Why the TIE Fighter is the BEST Spacecraft in the Star Wars Universe

"No, I don't thank you for the fish at all" (notindetroit)
12/13/2015 at 17:23 • Filed to: star wars, tie fighter, jason torchinsky, is wrong again, except on vw

Hey did you know that there’s a new Star Wars movie opening this weekend? Oh, you did, because !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ? Apparently he’s not too keen on the look and function of the Empire’s/First Order’s primary symbol of intergalactic policy enforcement. This is why he’s dead wrong.

(Not literally dead wrong, mind you).

Torchinsky’s argument boils down to a single point: they’re too small. To elaborate: they’re too small for fuel, for engines, for weapons, for pilot utility and even size aside the fundamentals of the engineering suck. This is independent of real-world engineering, but within the apparent engineering presented in the Star Wars universe itself. Whereas the Rebellion’s/Resistence’s fighters and even the Empire’s/First Order’s own capital ships and shuttles contain apparent space for all the essentials, the TIE Fighter somehow exists in its own isolated vaccuum independently powered by magic, !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! .

My counter-argument is: none of that matters . Here’s why.

First, let’s understand exactly what Star Wars is, and in the process a little bit about how the prequels (and potentially The Force Awakens ) missed the boat.

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I’m going to steal a few words from !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! : Star Wars is archetypes. Good vs. evil. Star Wars is adventure, excitement, characters, humor, swagger, amazing locations and more amazing creatures. It’s about people who are nothing becoming something.

But what the heck does that all mean?

You know that term that gets thrown around when nerds talk about Star Wars ? Where they call it a “space opera?” Let’s define what an “opera” is exactly (the “space” part is pretty self-explanatory):

Opera !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ( Italian: !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ; English plural: operas; Italian plural: opere !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ) is an !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! in which !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! perform a !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! work combining text ( !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ) and !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , usually in a theatrical !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! (from the Wikipedia main entry for “Opera”)

On the bold face of it, Star Wars certainly qualifies: a dramatic work where text (the main storytelling component: the action of the film itself, including the action, plot development, dialogue, cinematography, direction, etc) is combined with a musical score (John Williams’ groundbreaking score, as every bit as revolutionary as the films themselves) for a combined narrative effect. Seriously, do you think Star Wars would be half as exciting without its Wagner-esque overture?

But the not quite as literal, more “classic” definition of a “space opera” as usually applied concerns any particular science fiction or fantasy work that closely follows the storytelling tenants of Joseph Campbell, one of the most influential scholars of the entire history of fiction as an art form. Or rather, what he discovered when he researched that history, all the way to the dawn of when humankind started forming fictional narratives straight from their tongues while sitting around tribal campfires.

Campbell compiled his findings into !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! which literally became the textbook George Lucas modeled Star Wars after. Using the tenants featured in Campbell’s work, Lucas took a few disparate ideas floating around in his head since film school ( !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and his nostalgic fondness for Flash Gordon - it’s famously rumored that Star Wars was at least partially intended as a thumb to the eye of Dino de Laurentis [ !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! ] who had sniped the film rights to Flash Gordon from him) and combined them into a loose saga that would become more refined and more connected as he started to seriously pen them down. The rough draft of this basic galaxy-spanning framework would be published later as !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and of course would be the foundation of the movies we all know today.

The thesis of The Hero of a Thousand Faces is that all of the stories that have been passed down through millennia - Gilgamesh , The Odyssey , Beowulf and all those other dusty epics you had to learn about in high school and college - all follow a very specific archetypical framework. The hero of each of these stories is more or less universal (hence Campbell’s choice for a title): an unproven youth (doesn’t have to be male specifically - but more on that a little later) is forced through unavoidable circumstance to face a great evil that threatens to destroy that hero’s entire civilization and/or way of life. To defeat this evil requires a life-changing epic journey including travel to the underworld, or some sort of stand-in. In most classic epics such as the aforementioned ones the journey to the underground is quite literal: Gilgamesh and Ulysses staring down the gods of the dead and visiting the departed souls of friends who perished on the heroes’ journey. In A New Hope it’s roughly analogous to Princess Leia’s rescue on the Death Star (a bit played with as in this is where Ben Kenobi dies so that he may revisit the hero later, rather than the other way around). In the larger picture of the original trilogy it’s best illustrated through Luke wandering into the forbidden cave on Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back. He is even visited by a departed spirit - again, Ben Kenobi - to deliver a warning of where his path may take him. It even happens again in Return of the Jedi where both Kenobi and Yoda visit Luke when he starts to inquire about his family lineage with Darth Vader - again, representing the temptation down a dangerous path.

As Lussier succinctly points out, this is where the prequels missed the boat, and ultimately in how they suffered: they got lost in the mythos of Star Wars itself and ignored the ancient archetypes and symbolism upon which that mythos was built upon.

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Because symbolism is very important in how Star Wars is told. It’s perhaps the primary means of which Star Wars is told as a narrative, and again it’s where the prequels missed the boat (and potentially where The Force Awakens potentially misses too). It permeates everywhere in the original trilogy, to how the very shots are framed, how the characters act and look like and even in the design of the spaceships.

The symbology of Star Wars can best be described as humanism verses inhumanism. “The Force” is really an outgrowth, a mystical symbol for the humanism of good; conversely, the “Dark Side” and the Sith are the symbolic mysticism of the inhumanity of evil. Not evil itself, but the inhumanity of evil - understanding that distinction reveals how and why the Empire of the Original Trilogy is shaped. The Rebel Alliance is few and far between, but what we see of them stands much larger than life - Luke Skywalker is a hero for the ages, Ben Kenobi and Yoda are able to shape the course of events even beyond the grave through immortal spiritualism, and Han Solo is the Wyatt Earp of space, able to round up all the black hats and cattle rustlers no matter how many and how often they come. Even the equipment the Rebels use reflects this - as Kenobi himself describes the lightsabre in contrast to the blaster, the favored weapon not only of the roguish Han but of the Empire. The Empire relies on the raw military might of their immense Star Destroyers and Death Stars while Luke and Kenobi calmly contemplate and allow the spiritualism of the Force to guide them to victory near the comfort and familiarity of the Millennium Falcon ’s Sabaac table. Even the X-Wing’s design is guided by symbolism. It’s at once alien enough to be “cool” but familiar enough to, well, also be cool. It’s long nose - incidentally enough, allegedly inspired by drag racers (Lucas is perhaps the most Jalop director of all time, after all), machine-gun like laser cannons, and large and visually loud engines are all familiar elements that immediately identify the X-Wing as plausibly contemporary while allowing the X-Wing to function as a futuristic spaceship. The sci-fi aesthetic of the X-Wing allows it to plausibly function in the cosmic milleiu of the opera, but the familiar elements allow the craft to be recognized as familiar to the audience.

Before examining the similar (anti)-aesthetics of the Empire and First Order, I want to take the opportunity to address one of the most controversial elements of The Force Awakens and why this controversy exists as an inevitable side element of the Original Trilogy’s symbolism. In the ancient crucible in which most of the original mythos were created, this human-inhuman good verses evil dichotomy pretty much stayed consistent as demonstrated in Star Wars . Good was human (Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Ulysses), and to represent evil, the symbolism simply shifted to as far away from human as the original bards and oralists could imagine (the divine animals that repeatedly ravaged Gilgamesh and his village; Grendel the Dragon’s Mother; the Gorgons, the Sirens, the Cyclopses, etc.) As time progressed, some of that inhuman symbolism started to shift towards what today would be unfortunate implications - the “savage man” of the indigenous inhabitants of Africa and the Americas; the “Mongrel tribes” of Asia, etc. Even in the original texts women had been dehumanized into symbolism as well - the female goddesses such as Aphrodite, Circe and the Gorgons that sparked the Trojan War and made Ulysses’ journey back home a hellish nightmare; the traitorous maids that slept with Penelope’s would-be suitors; Grendel’s mother’s female gender, etc. This is simultaneous to the depiction of women as symbols of inherent good - Gilgamesh’s ever-faithful wife, or the Greek equivalent in Penelope; Circe’s turn to a near mother-figure for Ulysses; even Grendel’s mother herself is humanized as a woman needing vengence for her son, no hard feelings against Beowulf and his clan (well, aside from the whole vengence thing). Recently, with the Civil Rights Movements from the 60s to the present, the symbolism of humanity started to shift. Being female, or being a person of color, became convienient symbolism to instantly represent humanity and therefore good. In The Hunger Games , probably the best modern example, Katniss’ very sex and gender becomes symbolism for her humanity. This is again repeated in Divergent and in the yet-to-be-adapted-to-movie series Legend . Again, in The Hunger Games , the symbolism of District 13’s President Coin as represented by her sex and gender contrast with President Snow’s more “traditional” male power status and as that series’ equivalent of Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine rolled into one. Even Star Wars itself is getting into the act with Ren being female and Flynn being a male of color. Flynn’s race as it contrasts with the Stormtrooper uniform we first see him in is important because both of those elements - his race and how it contrasts with the stark associative properties of that Stormtrooper uniform - instantly humanize him against the inhumanity represented in the Stormtrooper and ultimately serves as a loud beacon which says to the audience, hey, people, this here is a good guy!

In the interest of fairness, this is why I think so many people were upset at Flynn being a person of color and !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . It’s not because these people are racist or sexist, but perhaps even the opposite - it adds humanization to elements that are supposed to work against humanization. A lot of these people shut up once they found out Flynn was supposed to be co-hero to the whole sequel trilogy, and I’ve yet to hear anybody complain at all about Ren. It’s not the fear of people of color or women being represented fairly or at all in the movies, but in how this representation may end up working counter to promoting people of color and women as important hero figures by having people of color and women represent the oppression and inhumanity of the First Order. Then again, Flynn’s defection to the Resistence aside, that may be the whole point . Numerous interviews have been given about how “this isn’t your Sith Lord Father’s Empire” and how the First Order is a contradiction of the inhumanity and oppression of the old order Empire and a new humanity wishing to police the galaxy with justice and order. How that works out will be answered this Friday.

But back to the TIE Fighter.

As painstakingly described above, the faceless and soulless Stormtrooper, whose features, identity and very sex/gender are anonymously hidden under cold and deadly armor contrast to the few but visible heroes of the Rebel Alliance. The Stormtrooper exists in disposable, innumerable human waves just as the Red Chinese had when they went “over the border” in the Korean War. Each and every one is perfectly uniform in appearance, utility and disposability with not a shred of visible humanity. Aside from the Death Stars, the ultimate symbols of the Empire - the Star Destroyers - are literal floating mountains of !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! that are unstoppable and best simply avoided. Until Return of the Jedi the Rebels had absolutely nothing that could even compare just within the symbolic contexts of the movies themselves, which seems to be repeated again in The Force Awakens . These are not people, these are machines, mechanisms within a larger mechanism of order and oppression, fronted by a man and a Sith Lord who himself is just as much machine as man.

And then we get to the TIE Fighter.

If there’s one thing to take away, it’s that the most important, overriding aspect in the entirety of the very essence of Star Wars is symbolism, and the TIE Fighter is no exception. As an extension of that symbolism the TIE Fighter is in fact dead-on perfect. In contrast to the X-Wing, the TIE Fighter looks completely alien, something the audience is not familiar with, and therefore not comfortable with. Which is the whole point - the TIE Fighter, like the Stormtrooper and Star Destroyer, is nothing but a harbinger of death and destruction. Collectively, they represent a visual symbolism not only in the evil inhumanity of the Empire, but in the failure of that evil inhumanity. The TIE Fighter looks menacing, but also impractical and fragile at the same time, and in battle against the Rebel Alliance, they fall from the heavens in droves, turning into exploding funeral pyres for their unseen pilots buried under humanity-shielding helmets. As a massed army, the Stormtrooper looks intimidating and deadly, but in combat against the plucky Rebel commandos and even “under-armed” Ewoks, wearing a Stormtrooper uniform is practically a death sentence, with the added guarantee that your death will be useless and in vain. The immense Star Destroyers are large and powerful, but impractical - so immense that the nimble Rebel starfighters simply fly around and ignore them, much like how the immense and powerful battleship USS New Jersey and its missile-slinging cruiser escorts were of no factor whatsoever to the “Victor Charlie” in the rice paddies. The mighty AT-AT walkers, large enough to literally crush their enemies, were defeated by tiny and nimble speeders armed with tow cable s and being tripped up like a cartoon villain in pursuit of a plucky anthropomorphic !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! - not unlike how the VC used RPGs and even primitive traps to stop American battle tanks dead in their tracks. The symbolism of the Empire isn’t just about its inhumanity, but an active warning against that inhumanity and how it spells certain death and defeat.

And that is why the TIE Fighter is the best spaceship in Star Wars , precisely because it’s an impractical flaming death trap.

DISCUSSION (5)

Supreme Chancellor and Glorious Leader SaveTheIntegras > No, I don't thank you for the fish at all
12/13/2015 at 17:28

False. B wing > all

Sneaky Pete > Supreme Chancellor and Glorious Leader SaveTheIntegras
12/13/2015 at 17:34

I’m partial to the A-Wing. I think that has to do with playing X-Wing when I was a kid. The A-Wing was fast and maneuverable.

I think the Falcon is the most Jalop of all Star Wars ships though.

Short-throw Granny Shifter is 2 #blessed 2b stressed > No, I don't thank you for the fish at all
12/13/2015 at 17:58

Wow, good read. The amount of research makes me suspect you have written a term paper on Star Wars at some point in your schooling.

I found The Hero of a Thousand Faces to be incredibly enlightening but a very difficult read. It’s so dense, I ended up scrawling notes in the margins of nearly every page and both inside covers. It would have been a little easier if I had more background in theology and Freudian psychology though.

Santiago of Escuderia Boricua > No, I don't thank you for the fish at all
12/13/2015 at 22:43

Wat. The tie fighter is cheap as fuck to produce and that’s the the empire made it.

Way too much whitesplaining

StingrayJake > No, I don't thank you for the fish at all
12/14/2015 at 10:42

I... uh... well... ok.