'Andor' is Not Left-Wing Art

But it's one of the best shows about politics I've ever seen.

Before I saw the widely acclaimed second season of Andor, I heard

Ross Douthat

claim that it was “left-wing art.” In his conversation with the neo-fascist publisher Jonathan Keeperman, Douthat was attempting to define right-wing art, and praised Andor this way: “It’s a show that uses the background of the Empire and the Star Wars universe to tell a story about punishing militaristic tyranny and resistance to it in ways that are left coded, but also it’s a really good show.”

Douthat and Keeperman passed relatively quickly and unsatisfactorily over the question of what makes good political art, but Douthat pursued the inquiry in a later conversation with Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy, who strongly protested the idea that Andor is a left-wing show. He insists it’s about characters on all sides, about human experience and morality.

Douthat: So this is a show — it’s a story — where you are rooting for revolutionaries against a fascist regime, right?

Gilroy: OK. All right, all right.

Douthat: As you said, you’re not rooting for the Empire in the end, right?

Gilroy: No, no, no.

Douthat: That to me is the political foundation of the work. And that’s why I use the term “left wing” — not because you have a 10-point list of revolutionary demands that you, Tony Gilroy, support, but you’re telling a story in which basically you’re on the side of the radicals and the revolutionaries.

At the same time — and this is why I think it is effective art — what I think you’ve been able to do, maybe coming out of all of this autodidactic reading, is give people a window into why the radicals, even if you’re rooting for them, you can see how things can go wrong. But that is what I really like about the show’s approach to politics, is that it’s ——

Gilroy: But what’s fascinating is, particularly in the second season, I was really eager to get into the idea of using Stellan Skarsgard’s character, Luthen, and Forest Whitaker’s character as the original gangsters, and the difficulty of integrating the inceptors of radicalism into a coalition.

But there’s never anybody, I don’t think, whoever espouses an actual ideology of what they want to achieve at the end, other than: Please leave us alone. Stop killing us. Stop destroying our communities. Don’t build the Death Star and kill us.

I never have a character, I don’t think, stand up and say: This is the galaxy that I am trying to build, and this is what I want to see.

Douthat: That’s fair. That is, in fact, literally the argument that some of my more libertarian friends who love the show have made to me, saying: This is ultimately a show about localism and leaving us alone against the depredations of tyranny.

Gilroy initially rejects the question outright, but ultimately gets around to articulating what I think is the correct response to Douthat. Douthat is the one who is trying to impose rather shallow political classifications on art—a reminder that conservatives have also long been energetic progenitors of skin-deep political readings of pop culture—along the lines of: if revolutionaries are the good guys, it’s left-wing, and if an “African American lesbian professor” is the villain, it’s right-wing.

Perhaps it’s worth digressing into the actual history that inspired Andor and how Hollywood uses history for popular entertainment. Considering Andor through the lens of the specifics of the histories and tropes with which it paints its canvas shows Gilroy made an excellent show that, while certainly open to a left reading, captured some deep truths about politics in general without exactly being left-wing art.

Gilroy, it turns out, is an avid reader of history, fascinated by the French and Russian revolutions, Stalinism, fascism, and colonialism. (I was most impressed that he’s read Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government.) But Andor seems above all to be, as Gilroy told the French newspaper Le Point, an “homage” to the French resistance in World War II. The French press picked up on the fact that Gilroy is a fan of Un village français, possibly the greatest historical TV series of all time; Andor seems to draw heavily from its kaleidoscopic social portrait of occupied France, the tense interplay of Nazi officers, local politicians, Communists, the self-organized bands of rebels known as the maquis, right-wing (anti-Nazi) French nationalist militias, rogue actors, Jews, and the ordinary French people in between. Though Andor is simpler, the narrative heart is the same: the disparate motivations and personal turning points that motivate resistance, the struggle to maintain organizational continuity amid secrecy and losses, the atrocities that are inevitably committed in the name of a righteous cause, and the deep moral ambiguity of war. Gilroy even swiped some of the cast of Un village français, who portray the people of the besieged planet Ghorman in Andor and whose native language is an invented faux-French.¹

All this might seem strong evidence for Douthat’s case. The French resistance was heavily left-coded, largely due to the organizational centrality within it of the French Communist Party, which reaped enormous moral prestige and became the largest party in France in its immediate aftermath. But however much its left-wing participants saw it as a proto-socialist revolution, the resistance’s fractious unity came from the fact that the historical circumstances made anti-fascism and nationalism synonymous. The PCF played its role—as was often the case in its greatest successes—by leaning into French nationalism and mobilizing the organizational strengths of its Stalinist structure. Communists were among the best resisters because they were highly organized, clandestine, and unquestioningly followed the chain of command. The other major force in the resistance—Charles de Gaulle—was a right-wing nationalist, and after the war, the resistance quickly transcended its left image and became a new unifying national myth that swept the Pétain regime and the reality of French collaboration under the historical rug.

That brings us to the Star Wars universe and what I think is a misclassification that I think both Douthat and Gilroy make, which is to characterize the Empire as “fascist.” Star Wars has, of course, always trafficked in fascist iconography, but only as surface and decoration. It features extremely generic rebels fighting an extremely generic empire, two sides whose goodness and evil are supposed to be self-evident. The Empire in particular, including in Andor, is cartoonish in every respect, basically a vengeful military without a state or a people, one that doesn’t seem to have any ideology other than domination for its own sake.² The real historical phenomenon Star Wars politics most closely resembles is imperialism and anti-colonial resistance, not fascism, to which imperialism was certainly crucial but was a movement that commanded popular support and was grounded in specific national polities.

Like revolution, anti-colonial resistance occurs on a broad spectrum. Many historical resistance movements have been reactionary, traditionalist, religious, or alloys of Communism and all of the above. “Resistance” works well for popular entertainment precisely because it is a blank canvas with such a deep archive available to pastiche: it can evoke the defense of place and community from vastly different historical periods or with vastly different ideological content, and stir visceral, pre-political human revulsion to invasion by outsiders and the destruction of what one loves. This is basically what Gilroy describes as the ideology of Andor:

I think if there’s any ideology in the show at all that is expressed, that seems consistent through the whole thing — and I don’t know where it lines up; I think it would probably be just as confusing for you to try to make a left-right marker on it. But I feel the disruption of community, and the destruction of community — whether it’s on a large scale with colonialism, if it’s on a small scale with a city, in a town or a family — the Empire in the show is consuming and destroying communities everywhere. And the concept of community is the universal flag that I think I can fly all the way through the whole show and feel comfortable with.

I think this is correct, and Gilroy is right to say that he is a “moralist,” not a political filmmaker. What he’s describing is a generic moral impulse that could be and has been mobilized in left-wing politics, but could every bit equally drive conservative or reactionary politics. Or a settler revolt. Picture the scene in the town square on Ghorman, when the assembled crowd faces down the Empire’s storm troopers, droids, and barricades and breaks into song, à la Les Miserables. But imagine a different context: instead of trying to build the Death Star, the empire is simply trying to tax Ghorman’s vast silk wealth or its mine kalkite in order to defend the planet’s settlers from rival empires and from the natives they displaced. The Ghor refuse to contribute to their own defense and mount an armed resistance in the name of liberty and the right to self-government. We’d still probably feel sorry for them getting shot, as humans, and the scene might still feel violent and unjust. But they wouldn’t be uncomplicatedly heroic resisters.

If Andor is left-wing art, then it’s a Hollywood version of left-wing, processed down to a generic moral purée that can also be enjoyed by people who have always thought the Empire is a stand-in for big government. Gilroy is a perfect example of a Hollywood liberal, someone who thinks more about character and drama than about ideology. And it’s worth noting that, Douthat’s protests not withstanding, Hollywood liberals are just as likely to make vaguely right-wing moral purée that suggests American military invasions are heroic and necessary, just as exemplary of a universal desire to resist evil as a revolution.

But if it’s not left-wing art, then Andor is at least a very good show about politics, one that reveals Douthat’s left-right classification to be a symptom of our shallow cultural relationship to the subject. (Though maybe I have to hand it to Douthat that its detailed texture of rebellion makes it least left-coded.) Within the requisite political black and white of the Star Wars universe, Gilroy’s historical nerdiness enables Andor to take an unusual interest in what politics is actually like. It is a realistic portrayal of the reality that resistance—any kind of resistance, or any kind of politics, really—is a long, slow, thankless project that can be brutal to the people committed to it. That it demands enormous self-sacrifice, even the sacrifice of parts of one’s humanity and morality. That whether they’re in military bureaucracies or ragtag bands of insurgent spies, it pulls individuals in opposite directions and gives them impossible choices. That long-term strategy and organization are the only thing that wins, and a gift for flexibility and spontaneity are crucial. That it requires finding people’s interests and motivations and working with them, however much you may dislike them. Gilroy’s historical texture and his moralism come together for a point that’s deeper than ideology: that politics requires people who can live without simplistic moralism, in an arena where terms like good and evil are inadequate.

1. One of the most jarring carryovers was the German actor Richard Sammel, who plays a particularly flamboyant, sadistic Nazi in Un village français, and brings the same ethereal presence, and same German-accented French, to his role as the leader of the Ghor resistance in Andor.

2. The Hollywood manifestation, perhaps, of the generic, ahistorical concept of totalitarianism.