Resisting Andor

I've got a bad feeling about this

In a 1969 essay for Cahiers du Cinema, Jean-Luc Comolli and Paul Narboni took stock of the magazine’s radical mission and proposed a set of categories for evaluating the relationship of films to capitalist ideology. Within this essay, titled “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism”, the authors asserted that “every film is political … The cinema is all the more thoroughly and completely determined because unlike other arts or ideological systems its very manufacture mobilizes powerful economic forces …” They proposed that Cahiers concern itself primarily with categories B and C, films that attack the dominant ideology on the levels of form and subject. Separate buckets included category A, films “imbued through and through with the dominant ideology and pure and unadulterated form,” and category D, films “which have an explicitly political content … but which do not effectively criticize the ideological system in which they are embedded because they unquestioningly adopt its language and its imagery.”

Comolli and Narboni’s categories are a useful starting point for debates about ideology in film. We live in a time when reactionaries frequently argue that Hollywood films and television are too ideologically biased — although not in favor of capitalism per se, but in favor of so-called multicultural progressivism. Critics who study genre know that ideology and content rarely intertwine seamlessly. Another seminal essay, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur” published in 1977 by the English-Canadian critic Robin Wood, presented a list of 12 components or values that the Hollywood cinema advanced, concluding that “[the list] presents an ideology that, far from being monolithic, is inherently riddled with hopeless contradictions and unresolvable tensions.”

An interesting thought experiment at this point might be to examine a recent work that belongs totally to the Hollywood system — the biggest film studio of the 21st century, Disney, producing a series based on one of its tentpole intellectual properties, the Star Wars universe — which foregrounds explicitly political subject matter. Comolli and Narboni might well have included under category D the new Disney+ series Andor, which follows the origin story of Diego Luna’s Rebel superspy Cassian Andor from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The series was conceived by Tony Gilroy, a venerable Hollywood hack who cut his teeth on scripts for Dolores Claiborne and The Devil’s Advocate before stepping behind the camera for 2007’s Michael Clayton. His father Frank was a veteran writer and director who served as president of the Dramatists Guild, and in interviews Tony has the swaggering demeanor of someone who was raised to reach the top of his profession. Unfortunately for him, this now means franchise gigs, and after a profitable period stewarding the Bourne series he came aboard Rogue One to take over the job from original director Gareth Edwards.

Gilroy has been unapologetic about his lack of interest in Star Wars, which motivated his more grounded approach to Andor, and with good reason. Any thinking viewer in 2022 is mindful of the attention economy and the glut of IP-based entertainment flooding the market. A new Star Wars or MCU series arriving every few weeks like clockwork ensures that people are always talking about these franchises, and not about any other kind of cinema that doesn’t pander to a fanbase. Opting out feels like the sensible thing to do. But I have to conclude that what Gilroy and his collaborators have attempted here merits engagement, and as much as I endorse withdrawing from the content stream, critics should not be too stubborn to wade back into these waters when an opportunity presents itself.

Andor, Gilroy says, will run for two seasons that cover a five year period leading up to the events of Rogue One. The first season contains twelve episodes, divided roughly into “mini-arcs” with action climaxes arriving in episodes three, six, ten, and twelve. Gilroy has no experience with episodic TV as such — despite a “consulting producer” credit on the heavily serialized House of Cards — so the episodes preceding these climaxes have the abortive, fragmentary structure of a series designed to play like a movie for the small screen. The second and third arcs move Andor to new locations with their own specific trappings and set of expectations, bookended by his escape from and return to the industrial world he calls home, an outline which provides opportunities to shift between a few different generic modes.

1. The heist or men-on-a-mission genre

One of the indispensable influences on Andor is the World War II movie, in which Allies team up to carry out a mission against black-jacketed villains. In Andor’s second mini-arc, the plot moves to an occupied world called Aldhani, where a band of Rebels are plotting to steal the Imperial payroll with the help of a double agent. I was reminded irresistibly of Where Eagles Dare, and the underground elements also suggest Melville’s Army of Shadows. There are some discombobulating moments that result from the less-is-more worldbuilding: when the young revolutionary played by Alex Lawther relates his political manifesto to Andor, I tried to tease out what ideological priors he might be working with. Is there a Marx in this universe? A Fanon? Is this kid supposed to be Space Marx?

After some extended setup in which the characters get to know each other via a number of suspicious exchanges, the heist episode provides an opportunity for Gilroy to build in some of that trademarked Star Wars spectacle from the ground up. Entering the Imperial base in the guise of officers and under the cover of an indigenous festival involving a grand light show, the Rebels take hostages and execute their plan in military fashion. The inevitable complication posed by a guard who chases down small signs of alarm results in a shootout and escape in which Andor pilots a starship to safety while pursued by a TIE fighter, one of the few pieces of Star Wars iconography interspersed throughout the show. Here the thrill of space flight returns thanks to the gradual escalation of the stakes and the investment in the heist genre’s core principle: process.

2. The prison escape movie

After the Aldhani arc, Andor makes the shrewdest move of its narrative, having galactic fugitive Andor detained and arrested for seemingly no reason at all by a police droid who does not recognize him and shortly thereafter sentenced to a six-year prison term. This kind of maneuver deepens the viewer’s understanding of the nature of the Empire’s crimes, destabilizes expectations, and provides a convenient pretext to move into an entirely new location with its own genre to fulfill. The prison colony on Narkina 5 where Andor winds up looks like standard Space Jail material: Apple Store white, duo-chrome jumpsuits, electrified floors that can be switched on to subdue the inmates. But Gilroy and his writers — particularly Beau Willimon, who’s credited with each of the prison episodes — however, have studied the right influences in this genre, and the passages relating to the mechanisms of the prison and the eventual escape plan are the most absorbing in the series.

The scene in which Andor is shown the prison workshop, overseen by a gruff veteran played by Andy Serkis, and its gameified system of teams competing against each other to build the most giant widgets in exchange for meager rewards or to avoid torture, foregrounds the social engineering at play. This mini-arc also meaningfully recovers the prison genre’s relationship to photographed reality, which has been shorn away by recent entries like Escape Plan which depend upon a high-tech, CGI-inflected prison structure. Here the effects of this gulag are best felt in the faces of the actors, particularly an elderly inmate (Christopher Fairbanks) who rapidly declines under the demands of his sentence, which everyone silently acknowledges he will not live out as they continue to offer him encouragement. The eventual formulation and execution of an escape plan, which relies mostly on easily understandable technology and strategy, unites the inmates under the leadership of Serkis’s lifer, a rousing sequence nonetheless heavy on the inspirational score and monologues — maybe Serkis relished the chance to deliver one of the battle speeches from The Return of the King.

3. The espionage or political thriller

I’m sweeping this together in the same bucket as the guerrilla warfare elements that have drawn comparison to The Battle of Algiers, since I think they’re best discussed together. Andor’s involvement in Rebel activities arises from simple opportunity and desperation, after killing two Imperial officers in the opening sequence of the pilot. He takes the heist job at the suggestion of a Rebel spymaster named Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård), himself wanted and pursued under the codename Axis by an ambitious Imperial bureaucrat, Dedra Meero (Denise Gough). Eventually Meero’s pursuit of Axis leads her back to Andor’s home world, where the heightened Imperial presence and deaths of several citizens result in a public funeral that becomes a riot, seeming to prove the success of Rael’s accelerationist tactics.

This revolutionary narrative is the level on which I find Andor the least convincing. One of the arguments that has been advanced in the series’ favor is that it exposes a mass audience to revolutionary rhetoric, along with critiques of policing and mass incarceration. Because these supposed critiques exist in a fictional context that does not even adequately detail the specifics of its own construction, these elements are as ambiguous as ever in this franchise. Remember that the moniker of the anti-Trump “Resistance” was itself borrowed from 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and that Willimon, creator of Netflix’s House of Cards, was one of its most outspoken Hollywood representatives. But just as doctrinaire liberals and further-left viewers may read the Empire as analogous to the fascist creep in Western democracies or our own American police state, there’s nothing to prevent reactionary viewers from reading this brutal regime as, say, what’ll happen to good white folk when the Democrats get in.

The writers couch the Rebel struggle against the Empire in the same kind of libertarian bromides and sacred rhetoric that have littered Hollywood scripts since the first wave of anticommunist backlash. Freedom from oppression can only be a radical idea to the extent that the axes of oppression are defined, which is not the same thing as devising new forms of futuristic torture. What’s left unsaid isn’t the way that the oppressor brutalizes the oppressed, but how the oppressed are chosen, perhaps via social or racial caste, ideas the show can’t or won’t entertain. Andor makes some gestures toward colonial tropes in the Aldhani arc, and the Narkina 5 arc can be read as a critique of for-profit prisons — but also, conveniently, of Soviet gulags. Jedi, Sith, and the Force are never mentioned in the series, with good reason: the widespread awareness and acceptance of an order of magical warrior knights might wreck the guiding principle of Earthbound plausibility, or worse, raise doubts as to how this universe could develop so similarly to our own.

Gilroy’s disinterest in the trappings of Star Wars is both Andor’s singular asset and its defining weakness. Espionage narratives usually demand some geopolitical context, and the best ones are steeped in a deep knowledge of the trade and its particularities. Because Gilroy doesn’t care to investigate this universe, all the details get fudged, and he hews to recognizable Hollywood tropes, like the competitive bureaucracies and cosseted government insider circles found on the metropolitan world of Coruscant. The existential drain and moral oblivion of these environments are a favorite subject of Gilroy’s, so memorably explored in Michael Clayton, but also familiar terrain for contemporary TV writing. The skill with which characters like Meero are brought to life only heightens the sense that this story has been airdropped into its setting without care for the specifics. This vagueness is exactly what was meant by Comolli and Narboni’s description of category D: cinema that cannot mount an effective ideological critique due to its commercial form.

Andor works, often and well, as genre entertainment that repurposes some of the spectacle and scale of George Lucas’s creation to new effect. It is limited, seriously if not fatally, by a quality of reticence: Gilroy’s resistance to building out the screen universe in a way that might support the subject he has chosen. Star Wars — long characterized as space opera, not science fiction but a fusion of melodrama and action spectacle — was never built for intricate narratives of moral and political complexity, whatever inspiration Lucas may have drawn from the Vietnam zeitgeist. If it sounds silly to suggest that this fantastical, Disney-branded series develop a more detailed, speculative world that could engage with revolutionary thought — well, Gilroy obviously agrees, and he’ll soon move on to the next thing. On the other hand, it’s no sin to make something ideologically confused — practically every good Hollywood movie fits this category. Wood wrote in his essay that a critic should be “alive to the opposing pulls, the tensions, of one’s world,” and drawing out those tensions is what makes Andor worth watching and thinking about.