[COLUMN] Andor is a Timeless - and Timely - Study of Fascism | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the first three episodes of the second season of Andor, which is now streaming on Disney+. Having seen the whole season, the series is a strong contender for the best Star Wars ever made. This piece is a bit longer than usual, and the next three pieces on the show will probably also be, but we hope you’ll indulge us.

The closing sequence of “Harvest”, the third episode of the second season of Andor that wraps up the first of the season’s four arcs, is breathtaking. It is utterly unlike anything that Star Wars has ever done before, and yet feels quintessentially Star Wars.

Some of the individual elements are familiar. The first arc ends with Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and the survivors of Ferrix on the run from the Imperial authorities, fleeing Mina-Rau. The group is wounded and demoralized. Cassian’s partner, Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona), was almost sexually assaulted by an Imperial lieutenant (Alex Waldmann). Young Wilmon Paak (Muhannad Bhaier) has abandoned his lover, Beela (Laura Marcus). Brasso (Joplin Sibtain) is dead.

To be clear, this is not particularly unusual for Star Wars. The ending of The Empire Strikes Back famously finds the heroes, including Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), licking their wounds. However, what is particularly striking about the end of “Harvest”, is the sense of venomous and bitter irony that plays through this sequence. This is most obvious in the choice of score, which juxtaposes the traumatized faces of these characters with a remix of Nicholas Britell’s upbeat “Naimos!”

“Naimos!” is playing on the soundtrack over these images because it is playing at the sequence that this escape is cut against, the Chandrilan wedding of Leida Mothma (Bronte Carmichael) to Stekan Sculdun (Finley Glasgow). The wedding is a decidedly decadent affair, a three-day gathering of the who’s who of the galactic elite to gossip, drink and party like the world is about to end. There is a striking dissonance between the luxury on Chandrila and the horror of Mina-Rau.

Even on Chandrila, the celebration is laced with bitterness. Leida’s mother, Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O'Reilly), has effectively traded her daughter to crime baron Davo Sculdun (Richard Dillane), in return for Sculdun’s help disguising her financial support of rebel elements. At the wedding, she discovers that her old friend Tay Kolma (Ben Miles) is a potential loose end that could expose her. She tells Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) this, basically signing Kolma’s death warrant.

In the final moments of “Harvest” as Mon Mothma processes all that has just happened and her complicity in all of it, she desperately tries to escape the horror. She throws herself on to the dance floor as the music roars. She downs shots; first one-at-time and then two-at-a-time. There is a sense of Mothma trying to lose herself in the moment to avoid grappling with the reality of what is happening and what she has done, cut frantically against Cassian’s escape from Mina-Rau.

It is an incredibly visceral sequence. The final shot of “Harvest” is not Cassian Andor, the ostensible protagonist of this particular show. It is instead Mothma, dancing. Her limbs flail and her hair flies. It seems almost like a seizure, like an attempt to break free of something oppressive and suffocating. The music builds and builds. There is nothing but the rhythm and the beat. And then there is a sharp cut to black and silence, a brutal juxtaposition that understands how futile Mothma’s efforts are.

Star Wars does not generally do this sort of dramatic irony. The closest is perhaps the closing sequence of Attack of the Clones, in which ostensibly triumphant imagery like Anakin’s (Hayden Christensen) secret wedding to Padmé (Natalie Portman) and the arrival of the New Republic’s clone army takes on a knowingly tragic tone, as the audience understands where this is going. Still, nothing in that closing sequence is quite as unsettling and uncanny as the closing moments of “Harvest.”

The opening arc of the second season of Andor does an excellent job of laying its cards on the table. In doing so, it grapples with a fundamental truth of Star Wars, something that the franchise has always struggled to articulate. Under showrunner Tony Gilroy, Andor has always understood what the First Galactic Empire is and the context in which it exists. This is a show about the death of democracy. Among many other examples, it is about the collapse of Weimar Germany.

The Empire in Star Wars has always drawn very heavily from Nazi Germany. The Imperial Stormtroopers named for the Sturmabteilung, an elite fascist force assembled in 1921 by Hitler to fight communists in the street. Although John Williams disputes any explicit or conscious influence, the franchise’s soundtrack is massively indebted to composer Richard Wagner, whose work was central to the Nazis.

The Star Wars franchise has struggled with expressing the true horrors of that sort of fascism within the framework of a toyetic family-friendly franchise. Disney’s failed Star Wars-themed hotel invited fans to cosplay as fascists who would helpfully rat out Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew, Joonas Suotamo) to Imperial authorities between meal courses. The Empire has its own very strange fandom, with certain audience members drawn to the empty aesthetics of fascism divorced from the horror.

Part of the beauty of the second season of Andor is its willingness to actually unpack that. What would it mean for a science-fantasy entity to emerge modelled on the Third Reich? How would it behave? How would it solidify its hold on power? What would that feel like for the people living in the shadow of such an organization? It’s one of the great unexamined questions of the larger Star Wars franchise, and Andor has the courage to tackle it head-on.

In “One Year Later”, the season premiere, members of the Imperial Security Bureau including Major Lio Partagaz (Anton Lesser) and Supervisor Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) are invited to the Maltheen Divide to attend a meeting organized by Director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn). They discuss what to do about Ghorman, a planet rich in the precious metal Kalkite. They are gathered to debate how best to facilitate the Empire’s seizure of the planet for mining that risks leaving it uninhabitable.

It is one of the most deeply unsettling sequences ever produced for Star Wars, and it features no direct violence or raised voices. During this top secret meeting, the assembled officers calmly and rationally debate how best to go about destroying an entire culture while maintaining the illusion of moral authority. They even break for coffee to allow the assembled minds the chance to take in the breathtaking views.

This sequence is saturated with imagery evoking Nazi Germany. The remote mountaintop retreat recalls the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s infamous headquarters. The room is lit by a rustic fireplace offset against the brutalist architecture. The far wall features a mural depicting a scene that evokes The Wild Hunt, a painting by Franz von Stuck often associated with Hitler. Some of the figures are blindfolded, so as to be spared having to witness the horror before them.

With its celebration of “the Great Valleys of Ghorman” and “the traditional Ghorman Valley Horn”, the mid-twentieth-century-esque tourist reel that Krennic plays for the assembled group presents Ghorman as an alpine ecosystem. It resembles the vision of mid-century Austria presented in popular culture like The Sound of Music. As such, the Imperial attempt to manufacture consent for the invasion of Ghorman recalls the Anschluss, Germany’s annexation and occupation of Austria.

However, the plan to annex Ghorman is not mere the Anschluss. Midway through the meeting, Krennic hands the floor over to two representatives of “the Ministry of Enlightenment”, Dee Shambo (Fred Haig) and Nisus Osar (Tom Durant-Pritchard). “Some of what you’re thinking about Ghormans at this very moment exists because we put it there,” Shambo tells the group. Osar continues, “Hasn’t there always been something slightly arrogant about the Ghor? Oh, we all feel it. What is that?”

This meeting is not merely about planning the occupation of a planet. It is about preparing for the destruction of a culture. The Empire is planning a genocide. “No notes,” Krennic warns the assembled group. “No records. None of you were here. Nobody puts this in their calendar. All service and transport droids will be wiped, once we’re done. Your colleagues, superiors: if they’re not in this room, they’re not cleared for this project.”

This is a very direct invocation of the Wannsee Conference, at which the highest levels of the Nazi Party planned the Holocaust. Krennic’s insistence that no record of the conference should exist recalls the German attempt to destroy all records of the meeting of Wannsee as the Allies marched on Berlin. Much as Wannsee was only one step on the road to the implementation of the Final Solution, Krennic advises his guests that “this is not [his] first meeting on the subject.”

The most striking aspect of all of this is the banality. It is all very ordered and very rational. Afterwards, Partagaz and Meero return to Coruscant to talk about what Meero’s appointment to oversee “the Suppression of Ghorman” will mean for her long-term career prospects. Meero returns to her lush apartment, and listens to vaguely Wagnerian opera as her partner, Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) returns home with the shopping to prepare dinner for his mother, Edy (Kathryn Hunter).

While the conference itself is uncomfortable and upsetting, it becomes more upsetting for the fact that life continues as normal around it. Meero effortlessly shifts between an imperial officer who can give Krennic pragmatic advice on how best to ensure galactic approval for an Imperial annexation of a sovereign planet and the destruction of its culture to a woman choosing dinner outfits to soft jazz as she practices unconvincingly smiling to impress her partner’s mother.

All of this is cut consistently against the wedding on Chandrila, which is a lavish affair. Leida’s father, Perrin Fertha (Alastair Mackenzie), gives a toast in which he argues for hedonism. “You simply stand still and the galaxy will deliver a daily basket of fresh anxieties to your door without fail,” he warns his daughter. “My hope is that you learn to reach past this constant cloud of sadness. Pleasure. Gaiety. Amusement. These are the hidden things. The music hidden beneath all that noise.”

There is something of Weimar Germany to all this, of that window between the end of the First World War and the solidification of Nazi political power. Although scholars suggest that the era’s reputation is exaggerated by works like Cabaret, Weimar Germany was known for its opulence and decadence. It’s hard not to think of Cabaret while watching “Harvest”, particularly the way that the party and celebration is reflected and warped in the shiny surface of the music droid.

Weimar Germany lingers in the collective consciousness. It has had something of a resurgence in recent years, whether in shows like Babylon Berlin, concert series like Weimar Berlin: Bittersweet Metropolis, exhibits like Magical Realism: Art in Weimar Germany, or books like The Hiding Game or Blueprint. Even Cabaret has had a comeback. These are all stories about a civilization that finds itself on the precipice, staring into the abyss. They seem to resonate in the current moment. Gilroy has acknowledged Babylon Berlin as an influence.

Historian Gavin Plumley suggests that what resonates about such stories “is that rather vicious and lurid combination of extraordinary hedonism and a train driving into the buffers. There’s definitely the idea that we’re becoming almost blind to the appalling situation unfolding around us.” It makes sense that Andor would draw from Cabaret, which was based on the novel Goodbye to Berlin, in which author Christopher Isherwood offered a snapshot of “a country blindly barreling into the abyss as its inhabitants drowned in decadence.”

Of course, Andor does not draw exclusively from Nazi Germany in its understanding of totalitarianism and revolution. Nazi Germany is just one touchstone for the series, albeit a very pronounced one because Nazism is a particularly well-known brand of fascism. Showrunner Tony Gilroy has likened Cassian Andor to Josef Stalin and Luthen Rael to Vladimir Lenin. Gilroy wrote the character of idealistic young revolutionary Karis Nemik (Alex Lawther) because he “always wanted a Trotsky.”

There are other more contemporary aspects of Andor. Nemik’s understanding that, from the Empire’s perspective, “it’s easier to hide behind forty atrocities than a single incident” is just a more eloquent framing of Steve Banon’s lesson to the Trump White House that “the way to deal with [opposition] is to flood the zone with shit.” Nemik’s argument that “the pace of oppression outstrips our ability to understand it” resonates in the era of social media.

The entire subplot following Bix and Brasso on Mina-Rau feels especially in tune with the current moment, with the refugees for Ferrix serving as seasonal workers helping to tend crops. As the overseer, Kellen (Ryan Pope) explains, the Empire has long turned a blind eye to this. “Look, they need the grain,” he tells Brasso. “They know we need the help, they know everyone isn’t legal.” However, while these workers provide essential work, they enjoy no rights or freedoms.

This subplot, unfolding in parallel with the planning of the ethnic cleansing of Ghorman and the decadent wedding on Chandrila underscores one of the central themes of Andor. This is all connected. These events might appear to be isolated from one another, with minimal overlap of characters or communication between them, but they are expressions of the same basic idea. They are all connected, expressions of the same mounting and suffocating existential dread.

As the Empire harasses the citizens and workers on Mina-Rau, Kellen appeals to Brasso to get Cassian to talk to Rael about the tightening grip of the Empire on this small agricultural community. “Someone needs to tell him what’s going on here,” Kellen insists. Brasso, who has already witnessed the Imperial boot crushing Ferrix, replies, “It’s going on everywhere.” There is a sense that this struggle is repeating and recurring, across time and space.

Indeed, Gilroy largely avoids getting drawn into discussions of the show’s contemporary resonance, insisting that Andor is about timeless cycles of repetition. Asked if the Bush Administration was a frame of reference for the first season, Gilroy replied, “You could point at that, but there’s 3,000 years of recorded history too. You can go to the Montagnards, you can go to the Urgun, you can go to the African National Congress, you can go back to the Roman revolution.” It’s all interlinked. These patterns recur. “It rhymes.”

There is a grim sense of inevitability to the second season of Andor. The first season covered an entire year. The second will cover four years, jumping one year every three episodes. Each three-episode arc begins with a “one year later” title card, the sound of a gong and a countdown to the Battle of Yavin at the climax of the original Star Wars. Time is not just running out, time is moving faster. These characters are hurtling towards the abyss, and they are only accelerating.

With the Death Star still four years away, the opening arc of the second season of Andor places an emphasis on passivity and willful ignorance. The blindfolded figures in the mural at the Maltheen Divide are representative of the officials of Mina-Rau who turn a blind eye to the “illegals” picking their crops and stand by as the Empire harasses them. When Rael tells Mothma that she “needs to be protected” from the risk posed by Tay, she replies, “I’m not sure what you’re saying.” Rael coldly replies, “How nice for you.” What is happening is still deniable. Looking away is still a choice.

That is the power of those closing moments of “Harvest.” Mothma is trying desperately to follow the advice given by her husband, to find the “pleasure”, “gaiety” and “amusement” that provides an escape from the “constant cloud of sadness” suffocating her, to find “the music hidden beneath all that noise.” However, it’s ultimately just an unconvincing attempt to drown out the steady drumbeat of oppression, and there is nothing beneath it but just the cold and empty silence of the abyss.