We live in a period of not-so-great media literacy. Bruce Springsteen and Rage Against the Machine fans decry their one-time favorites for criticizing Trump. People go to message boards to complain that Star Trek is woke, decades after Kirk reprimanded Stiles for his bigotry. Marvel readers boycott Captain America for being mean to Nazis, despite the fact the guy debuted punching Hitler in the face.
Well, Andor creator Tony Gilroy isn’t having it. In a postmortem with The Hollywood Reporter, Gilroy makes it very clear that his prequel to Rogue One, itself a prequel to the first Star Wars, is about fascism as it existed in 1930s Germany, and as it exists in America today.
Gilroy drew those connections when asked about the similarities between the events on the show and real life events such as ICE agents murdering citizens in Minneapolis. “The simplest answer to the strange synchronicity of all of this is really on them, the outside forces,” Gilroy explained. “We were pretty much doing a story about authoritarianism and fascism, and the Empire is very clearly a great example of that. It’s a great place to deal with those issues, and as we’ve discussed many times before, we had this wide open canvas to deal with it.”
Further, Gilroy rejects the idea that Andor was prescient, simply because real-world reactionary forces are so obvious. “You get out your Fascism for Dummies book for the 15 things you do, and we tried to include as many of them as we could [in Andor] in the most artful way possible. How were we supposed to know that this clown car in Washington was going to basically use the same book that we used?” Rather than credit himself with special insight, Gilroy blames “the sad familiarity of fascism and the karaoke menu of things that you go through to do it.”
Part of Andor‘s power came from the way Gilroy and his co-creators, including brother Dan Gilroy, turned the greatest weakness of a prequel into a strength. Audiences know that the Empire will exert its will on the citizens, that the rebellion will not win until Luke Skywalker convinces Darth Vader to join him.
But the characters in Andor do not know that, and thus their reluctance to join the resistance mirrors the refusal of some Americans to accept the obvious. Cassian Andor, Mon Mothma, and others realize that Luthen Rael, the cold-hearted spymaster played by Stellan Skarsgård is right, but only slowly and reluctantly.
Gilroy believes so firmly that the show’s themes are obvious that he even agreed to Disney’s request that he and star Diego Luna avoid making obvious parallels to the present. “We came up with a legit historical model, and it’s a version of what I’m telling you now,” he pointed out. “That was a very, very safe and legitimate place for us to sell the show without ever having to say what I’m free to say now.”
Legitimate as it may have been, some people still didn’t get the point. Will Gilroy’s blunt talk be enough to get some folks to see that the Empire is like real fascists? That seems more unrealistic than anything in the Star Wars universe.
The post Andor Creator Lays Out the Show’s Politics For Those Who Still Refuse to See Them appeared first on Den of Geek.
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