Disney Star Wars is an endlessly fascinating thing not because it is such a colossal failure, but because it was such a predictable colossal failure that managed to be even worse than one would have expected it to be. (If you want to laugh at part of it, consider reading my review of the second film, The Least Jedi.) The aspect of this failure I want to discuss today is the issue that the sequel trilogy intrinsically needed to pass on the torch, and how they snuffed it out instead.

There’s nothing wrong with the idea that the sequel trilogy should have passed on the torch from the original characters, who are now in their sixties and seventies, to the next generation. This was necessary from a purely practical perspective for keeping the franchise going, but the good news for Disney, as far as this goes, is that passing on the torch is an intrinsic human activity. We’re all here only for a while, and then we’re gone, so we’re all eventually replaced. Passing the torch on to the next generation is a very human thing to do and part of our natural lifecycle. Indeed, as we grow older, healthy human beings begin to want to pass the torch on as befits our stage in life. And there’s the rub. Healthy human beings want to do that. Hollywood’s problem is that it’s filled with utterly broken people who wouldn’t know healthy if they were handed a textbook on it.

This is related to the reason Why Moderns Always Modernize Stories. Because, at base, they are will-worshippers, they cannot have real community. The will must be subservient to the intellect in order to have real community, because the intellect is the way one will can communicate with another; intellect is the thing which allows one self to know another, because of the shared reality that neither created. Because the modern worships the will, they can only love what they create, which means that they cannot love other human beings. So they must necessarily be radical individualists, and this makes it impossible for them to engage in the human activity of passing on the torch. In a Nietzschean struggle of will, at most one can win. When human beings pass on the torch, they both win, because both gives up a portion of themselves to the other.

A mentor does not want to make a protege a carbon-copy of himself, but neither does he want his protege to be completely independent. What he wants is to give the best of himself that his protege is capable of accepting to his protege. He wants the protege to accept this and incorporate it into how the protege acts, but not to replace himself, but to build the two together, so that the protege is more than either of the two of them would have been alone. SImilarly, the protege does not want to be a slave to his mentor, but neither does he want to be completely free of his mentor. He wants to honor his mentor, incorporating the best of his mentor into himself. Thus each man, in his turn, is both himself and a summation of those who came before. The past does not dominate the future, nor the future dominate the past, but the two co-operate. This is the way healthy human beings pass on the torch.

Moderns, however, being will-worshippers, can only exist in a war of all-against-all. They cannot love, because that entails giving up a part of themselves to something they didn’t create, which they can only understand as death. This is actually a universal weakness of will-worship; anything which is not imposing one’s will is the same thing as death to the will-worshipper. Thus it is not possible for someone’s work to be completed and it now to be time to pass on the torch. Thus for the modern to understand passing on the torch, the legacy character must be broken and then die. The new character can’t learn from the legacy character because then he would be dominated and, to the degree the teaching worked, killed, by the legacy character. The new character can’t love and wish to honor the legacy character because love is a lie and only the desire to dominate is real. (Hence the modern aphorism, “everything is about sex except for sex, which is about power.”)

So it was inevitable that the sequel trilogy would fail to establish new characters, since they had to be enemies of the beloved legacy characters, and how can you love the people who killed off the legacy characters you love?

Of course, Hollywood knows that it can’t tell passing-the-torch stories, but it does believe it can tell bait-and-switch stories. The idea was something like people nostalgic for the legacy characters would drag children and others who didn’t care about the legacy characters to the theater, who would then love the new characters while not caring about the broken legacy characters who died off. Which is where the sequel trilogy managed to be an even more colossal disaster than one would have predicted. It takes rare skill to make so many completely unlikable new characters.