I have a toxic relationship with movies. Scratch that. I have a toxic relationship with stories. It’s difficult to explain, but I need to try. When I was a child, stories were my everything. I read constantly, I played video games, I watched a few movies here and there. My friends and I made up our own episodic stories to play out on the playground every day. I drew fan-art for my own stories in class. When I should have been learning math, I imagined what musical score would accompany the major character arcs—I lived the stories I imagined. I later learned that I could write, and writing became a tool to tell stories more powerfully. I wrote novels all throughout elementary school. Epic fantasy stories about animals (it wasn’t until middle school that I finally decided maybe I could write about humans). My favorite childhood game, however, was Star Wars. My friend Addison and I picked up right where Return of the Jedi left off and played out episode after episode in our backyards and in playgrounds. For some reason, our Jedi characters were mice (again, I had this weird thing where I only wrote about animals). I remember reaching episode 22 at the very least before we finally grew tired of it. My early memories of stories were memories of absolute joy. But I also remember the first time a story made me miserable. It was Cornelia Funke’s Inkdeath, which I didn’t even read. I had just finished the second book in the series, Inkspell, when I accidentally read a spoiler that I hated about two characters breaking up for bad reasons. This led to more frantic reading of spoilers and reviews: the story fell apart, reviews said; The characters became shadows of their former selves; the center did not hold. Something inside of me shattered. Stories were not meant to sabotage themselves.

 

The next time a story upset me for a prolonged period of time was How I Met Your Mother. The rest of my family had mixed reactions to the finale but didn’t dwell on it. I wept. In fact, I briefly thought I wanted to die. I was utterly miserable about the terrible decisions the writers had made, the cowardice or laziness at sticking to plans established in Season 1 rather than adapting to the ways the characters and story had changed. I was a high school senior and I was weeping in a ball on the kitchen floor. At first, my family was amused. But then they became upset, frustrated, unable to understand my perspective. I knew the things I was feeling were ridiculous, but I couldn’t stop feeling them. To fully understand what I was going through, we have to go back in time a bit to when I was in eighth grade and I was miserable, like most eighth graders, but for different reasons than those which haunt most eighth graders. I was nervous all the time, anxious to the point of feeling ill, constantly praying to a god I was rapidly losing faith in, thinking about going to hell anyway. I mouthed prayers carefully in math class while trying to learn at the same time. I had to say them out loud or they weren’t real. But I couldn’t be heard by my classmates, so I had to whisper. I worried about everyone I talked to, everyone I accidentally bumped into in the hallway. I worried about sex and God and a bunch of other things. I was diagnosed with Obsessive-compulsive disorder, and that diagnosis was a blessing. But it all comes back to Star Wars, I promise.

 

I’ve always had a bizarre conviction that there is one right way for stories to go. I think it has something to do with my OCD, but I’m not sure. Most stories don’t go exactly the right way, but some get really close. Most people call these convictions “opinions” and accept that they are not universal. But for me it wasn’t like that. It was somehow different. I had opinions about things for sure, but not the big things. The big elements of stories were things which just needed to be a certain way, or they were wrong. I hadn’t always felt this way, but I was beginning to feel it more and more strongly. It’s a feeling I’ve had to unlearn, a toxic impulse. (I had another mental breakdown after The Incredibles 2 for some reason and had to walk myself back through the unlearning thing). I think my convictions sometimes make me a better writer; I’m constantly questioning the decisions I make. Is this really the right decision for this character to make? After all, there’s only one right decision. But I’m beginning to think that’s a bad way to treat stories. I don’t want to get sidetracked anymore; this isn’t just an essay about the One True StoryTM or OCD. Mostly, it’s about Star Wars.

 

The night it came out, I watched Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and I really liked it. But before I watched it, I read reviews. Lots of reviews. And I got a sick feeling in my stomach. They told the story wrong. All the critics seemed to agree. I was frustrated. I’ll admit that I didn’t like The Last Jedi. I didn’t quite hate it. I couldn’t bring myself to hate it. But I very much disliked it. I didn’t like the way it sidelined Finn and turned him into a joke, I didn’t like that Rey’s character arc had to do with some weird phantom darkness she was attracted to, but the narrative gave no compelling explanation of what exactly was so “dark side” about her. I didn’t like how Admiral Holdo didn’t explain her plan to anyone, and people died because of it. I didn’t like how Poe had become a cocky shadow of his former self. Even John Williams’s soundtrack left me disappointed. My faith in Star Wars was restored with Solo, a movie the critics didn’t love but I did. It was plucky and fun, vibrant and wacky, full of space Western tropes and train battles. I didn’t love Rise of Skywalker the way I loved Solo, but I liked it. My favorite thing about it is the little droid who’s had a rough life and doesn’t want to be touched. I relate to him, to his anxiety. Unless Disney lets me write a Star War someday, D-0 is probably the closest we’ll ever get to a droid with obsessive-compulsive disorder. But I also liked the bigger stuff (spoilers ahead). I liked how we got to see our three protagonists actually spend time together, how the first half of the movie was a fun, goofy fetch-quest, how good the soundtrack was this time around, how we got to see Rey train with Leia. But perhaps most unexpectedly, I liked that Rey was a Palpatine. I know I shouldn’t. I know it’s the Wrong StoryTM. After all, Rian Johnson made sure to tell us she was a nobody in the last movie, and I liked that. It’s okay for heroes to come from nowhere, to be nobodies, to become somebodies through sheer grit and talent rather than bloodline. I liked that twist in The Last Jedi. So when Rey was revealed to be a Palpatine, I hated it at first. But there was a point after the pretty badly executed reveal where I started to change my mind, and I became something I never expected: I became okay with it.

 

We inherit certain traits genetically, and sometimes it feels like there is nothing we can do about it. In The Last Jedi, Rey is drawn to the dark side, but I don’t understand how or why. That answer doesn’t have to have anything to do with her parentage, her genetics, her birth, but it has to have to do with something. She doesn’t do anything “dark side” in The Last Jedi.  She visits a spooky cave and Luke says, “Wow, you’re really going straight to that dark side energy” and as an audience member, I just went, “What?” because Rey never does anything—anything at all—to justify saying that she’s drawn to the darkness. This depiction of the dark side of the Force as something which she is drawn to with no explanation is a depiction of the Force at its most metaphysical, most removed from ethics, real-world implications, meaning. It’s just “the dark side” to be “the dark side.” But Rise of Skywalker unexpectedly fixes that for me. We see Rey get so frustrated, so angry, that she destroys an entire ship, and she thinks it results in the death of her friend. But we also see her discover force-healing a few scenes earlier. This is the depiction of Rey I like, a Rey struggling between two impulses and picking good. A Rey with “dark side” baked into her DNA who chooses to ignore that impulse. The main Star Wars films have always been about ancestry, legacies, and fate, but they’ve always sought to subvert that same theme in some capacity. Luke was sort of the “chosen one,” but his father turned out to be the villain he had to kill. Anakin was most definitely and explicitly the chosen one, but he became a Sith Lord and the complete opposite of who he was “supposed” to be. So this final identity twist, this “Rey is a ‘somebody,’ but not who she wants to be” twist mostly works for me. Because now we have the character who should be evil, the “anti-chosen one,” who turns her back on what she should be and becomes what she wants to be. Rey has the lightning powers of a Sith Lord. She sees a vision of herself with a red lightsaber. At no point in the film does she really seem poised to turn to the dark side. It doesn’t make sense for her character. But the anxiety makes sense. The fear makes sense. For anyone struggling with a mental disorder—or anyone who has seen Hereditary—this may be starting to feel familiar. We inherit certain things which we don’t want. Certain compulsions, fears, traumas—scientists in the field of epigenetics are doing groundbreaking research on inherited trauma if you’re interested. As a Jewish person with OCD, I think a lot about inherited trauma. And I see a little bit of myself in Rey. Not because my ancestors were villainous Sith Lords, but because people on one side of my family lived through horrible things and people on the other side have a history of various anxieties and depressions, and just being alive, being a human being, is being susceptible to the genetic whims of the universe. It sucks. But at the end of the day, we all make choices. And that’s why, when Rey declares herself a “Skywalker,” I don’t see it as cheesy, cheap fanservice. I see it as a resounding declaration that we choose who we are, regardless of what the world around us tells us, regardless of what our very DNA is screaming. Rey becomes a Skywalker precisely because in The Last Jedi Luke is elevated to myth and she was trained by that myth, because Leia was her mentor, because identity is about choice.

 

Are there things I don’t like in Rise of Skywalker? Definitely. I don’t like the kiss. My OCD has made it impossible to get over the fact that Rey kisses a genocidal asshole who kidnapped and tortured her two movies ago, who injured Finn badly and killed two of her mentor figures. I hate it, and I think it cheapens the movie. I do think Kylo/Ben has changed, I do think he’s redeemed himself somewhat, and I don’t hate him as a character. But at the end of the day, I don’t think we need another whiny misunderstood white boy turned murderous villain to get saved. I console myself by remembering that Rey is all about radical kindness, that she has a great capacity for love, and that she can kiss whoever she wants, goddamnit, but the storytelling decision still bothers me. And that’s the problem with OCD. It’s very hard to like something when a little persistent issue sticks around, knocking at the corners of my brain. But I’m trying. I’m really trying. Because I think Star Wars: the Rise of Skywalker is mostly a good movie. And I think it has become increasingly hard to appreciate things as “good” when you know they have problems. I can’t look at my Twitter feed without seeing a complex discussion of Rian Johnson and J.J. Abrams’s differing views on heroism and legacy and how Abrams reinforces troubling hero’s narrative trends. I read comments and articles about how this film reduces Rey to her relationships to men (to Luke, to Ben, and to Palpatine). I tend to disagree with that particular critique. After all, the surname “Skywalker” for Rey is as much about Leia as Luke, Kylo and Rey’s relationship has been the crux of the trilogy since the beginning of the previous film, and Rey’s relationship to Palpatine is more about that genetic, ancestral anxiety I find so interesting than a tangible relationship. None of this invalidates the perspectives of people who took issue with these things, but I’m trying to unlearn the habit of forcing myself to hate things just because they have flaws, or just because a Twitter thread proved something awful about a movie’s themes or structures. I’m trying to teach myself to have fun with stories again. To enjoy them and interpret them in the ways they resonate with me. To accept that there is no single Right StoryTM, but also that sometimes it’s okay to like the Wrong StoryTM. Sometimes it’s okay to acknowledge something messy and deeply flawed and built on the back of nostalgia and featuring some dubious storytelling decisions and say, “I like it.”

 

Notes:

• The sidelining of Kelly Marie Tran’s Rose Tico is inexcusable and hurts the movie a lot.

• The soundtrack is phenomenal, easily my favorite of the sequel trilogy; John Williams outdid himself. My favorite tracks include the eponymous “The Rise of Skywalker,” “Destiny of a Jedi,” “Battle of the Resistance,” and “A New Home.”

• The movie is deeply flawed structurally, and multiple important plot details are somehow relegated to the visual encyclopedia or outside sources.

• The movie still doesn’t know what to do with Finn and Poe half the time, Disney is too cowardly to let them date, and Poe’s new past as a “spice trader” is far from ideal.

• Finn being force-sensitive should have been a way bigger deal and there should have been a more serious talk about the First Order’s whole kidnapping children to make into child soldiers thing.

• When Palpatine says, “I am all the Sith” and Rey says, “I am all the Jedi,” yeah it’s cheesy, but I liked it, okay?

• You may not like Ben Solo hitting that metal chain and saying “ow,” but it’s probably the most Star War thing in this Star War movie.

• If Disney wants to hire someone to write the story of Chewie and Lando mourning the loss of all their friends post-Rise of Skywalker, they can hit me up.

​