James

A stock narrative from the Star Wars assembly line

Revisado: 02-13-22

I know this one is intended for children, but my sense is that the High Republic books are already devolving into a content assembly line. This lacked the inventive setpieces of the previous book (and other Star Wars books), and even falters on the character front. Stock characters stud the roster, like "farm boy who longs for something more" (gee, I wonder where we've seen that one before in Star Wars), and "genius black girl" (I'm sorry to criticise a gesture to diversity, but this particular trope is starting to feel like a cliché). The story said characters find themselves in is straightforward and predictable, and despite dealing with themes of death and grief, never feels particularly profound. It's a serviceable rendition of the stock narrative "ragtag group of kids turn the tables on a pair of crooks," but it just never gets off the ground.

Keylor Leigh delivers the high standard of narration we've come to expect from Star Wars, despite doing a weird accent for Imri (he is written as having a weird accent, so I guess that was partially out of her hands).

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A concise look at the supermajority's plans

Revisado: 01-14-22

Millhiser has written a very good, concise book on what the Roberts court likely intends to get up to with their new supermajority. Although everyone's eyes are on Roe v. Wade, Millhiser is quite correct to put little emphasis on that precedent; although overturning the federal right to an abortion would rightly be considered a catastrophe, it really is merely the tip of the iceberg for what the conservative majority have planned (and let's face it, Roe—which was already in some respects a mediocre opinion to begin with—has kind of been a moribund precedent for some time now thanks to Casey's "undue burden" standard).

Millhiser instead lays out how Gorsuch, who seems to be the ideological leader, longs to lead the court back to the freedom of contract doctrine of the Lochner court, which would comprehensively strip the American worker of power and tip the scales even further in favour of the wealthy. I was struck by the anecdotes of the shocking conditions bakery workers experienced in the Lochner era, working mercilessly long hours in revolting environments. When one thinks of what Amazon et al. are already able to get away with, the prospect of handing them even more power to dominate their workforces fills one with dread. Gorsuch's other big project, to dismantle the administrative state and agency regulations (because blah blah chevron deference and non-delegation doctrine), seems potentially so vast in its consequences I can scarcely even imagine the damage that could be caused if he's successful.

Millhiser engages in a bit of lawyerly gotcha rhetoric of the sort that I often see in Supreme Court journalism where the hypocrisy of conservative self-proclaimed textualists/originalists is pointed out (Millhiser points out that they used two different definitions of "commerce" in Circuit City v. Adams, depending on which suited their preferred outcome). I often feel authors can get a bit too wrapped up in criticism of this sort, taking elaborate routes to their gotcha moments that conservatives don't pay one iota of attention to, as they're too busy thinking "haha, majority opinion go brrrrr." I always think about the peyote case on this point: one might think that a conservative would consider the case to have raised perplexing issues about how to consistently apply the principle of free exercise of religion and respect the rights of religious minorities, or something to that effect; an actual conservative seems just to think, "Are the plaintiffs Christians? No? And they're doing drugs? They can fuck off, then." Conservatives have no problem discarding their professed principles as soon as it suits them, and liberals arguably waste their energy when they tie themselves up in knots trying to wield conservative jurisprudential philosophies that they probably shouldn't really care much about in the first place.

The other topics Millhiser addresses are just as alarming—voter suppression, exemptions from anti-discrimination laws for religious conservatives, allowing class action lawsuits to be quashed before they occur. I think my biggest takeaway lesson might be on the decidedly more law school 101 matter of the Carolene Products footnote, the source of strict scrutiny, which I must have heard of before, but now I'll actually remember it (it has already popped up in the next book I've started reading, so it truly is the most famous footnote in constitutional law).

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A retrospective that mostly skims the surface

Revisado: 04-07-21

A bit more surface-level than I was expecting, but I suppose I should have seen that coming. Most of the story I already knew from sources like Carrie Fisher's books, and other things I must have read here and there. I was really expecting more of a deep dive into the making of the first Star Wars, but Ramsey paints with pretty broad strokes—there wasn't much detail in the depiction of day-to-day filmmaking, mostly just non-specific sketches of robots breaking down and budgets running over. I don't think the word "Tunisia" is mentioned more than once, and The Hidden Fortress and Joseph Campbell aren't mentioned at all.

What also didn't help the level of detail is that three-and-a-half of the episodes aren't actually about Star Wars, leaving under half of the total runtime to cover the production itself: two-and-a-half episodes are run-up, which isn't such a bad thing, covering Lucas' biography and then his first two films, but the final episode covers the film's legacy, and the subsequent 40+ years of franchise history, and, to be honest, that's not really what I was here for. Like everyone else in the galaxy, I am well aware that Star Wars' original trilogy was followed up by some not-so-well-beloved prequels and a corporate buyout which led to more films yadda yadda yadda. It's difficult to divorce this one film from its subsequent half-century of cultural baggage, which was perhaps why I was hoping the podcast would strip that all back to take a closer look at where it all started.

The production decision to have the show structured largely as reenactments narrated solely by Ramsey was questionable, though I'm sure the lack of a voice cast helped keep the budget low for Wondery. He kind of does half-impressions some of the time, occasionally sounding a little like Carrie Fisher, for instance, but he makes no effort to do any accents for British personalities, like Alec Guinness. What really made the sole-narrator format unhelpful, though, was the fact that the podcast featured an "interview" with George Lucas, but because Ramsey was reading both roles, it's difficult to know whether this was an actual interview that really took place, or whether it was a fictional device that conjectured Lucas' responses based on recent interviews he really has given. And if it was a real interview, were these Lucas' verbatim words, or has the dialogue been edited for the show? Why wasn't it recorded for the podcast, an audio medium? Really a confusing choice.

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