The Fall of Hamill-lot

Have you ever heard the tragedy of Mark Hamill? I thought not. It's not a story that Disney would tell you.

Forgive the pun. Please.

Also, forgive me for writing about something Star Wars adjacent - again - but the recent news surrounding it has been such a target rich environment that one popped up this very morning, before the other articles I have been meticulously tweaking and editing over the past week or two are still chilling in the fridge.

When that’s ready, I’ll cut you a nice, thick slice of it on one of my fine china plates, but, until then, have this to hold you over.

So, Mark Hamill is washing his hands of the Star Wars franchise. Supposedly.

In his own words - "Well, you never say never. I just don't see any reason to. Let me put it that way: I mean, they have so many stories to tell, they don't need Luke anymore."

So, you see why I say supposedly - never means never is really just a roundabout way of saying, Well, if Disney ever backs a dump truck of cash up to my house, I’d probably do it.

I mean, remember when Harrison Ford was adamant that, after The Force Awakens, he’d never be in another Star Wars film again?

I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t know that this was from The Rise of Skywalker.

Yeah.

Don’t get me wrong, I respect the hustle, and the Mouse’s cheddar spends the same as any other, but make no mistake - you’re only done when Mickey says you’re done, and if he tells you to come back, your answer had better be, How quick?

The only way you leave the Happiest Place on Earth is in a pine box.

Even then, that’s if your lucky, and they don’t decide to entomb you in the cryogenic vaults beneath the Magic Kingdom so you can be unthawed at a later date to continue your eternal servitude to the House of Mouse.

But y’all ain’t ready for that conversation yet.

I find this development worth commenting on for two reasons that kind of dovetail together.

Mark Hamill is an interesting fellow.

By all accounts, Harrison Ford really had the post-Star Wars career that Hamill, as the veritable lead of the original Star Wars trilogy, should have had. It really is kind of incredible when you think about how any aspiring actor would probably enter a battle royal and bludgeon another struggling Hollywood wannabe with a rock, Cain style, for the chance to land a role as iconic as Han Solo, but to also rack up Indiana Jones, Rick Deckard, and Jack Ryan?

Also, he was in a guilty pleasure of mine, Cowboys and Aliens, but here’s a more flattering photo from Blade Runner.

I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say the man is probably one of the most prolific and successful actors of his generation. But this ain’t about him.

Mr. Hamill, on the other hand, has managed to carve out a successful, if not particularly robust, place for himself in Hollywood, mostly as a bit actor but very much as a voice actor, where his role as the Joker in various Batman media cemented his status as nerd royalty.

To be fair, when you take up the mantle of a role as long-lived and recognizable as the Joker, it’s no mean feat to be considered many people’s default interpretation of the character.

Now, as someone who grew up as a fan of both Star Wars and Batman, and liked Hamill’s turns in both, it disappointed me greatly to see that he took a very nasty turn circa 2016, when he took umbrage with a certain orange man who was, in his opinion, most disagreeable.

For the sake of anyone reading this in posterity, I cannot stress how ubiquitous images like this were in 2015 to, er… well, the time of this writing, actually.

Now, this wasn’t particularly remarkable in and of itself - pretty much anyone who was anybody in Hollywood (and also everybody else) was vocal in their disdain for Orange Cheetoh Hitler, or whatever. Hell, they haven’t shut up about the guy ever since, and at the rate we’re going, I suspect the name Trump will be lingering in the collective noosphere of Gaia’s supra-concious until we either cleanse the world in nuclear hellfire or the heat death of the universe - whichever comes first.

It’s an open secret that Hamill was not the biggest fan of where the sequel series took the character of Luke Skywalker, going so far as to say that he had to imagine himself playing a different character named Jake Skywalker just to get through filming of The Last Jedi, but it’s hard to find much sympathy for the guy when you look at the way he’s conducted himself since Trump’s ascension to the Oval Office

Hamill was inordinately vociferous in his “criticisms” - which was mostly just puerile and excessive name-calling - of the Darth Trump. Off the top of my head, the only other celebrities who were outdoing him in the Trump Hate Olympics were Stephen “Sex Pervert” King, who secured the Bronze medal in acting a fool on Twitter -

Ron “Piss-Hands” Perlman, who had a definitive hold on Silver -

This really is not the epic own that I think he thought it was.

And, of course, we have the undeniable GOAT, taking home the gold:

So far as I heard, she was the only one who got Barron to actually cry - pretty impressive.

The only thing that stopped Mark Hamill from pulling a stunt bad enough to dethrone Queen Griffin was the fact that a lot of eyes were on him in 2015, with the release of The Last Jedi, which, simultaneously, is exactly the reason I felt he was so vocal - he had eyes on him, and, in classic neo-liberal self-appointed Brahmin fashion, felt obligated to use his platform to educate and enlighten the slovenly Shudra masses.

There was one particular instance that left a special flavor of bad in my mouth.

Classy.

I’m not sure what I dislike more about it: the sheer tastelessness of what amounts to trashing a little kid, or the fact that it generated a hundred something tweets that read like this:

Something about the way this is worded alone just makes me sick to my stomach in a way that escapes articulation.

In fact, it looks like he’s still talking about Trump today:

At least Stephen King moved on to badgering Elon Musk.

Though, I’m being somewhat disingenuous with that comment - Hamill has found a new cause to rally around, a political raison d’etre that supersedes posting Boomer comics with Trump in a diaper or insulting his extended family, inciting a bunch of bottle-blonde, childless jackals to descend on them in a cackling clique fueled by boxed wine and SSRIs.

Yes, like every other good neo-liberal Macoute, Mr. Hamill was quick to begin pounding the war drums for complete and total nuclear extermination liberation of Russia from the dictatorial grasp of Trump’s best friend, Vladimir Putin. Through nuclear extermination, if need be. Not only has he stumped several times for fundraising efforts to pay for drones that Ukraine can use to incinerate poor conscripts from the Caucasus who don’t want to be in Ukraine any more than the poor conscripts from Ukraine want them to be there, but he even lent his voice to an app that announces incoming air raids to both Ukrainian civilians and military personnel.

Now, this in itself is not an ignoble endeavor. An app that can give civilians and soldiers enough forewarning to vacate an area before it's flattened in an airstrike is not a bad idea, especially in a place where the warning sirens may be damaged.. But, ah…

The voice says with a Jedi knight’s gravitas is a line so Reddit I can practically feel my T-levels sinking.

Look - I get the idea, here. Really, I do, and I give props to Mr. Hamill for doing something, y’know, actually somewhat productive here rather than bitching on Twitter.

But, to be perfectly, completely blunt, one of the last fucking things I would want to hear before my house is reduced to cinders, or worse, a drone air-delivers a hellfire missile directly up my asshole, is “May the force be with you”. I won't say the people who made this app or Mr. Hamill's hearts weren't in the right place, I'm not that cynical, but I can't imagine how much one must suffer from a terminal case of media poisoning or Reddit syndrome to think it doesn't feel a bit… demeaning. Condescending. It feels so fundamentally… silly, almost. It's already clear no one in a position of power is really treating the total destitution of the Slavic heartland seriously, but this really seems to highlight what a clown show the West views it as, and how detached from the reality of war we are.

“Aw, shucks. Yer husband got blown to pieces in Bakhmut? That’s right terrible, Missus. Anyways, here’s Wonderwall.”

But, I digress. Let's move on.

Hamill's professed desire to leave the Star Wars plantation for forty acres and a mule of his very own is most likely the last nail in the coffin of many a jilted Star Wars fan's hopes that the ship can be corrected. Really, it should have been painfully obvious seven or eight years ago, but I get it. It's difficult to let go, sometimes.

Not even a month ago, culture war hucksters in the “Fandom Menace” that thrive on the cottage industry of peddling “leaks” from the inside of Disney were talking about Hamill returning to the franchise for a series on Disney+. Now, in the age of CGI, Deepfakes, and Voice Synthesis, it's totally possible they could make an entire series about Luke Skywalker without Hamill's involvement at all.

Supposedly, they have the rights to Hamill's likeness from the original Trilogy, which is as draconian as it is disturbing, and they verifiably have cast an “official” body double for Luke that they can deepfake a young Hamill's face on to, much in the same way they hired some Scandanavian bridge-troll to inhabit the Chewbacca suit since Peter Mayhew passed.

It’s worth noting that Disney would love nothing more than to divorce the actors behind their most bankable characters so they can keep pumping out tasteless audio-visual slop with their likenesses in perpetuity. Previously, the only way to do this was to pull a James Bond and just recast the character every time the current actor got too old for the role or plain tired of it, but, fortunately for them, technological advances have made it completely possible for them to create digital homunculi that they can be puppeted about in a ghoulish Punch and Judy show of cybernetic horrors - at least until a supermassive Carrington Event destroys all of our computer technology, or we have our own Butlerian Jihad. Whichever comes first.

Of course, I’m not convinced the technology is completely there - after all, if it was, they would have resurrected Chadwick Boseman through digital necromancy and had him play Black Panther post-mortem. Instead, they were forced to hand the baton to Leticia Wright¹, when they really should have just recast T’Challa as a character.

I know who my vote for the new T’Challa would have been.

But, even if the tech isn’t quite there yet…

This sub-plot from, uh… was this the Mandalorian? Or that dogshit Boba Fett show? I don’t recall. I didn’t watch either. And I’m not going to. Suffice to say, this was a proof of concept. And, given the fact that YouTube was flooded with hundreds of videos of Reddit Americans weeping tears of soy over the digital reconstruction of Mr. Hamill, I think it’s safe to say a company as greedy and cynical as Disney is not above finding some legal loophole to literally buy his face, whether he’s on board with it or not.

But, ultimately, this is speculation. It doesn’t matter what dark wizardry Bob Iger is hiding behind closed doors; if Mr. Hamill really is turning his back on Star Wars, the odds of any kind of Luke Skywalker series or movie of any kind dwindles significantly.

Of course, the usual grifters will continue to conveniently find sources from behind Kathleen Kennedy’s Iron Curtain around LucasFilm that promise and swear that, this time, no, for real, seriously, you gotta believe me, Star Wars is gonna come back, and it’s gonna be better than ever!

Just be sure to subscribe and pay for my channel membership, so you can keep up with the latest updates! Don’t be afraid to drop a superchat during the livestream, either. I read ‘em all! And, if ya wanna kick a couple dollars over to my Patreon, well… it’d be appreciated. I can’t keep up the fight without you.

This is the furthest back I was willing to scroll, but trust me, this certain individual has been swearing up and down Kathleen Kennedy is a week away from being fired since 2015.

You remember in those old Peanuts cartoons when Lucy would yank the football out from in front of Charlie Brown?

Yeah.

I plan on giving this absolutely baffling phenomenon, which is every bit as absurd as it is sad, a much more thorough investigation and exploration at a later date.

We talk a lot about stuck culture, but we rarely talk about why the culture is so firmly jammed in place. I think we all know why, too - at least, to some extent - so we don’t ever stop and think much about why so much as we continue to pontificate on how it is.² And that really isn’t a problem. You can’t fix a problem until you’ve identified it.

But, Mr. Hamill’s quote-unquote retirement offers a very interesting glance into the psychology of the segment of the population that is keeping us moored where we are. They’re the ones mourning this dream of Hamill reprising Skywalker as a protagonist that was never going to pass - it wasn’t just dead on arrival, it was never alive to begin with.

For years, these people have been stuck in this miserable, hopeless holding pattern, peddled false promises by grifters and hucksters, their excitement waxing to a crescendo only to plummet with the announcement of some new movie about Daisy Ridley’s character or another piece of dreck on Disney+. They want to go back. They want to go back to the old days so bad. They want to see Mark Hamill standing tall on the silver screen, lightsaber in hand, dashing, handsome, and young, just as they recall, smiling and leading them back to a better time in their lives. Before they had to pay rent and taxes. Before their wife took the kids and the house and sold their Funko Pop collection. Before things got weird and confusing - it was so much easier when everything was black and white, when the good guys had green lightsabers, the bad guys had red ones, and you could mow down Stormtroopers left and right because all those faceless goons were objectively evil the other side were unquestionably righteous and noble.

For now, I only bring this rinse-and-repeat cycle up because, for years, this corner of the Star Wars fandom has hinged their hopes on the idea that Mark Hamill or Jon Favreau or George Lucas himself would return as some sort of Moses figure that would liberate them from the tyranny of Pharaoh Kennedy the Terrible and lead them to the Promised Land. I guess ol’ Marky-Mark is out of the running, now, but the thing is, that was never something he could do. It’s not something any of them could do, or any one, for that matter.

You can’t go home again.³ You shouldn’t even try. You can look back fondly upon old photos and videos, and you can mourn what has passed, but trying to return will only bring about more despair, as everything has it’s time, and one that time had gone, it becomes a miserable exercise in futility to try and bring it back. Trying to go home, you’ll find the structure in shambles, and the spirited young man that lived there is now a jaded geezer spitting venom at children on the internet.

My prescription to alleviate the heartache of a ruined home - metaphorically speaking, of course - is to take what you can from it and build something new upon the foundation that remains. Just because the old home is gone doesn’t mean something else can’t take its place. And, who knows - maybe one day, the new house will surpass the old in terms of splendor and class.

But, to do that, you have to accept what’s gone is gone. You have to remove yourself from the wedge you’ve been trapped in, shirk off the grifters, both corporate and otherwise, attempting to sell you a fantasy, and move on. Otherwise, you’ll be shackled by an impossible dream, laboring under the delusions of a by-gone Golden Age, while the rest of the world passes you by.

And, if you still think I’m talking about Star Wars in specifically, I promise you - I’m really not.

“The politics of Nostalgia is at best distracting, at worst pernicious.” - Irving Kristol

1. Given her outspoken views on both the Covid Jab and vaccines as a whole, this development was legitimately surprising, but I’m sure she’ll be shooed out in due time.

2. Guilty as charged.

3. I tried to find a nice quote from the Thomas Wolfe novel of the same name, but couldn’t find a succinct quote that encapsulated the sentiment.