Finn’s subversive decency

[ljwrites]

Choosing to be kind is not choosing to be passive. It’s choosing to end the cycle of abuse . . . It’s a courageous act in itself.

-Melissa Grey on Cinderella

It’s amazing to me how some parts of the Star Wars fandom have no sense of nuance when it comes to Finn’s character, seeing him as either a naive child who can hardly function in the real world or a ruthless killer who showed no regrets or conflicts whatsoever about killing his former comrades.

Both extremes are fairly dehumanizing and distorted portrayals of the actual character, because the core of Finn’s character is that he is innocent when he has no business being so. He’s a character whose innocence and purity are not oblivious naïvete but qualities he had to fight to keep and attain. His morality is not based on an ignorance of life’s harsh realities, but rather on an intimate knowledge of brutality and the will to break free of it.

Finn’s fight to claim morality and innocence, in fact, starts with an act of defiance to a direct order, a defiance that could have resulted in his execution. His next act of major defiance is to reach out to a prisoner so they can escape together, an infinitely more dangerous and even desperate act.

Some fans point to his lack of hesitation in fighting his way out of Starkiller Base, the all but joyous way he gunned down his former comrades, and his seeming lack of regret at his actions there. They argue that this proves that he is a far morally grayer figure than his fans believe, and showed how little he cared about the lives of Stormtroopers who were much like he used to be.

The battle sequence on leaving Starkiller Base, however, actually goes to the heart of my point about Finn’s innocence being something he has to constantly fight for. What’s the likelier explanation for Finn’s lack of hesitation during that battle sequence? That he abruptly lost sight of the humanity of Stormtroopers in the space of a couple of scenes, when his shock and grief over a comrade’s death were evident in his very first appearace? Or that the First Order had instilled unthinking battle reflexes in Stormtrooper FN-2187, reflexes that took over once he allowed them to in order to survive?

I would argue that the second interpretation is more consistent and plausible, given the events of the film and the worldbuilding presented to us. He was taken from his family and brought up to do one thing, as he tells Rey, and we know what that one thing is. Killing fellow human beings does not come easily or naturally to people, and modern military and police require significant training in order to be able to shoot directly at people. How much amplified would such training be in a force of slave soldiers under a totalitarian dictatorship?

Finn goes on to tell Rey he was ashamed of what he was, which seems an odd statement when he by his own admission refused to kill in his first battle. That statement becomes more understandable, however, when you understand him to mean that he was ashamed of being made into a machine for slaughter. That was arguably the side of Finn that he forced down, at great risk to himself, and that he used during his and Poe’s escape from Starkiller Base to survive.

Additionally, as I argued in an earlier post about Finn, I just don’t think it’s true that Finn had no conflicting feelings about fighting fellow Stormtroopers. At the very least there there are strong grounds to believe that he spent much of the movie running from himself, from the killer the First Order had made him into, precisely so he would not have to kill his former comrades again.

What gave Finn the courage to face up to his fears of the violence he was capable of and fight back against the First Order? That, I think, is the second pillar of his subversion: His ability and willingness to reach out and form genuine connections with people.

The ability to trust people and become close to them was not something that should have come easily to Finn. He had been taken from his family, remember, was raised all his life to be a cog in the First Order and lived under extreme surveillance and control where his every move was watched. As a part of this control, Stormtroopers were likely encouraged to report on each other. Yet somehow Finn had retained his ability to trust and love people.

Under these circumstances, it's certainly valid to wonder whether Finn’s comrades could even be called such. It’s true he would have had every reason to deny they were his comrades or friends, but rather that they were simply his fellow slave soldiers thrown together by the will of a despotic organization.

But I don’t think that’s what happened. No matter what the circumstances that had brought them together I think Finn and at least a few of his fellow Stormtroopers did forge bonds of friendship. That’s what I believe we were witnessing in Finn’s first appearance when the death of a Stormtrooper left him in shocked grief. The First Order did everything to rob him of his humanity and turn him into an unfeeling mechanical part, but he held onto it by reaching out, by touching and being touched deeply enough suffer bereavement.

Seen in this sense, the quiet subversion of Finn–and others like him–started long before his first battle, by turning the organization of the First Order against it. The Order must have encouraged a degree of unit cohesion for practical reasons, but at the same time they would not have wanted the Stormtroopers’ devotion to each other to be greater than their fiealty to the Order. As I speculated above, they were probably encouraged to report infractions and disloyalties as part of the systems of surveillance and control they lived under. They were certainly not supposed to become real friends who trusted each other over the system. Finn did exactly what he wasn’t supposed to do by achieving what seems natural, even boring until it is taken away: Form deep and trusting relationships.

Finn carried this subversive, revolutionary willingness to trust and be vulnerable out into the world beyond the First Order, becoming friends with Poe, and then Rey, then winning over the leadership of the Resistance who, against all odds, gave him a chance and believed him.

It was through the depth of his caring for his new friends that Finn could overcome the fear of the First Order, and I would argue his fear of his own violence, to walk back into the heart of the Order and fight for the values he had nurtured in an environment unbelievably hostile to them. He was brought up to be a monster, and on some level feared that fighting would make him one. But because he used violence in the service of love and not power, he became a hero instead, again turning a weapon of the First Order–himself–against it.

Finn’s qualities of moral innocence and emotional openness, then, are not born of ignorance about the darker reality of the world. Finn not only lived that reality since before memory, he was brought up in the service of evil. Rather, Finn’s personal decency was the start of his own personal rebellion whether he realized it or not. His choice to be a decent person, far from being bland, is a subversion in of itself. His ability to keep the best of his humanity under the full power of the First Order shows the first cracks in its strength, and he will ultimately be one of the people to bring it down.

(This essay was originally posted to Tumblr on January 2, 2017.)