The Problem with Grand Admiral Thrawn

Researching the second edition of Star Wars in Context I found myself delving into some of Lucas' well-known inspirations--like Bruno Bettelheim, and specifically his writing on fairy tales in The Uses of Enchantment. That book, which I suspect is not much read these days (Bettelheim has long since fallen from grace), seems to have profoundly oriented Lucas to the vision he followed in the first film--setting aside the relatively complex and political story of the early scripts in favor of a simpler, more fairy tale-like film.

As explained by Bettelheim, fairy tales are stories dealing with existential, life-and-death matters in a simple form that makes them accessible to children. Part of this is that the good are all good, the bad all bad; and precisely because the young are young, still forming a morality, and so less responsive to good and bad on their own terms than other attractions or repulsions, it matters that the bad are made unattractive, the good more so. (Thus the evil witch is also ugly.)

Darth Vader seems to me exemplary of this. Certainly in the first film there is no ambiguity about the character. This is not to say that Vader wholly lacks traits people could admire. He is perceptive, quick, cunning, determined, whether in handling subordinates, carrying out a raid, conducting himself in a fight, flying a TIE fighter. One can call him intelligent, decisive, forceful--which is why he holds the position of authority and enjoys the power that he does, as the right-hand man of the absolute ruler of a Galactic Empire (apparently, rather more meritocratic than any world we know). However, any admiration for these qualities is preempted by the more immediate concern we are made to feel for the fate of our heroes--and more generally the fact that he keeps killing people like flies (with Empire Strikes Back seeing him do this with subordinates who, in spite of their best efforts, let him down). That he does vile things, that he intimidates and threatens, that he is a menace--an embodiment of evil--overwhelms everything else.

It has struck me that Timothy Zahn's creation, the Imperial Grand Admiral Thrawn, is very different in this way. His good qualities are not only abundant, but foregrounded, and in such a manner as to make him admirable and appealing, even if he is the bad guy. Rather than his intelligence being something we only appreciate if we stop and think, Zahn makes a point of having Thrawn put on one bravura display of performative intelligence for the audience after another, with Admiral Pellaeon playing the sometimes skeptical but suitably impressed Watson to Thrawn's Sherlock Holmes as he uses his deductive skills to navigate one strategic, one tactical, problem after another (all without making Thrawn seem a tiresome know-it-all). Thrawn is cultured, too--an art-lover whose understanding of art work is deep enough that he can derive militarily applicable insights from his examination of a particular culture's painting. He can be very charming when he wants to be. He can be fair with subordinates--rather more so than most people we see--not only punishing incompetence, but rewarding intelligence and initiative with promotion even where that intelligence and initiative did not, on a particular occasion, produce the hoped-for result (as seen in The Last Command). And while Zahn does not probe into his motives too deeply, it does seem at least plausible that while Thrawn is personally ambitious, he does believe himself to be doing the right thing in striving to restore the Empire to its earlier stature.

Indeed, if we go by the fairy tale vision of the original Star Wars, a figure like Grand Admiral Thrawn can seem to have no place in the franchise, at least as understood by the sort of purist who was so quick and vehement in calling out the prequels for their breaches with the fairy tale simplicity established in Episode IV. Yet Thrawn proved hugely popular--perhaps the most popular of the Expanded Universe's creations. In fact, I cannot remember reading a single derogatory comment about him.

Why have so few sensed any dissonance here? I suspect it is because audiences were less critically-minded in regard to the books than they were to the films. Watching the prequels they were alert to these films not "feeling" like the original trilogy, not recapturing their (imperfect and perhaps romanticized) memory of the experience. They had fewer preconceptions about what a Star Wars book should feel like, and that the book let them create the images for themselves in their minds (rather than presenting them with an abundance of CGI clashing with their visual memories), at the least made any issues less immediate, less visceral. And if the resulting books as a whole do not stay so fairy tale-simple as the originals (the story sprawls, the military detail is more pronounced), Zahn keeps to a minimum the increase in the sorts of complexity that so troubled many a fan (like more elaborate world-building, or the intricacy of the political premise, with all their Brechtian alienations), all as a good deal rings true. (Zahn's novels in a multitude of other ways made a point of evoking the original trilogy without too closely repeating it--Luke returns to Dagobah, significantly, while Lando is back on the make, and so on and so forth.) Moreover, precisely because the Thrawn character did appeal to readers, they were comparatively prepared to forgive the breach with the older conception--perhaps the more after the broadening of the Expanded Universe accustomed them to a more complex, more "adult" fictional universe on paper, where this sort of thing may anyway "play" better than in a two-hour movie, even without such particular expectations as the fans had.