Why "The Force Awakens" Is A Turkey

In the lead up to and immediately after the release of the new film in the Star Wars franchise, The Force Awakens, it has been difficult finding genuinely critical voices willing to assess it honestly. Thoughtful appraisals have been extremely thin on the ground. Few reviewers, if any, have been willing to say the truth – that the movie is, compared to the originals, a massive turkey. The official party line among commentators is that The Force Awakens is some kind of ‘triumphant return to form’ after the disappointment of the prequels – and woe betide any critic who strays from the herd. Occasionally, a reviewer may dare to imply that the film has its faults, that it is, say, too derivative of the original trilogy, but generally, though, the early reports have been almost exclusively positive. Perhaps no one wants to offend Disney or jinx the film.  Perhaps no one wants to seem a wet blanket; no one wants to upset the legions of fans that bought advance tickets by saying that their enthusiasm is unjustified. The film has Han Solo in it! And Chewbacca and C3P0!  Who wants to be the grinch who ruined Christmas?

A few reviewers have shown the temerity to criticize it. The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, for instance. The cleric who wrote the piece argued that the evil characters weren’t evil enough - I must say I have to agree with the Catholics on this one. Another rare example of a negative review, this time online, is the critique by Rubin Safaya in Cinemalogue. Safaya focuses mainly on directorial failings and makes a number of good points; I recommend his review highly. In this post I intend to join Safaya and go against mass opinion by saying that the film simply doesn’t live up to expectations. Unlike Safaya I am going to focus mainly on narrative defects, particularly with respect to genre, rather than directorial mistakes. I am going to say something perhaps unpopular. I am going to argue that the film fails to get to the heart of what made the original Star Wars so great in the first place.

I will say one positive thing for the film straight off – despite a running time of some two hours and twenty-five minutes, when I saw it the other night, I was never bored. There is always something happening. Theme park rides are never boring for the same reason. The film is a succession of action scenes connected by improbable plot developments and allusions to the original series (often in the form of cameos). Like a roller coaster, the film has it twists and turns – but a roller coaster is not a story. The film fails to live up to its classic predecessors. What the film lacks is any sense of depth, the depth that is the most important aspect of any fantasy epic. Its narrative flaws are legion. For instance, the film’s protagonists Finn and Rey just happen to find the Millennium Falcon on the desert planet Jakku; escaping the planet, they are picked up by a space trawler that just happens to be piloted by Han Solo and Chewbacca. Just how big is the galaxy in which Star Wars is set? It must be fairly small. How else explain such enormous (albeit convenient) coincidences?

One of the defining aspects of virtually all epic fantasies is the gradual move by the protagonist from a small scale world to a large scale one. In the original Star Wars, Luke begins as a simple farm boy on Tatooine with no more than a wistful yearning to play a larger role in the universe. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo starts off as a simple hobbit living in the Shire with little impulse to take part in the great wars of Elves and Men. At the start of The Dragonbone Chair (to pick a random fantasy novel), Simon is a simple kitchen boy. As these stories progress, the hero’s ‘stature’ gradually increases, the more incrementally the better, and one way this is dramatized is through revelations that peripheral characters are secretly more important than they at first seemed. Gandalf is no mere conjurer, in reality he is an Istari equal in authority to the rulers of Gondor and Rivindell; old Ben Kinobe is no mere hermit living in a valley, in reality he is the powerful Jedi master who once taught and fought Darth Vader himself. Often, and usually towards the end of such epic fantasies, the protagonist is himself revealed to have a secret identity, one of which he was himself has been unaware. Simon is really the scion to the throne of all Osten Ard; Luke is really a Jedi master who must defeat the Empire and redeem the crimes of his father. The elevation of an ordinary person with whom the audience can identify to the status of messianic hero is key to most fantasy epics, from A Wizard of Earthsea to Harry Potter.

This depiction of two worlds, the big world and the small world, is essential to any fantasy story. In this department, The Force Awakens fails miserably. Fantasy fiction should feel that it is set in a believable consistent universe, a universe with depth. The new Star Wars film simply gives no sense of a plausible context. An example… Presumably, after the defeat of the Empire in The Return of the Jedi, the good guys, having won, have established the New Republic. What does that make the antagonists in The Force Awakens? Is the First Order a terrorist organization like Isis? Does the film describe some kind of civil war? If the good guys represent the New Republic, does that make the First Order the new rebellion? The Force Awakens is trying to have it both ways at once – to rehash A New Hope, in which the heroes were underdogs, and also to follow on from The Return of the Jedi in which the Rebellion won– that is why Leia’s army is rather confusingly called ‘the Resistance’. Are the good guys in charge of the galaxy or not? Although it is fashionable to bag the prequels, at least the universe they presented made sense.

The fundamental error JJ Abrams and co made in conceptualising this film is that they thought they could recapture the magic of the original films simply by recycling characters, set pieces, visual tropes and plot devices from the first three films. In fact, they would have been better served by re-reading The Hero with A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. The emotional resonance of the original Star Wars was based on its firm foundation in the kinds of stories we find in folklore and mythology. In a previous post, “The Problem with Robert McKee”, I attacked the idea, current among many screenwriting teachers, that all stories are types of quest – I believe McKee wrong in saying that all good films can be considered quests. But some, such as A New Hope, certainly are. The Force Awakens, though, never feels remotely quest-like. For one thing, it has two protagonists. Is Finn the hero, or Rey? The actors who play both parts are great – I feel I should say this in the film’s defence. The moment when Finn takes off his white Stormtrooper helmet to reveal a black face is perhaps the best moment in the film. Yet, to be honest, neither Finn nor Rey feel at all hero-like – although they both perform hero-type actions during the course of the film (actions which, arguably, seem to come to them a little too easily), they both lack some kind of quality, some desire to make a difference, that real fantasy heroes should possess. Personally, I would like Finn to have been the protagonist because he seems like an Everyman in a way the Rey doesn’t, but I didn’t write the film. And it seems, in fact, from the last scene, that it is Rey who is intended to be the hero.

The magic of the original would have been better served if Abrams had stuck more firmly to a quest plot and if he had had courage enough to invent a genuinely new storyline. The device of a planet-destroying battle-station used in The Force Awakens has been employed in the series before, not once but twice – and is used clumsily here, without any real dramatic impact. The new Death Star, called the Starkiller, is virtually redundant; the story could quite literally have been told without it. Does ‘the Resistance’ need a reason to want to vanquish the First Order? The Starkiller is a kind of MacGuffin. With this difference. Usually MacGuffins are necessary to advance the plot but, in this film, the Starkiller occurs only because it was a plot fixture in previous films.

If I had written The Force Awakens, I would have told a quite different story. The idea that Luke has gone into self-imposed exile is good and I would keep it. It is an allusion to Obiwan that feels appropriate rather than redundant. The whole film could have been a quest to find Luke, a journey through space (encountering obstacles, gatekeepers, etc.) motivated by the fact that the First Order want to find him first and kill him. The quest would be a race against the First Order, who, in the film I would have written, would have their place in the universe more clearly delineated. If the story required additional motivation for why the good guys need to find Luke, perhaps we could have it that some child strong in the force might have had a dream that some impending but as yet unknown threat to the New Republic is going to arise in the near future and that Luke will needed. Wouldn’t this be an excellent way to set up the next two films?

See? It took me five minutes to come up with a better storyline than Abrams and co did. Perhaps they should have devoted a little more than six weeks to writing the screenplay.

The Reverse-Placebo Effect – or, How to Make People Ill and Keep Them Ill

In last week’s post, I wrote about the Placebo Effect and the ability of subliminal suggestion, particularly within a therapeutic context, to destabilize a person’s sense of identity. Although this post had little bearing on theories of literary interpretation, the ostensible purpose of this blog, I thought the topic important enough to comment on via the interweb. It is, I suspect, an issue that seriously deserves public attention. In today’s post, I want to talk a little more about how the power of belief can create (as well as alleviate) mental illness, and, in particular, how beliefs in the efficacy of medications can, in fact, have counterproductive outcomes. I feel sure this topic is associated with the misery of many thousands of people around the world in the present era; I have no idea how many people are on prescription psychotropic drugs but I understand that the number is constantly increasing. I think this is wrong. What I am going to suggest may seem to go against the grain of common sense but, on occasion, uncommon sense is the better bet.

I’ll start with an anecdote. A couple of months ago I met a youngish man who had recently been put under a Community Treatment Order. He was being compelled, effectively coerced, as so many people are these days now that Community Treatment Orders have been incorporated into our legal systems, into going into his local clinic to receive a dosage of antipsychotic medication, I think Olanzapine, administered every fortnight or month via needle in the backside. I asked him why he had been put under the Mental Health Act and he related the following story. This young man had first experienced psychosis as a teenager and had been under the umbrella of the Mental Health Service ever since; at the time prior to being put under the Act, he was living in a supported accommodation for people classified mentally ill. During the period immediately before being put under the Act, he was thought to be taking his medication voluntarily and orally, in pill form, but in fact he had, for some significant duration, secretly been spitting it out. One night, a strong smell of cannabis was noted in the environs of the facility. The Mental Health workers who administered the place decided to search all the rooms and, when they searched this young man’s room, found all the pills he had been refusing to swallow. Consequently, he was put under the Mental Health Act. His crime? Non-compliance with his drug regimen. His punishment? Being forced to take the drugs he had gone to such lengths to avoid.

The Mental Health System is based on one fundamental axiom or tenet: people are well when they take their medication and become sick if they stop. Consequently, if a patient does not take his pills voluntarily, he or she should be made to. This belief is so profoundly entrenched not only in modern psychiatric discourse but also in the general culture, that it seems absurd to even question it. One can understand why. Psychiatrists are doctors – they are professionally biased towards viewing mental ‘illnesses’ as physical diseases. And surely doctors know best. Moreover, medication is pretty much the only form of treatment the psychiatrists recognize and put any faith in. If it became general known that antipsychotics are at best useless and at worst detrimental, every psychiatrist in the world would immediately be put out of his or her job.

Naturally, therefore, there is a bias towards a belief in the efficacy of medication. People diagnosed schizophrenic, it is thought, have a congenital disease that can be managed by treatment with antipsychotics but cannot be cured; if someone diagnosed schizophrenic refuses to take his medication or dares to suggest that he has recovered and no longer needs it, he lacks ‘insight’ – he is delusional. And a lack of insight is, of course, a symptom of the disease. Either the patient accepts his diagnosis and takes his medication like a good boy or, if he refuses, he must be sick and so should be forced to take his medication. It’s a Catch 22. There is simply no way out.

The young man I described above had made the mistake of going against prevailing psychiatric wisdom. You might ask: during the period when he had discontinued his medication, did the young man I described become ‘sick’? Apparently not. Apparently, his mental health team had repeatedly been telling him how well he was doing. The young man told me that, in fact, he did actually become sick again but “weirdly it didn’t happen until after they found out”. To me this doesn’t seem so weird. Knowing that you are almost certainly going to be subjected to bullying by the mental health service, paraded like a trained ape in front of a judge and, despite anything you might say, forced to take a drug you don’t want to take, all would obviously constitute a significant source of stress – and psychotic episodes are most frequently the result of environmental stress. The anxiety related to an attempt to secretly wean oneself off one’s medication is enough, in itself, to provoke an episode. Germane to this story is another I heard recently. Another young schizophrenic, one who had been diagnosed ‘treatment-resistant’ (a typical example of psychiatric double-speak to cover up the failures of the system) had been experiencing suicidal ideation but didn’t want to tell anyone because he was terrified of being put in hospital, an institution which he regarded as being like prison. Rather than allow himself to be bullied, he took the terrible step of taking his own life. Stories like this, which I believe are all too common, evince, yes, the fragility of schizophrenics, but also the fact that the mental health system too often lets down the people it is supposedly designed to help.

As you might have guessed, I do not subscribe to the myth that schizophrenics are well when they take their medication and sick when they don’t. It doesn’t tally with my experience of the schizophrenics I have met. If it was true, than schizophrenics who take their medication should be able to go on and live normal lives involving productive satisfying work and harmonious familial relations. In my experience, the schizophrenics I’ve known, the ones who accept the label, never get better, never improve. To me this evinces the fact that medication simply doesn’t work. Psychotic episodes come and go based on exogenous and endogenous factors that have little or nothing to do with dosage. I concede I cannot prove that the idea of the efficacy of medication is only a myth. To do that one would need a large controlled experiment with a sizeable group of people diagnosed schizophrenic who don’t take any kind of medication at all – and such a group does not exist.

Nevertheless I believe the myth is false. If it is false, as I contend, you might wonder how could it become so entrenched in the Mental Health System and in society at large? It is a myth that effectively consigns people to a box and makes them life-long drug users. I believe that there are two explanations. The first is confirmation-bias. Mental health professionals of any rank tend to look for evidence that medical treatment is effective and that a cessation of such treatment results in relapse. Such evidence is always easy to find if one is deliberately looking for it. Psychiatrists in particular, I believe, tend to over-estimate their ability to ‘read’ their patients. Even those patients who report no symptoms at all can be unriddled as secret psychotics if a psychiatrist wishes. This may be a compensatory device. What psychiatrist would be prepared to concede that he or she is inadequate, incompetent or even just fallible? Why would they risk their job and livelihood? Mental health professionals further down the pecking order moreover tend to defer to the psychiatrists. It is safer to pass the buck. All in all, the culture of the Mental Health System is highly conducive to confirmation bias and to the promulgation of false myths.

The second explanation is what I call the reverse-placebo effect. The reason patients who discontinue their medication become sick again may simply be because they subconsciously believe that they will. They have been brain-washed by the prevailing discourse. It is established wisdom that is at fault, not some kind of neurological susceptibility. To successfully discontinue his medication, a patient needs two things. He needs a social environment that actively supports and encourages his decision and he needs to expunge the idea that medication actually helps entirely from his mind. I said at the beginning of this post that what we need now is uncommon sense and this last statement is an example of that.

This post is a most unscientific opinion. It is based on experience and rumination rather than methodical studies. To really bolster my argument, I would have to describe my own experiences of psychosis – and I am not prepared to do that yet. I would recommend though, for those interested, the previous post “An Unpalatable Suggestion” and the post “Why I hate ‘A Beautiful Mind’” Alternatively, if you want to read just about the best theory of schizophrenia around, I would point you in the direction of the essay “The Stress-Vulnerability Model” written by Zubin et al, in 1977. Zubin’s theory is not perfect but it resonates with me more than any other. In the essay, Zubin cites an extremely interesting study. Patients diagnosed schizophrenic were divided into three groups: label deniers (patients who never accepted the label), label acceptors (patients who accepted the label) and label rejectors (patients who accepted the label for a time, albeit grudgingly, and then later rejected it). What the researchers found was that, counter-intuitively, it was the label rejectors who had the highest rate of recovery.

How can one reject the label without also rejecting the medication?