I Hope Our Paths Cross Again

The Mandalorian and Lullabies

I’ve never seen a full episode of Gunsmoke or Bonanza or Rawhide. Though I’ve stopped many times at the rundown hotel in Medicine Bow, Wyoming named after Owen Wister’s The Virginian, I’ve never completed an episode of the TV adaptation. All I have are free-floating images of men in cowboy hats leaning against flimsy sound-stage facades.

If you were born within a decade or two of me, mid-century Western shows likely exist for you as figments. Sepia shadows on the screen as you flip through channels late at night on your parents’ cable. Maybe under a blanket, maybe with a fire dying out beside you. By the time you encounter these flickerings, bed is inevitable and welcome. Old Westerns become lullabies.

A non-verbal baby is at the heart of the most popular Western now on TV. Baby Yoda was a merchandizing lynchpin for Disney even before The Mandalorian premiered last winter. What needs to be said? He’s like Yoda, from those Star Wars movies you love so well, and he’s also a cute baby. He twitches his ears and coos. He gets into mischief and is occasionally heroic. We’re there for the baby, even though his protector is the guy with cool armor and a jetpack.

Maybe we are the baby. I mean, wouldn’t that be nice?

It’s often said that mass culture is increasingly for babies. Superhero movies infantilize us; adults compulsively reference Harry Potter; everywhere we are confronted with our own childhood nostalgia, commodified and sold back to us. The arc of all things Star Wars since the franchise was bought by Disney bends toward nostalgia-merchanting. It gets results on people like me. I spent a lot of my childhood in my best friend’s basement endlessly rewatching VHSs of the original trilogy and, for our sins, Episode One.

So when the first episode of this season of Mandalorian almost immediately took us back to Luke Skywalker’s desert home planet of Tatooine, I had two contradictory reactions. First I thought, oh great, they’re doing the “You morons love this shit, right?” thing again. Then I thought, oh hell yeah, let’s go back baby. I want to go back. Why can’t we go backwards?

I tweeted out a version of the former reaction. My replies quickly filled with people telling me that they did love it. Cynical as it may be to tug at our nostalgia-strings—with Timothy Olyphant as a rugged, wry lawman, no less—Mandalorian understands its audience. And its audience understands the show. Olyphant and Mando make a big sand dragon go boom. Baby Yoda coos and gurgles. A rugged frontier outpost learns a lesson in tolerance. There are triumphant references to the destruction of the second Death Star. Olyphant says he hopes to cross paths with Mando again, and we say, yes, yes we hope so too.

The first season of Mandalorian felt darker. A characteristically creepy Werner Herzog was the first bad guy from whom Mando took a commission, and then Giancarlo Esposito arrived toward the end to lend his usual unsettling gravitas. Theirs are screen presences who almost preclude corniness, but they and their peers are nowhere to be found thus far in the second season.

Instead we get Amy Sedaris cracking wise as Mando’s spaceship mechanic. We get a story arc about transporting the eggs of a reptilian personoid who comically darts out her tongue to grab her discarded clothes. The ringside fight scene that opens this season feels almost hammily slapstick, as if you could set it to the lighter portions of the Heavy Metal soundtrack. You could always tell the show was headed this way, that no epic through-line would stop it from falling into the comforting rhythms of an episodic romp. If this is not what you wanted, you wouldn’t be here.

Where is here, exactly? Mandalorian luxuriates in the endless variety of settings provided by its narrative universe. Our heroes bounce from jungle to ice cavern to desert to a series of gritty galactic-cyberpunk trading towns. There’s also plenty of time spent in space, often aboard Mando’s ever-imperiled ship. But insofar as this show has an enduring perch, it’s inside Baby Yoda’s hovering pram. When we watch Baby Yoda, he’s mostly watching. He sometimes does things, but usually he revels in Mando’s deeds without fully understanding them.

So maybe we in the audience are not quite Baby Yoda, if only because we do understand everything that’s going on. Mandalorian is an easy show to watch with your phone in your hand and Twitter open. You long ago internalized all of its beats and the order in which it hits them. It all washed over you when you flipped through those old Western shows, themselves facsimiles of samurai and cowboy movies. Watching it feels like going back to that couch in your parents’ house, or to your friend’s basement.

There’s nothing wrong with following a formula well. Sometimes doing so allows you to go to an entirely new place; sometimes it allows you to sing a nice lullaby. We can never be as simultaneously innocent and powerful as Baby Yoda, but we can mimic his delight at seeing the man in the shiny armor blow up the big dragon. We can coo and gurgle and wave our little paws. Maybe doing this makes us babies. But you don’t need every show to remind you that there’s an entire cold, dark world out there to be a grownup in.

Calvin and Hobbes Corner

Speaking of paths crossing:

We reached the end of Calvin’s abortive trek to the Yukon in the last installment of this newsletter. I don’t yet know where to go next, so here’s the next strip in chronological order. It’s our first encounter (in this newsletter; not in Calvin and Hobbes) with perhaps the most important character in Calvin’s rogues’ gallery: Susie Derkins.

Susie is everything Calvin is not: Studious, polite, dutiful, imbued with a belief that the way of things must exist for a reason. If I wanted to be unkind to her, I would say that if she were six years old when the strip launched in 1985, she would be exactly the right age to be an also-ran in this year’s Democratic Party primaries. She would be congresswoman for an ever-bluer, professional-laden suburban district in Calvin’s native Ohio. Her stance on Medicare for—OK, this is getting unfair. She’s only six years old in the actual story.

The basic conflict between Susie and Calvin is nicely on display in this strip. Susie wants to play with her neighbor in a perfectly normal way, but he’s wrapped up in his grandiose egoism, which is both the cause of and result of his alienation from other kids. He’s mean to her for no reason, which makes her mad. She is kind of a dork but she is also in every way in the right. Calvin is being a tool, including in his casual misogyny once she’s gone.

Calvin hates on girls a lot, in a way that would be harder to pull off in 2020, even as it’s characteristic of six-year-old boys and played as one of his many flaws. I’ll just say this: If you ever find yourself going out of your way to cancel Calvin and Hobbes, you should probably reassess some things.

A poem

Carol Ann Duffy is texting