project was really on-point for our current moment—an especially neat trick for the movie, released before Trump was first elected. In both the show and movie, it’s hard not to feel the flash of recognition at the general structure of a totalitarian state using its superior technology and power to contain a population it despises and fears.
The great thing about Andor is the way it follows the rebellion’s grass roots, rather than focusing on the leadership, as the original trilogy did. The rebellion was basically invisible save for the heroics of Luke, Han, and Leia. We had no sense of a population or the ways in which their lives were impacted by a repressive Empire. Lucas was not good at understanding or presenting the range of human emotion and motivation—he dealt solely in archetypes and stereotypes.
In Andor, we get to know the grubby life of peasants, starting with Cassian Andor, a charismatic scavenger and smuggler who lets down most of the people in his life. His backstory explains the way empire wounds people, leaving them to contend with scar tissue the rest of their lives. They crash around against other wounded people, causing further damage as they try to survive in their mean little towns in the hinterlands. Most of the people in these situations look out for themselves and grab what they can, or try to anesthetize themselves along the way.
A few fight back. Andor is drawn into their world out of a smuggler’s self-interest, but over time begins to warm to the greater cause. The rebellion, at this level, is very disconnected from the halls of power. It mainly manifests as subtle disobedience or, for the committed, small missions whose purpose is unknown to those conducting their operations.
We get a glimpse into some of the rebellion’s leadership through the lens of one of the power-brokers name Luthen, but he is a peripheral character. Indeed, we get the impression that there are a number of these figures working independently, in the manner of terror cells, throughout the rebellion’s shaggy ranks. Luthen’s function is less plot-driven than to highlight the tensions that threaten to divide the rebellion—or this little piece of it. He is there to frame Andor’s life and experiences, of which he is not the author.
(The largest flaw in the series is a side-plot involving a secret rebel supporter in the Imperial Senate. The writers apparently thought we needed this window into the machinations of the rich, powerful, and corrupt. But there’s no point to these scenes except to emphasize that the wealthy and powerful are corrupt, which the writers might have conveyed in a brief scene or three. And even that was probably overkill—we are treated to this lesson constantly in countless movies and novels, not to mention real life.)
Fans who had already seen Rogue One know where this is headed. The movie is a less-gritty, more canonical approach to the Star Wars world, mostly to its mild detriment—with an important exception. One of the themes running through the movie is hope. It’s handled pretty broadly there, coming off almost as a cliche when Cassian tells Jyn, the co-star, “rebellions are built on hope.” The TV series, however, can in some sense be seen as a way of retconning the phrase to give it quite a bit more meaning. In the original use, it comes from a bellhop who offered it as a rejoinder to Andor, who has just told him, “I hope everything works out for you.”
One key lesson, as fleshed out in the TV series, is that things almost never work out for individual revolutionaries. Thankfully, Rogue One had already honored this insight, which gives the scene in Andor real poignancy. In the morality of the Star Wars universe, the dividing line is self-interest and selflessness. The empire is filled with people attempting to gain power. The whole dark-side/light-side morality of the Force echoes the theme of power and selflessness.
The rebellion is filled with people working for a greater good—a good they know they will probably not see in their lives. It is a double sacrifice: subsuming one’s personal goals for the sake of others—in the TV series we see this means forsaking the most basic pleasures, like romantic love—and accepting that the work will only benefit one’s (possibly distant) descendants. The “hope” is born of generosity rather than greed.
It’s hard not to see the parallels with our current world. Especially in the real world, hope is actually a powerful and unsentimental prerequisite for fighting back. In one case we have very corrupt leaders who are like pigs at a trough, trying to quench all their hungers. Their greed comes at the expense of the people they will crush and steal from. Joining this team means naked self-interest. The second and largest group are those who are just ducking their heads and trying to get by. It is the path of least resistance, but an unfulfilling one. It is the world we see at the start of the TV series—and in American culture at the dawn of this new administration.
Finally, there is the resistance. This group exists only because its members have a sense of hope that their work will pay off eventually. Black Americans who fought for their rights did so across centuries. It took women 130 years to earn the right to vote. Those fighting for liberal democracy spent nearly a half-century doing so in the eastern bloc (longer in the Soviet Union). All those efforts required the hope that at some point their work would bear fruit.
We have entered a dark time, a post-democratic time. This new authoritarian government might last a few years, a few decades, or centuries. The irony is that if we want to fight it effectively, we have to adopt the altruism of a hope not bounded by our own personal benefit. The lesson of Star Wars—but more convincingly of the successful revolutions in the real world—is that the altruism of hope is the fuel necessary to sustain any resistance that can undermine tyranny. And it’s true. If we throw up our hands and try to make the best of a terrible situation, it won’t change.
I have my quibbles with Andor and Rogue One but, unexpectedly, they get the important stuff exactly right. Over a dark Fourth of July weekend, it has offered a little bit of wisdom and light.