droid_cover

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/l3-37-droid-rights-charade/"></div>Worlds like those of Battlestar Galactica, Westworld, and Blade Runner — worlds where robots easily pass as human — invite us to ask where robots end and humanity begins. In the Star Wars universe, we know who is human and who is a droid, and so we have the opportunity to ask a more subtle question: if (and when and why) non-humans are worthy of moral consideration.
Is it when they demonstrate at least some rudimentary kind of emotion, even if only through beams and beeps (R2-D2)? When they use language to express emotions like fear and concern (C3PO)? When they develop relationships with human beings, especially relationships that change over time (Rogue One’s K2SO)? Though no Star Wars movie has done more than Solo: A Star Wars Story to raise these questions, none has done less to advance worthwhile answers.
When Solo was released last year, critics bemoaned the movie’s mediocrity but championed its one saving grace: L3-37, the funny, brash droid and first mate to Han’s partner-in-crime pilot, Lando Calrissian. Played by the excellent Phoebe Waller-Bridge, L3 is the first female-voiced droid in the Star Wars universe, and she is very vocal about her politics: droids have rights, and those rights are being violated. She is given plenty of droid rights one-liners to shout, but they all land as punchlines; Lando, her closest friend, more than once mocks her outrage over the indignities of droid servitude; and when L3 eventually liberates some of her fellow droids, it’s a distraction to save Han and Lando, not an attempt at political change.
And yet, praise for L3’s revolutionary spirit was nearly unanimous. From the Detroit Free Press to Vulture to IndieWire, she was hailed as “incandescent,” “one of the best Star Wars characters ever,” and a “revolutionary queen.” The Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber called her “a robot revolutionary… sowing dissent among servants.”
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qj139dE7tFI">But they were all of them deceived</a>. Critics have confused Solo’s explicit treatment of this issue for serious treatment of it. L3’s presence is the film equivalent of Instagramming a selfie wearing a t-shirt that says “FEMINIST” in imitation-lipstick font. Shouting “droid rights!” tells us exactly nothing about those rights, or the conditions that might make such an utterance necessary.
¤
The droids of Star Wars are a true underclass. Though they are called droids (short for “androids”), the word “robot” would be more accurate. Coined in the early 20th century by Czech playwright Karel Čapek, “robot” comes from robota, meaning forced labor or drudgery. Robots do the work that is too dangerous, too tedious, or too dirty for humans to stomach. They are enslaved, tortured, and beaten — “deactivated” if they become too much trouble.
We first meet L3 outside a droid cage fight. “We are sentient!” she screams in earnest, as she rattles the cage. The man who owns the fighters confronts her, things get physical, and Lando has to intervene. “L3! Let go of the mean man’s face.” She relents, but bickers with Lando all the way to their ship, the Millennium Falcon. Lando tells Han quietly, “I actually would have her memory wiped, but she’s got the best damn navigational database in the galaxy.”
What about this dynamic is revolutionary, or for that matter even original? A man who says he’d rid himself of a nagging woman concerned for her “rights,” if only she weren’t so immensely useful to him? Lando adds, loud enough for L3 to hear: “Could use a fresh coat of paint, though!”
“Landonis” — ah, she likes to use his full name when she scolds him — “you do not want to press that button with me!”
L3 being Star Wars’ first female droid is not at all incidental here; it’s central to the way the character is pitched for laughs. Critics used words like “feisty” and “sass” when writing about her. This isn’t how we describe people we take seriously. These are words we use to downplay the rage and radicalism of women, to make them seem sweet and manageable enough to fit our understanding of femininity.
An alternative to declawing female activists by sweetening them is doing so by sexualizing them. Besides having Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s voice, L3-37’s physicality (also created by Waller-Bridge, in motion-capture) has a definite tall, powerful, sexy femaleness, and the movie hardly tries to hide that. After the droid cage fight, the fighters’ owner yells to L3, “I’ll flip your switch!” She replies, “good luck finding it.”
David Ehrlich wrote in IndieWire that “The first thing we notice is her height, which she wears kind of unnaturally — like a low-rider that’s been jacked up on a massive set of rims.” Here, a male critic attempts to circumvent sexualizing a female character — by comparing her to a car. Kornhaber hedges less: “her tall silhouette, it must be said, has noticeable hips.” It must be said.
Her sexiness wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, if it were not part of the movie’s broader failure to take its women seriously. Despite having a handful of Strong Female Characters, Solo barely <a href="https://bechdeltest.com/view/8246/solo:_a_star_wars_story/">scrapes by with a pass</a> on the Bechdel Test. And one of the SFCs, played by Thandie Newton, makes it no more than 21 minutes — if you round up — before sacrificing herself for a man.
Later in the movie, as Lando leaves the cockpit, he asks L3 if she needs anything. “Equal rights?” she suggests. Lando pauses, rolls his eyes, and walks away.
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In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth of the Potter books, Hermione Granger decides to add to her long list of academic and extracurricular commitments (so intense it literally requires time travel) the abolition of house-elf enslavement in the wizarding world. House-elves are the sentient property of certain wizarding families, unless or until their owners are moved to free them by offering their house-elf a clothing item. Hermione declares the treatment of house-elves cruel and immoral, and announces the establishment of the Society for the Protection of Elfish Welfare. Harry is uncomfortable, Ron laughs, and readers do, too — I mean, she’s named it S.P.E.W.
But we also suspect that Hermione is right — she is the smartest of the group, after all. We encounter the plight of the house-elves two books earlier, in Chamber of Secrets. Dobby the house-elf reluctantly serves Lucius Malfoy, a man who is not only malevolent but deeply anxious that others recognize his evil credentials. When Dobby makes a mistake, he is beaten by Lucius, or pre-emptively punishes himself by slamming his fingers in an oven door.
After witnessing this horror for much of the school year, twelve-year-old Harry has the decency to free the elf in the book’s conclusion. He surreptitiously slips a sock into a book he knows Lucius will be too lazy to carry, Lucius shoves it into Dobby’s hands, and Dobby is therefore free.
With S.P.E.W., Rowling has set us up. We laugh with Ron, as we often laugh in life at those who earnestly champion legitimate causes. We roll our eyes at those who probe our moral blind spots, which restrain our compassion to allow us to charge ahead with our daily lives in an unjust world. It is much easier to laugh with Lando at L3’s quest for rights than it is to think she might be right, and about what that might mean for the Star Wars universe — and our own.
Dobby rather problematically goes on to serve Harry and his friends loyally, to his death, in the war to come — but we have seen the horror that plagued him before. His death is also taken seriously. It’s the turning point of the seventh book, and the dramatic climax of the penultimate movie.
There is a moment where it seems Solo’s writers may have set us up as well. Another female character, Qi’ra, barely restrains laughter while L3 explains her relationship with Lando near the middle of the movie. He’s in love with her, she says, but she’s not sure she feels the same way. Qi’ra’s barely restrained laughter in response suggests it’s funny, but it might also be true. When L3 lies dying in Lando’s arms, it seems like the moment of reckoning with our laughter has come.
It hasn’t. L3’s death is swift, its consequences minimal. Lando sheds a tear or two and moves on. We are left to conclude, I suppose, that the scene with Qi’ra was only a joke — the punchline being that this robot thought she was worthy of love and equality, and merely imagined the relationship, as we sentimental women are wont to do.
Not to worry, though — her death does not deprive her male companions of that precious mapping database. It is, as Kornhaber explains, “uploaded to the Millennium Falcon’s computer… a fate that nearly suggests a droid has a soul — and it definitely says that the soul of Solo is this robot.” Kornhaber may be right that the movie’s writers hoped her database-upload would read as a worthwhile afterlife. But offering up her geographic data and becoming part of a ship that will take moderately sexist commands from Han Solo for the next few decades? Hardly sounds like an activist’s version of droid heaven.
Before her death L3 does, as critics emphasized, start a rebellion of sorts. Han, Lando, L3, and their crew head to a mining camp to secure some goods for a crime lord. While at a control panel, L3’s way is blocked by a small droid hampered by a restraining bolt, used by humans to keep their droids obedient.
“Barbaric,” she mutters, removing the bolt. “Congratulations! You’re liberated,” L3 jokes (which we are apparently supposed to accept as consistent with screaming herself hoarse earlier trying to free droid cage fighters). Some beeps ensue — the other droid is puzzled, asking her what to do. (How funny! If we did free our [droid] slaves, they wouldn’t even know what to do with themselves.) “I don’t know,” she replies, “free your brothers and sisters or something.”
Compare this with Chewbacca, who at the same time is in the mine below with Han, fighting their way to acquire the coaxium. He sees his Wookiee brethren in chains, being beaten, and cannot bring himself to leave. He abandons the mission, takes up arms, and turns to fight for his people.
As the crew runs back to their ship, L3 pumps her fist into the air, shouting “Rebelliooon!” It’s not a revolution; it’s a lark. Besides, this is a prequel. We know the fight for droid rights is going nowhere in a galaxy far, far away.
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The mechanisms of oppression are simple. One group of people has power over another, whether they are divided by nationality, race, class, gender, sexuality, or species. Those in power slowly, systematically lock the other group out of any possibility of overcoming their subjugation. Soon enough, the powerful — and even some of the powerless — decide that this is the world’s natural (see: right) hierarchy: those who have been subjugated are not capable of more, and therefore ought to remain subjugated.
Not all science fiction needs to challenge oppression or strive to answer humanity’s deepest questions. That’s fine; give us a cute non-speaking droid like The Last Jedi’s BB-8 and send us on our way. But for Solo to put L3-37 forward as revolutionary, and for viewers and critics to accept her as such, is a misuse of the power of speculative fiction. The movie signals its virtue with L3’s dialogue, but continues to remind us that it’s just for fun. Solo’s jokes are sobering, a reminder that even when our culture appears awakened to injustice, we often prefer to deactivate our activists before they present too much of a challenge, too great a demand for change.
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L3-37 and the Droid Rights Charade

columbus

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/coming-age-columbus/"></div>Last year’s best coming-of-age film, the deftly shot and subtly scripted Columbus, was released to little fanfare last fall despite near-universal critical acclaim. The film sidesteps well-trodden plot devices and suggestive music to instead offer a window that gently, steadily opens onto the inner lives of its characters.
Columbus is the debut feature of writer and director Kogonada, previously known for his video essays centered on other filmmakers’ visual and thematic motifs, like “Linklater // On Cinema and Time,” “Mirrors of Bergman,” and “Ozu // Passageways.” In Columbus, Kogonada makes good use of his studies in film, delicately balancing a story of new friendships and old wounds with breathtaking visuals and philosophical reflection.
Though press coverage and award nominations lauded Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird as the year’s most original coming-of-age film, Columbus captures an even more distinctive and unworn experience of teenage life. Like Lady Bird, Columbus tells the story of a girl approaching adulthood while dealing with a difficult mother. But while Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan) and most characters coming of age try desperately to escape their families, their houses, and their hometowns, 19-year-old Casey (Haley Lu Richardson) is insistent about remaining with her mother (Michelle Forbes) in Columbus, Indiana. “I like Columbus… I do,” she tells a childhood friend who asks when Casey will move somewhere, anywhere else. “I love it,” she tells a family friend about her mundane job at the public library.
This begs the question: why doesn’t Casey, who is intelligent, curious, and capable, long to escape like her contemporaries? Columbus is a sleepy town, especially as represented in the film’s quiet soundscape, scored by Hammock, and its carefully framed shots in which the camera almost never moves. Casey’s most important reason for staying is not revealed until later in the film, but the town’s primary asset does happen to be Casey’s primary interest — modernist architecture.
Casey is an amateur expert on the town’s wealth of modernist exemplars and has attended nearly every visiting professor’s lectures about them. She planned to hear a lecture by a professor visiting from Korea, but after he collapses in the film’s opening scene Casey meets the professor’s son Jin instead. Jin (John Cho), a translator living in Seoul, has reluctantly flown in to be with his comatose father. Jin is tense and guarded, but when Casey approaches him across a fence and asks about his father, the two strike up a cautious friendship. The camera moves for the first time in the film as it follows Casey and Jin walking the fence line together.
Throughout their long talks and visits to Casey’s favorite buildings, both characters’ stories begin to unfold. So many dramas hinge on explosive moments or big breakdowns — an angry boss swiping everything off his desk onto the floor in a rage, a sad woman shown in close-up telling her most tragic story, a declaration of love shouted up to the beloved’s window — but these things rarely happen in life. In our real lives, even when we are suffering, most of us fight hard to maintain some kind of functioning exterior, to go to work, make dinner for our families, show up at social events. Columbus does not live in the explosive drama, but in this subtle struggle between the exterior and the interior.
Most of the emotional moments in the film are not looked at directly; instead, they are reflected or deflected. Early in the film, Casey begins a tour guide-style rundown of facts about a modernist bank she and Jin are standing outside. Jin asks her to stop, to tell him instead what it was about the building that moved her when she first saw it. She considers this for a moment, and the shot shifts. We then watch through the glass from inside the bank as Casey responds, her answer kept silent. Later in the film, a tense scene between Jin and Eleanor is seen entirely in a mirror. Other scenes are viewed from behind a door, or through a doorway.
The dialogue is never overly expository. The characters deflect like the camera and do not, cannot, linger too long on their own emotions. Finally beginning to open up about her mother’s drug addiction, Casey abruptly cuts off Jin’s questions. “I don’t really want to talk about it. I just wanted you to see this building.”
One night, Casey’s mom does not come home. To dull her anxiety, Casey drags Jin out to look at another building, and he can tell she’s upset. When Casey alludes to meth in their conversation, Jin asks if Casey struggled with an addiction to it. Casey says no, and Jin tries again. “Your mother? Did she do meth?”
Casey repeats the question a few times, laughing at how it sounds out loud, before Jin asks again. “It was really hard for a long time,” she finally answers, barely holding back tears. “We sort of hit bottom before my mom was willing to do anything… I’d rather not talk about it.” She wipes her cheeks and up comes the glass, the mirror, the façade — this time with words instead of camerawork. “I met Deborah Berke last year,” she tells Jin through an effortful smile.
Berke, an architect and professor at Yale, even offered Casey a sort of job opportunity. Jin, in disbelief, asks why Casey did not accept the offer. “I really think I should stay with my mom. She’s doing really well, we’re happy… I just think I should stay here.”
Compare this with the eponymous character in Gerwig’s Lady Bird, who throws herself from her mother’s car during an argument in the film’s opening scene after announcing, “I hate California…I want to go where culture is, like New York.” Their contrasting ambitions may merely be the result of Casey and Lady Bird being different people contending with differently difficult mothers. Casey’s perspective is unexpected, though, while Lady Bird’s outburst is part of a well-worn script.
Columbus is an exercise in restraint and contrast. The movie’s rigid lines make every curve stand out, the places where the inhabitants do not quite fit the boundaries of their world — Casey’s curly hair, the imperfections of a parsnip she peels while making dinner, the red flowers out of focus behind her as she stares at a beautiful building.
The emotional restraint throughout the movie is another kind of boundary-making, with both Casey and Jin working hard, as adults do, to maintain the normalcy of their lives. Against Kogonada’s motionless visual landscape and the gentle score by Hammock, small moments of fighting back tears or reaching out to touch someone loom large. Richardson is particularly excellent at conveying the sense that we are just seeing the surface of something bigger and deeper underneath.
The film is as often beautiful for what it is not as for what it is. At almost every turning point in the plot, it is easy to imagine the path that most other movies would take. Columbus always turns another direction.
The typical female coming-of-age story has a number of key plot points, which Lady Bird hits without fail: one difficult parent and one understanding parent, a rebellion that lands the character in mild trouble, abandonment of a long-time friend in favor of a newer, more popular friend who turns out to be shallow, a cool teacher’s unsolicited wisdom, disappointing sexual misadventures, the realization that home might be just as good a place as anywhere else, and a subsequent profession of love for the protagonist’s old friends, family, and hometown. The heroine ultimately moves forward, but keeps the life she formerly renounced close to her heart.
Columbus overturns all of these conventions, in large part because the narrative is rooted in a very different premise. Casey’s challenge in becoming an adult is not to learn the value of her home and her family, but to learn that it is alright to move on and to do something just for herself. Young women’s arrival to adulthood is often signaled by sexuality or rebellion, but what gives Casey her maturity is her focus and seriousness, earned through years of bearing responsibilities only adults should carry. She has learned to carry them well, finding a sober satisfaction in caregiving as her purpose, but her youth shines through in her yearning — her passionate love of architecture, her dreams of college, and the moments when she cannot hold back tears.
Columbus also sidesteps the thankfully now-passé fantasy of the manic pixie dream girl and the sadly still-very-real fantasy of older men and younger women in which a stiff, usually slightly older man, having lost his enthusiasm for life, meets a young, vivacious woman who changes his perspective on the world and rejuvenates him. When Jin and Casey first meet, our moviegoing radar immediately detects this dynamic as a possibility. But Jin and Casey never become romantically involved and, although Jin is excited by Casey’s excitement about architecture and seems relieved to connect with another human being, there is no major awakening or change of heart for him. It turns out he is also wrapped up — in an even further subversion of the dream-girl trope — in lingering feelings from his youth for an older woman named Eleanor. (Eleanor, played by Parker Posey, is Jin’s father’s assistant.)
Jin’s emotional restraint can sometimes feel overdone. His stiffness makes his flashes of catharsis more jarring, emerging less gradually than Casey’s. There are moments, too, when his questions seem designed solely to give us insight into Casey’s psyche. In a storytelling tradition where women often exist primarily to aid a man’s self-discovery, though, this reversal almost comes as a relief.
Neither Casey nor Lady Bird has the neat, cathartic reconciliation with her mother that coming-of-age films have trained us to expect. Lady Bird does end with a confession of love from Lady Bird to her exceptionally critical mother, but her mother does not reply, and there is no confirmation that their relationship is healed. Casey never confronts her mother about her past or present mistakes. In their last scene together, her mother says only that she is so sorry that they never traveled together. A tear pools on the bridge of her mother’s nose as they lie curled up together on Casey’s bed.
A few moments in Columbus offer themselves as a possible thesis. In one, Casey’s coworker at the library, Gabe (Rory Culkin), tells her about an obscure book he’s been reading on contemporary society’s crisis of interest. “The question is,” Gabe says, “are we losing interest in everyday life?”
Later, Jin tries to encourage Casey to pursue architecture, to leave Columbus behind. “You could do a lot better,” he says forcefully.
“Than what?” She shoots back. “Than taking care of my mom?”
The truth is, although Casey does eventually leave when Eleanor offers her a job, coming of age is not as simple as breaking away from one’s family, or falling in love, or choosing one’s career. Coming of age is also about accepting life’s slowness, life’s everydayness, life’s obligations. In Columbus, it’s about making a compromise between vulnerability and distance, between lines and curves, between standing still and moving forward.
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Coming of Age in Columbus

Coming of Age in Columbus

K. Aleah Papes is a New York-based writer and editor focused on culture and agriculture. Find her on Twitter at @uh_lee_uh_p.