Star Wars: Episode 8 is half through its production shoot, and to celebrate, director Rian Johnson posted two new photos from the set. The pictures from the Episode 8 set aren’t exactly spoiler-laden — Johnson tweeted “the NYT could print a rumor that the opening crawl will be yellow & I wouldn’t confirm/deny.” — but they provide even more evidence against one of the most pervasive and silly Star Wars fan theories to permeate fandom in recent years.
The two Episode 8 photos are united by a microfiber cleaning cloth. “Good. Bad. I’m the guy with the microfiber sham,” Johnson wrote. The first shows the cockpit of an X-Wing:
The second shows a First Order control panel of some sort, with a villainous control panel technician evocative of the Death Star operators:
But something unites the two photos other than that microfiber chamois: the standard galactic alphabet. Look closely and you can see alien writing in both photos. Which brings us to that fan theory. Are the people of the Star Wars galaxy mostly illiterate?
The theory originated with Ryan Britt on Tor.com, who laid out several pieces of evidence to demonstrate that most Star Wars characters, Luke Skywalker included, can’t read. He reiterated many of these points in a video for all those illiterate Mos Eisley residents:
“ Not once in any Star Wars movie does someone pick up a book or newspaper, magazine, literary journal, or chapbook handmade by an aspiring Jawa poet.”
“There’s no journalism of any kind, so that’s why nobody seems to know anything about all these terrible things these governments are doing.”
Yeah, Luke Skywalker reads full sentences off his X-Wing, “but these letters and pieces of writing are directly related to tasks.”
Messages and records are often in video form.
The Death Star operators may be surrounded by hundreds of buttons covered in writing, but that doesn’t mean anything. “He could push a button that says ‘destroy planet,’ maybe it’s written there, but it’s not like he can write an email.”
Many of these points can be easily dismissed. No one reads John McClane or the Terminator’s lack of literary journal consumption as evidence of illiteracy (reading a slim volume of poetry on the divan doesn’t often make for exciting cinema). Totalitarian governments often control the media. People reading things is not often cited as evidence of their illiteracy, etc. etc. etc., but what stands out more than the flimsiness of the evidence is the extratextual work done to overlay his thesis on the Star Wars galaxy.
No one, Britt included, is under the impression that Star Wars was originally designed with illiteracy in mind. Instead, an effort has been made to drape an extra layer of meaning over the movies, attaching itself at points where illiteracy is conceivable, rather than plausible. Without actual evidence for illiteracy, the whole theory relies instead on an absence of evidence against it.
This is obnoxious on its own merits. Devin Faraci of Birth.Movies.Death called a similar fan theory involving the Mad Max movies “an attempt to prove superiority over the movie, to mount it and conquer it… there's a refusal to submit to the world of the film, and a desire to outsmart it at every turn.” But even more galling is that it worked, with numerous outlets asserting the simple fact of Luke Skywalker’s illiteracy. The transformation is complete, with something that began as merely imaginable becoming instead something credible, elbowed and forced awkwardly through the permeable barrier separating fan theory from the actual Star Wars movies.
Thankfully, it seems, Star Wars: Episode 8 didn’t absorb the lesson. On Dec. 15, 2017, Star Wars: Episode 8 will once again show us a galaxy loaded with the written word.
