Villains With Our Faces: What radicals can learn from Andor’s Imperials

By Your Friend Michael

Hello, reader. I’d like you to perform an exercise with me right now. I’d like you to look up from your screen and examine your surroundings.

Now I don’t know you, but based on the mere fact that you’re reading this article, I can make a few guesses about who you are. I know you can read English, are online, and have the spare time to both watch a Disney+ series and read political commentary on it. Whether you’re at home or sneaking this in at your office job, you are physically comfortable and have a rough idea of where your next meal is coming from and where you’re going to sleep tonight, too. Yes?

What you’re not doing, I’m guessing, is engaging in armed guerrilla struggle. You have never worked on the periphery of the world economic system, outside the comforts of urban industrial society. You’re not a small farmer or a drug smuggler. Most likely, you’ve never committed a crime in furtherance of your politics that has risked any significant jail time or your own life, and you’re not currently engaged in a covert war against the state.

Therefore, on at least a surface level, you don’t have much in common with Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, or Princess Leia, do you? You don’t have much in common with Cassian Andor or Luthen Rael or Mon Mothma either, right? In fact, you likely have much more in common with fellow “first-world” office bureaucrats Syril Karn and Dedra Meero. And this is one of the most important things about Andor: its villains have lives and emotional needs that are entirely relatable to its viewers.

In this essay, I will briefly discuss how Andor’s Imperial villains, notably Dedra Meero and Syril Karn, represent a break from the distant, and often literally faceless, prior presentation of Imperial villains in Star Wars. I will then highlight some writing that similarly examines the motivations of those involved in building and maintaining hierarchical political orders, and what lessons we can bring to our own work building a more egalitarian society.

The Faceless Imperial Villains in The Original Trilogy

In the Original Trilogy of Star Wars movies (Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi), almost, if not every single Imperial character we see is a member of the Imperial military and wearing some kind of uniform. We see them on starships or attacking and defending patches of land on whatever planet they are on.

We only see the parts of these characters’ lives centred entirely on their jobs in the Imperial military. Imperial soldiers and officers are always shown either carrying out their role as soldiers or engaged in active combat. We don’t see them eat, sleep, listen to music, or talk about their families. The closest thing in the Original Trilogy to this kind of individual characterisation is the two stormtroopers discussing new landspeeder designs as Obi-Wan Kenobi shuts down the tractor beam on the first Death Star.

And about those stormtroopers – they are literally faceless. Their faces are obscured by masks that give them a permanent, unpleasant frown. The Empire’s rank and file soldiers are faceless frowny men who are always trying to kill our protagonists. How can we as an audience feel anything but uncomplicated joy as our heroes shoot and bludgeon them to death?

To the extent that the Imperial villains of the Original Trilogy have faces and/or names and therefore can differentiate themselves, it is in the performance of their jobs. Take the opening act of The Empire Strikes Back: Admiral Ozzel is as clumsy as he is stupid. First Captain, then Admiral Piett is an aggressive and conscientious officer. General Maximillian Veers, the leader of the ground assault on Hoth, is a perfectly efficient soldier who does everything expected of him with no complications, despite a brave defence put up by the Rebel forces. We know nothing of them outside this; all other details are withheld either in the service of screenwriting efficiency or ensuring that the audience feels as little in common with the villains as possible. Regardless of intent, the audience reaction is undoubtedly an effect.

The only exception to this is Darth Vader, the single villainous character who is allowed to have an individual characterisation beyond his “job” as Emperor Palpatine’s enforcer. In A New Hope, we learn that he was once a Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi's student, who seeks revenge against Obi-Wan for previously defeating him in a fight, and that he betrayed and murdered Luke Skywalker's father, Anakin. In The Empire Strikes Back, we learn that he turned from the Jedi Order to the dark side of the Force, is actually Anakin Skywalker, and longs to be reunited with his son. In Return of the Jedi, we learn that he regrets his decision to join the Emperor and, finally, with the help of his son, decides to abandon the Emperor and the Empire, ultimately destroying both. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the only Imperial character with any personal history or motivation in the first movie, outside their role in the state, ends up joining the rebels by the third. The unstated message is clear: the Empire is inhuman, and therefore anyone who has recognisable human desires cannot possibly be a part of it.

The Importance of Andor’s Humanised Imperials

But we know this to be untrue. Humans have built, and more importantly, staffed, every murderous tyranny to ever exist, and this is something that Andor takes pains to emphasise at every opportunity. While Andor’s imperials are undeniably engaged in evil, the show makes repeated efforts to display its antagonists as human beings. It is illustrated in three ongoing ways throughout the show.

Firstly, whether wearing a corporate or imperial uniform, the soldiers of the oppressive force in Andor are more likely to have faces. Some representative examples include Syril Karn’s squad at the beginning of the story, the riot troopers sent into the crowd on Ghorman, or Sergeant Benzi’s squad in Coruscant at the end of the story. At key moments in the action, the audience is therefore allowed to experience and understand the emotions of the soldiers the rebellion are fighting. When they die, they slump over and close their eyes. This invites us to revel in their fear, to recoil in sympathetic shock, or to question the cost of the rebellion, especially in a moment in Season Two when Bix Caleen is literally haunted in her dreams by an imperial guard she and Cassian killed on a mission. And when she confides in Cassian that this is happening, she says, “I can’t stop seeing his face.”

Secondly, we are introduced to several Imperial defectors. Whether it’s Lieutenant Gorn from the Aldahni garrison, Taramyn Barcona, the former soldier helping the same robbery, or Lonni Jung, the ISB agent who ends up becoming the key link in early rebel intelligence gathering, these defectors underline something crucial: that being a soldier for the Empire is a choice, rather than an immutable condition. Every Imperial soldier and civilian functionary is choosing to do their jobs.

Thirdly, we see much more of the personalities of various imperial officers, agents, and soldiers outside their officially prescribed duties. As a minor example, Jayhold Beehaz, the commander of the Aldahni garrison, has a wife and son on the base, and you see a snapshot of his home life as he prepares for the arrival of a visitor from Coruscant. He exhibits casual patriarchal cruelty towards them when annoyed, but when the rebel team holds them at gunpoint, he seeks to save their lives and pliantly complies with every single demand made of him. He would be sad if his son were killed just like Darth Vader would have been. Except Jayhold Beehaz is an ordinary man, rather than a fallen Jedi. He dies of a heart attack on a concrete floor in a loading dock.

But of course, the primary examples of this humanising approach to the Empire are the two imperial characters whose point of view we see in any given episode of the show: Syril Karn and Dedra Meero. We spend hours of screen time with them and learn how they navigate the imperial system and respond to the rebellion. But we also watch them as they rest, as they deal with Syril’s mother, as they try to build a romantic partnership together, all circumstances to which we can relate as ordinary people with “first-world problems.” And it is with them that we will spend the rest of this essay.

There is more to crafting relatable villains than the obvious narrative function. There is also much we can learn about our opponents through the fictional device. And in Andor’s case, the key message is that we are not so terribly different on a personal level than our adversaries. In Dedra Meero, we see an innovative thinker struggling with the constraints of outmoded procedures in an obviously classist and sexist work environment. In Syril Karn, we see an idealist who wants to make the world a better place, as long as he can also have a more important life for himself than that of an anonymous resident of a dreary apartment building. I will now place them in a brief conversation with works by leftist authors who likewise sought to understand our opponents on an intellectual and emotional level.

Dedra Meero as a Reactionary Mind

What is the reward for all the effort that dominating others demands?

In his treatise The Reactionary Mind, first published in 2011 in the wake of the Tea Party and re-released in 2017 post-Trump, the Brooklyn College Professor Corey Robin sought to solve the core problem that liberals and leftists have often spent hours at dinner tables with sympathetic family members trying to unravel. What holds the “right-wing” or “conservative” coalition together? How can libertarians who want limited government regulation possibly stomach being in coalition with social conservatives who want the government to regulate when, how, and with whom consenting adults should have sexual relations with? How can militarists obsessed with a state strong enough to defeat all its adversaries countenance libertarian principles that insist on the wealthy not paying a reasonable share of taxes or allowing businesses to create problems like industrial pollution or mass obesity that so clearly impair military readiness?

Robin’s answer to what motivates the conservative is the creation and maintenance of hierarchy in the face of demands for equality from traditionally subordinate groups, rather than a dogmatic adherence to the methods used to maintain hierarchy. Despite technological and historical change, the conservative insists that the boss controls the worker, the man controls the woman, and White nations control the rest of the world. While there may be idiosyncratic and contradictory elements within the coalition, they can all agree that there are natural superiors who should command and natural subordinates who should obey. This would supposedly be for the good of all, superior and subordinate alike, as those subject to command would be incapable of exercising it properly for the good of all. Robin quotes Ayn Rand, who argued that “it is the members of this exceptional minority who lift the whole of a free society to the level of their own achievements, while rising further and ever further.”

As a subsidiary point to this argument, Robin notes that, because conservatives are not tied to specific policies or forms of governance, conservatism has proven highly adaptive in its philosophies and methods over the years as it has responded to challenges from advocates for the dispossessed. Hence, how the same revanchists who would have defended traditional forms of domination under a feudal social order learned to play mass politics, transforming into a movement that could contend with liberals for the bourgeoisie and with socialists for the working class. Another example is the work of Phyllis Schlafly, who mobilised women to fight *against* government action to codify the rights of women to participate in the work force or enter politics on the grounds that such action restricted women’s freedom to express themselves in a traditional manner. This argument would have been unthinkable before the feminist challenge, but Schlafly deftly adapted to the new paradigm. On a more tactical level, one also could see how American conservatives adapted to use social media in the form of the “Tea Party movement” and later the Trump campaign to mobilise large numbers of disaffected voters into an effective backlash to the Obama administration that had first introduced social media to politics only a few years earlier. The entire history of the project of conservatism has been one of constant and adaptive reaction to conditions, in defiance of the liberal stereotype of its practitioners as inflexible and hopelessly stuck in the past.

The character Dedra Meero exemplifies this adaptive tendency within conservatism. Early in the run of the show, when challenged on her new methods for collating existing information, she blurts out, “Systems change or they die.” She is consistently shown analysing and adapting to new circumstances, often ignoring established methods to do so. And far from being chastised or punished for this original thinking, she is rewarded for it. The Empire recognises her results. As a result of her work outlining the extent of ongoing rebel activity, she is brought upstairs to Director Krennic, who confirms that her reputation as an independent thinker has reached him and asks her for a new idea to make it easier to displace the people of Ghorman. She proposes the idea of turning the resistance movement into an armed uprising that will give the excuse for the destruction of the Ghorman homeworld, rather than simply fabricating an excuse through propaganda. This insight is recognised, and she is immediately tasked with implementing it.

But perhaps more importantly than the Empire’s reaction to Meero, is how the audience is invited to sympathise with her, up to a point. This drive to do a task as well as you can is as human as walking upright. When we watch her humiliate more senior personnel for their pomposity towards her (tinged with more than a bit of sexism), we smile. Watching her and her associates find details in overlooked documents is exciting, perhaps driven by recognition of similar moments in our own professional lives. However, this sympathy lasts for the audience only up until we see Meero torturing people on Ferrix, including Bix Caleen, who we know and like. And we see the same glee on Meero’s face in the simple application of suffering as she does in a complex analysis. We are to understand that what drives Meero is not really the joy she takes in her own proficiency but a joy she takes in the subordination of others, a trait she shares with the Empire she serves. This fully realised understanding of the Empire’s role in creating and enforcing hierarchies distinguishes her from her stalker-cum-boyfriend, Syril Karn, who knows just enough about the Empire to hope that service to it will give him the heroic life he wants, without considering that it might exact a bloody cost on innocent people.

Syril Karn as the Revolutionary’s Doppelganger

How can fighting for the status quo feel like fighting against it?

In the wide-ranging essay collection and political memoir Doppelganger, Naomi Klein examines numerous mirror-image figures in culture and politics. Some examples include the 2022 Canadian Trucker convoy, which almost directly mirrored a prior demonstration in Canada for indigenous rights, or how the far right of Israel came to resemble the antisemites that nearly annihilated the Jewish communities of Europe. Klein’s interest in this theme stems from a very personal place. Klein was being constantly confused online with a fellow Naomi, the author Naomi Wolf. Wolf was a former liberal leading light who by 2021 had aligned herself with the American fascist Steve Bannon and the MAGA movement, mainly through conspiracy theories about COVID and vaccination. Therefore, throughout the book, Klein reflects on the long arc of Wolf’s career and raises interesting doubts for readers like us, as anti-authoritarians on the left, about how emotionally distinct we are from our counterparts who uphold society’s hierarchies on the right.

In Klein’s telling, Wolf was a popular third-wave feminist author who rose to fame based on her book, The Beauty Myth, which criticised mainstream culture for imposing additional demands on women to conform their appearance to impossible-to-meet standards. It earned her significant acclaim on these issues, which she leveraged into a consultancy for Al Gore’s presidential campaign, advising him on how to appeal to women. But this success proved fleeting. Al Gore didn’t become president. None of Wolf’s subsequent books achieved the success of The Beauty Myth, and despite showing up to work with movements like Occupy Wall Street, her haphazard contributions often weren’t welcomed. Finally, in 2019, what was to be her next book’s central thesis, that hundreds of gay men were executed in Victorian England purely for their sexual orientation, was shown during a live BBC radio interview to be a glaring and obvious mistake Wolf made by misunderstanding a legal term: “death recorded.”  The book, Outrages, was recalled and pulped, and Wolf was mocked around the world.[1]

But Wolf’s career as a public figure did not end. Instead, during the COVID pandemic, her scepticism of public health measures found an eager audience among people on the right, who were as distrustful of mainstream news as her former left-leaning fans had been. The fascist strategist Steve Bannon invited Wolf to his “War Room” podcast, and she kept accepting, commenting – less and less convincingly over time – that she had never expected to end up working with him. Klein argues that Bannon and his followers offered her two things she had lost from her left-leaning former audience. One would of course be the audience itself, the attention and the money that comes with it. The other thing Klein recognises Wolf receiving from Bannon: the feeling of being in conflict with greater forces, of having a secret truth that your complacent friends and family are too ignorant or afraid to hear you discuss. 

Klein heavily implies that this frisson of struggle from the right felt the same to Wolf as when she waged it from the left. Whether Wolf was opposing a dominant narrative of oppressive female beauty standards or opposing a dominant narrative that public health measures could save millions of people from dying, she derived the same righteous thrill. Throughout the book, Klein makes note of other media figures who have switched sides “diagonally”  from the anti-establishment left to the anti-establishment right. Although she avoids naming names, one can’t help but think of the Occupy-adjacent Tim Pool and Matt Taibbi, and wonder if the prior generations of have youthful socialists who became neoconservatives, such as Irving Kristol, had similar emotional experiences. Klein makes two points in highlighting these “diagonal” transitions. The first is to note that the Right will often pick up people the Left throws away, so we should be careful not to do so without good cause. The second is to raise the question…Are we really so different, Us and Them?  

Let’s discuss Syril Karn from Andor now. Tony Gilroy, Andor’s showrunner, has referred to Syril as a “tragic”[2] and “romantic” figure. But how can that possibly be? Syril Karn is an officious prick who, at the beginning of the show, cannot relate to even the other corporate police officers under his command. He doesn’t seem to have a sense of humour about anything. He poses a constant threat to the safety of all the rebel characters we care about on the show.

So why is there that sense of tragedy when we watch Syril? Watching him, we see the same example of doomed self-sacrifice as in many of the rebels in this show and in heroic figures throughout fiction. His entire conflict with Cassian Andor is prompted by Cassian accidentally killing one corporate police officer in self-defence and then murdering another to eliminate him as a witness. Syril’s job was to investigate these crimes (and yes, under any system of government, that second killing's definitely a crime), and he did that, despite instructions to simply make the murder vanish to keep crime statistics low. Unlike Meero, he would not expect his supervisors to reward him even if he had succeeded in bringing Andor into custody. In fact, after losing his job as a police officer, he risks his new job and his freedom to continue hunting Andor. Now this is stupid and vain, but what it is not is straightforwardly selfish. After he ends up in Dedra’s orbit, he spends at least three years of his life committed to life as a double agent to, he believes, identify violent terrorists so that the planet Ghorman can live in peace. When he learns that he has, in fact, enabled Ghorman’s destruction, he instantly quits imperial service and walks into the streets of a doomed city. He dies within minutes.

For his many, many faults, Syril Karn believed in his idea of justice enough to repeatedly risk his life for it. In this, he has a lot in common with the various rebels we’ve seen give their lives willingly for a cause. So what makes them different? What categorically makes the villains we have seen occasionally display virtuous qualities different from our heroes?

[We] Have Friends Everywhere

This question, asked from the other direction, is the crux of much handwringing among leftists both in Andor’s world and our own. If we are engaged in violent or nonviolent struggle with the forces of reaction, sometimes violating our individual principles for the greater good, how do we know we’re still the heroes of the story, especially when our opponents have faces, families, and recognizably positive qualities? And the answer is a word I don’t believe Andor ever uses, but it’s a running theme throughout the entire run of the show: Solidarity. A full reckoning with that term is beyond the scope of this essay, and has been grappled with for hundreds of years.[3] For now, let’s use a relatively orthodox definition: a feeling of mutual obligation among members of a self-conceived group. This obligation is reflected in the term’s origin in Latin for a debt of money owed by a group, rather than an individual.

In Andor, our heroes are imperfect; they constantly make tactical and strategic errors that hurt and sometimes kill their friends, compatriots, and bystanders. But what they share is a drive to be in communities of people who owe a hypothetical better future to their shared struggle. They fight not out of some abstract sense of justice, but in solidarity with people they live with and around. This is true of our hero, Cassian Andor, who, while starting as a petty thief, knows and loves his friends and family and always tries to do right by them as well as he can. To the extent he is self-sacrificing, he is not doing it just for some abstract principle but instead because it will help the people he has found himself in and around, whether it’s the residents of his hometown, political dissidents, criminals or people targeted by the Empire because they live on land they want. He cares about the overall mission to fight the Empire, but also about ensuring as many people as possible survive a given situation. This care is almost to a fault, and it is his people, specifically his partner, Bix Calleen, who eventually take the choice out of his hands for him to commit to his connection to the movement as whole, rather than to any particular relationship he has. They remind him that his debt is held by his community, and he has not been released from it.

The difference between this solidaristic mutual obligation and the ethics of superiority expresses itself in both the personal and the political in the show. Cassian and Bix put constant effort into finding a way to live together with their individual pains by, imperfectly to be sure, discussing their feelings with one another throughout Season Two. This often leads to arguments, whether it's over which store to shop at or whether or not the Force is real. But in the end, despite Bix effectively leaving Cassian, there’s no hatred between them. 

Dedra and Syril have a different relationship style. She commands, he obeys. To the extent that a disagreement could ever exist between them, about whether it is a good time to invite Syril’s mom over or whether it’s right to destroy a planet for its resources, Dedra either tells Syril what to do or makes him do what she wants by lying to him about what is happening. It’s a deal Syril takes subconsciously because of how much easier it makes his life, but there is never a possibility of a completely honest discussion between them. This works until it doesn’t. When the truth is finally revealed about Ghorman, Syril physically assaults Dedra and almost kills her. 

The difference seems to reflect, perhaps too neatly, the one between the political entities they serve. In the Rebellion, people spend hours yelling at each other around a council table, and despite hostility, the people there always end up back the next day. In the Empire, there’s one man at the head of the table (Partagaz), no yelling back and forth across it and mistakes made by his subordinates lead to them disappearing until there’s nobody left to take the blame but himself. 

Of course all of this is an imperfect comparison. No organization lives up to its ideals 100 percent of the time. “Oh, what about Luthen?” You might rightly ask. Luthen who never discusses anything with anyone, and is willing to sacrifice anyone for the rebel cause. Well, we can see that Luthen is an outlier within the movement. Every other rebel not named Luthen Rael has major problems with how Luthen Rael operates. And to be clear, Luthen Rael has problems with how Luthen Rael operates. He says, “I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy” and “I’m damned for what I do,” and there’s no indication he’s not serious about this view of his methods. We don’t see him grinning when he decides to kill his own agents, like Dedra does torturing people or Syril does being a double agent. The cruelty is not the point with him. Now, could this be because he’s just a better person than these imperials we’ve met? Sure. But I think that it’s possible that commitment to the establishment of a political order based on freedom leads one to be more circumspect and reluctant in the application of violence. 

And that’s not just morally good, not just something that makes “us” morally better and more virtuous than “them”, but it makes us more effective. The Nazi and the Imperial Japanese societies of the 1930s were built around a valorization of the hierarchical violence of the soldier bringing order to the world. And then by 1945 they both ceased to exist because they lost the wars they started. And a huge part of the reason why they lost is because the hierarchies these fascists constructed, while as outwardly frictionless as Dedra and Syril’s relationship, contained within them barely submerged individual drives for dominance that led to constant conflict even within the ruling power structure. The Nazis started and abandoned dozens of wonder weapons that never made it much further than limited production runs because the military officers and industrialists were incentivized to compete for Hitler’s personal patronage, instead of working through a deliberative bureaucracy. The Japanese Army and Navy famously spent their downtime trying to kill the other branch’s flag officers. Their allied opponents, as a result of the more collaborative (give or take a Stalin) models of their societies were not only able to more effectively marshall the resources of their own nations, but were able to coordinate their efforts together.

And perhaps this the final lesson that we can learn from our adaptive and motivated villains. We can’t count on them to make mistakes and they’re as willing to fight as us. When we recognize ourselves in our opponents, it must give us the motivation to know that what has allowed us to beat them in the past has not been us being some superior people, but that we have joined together in solidarity. And working together we can become more powerful than they, trapped in their frameworks of dominance and glory, can possibly imagine.

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[1] Reader, if you have the time, do yourself a favor and listen to the relevant part of the interview. It’s 8 minutes long and embedded in this BBC article, and how often do you get to hear what someone thought would be their crowning achievement collapse in real time? https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-50153743

[2] See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3h-sVkZx-4

[3] Recent popular works read by the author have included Solidarity: The Past Present and Future of a World-Changing Idea by Leah Hunt-Hendrix & Astra Taylor and The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity by Sarah Shulman