I’VE GOT A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS: Andor Creator Explains That Shocking Assault Scene: “We’re All the Product of Rape.”
Disney+’s acclaimed Andor has stretched the creative boundaries of Star Wars in countless ways, bringing a grown-up sensibility to a galaxy far, far away.
Yet even by Andor standards, a scene from the second season is leaving fans shocked: An Imperial officer tries to violently rape a Rebel fugitive, Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona), who is hiding out in a farming settlement while Imperial troops are rounding up “undocumented” citizens (read some sample reactions below).
The sequence plays out over the course of the show’s third episode (the first three episodes were released all at once on Tuesday) with the officer’s flirtation with Bix turning growing increasingly persistent and eventually cumulating with a brutal life-and-death struggle. Bix eventually gets the upper hand and the officer is killed. But Andorboldly leaves zero ambiguity as to what viewers just witnessed as Bix screams, “He tried to rape me!”
Star Wars is a franchise that has never — in film form — shown even consensual sex. During its first season, Andor pushed the envelope with scenes that suggested sex was about to take place, or just had (much like old Hollywood films during the Hays Code censorship era).
When asked about the Bix scene, Andor creator Tony Gilroy explained to The Hollywood Reporter that when telling a story about a war, shying away from sexual assault didn’t feel truthful.
“I get one shot to tell everything I know — or can discover, or that I’ve learned — about revolution, about battles, with as many incidents and as many colors as I can get in there, without having [the story] tip over,” says Gilroy. “I mean, let’s be honest, man: The history of civilization, there’s a huge arterial component of it that’s rape. All of us who are here — we are all the product of rape. I mean armies and power throughout history [have committed rape]. So to not touch on it, in some way … It just was organic and it felt right, coming about as a power trip for this guy. I was really trying to make a path for Bix that would ultimately lead to clarity — but a difficult path to get back to clarity.”
We’ve come a long way (baby) from 1977, when George Lucas was promoting his then-new film called Star Wars and telling interviewers:
“When I did [American] Graffiti, I discovered that making a positive film is exhilarating,” he said. “I thought, Maybe I should make a film like this for even younger kids. Graffiti was for sixteen-year-olds; this [Star Wars] is for ten- and twelve-year-olds, who have lost something even more significant than the teenager. I saw that kids today don’t have any fantasy life the way we had—they don’t have Westerns, they don’t have pirate movies…. the real Errol Flynn, John Wayne kind of adventures. Disney had abdicated its reign over the children’s market, and nothing had replaced it.”
If Lucas had thought that “Disney had abdicated its reign over the children’s market,” he had no idea what they would do to his franchise after acquiring the rights to it:
UPDATE: The Critical Drinker on Andor Season 2: A Rough Start.