The years from 1991 to 1998 were special ones in which to be a Star Wars fan. For during these years, more so than during any other time in the franchise’s existence, Star Wars truly belonged to its fans.

The period just before this one is sometimes called the “Dark Period” or the “Dark Ages” by the fans of today. After 1983’s Return of the Jedi, that concluding installment in the original trilogy of films, George Lucas, Star Wars‘s sometimes cantankerous creator, insisted that he was done with his most beloved creation. A few underwhelming television productions aside, he stayed true to his word in the years that followed, whilst also refusing anyone else the right to play in his playground; even Kenner Toys was denied its request to invent some new characters and vehicles with which to freshen up the action-figure line. So, Star Wars gradually faded from the mass-media consciousness, much like the first generation of videogames that so infamously crashed the same year Return of the Jedi dropped. But no Nintendo came along to revive Star Wars‘s fortunes, for the simple reason that Lucas refused to allow it. The action figures that had revolutionized the toy industry gathered dust and then slowly disappeared from store shelves, to be replaced by cynical adjuncts to Saturday-morning cartoons: Transformers, He-Man, G.I. Joe. (Or, perhaps better said, the television shows were adjuncts to the action figures: the old scoffer’s claim that Star Wars had been created strictly to sell toys was actually true in their case.)

The biggest Star Wars project of this period wasn’t any traditional piece of media but rather a theme-park attraction. In a foreshadowing of the franchise’s still-distant future, Disneyland in January of 1987 opened its Star Wars ride, whose final price tag was almost exactly the same as that of the last film. Yet even at that price, something felt vaguely low-rent about it: the ride had been conceived under the banner of The Black Hole, one of the spate of cinematic Star Wars clones from the films’ first blush of popularity, then rebranded when Disney managed to acquire a license for The Black Hole’s inspiration. The ride fit in disarmingly well at a theme park whose guiding ethic was nostalgia for a vanished American past of Main Streets and picket fences. Rather than remaining a living property, Star Wars was being consigned to the same realm of kitschy nostalgia. In these dying days of the Cold War, the name was now heard most commonly as shorthand for President Ronald Reagan’s misconceived, logistically unsustainable idea for a defensive umbrella that would make the United States impervious to Soviet nuclear strikes.

George Lucas’s refusal to make more Star Wars feature films left Lucasfilm, the sprawling House That Star Wars Built, in an awkward situation. To be sure, there were still the Indiana Jones films, but those had at least as much to do with the far more prolific cinematic imagination of Steven Spielberg as they did with Lucas himself. When Lucas tried to strike out in new directions on his own, the results were not terribly impressive. Lucasfilm became as much a technology incubator as a film-production studio, spawning the likes of Pixar, that pioneer of computer-generated 3D animation, and Lucasfilm Games (later LucasArts), an in-house games studio which for many years wasn’t allowed to make Star Wars games. The long-running Star Wars comic book, which is credited with saving Marvel Comics from bankruptcy in the late 1970s, sent out its last issue in May of 1986; the official Star Wars fan club sent out its last newsletter in February of 1987. At this point, what was there left to write about? It seemed that Star Wars was dead and already more than half buried. But, as the cliché says, the night is often darkest just before the dawn.

The seeds of a revival were planted the very same year that the Star Wars fan club closed up shop, when West End Games published Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, a tabletop RPG. Perhaps because it addressed such a niche segment of the overall entertainment marketplace, it was allowed more freedom to expand upon the extant universe of Star Wars than anything that had come before from anyone not named George Lucas. Although its overall commercial profile would indeed remain small in comparison to the blockbuster films and toys, it set a precedent for what was to come.

In the fall of 1988, Lou Aronica, head of Bantam Books’s science-fiction imprint Spectra, sent a proposal to Lucas for a series of new novels set in the Star Wars universe. This was by no means an entirely original idea in the broad strokes. The very first Star Wars novel, Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, had appeared just nine months after the first film, having been born as a script treatment for a potential quickie low-budget sequel if the movie should prove modestly but not extremely successful. After it, a handful of additional paperbacks starring Han Solo and Lando Calrissian had been published. But Aronica envisioned something bigger than those early coattail-riders, a series of true “event” novels. “We can’t do these casually,” he wrote to Lucas. “They have to be as ambitious as the movies were. This body of work is too important to popular culture to end with these three movies.”

He knew it was a shot in the dark. Thus he was disappointed but not overly surprised when he heard nothing back for months; many an earlier proposal for doing something new with Star Wars had fallen on similarly deaf ears. Then, out of the blue, he received a grudging letter expressing interest. “No one is going to buy these,” Lucas groused — but if Bantam Books wanted to throw its money away, Lucasfilm would deign to accept a licensing royalty, predicated on a number of conditions. The most significant of these were that the books could take place between, during, or after the movies but not before; that they would be labeled as artifacts of an “Expanded Universe” which George Lucas could feel free to contradict at any time, if he should ever wish to return to Star Wars himself; and that Lucas and his lieutenants at Lucasfilm would be able to request whatever changes they liked in the manuscripts — or reject them completely — prior to their publication. All of that sounded fine to Lou Aronica.

So, Heir to the Empire, the first of a trilogy of novels telling what happened immediately after Return of the Jedi, was published on May 1, 1991. Its author was Timothy Zahn, an up-and-coming writer whose short stories had been nominated for Hugo awards four times, winning once. Zahn was symbolic of the new group of creators who would be allowed to take the reins of Star Wars for the next seven years. For unlike the workaday writers who had crafted those earlier Star Wars novels to specifications, Zahn was a true-blue fan of the movies, a member of the generation who had first seen them as children or adolescents — Zahn was fifteen when the first film arrived in theaters — and literally had the trajectory of their lives altered by the encounter. Despite the Bantam Spectra imprint on its spine, in other words, Heir to the Empire was a form of fan fiction.

Heir to the Empire helped the cause immensely by being better than anyone might have expected. Even the sniffy mainstream reviewers who took it on had to admit that it did what it set out to do pretty darn effectively. Drawing heavily on the published lore of Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game as well as his own imagination, Zahn found a way to make his novel feel like Star Wars without lapsing into rote regurgitation of George Lucas’s tropes and plot lines. Grand Admiral Thrawn, his replacement for Darth Vader in the role of chief villain, was at least as interesting a character as his predecessor, whilst being interesting in totally different ways. Through him, Zahn was able to articulate an ethical code for the Empire that went beyond being evil and oppressive for the sake of it: a philosophy of political economy by no means unknown to some of the authoritarian nations of our own world, hinging on the belief that too much personal freedom leads only to anarchy and chaos and an endemic civic selfishness, making life worse for everyone. It’s a philosophy with which you can disagree — I certainly do, stridently — but it isn’t a thoughtless or even an entirely heartless one.

This is not to say that Heir to the Empire was some dry political dissertation; Zahn kept the action scenes coming, kept it fun, kept it Star Wars, striking a balance that George Lucas himself would later fail badly to establish in his own return to his science-fiction universe. The hardcover novel topped the New York Times bestseller chart, defying Lucas’s predictions of its failure, proving there was a ready market out there for new Star Wars product.

That said, very few of the Star Wars novels that would follow would match Heir to the Empire and its two sequels in terms of quality. With so much money waiting to be made, Lou Aronica’s vision for a carefully curated and edited series of event novels — perhaps one per year — fell by the wayside all too rapidly. Soon new novels were appearing monthly rather than yearly, alongside a rebooted comic book. Then they were coming even faster than that; 1997 alone saw a staggering 22 new Star Wars novels. And so the Expanded Universe fell victim to that bane of fan fictions everywhere, a lack of quality control. By the time Han Solo and Princess Leia had gotten married and produced three young Jedi of their own, who were all running around having adventures of their own in their own intertwining series of books, it was reasonable to ask whether it was all becoming much, much too much. A drought had become an indiscriminate tsunami; a trilogy of action movies had turned into All My Children.

Even when it was no better than it ought to have been, however, there was a freewheeling joy to the early Expanded Universe which is poignant to look back upon from the perspective of these latter days of Star Wars, when everything about the franchise is meticulously managed from the top down. The Expanded Universe, by contrast, was a case of by the fans, for the fans. With new movies the stuff of dreams only, they painted every corner of the universe in vivid colors of their own. The Expanded Universe could be cheesy, but it was never cynical. One could argue that it felt more like Star Wars — the original Star Wars of simple summertime fun, the one that didn’t take itself so gosh-darn seriously — than anything that has appeared under the name since 1998.

By a happy accident, a contract between Lucasfilm and Kenner Toys, giving the latter an exclusive monopoly on Star Wars “toys and games,” was allowed to lapse the same year that Heir to the Empire appeared in bookstores. Thus LucasArts, Lucasfilm’s own games division, could get in on the Expanded Universe fun. What had been a bizarre dearth of Star Wars games during the 1980s turned into a 1990s deluge almost comparable to the one taking place in novels. LucasArts released a dozen or so Star Wars games in a broad range of gameplay genres between 1993 and 1998, drawing indiscriminately both from the original movies and from the new tropes and characters of the literary Expanded Universe. Like the books, these games weren’t always or even usually masterpieces, but their unconstrained sense of possibility makes them feel charmingly anomalous in comparison to the corporate-managed, risk-averse, Disneyfied Star Wars of today.

And then, too, LucasArts did produce two games that deserve to be ranked alongside Timothy Zahn’s first trilogy of Star Wars novels as genuine classics in their field. We’ve met one of these already in an earlier article: the “space simulator” TIE Fighter, whose plot had you flying and fighting for Zahn’s more philosophically coherent version of the Empire, with both Darth Vader and Admiral Thrawn featuring in prominent roles. The other, the first-person shooter Jedi Knight, will be our subject for today.

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Among other things, Jedi Knight heralded a dawning era of improbably tortured names in games. Its official full name is Star Wars: Jedi Knight — Dark Forces II, a word salad that you can arrange however you like and still have it make just about the same amount of sense. It’s trying to tell us in its roundabout way that Jedi Knight is a sequel to Dark Forces, the first Star Wars-themed shooter released by LucasArts. Just as TIE Fighter and its slightly less refined space-simulator predecessor X-Wing were responses to the Wing Commander phenomenon, Jedi Knight and before it Dark Forces put a Star Wars spin on the first-person-shooter (FPS) craze that was inaugurated by DOOM. So, it’s with Dark Forces that any Jedi Knight story has to begin.

Dark Forces was born in the immediate aftermath of DOOM, when half or more of the studios in the games industry seemed suddenly to be working on a “DOOM clone,” as the nascent FPS genre was known before that acronym was invented. It was in fact one of the first of the breed to be finished, shipping already in February of 1995, barely a year after its inspiration. And yet it was also one of the few to not just match but clearly improve upon id Software’s DOOM engine. Whereas DOOM existed on a single plane, didn’t even allow you to look or aim up or down, LucasArts’s “Jedi” engine could play host to vertiginous environments full of perches and ledges and passages that snaked over and under as well as around one another.

Dark Forces stood out as well for its interest in storytelling, despite inhabiting a genre in which, according to a famous claim once advanced by id’s John Carmack, story was no more important than it was in a porn movie. This game’s plot could easily have been that of an Expanded Universe novel.

Dark Forces begins concurrent to the events of the first Star Wars movie. Its star is Kyle Katarn, a charming rogue of the Han Solo stripe, a mercenary who once worked for the Empire but is now peddling his services to the Rebel Alliance alongside his friend Jan Ors, a space jockey with a knack for swooping in in the nick of time to save him from the various predicaments he gets himself into. The two are hired to steal the blueprints of the Death Star, the same ones that will allow the Rebels to identify the massive battle station’s one vulnerability and destroy it in the film’s bravura climax. Once their role in the run-up to that event has been duly fulfilled, Kyle and Jan then go on to foil an Imperial plot to create a new legion of super soldiers known as Dark Troopers. (This whole plot line can be read as an extended inside joke about how remarkably incompetent the Empire’s everyday Stormtroopers are, throughout this game just as in the movies. If ever there was a gang who couldn’t shoot straight…)

Told through sparsely animated between-mission cut scenes, it’s not a great story by any means, but it serves its purpose of justifying the many changes of scenery and providing some motivation to traverse each succeeding level. Staying true to the Han Solo archetype, Kyle Katarn is even showing signs of developing a conscience by the time it’s over. All of which is to say that, in plot as in its audiovisual aesthetics, Dark Forces feels very much like Star Wars. It provided for its contemporary players an immersive rush that no novel could match; this and the other games of LucasArts were the only places where you could actually see Star Wars on a screen during the mid-1990s.

Unfortunately, Dark Forces is more of its time than timeless.^[1]A reworked and remastered version of Dark Forces has recently been released as of this writing; it undoubtedly eases some of the issues I’m about to describe. These comments apply only to the original version of the game. I concur with Wes Fenlon of PC Gamer, who wrote in a retrospective review in 2016 that “I spent more of my Dark Forces playthrough appreciating what it pulled off in 1995 than I did really having fun.” Coming so early in the lifespan of the FPS as it did, its controls are nonstandard and, from the perspective of the modern player at least, rather awkward, lacking even such niceties as mouse-look. In lieu of a save-anywhere system or even save checkpoints, it gives you a limited number of lives with which to complete each level, like one of the arcade quarter-eaters of yore.

Its worst issues, however, are connected to level design, which was still a bit of a black art at this point in time. It’s absurdly easy to get completely lost in its enormous levels, which have no obvious geographical through-line to follow, but are rather built around a tangled collection of lock-and-key puzzles that require lots and lots of criss-crossing and backtracking. Although there is an auto-map, there’s no easy way to project a three-dimensional space like these levels onto its two-dimensional plane; all those ladders and rising and falling passageways quickly turn into an incomprehensible mess on the map. Dark Forces is an ironic case of a game being undone by the very technological affordances that made it stand out; playing it, one gets the sense that the developers have rather outsmarted themselves. When I think back on it now, my main memory is of running around like a rat in a maze, circling back into the same areas again and again, trying to figure out what the hell the game wants me to do next.

Nevertheless, Dark Forces was very well-received in its day as the first game to not just copy DOOM‘s technology but to push it forward — and with a Star Wars twist at that. Just two complaints cut through the din of praise, neither of them having anything to do with the level design that so frustrated me. One was the lack of a multiplayer mode, an equivalent to DOOM‘s famed deathmatches. And the other was the fact that Dark Forces never let you fight with a light saber, rather giving the lie to the name of the Jedi engine that powered it. The game barely even mentioned Jedi and The Force and all the rest; like Han Solo, Kyle Katarn was strictly a blaster sort of guy at this juncture. LucasArts resolved to remedy both of these complaints in the sequel.

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Jedi Knight actually straddles two trends in 1990s gaming, one of which has remained an evergreen staple of the hobby to this day, the other of which has long since been consigned to the realm of retro kitsch. The former is of course the FPS genre; the later is the craze for “full-motion video,” the insertion of video clips featuring real human actors into games. This “interactive movie” fad was already fast becoming passé when Jedi Knight was released in October of 1997. It was one of the last relatively big-budget, mainstream releases to embrace it.

Having written about so many of these vintage FMV productions in recent years, I’ve developed an odd fascination with the people who starred in them. These were generally either recognizable faces with careers past their prime or, more commonly, fresh-faced strivers looking for their big break, the sort of aspirants who have been waiting tables and dressing up in superhero costumes for the tourists strolling the Hollywood Walk of Fame for time immemorial, waiting for that call from their agent that means their ship has finally come in. Needless to say, for the vast majority of the strivers, a role in a CD-ROM game was as close as they ever came to stardom. Most of them gave up their acting dream at some point, went back home, and embarked on some more sensible career. I don’t see their histories as tragic at all; they rather speak to me of the infinite adaptability of our species, our adroitness at getting on with a Plan B when Plan A doesn’t work out, leaving us only with some amusing stories to share at dinner parties. Such stories certainly aren’t nothing. For what are any of our lives in the end but the sum total of the stories we can share, the experiences we’ve accumulated? All that stuff about “if you can dream it, you can do it” is nonsense; success in any field depends on circumstance and happenstance as much as effort or desire. Nonetheless, “it’s better to try and fail than never to try at all” is a cliché I can get behind.

But I digress. In Jedi Knight, Kyle Katarn is played by a fellow named Jason Court, whose résumé at the time consisted of a few minor television guest appearances, who would “retire” from acting by the end of the decade to become a Napa Valley winemaker. Court isn’t terrible here — a little wooden perhaps, but who wouldn’t be in a situation like this, acting on an empty sound stage whose background will later be painted in on the computer, intoning a script like this one?

Ah, yes… the script. Do you remember me telling you how Timothy Zahn’s early Star Wars novels succeeded by not slavishly echoing the tropes and character beats from the films? Well, this script is the opposite of that. The first words out of any character’s mouth are those of a Light Jedi promising a Dark Jedi that “striking me down” will have unforeseen consequences, just as Obi-Wan Kenobi once said to Darth Vader. What follows is a series of reenactments of beats and entire scenes from the movies in slightly altered contexts, on a budget of about one percent the size. Kyle Katarn, now yanked out of Han Solo’s shoes and thrust into those of Luke Skywalker, turns out to have grown up on a planet bizarrely similar to Tatooine and to have some serious daddy issues to go along with an inherited light saber and undreamt-of potential in The Force. The word “derivative” hardly begins to convey the scale of this game’s debt to its cinematic betters.

For all that, though, it’s hard to really hate the cut scenes. Their saving grace is that of the Expanded Universe as a whole (into whose welcoming canon Kyle Katarn was duly written, appearing in the comics, the novels, even as an action figure of his own): the lack of cynicism, the sense that everything being done is being done out of love even when it’s being done badly. When the Jedi ignited their light sabers during the opening cut scene, it was the first time that distinctive swoosh and buzz had been seen and heard since Return of the Jedi. Even in our jaded present age, we can still sense the makers’ excitement at being allowed to do this, can imagine the audience’s excitement at being witness to it. There are worse things in this world than a community-theater re-creation of Star Wars.

The cut scenes are weirdly divorced from everything else in Jedi Knight. Many FMV productions have this same disjointed quality to them, a sense that the movie clips we watch and the game we play have little to do with one another. Yet seldom is that sense of a right hand that doesn’t know what the left is doing more pronounced than here. The Kyle of the video clips doesn’t even look like the Kyle of the rest of the game; the former has a beard, the latter does not. The divide is made that much more jarring by the aesthetic masterfulness of the game whenever the actors aren’t onscreen. Beginning with that iconic three-dimensional text crawl and John William’s equally iconic score, this game looks, sounds, and plays like an interactive Star Wars movie — whenever, that is, it’s not literally trying to be a Star Wars movie.

Certainly the environments you explore here are pure Star Wars. The action starts in a bar that looks like the Mos Eisley cantina, then sends you scampering off through one of those sprawling indoor complexes that seem to be everywhere in the Star Wars universe, all huge halls with improbably high ceilings and miles of corridors and air shafts connecting them, full of yawning gaps and precarious lifts, gun-metal grays and glittering blacks. Later, you’ll visit the streets and rooftops of a desert town with a vaguely Middle Eastern feel, the halls and courts of a fascistic palace lifted straight out of Triumph of the Will, the crawl-ways and garbage bins of a rattletrap spaceship… all very, very Star Wars, all pulsing with that unmistakable Star Wars soundtrack.

Just as Dark Forces was a direct response to DOOM, in technological terms Jedi Knight was LucasArts’s reply to id’s Quake, which was released about fifteen months before it. DOOM and Dark Forces are what is sometimes called “2.5D games” — superficially 3D, but relying on a lot of cheats and shortcuts, such as pre-rendered sprites standing in for properly 3D-modelled characters and monsters in the world. The Quake engine and the “Sith” engine that powers Jedi Knight are, by contrast, 3D-rendered from top to bottom, taking advantage not only of the faster processors and more expansive memories of the computers of their era but the new hardware-accelerated 3D graphics cards. Not only do they look better for it, but they play better as well; the vertical dimension which LucasArts so consistently emphasized benefits especially. There’s a lot of death-defying leaping and controlled falling in Jedi Knight, just as in Dark Forces, but it feels more natural and satisfying here. Indeed, Jedi Knight in general feels so much more modern than Dark Forces that it’s hard to believe the two games were separated in time by only two and a half years. Gone, for example, are the arcade-like limited lives of Dark Forces, replaced by the ability to save wherever you want whenever you want, a godsend for working adults like yours truly whose bedtime won’t wait for them to finish a level.

If you ask me, though, the area where Jedi Knight improves most upon its predecessor has nothing to do with algorithms or resolutions or frame rates, nor even convenience features like the save system. More than anything, it’s the level design here that is just so, so much better. Jedi Knight’s levels are as enormous as ever, whilst being if anything even more vertiginous than the ones of Dark Forces. And yet they manage to be far less confusing, having the intuitive through-line that the levels of Dark Forces lacked. Very rarely was I more than momentarily stumped about where to go next in Jedi Knight; in Dark Forces, on the other hand, I was confused more or less constantly.

Maybe I should clarify something at this point: when I play an FPS or a Star Wars game, and especially when I play a Star Wars FPS, I’m not looking to labor too hard for my fun. I want a romp; “Easy” mode suits me just fine. You know how in the movies, when Luke and Leia and the gang are running around getting shot at by all those Stormtroopers who can’t seem to hit the broadside of a barn, things just kind of work out for them? A bridge conveniently collapses just after they run across, a rope is hanging conveniently to hand just when they need it, etc. Well, this game does that for you. You go charging through the maelstrom, laser blasts ricocheting every which way, and, lo and behold, there’s the elevator platform you need to climb onto to get away, the closing door you need to dive under, the maintenance tunnel you need to leap into. It’s frantic and nerve-wracking and then suddenly awesome, over and over and over again. It’s incredibly hard in any creative field, whether it happens to be writing or action-game level design, to make the final product feel effortless. In fact, I can promise you that, the more effortless something feels, the more hard work went into it to make it feel that way. My kudos, then, to project leader Justin Chin and the many other hands who contributed to Jedi Knight, for being willing to put in the long, hard hours to make it look easy.

Of those two pieces of fan service that were deemed essential in this sequel — a multiplayer mode and light sabers — I can only speak of the second from direct experience. By their own admission, the developers struggled for some time to find a way of implementing light sabers in a way that felt both authentic and playable. In the end, they opted to zoom back to a Tomb Raider-like third-person, behind-the-back perspective whenever you pull out your trusty laser sword. This approach generated some controversy, first within LucasArts and later among FPS purists in the general public, but it works pretty well in my opinion. Still, I must admit that when I played the game I stuck mostly with guns and other ranged weapons, which run the gamut from blasters to grenades, bazookas to Chewbacca’s crossbow.

The exceptions — the places where I had no choice but to swing a light saber — were the one-on-one duels with other Jedi. These serve as the game’s bosses, coming along every few levels until the climax arrives in the form of a meeting with the ultimate bad guy, the Dark Jedi Jerec whom you’ve been in a race with all along to locate the game’s McGuffin, a mysterious Valley of the Jedi. (Don’t ask; it’s really not worth worrying about.) Like everything else here, these duels feel very, very Star Wars, complete with lots of villainous speechifying beforehand and lots of testing of Kyle’s willpower: “Give in to the Dark Side, Kyle! Use your hatred!” You know the drill. I enjoyed their derivative enthusiasm just as much as I enjoyed the rest of the game.

Almost more interesting than the light sabers, however, is the decision to implement other types of Force powers, and with them a morality tracker that sees you veering toward either the Dark or the Light Side of the Force as you play. If you go Dark by endangering or indiscriminately killing civilians and showing no mercy to your enemies, you gradually gain access to Force powers that let you deal out impressive amounts of damage without having to lay your hand on a physical weapon. If you go Light by protecting the innocent and sparing your defeated foes, your talents veer more toward the protective and healing arts — which, given the staggering amounts of firepower at your disposal in conventional-weapon form, is probably more useful in the long run. Regardless of which path you go down, you’ll learn to pull guns right out of your enemies’ hands from a distance and to “Force Jump” across gaps you could never otherwise hope to clear. Doing so feels predictably amazing.

I’m going to couch a confession inside of my praise at this point: Jedi Knight is the first FPS I’ve attempted whilst writing these histories that I’ve enjoyed enough to play right through to the end. It took me about a week and a half of evenings to finish, the perfect length for a game like this in my book. Obviously, the experience I was looking for may not be the one that other people who play this game have in mind; those people can try turning up the difficulty level, ferreting out every single secret area, killing every single enemy, or doing whatever else they need to in order to find the sort of challenge they’d prefer. They might also want to check out the game’s expansion pack, which caters more to the FPS hardcore by eliminating the community-theater cut scenes and making everything in general a little bit harder. I didn’t bother, having gotten everything I was looking for out of the base game.

That said, I do look forward to playing more games like Jedi Knight as we move on into a slightly more evolved era of the FPS genre as a whole. While I’m never likely to join the hardcore blood-and-guts contingent, action-packed fun like this game offers up is hard for even a reflex-challenged, violence-ambivalent old man like me to resist.

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Epilogue: The Universe Shrinks

Students of history like to say that every golden age carries within it the seeds of its demise. That rings especially true when it comes to the heyday of the Expanded Universe: the very popularity of the many new Star Wars novels, comics, and games reportedly did much to convince George Lucas that it might be worth returning to Star Wars himself. And because Lucas was one of the entertainment world’s more noted control freaks, such a return could bode no good for this giddy era of fan ownership.

We can pin the beginning of the end down to a precise date: November 1, 1994, the day on which George Lucas sat down to start writing the scripts for what would become the Star Wars prequels, going so far as to bring in a film crew to commemorate the occasion. “I have beautiful pristine yellow tablets,” he told the camera proudly, waving a stack of empty notebooks in front of its lens. “A nice fresh box of pencils. All I need is an idea.” Four and a half years later, The Phantom Menace would reach theaters, inaugurating for better or for worse — mostly for the latter, many fans would come to believe — the next era of Star Wars as a media phenomenon.

Critics and fans have posited many theories as to why the prequel trilogy turned out to be so dreary, drearier even than clichés about lightning in a bottle and not being able to go home again would lead one to expect. One good reason was the absence in the editing box of Marcia Lucas, whose ability to trim the fat from her ex-husband’s bloated, overly verbose story lines was as sorely missed as her deft way with character moments, the ones dismissed by George as the “dying and crying” scenes. Another was the self-serious insecurity of the middle-aged George Lucas, who wanted the populist adulation that comes from making blockbusters simultaneously with the respect of the art-house cognoscenti, who therefore decided to make the prequels a political parable about “what happens to you if you’ve got a dysfunctional government that’s corrupt and doesn’t work” instead of allowing them to be the “straightforward, wholesome, fun adventure” he had described the first Star Wars movie to be back in 1977. Suffice to say that Lucas displayed none of Timothy Zahn’s ability to touch on more complicated ideas without getting bogged down in them.

But whatever the reasons, dreary the prequels were, and their dreariness seeped into the Expanded Universe, whose fannish masterminds saw the breadth of their creative discretion steadily constricted. A financially troubled West End Games lost the license for its Star Wars tabletop RPG, the Big Bang that had gotten the universe expanding in the first place, in 1999. In 2002, the year that the second of the cinematic prequels was released, Alan Dean Foster, the author of the very first Star Wars novel from 1978, agreed to return to write another one. “It was no fun,” he remembers. The guidance he got from Lucasfilm “was guidance in the sense that you’re in a Catholic school and nuns walk by with rulers.”

And then, eventually, came the sale to Disney, which in its quest to own all of our childhoods turned Star Wars into just another tightly controlled corporate property like any of its others. The Expanded Universe was finally put out of its misery once and for all in 2014, a decade and a half past its golden age. It continues to exist today only in the form of a handful of characters, Grand Admiral Thrawn among them, who have been co-opted by Disney and integrated into the official lore.

The corporate Star Wars of these latter days can leave one longing for the moment when the first film and its iconic characters fall out of copyright and go back to the people permanently. But even if Congress is willing and the creek don’t rise, that won’t occur until 2072, a year I and presumably many of you as well may not get to see. In the meantime, we can still use the best artifacts of the early Expanded Universe as our time machines for traveling back to Star Wars‘s last age of innocent, uncalculating fun.

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Sources: The books Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Age of First-Person Shooters by David L. Craddock, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe by Chris Taylor, and The Secret History of Star Wars by Michael Kaminski. Computer Gaming World of May 1995, October 1996, January 1997, December 1997, and March 1998; PC Zone of May 1997; Retro Gamer 138; Chicago Tribune of May 24 2017.

Online sources include Wes Fenlon’s Dark Forces and Jedi Knight retrospective for PC Gamer. The film George Lucas made to commemorate his first day of writing the Star Wars prequels is available on YouTube.

Jedi Knight is available for digital purchase at GOG.com. Those who want to dive deeper may also find the original and/or remastered version of Dark Forces to be of interest.

Some Gaza updates: carnage and starvation on the ground, cynical US machinations, and more signs of IDF weakness.

Patrick Stewart grew up with no indoor toilet, no hot water, and no central heat. He shared a bed with his brother. His family had bath night once a week. It's sort of ironic that he wound up playing a character who can basically snap his fingers and go anywhere in the known universe, or tell a computer to make him hot tea any time of day or night. A piece in The Guardian refers to all of that as childhood trauma. It got me thinking. It's interesting how one person's trauma looks like another person's Tuesday afternoon. It's also interesting how millions of spoiled Americans would consider Captain Picard's childhood a rather dystopian existence. And of course, they'll do anything to avoid living like that, even if it means invading other countries and stealing everything they own while excusing it as "defending democracy." Hence the mess we're in.

Hi, I'm back.

It's been an interesting couple of months. My family got a little taste of Picard's childhood trauma in January when our (brand new and very expensive) water heater crapped out during a winter storm. Then our refrigerator crapped out. Then our wise old cat started puking three times a day and lost half her body weight. (We had to put her down.) Then my spouse had a cancer scare. All the while, we spent about one night a week hiding from a tornado in the bathroom, because we don't have a basement or garage.

Patrick Stewart had family bath night.

We have twister night.

Poor me, right?

The interesting thing about this newsletter is that I deal with the exact same garbage as everyone else. I just make it sound better.

For the last several weeks, I haven't had much disposable time. I've been figuring out yet another side hustle, and this one requires serious computer skills. It was time for me to branch out anyway.

We're gearing up for real home school in about a month. Our current school is shutting down. It was an outdoor school that went year-round, not unlike the kind of schools you find in Europe where kids spend most of their time outside and a little bit of time inside on formal education. We looked hard for a Covid safe outdoor school and came up empty. We did find a couple of places where kids can go once or twice a week. It's basically a homeschool supplement.

I did go on a couple of school tours. Even the nicest, most progressive schools that "still care about Covid" aren't doing masks. They've made a modest attempt to improve their air quality, or they're planning on it. The school directors and teachers say things like, "It's completely okay if your child wears a mask. We won't judge you. We're very open-minded."

Wow, thanks.

Turns out, the American socio-economic landscape makes it almost impossible to run a school like the one we've been attending. They're shutting down because they're riddled with debt, and the nonprofit that supports them has run out of money. A handful of parents tried to save it and couldn't come up with a viable plan. The director has already left for another job. In a few weeks, this wonderful school will be no more.

Yeah, it's sad.

As for my family, we're moving.

We have a house. We're selling the old one. We're packing boxes. We can't really afford to move. And yet, we can't afford to stay here either. We've had more close calls with tornadoes in the last year than the entire time I lived in the middle of tornado alley. In the summer, the heat index soars into the upper 100s and above. It's literally not safe for my kid to play outside. Thanks to Covid, outside was the one place where she wasn't in imminent danger.

We're managing.

Social media remains a hellscape. Bluesky is growing, and maybe it offers everyone a reprieve from the daily onslaught of Covid denial, climate denial, and the general dull ache of dealing with assholes.

Like many others, I needed a break. Not from the doom. From the denial. The denial was getting to me. I needed to go a few days without hearing about the latest demonstration of egregious, oblivious privilege by a celebrity or an influencer.

I especially needed a break from politics.

Don't you?

On that front, we get it. Trump has the Republican party in his pocket. He stands a good chance of winning. Nobody will dare slap cuffs on him before the election. They're scared it will start a civil war. They're also scared of all the crazies who will come after them with guns.

They're not wrong.

We face a pretty awful choice. We can go with Biden and keep the train on the tracks, but the tracks are heading toward industrial collapse within a decade. Or we can go with Trump and derail completely. And honestly, fine. I would rather keep the train on the tracks. At least Biden is predictable. The irony is that we could reject this choice at any time, but the majority won't do it because they're scared of what everyone else will do.

While this circus of an election unfolds, my attention has been consumed by immediate needs.

On a related note:

My university initially rejected my request for a remote job. Then they came back and said they would think about it if I did more work for less money. So I've been doing that. I've written three different proposals for my new position. And... they've spent the last six weeks jerking me around.

So... I don't know if I'll have a job in six weeks. Hence me putting extra time into a new side hustle and trying to rest myself before a possible plunge into a dreadful job market that thinks Covid is over.

Moving forward, I'll keep this newsletter going. I'll update it once or twice a week for the rest of this year, then we'll see what happens. I'll continue commenting on the circus and sharing my insights. That said, it's become pretty clear to me that this thing will remain a side hustle. Trying to turn it into a main source of income was making me miserable. If you signed up, you didn't waste your cash and you didn't get "cheated." Look at all the essays I've written. Most of those are evergreen, even if they reference current events. Also, consider that I still have to pay to keep this site itself going. So if anyone was under the impression that I was on a cruise sipping margaritas...

um...no...

To remind everyone, I didn't ask for this. I was happy at Medium (my original platform). They, however, decided to do everything within their power to ensure doomers like me felt unwelcome. So I moved to Substack, only to watch them start a pointless turf war with Elon Musk while bankrolling Nazis. Ghost isn't exactly cheap for someone with 20,000 free email subscribers, but I think we're all tired of migrating from one platform to the next.

I'll continue to produce work, just not at the insane breakneck pace that many people took for granted. I can't stay up all night updating Covid reading lists all the time, not anymore. I can't spend 8 hours researching and writing a piece on something like self-triggering if it's going to land with a thud on readers. As I realized lately, that was taking a lot of energy to maintain.

For writers: I'll update this on the site, but here's the deal. I can't afford to pay anyone anymore. I actually couldn't afford it while I was paying people, but now I really can't afford it. So if you want to publish here, you can for free. It's up to you.

So, there's a takeaway here for everyone:

You're allowed to take a break. It doesn't diminish the important work you've done. It doesn't mean you're lazy or apathetic. It doesn't mean you have to stop wearing an effective mask or cleaning the air. It doesn't mean you need to start buying cheap plastic for fun.

You can just live.

Recently, it has become painfully clear to me what a waste of time it is to argue with people on your phone about any of this. If you want to make it, then you have to do what we're doing. Circle your wagons. Make whatever community you can. If you possibly can, move away from places that are already dealing with the worst impacts of climate change (like us). You can't really escape the collapse, but you can defer your doom for a while.

Most importantly:

Do things you enjoy. Nobody knows how much time we have left. There's plenty of fun, relaxing, fulfilling things to do that don't require flying halfway around the world on a jet or producing piles of trash. Play with your kids. Take a nap. Read a book. Listen to music. Make some music.

Draw something. Sculpt something.

Breathe.

Don't you deserve it?

The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of  fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here. 

Read previous entries in the column here, listen to the podcast here, pledge to the Travolta/Cage Patreon at this blessed web address and finally follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/travoltacage

Hollywood loves a comeback. Richard Stanley had a doozy. The South African filmmaker with the witchy aura graduated from short films and music videos with his 1990 cult classic debut Hardware. 

The low-budget 1992 fright flick Dust Devil followed before Stanley got what could have been his big break: getting hired to write and direct an adaptation of H.G Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau starring Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer. 

Things fell apart very quickly, however. There was just too much goddamned eccentricity for any one film to handle. So, after a disastrous week, Stanley was fired and replaced by John Frankenheimer, a steady old pro who, needless to say, delivered one of the biggest and most notorious flops in film history. 

Rather than go home and lick his wounds Stanley was made up as one of Dr. Moreau’s mutants so that he could watch the madness that ensued firsthand. 

It’s a development chronicled in the wonderful, juicy documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau. 

Stanley spent the next few decades in development hell, working on projects that would never get made before he began work on the 2019 H.P. Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space. 

Color Out of Space was widely and rightly deemed a masterpiece of cosmic horror that more than made good on the abundant promise of Hardware. 

The film got ecstatic reviews and deafening buzz, though it bewilderingly didn’t do much at the box-office and was largely overlooked during awards time. 

It did not matter. Stanley was back and seemingly better than ever. It was one hell of a comeback. Stanley announced plans to follow up Color Out of Space with two more Lovecraft adaptations, beginning with The Dunwich Horror. 

Stanley suddenly had heat. He had acclaim. He had an amazing comeback movie.

Then things took a turn. Scarlett Amaris, an ex-partner of the filmmaker and the co-screenwriter of Color Out of Space went public with allegations of horrendous physical and psychological abuse. Stanley went from red hot to ice cold. 

Spectrevision, Elijah Wood’s production company, produced Color Out of Space. Spectrevision announced that it would no longer work with Stanley and donated money from the film to anti-domestic violence charities. 

Stanley filed a libel suit against Amaris in France, but he remained cancelled. Stanley’s fall was as dramatic as his rise and his comeback. 

Amaris’ allegations cast a dark shadow over a movie that’s an unearthly shade of magenta visually and every shade of black thematically. Back at The A.V. Club we had a popular list of great movies too intense and grim to see more than once. 

Color Out of Space belongs on the list. It wrecked me. It was everything that I had hoped and feared that it would be and more. 

The adaptation of Lovecraft’s short story of the same name stars Nicolas Cage as Nathan Gardner, a father and husband who moves to his late father’s farm with his hard-charging businesswoman wife Theresa (Joely Richardson), his rebellious Wiccan daughter Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur), stoner son Benny (Brendan Meyer) and spooky younger son Jack (Julian Hilliard). 

It’s a beautiful, wild, pastoral paradise filled with Alpacas and trees until a meteorite arrives and transforms the family’s heaven into hell. 

Color Out of Space makes us believe in the embattled family at its center. We care about these characters because they are crafted with depth and nuance and performed with sensitivity and empathy. This extends to a squatter named Ezra (Tommy Chong), who has a nifty set-up in a cozy little spot on the farm. Ezra is tuned to a frequency all his own. His body might be on earth, but his mind and spirit are somewhere in the stars. 

This is not a sentence I’ve ever written before but Color Out of Space features a tremendous dramatic performance from noted marijuana enthusiast Tommy Chong. 

Everything changes after the ominous arrival of that cursed rock from outer space. The vegetables that Nathan grows are massive but inedible. The mother and daughter find themselves ruled by strange, masochistic compulsions to hurt themselves. 

When Nathan calls his children, the connection is so riddled with sinister static that he’s indecipherable. But it’s not just the phone that has been hopelessly tainted by their unexpected, unwanted visitor from outer space; everything has been corrupted down to a molecular level. 

There’s something in the water, literally and figuratively, something alien and evil and terrifyingly powerful and vast. 

I’ve written extensively about two of Nicolas Cage’s primary late-period modes: Dorky Dad Cage and Crazy Cage. Mom and Dad brilliantly uses both aspects of Cage’s larger-than-life persona. He begins the film as a Dorky Dad and ends it in a place of madness, violence, and despair. 

The same is true of Color Out of Space. The titular evil changes the unfortunate life form it encounters on a physical and biological level. It gets inside their bodies and deep inside their minds. 

As the evil spreads, Nathan’s behavior begins to change along with it. His voice goes up an octave so that he sounds upset and angry, which is a wholly natural response to the situation. 

Cage’s mannerisms change along with them. At first, there is fun and pleasure to be had from this most entertaining of actors spectacularly losing his shit, but there comes a point in its third act where the film ceases to be entertaining or pleasurable.

That’s not because Color Out of Space stops being a masterful exercise in virtuoso filmmaking. On the contrary, it’s precisely because Color Out of Space represents such a masterful exercise in virtuoso filmmaking that it’s damn near impossible to derive pleasure from a vision so evisceratingly dark and unrelentingly bleak. 

I’ve also written about how one of Cage’s late-period strengths is his strong chemistry with age-appropriate female leads. That is very much in effect here. The entire cast is outstanding, but Richardson is horrifying and heartbreaking as a strong-willed would-be survivor who begins the film a lost and broken woman and ends it an inhuman ghoul almost beyond imagination. 

In scenes that are hard to watch and painful to remember, Jack, the youngest child, re-enters his mother’s body under the malevolent influence of the titular evil. It’s body horror on par with the best of David Cronenberg or Stuart Gordon, our preeminent adapter of Lovecraft’s work. 

Stanley might have mounted a challenge to him on that front, but we’ll probably never know because Stanley, the person, destroyed the career of Stanley, the filmmaker. That’s a shame because while I have nothing but contempt for Stanley as a person, he did a magnificent job writing and directing Color Out of Space. 

The disgraced writer-director realized an ambitious and exhaustive vision. It’s the work of a true auteur operating at the apex of his abilities. 

Color Out of Space does not linger on the hideousness of the Theresa/Jack mutation. We see just enough of it to be disgusted and horrified but also deeply moved. 

The color transforms animals as well as people. The family dog becomes a hell hound, and the Alpacas stop being cute and cuddly and become creatures of Lovecraftian cosmic horror. 

I tend to grade late-period Cage movies on a curve because he makes so many movies, and so many are terrible. But Color Out of Space is a real-ass movie, just as Mom and Dad and Mandy were films of quality and vision, not just work Cage grudgingly accepted to pay for castles and ex-wives. 

Cage embraces pure madness in Color Out of Space, but he never stops being achingly human and real, even when his body is at least partially alien. 

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By Michael Brenner

Western leaders are experiencing two stunning events: defeat in Ukraine, genocide in Palestine. The first is humiliating, the other shameful. Yet, they feel no humiliation or shame. Their actions show vividly that those sentiments are alien to them – unable to penetrate the entrenched barriers of dogma, arrogance and deep-seated insecurities. The last are personal as well as political. Therein lies a puzzle.  For, as a consequence, the West has set itself on a path of collective suicide. Moral suicide in Gaza; diplomatic suicide – the foundations laid in Europe, the Middle East and across Eurasia; economic suicide – the dollar-based global financial system jeopardized, Europe deindustrializing. It is not a pretty picture. Astoundingly, this self-destruction is occurring in the absence of any major trauma – external or internal. Therein lies another, related puzzle.

Some clues for these abnormalities are provided by their most recent responses as deteriorating conditions tighten the vise – on emotions, on prevailing policies, on domestic political worries, on ginger egos. Those responses fall under the category of panic behavior. Deep down, they are scared, fearful and agitated. Biden et al in Washington, Macron, Schulz, Sunak, Stoltenberg, von der Leyen. They lack the courage of their stated convictions or the courage to face reality squarely. The blunt truth is that they have contrived to get themselves, and their countries, in a quandary from which there is no escape conforming to their current self-defined interests and emotional engagement.  Hence, we observe an array of reactions that are feckless, grotesque and dangerous. 

Feckless

Exhibit 1 is French President Emmanuel Macon’s proposed plan to station military personnel from NATO members within Ukraine to serve as a tripwire. Arrayed as a cordon around Kharkov, Odessa and Kiev they are meant to deter advancing Russian forces from moving on those cities for fear of killing Western soldiers – thereby risking a direct confrontation with the Alliance. It is a highly dubious idea that defies logic and experience while tempting fate. France long has deployed members of its armed forces in Ukraine where they programed and operated sophisticated equipment – in particular, the SCALP cruise missiles.  Scores were killed by a Russian retaliatory strike a few months ago that destroyed their residence. Paris cried ‘holy murder’ for Moscow’s unsporting conduct in shooting back at those attacking them.   It was retaliation for the French participation in the deadly bombing of the Russian city of Belgorod. Why then should we expect that the Kremlin would abandon a costly campaign involving what they see as vital national interests if uniformed Western troops were deployed in a picket line around cities?  Would they be intimated into passivity by spiffy uniforms assembled under outsized banners inscribed with the slogan: “DON’T MESS WITH NATO”?

Moreover, there already are thousands of Westerners bolstering the Ukrainian armed forces. Roughly 4 – 5,000 Americans have been performing critical operational functions from the outset. The presence of a majority predates by several years the onset of hostilities 2 years ago. That contingent was augmented by a supplementary group of 1,700 last summer which was as a corps of logistic experts advertised as mandated to seek out and eradicate corruption in the black-marketing of pilfered supplies. The Pentagon people are sown thought the Ukrainian military from headquarters planning units, to advisers in the field, to technicians and Special Forces. It is widely understood that Americans have operated the sophisticated HIMARS long-range artillery and the Patriot air defense batteries. This last means that members of the U.S. military have been aiming – perhaps pulling the trigger on – weapons that kill Russians. In addition, the CIA has established a massive, multipurpose system able to conduct a wide range of Intelligence and operational activities- independently as well as in conjunction with the Ukrainian FSB. That includes tactical Intelligence on a day-by-day basis. We don’t know whether they had a role in the campaign of targeted assassinations inside Russia.

A critical role also has been played by Britain. Their specialized personnel have been operating the Storm Shadow missiles (counterpart to the French SCALP) employed against Crimea and elsewhere. Too, MI-6 has taken a lead role in designing multiple attacks on the Kerch Bridge and other critical infrastructure. The principal lesson to be drawn from this overview is that the positioning of European troops at key sites as human hostages in not wholly original. Their presence has not deterred Russia from attacking them in the field or, as in the French case, hunting them down in their residences.

Feckless: Exhibit 2 is the American airdrop of a paltry load of humanitarian aid in the sea off of Gaza. This bizarre action overlaps the silly and the grotesque. The United States has been the major accomplice in the Israeli ravaging of Gaza. Its weapons have killed 30,000 Gazans, wounded 70,000+, and devastated hospitals. Washington has actively blocked any serious attempt at aid by the UNWRO in withholding the funds necessary to finance its operations, while staying silent as Israel blocks entry points from Egypt and massacres residents awaiting the arrival of a food convoy. Furthermore, it has vetoed every attempt to end the carnage through ceasefire resolutions of the UN Security Council. This absurd gesture of kicking pallets out an airplane hatch simply underscores American disregard for Palestinian lives, its contempt for world opinion and its shameless subjugation to dictates from Israel.

Feckless: Exhibit 3 is provided by Rishi (Sage) Sunak, interim Prime Minister of the U.K. An ardent backer of Israel, he consistently has criticized Peace demonstrations protesting the assault on Gazans as obstacles to achieving a long-term ceasefire and political settlement. In this, he continues the long tradition of British fealty to its American overlord. Last week, he escalated the attack in denouncing them as tools of Hamas who have been taken over by terrorists – terrorists who threaten to tear the country apart. He likened it to ‘mob rule’ – as punctuated by the electoral victory of maverick George Galloway who crushed the Tories (and Labour) in a by-election. No evidence, of course, as to how half a million peaceable citizens are a Trojan horse for Muslim jihadis. This fecklessness is recognizable for those familiar with the haughty manner cultivated by the English upper crust – infecting even an arriviste in those exalted circles whose origins were in the Indian Raj. Condescension toward the lower ranks, instruction as to where the boundaries of acceptable behavior lie. That attitude often is laced with cute disparagements of groups or nationalities that don’t conform. The fact that Sunak himself is unabashed at now making snide accusations – however implied – about Muslims demonstrates the durability of cultural prejudices along with the historical openness of England’s upper class to those with money or cachet. These days, even a rishi. I suppose that’s social progress.

The dangerous element in Sunak’s unbecoming demagoguery is not its aggravating effect on the West’s culpability in the Palestine. The regional protagonists, as well as the rest of the world, smile at Britain’s grand rhetorical flourishes knowing that it counts only as America’s Tonto. Rather, it opens a breach in the country’s dedication to free speech and assembly. For it comes close to saying that any public disagreement with HMG’s policy is tantamount to treason.

Grotesque

Insofar as violent ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians is concerned, it is fair to say that the Western governments’ complicity via its arming and unqualified backing for Israel’s gruesome actions constitutes grotesque behavior. To single out individual elements among individual governments is superfluous. The entire episode is grotesque. So it is seen by nearly the entire world outside the countries of the collective West. That represents about 2/3 of humanity. Still, our nations’ political elites appear oblivious and/or disdainful of that judgment. It matters little to them that they are seen by the ‘others’ as inhumane, arch hypocrites and racists. Those strong impressions are reinforced in many places by traumatic memories of how they themselves were subjugated, trodden upon and exploited over the centuries by people who righteously instructed them on the superiority of Western values – just as they do today.    

There are actions that manifestly represent a clear and future danger of an expanding war in Europe. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s belligerent Secretary-General, boldly stated last week that the Western allies should give Ukraine the green light to use the cruise missiles they have acquired to attack targets in Russia proper. Those weapons include the Storm Shadow, the Scalp, the long-range Tauras that Germany may soon dispatch and similar hardware to be provided by the U.S. (perhaps launched from the F-16s already arriving). Such a drastic move has been hinted at by other Western leaders, and pushed by hardline factions in Washington. Putin has warned that such escalation by the West – as with the conjectured deployment of NATO troops in Ukraine – would provoke a military response from Moscow. The extreme risks of the ensuing hostilities spiraling out of control to the nuclear threshold are self-evident.

Taken together, the actions by Western leaders – supported by their nations’ political elites – are indicative of a behavior pattern that has parted ways with reality. They derive deductively from dogmas unsubstantiated by objective fact. They are logically self-contradictory, impervious to events that shift the landscape, and radically unbalanced in weighting benefits/costs/risks and probabilities of success. How do we explain this ‘irrationality’? There are background conditions that are permissive or encouraging of this flight from sound reasoning. They include: the nihilistic socio-cultural trends in our contemporary post-modern societies; their susceptibility to collective hysteria/overwrought emotional reactions to unsettling events – 9/11, Islamic terrorism, the fable about Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election among other political matters, the conjuring of the menacing Chinese dragon, scary predictions of inevitable war with the PRC, outlandish claims that Putin is planning to launch an all-out campaign to conquer Europe up to the English Channel. The last two are fed by the free-floating anxieties, i.e. dread, engendered by the earlier bouts of mass psychopathology. Those allegations, in fact pure fictions, have gained currency among senior military figures, heads of government, and among strategic ‘thinkers.’

Back to the ingredients of panic. We noted fear – of both the identifiable and the unknown, and sub-conscious feelings of insecurity. Those feelings derive from a matrix of disorienting shifts in the global environment inhabited by Western societies. They, in turn, grow in reciprocation with unsetting domestic developments. The outcome is two-fold: a stultifying of any reasonable debate about dubious policies – leaving premises and purposes untested, and opening opportunities for willful persons or factions who harbor audacious objectives of remaking the world’s geo-political space according to American hegemonic specifications. To that end, our leaders manipulate and exploit conditions of emotional disorientation and political conformity. The outstanding example are the so-called ‘neo-cons’ in Washington (who number Joe Biden as a comrade-in-arms) who have crafted a network of like-minded true believers in London, Paris, Berlin and at both ends of Brussels.

What of the puzzle we noted as to the near complete absence of feelings of guilt or shame – especially over Gaza, of being humiliated in the eyes of the world? In conditions of nihilism, matters of conscience are moot. For the implicit rejection of norms, rules and laws frees the individual self to do whatever impulses or ideas or selfish interests impel it. With the superego dissolved, there is no felt obligation to judge oneself in reference to any external or abstract standard. Narcissistic tendencies flourish. A similar psychology obviates the requirement for experiencing shame. That is something that can only exist if we subjectively are part of a social grouping wherein personal status, and sense of worth, depend on how others view us and whether they grant us respect. In the absence of such a communal identity, with its attendant sensitivity to its opinion, shame can exist only in the perverse form of regret that one has been unable to meet the demanding, all-consuming need for self-gratification. That applies to nations as well as its individual leaders.

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One of the most curious assumptions of contemporary capitalism discourse is the widespread belief that we have entered something called “Late Stage Capitalism,” typically with the implication that revolution is right around the corner. The main rationale for this is always just a kind of subjective judgment about “how bad things have gotten” and a conviction that “workers aren’t going to take much more”. This perspective may feel true if you are a downwardly mobile American comparing your lot to the lives of your parents and grandparents, but from a historical perspective it seems to me entirely unfounded.

Even if one buys the emisseration hypothesis, which holds that it is worker resistance to their increasing exploitation that will ultimately bring down capitalism, there are good reasons to believe that workers are unlikely to snap anytime soon. Why? Consider the Gravettians:

The world at 20,000 BC is inhospitable, a cold, dry and windy planet with frequent storms and a dust-laden atmosphere… People survive wherever they can, struggling with freezing temperatures and persistent drought…[their] dwellings are igloo-like but built from mammoth bone and hide rather than blocks of ice… Life is tough: hauling the bones, building and repairing dwellings, cutting and breaking tusks into sections… 1

These people lived lives that were far worse, by several orders of magnitude, than anything anyone reading this will ever face. And contrary to the stereotype of cavemen as half-conscious morons, the Gravettians had thoroughly modern brains; they would have experienced this world just as you do. But what’s crucial to appreciate here is that the Gravettians put up with this life for about 9000 years. By the time their culture disappeared, the first mammoth shelters they built were older than the pyramids are today.

There is a related problem in anthropology that Colin Renfew called the sapient paradox: biologically modern humans roamed the earth for nearly 200,000 years, but only adopted the trappings of civilization quite recently. Here we must ask: Why didn’t the Gravettians at least build better shelters like mud huts? How did their tool-making technology stay stuck at chipping away pieces of rock for nearly ten thousand years? It is understandable that living through an ice age would slow a society’s progress considerably, but ten thousand years is (on human scales) a very, very, very long time. Why didn’t people do more to change their material conditions?

I have no idea; but what I do know is that they didn’t. Nothing about living in obscene misery for several millennia forced the Gravettians to make radical changes to their society, or for that matter even modest changes, the kind that seem trivial to us in retrospect. They just endured. Why assume that we are going to react to the persisting miseries of capitalism any different?

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To get a sense of just how long capitalism could be with us, consider what I’ve often called the “company town” path to socialism. There is ultimately no way to predict which of capitalism’s contradictions will eventually bring it down, but I have always intuitively thought this one the most likely since it relies on features of capitalism that the state has proven extremely bad at managing: privatization and capital concentration.

And it centers around a phenomena that we have seen over and over again: the company town, a kind of quasi-state structure that can emerge within capitalism when enough of the government has been privatized, and when most (if not all) of the local economy becomes integrated into the same private bureaucracy. They used to be extremely common in the United States and are still fairly common today, particularly in the developing world. On the left one occasionally encounters a certain mythology that CTs declined in the United States because of opposition by labor, but as historians like Czambel and Crawford have persuasively argued, the proximate cause really appears to be postwar rising wages in the early-mid-twentieth century. That affluence, of course, is rapidly disappearing in the United States today.

Privatization is an inevitable expression of capitalism’s relentless drive for profit, and even when it causes serious social problems, liberal governance only seems capable of slowing it down. The same, of course, holds for capital concentration: pundits like Matt Stoller can call for antitrust all they like, but as companies become too big to fail and too influential to break up, this ultimately proves a lost cause. In tandem, these privatization and concentration seem to inevitably give us the company town: private interests decide it would be more efficient and more profitable to organize more and more of the local economy under one roof.

While these trends may seem diametrically opposed to anything resembling socialism, I think CTs are likely to do two things that socialists should take quite seriously.

First, there does not really appear to be any logical limit to their expansion. CTs have mostly failed in the past when workers became affluent enough to essentially buy their way out of localized economies, but historically much of that affluence in America came from us picking low-hanging technological fruit and benefitting from our geographic isolation during WW2. There is no reason to believe that historical incidents like this will always bail democracy out, particularly as we watch massive corporations like Amazon start to build CTs around the US. That Amazon has also built CTs in other parts of the world shows us another limit that the private sector can move past: national borders. With a market cap that exceeds even medium-sized developed economies like Spain and Australia, Amazon has proven that size is not an issue for private power; the logistical and managerial problems of scale and complexity that plagued states like the Roman Empire and the Soviet Union do not seem to be all that challenging after the rise of modern computing and telecommunications. Even bourgeois economists like Parag Khanna predict a “new world order rule by global corporations and megacities — not countries”; this is only at odds with a Marxist analysis insofar as it envisions a permanent market of competing CTs rather than their gradual consolidation into a single global monopoly.

This brings us to the second feature of CTs that socialists should take seriously: their tendencies towards centralization and efficiency. On one hand, capital is gradually consolidating functions performed in diverse ways by multiple states under the umbrella of a single board. Supply chains that deliver staple foods to cities on opposite sides of the world can be wholly controlled by a single company. On the other hand, capital moves towards performing these functions as efficiently as possible. In part this is just a side-effect of centralization: when you replace two distinct governments, each with its own byzantine mechanisms of power shaped by long and complex histories, with a single structure of corporate governance, you are probably going to get something a lot simpler. But this is also, of course, because of capitalism’s irresistable drive to maximize profits.

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What I think capitalism will eventually create, then, is a de facto sovereign, fairly centralized, and remarkably efficient structure for delivering what Marx called “the necessary wage” — that is, the bare minimum of what workers need to survive — to people all over the world. This is obviously dystopian in one sense, but in another it solves the greatest challenge facing socialism: the need to build an international system that is not bound by national states and that can produce and redistribute resources at an international scale. What is left, from here, is for workers to take control of that system and establish democratic mechanisms for its governance. That is by no means an “easy” or simple task, but it is one that faces fewer challenges than paths to socialism usually encounter. Even more importantly, it is one that sails with the headwinds of capitalist development rather than against them.

Supposing that something like this is the process that gets us to socialism, imagine how long it could take to play out. Individual nation-states continuing to bleed out their sovereignty until there is nothing left. Massive international monopolies passing through a state of naked imperial competition until their economic interests become so entangled that we see mergers instead. This is a story of hundreds or even thousands of years — not decades. Will socialists, like evangelicals waiting for the rapture, spend all that time preaching that revolution is just around the corner?

***

Bertand Russell, on the decline of the Roman Empire:

The economic system was very bad; Italy was going out of cultivation, and Rome depended upon the free distribution of grain from the provinces. All initiative was concentrated in the Emperor and his ministers; throughout the vast extent of the Empire, no one, except an occasional rebellious general, could do anything but submit. Men looked to the past for what was best; the future, they felt, would be at best a weariness, and at worse a horror…[here] we see the difference between a tired and a hopeful age. In a hopeful age, great present evils can be endured, because it is thought that they will pass; but in a tired age even real goods lose their savour.2

Socialism, as practiced today, was developed in an age of hope. Marx wisely declined to make much more that the vaguest predictions about the fall of capitalism, but he lived during years of radical economic transformations and this plainly informed his activism. The revolutionaries of the early twentieth centuries saw a world where labor activists and bands of militants could still topple entire empires. It was their understanding of material analysis and their grasp of the private property system that compelled socialists to predict that capitalism must fall; but it was their position in history, in the age of hope, that encouraged them to add “soon.”

Elsewhere, Russell compares Marx’s role in society to Abrahamic religion:

To understand Marx psychologically, one should use the following dictionary…The Second Coming = The Revolution…The terms on the left give the emotional content of the terms on the right, and it is this emotional content, familiar to those who have had a Christian or a Jewish upbringining, that makes Marx’s eschatology credible.

Russell is trying to criticize Marxism here, but I think we can salvage his comparison by replacing “credible” with “persuasive.” In the days of the early Church, it was believed that Christ had visited earth quite recently, and this, rather than some intellectual / theological argument about the apocalypse, is what made his imminent return easy to believe. Similarly, in the days of Marx, social unrest was growing, and the memory of the bourgeois revolution against feudalism was not that distant. Marx was easy to believe not because people were smarter or because the arguments for it were more rigorous, but simply because such things seemed much more likely at the time.

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What I think makes Russell’s parallel insightful, however, is that most people don’t believe in an imminent apocalypse anymore. And the reasons for this are well understood: as millennia passed and Christ did not return, it became clear even to believers that the early Church had proceeded with a certain naivete. Today, there is no real reason within the framework of orthodox Christianity to maintain that Christ will not return soon; and yet in practice, Christians who say it will happen tomorrow are generally regarded as oblivious and uncoupled from reality. Once the core of this teaching was “Behold, I come quickly”; today, it is “No man knows the hour or the day.”

The public’s reception of Marxism has undergone a similar shift, though one that I do not think socialists themselves are often aware of. Today it is actually not uncommon to even hear liberals magnanimously concede that capitalism “can’t go on like this forever,” or that “perhaps someday we’ll get to socialism”; it is not a sincere concession, but it works precisely because people still find the notion of eventual economic transformation hard to dismiss. The target of ridicule now is the notion of imminent revolution. Liberalism parodies today’s socialists as would-be revolutionaries precisely because the notion of capitalism collapsing tomorrow seems absolutely ridiculous to everyone. Indeed, it seems even more ridiculous to some than the notion of Christ’s return: as Jameson put it, “It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.”

If Christianity is any precedent then I fear the modern socialist is likely to go the way of the modern apocalptic evangelical who builds his entire ideology around an unfulfilled expectation. Consider just a few of the consequences:

• Evangelicals routinely predict a rapture that never comes; and when this happens, it discredits not just their prediction, but their entire worldview.

• As evangelicals predict a world that remains uncoupled from reality, they predictably attract a certain kind of devotee: contrarian, opportunistic, prone to disassociative thinking, and so on.

• Because their optimism is grounded in a world that no longer is, the evangelical is constantly tempted to recreate that world that was: they are tempted, in other words, into reaction. Evangelicals constantly romanticize the early church’s faith in Christ’s imminent return, for example; and this has often led them into arguments like “there was something about having a male leadership that led them to this correct conclusion.”

Compare this to tendencies we can see on the socialist left today:

• The convinction that we live in the age of late stage capitalism has fed everything from hilarious triumphalism about the growth of DSA to absurd speculation that BRICS is some kind of nascent anti-capitalist coalition.

• The conviction that we live in the age of late stage capitalism has attracted conspiracy theorists who resort to crazier and crazier explanations for its persistence; opportunists who build their entire rhetoric around outflanking competitors with revolutionary optimism; and (it must be said) an unusual proportion of folks who plainly suffer from varying degrees of ODD and schizotypal personality disorders.

• Because their optimism is plainly grounded in a revolutionary period that is no longer with us today, the socialist is constantly tempted to try to recreate it through a kind of revolutionary nostalgia. Thus we see (for example) appeals to tangential expressions of bigotry in early twentieth century Marxism (expressions one can find everywhere in that age) as expressions of an “authentic” Marxism that we must return to.

Philosophies developed during an age of optimism about change are a poor fit for an age of endurance, when we can clearly see that the world has not changed and is unlikely to change anytime soon. In an age of endurance, such philosophies become the province of cranks, revolutionaries, and frauds. They have nothing but false hope in imminent salvation to offer the world; most see through this farce, and only an unfortunate few buy into it.

***

Many readers, I suspect, will read this article as an attack on Marxism itself. What is left of socialist praxis in a world of early capitalism? Marx himself famously wrote that “philosophers have only interpreted the world…the point, however, is to change it.” So what is the point of a Marxist philosophy in a world that will eventually change, but that is unlikely to change anytime soon?

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I do not think I can provide a satisfactory answer to this question here, but I do think I can at least offer a starting point: Marx’s own method of historical materialism. As socialists, we have often used a similar method to compare ourselves to Bolshevik or Maoist revolutionaries. We know how they managed to overthrow capitalism, if only temporarily, in the context of their specific material conditions.

But what if, instead, we were to compare ourselves to a very different underclass: medieval serfs at the dawn of feudalism? Suppose that tomorrow you wake up and find that you now live in (say) ninth century Britain. You are destitute and landless, but you are inexplicably blessed with an intuitive grasp of the principles of Marxist theory. This allows you to deduce, correctly, that the basic structure of the economy is not going to change anytime soon. There are no clever arguments you can make or ferocious rebellions you can start that will overthrow the feudal aristocracy in your lifetime, or even in the lifetime of your great great great grandchildren. The economy itself will have to evolve in certain ways that are impossible to predict, but that will change the balance of forces enough to allow for successful challenges to the feudal lords. For example, the heavy plough, which has recently been invented in Northern Europe, will have to become widely adopted enough to spread prosperity to the peasantry, which will be one of the first steps towards the bourgeois revolution; but you do not know any of this, and have no way of knowing any of this, and even if you did it is unlikely that you, a destitute peasant, would be able to do a single thing to accellerate this process.

What can Marxism do for the doomed medieval serf? If the point of philosophy is simply to change the world in some kind of revolutionary sense, then the answer seems clear: absolutely nothing. But I can still think of all kinds of reasons why I, reborn as a medieval serf, would still want to be a Marxist:

• Marxism would help me to understand that my lot in life is not due to some kind of personal inferiority to the feudal aristocracy. I would not think of myself as slothful or unintelligent or somehow less valuable than men who had only achieved their station by luck of inheritance. Similarly, I would not think this way about other people either.

• Marxism would correctly calibrate my political ambitions. I might do things that I think could one day, in the distant future, have revolutionary consequences; but I would not do things with the expectation of immediate victory. For example, I might risk my life rebelling against my lord, but I would not do so because I believed it would have immediate world-changing consequences.

• Marxism would help me to understand our world correctly rather than incorrectly. I would not, for example, write as King Alfred did that the laws I wrote had some kind of mystical link to Mosaic law, a claim that has proven embarrassing in light of history, because I would have understood that the law simply expressed the superstructure of the feudal economy.

• Marxism would give me hope that while many things about the current world seemed terrible, and unlikely to change anytime soon, they would eventually have to change because of systematic features of the fedual order that guaranteed it.

This is how I, at least, think about Marxism in an age of endurance. Just as anthropology has given us the sapient paradox, so historical materialism implies its own puzzle: most people throughout history have not lived in an age of economic revolution. How they should live is a question that Marxists, particularly today, cannot afford to ignore.