A few weeks ago, online rumors erupted that Kathleen Kennedy was stepping back from her longtime role as head of Disney’s Star Wars franchise. Though the rumors were false, they were enough to incite a social media flurry analyzing the state of our art, entertainment, and culture. 

Kennedy’s time at the helm of this “galaxy far, far away” has been controversial. The Mandalorian and Andor were hits, but other offerings and ideas during her tenure didn’t go over as well. This was especially true when “woke” storylines were confused with good storytelling. For example, the creators of The Acolyte bragged that the series would be the “most gay” in the Star Wars franchise. It was pulled after one season for low viewership. 

Even so, at least according to pastor and Lutheran Satirist Hans Fiene, it wasn’t just the wokeness. In a tweet, he wrote, “The failure of modern Star Wars was not just a Kathleen Kennedy problem. It’s a cultural problem. We don’t want our heroes to be more righteous than we are.”  

Our superheroes have been downgraded over the years, and more than just from superhuman to human. In the Tobey Maguire movies, Spiderman was an earnest hero who could identify the enemy and understand his role in the fight. Even in the darker-themed Batman movies that struggled with deeper questions of revenge and justice, Christian Bale was clear that the bad guys need killing. Today’s Marvel movies feature quippy heroes who don’t take much of anything seriously but still end up on the right side of Thanos. 

Those stories stand in sharp contrast with others that blur the lines of good and evil, hero and villain. In Maleficent, the bad queen is working through her trauma of not being invited to Sleeping Beauty’s christening. In Wicked, the wicked witch is a victim of discrimination and corruption. Likewise, Mufasa explores the sympathetic backstory of Scar and offers good reasons why he became evil. In this brave new world, the heroes and villains aren’t all that different after all.  

The same thing is reflected in real life. Western academics have been “reimagining” the villains and heroes of history for quite a while. Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln aren’t flawed men striving for a better world, but exploiters who lived for power. Much of this comes from the cultural and political Left but in more recent times, voices on the extreme Right have attempted to make Western leaders like Churchill the bad guys while explaining away historical villains like Stalin, Mao, and Hitler.

As Cole Porter sang almost a century ago,  

The world has gone mad today  

And good’s bad today,  

And black’s white today,  

And day’s night today. 

History will never be understood, much less learned from, without clarity about what is good and what is evil. Fairytales and myths have nothing to teach us if they confuse what makes the good guys good and what makes the bad guys bad. Too many of those who tell our stories, fictional and historical, see the world through any of the various critical theories that deny eternal virtues and binding ethical standards, and reject metanarratives as mere power grabs.  

The best stories recognize that though even the best of us have flaws, rejecting notions of good or evil leaves us unable to recognize those flaws or learn from them. After all, there’s no possibility of making a better world if we think that there’s no such thing as better, and there is no possibility of improving ourselves if we excuse away every fault. The Christian vision of life and humanity is better because it’s true, and that means we have better stories, fictional and historical, to tell the world.