The numbers, Mason. What do they mean?

This one’s a little tricky. I set up an argument, then halfway through I flip it and argue the opposite. I’m talking about what things mean in fiction, and how fair it is to expect your audience to know what they mean when that meaning isn’t found anywhere in the story itself. It’s about in- and out-of-text references, basically.

Got it? Right.

At the end of the eleventh theatrical Star Wars movie and ninth in the main series of trilogies, “The Rise of Skywalker,” the heroine Rey “Skywalker” Palpatine return’s to Luke’s childhood home, buries his and Leia’s lightsabers in the ground, then pulls out her own newly-made one and briefly ignites it. Revealing, dun dun DUN, that the blade is … yellow! Wow.

So the capstone, the culmination and the climax of nine movies, forty years, thousands of special effects shots, a centillion toys and one young boy’s rather unhealthy fixation with Carrie Fisher was: A lemon-flavored lightsaber.

So what?

Well, that’s a good question. What does it mean? It’s a new color, after the blue, green and red ones we’ve seen in the movies (and Samuel L. Jackson’s purple one), so, symbolic of new beginnings maybe? As a kid who grew up with the toys, the only thing it calls to mind is that one of the Luke action figures had a yellow lightsaber. The movie is packed to the hyperdrives with callbacks, so maybe it’s just another blast of pointless nostalgia?

What I’m saying is, it’s not calling back to anything we’ve been shown earlier in the movie, or even in any of the earlier movies. There’s no reference in the “text” (the story or action of the movie, or book, or play, or game, or whatever) to lightsabers of any color having any meaning.

Some people get really mad when you say that, though (and they have, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered to write this post). Of course a Star Wars nerd immersed in, sigh, lore, will tell you all about the 2003 video game “Knights of the Old Republic” and how a game mechanic designed to allow for character and playstyle customization means X Y not to mention Z, but come on, to your average audience member, the scene meant precisely jack shit. The meaning, to the extent there is one (and I think the gamers are giving JJ Abrams far too much credit), is found out-of-text.

“The Rise of Skywalker” does this a lot, not just about the color filter of its lightsaber effects. What the heck is Exegol, who lives there, where did they get a huge fleet and the people to crew it? Ah, read the Visual Dictionary. Finn's putative Force-sensitivity was explained in an interview with Hollywood Reporter. And so on.

Star Wars isn’t the only franchise doing it either. Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling apparently spends most of her post-Potter years tweeting new facts that never appeared in the books, such as Dumbledore’s sexual proclivities.

This gets into the more interesting question of semiotics—what do things mean—and more specifically, in- and out-of-text references in constructing meaning.

Let’s set the ground rules first. If you want an action or thing in a movie to have some meaning beyond the thing itself—such as Cobb’s spinning top in “Inception” being symbolic of his obsession with the past, or the idea that only those ‘worthy’ can pick up Thor’s hammer in “Age of Ultron”—then that meaning has to be established in the story itself. It has to be in the text. It can’t be buried in some 20-year-old video game. You can’t just stick it in the Visual Dictionary or mention it casually in a tweet. Stories don’t work that way. The meaning has to be in the story. It can’t be out-of-text.

This isn’t some special law of movie-making or book-writing, this is just, like, “if you want people to know what you’re talking about you have to explain what you’re talking about.” You know? “The message of the story has to be in the story.” It’s common sense.

OR IS IT?

Told you I was going to flip this halfway through.

There are plainly things you can reference and allude to without spelling it out for the audience, or even hinting at within your book or movie, yet you can still fairly expect them to understand. If someone finds a sword in a stone, you’ll automatically know that pulling out that sword is a sign of worthiness. The writer doesn’t have to remind you of the whole King Arthur mythos, they can expect you to know it. If some dude gets shot or stabbed and flails his arms to the side in, you know, the shape of a cross, we don’t have to be told this is an allusion to Jesus. You don’t need an establishing conversation where characters talk about what a nice bloke Jesus was and how sad it was that he got crucified. We just get it.

Let’s go back to Thor’s hammer. Later on in the movie series, in “End Game,” Captain America picks up and uses the hammer. The movie doesn’t explain the whole worthiness thing all over again. It assumes you know, even though it’s a reference to an earlier movie, not within “End Game” itself.

In other words, I think the concept of what is “in-text” and “out-of-text” is elastic. For some things, we can expand it, based on a shared culture and understanding. In the introduction up there, I tossed around the names Luke and Leia and just expected you to follow along, because anybody who knows about Star Wars will also know who they are. In the Marvel movies, there’s a whole freight train of characters, relationships, abilities and other universe-building you’re just expected to be on board with from the get-go.

To a certain extent, then, I think it’s fair to expect audiences especially of these larger, longer-running and more popular franchises, to get not only the surface meaning but also the connotation of it without signposting back to earlier works in the series.

The question then becomes, how far does the concept stretch? If older Star Wars movies are fair game, then what about the video games? The comic books? The, sigh, Visual Dictionary? If it’s reasonable to expect audiences to be familiar with other Marvel movies, how about the comics? Where do you draw the line?

I think the only honest answer is ‘depends,’ and I think it depends both on the audience, how engaged they are with the property, and on the thing being referenced. The broader the audience, the less in-depth knowledge they’re going to have. More cultish fanbases are probably more accepting of obscure references.

Similarly, the more popular the thing being referenced, the more you can get away with. You can reference the Bible without too much preamble.

Though this has to be of secondary importance, because the purpose of all communication is to have the thing you are trying to communicate be understood by someone else. If you’re just pontificating for your own gratification, jeez, write a blog or something. Oh.

Star Wars, at least in its original incarnation, had the broadest audience imaginable. Everyone saw it. You can certainly still put winks and callbacks from games or comics into the stories for the uber-fans, just don’t make them part of the climactic finale. More targeted offerings like the Disney+ shows can get away with more because they’ll have a narrower audience. Hence, literally every character who has ever appeared will now be appearing in season 2 of “The Mandalorian.”

Marvel movies, similarly, have huge, huge audiences, the Avengers ones in particular the hugest, so you can safely refer to other movies, but probably not the comics. Even Captain America needed a first movie to establish who he was. Again, a costume, a line of dialog, sure, throw the die-hards a bone, but you can’t have a key plot point depend on reading Uncanny X-Men #129 (Jan. 1963, “Save us from the Knights of Hellfire!”)

Back to Rey’s lightsaber then. The KotR game came out in 2003, and Wikipedia tells me it sold 3 million copies, making it pretty popular. Ah. But. “Rise of Skywalker” made $1 billion internationally, so assuming a generous $20 per head, that works out to 50 million people (“The Force Awakens” made twice as much, FWIW). The problem is then that you had a climactic scene which slightly less than 10% of the audience had even a chance of understanding, even assuming every single person who bought the game also saw the movie.

So I’m not saying movies and books or whatever can’t do it, but come on, let’s be reasonable. We know the fannest of fans have read every tie-in novel, comic book and Wookiepedia entry, played every game, watched every episode of every show. That cannot and should not be the baseline for any product hoping to have a mass appeal.

Yes to the idea that the ‘text’ of popular movies should include a basic understanding of the way these universes work or who the people are, but no to the idea that this extends to cover every single scrap of minutiae.