Thoughts While Binge-Watching “The Mandalorian” - S.P. Somtow
I was finally able to watch The Mandalorian recently in between moments of incredible personal and professional stress. And one of the best things about it, ironically, is that it doesn’t contain a single original idea. I’m not praising with faint damns here — far from it — I am trying to explain why this series is so appealing, absorbing, and generally bingeworthy.
Alexander Pope said of great poetry that is “what oft was said, yet ne’er so well express’d.” The Mandalorian is great because it uses tropes that we know and love, and serves them up in ways that are fresh and surprising enough to please the palate and push our emotional buttons. Everyone knows apples and walnuts — yet a Waldorf salad is an exquisite masterpiece of recombinant DNA.
And when you start disassembling the tropes, you also see a whole history of science fiction and adventure stories — a long line stretching all the way back to Gilgamesh, but this is just a short review so I’ll mostly stick with the last hundred years.
First, it’s the music the telegraphs the milieu. Gone are the lush late-romantic soundscapes of “big epic”. Odd, ethnic sounding wind instruments, rattling percussion immediately bring a particular shade of Ennio Morricone to mind, so before we even see much, we know we’re in a sort of spaghetti western. The lone hero travelling through a desert with a mute child is also inhabiting the world of Jodorowsky’s El Topo … and then there’s the veneer of orientalism — the ronin-like guild, “the way” (and what is the way but bushido?). We are in a very real sense back in the 1970s, the “birth time” of Star Wars — but we have moved in the direction of David Carradine in Kung Fu — a TV series so influential to the culture and to what came after that we take all its radical influences for granted and have forgotten the show itself.
All of this puts us in the same universe as Star Wars but in a wholly “new” kind of “old” story — the picaresque tale of a knight errant on a solitary quest accompanied by a mysterious fifty-year-old Child.
Calling the companion simply “The Child” and mentioning its age reminds us also The Child, one of the main Jungian archetypes, isn’t just some undeveloped person but in mythological terms is someone infinitely old and wise who appears as a Child.
So, apart from a few red herrings in the middle, this is a pretty clean clear-cut arc of a story and I am not surprised that it’s getting more positive attention than the more ambiguous and perhaps “kit-bashed” films of the final trilogy. The Mandalorian with his thinly disguised bushido code, the miniature Yoda-like alien, the much subtler fansaabisu which reference more obscure minutiae of the canon (and occasionally even things rejected from canon) … all these things keep hitting the right buttons and it’s particularly delicious that this iteration of the “hero with a thousand faces” has no face.
Indeed, how any acting manages to occur at all is a triumph with all that armor. I am assuming its mostly ADR work, meaning that scenes of interactions with others must be particularly hard on the other actors. And yet it kind of works. Perhaps a “Lone Hero” by nature has to act like a block of wood — pace David Carradine. The inevitable last minute face revelation, mandated by the structure of such shows, was almost unnecessary, though it was useful to see that the hero was not some scarred monster — or some surprise celebrity — as men in iron masks are wont to be.
Although it’s clear that “Baby Yoda” has injected an almost unbearable level of cuteness into the show, this little guy’s no Ewok. The Ewoks were somewhat nauseating in their cuteness whereas B.Y. is genuinely adorable. The Ewoks were very obviously toys, as well, and served no actual plot-based purpose, whereas the existence of the B.Y. opens all sorts of doors and asks interesting questions. And puppetry, or whatever this is, seems to have improved a lot since the Ewoks — whose toy-ness one could never actually forget. B.Y. was pretty convincing — this was no muppet.
The best thing about this new series is the very human scale in which it’s set. There aren’t any space battles with thousands of battleships, and there isn’t a super-weapon that annihilates an entire planet, let alone an entire fleet of such weapons. There’s no one who wants to rule the entire universe — just a planet or two is fine. As befits climbing down from the movie screen to the home screen, the operatic bombast is greatly reduced.
When an actor plays one of those rugged, implacable types, we often say that his face is masklike. In The Mandalorian, the face and the mask are one, so acting ability is basically moot. Sexual charisma is moot. Rippling muscles are moot. Hell, it’s all moot. The ability to play a convincing protagonist while completely encased in Beskar is probably quite rare, though we don’t have many antecedents to compare our favorite bounty hunter with. David Carradine probably worked pretty hard to impersonate a block of wood; portraying a hunk of metal comes easy to Pedro Pascal, thanks to the fact that he is his costume.
And yet we’re all in love with him.
It doesn’t hurt that we were in love with Boba Fett when he was no more than an action figure. It doesn’t hurt that Baby Yoda presumably sees his saintly nature beneath his rough-hewn exterior — presumably being a Force user lets you see the man beneath the metal.
So — it’s the adventures of a tin man and a cute puppet, zooming through the galaxy, busting balls. one step ahead of the law, bargaining with jawas, getting chased through sewers, with a healthy dose of scum and villainy — how could one not enjoy it, guilty pleasure though it might be? And when the wicked Moff pulls out a — gasp — darksaber — while our hero finally achieves flight — well, a lot of buttons are being pushed.
It’s not deep, as such, but there’s enough quasi-Eastern philosophy woven into it to create a credible aura of depth. And it asks many questions that Warsies have always wanted answers to. Next season, presumably, there will be answers.