Are We Really OK with Executing Stormtroopers?

Spoiler Alert: We are gonna spoil everything about Rogue One.

Stormtroopers: the fist of the Galactic Empire, a faceless mob of evil, tragically unable to ever accurately shoot anything. Some of our fondest collective memories involve our childhood heroes owning legions of them with simple deceptions or laser beams. But while watching Rogue One, the Star Wars franchise's gritty new semi-reboot-mostly-fanfic, I was struck with a genuine ethical question: why are we so cool with stormtroopers getting murdered for our entertainment?

Bear with me. The Star Wars franchise has always been a more or less straightforward morality tale. The original trilogy, in theatres between 1977 and 1983, is the least nebulous. A ragtag group of democrats and religious zealots wage war against a sinister and aggressively secular totalitarian state. (I have a pet theory that the original trilogy is actually a metaphor for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. I am a hoot at parties.)

It was easy to tell who the good guys and bad guys were without getting into too much of a discussion of deeper values or the complications of war. The Empire is bad because the Emperor is an evil wizard who is fixated on building Death Stars and all his soldiers have to dress like fucked up skeletons. The Rebel Alliance is good because they all have American (and occasional British) accents. Case closed.

Things have become a little more complicated since Episode VII, however. Pivotally, the plot of that film centres around the experience of stormtrooper FN-2187, aka Finn. His storyline, for the first time in the franchise's nearly 40 year history, gives us insight into the human lives of stormtroopers. (We're going to ignore the fact that the first stormtroopers were all clones, because a) the clone troopers were phased out during the Empire's post-Clone Wars consolidation, and b) the prequels were terrible.) Namely, Finn was kidnapped at a young age and brutally indoctrinated into the post-Imperial military machine. We get the sense that he and all his comrades were the subjects of violent brainwashing, forced to do the bidding of their overlords.

The distinction with Finn is that, when ordered by Kylo Ren to massacre civilians, he was unable to do so. He experiences great anxiety both over the ghoulish nature of this command, but also his own failure to live up to it; his failure to properly be what he has been trained to be. This raises a whole bunch of complex questions about who the Imperial stormtroopers actually are. Presumably, many of them are not merry footsoldiers who signed up to spread fascism across the galaxy, or even desperate volunteers from impoverished homeworlds where military service was the only out. Episode VII raises the possibility that many or even most stormtroopers live as literal slaves, psychologically compelled to serve their masters.

Flash forward (or, uh, back) to Rogue One. Set as an immediate prequel to the events of 1977's Episode IV, the film is itself very much a product of its historical moment. In 1977 America could be confident which side it was supposed to empathize with; in 2016, most of us in the West are grappling with the reality that we resemble the Empire more than the Rebellion.

This particular point was underscored in the film through the scenes in the holy city of Jedha, where an occupying Imperial force is looting an ancient Jedi temple on the desert world for the crystals used to power the Death Star. The setting is a clear Middle Eastern analogue. Rogue One's protagonists—Jyn Erso and Cassion Andor, the Spanish Han Solo—are on the planet as Rebel agents, looking to make contact with a splinter group of radicals whose violent methods were deemed "too extreme for the Rebel Alliance."

We are shown just how extreme when a group of local rebels/terrorists ambush a platoon of stormtroopers in the city's marketplace. Mayhem breaks out; while the terrorists and the stormtroopers are blowing each other up, we see a small child crying amid gunfire. In a display of her moral purity, Jyn rushes out to save the child while Andor urges her to stay in cover, which underscores his own symbolic role as the essentially amoral veteran guerrilla. It is a delightfully intense scene and the first major action of the film.

But something about the scene feels complicated; much more complicated than, say, Princess Leia's escape from the Cloud City of Bespin, or watching adorably barbaric Ewoks smash Imperial skulls with rocks. (Not to mention the scene includes a Rebel delivering a head shot, execution-style, to a stormtrooper who is lying on the ground.) Part of this is deliberate: the movie goes to lengths to have Rebel characters muse gravely about the awful things they've had to do for The Cause, although any sustained reflection is obscured by ratcheting up the combat scenes and ratcheting down any attempt at character development. Partly, however, it is because we must now contend with the knowledge that the stormtroopers are virtually slaves to Imperial power themselves.

I'm honestly not sure how to feel about this. Obviously, the agency of the stormtroopers is at the heart of the matter. Do the stormtroopers have any agency? Are they more or less willingly oppressing these desert people or are they literally compelled to do so by a terrible power? Why are they stripped away of their dignity? Why does the gaze of the camera (and us, the viewer) delight in their constant, senseless, and often comical death and suffering, such as when the blind cleric hooks a stormtrooper onto his staff and uses his groin as a human shield? This gratuitous violence would be questionable even assuming the stormtroopers have freely chosen to participate in the Imperial war effort. But it's much more troubling now that that, after Episode VII, we know their true and horrific condition.

Conversely, I also understand the Jedhans explosive, seemingly inhuman violence. They are an oppressed people, chafing under the jackboot of chauvinist infidels who are literally looting their most sacred site for the materials to make an unholy weapon. This is clearly a struggle for liberation and the principles of universal justice must give way to both the tactical necessity of a partisan war and what Frantz Fanon has described as the colonial subject's self-actualization in their assertive violence against the colonizer. In this sense perhaps the brutality they show the stormtroopers does not yet go far enough. They are enacting a divine violence, a violence that overturns the powers of domination and makes space for true freedom; their struggle foreshadows the struggle on Endor and the triumphant murder of everyone on board the second Death Star in Episode VI.

The film clearly takes a side in all this. Although war is always terrible, the Rebellion is obviously justified, and the Empire, at its planet-killing height, is obviously monstrous. But so too are those who rebel against the Empire in inappropriately violent ways. We are shown a basic moral equivalence between Saw Gerrera's gang and the stormtroopers they resist. This is clearly an unsubtle commentary on the civil war in Syria. The Imperial force is obviously Assad and his Russian backers, but the Jedhan resistance is also portrayed as untrustworthy, savagely religious, violent, and profoundly, unapproachably, alien—like an intergalactic al-Nusra.

The only lives in the film that matter are those of the 'good' Rebels—the recognizably liberal ragtag band of politically-correct casting choices. This is why the film spends no time mourning (or even contemplating) the destruction of the holy city of Jedha at the same time as it spends more time exploring the tragic humanity of a reprogrammed Imperial droid than it does the mounds of murdered slave-soldiers lying at its feet.

Perhaps, then, the truly inhuman and alien presence we encounter in Rogue One is the camera's orientalist condemnation of violence at the same moment as violence is joyously celebrated.

Upon consideration, this conclusion is inescapable: no one should ever apply this much mental energy to masturbatory speculation about a pop culture commodity meant for children and aging nerds and pretend it is some kind of profound political act—and never let grad school convince you otherwise.

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