The German director Werner Herzog, who is famous in the English-speaking world for his dead-pan pronouncements, is one of three elements that make the Disney+ TV series The Mandalorian entertaining. In the penultimate episode of the series, "The Reckoning" (which was directed by Deborah Chow and aired on December 18, two days before the box office of the inferior The Rise of Skywalker opened), Herzog, whose character, of course, is simply called the Client (and he badly wants to get his hands on baby Yoda), explains, like never before, what the Imperial order is all about. The stormtroopers, the Resistance, the aristocratic saber clashes (Jedi's)—it all comes down to this: Though the galactic empire draws its force from the darkside, it still provides order to an otherwise chaotic galaxy. Do you want pandemonium? Or do you want a galaxy that's anchored by imperial power?
Near the climax of the episode, the Client says to the Mandalorian, "Judged by any metric—safety, prosperity, trade opportunity, peace—compare imperial rule to what is happening now. Look outside, is the world more peaceful since the revolution? I see nothing but death, and chaos. I would like to see the baby." The baby is Yoda, and for a reason we do not yet know, the baby is important for the restoration of the empire, the restoration of order by the dark forces. Force, of any kind, is better than no force at all.
Let's now consider what exactly the Client's statement to the Mandalorian means.
In The Rise of Skywalker, we get no real explanation as to what the Empire is about. Why all of this suffering, fighting, family drama? What is the cause? What exactly is this struggle between the forces of darkness and lightness? Judging from the speech of the main villain in the last film of the Skywalker saga (Sheev Palpatine), it is about exerting force to rule the galaxy. But what does that even mean? Is the force an end and not a means? The force is control and control is the force? Ruling the galaxy is not about the accumulation and command of resources and merchandise (stuff—or stoff)? If the force is an end, then this is very much like the battle between God and Satan—the reason of the contest for souls is just out of this world. The same goes with the present Middle East crisis. We are told that it is a "clash of civilizations," but remove petroleum from this region and what you got? The US giving a fuck?
In walks Werner Herzog. He sits down, and takes the time to say a few things about the Empire and its justification to the Mandalorian. It is not otherworldly, like the nonsense battle in heaven. It begins in and has all of its final implications in the world of real things: teeth, throats, stomachs. In this scene, we finally have a political economy of the galaxy far, far away that's under Imperial rule: peace, trade, the accumulation of wealth. (Let's put aside for now Herzog's defining movie, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, which is about the ugly but, at the end of the day, justifiable madness of empire.) And that political economy looks like the one that developed over the past 400 years and has its epicenter in Europe.
And so the galaxy has a political economy. This is what the stormtroopers are really about. They get paid to enforce the force that has a market order as one of its key justifications. If the stormtroppers (some of whom are women, as we learn in The Rise of Skywalker) do not get paid, they leave and become ronins (masterless soldiers). The TV series has been a pleasure to watch.
