Friday night was Nearly Dan at the Liquid Room. They were great last year, off the chart this year, delivering a joyous show from start to finish. I ended up with a crocked back from dad dancing and a hoarse voice from singing. Roll on their next visit.
Last night was East Kilbride for an old friend’s 65th, another good night with some people I hadn’t met with for a very long time, remembering things I’d forgotten. Photographs and memories, as they say.
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As you know, I don’t watch much TV, but the return of Andor (Disney) for its second and final season is a must-watch. The Star Wars universe is full of possibilities, some of which are better realised than others. Andor is at the complex, grown-up end of the spectrum: there are no prominent Sith or Jedi or even, so far at least, Force users, but there is plenty of moral ambiguity in both Empire and Rebellion.
I noted previously that one of George Lucas’s achievements in Star Wars (1977/8) was to gull a generation of Americans into supporting the Vietcong in their uprising against the evil Empire. Andor casts a more focused eye on something similar, on oppression and radicalisation. It also picks up on the Canto-Bight sequence in The Last Jedi, looking at the role of the Empire’s elites in scenes reminiscent of The Godfather. The tone is reinforced in a conversation in episode 1.11 between Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) and Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) regarding a sacrificial gambit – allowing fellow rebels to go to their deaths because to do otherwise would alert Imperial intelligence to a mole.
‘For the greater good.’
‘Call it what you want.’
‘Let’s call it war.’
Dedra sees your childish euphemisms and judges you harshly
Star Wars, in fact.
One interesting thing arising from episode 2.03 is the reaction, from some quarters at least, to the attempted sexual assault on one of the core characters by a slimy Imperial functionary. There is a cadre of online commentators who find this ‘problematic,’ to the extent that they are unable to to utter the word ‘rape,’ preferring the TikTok-inspired substitution ‘grape,’ as if the correct word cannot be said or written in case the least mention invokes discomfort by some kind of sympathetic magic; this is infantilisation. No doubt some of them are the same people who objected to the excellent The Acolyte as too woke.
The thing is, although Andor was written and filmed some months ago, and certainly before the 2024 US election, it dramatises a familiar dynamic. The attempted sexual assault anticipates the man who, during that election, said of women, their bodies, our choice. I sometimes wonder if the commentators have any grasp of the ways in which fiction and art interact with the real world.
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