'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.