There’s an article on the AV Club right now about how Andy Serkis didn’t know who Snoke was while making the Star Wars sequels. Which doesn’t really feel like as much of a revelation as it sounds like — sometimes the cast and crew know more than what’s revealed in the piece/on the script, sometimes what’s there is all that’s there1. But that the mystery around who Snoke is warrants a headline a decade after The Force Awakens was released2 speaks to a deeper weirdness around media and how we, as a media-consuming populace, interact with it.
Palpatine is awfully amorphous in the original Star Wars trilogy. The name ‘Palpatine’ isn’t even said on screen at all! All that we know through the movies, particularly Jedi, is that he’s the leader of the evil Empire, a master of the Dark Side, and the guy that Darth Vader reports to. How did he become the Emperor? Why can he shoot lighting from his hands? Why’s he look so old and weird? None of that’s answered — and none of that is really important. For the story, Palpatine is there, he’s the ultimate evil, it is his corruption that Luke Skywalker must overcome if he is able to save his father. He is a mythic figure in a mythic story.
Years of lore and an Expanded Universe that I adore filled in all those gaps around who Palpatine was. The prequels showed his rise to power and soon enough, the Emperor had a veritable biography. And not just the Emperor, either. Everyone from the Ewok Leia meets on Endor (Wicket W. Warrick) to the cool looking alien sitting to Mace Windu’s left on the Jedi Council (Plo Koon, who’s a Kel Dor) got impressive backstories and lore. Just about every inch of Star Wars lore was covered.
So when Snoke appears in The Force Awakens of course there’s the question of who’s this guy, where’d he come from, what’s going on. And while I will admit that, yes, there are a lot of questions about Snoke for a Star Wars nerd like me (Where did he come from? Did he know Palpatine? If he was just chilling in the Unknown Regions, why is he showing up now?), those questions aren’t super relevant to the story at hand. He’s the bad guy, the corruptor of Kylo Ren.
There’s been this trend to watch everything like it’s Lost, where any unknown is a mystery to be uncovered. Sometimes, it’s fair! Game of Thrones peppered its politicking and drama with questions of Jon Snow’s parentage and what the White Walkers were. But then, perhaps in response, Rings of Power spent so much of its first season pouring energy into building up the mystery of where was Sauron, who was the Stranger, and who was Adar that any actual character or narrative fell by the wayside (the rationale probably being that the mystery would keep viewers tuning in). There are a contingent of fans who treat The Pitt like a mystery that needs to be solved instead of a medical drama. Overanalyze, theorize, get mad when something’s not explained. Repeat.
I am loathe to describe this attitude as watching movies wrong — the beautiful thing about art is three people can look at the same thing and have five different views. But I do think something is lost when the focus on a piece of media becomes the lore and mystery and not the actual, y’know, story and plot. The Rise of Skywalker didn’t work for me not because Palpatine’s (somehow) returning was unexplained but because so much of the movie’s characterization and plot felt disjointed from what had come before and narratively uninteresting. Conversely, Snoke’s role in The Force Awakens and (especially) The Last Jedi works for me because he fits into the narrative exactly where and how he needs to be. This blog should make it clear that I’m someone who loves the minutiae of plot and lore and Star Wars, but sometimes, sometimes it’s better to just enjoy it for what it is.
Essays, Not Rants! 