Spoilers for the season finale of The Mandalorian follow, if you care about that sort of thing.
A little while back, around this time of year, the Walt Disney Corporation (all hail) released a highly-anticipated sequel to a science-fiction flick from the ‘80s. The original cast was back, ready to pass the torch to a fresh-faced new generation of movie stars. And the plot — a breakneck race to find the star of the original film, now a bearded recluse — was to die for. I’m being coy, but we all know what movie we’re talking about here. That’s right! 2010’s Tron: Legacy.
If you haven’t seen Tron: Legacy, you should, and not just because it kind of rips. In a strange way, it’s become a sort of Rosetta Stone for blockbuster culture, a legacy sequel that struggles to turn what was a weird, quirky little cult hit into an epic piece of cultural mythmaking. But even more than that, Legacy is important because it was one of the first blockbusters to cross the rubicon and create a fully digital, deeply disturbing main human character — the dastardly computer program “Clu.”
To be honest, I can’t really remember what Clu’s evil plan was. Maybe it was to make everyone in the world a computer program who looked like him? If that’s the case, he’s doing pretty well. In the ten years since Tron: Legacy, there have been dozens of attempts to resuscitate the familiar young faces of our favorite movie stars. We’ve seen a dead-eyed Michael Douglas trading barbs with John Slattery in Ant-Man; a very smooth Arnold Schwarzenegger facing off against his even smoother self in Terminator: Genisys; and finally, a ghoulish recreation of 1983-era Mark Hamill on last week’s abysmal Mandalorian episode.
These appearances have something in common: They turn their respective films into a museum piece for a technology that, with respect to the many hardworking visual effects artists who have slaved away erasing Kurt Russell’s wrinkles, doesn’t seem like it will ever be ready for primetime. In its very worst instances, digital deaging can feel downright immoral. (It remains somewhat impressive that no one has been sent to federal prison for Peter Cushing’s posthumous “performance” in Rogue One, or for the horribly offensive choice to turn Carrie Fisher’s final film appearance into a demonic Princess Leia soundboard.)
Somehow, almost everyone who’s aped Tron in the past decade has missed what that film itself makes pretty clear — that this horrifying parody of a human face exists within the text as a parody of a human face. Digi-Bridges works (barely) because he exists in the same cinematic space as the real, craggy and aged Bridges. Ang Lee pulled off a similar feat with his Will Smith vs. Will Smith thriller Gemini Man, and Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman threads the needle by recasting the muddled quality of the digital effects as the fogginess of an old man’s memory. The Sean Young scene in Blade Runner 2049 is heartbreaking because both the audience and the characters understand that there is something not quite right here.
When the effect works, it works because filmmakers call attention to it, and build their work around that. When it fails, it fails because it’s being used as a straight-faced tool that’s meant to be taken at face value. In your average Marvel movie, deaging is there exclusively to paper over the cracks of a comic-book timeline (and, perhaps, to build out a convincing stable of “young” performers for the studio to hire after it runs out of roided-up sitcom actors). Luke Skywalker’s appearance on The Mandalorian follows the same strategy; there is no textual reason for him to look like he just stepped off Robert Zemeckis’ Polar Express. He only looks that way because of continuity.
Like its Disney siblings at Marvel, Star Wars has become more about gap-filling more than it is about story. The wildly divisive reaction to the sequel trilogy has led to a narrative retrenchment, back to the characters the company is absolutely sure we have some residual fondness for. And if that cynical corporate strategy is to bear out, 1983 Luke Skywalker must be forcefully resuscitated, pixel by pixel. He must invade The Mandalorian and stand there like a lost Sims character, sucking all the air out of the room as the two characters that the show is actually about say a tearful goodbye.
Placing the character’s dead, motionless face opposite the equally fake, but somehow more alive Baby Yoda only serves to drive home just how magical that little puppet is. It’s the magic of something tangible, something built from the ground up via design and performance. Not a reconstruction of something you know, but the creation of something new and exciting. The Luke that appeared onscreen last Friday gave a lot of Star Wars fans what they wanted: a look at their childhood hero in his prime. But in its deeply artifical nature it ensured that he would remain a childhood hero — distant, unknowable. Some of us prefer a real person.
What’s worth watching this week: The late Chadwick Boseman’s electrifying performance in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (streaming on Netflix).