All that skin against the glass
It would be neither entirely fair nor completely accurate to say that the second season of Andor (2022–25) holocausted too close to the sun for my tolerance, but it got a lot closer than I had thought was possible.
To be clear, of the historical allusions remixed into what the Empire euphemistically designates the Ghorman Project, the Shoah is far from the first in line. The WWII echoes on Ghorman are channeled toward occupied France, right down to the berets and cafés and the cut of everyone's retro-futuristic overcoats. Not only are the Ghor themselves cast with Francophone actors, their conlang of which we hear a notable, bilingual amount leans heavily into the phonemes of French. When their resistance cells with their suitcase radios and acts of sabotage are advised and supplied by agents of the nascent Rebellion, the viewer does not need to have read Leo Marks to catch the ghosts of the French Resistance and SOE, though when those agents are dropped into networks so blown from the start that the Empire expects them on schedule, this viewer calls Englandspiel. The Empire needs Ghorman in ferment, the visible pretext for its pacification. There are encroachments on civil rights, a gradual throttling of trade and travel. By the time the discontents of a penned and impoverished, bewildered and legitimately aggrieved population can be flashed over into full-scale military crackdown, the show has cast its net well beyond the iconography of the 1940's—the chant of the galaxy is watching is just a little more cosmic than Chicago 1968. Peacefully assembled protesters state-murdered in the uncountable hundreds to thousands recall Tiananmen Square, but there's Mai 68 in there too with the general strike, perhaps even Budapest in 1956. Kent State. Tlatelolco. Bloody Sunday. Euromaidan. It is a well-assembled fictional atrocity in that it has no one-for-one equivalent with history that could flatten its horror into a safely memorial reading. I imagine there were contributions from state-sponsored brutalities I don't even know. But there is an ethnic substrate to its violence, flagged from the start of the season with the conspicuously Wannsee-like conference at which it is already understood that the vast and militarily invaluable reserves of kalkite within the crust of Ghorman cannot be extracted at the necessary scale without effectively cracking the planet, which makes its eight hundred thousand inhabitants a problem. Exodus by pandemic or natural disaster plays poorly in the scenario analysis, so depopulation through mass murder and forced relocation it is, for which the ground of public opinion has been prepared by Imperial propaganda fanning anti-Ghor sentiment—clannish, arrogant, money-minded, unassimilable, creepily likened to the spiders which spin the irreproducibly luxurious silk of their planet's heretofore prized and sole export, whatever they bring down on themselves, assuming it happened, didn't they have it coming? With the capital city locked down under Imperial curfew, members of the Ghorman Front argue over the efficacy of sitting tight versus taking to the streets and the audience knows it makes no difference: the soldiers are there to fire on civilians whether they throw rocks or stay home. The massacre will be mechanized when the human shock of snipers and stormtroopers gives way to the implacable mop-up of security droids, survivors smashed and flung and left like broken dolls. To the last possible minute, a wireless operator stays on the air, broadcasting frantically to a galaxy that may never even hear her: "We are under siege. We are being slaughtered. The Imperial murder of Ghorman has begun . . . Help us! Is there no one who can help us?"
It is intricate, bludgeoning, impressive television; its build-up suffers from the compressed time-jumps of its season—the interpersonal trickiness of its ungentlemanly warfare needed more room to breathe, especially when its dead end seems so closely written as a dreadful bookend to the liberation of the first-season finale—but it pulls the trigger on its genocide in relentlessly real time and lets none of it feel weightless or bloodless even within the cauterizing limits of blaster fire.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch tells me that I kept predicting the next move of the massacre with historical citations, which must have made for the world's least enjoyable MST3K but testifies that the Gilroys and company were not phoning their crime against humanity in. As it spirals outward from a memorial plaza kettled into a killing zone, the violence remains vividly street-level where an Alderaan-sized explosion is too huge to be more than immediately abstract, its losses personalized whether the cannon fodder of the green security troopers or the unarmed flag-bearer picked off in the first chaotic moments. The Ghor have blasters of their own, grenades and whatever Molotov cocktails are called in their universe, but not enough to mount a successful defense. The results are as unpleasant as a sudden war crime should be. Coming down from my initial overload, I just find myself thinking that I wish the series had left the specifically final solution vibes out of it, because they point in the wrong direction. Nazi Germany is unavoidably baked into the Galactic Empire, but in this instance the likeness is just close enough to be misleading: the Ghor are not demonized and murdered out of racialized conspiracy theory or even just because fascism loves itself a scapegoat, but because they are in inconvenient possession of something of value to a rapacious and ruthless state. We shouldn't need an establishing shot of the Imperial equivalent of the Eagle's Nest to refresh our minds on the shape of that story; it is not unique to the Third Reich. Indigenous peoples murdered off their resource-rich lands, take a colonial letter. This manifest destiny whose post-apocalypse I was born into needed no help from Lebensraum. I always think of myself as missing most of the standard toolkit of generational trauma for an American Jew, but apparently it does extend to arguing with fictional transpositions of the Holocaust, and also a little America. On the other hand, I had been afraid that the plaza would end in Estadio Chile. Go Warsaw Ghetto Uprising or go home.
tl;dr we will be returning to the series once I cool down and the news out of L.A. and D.C. could stop being quite so bleeding-edge at any second. I should decompress with some queer film.
To be clear, of the historical allusions remixed into what the Empire euphemistically designates the Ghorman Project, the Shoah is far from the first in line. The WWII echoes on Ghorman are channeled toward occupied France, right down to the berets and cafés and the cut of everyone's retro-futuristic overcoats. Not only are the Ghor themselves cast with Francophone actors, their conlang of which we hear a notable, bilingual amount leans heavily into the phonemes of French. When their resistance cells with their suitcase radios and acts of sabotage are advised and supplied by agents of the nascent Rebellion, the viewer does not need to have read Leo Marks to catch the ghosts of the French Resistance and SOE, though when those agents are dropped into networks so blown from the start that the Empire expects them on schedule, this viewer calls Englandspiel. The Empire needs Ghorman in ferment, the visible pretext for its pacification. There are encroachments on civil rights, a gradual throttling of trade and travel. By the time the discontents of a penned and impoverished, bewildered and legitimately aggrieved population can be flashed over into full-scale military crackdown, the show has cast its net well beyond the iconography of the 1940's—the chant of the galaxy is watching is just a little more cosmic than Chicago 1968. Peacefully assembled protesters state-murdered in the uncountable hundreds to thousands recall Tiananmen Square, but there's Mai 68 in there too with the general strike, perhaps even Budapest in 1956. Kent State. Tlatelolco. Bloody Sunday. Euromaidan. It is a well-assembled fictional atrocity in that it has no one-for-one equivalent with history that could flatten its horror into a safely memorial reading. I imagine there were contributions from state-sponsored brutalities I don't even know. But there is an ethnic substrate to its violence, flagged from the start of the season with the conspicuously Wannsee-like conference at which it is already understood that the vast and militarily invaluable reserves of kalkite within the crust of Ghorman cannot be extracted at the necessary scale without effectively cracking the planet, which makes its eight hundred thousand inhabitants a problem. Exodus by pandemic or natural disaster plays poorly in the scenario analysis, so depopulation through mass murder and forced relocation it is, for which the ground of public opinion has been prepared by Imperial propaganda fanning anti-Ghor sentiment—clannish, arrogant, money-minded, unassimilable, creepily likened to the spiders which spin the irreproducibly luxurious silk of their planet's heretofore prized and sole export, whatever they bring down on themselves, assuming it happened, didn't they have it coming? With the capital city locked down under Imperial curfew, members of the Ghorman Front argue over the efficacy of sitting tight versus taking to the streets and the audience knows it makes no difference: the soldiers are there to fire on civilians whether they throw rocks or stay home. The massacre will be mechanized when the human shock of snipers and stormtroopers gives way to the implacable mop-up of security droids, survivors smashed and flung and left like broken dolls. To the last possible minute, a wireless operator stays on the air, broadcasting frantically to a galaxy that may never even hear her: "We are under siege. We are being slaughtered. The Imperial murder of Ghorman has begun . . . Help us! Is there no one who can help us?"
It is intricate, bludgeoning, impressive television; its build-up suffers from the compressed time-jumps of its season—the interpersonal trickiness of its ungentlemanly warfare needed more room to breathe, especially when its dead end seems so closely written as a dreadful bookend to the liberation of the first-season finale—but it pulls the trigger on its genocide in relentlessly real time and lets none of it feel weightless or bloodless even within the cauterizing limits of blaster fire.
spatch tells me that I kept predicting the next move of the massacre with historical citations, which must have made for the world's least enjoyable MST3K but testifies that the Gilroys and company were not phoning their crime against humanity in. As it spirals outward from a memorial plaza kettled into a killing zone, the violence remains vividly street-level where an Alderaan-sized explosion is too huge to be more than immediately abstract, its losses personalized whether the cannon fodder of the green security troopers or the unarmed flag-bearer picked off in the first chaotic moments. The Ghor have blasters of their own, grenades and whatever Molotov cocktails are called in their universe, but not enough to mount a successful defense. The results are as unpleasant as a sudden war crime should be. Coming down from my initial overload, I just find myself thinking that I wish the series had left the specifically final solution vibes out of it, because they point in the wrong direction. Nazi Germany is unavoidably baked into the Galactic Empire, but in this instance the likeness is just close enough to be misleading: the Ghor are not demonized and murdered out of racialized conspiracy theory or even just because fascism loves itself a scapegoat, but because they are in inconvenient possession of something of value to a rapacious and ruthless state. We shouldn't need an establishing shot of the Imperial equivalent of the Eagle's Nest to refresh our minds on the shape of that story; it is not unique to the Third Reich. Indigenous peoples murdered off their resource-rich lands, take a colonial letter. This manifest destiny whose post-apocalypse I was born into needed no help from Lebensraum. I always think of myself as missing most of the standard toolkit of generational trauma for an American Jew, but apparently it does extend to arguing with fictional transpositions of the Holocaust, and also a little America. On the other hand, I had been afraid that the plaza would end in Estadio Chile. Go Warsaw Ghetto Uprising or go home.tl;dr we will be returning to the series once I cool down and the news out of L.A. and D.C. could stop being quite so bleeding-edge at any second. I should decompress with some queer film.