Spoiler warning for Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Please proceed accordingly!
The first time I watched Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the 8th film in the Skywalker Saga, I was in the middle of the first of several major low points induced by my time as a PhD student. The Friday it was released, I tiptoed quietly out of my office and headed towards the movie theater to catch the first showing of the day, desperate for the kind of hope that Star Wars had always provided for me. I was ready to see good triumph over evil, and to ride that high through all the work I had to do.
Several hours later I walked back to my desk, stared at the unending torrent of tasks I’d tried to leave behind, and sobbed in despair. (Fortunately, the lab was empty.) I thought of Luke, whose mistakes propagated the destructive cycle of failure that haunts the Jedi and left him a depressed and deeply lonely man. I thought of Leia, who, instead of stepping back to a well-deserved rest, was doomed to devote her entire life to fighting the relentless tide of fascism, without any of her loved ones beside her. Trapped in my despair about my own life, I the only thing I could see in their stories was tragedy. If Luke Skywalker could fail so utterly, who was I in the face of my own insurmountable task? Did my struggle have any meaning at all, or was I doomed to watch all my potential crumble under the weight of my own inability to live up to it?
The first lesson here: The Last Jedi is not necessarily a movie you should watch if you’re a huge Star Wars fan in the middle of a serious mental health crisis. But the second lesson here is: maybe it is, actually. Maybe, like me, you should take a few deep breaths, go to sleep, maybe take a shower, then go see it again. When I returned to the theater, armed with pockets full of tissues and a cautiously open mind, the world of Star Wars unfurled for me once more. The Last Jedi couldn’t give me blind faith or the comfort of easy answers; instead, it offered me hard-won hope, the kind that’s stored in gritted teeth and gripping hands. I didn’t understand it the first time, but that was the hope I needed. That was the mindset that would see me through.
The Last Jedi told me: fighting for what you believe in is going to be hard. If you let it, it will consume you. And sometimes, just standing and keeping your head up will be the hardest thing you do.
Image via Lucasfilm
There is a myth surrounding getting a PhD that centers on the poor, underappreciated graduate student. Here “poor” can be viewed in both the financial sense, as we are often pushed below the poverty line, and in the sense of being rather pathetic, as we are also often driven to misery in the pursuit of knowledge so esoteric that our lives are deemed both a wonder and waste. Within the academy, we are told that our pain is a kind of nobility, that in living in a state of financial and psychological uncertainty shows our dedication to our craft and may, somehow, aid us in our search for the profound.
Like many, I suffered deeply during graduate school, and despite what I repeated to myself at the time, there was nothing noble nor profound about it.
It took many years for me to realize several important truths: first, that this myth of the graduate student is told for a purpose, and that purpose is to make graduate students accept being underpaid and overworked so they do not question their perpetuation of academia’s deeply hierarchical system, and do not imagine or agitate for something better. Second, that I could clearly map how internalizing this myth had almost ruined me; my suffering did not make me a better scientist, despite the constant reinforcement that somehow, somewhere, my pain would metamorphose into brilliance like graphite turning into diamond. And third, that, as much as it felt like I was being ground under a system with roots deeper than the bedrock, I could dream of something better. I could demand something better.
In December 2017, when I walked into The Last Jedi for the first time, I had not yet made these realizations. I was not yet capable of questioning the system that was dismantling me, even as it outsourced that labor and demanded that I do the dismantling myself. I was asked to give up my nights, and then my weekends, for the pursuit of science. And I did. I was tied to a project I struggled to understand, and had no idea what to do about it other than the vague notion that more hours could somehow substitute for my lack of guidance. I was told that a truly smart graduate student, someone really destined for greatness, did not need to be taught. I should not crave explanations or ask for assistance, because if I was smart enough and put in enough lonesome hours, I would either become a genius or reveal my own inherent lack of ability. Graduate school taught me that if I was unhappy as a PhD student, this was an indicator of my own failure to hack it in a system that otherwise produced Carl Sagans. I was terrified, and I felt deeply, deeply alone.
I then, of course, projected all of that onto The Last Jedi, which isn’t really very fair.
Image via Lucasfilm
Why did The Last Jedi hit me so hard that first time, and do so in all the wrong ways? Well, it’s a movie in which the heroes make a LOT of mistakes, and those mistakes cost them almost everything. Poe’s rash command choices leave a large portion of the Resistance fleet destroyed; Finn’s trust in the wrong man ruins their later evacuation; Luke chose fear over love in a critical moment and enabled a young boy’s descent into darkness with galactic implications. At the end of the movie, relentless casualties have reduced the Resistance to a handful of people, and Luke Skywalker is dead. There is no great battle where light triumphs over dark. Instead, the “bad guys” very clearly have the upper hand, and the “good guys” generally make their own situation worse, and must run away or face certain eradication.
That was my first interpretation of the movie, and in being laser-focused on the gravity of the heroes’ mistakes, it has some serious flaws. I’ll dig into those flaws in a bit (namely, I ignored how mistakes serve to drive the characters’ arcs and their positive growth, as well as the ultimately hopeful ending of the film). But that was my initial reading, and it affected me deeply, to the point where, hours later, I was sobbing at my desk while staring at my uncompleted code. Remember: my experiences in graduate school had taught me that my unhappiness was a sign of failure. I had reached a point where my ever-deepening sense of failure just made me more and more unhappy, and my only hope was that at the end of this spiral some ambiguous “future me” would emerge as a fully-formed, hyper-competent scientific mastermind.
So naturally, Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi initially devastated me.
I was so tied to the idea that paying my dues in misery would lead to either my great success or my inevitable demise that I had written Luke’s story for him. He had put in the work (read: blowing up two Death Stars, inciting his father’s redemption)! Surely, he had come out the other side an accomplished Jedi with the wisdom and power to, if not singlehandedly fix the galaxy’s problems, then quite handily nudge them along. I expected an evolution of the cool and collected Luke we met in Return of the Jedi, who had grown still stronger in his mastery of the Force. I was ready to find comfort in Luke, to identify with him and let him make me feel powerful, just as previous Star Wars movies had done.
Instead, Luke Skywalker was none of those things. At the beginning of The Last Jedi, he is in no position to live up to his own legend. Instead, he is ossified, isolated by his own fear and pain until he is hardly recognizable. Instead of finding comfort in his heroism, I was haunted by his cynicism and the magnitude of his downfall. I so badly needed Luke to have grown into the perfect Jedi to validate my hope that I would become the perfect scientist. As I came to the horrifying realization that I was much closer to the Luke of The Last Jedi than the Luke I’d made up in my head, I began to dwell with increasing dismay on the possibility that maybe all my long nights in the lab were not the stacking of bricks that would build my ascent but were instead…. meaningless. Worse, as I thought more broadly about how the Resistance came to ruin, I became convinced that, given the disparity between what I was capable of and what academia demanded, any mistake I had could wreck everything I’d worked for. What if I dedicated my entire life to science, escalating my work hours and excising every hobby and bit of joy, and instead of becoming superhuman, I was left bitter, broken-down, and alone?
The Last Jedi, and Luke Skywalker’s misery in particular, forced me to really, truly face the magnitude of the slow-burning existential crisis I had been studiously ignoring. And even though Luke finds his own peace at the end of his story, a fact which I did eventually realize after a torrent of tears and a good night’s sleep, I was no closer to knowing how to find any peace in mine.
Image via Lucasfilm
Watching The Last Jedi a second time and rethinking my interpretation of it did not magically fix my life’s problems, which were vast, structural in nature, and nearly debilitating. It did, however, give me a critical tool, one that I held close to my chest for the remaining five years that it took for me to gut out my degree. It has to do with the conception of hope, and is something I found upon taking a closer look at the female characters in the movie. Leia, Holdo, Rey, and Rose each exhibit a facet of the kind hope that is rarely shown in movies, let alone Star Wars movies, and it is because things become so dire — a fact which initially agonized me — that they are allowed to do so.
In conventional storytelling, hope has a clear and consistent narrative role; that is, it manifests in the heroes’ refusal to give up, their drive to keep fighting and to not let the “bad guys” win. It is Gandalf returning at dawn on the third day. It is the Avengers uniting one last time to fight Thanos. Interestingly, this kind of approach to story resolution appears in The Last Jedi as Poe’s ill-conceived plan that he hatches with Finn and Rose — the conviction that a dramatic, risky move will completely turn the tides and save the day. The difference, of course, is that the plan fails, and even undermines the Resistance’s successful evacuation as designed by Holdo. The Last Jedi is not interested in self-consuming sacrifice, which it presents as both performative and dangerous and very clearly makes things worse. We are told to look elsewhere for real solutions to the kind of problems facing the Resistance.
Underneath all the complexities of set dressing and scene changes, what the movie offers in its place is very simple: love. Love, deep and abiding, produces the kind of hope that can create as well as destroy. Rose must save Finn from himself, because it is more critical for the Resistance to survive than the First Order to fall. Holdo’s sacrifice is necessary to shield the Resistance retreat, not just to cripple the First Order’s fleet. When Rey, terrified of her own insignificance, realizes that she is enough exactly as she is, the strength of her newfound convictions enables her to literally move mountains. And Leia is once again able to look beyond all she has lost and accept the sacrifices that were made to give her, and the remainder of the Resistance, the ability to live on. Their survival, and the hope that it represents, is a victory greater than any busted First Order ship.
That concept is what has ultimately stuck with me, and what I revisit in my darkest moments: that hope is not the wish that someone would save the day, but a choice, consciously made, to keep surviving. That there is more meaning in living long enough to help build a brighter future than dying for the sake of the fight. I had convinced myself that giving up everything I loved for the sake of science was the noble sacrifice for my bright future. I began to realize that instead, it reflected my acceptance of a system that would burn me until I turned to ash. Maybe I wasn’t a predestined failure because I was struggling; maybe, just like Rey, I had everything it took to succeed, and the system had failed me. Maybe, if I stayed alive long enough to make it to the other side, I could help reject academia and build something better.
Maybe my own survival was worth far, far more than any code I could ever write.
Image via Lucasfilm
The Last Jedi is not interested in providing comfort; it’s here to tell a good story, and good stories are often not particularly comfortable, because they are designed to make you think. I went into The Last Jedi hoping I would find a movie that made me feel powerful, because that was what I thought I needed. Instead, it ripped away my unraveling worldview and in so doing, forced me to build a better one. This isn’t to say that it’s a masterpiece. It’s a movie, and a pretty good one, but it probably didn’t upend most people’s lives the way it did mine.
Fortunately for me, the unique confluence of the movie’s themes and my dire situation led me to the sudden, critical realization that, sooner or later, I would run out of parts of myself to sacrifice at the altar of my dreams. And as I was forced to stop and reevaluate, I could finally see two things: first, that the path I was on was taking me to a cold, dark place, and second, that I could choose to find a different path. It would be scary, and probably difficult, but I could hold tight to myself and my convictions as best I could, while still chasing after the PhD.
Graduate school did not miraculously become easier. In the ensuing five years I would hit several similar dark patches where I couldn’t see any kind of light. But somehow, I never forgot that my survival was more important, at any cost, than anything that anyone ever asked of me. I couldn’t let go of that conviction, even if I couldn’t remember why I had it. So, in some ways, The Last Jedi really did help me get my PhD, and I owe it quite a lot for that.
After all, as Leia says, “Hope is like the sun. If you only believe in it when you can see it, you’ll never make it through the night.”
Image via Lucasfilm