#javier grillo-marxuach
… though i am not currently at liberty to share the book-length memoir that precedes this, this is the final piece of the much larger whole and may be of interest to some…
EPILOGUE: A STAR WARS STORY
One of the many benefits of Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm is that a Star Wars prequel, sequel, or equal, can now be reliably counted on to hit the screens at the same time, every year, from now until… well, I imagine pretty much until long after I’ve died.
This is all very convenient for geeks like me because it is not only guaranteed entertainment, but also because it helps to mark the passage of time.
By the time Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was released in December of 2016, the controversy over Lexa’s death was enjoying a brief resurgence when “Thirteen” - either because of the death itself, or the way the series aggressively promoted itself to the LGBTQ+ audience prior to the death - showed up on a few end-of-the-year “worst of” lists. Trying to take this in stride, I took to retweeting the links to the “worst of” lists under the heading “Hey look! I made an end of the year list! Oh… wait”.
The life of a walking cautionary tale is not too awful if you manage to keep your sense of humor.
All of this was made only more bittersweet by my knowledge, - which I had to keep secret at the time - that the Xena reboot was not moving forward. After more than a year of work, I had reached an impasse with the co-creator of the original over the show’s tone and execution. So I resigned from the project and kept the news to myself in the name of being a good soldier - and keeping negative press away from the property - and privately grieved the loss that Lexa’s fans would never get to see my “apology”.
With richly-earned wariness, many fans of both The 100 and Xena assumed that my departure from the project was due to the network or studio blocking my stated goal of putting the romance between Xena and Gabrielle front and center in the reboot. Nothing could have been further from the truth: from jump street, NBC, Universal, and all the other involved parties, supported that part of my take on the characters.
On the day Rogue One opened, I took my niece to an early showing. She was visiting from college for my daughter’s first birthday. Over lunch before the screening, she confessed that that she had not “really” seen much Star Wars but knew enough about it due to its pop-cultural ubiquity that, hopefully, I wouldn’t have to explain too much of what was going on in this between-two-trilogies-prequel to her.
Hearing that put me in a reflective mood.
In 1977, in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico - in the middle-class circles in which I was raised - all things American were held as aspirational. American films were better than Spanish-language films from Spain and Mexico (I think I can count on one hand the number of Puerto Rican films I have seen), and subtitled American films were considered a superior viewing experience to dubbed films because fluency in the language of our colonial masters was a status symbol.
It was around this time that cable TV first appeared on the island, and being lucky enough to live in one of the select neighborhoods where the feed was available was a definite indicator of wealth and status.
Similarly, vacationing in - or sending your children to college to - the United States was a huge indicator of wealth and position. An American Higher Education was a boon that would handily prepare your offspring to return to the island and take their part in the ruling circles. And moving your entire family wholesale to the United States for some career opportunity with an American business concern?
That was like being selected by “The Claw” from Toy Story.
The United States I knew growing up was not the United States you probably knew. The United States I grew up knowing was the Bright Center of the Galaxy. It was a fantastic, glowing city made of equal parts history book hagiography and Hollywood invention.
It was the only place I wanted to be.
And, of course, the audible buzz of racial discrimination was every bit as much a persistent background noise of our Puerto Rican lives as it was in the continent. In our small island, this took the form of a subtle - sometimes not so subtle - ongoing discussion about the racial purity of your friends and neighbors. In a place where the Conquistadors intermixed freely with the slaves and natives, a value system had evolved in which the lighter the skin, the closer you were to the original masters from Mother Europe… or the current ones United States.
When I first saw Star Wars, it crystallized both my sense of vocation and my desire to come to the United States to fulfill that burning wish to tell stories at the highest levels of access to the broadest audience and technological sophistication. I suppose my colonial overlords did too good a job imprinting on me - or maybe I’m just genetically wired for Stockholm Syndrome - because the message I took from Star Wars was not “you’re not the same race as these heroes” but rather “you need to get out of this subjugated colony, just like Luke Skywalker”.
–
Thirty-nine years later, at the Arclight Theater in Hollywood - some two-thirds of the way into Rogue One: A Star Wars Story - I felt a strange sensation in my throat. It was a hot, cramping choke-hold: a powerful emotional response amassing somewhere inside of me.
It happened during a scene in which “Cassian Andor”, played by Diego Luna, and “Jyn Erso”, played by Felicity Jones, have a big, climactic argument about heroism, mission, and morality.
I stopped for a moment to process what I was feeling. The scene was perfectly fine on its own, but, in truth, I have seen its like a million times in a million other sci-fi and war movies.
Why was I reacting this way?
That’s when I realized that I was watching not just a film, but a Star Wars film, in which a Latino man with a discernible - and pronounced - accent was actually one of the two people in the climactic two-person scene about heroism, mission, and morality.
Because my skin is light, most people who see me just assume I’m “white”. Hell, upon first meeting me, my wife thought I was Jewish - and gay - but I digress. The one thing that invariably gave me away as “other” after my family’s move to the United States was my accent.
After being much mocked in my first year in the States, I worked tirelessly to mitigate that tell-tale sign of my ethnicity.
Eventually - through some lucky combination of hours spent trying to imitate Robin Williams in Mork & Mindy, sustained recitations of the Star Wars Story LP, and the natural plasticity of my pre-tween brain - my accent receded into the aural nimbus of the now-distant past. In truth, I can barely call my accent back at will anymore. When I try, it comes out as more of a stylized impersonation of a memory than something native to my being.
Imagine that: hating something of yourself so much that you bury it so deep that there’s days you can almost convince yourself it was never there in the first place.
At the ripe old age of forty-seven I thought I had achieved a fairly serene state of learned resignation to the depredations of American mainstream popular culture on minorities. I mean, considering the portrayal of people of color in the media I grew up watching, my heart would have exploded years ago if I experienced a paroxysm of rage every time I saw the Latino partner of a white cop get killed to show that the bad guy meant business… or if the bad guy who needed to show that he meant business by murdering the noble sacrificial black partner of the white cop was the grotesquely Latinoid gang-banger subaltern to an as-yet-unseen, puppet-mastering, white villain.
And, lest we kid ourselves, you can look at my IMDB page and make the case that - through my entire professional life - I have more than frequently been an enabler of those depredations. All that taken into account, I figured I had long ago made peace with the uncomfortable truth that - try as I might to make it happen for others in my current occupation - I had become pretty much immune to the revelation that it feels good to see yourself on the screen.
Turns out I’m not.
And I’m glad I know that now.
Whatever greatness or flaws Rogue One: A Star Wars Story may possess on its own, that one moment transported me. It gave me a glimpse of how much more Star Wars could have meant to me as a child (and, believe me, it’s hard to imagine it could have meant more) had it deigned to reflect the world a little more accurately. That one moment made me wonder how my life might have been different if forty years ago Star Wars had perhaps made me feel that I could have gone on my hero’s journey without regard to - and not in spite of - the sound of my true voice.
Representation matters.
