Review essay

‘It’s just us now’: nostalgia and Star Wars Episode VII:

The Force Awakens
Benjamin J. Robertson

Certainly Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (Abrams US 2015) appears
simply to wallow in nostalgia, to merely mimic Star Wars (Lucas US 1977, later
re-christened Episode IV: A New Hope). We find in it another desert planet;
another force-using, orphaned protagonist; another Death Star. Information
crucial to the fate of seemingly everything is once again hidden inside a droid,
planets are destroyed in demonstrations of force, and weird creatures mingle
in a bar. Structurally and thematically, audiences are treated to a hero’s (or,
rather, heroine’s) journey, which culminates in the death of a potential mentor
or even father-figure.
Certainly J.J. Abrams and Disney Lucasfilm had found themselves in a tough
spot with regard to the marketability of the franchise. The prequels (1999–2005)
disappointed many fans of the original trilogy even as they introduced a new
generation of fans to the Star Wars universe. Thus The Force Awakens had to
somehow recapture the older generation of fans – many of whom were now
bringing their children and grandchildren to theatres – while still maintaining
the younger one, and create a means by which to draw in even more fans by
way of this film as well as the endless sequels and spin-offs the world can now
expect in perpetuity. That The Force Awakens plays to the past of the franchise
even as it tries to look forward should not therefore be surprising. The film’s
very first line, ‘This will begin to set things right’ – a sentence that has garnered
much attention for what it metatextually suggests about the state of Star Wars
in December 2015, as in the title of J.D. Connor’s Los Angeles Review of Books
essay ‘Making Things Right: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens’ –
attests to the complex terrain The Force Awakens had to navigate. Nonetheless,
as this discussion suggests, the allegiance that the most recent instalment in
the Star Wars saga – a cinematic event which, until a few years ago, was nearly
unthinkable – demonstrates to the past, and the manner in which it re-deploys
familiar conventions, cannot be understood only in the context of this single

Science Fiction Film and Television 9.3 (2016), 479–88 ISSN 1754-3770 (print)  1754-3789 (online)
© Liverpool University Press doi:10.3828/sfftv.2016.9.16
480 Benjamin J. Robertson

film. Whatever we gain as critics from analysis of The Force Awakens remains
limited until we consider it in the context of the franchise from which it was
born and for which it provides a new hope.
In the context of The Force Awakens as a discrete and coherent object of
interpretation, the critic (and fan for that matter) might easily ignore that the
film is framed by two deaths. The second death, which begins the film’s final
act, and to which I will turn below, seems the more important one. It certainly
carries more emotional weight for fans of the franchise. The absence of Han
Solo (Harrison Ford) from the prequel films – or even a character remotely
like Han Solo – is part and parcel of those films’ failure with fans who grew up
with the original trilogy as their touchstone for the franchise. His return, again
unthinkable until very recently when Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012 for
US$4 billion, promised the return of a certain swagger, a certain irreverence, a
certain humour to a franchise that had become mired in the sheer boringness
of the monk-like Jedi and the retconned origins of one of American cinema’s
great villains as little orphan Ani (Jake Lloyd and Hayden Christensen).
As important as Han’s death is, however, it’s the earlier death, which perhaps
barely registers for even the most hardcore fans, that signals something
important for the franchise known as Star Wars: the disposal of nostalgia.
Few fans, of whatever degree, could have been familiar with Lor San Tekka
(Max von Sydow) before he utters the first words of the franchise reboot, the
aforementioned ‘This will begin to set things right’. Indeed, even Wookiepedia,
probably the most comprehensive source of publicly available Star Wars
information, offers little helpful, specific information about who he is or about
his place in the Star Wars universe. Much of the information in the entry on
San Tekka seems to be simple and rather fanciful extrapolation from what we
learn about him during the scant seconds he appears on screen before Kylo
Ren (Adam Driver) kills him. And yet he is granted pride of place in Disney’s
great franchise instauration. However large or small his role in the ongoing
story turns out to be, his death nonetheless becomes crucially important to the
franchise, as an interpretive unit distinct from story or narrative (or, for that
matter, genre). A long time ago, in a media ecology and cultural environment
far, far away, Max von Sydow played Ming the Merciless. In 1980, on the heels
of the success of Star Wars, Flash Gordon (Hodges UK/US 1980) became a film,
one based upon the characters and settings of the 1936 serial that, in part, had
inspired George Lucas to create Star Wars to begin with. In fact, the story goes
that Lucas wanted to make a film of Flash Gordon from the start, but could not
acquire the rights and so instead created Star Wars in an attempt (according
to Fredric Jameson’s famous argument and, it would seem, common sense) to
 Review essay 481

nostalgically recapture the media objects of the past (rather than the actual
past). Flash Gordon itself would in a small way benefit from the extraordinary
success of the first Star Wars film, capitalising on a fan base vicariously experi-
encing Lucas’ nostalgia for the serial even as it immediately began to develop
a nostalgia of its own for a franchise that had begun just three years earlier.
Upon confronting San Tekka, Kylo Ren (in his first line) sneers, ‘Look
how old you’ve become’. On the level of narrative, isolated in this single film
in which we first meet these characters and to which they are as yet still
limited, this line creates a suggestive backstory for San Tekka and Ren and, by
implication, for other characters as well. We will learn, for example, that Leia
Organa is Kylo Ren’s mother. As San Tekka expresses his warmth for Leia, and
his disdain for the way in which Kylo Ren has betrayed his family, we can begin
to construct some web of history among all these characters. However, we do
not yet know what that history is and therefore can say little about it – even
about its meaning within the context of the story elaborated during the two
hours that make up the film known as The Force Awakens. On the larger level
of franchise, however, Kylo Ren’s statement means quite a bit.
In a recent issue of Science Fiction Film and Television, Ryan Vu, discussing
the Marvel Cinematic Universe, notes that ‘as long as [film criticism] evaluates
megafranchises in terms of their individual instalments its judgements will
remain superficial’ (130). Along the same lines, Vu also writes that ‘it is safe
to say that the megafranchise replaced the trilogy and the ad hoc sequel as
the engine of Hollywood brand development; how criticism will respond
to this epochal shift remains to be seen’ (131). From Vu’s analysis, and from
the problems The Force Awakens presents to both viewers and critics who
cannot help but wonder and even scoff at its narrative choices, it becomes
clear that, if individual Stars Wars films remain available as objects of study,
they do so only to the extent that we idealise them and thereby artificially
separate them from their particular media ecological niche – a niche no longer
merely generic, nor defined by auteurs, but characterised by (mega)franchise.
Obviously, critical examinations of franchises already exist, the best of which
is Derek Johnson’s Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in
the Culture Industries. However, much (all?) of this scholarship focuses on the
political economy surrounding franchises, which is to say the transformations
in the conditions of cultural production that make franchises viable and, most
importantly, profitable. Likely this focus results from disciplinary norms and
demands, and proves quite worthwhile in numerous other contexts. However,
in the present context, in which individual narrative objects (such as The Force
Awakens) exist in a media ecology determined by franchise – which involves
482 Benjamin J. Robertson

multimedia and cross-platform promotion and narrative development, endless

paratextual elaboration, fan labour, and even critical methodologies and the
statements that derive therefrom – a focus on conditions of production can
only tell us so much. That focus does not readily allow for interpretation of
franchises as franchises. (The most notable exception to this rule is much of the
scholarship on the Bond films, although the question of whether Bond is even
properly a franchise at all remains open within that scholarship.)
If we return to Kylo Ren’s confrontation with Lor San Tekka, we can ask what
his statement means not only in terms of this film (where it is provocative but
tells us very little concretely), but in terms of the Star Wars franchise. Since we
cannot ask, much less answer, the question ‘Who has become old?’ in terms
of this character in this film, or even of the larger narrative in which this film
participates – again, we know next to nothing about this character or his place
in the Star Wars saga – we are left with the question ‘Who, or even what, has
become old?’ in terms of the franchise and the larger context it creates, a context
in which narrative concerns become local and are sacrificed to the global needs
of the franchise itself. San Tekka the character has clearly become old, but more
intriguing here is the fact that von Sydow, the actor, and along with him all the
roles he has played, has also become old. The nostalgia he embodies – Lucas’
nostalgia for Flash Gordon and the audience’s nostalgia for the historical media
environment in which Ming the Merciless last appeared in a film, alongside the
original Star Wars trilogy – has become outdated. Neither the original trilogy
nor the cultural or economic circumstances under which it was produced can
possibly return, even if the Jedi might (again). A New Hope might appear in
fleeting glances in The Force Awakens, mediated through and by new actors, new
conditions of production and new technologies, not to mention the prequels and
the complex set of texts and paratexts known as the Expanded Universe (now
relegated to the status of uncanonical Star Wars Legends). However, A New Hope
will never be repeated (and we can, of course, claim this point literally as the
original version of the film, the one known as only Star Wars, barely seems to
exist at this point). Thus we have a young character, Kylo Ren, not only killing an
old one (and one who is nostalgic for Princess, not General, Leia (Carrie Fisher)),
but also a young actor, Adam Driver, claiming Star Wars for his cohort against
layer upon layer of nostalgia (not to mention against those older, ‘original’ fans,
sitting in the theatre with those kids and grandkids).
The Force Awakens has problems as a standalone text. (The same might be
said for most if not all of the individual Star Wars films, even accounting for
their positions as moments in an ongoing narrative.) I have already noted its
apparent reliance on A New Hope for its structure, themes and even set pieces.
 Review essay 483

Beyond this issue, the film suffers from extraordinary temporal and spatial
compression. Although it’s not at all clear how long the film’s narrative lasts
in ‘real time’ (or how such a measurement might be taken given its galactic
setting), the film’s pacing suggests that its events transpire over a matter of
days. No one seems to sleep or eat; certainly, no one changes their clothes.
Hyperspace journeys last for what seem to be minutes or even seconds.
The First Order has no idea where the Resistance base is, suggesting a great
distance between worlds, but Resistance ships travel from it to Starkiller Base
nearly instantaneously after Han and company manage to destroy its defensive
shields. This same issue reappears when Rey (Daisy Ridley) travels to find Luke
Skywalker (Mark Hamill) in short order despite the fact that he is so remote
from the rest of the galaxy that no one has been able to find him for years. In
terms of space, it seems unlikely that everyone in the galaxy would be able to
see the beams that Starkiller Base uses to destroy the Hosnian Prime system.
Likewise, how is it that so many planets within this system are visible in a
single shot?
Of course the problems only multiply as we move from the domain of
physics to something like history or economics or military logistics, and ask
why the New Republic has set up shop in the Hosnian system to begin with
(what happened to Coruscant?), or what the precise relationship between the
New Republic and the Resistance is supposed to be, or indeed how any of these
groups have managed to research, develop or mass-manufacture any of these
fantastic new weapon technologies over what appears to have been a period of
decades-long social crisis on every conceivable level. While I am sure that fans
can concoct their own theories, or that Wookiepedia or other resources might
provide answers to such questions by way of the various pseudosciences that
rule the Star Wars universe, such plot devices, which seem to be conveniences
rather than necessities, not only strain the narrative logic of this film but call
into question those of previous films in the franchise by drawing our attention
to problems that have apparently always existed. However, if we understand
these conveniences as conveniences, not in the service of telling a coherent
story in a single film, but ones that seek to ‘set things right’ in the franchise
itself, things begin to make more sense. (Whether such ‘sense’ is itself a true
justification for such conveniences must remain an open question for now.)
Perhaps this reading would seem a stretch. However, if we take into account
the abstract properties of franchises such as Star Wars, and the necessity
of understanding franchises as objects of interpretation distinct from the
individual texts which make them up (or from the larger story arcs to which
each of these texts contributes) the centrality of convenience as a lubricant
484 Benjamin J. Robertson

comes into greater focus. First, franchises seek to leverage environments,

worlds and universes, rather than narratives. The latter will inevitably end,
whereas the former ideally always exists as the context for further narration
and monetisation. That is, the development of a rich universe provides the
means by which to extend the franchise itself when and if any given narrative
set within that universe exceeds its natural life (which is to say, its profitability).
(Worlds also afford paratexts, such as video games and novelisations and also
action figures and candy bars, that interact with and support narrative texts.
Paratexts extend the profitability of the franchise itself.) Star Trek (US 1966–)
and Doctor Who (UK 1963–) each provide models for such franchises, each
extending itself despite the fact that their casts grow older and established
plotlines cease to be interesting or sustainable.
By contrast, some nascent franchises may have difficulty breaking free
from the constraints of the original narratives upon which they are based.
Franchises such as Twilight, The Hunger Games and Harry Potter come to mind
here, although in the last instance a new film, Fantastic Beasts and Where
to Find Them (Yates US/UK 2016), will seek to restart the franchise with a
new narrative, new cast, in a new setting (the same world, but earlier in its
history), while a stage play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (2016), attempts
a Force-Awakens-style generational extension of the Hogwarts milieu into the
next generation of Potters, Weasleys and Malfoys. The other two franchises
have also gestured towards possible extensions, with less success: the author
of Twilight has rewritten a ‘gender-swapped’ version of the first book in the
series after an aborted attempt to rewrite the book from the male protagonist’s
perspective, while Lionsgate executives and Mockingjay (US 2014–15) director
Francis Lawrence have each proposed extending the Hunger Games film
franchise into prequel films set at historical ‘Hunger Games’ before Katniss’s
revolution ended the practice forever.
Second, although franchises tend to also be generic, their generic status
does not allow them to be readily compared with one another as franchises.
In other words, while Star Wars and Star Trek can conceivably both be called
sf, or Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings (2001–3) can both be called fantasy,
each of these franchises – in terms of its ‘enfranchisement’ – remain unique
insofar as it develops its own logics and conventions. Star Trek, for example,
because of the lack of overarching story baked into its original incarnation as
an episodic television program, has been more successful than Star Wars in
terms of developing new plot lines in new settings featuring new characters
(and therefore new casts). Star Wars, because it tied itself (in the films at any
rate) so closely to a single storyline (retroactively understood as the rise and fall
 Review essay 485

of Darth Vader), has had more difficulty moving forward from Return of the
Jedi (Marquand US 1983). The initial conditions each franchise set (even before
they were franchises we might note) constrained future progress and forced
their producers to develop novel solutions to certain dead ends they found
themselves facing. Star Trek, seemingly out of ideas for new characters and
casts, rebooted itself with a new cast but old characters by way of a time travel
that ‘worked’ (for the franchise if not the fans) because of the very episodic
structure that necessitated the intervention to begin with. The new Kirk, Spock,
McCoy, Uhura, etc. of Star Trek (Abrams US 2009) can have new adventures
in new bodies because the universe in which those adventures take place was
never burdened with the weight of the mythopoesis that characterises the
main storyline in Star Wars (a storyline that will necessarily be compromised
as myth with the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Edwards US 2016)).
Star Wars, by contrast, in terms of its films, bound itself more closely to specific
characters and the actors who play them by way of its single, mythic storyline.
As such, new storylines became potentially problematic investments (for
blockbuster or tentpole films at least). Viewers nostalgically invested in these
characters, these actors and the specific story in which they appear, may be less
willing to move on without them.
For all of the Star Wars novels which follow from the conclusion of Return of
the Jedi (again, now relegated, with The Force Awakens taking over as canon, to
the status of ‘Legends’), and eventually telling new stories about new characters,
the first trilogy of these novels – Heir to the Empire (1991), Dark Force Rising
(1992) and The Last Command (1993), all by Timothy Zahn – focused squarely
on Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Leia Organa and other familiar characters from
the original film trilogy. It therefore established the literary foundation of the
Expanded Universe within the main storyline; even works not focusing directly
on the Skywalker dynasty tended to take their point of origin from the films,
even if only from a single shot of an interesting-looking alien. In short, the
polyvalent structural logic of the Star Trek franchise is not that of the highly
centralised Star Wars franchise, whatever generic conventions they might share.
Parallel fundamental distinctions can be drawn between Star Wars and the
organising logic of other franchises as well, despite their surface similarities.
Third and finally, we must note the manner in which franchises operate
within time scales that are more institutional than individual. While stories
are written and films produced in the primary world in which the audience
consumes them (and in which cast members age), the secondary world that
audiences consume does not always, or even often, precisely correlate with
that primary world in terms of the passage of time. As a means to understand
486 Benjamin J. Robertson

this characteristic of franchises, we might say that they exhibit a differential

temporality that is almost Narnian. In The Chronicles of Narnia, the Pevensie
children travel between their own world (a literary representation of the
primary world in which the reader reads) and Narnia (a secondary world
with its own physical laws, laws different than those the children are familiar
with from their own world); the children may spend decades in Narnia only
to find, when they return home, little if any time has actually passed on
Earth. Likewise, they may spend months on Earth only to return to Narnia
many years or even centuries later (or earlier). This out-of-syncness, while not
precisely what happens in any particular franchise, serves as a useful proxy for
how, for example, the audience may leave Star Wars after the Battle of Endor in
1983 and return to it in 2015 with their last memories of Han, Luke and Leia as
relatively young. Moreover, this audience will also return to the franchise with
knowledge of the prequels and even perhaps of the now legendary Expanded
Universe. This audience may have developed new dimensions of their nostalgia
or overcome it altogether (to find it replaced with apathy, cynicism or even
anger). All of this knowledge and affect obtains in the primary world, but when
the audience re-encounters the secondary world, for good or ill according
to individual taste, it will discover that time has passed there as well, but in
ways that it cannot quite account for. Questions will undoubtedly come up
because of the secondary world history this gap implies but does not fill in.
What is the Resistance? Who are Rey’s parents? Who or what is Snoke? Why
precisely did Luke leave? How precisely did the First Order rise? How does it
recruit its soldiers, build and maintain its fleets, pay its salaries? What is the
relationship between Kylo Ren, as an almost religious figure, and the secular
aspect of the First Order represented by General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson)?
What is a Knight of Ren? What have they done? How do they differ from the
Sith? And so on. Most of all, this return to the franchise forces the audience to
understand how time has passed in perhaps the same quantity in both worlds
(about 30 years) but done so with very different effects in each. Look how old
you’ve become, indeed.
No franchise can move forward under the weight of so much history, history
that will be experienced differently no doubt by each of its generations of
fans, including those of a distant future who will not even have the original
generation (or anything like their media ecology) around as a reference point.
(As one article on the franchise has recently put it: ‘You won’t live to see the
last Stars Wars movie’.) In the service of fans past, present and future – and
most importantly in service of the franchise which seeks to profit from these
fans’ consumption as well as their affective and immaterial labour – The Force
 Review essay 487

Awakens begins the process of resetting the universe. Again, it clears away
much of what had previously been canonical and creates, in its wake, Star
Wars Legends. Similarly, by rehearsing familiar scenes, structures and plot
points from A New Hope, it perhaps obviates the need to do so in subsequent
instalments (although this remains to be seen, of course). More importantly,
it introduces new characters and actors who are more timely and who are
connected to other, less popular narratives and franchises which provide
cultural capital to the franchise without overburdening the expectations or
assumptions of Star Wars fans en masse: John Boyega to the well-received
Attack the Block (Cornish UK 2011); Oscar Isaac to a more complex sf film, Ex
Machina (Garland UK 2015) and the vastly hipper Inside Llewyn Davis (Coen
brothers US 2013); and Adam Driver to Girls (US 2012–2015). Daisy Ridley,
who plays The Force Awakens’s protagonist and therefore carries perhaps the
biggest burden going forward, was a relative unknown, appearing mainly in
minor television roles before taking on the role of Rey, a freedom from the past
the franchise desperately needed. Finally, the franchise squarely recognises the
weight of its past by acknowledging the age of its characters and the nostalgia
with which they are involved – and then beginning to kill them off.
Starkiller Base is not only the third Death Star. It does not only nod to
Luke Skywalker’s original surname from Lucas’s original scripts. Starkiller
Base is where the franchise’s star dies. Luke may have been the protagonist
of the original trilogy (Lucas’s post-facto claims that Episodes IV, V and VI
were about the redemption of Anakin Skywalker notwithstanding), but Han
Solo provided those films with their charm, levity and ambiguity. The prequel
trilogy may have missed a good deal of what made the original trilogy work (to
the extent that it worked at all), but it certainly did not lack a Luke-like figure,
whether the boyish Luke (Jake Lloyd’s Anakin), the whiny Luke (Hayden
Christensen’s Anakin) or the boring monk-like Luke (virtually any Jedi). What
the prequels lacked was Han. However, Harrison Ford had always had a fraught
relationship with the franchise, and allegedly was uncertain about returning
to it following The Empire Strikes Back (Kershner US 1980), hence the way the
end of that film was conceived, allowing for a natural disappearance of the
Han Solo character should the actor playing him no longer wish to do so. The
character was originally slated to die in Return of the Jedi as well. Ford’s return
to the franchise seems almost predicated on the demand that Han Solo die,
which serves not only to free the actor from the franchise but the franchise
from nostalgia for the character who himself has now become too old. As Kylo
Ren screams at Rey in the film’s climactic scene, ‘Han Solo can’t save you now’.
In fact, as he also says, ‘It’s just us now’ – it’s just the present and (near) future
488 Benjamin J. Robertson

of the franchise. The past, whatever nostalgia we feel for it, is gone. Star Wars
can never be what it was. It can only move forward, and indeed will do so with
a new actor playing Han Solo: Alden Ehrenreich will take over as a younger
Han in a film still in the early stages of development. Only the death of Ford’s
Han could allow another actor to take up that role, even as a younger version
of that character. The nostalgia is too strong, too old, too ingrained to allow for
anything else.
A franchise such as Star Wars will leverage its proprietary world by acknowl-
edging that worlds move on and taking steps to make such moving on possible.
‘Moving on’ not only includes ‘events happening’ or something like historical
progress, but also the liquidation of past elements of the franchise that have
outlived their usefulness or even present a hindrance to the franchise’s future.
Such a franchise must conceive of and develop means by which to accomplish
this task by paying close attention to its particularities as a franchise and
acting according to its established conventions, conventions that might include
generic dimensions but are not reducible to them. Finally, it must succeed in all
of this by negotiating the difference between the primary world of production
and consumption, and the secondary world that is produced and consumed,
a difference expressed by the variable quantities and qualities of time that
pass in each over the course of its existence. Most importantly, as The Force
Awakens demonstrates, as a franchise develops it will sacrifice the coherence of
its instalments and other constituent parts for the good of the franchise itself.
In the era of the franchise, notions such as narrative logic and pacing – which
are both modern and yet quaint – take a back seat to the logistics of world,
something we might call an ontologised capacity for profit.

Works cited

Connor, J.D. ‘Making Things Right: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens’. Los Angeles
Review of Books (7  January  2016). <https://lareviewof books.org/article/making-
things-right-star-wars-episode-vii-the-force-awakens/#!> Accessed 28 Jun 2016.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham:
Duke UP, 1991.
Johnson, Derek. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture
Industries. New York: New York UP, 2013.
‘Lor San Tekka’. Wookieepedia. <http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lor_San_Tekka> Accessed
28 Jun 2016.
Rogers, Adam. ‘You Won’t Live to See the Final Star Wars Movie’. Wired (December 2015).
Vu, Ryan. ‘Marvel Cinematic Universality’. Science Fiction Film and Television 9.1 (2016):
125–31.
506 About the contributors
Benjamin J. Robertson teaches genre studies, media studies and literary theory in the
English Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder. With Marie-Laure Ryan
and Lori Emerson he is editor of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media. His writing
on sf, fantasy, music, media studies and other topics has appeared or is forthcoming
in Amodern, Configurations, The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Music, Sound, and
the Moving Image and Science Fiction Studies. Stars Wars was the first film he ever saw.
Zara T. Wilkinson is a reference librarian at Rutgers University–Camden in New Jersey.
She has presented and published on depictions of women in sf media, and in 2014 she
co-organised ‘Buffy to Batgirl’, a two-day academic conference on gender in sf, fantasy
and comics.
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