16. Some People Call Him a Space Cowboy
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16. Some People Call Him a Space Cowboy Kanan Jarrus, Outer Rim Justice, and the Legitimization of the Obama Doctrine Derek R. Sweet One would be hard pressed to refute the argument that the Star Wars universe stands as an exemplary model of cinematic bricolage. Cobbled together from a variety of popular cultural artifacts, the mélange that is the Star Wars space opera famously draws from 1950s serials, samurai epics, war films, and Westerns. Despite the mishmash of textual references that solidified into one of the most recognizable transmedia franchises of all time, Douglas Brode has argued that Star Wars, despite its technologized, futuristic aesthetic, is primarily a story about “cowboys in space.”1 In fact, the commonalities between the traditional Western and popular space opera seem so apparent to Will Wright that he positions Star Wars as “just another revision of the Western, the Western in intergalactic drag.”2 Even Lucas’s penchant for the films of Akira Kurosawa, the Japanese filmmaker known for his samurai epics, strengthens the case for reading Star Wars as a continuation of the Western filmic tradition. As Michael Kaminski argues, Kurosawa studied John Ford’s epic Westerns and incorporated Ford’s “long tracking shots, tension-driven editing, widescreen composition, and dynamic movement” into his own works.3 Though his admiration for the Western-influenced works of Kurosawa, as well as his own appreciation of Ford’s films, Lucas rehabilitates the Western mythos under a thin veneer of space opera.4 One of the more obvious manifestations of this Western mythos in the Star Wars pantheon is the Rebels character Kanan Jarrus. Nearly eight months before the October 2, 2014 premiere of Rebels on the Disney XD network, longtime Lucasfilm employee Dave Filoni (executive 1 Douglas Brode, “‘Cowboys in Space’: Star Wars and the Western Film,” in Myth, Media, and Culture in Star Wars: An Anthology, ed. Douglas Brode and Leah Deyneka (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2012), 1. 2 Will Wright, “The Empire Bites the Dust,” Social Text 6 (Fall 1982): 120. 3 Michael Kaminski, “Under the Influence of Akira Kurosawa: The Visual Style of George Lucas,” in Myth, Media, and Culture in Star Wars: An Anthology, ed. Douglas Brode and Leah Deyneka (The Scarecrow Press, 2012), 90. 4 For a discussion of the relationship between horse opera and space opera, and how the latter is derived from the former, see Brode, “Cowboys in Space,” 2. 242 STAR WARS AND THE HIstORY OF TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING producer and supervising director for the animated series) introduced Kanan Jarrus, a character who confirmed that some Jedi Knights survived Emperor Palpatine’s Order 66 and the ensuing Jedi purge in Revenge of the Sith. In a live-streaming video featured on StarWars.com, Filoni described Kanan as “the cowboy Jedi […] He’s a gunslinger that needs to put the gun away and pick up the sword again to fight for noble causes and selfless causes.”5 Kanan’s story, a narrative shifting back and forth from television series, to comic, to novel, marked Disney’s initial foray into a transmediated Star Wars universe. Important for this particular essay is the way Kanan’s transmedia representation reworks the familiar cowboy myth that is so intricately intertwined with US national identity and that intersects so strongly with contemporary foreign policy doctrines. Grounded in the familiar narratives and iconography of the mythic American west, yet presented via the postmodern pastiche of futuristic space opera, the Star Wars megatext—the story that unfolds across films, comic books, animated television series, and other media—simultaneously reinforces and reconfigures the broadly accepted social truths of rugged individualism, the hostile frontier, and gunslinger justice. Indeed, scholars of Star Wars frequently argue that the mythic Wild West ethos developed by the original trilogy also has political resonance. Alan Nadel, for example, draws parallels between Cold War geopolitics and intergalactic politics as he illustrates the ideological commonalities between Reagan-era foreign policy on the one hand and the fictional conflict between the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire on the other.6 My own analysis of The Clone Wars (2008- 2014) questions the black-and-white ethos of cowboy diplomacy and situates the animated series as an important cultural voice in ongoing wartime deliberations concerning just war theory, peace, torture, and drone warfare.7 In a similar fashion, I turn my attention in this chapter to transmedial cowboy-Jedi Kanan Jarrus to illustrate how the Star Wars saga continues to reinvigorate and reconceptualize the familiar Western mythos. I argue that the animated TV series challenges the notion of cowboy diplomacy while calling on audiences to embrace President Obama’s turn toward a 5 “Kanan, the Cowboy Jedi,” StarWars.com, accessed November 11, 2016, http://www.starwars. com/video/ star-wars-rebels-meet-kanan-the-cowboy-jedi. 6 Alan Nadel, “The Empire Strikes Out: Star Wars (IV, V, and VI) and the Advent of Reaganism,” in New American Canon: American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War, ed. Steven Belletto and Daniel Grausam (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 187-208. 7 Derek R. Sweet, Star Wars in the Public Square: The Clone Wars as Political Dialogue (Jef- ferson, NC: McFarland, 2015). SOME PEOPLE CALL HIM A SPACE COwbOY 243 supposedly more prudent, multilateral, and humanitarian approach to US foreign policy. Star Wars, Politics, and the Western Mythos Kanan Jarrus stands as one of the first Star Wars characters to have his narrative arc woven throughout multiple media in the post-Lucas era: a novel, a twelve-issue limited comic-book series, and a television series. The idea that a character’s arc might reach across multiple platforms stands as an example of what Anne Lancashire describes as an integrated megatext. For Lancashire, Star Wars is “not a series of narratively-independent sequels and prequels […] but an epic mythological saga […] consisting of […] an intricately-designed narrative, mythological, and metaphoric whole.”8 Writing in the early 2000s, Lancashire could not have anticipated the expansion of the Star Wars saga to include the animated elements (The Clone Wars and Rebels) and the continuation of the Skywalker legacy via the Disney-backed third trilogy. With the rapidly expanding Disney-era canon, the familiar mythical elements of Star Wars continue to inspire consumers to meditate on their “responsibility to the world, to others, or to oneself.”9 In his work exploring the mythic American West, David Murdoch moves beyond the common understandings of myth as a pedagogical means of discerning and reinforcing communal values and turns to an examination of how certain myths mediate specific cultural tensions. These pragmatic, functional myths “arise as a means of dealing with a fundamental contradiction which compromises core-values of the society, the sort of conflict which causes a persistent dilemma in the collective unconscious.”10 To make his point regarding myth as the site of conflict mediation clear, Murdoch turns to the classic legend of King Arthur. The Arthurian mythos, he posits, explores a basic inconsistency underlying feudal society: the tension between the Church’s emphasis on transcendent spiritual values like peace and care for the other and the political system’s focus on social order through violence and class exploitation. The narratives of heroic characters who strive relentlessly to live up to spiritual ideals, 8 A. Lancashire, “The Phantom Menace: Repetition, Variation, Integration,” Film Criticism 24 (2000): 24. 9 John C. McDowell, The Gospel According to Star Wars: Faith, Hope, and the Force (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 13. 10 David H. Murdoch, The American West: The Invention of a Myth (Cardiff: Welsh Academic Press, 1996), 16. 244 STAR WARS AND THE HIstORY OF TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING but fall hopelessly short of doing so, provide solace for those encountering the Arthurian myths. In a similar fashion, the myth of the American West functions to mediate a societal conflict: the tension between reified social, economic, and political institutions benefiting cultural elites and a rustic, national wisdom grounded in “chivalry, honour, courage, and self-reliance.”11 The mythic embodiment of this American cultural tension is, of course, the Western cowboy. While Murdoch’s work illustrates how familiar cultural myths invite audiences to engage relevant social tensions and controversies, I want to shift attention to the way the Western mythos permeates US political nar- ratives. Since the late nineteenth century, representations of the self-reliant cowboy conquering the American frontier have been frequently associated with presidents’ personas and policies. Theodore Roosevelt, for example, characterized himself as a man reinvigorated by the violence and hard work accompanying a Western frontiersman’s struggles to subdue both the natural world and his own unruly spirit. When Roosevelt wrote about the cowboy, asserts Murdoch, he was writing not only about the people he encountered in the Dakotas, but also about himself and the American people at large.12 Always the savvy politician, Roosevelt cultivated the image of the cowboy as he rode his way back into political relevance and, eventually, the White House. John F. Kennedy also drew from the mythic West by replacing “an old, domestic, agrarian frontier” with a “new frontier of world power and industrial development.”13