Perhaps the most baffling complaint about The Last Jedi is this: the Finn and Rose subplot is poorly integrated, and could easily be cut without damaging the film. I’ve seen this complaint over and over again, even in reviews that are broadly insightful and positive about the movie. And I think it’s completely wrong. The Finn and Rose subplot is thematically central to the film.
Let’s recap. Finn and Rose need to visit a town on the Space French Riviera called Canto Bight, in order to make contact with someone who will help them break the security codes preventing them from boarding Snoke’s ship undetected.
So they leave the fleeing Resistance fleet in a shuttle and land in Canto Bight. Rose warns Finn that the people there are the worst people in the universe. It’s a wretched hive of scum and villainy, apparently.
We cut immediately to a shot of a popping champagne cork. Canto Bight is a gloriously golden deco set full of fat aliens in lovely suits drinking expensive drinks and carelessly throwing gold coins onto roulette tables. Finn is hugely impressed: these are the richest people in the galaxy. This is like nothing we’ve ever seen in Star Wars before.
Then there’s a shot of lots of lovely champagne glasses shaken, Jurassic Park style, by thunderous footsteps outside. We rush to a balcony, much like the balcony on that planet in the Hosnian system from which the Republican government witnessed its own destruction. A race is starting up, a race in which giant horse-like creatures — fathiers — are running around a track; presumably the rich fat aliens are betting extravagantly on the outcome.
While the race is going on, Rose tells Finn why she hates Canto Bight. The people of Canto Bight are rich from the profit they have earned dealing arms to the First Order. Her own planet was mined to create these arms, and then destroyed in order to test them. She doesn’t blame the First Order for this: she blames the fat aliens, the one percent, the richest people in the galaxy.
Throughout Rose’s speech, Finn is using a telescope to watch the fathiers racing. While she describes the oppression of her planet, Finn is watching the fathiers being savagely whipped by their riders: when we seem them later, they will have visible marks from this mistreatment. Then Finn moves the telescope to see one of the trainers attacking a small child, a stable boy. The fathiers and the boy become a symbol for the oppression caused by the people of Canto Bight, including the oppression of Rose’s home planet.
Finn and Rose return to the casino and spot the codebreaker, who seems to be a beautifully-groomed rich arsehole too concerned with his gambling to help them anyway. But before they can reach him, they are arrested by the police, whose job, of course, is to protect the interests of the rich fat aliens, and ensure that their conspicuous consumption should continue unmolested. We’ve never seen the police in Star Wars before: they will be our antagonists until the end of this sequence. The police tase them immediately and take them to prison.
After he rescues Finn and Rose, Benicio Del Toro will tell Finn and Rose that the fat aliens are rich not just because they sell arms to the First Order, but because they also sell arms — X-wings! — to the Resistance. “They blow you up, you blow them up,” he says. It’s not just the First Order oppressing Rose’s home planet. It’s the continual war between the Separatists and the Republic, the Empire and the Rebellion, the First Order and the Resistance. The peoples of the galaxy have been oppressed for decades by Star Wars.
No one in the Star Wars films cares about the miserable inhabitants of Rose’s home planet. (It’s called Hays Minor, as if anyone cared.) The good guys in Star Wars don’t liberate the oppressed. They blow up space stations and smash up Star Destroyers. Or they levitate rocks and ransack their desk calendars for wise sayings about detachment and balance. Even in this film, while Admiral Holdo is bravely sacrificing herself to save people’s lives, Rey is fighting Kylo Ren for possession of Luke Skywalker’s fucking lightsaber.
And that’s why no one on the Outer Rim answers Leia’s distress call from Crait, the planet salty from the tears of a million fanboys. No one on the Outer Rim gives a shit about the Resistance. Because the Resistance does nothing to relieve their oppression: instead, it actively contributes to it, only ever solving things by getting in an (expensive) X-wing and blowing something (expensive) up.
The film has two endings. The first one is the traditional tableau of our rebellious heroes, like the ones at the end of Episodes IV and VI, where the Rebellion celebrates victories that will not end up making life any better for the oppressed inhabitants of Hays Minor.
The second one is unlike anything we’ve seen in Star Wars before. Or is it? Somewhere on the Space French Riviera, the stable boy is telling the story of Luke Skywalker, a story he can’t possibly know. Like Rey, like us, he has an action figure to help him act the story out. Finn and Rose have given him a spark of hope: they released the oppressed fathiers, let them smash up the rich fat aliens’ casinos and cocktail bars, took off their saddles, and left them to run free in moonlight and long grass. Rose was smiling as she did it.
Because the Force doesn’t belong to the Jedi any more, the stable boy uses it to pick up his broom and starts sweeping. He pauses for a moment and, like farmboy Luke, he looks up into the sky. And John Williams kicks into gear.
Rian Johnson has burned Star Wars to the ground. Now we know who the real enemy is. And we know what the Resistance should really be doing. Let’s hope JJ manages to stick the landing in Episode IX.
If you asked me right now to name my favourite Star Wars film, my answer, without hesitation would be Episode VII: The Force Awakens. It’s the funniest of the Star Wars films, it has likeable, charismatic, well-drawn characters, and it carries on the overwrought intergenerational Skywalker saga in a satisfying way.
Plenty of people dismissed it as a remake of the original Star Wars film. Which it was, of course. But we hadn’t had a remake of the original Star Wars since 1999, and we hadn’t had a good remake since 1983. So 2015 needed a new remake of Star Wars to relaunch a the new series of films and to remind us that Star Wars isn’t just about bored actors sitting listlessly on couches talking about trade embargoes.
More than that, though. After nearly forty years of Star Wars films and spinoffs, The Force Awakens understands what it’s doing in a way that the original Star Wars really doesn’t.
I’m in Bari right now, on a ferry romantically named the SuperFast II. I’m about to head over to Patras in Greece. It’s the second time I’ve done this.
The first time was in 2008, my last long service leave. That time, Bari was not fun. My train arrived late, I had just over an hour to get to the ferry, I didn’t know where the ferry left from, I had a crummy paper map, and I got completely lost in the narrow and slippery lanes of the old city. And it was probably raining. I remember being getting incredibly angry and flustered, which was a thing that happened a lot on that particular trip.
This time, I booked a hotel for a night. So, when the train arrived late, I just needed to walk a few blocks drop off my luggage and then go out for dinner. Totally relaxed. After dinner, I wandered down to the water and around the old city. On the way back, I found a nice bar and had a glass of a noxious liqueur called pugliese. It was nice.
I didn’t need to check in for the ferry until 5:30 in the afternoon. I couldn’t find anything pressing to do, so I explored the streets of Bari, got a beard trim, had lunch in the old city, found the seaside and wandered around there for a while. I ended up finding somewhere to sit and read for a couple of hours.
I’ve said this before here: at the start of this trip, I had only a few concrete plans. I had a hotel booked for the first couple of days in London, a flight booked to Amsterdam, another hotel booked for my last couple of nights in Athens, and then a flight from Athens to Bangkok at Christmas. (Thanks, Calvin.) I also wanted to stay in Sorrento for a while. But everything else was open. I could go anywhere or do anything.
And yet, this trip has pretty much been a remake of my last long service leave. Last time I explored the south of France a bit more and only stayed in Italy for just over a week. But otherwise, the itinerary has been the same.
It would be easy to be disappointed with myself. I’ve still never been to Spain or Portugal. I didn’t go to Budapest or Trogir. Most of my time has been spent in places I’ve seen before.
But I just don’t care. I explored lots of new places in Sicily and Greece on the Classics Trip in June. I’m meeting Calvin after Christmas: we’ll be visiting Cambodia and Laos, adding two more countries to the growing list of places I’ve visited in South-East Asia.
And this trip has been so easy and pleasant. Most of my train trips have been about two hours long; none of them have been longer than four hours. I’ve enjoyed seeing familiar places, and finding out new things about them, and having new things to do. Venice, Naples, Sirmione and Antibes were all great. And I’m more relaxed and well-rested than I have ever been, I think.
I’ll be staying in Patras for two nights. I don’t know anything about Patras, except that there’s a cinema there called the Odeon, where Star Wars — Episode VIII is screening in English. I plan to watch it at least twice. I’ll let you know after that whether it’s my new favourite.
It’s raining like crazy today, so I’m postponing my visit to Pompeii until tomorrow, which is my last full day in Sorrento.
I arrived here on 3 December. There have been plenty of day trips since then, but also a lot of relaxing and doing nothing. So, this post will be mercifully free of narrative. Instead, some Sorrento things.
Io non posso entrare
There are dogs everywhere here. They’re allowed, or at least tolerated, in bars and restaurants. One woman was walking a dog in the ruins of Herculaneum; someone brought their dog into the Archaeological Museum in Naples.
And there are dogs freely wandering the streets. Last night I was sitting outside at a bar, when a dog wandered past and cocked his leg on a nearby fruit stall. The owner gently kicked the dog, who growled at him and ran off.
There’s one grubby snaggletoothed dog who wanders around Tasso Square. He seems fairly confident in traffic, but every time I see him, I’m terribly anxious about him getting run over. I’m sure he’ll be fine.
Christmas
It seems like middle-aged complaints about the length of the Christmas season start earlier every year. It’s been Christmas for my entire trip, all the way back in London in November. But it’s been crazy in Sorrento. Take a look:
This is all very sweet. The only annoying thing is the nightclub next to my apartment that plays Feliz Navidad loudly just once every night sometime late in the evening. Oh, and the horrific Christmas music that was playing throughout the main shopping area on Capri.
Uno spritz, per favore
It seems to me that Aperol only has only been a thing in Australia over the past year. Here it’s everywhere. Even the Beginner’s Italian course I’m doing on Babbel tells me that I have to have at least one spritz before dinner. And so I do.
Speaking Italian
My Italian is hundreds of years out of date, of course, and I’ve never actually formally attempted to learn it before. Now, for the first time, I’ve tried to give it a go.
The only thing is that my Italian is audibly terrible, and so everyone I try it on responds in English immediately. But still I persist.
More than once, though, I’ve received a verbal pat on the head for asking for the bill in Italian. Which is fine: I’ll take literally any reinforcement I can get.
Food and agoraphobia
I’ve never told anyone this before, but I actually get slightly anxious going into a shop or a bar or a restaurant I’ve never been to before. I often have to wander around for ages before finding somewhere where I’m prepared to go in and eat. (It’s even a thing at home, but then I have Calvin with me; given the choice, I’ll always go to somewhere familiar.)
It’s ridiculous, obviously. I’ve found lots of places to eat here; even the least expensive places have fantastic hearty food. The one time I screwed up the courage to go to a classy-looking restaurant and order from the specials menu, I ended up with a massive plate of gnocchi with gorgonzola and walnuts, which was like eating a giant tub of rancid wallpaper paste. I won’t be doing that again.
Naples
Naples is kind of horrible, isn’t it? I only spent one day there, last Saturday. It’s glamorous, but filthy and rundown and vaguely threatening. I wanted to visit the Archaeological Museum, which was okay — full of things looted from Pompeii and Herculaneum.
The highlight was the Secret Room, to which children under 14 are admitted at their own risk. It’s full of Roman erotica — frescoes of scenes from mythology, phalluses, tiny bronze dicks, and ridiculously obscene sculptures. Here’s the highlight:
This is exactly the kind of thing Cory Bernardi warned us about
Leaving Friday
I’m catching the train to Bari on Friday, staying there one night, and then catching the overnight ferry to Patras. Two nights in Patras, not because there’s lots of fun things to do there, but to give me the opportunity to repeatedly watch Star Wars VIII.
I’m going to go offline some time tomorrow, to avoid spoilers. I’ll be back once I’ve seen the film a couple of times.
Until then, here’s an inexpertly cobbled together photo gallery of Sorrento and the towns nearby. I’m off to have lunch somewhere I’ve been to before.
Reading:La Belle Sauvage, by Philip Pullman. Set 10 years before Northern Lights. It’s beautifully written, wonderfully anti-clerical, and about a third of the way through, it’s starting to get very tense.
I’ve made a lot of mistakes in the past few months.
Here’s one. I’ve been booking the cheapest possible hotels on trivago.com and booking.com. I can’t afford to stay in lovely five-star hotels every night for two months: I need to find cheap hotels reasonably close to the action in whatever city I’m staying in.
It took me a little while to properly get the hang of these sites, and so the hotel I booked in Amsterdam ended up being outside the old city, across a big bridgeless lake called the IJ.
The only easy way to cross the IJ is to take a free ferry from Amsterdam Centraal station to a place called Buiksloterweg. It’s free and it only takes five minutes. People board the ferry on foot, on their bikes or by just riding their motor scooters straight onto the deck.
The first night I tried to cross the IJ, I caught the wrong ferry and had to walk 45 minutes back to the hotel. Which was fine: I like walking, and I had podcasts to listen to.
But after the results of the non-compulsory non-binding postal survey, I had some very, very late nights out, and ended up having to catch the ferry, tired and emotional, at 3 o’clock in the morning. Or later.
It would have been much easier if I had booked a hotel in the Kerkstraat. Or somewhere else in the centre of Amsterdam.
Today, I went to Capri.
This wasn’t a mistake. I’d been there before, in 2008. It was spectacularly beautiful. Obviously, after my day off yesterday, it was going to be the first place I would visit during my stay in Sorrento.
I bought my ferry ticket from Sorrento port at 9 AM today. It cost €30. I had to choose a time for the return trip: 1:30 PM or 6:45 PM.
I chose 6:45 PM. There was no way I would get everything done by lunchtime, so I would have dinner on Capri and then head home after that.
I arrived on Capri, and, for the first time this trip, I checked in on Facebook. Lots of likes, which was nice, and a gratifying response from a beloved teacher from university. “Glorious place,” said Dexter. “(if expensive).”
He’s right. I’ve been travelling for over a month now, and today was the most glorious day so far.
I headed off towards the Villa Jovis, which was the biggest of the twelve villas on the island belonging to the Roman emperor Tiberius, who retired to Capri in 26 CE, leaving Rome to the tender mercies of Patrick Stewart’s Sejanus.
My first mistake was to take a wrong turn. I ended up at a place called the Arco Naturale.
Happy accident. But I was still keen to visit the Villa Jovis. I walked back, took a right turn at the Via Tiberio, and headed off in the right direction.
I found myself walking behind a talkative young American couple. I had been enjoying the silence, and I really didn’t want to follow them around Tiberius’s villa. So, at a fork in the road, I decided to head off to the Villa Lysis. There would be time for the Villa Jovis after that.
Tacitus mentions Tiberius’s twelve villas, but I know nothing at all about them. I supposed that the Villa Lysis might be one of them, but somewhere in the back of my mind I thought it seemed like an unlikely name for a Tiberian villa. (Who is Lysis? Why isn’t his name in the genitive case?) In any case, I was expecting some ruins.
I was wrong, of course.
There’s an early Platonic dialogue called the Lysis, about the nature of friendship. At the beginning, Socrates runs into Ctesippus and Hippothales and a bunch of young men who are hanging out with them. Socrates quickly realises that Hippothales is in love, and when Hippothales blushes and hesitates to tell him who he’s in love with, Ctesippus buts in and tells him that it’s Lysis: Hippothales won’t shut up about him — “Indeed, Socrates,” says Ctesippus, “he has literally deafened us, and stopped our ears with the praises of Lysis.”
That’s the Lysis that the Villa Lysis is named after. The villa was built in the first decade of the twentieth century by a man called Jacques d’Adelswärd Fersen. Fersen was born in Paris in 1880 to an incredibly wealthy family; at the age of 22 he inherited a bunch of money from his grandfather’s steel mills. After some kind of scandal involving tableaux vivants of schoolboys (whatever that means), he fled Paris; he settled in Capri in 1904 and built the Villa Lysis.
Fersen killed himself in 1923: glamorously, he dissolved 5 grams of cocaine in a glass of champagne and drank it. But he spent nearly two decades living in the Villa Lysis, smoking opium in a dedicated room, and sharing his life with an attractive young man called Nino Caesarini.
The inscription at the front of the Villa reads DOLORI ET AMORI SACRVM: sacred to pain and love. It’s totally camp and dramatic, of course, like the life of Fersen itself. He sounds like a truly terrible person, of course, but what would it have been like to be gay a hundred years ago, even in Europe, even for someone ridiculously privileged?
Okay for a while at least, I guess.
There was a ridiculously ramshackle path from the Villa Lysis to the Villa Jovis, which took half an hour and left me out of breath and disoriented. But I got there.
The Villa Jovis was a massive palace, bigger, I think, than any other villa I’ve ever visited. It’s right at the top of the Monte Tiberio, on the easternmost part of Capri. The unenthusiastic ticket-selling-guy gave me a horrible ASUS phone with an app on it to help me find my way around. The villa was massive and glamorous, perched on top of a cliff, eight stories high in places, with baths and kitchens and reception areas, and a massive dining room overlooking the sea.
Tiberius died there in 37 CE. According to an inscription in the main square of Capri, the elders of Capri don’t believe the infamous stories of his tableaux vivants, and are proud that he ruled the Empire from their beautiful island.
I got back to the main square at about 2:30 PM. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. But there was still four hours to go before my ferry back to Sorrento.
What was I to do? There are any number of things to do in Capri, but now, hours later, back in my apartment in Sorrento, I’ve already walked over 28,000 steps and met 173% of my move goal. I was tired and hungry.
A toasted sandwich and an aperol spritz in the main square cost €20. So I settled up and headed down to the Marina Grande, where my ferry would be leaving in three and a half hours.
There’s a whole mistake theme to this post, which I should be circling back to now. But screw it. I regret nothing.
My Kindle easily fits in my jacket pocket, so I spent hours sitting at various bars and restaurants, eating expensive food and drinking expensive drinks and reading and looking out over the water. It was dark soon enough — time to leave. The ferry was enormous: unlike the ferries that travel across the IJ, this one was full of luxury cars driven by attractive Italian men. I started writing this post there: but now it’s finished, and I’m back in my apartment. And tomorrow I can do anything I want.
I never really planned this holiday. Calvin booked the plane tickets and the hotel accommodation at the start and the end of the trip, and helped me to buy my Eurail pass. But I always intended to just make things up as I went along.
But I did have one thing I really wanted to do: to stay in Sorrento for a couple of weeks. Sorrento is a smallish town on the Bay of Naples. From there, you can catch the train to Pompeii or Herculaneum, or to Naples itself, and you can catch a ferry to Capri. So it’s within easy range of some spectacular ruins and archaeological museums. And even though it’s a bit touristy, it’s much quieter than the places I’ve been lately.
I arrived here yesterday. I’m staying in a small, newly-renovated apartment just off Tasso Square. The bed is soft, and the shower has good water pressure. Which is important, and rare. There’s even a kitchen. Not that that means anything.
I’m here till the 15th. Plenty of time to chill; plenty of time to see all the ruins and museums without feeling rushed.
I spent the last week travelling from Verona down to Sorrento: three nights in Venice, two nights in Florence and two nights in Rome. (Not really long enough, but I wanted to keep the train journeys short, and I lost a couple of nights to my extended stay in Verona.)
I had never been to Venice before. I did all the usual things: St Mark’s Cathedral, the Bell Tower, a gondola. (Gondoliers don’t sing O sole mio any more — they just chat to their mates on the phone.) I ate food and wandered the streets. Venice is kind of ridiculous; even though it’s very busy and touristy, the canals and the bridges and the alleys are really sweet and hilarious, and it’s easily possible to disappear down a side street to escape the crowds and have a quiet drink somewhere.
It was my second time in Florence. Again, there’s a standard list of things to see: the Duomo, David, the Uffizi, the Ponte Vecchio. I went in search of a crappy replica of David which I remember seeing when I first visited 20 years ago, and accidentally ended up at the Piazzale Michelangelo, which is a big square on top of a hill just outside the old city. Here’s the view from there:
And finally, Rome. I don’t think I know how to do Rome properly. It just seems crowded and unpleasant; and it’s increasingly necessary to be insistently grumpy and hostile to avoid buying bracelets and things from the jovial young street hawkers who circle around every tourist attraction.
I arrived mid-afternoon, and did a big walk down the Via dei Fori Imperiali, past the Colosseum, the Circus Maximus, the Bocca della Verità, that island in the middle of the Tiber and then back to the hotel by metro. The next day — my only full day in Rome — I visited the Palatine, the Forum and the Colosseum in the morning; in the afternoon, I saw some Caravaggios in the Church of St Luigi, gave up on the queues to the Parthenon and St Peter’s and went to a bar to drink beer instead.
Maybe it would have been better on a weekday. Maybe it’s a mistake to stay in a hotel so near the train station where it’s kind of horrible. Maybe I should have just spent the afternoon in the Capitoline Museums reading the inscriptions or something. I’ll need some advice from more experienced travellers before I attempt it again.
Enough of that. Time to go and have some lunch. I’m determined to spend the day doing nothing. It’ll be nice.
