The rebel briefing scene in Return of the Jedi has one of the most perplexing moments in the original trilogy, and that is the random appearance of Mon Mothma. She has half a dozen lines and then vanishes. Unlike the various generals we see pop up throughout the trilogy, whose purpose is clear, Mothma’s role is less obvious. I mean, we know of course that she is the head of the rebellion, but the film doesn’t tell us that.
Her cameo is both redundant and crucial. There is no reason why her lines couldn’t have been spoken by Admiral Ackbar, and yet – thanks to Caroline Blakiston’s sublime performance – no other part of the trilogy does a better job at conveying the idea that we are only seeing a small portion of the wider story about the rebellion.
Watching Jedi again recently, I was struck quite how odd the performance is. One minute she’s all smiles and twinkles – we’ve got the Empire by the balls you guys! – the next she’s desolate. It looks to me as if she’s on some strong anti-psychotics and is a hair’s breadth from throwing herself out of the airlock. According to the Expanded Universe, this was because she had just learned that the death of her son Jobin during the Battle of Hoth had been confirmed to her moments before. But it seems to me that there’s more to the story than that. Again, it’s a testament to Blakiston that while I don’t really care about the backstory of General Dodonna or Admiral Ackbar, she manages to make her even smaller role in terms of screen time that much more compelling.
I wish we’d seen more of her during the prequels. She pops up in the deleted scenes of Revenge of the Sith as a young senator (what is it about the prequels and teenage politicians? If she’d been in her 20s it would have better reflected Blakiston’s real age in Jedi) and seems to be pretty much exactly the same as she was 24 years later. She’s even virtually wearing the same clothes, or at least chain of office.
That doesn’t fit with me at all. Why are the politicos who are around at the start of the rebellion still in charge a quarter of a century later? Surely people would retire or rise to power during that time? Is the fact that someone was a senator during the period when the senate stopped doing its job and handed Palpatine the Republic on a plate really a suitable qualification to be in charge? Pretty much the only thing they had done to attempt to restrain him had been to sign a petition (the useless “Delegation of 2000″ – also to wind up on the cutting room floor for Revenge of the Sith – which includes such notable signatories as Jar Jar Binks, the incompetent senator who was duped into proposing giving Palpatine executive powers in the first place).
An opportunity was missed to give Mothma a much more interesting backstory, and an expanded role, to give us an insight into the idealistic young woman who would go on to earn her place at the head of the rebellion rather than simply have it handed to her. It would have been so much more interesting to see her as part of a resistance cell acting against the Separatists’ invasion of Chandrilla, working closely with a Jedi sent to help them, only to witness Order 66 and realise that the ideals her comrades had just died for had themselves been killed by Palpatine.
Or something. Anything really to make the most enigmatic character in the original trilogy more than just a sad politician who seems to have just floated from senior role to senior role throughout her life without having really apparently had to work for any of it.
Okay, you, you sit your butt right down, because I have been smoldering about this insulting-on-so-many-levels “assessment” of Mon Mothma’s character all day, and you’re going to have to hear about all the angry thoughts in my head right now.
First of all, let’s hit that last point of yours, “without having really apparently had to work for any of it,” excuse you, excuse YOU, this woman got herself elected/appointed to the Senate early in her life when the whole galaxy was starting to be torn apart by corruption. Even though she strongly opposed Palpatine’s methods, she never once became a Separatist because she still opposed Dooku’s views–even when the whole Senate was bribed, bullied, and/or mind-controlled by the most powerful Sith Lord of all time, she still remained devoted to her cause and helped to form her own resistance band. Nothing was “given” to her, she worked just as tirelessly as an associate to Bail Organa and Padme Amidala. She was not their leader, she was simply an accomplice–but both of them died and left her to be the one who carried on the war alone. She was a politician, someone who knew how to lead, who knew what a rebellion was fighting for, who saw everything go wrong and refused to throw up her hands and say “well I guess there’s nothing we can do about it”.
She kept this up and became the new Chancellor.
This was not a task that she accomplished simply by sitting back and urging others to fight, either. Bail Organa died when the Death Star obliterated Alderaan, and the message was clear: “continue to oppose the Empire, and we will annihilate everything you ever loved”. Mon Mothma knew what this meant for her homeworld of Chandrila–the moment the Second Death Star was activated, it would have proceeded to annihilate her world just as swiftly as its predecessor did Alderaan (this is confirmed in Moving Target, where Mon Mothma also explains how her planet has been besieged for years because of her). Does Mon Mothma allow this fear to force her into surrender and obedience? No. Mon Mothma keeps fighting, whatever the cost, because she knows that her cause is about more than just her own people.
So when she is standing in front of the Rebellion, with stony face and grim demeanor, it’s not because she’s a mother heartbroken over the loss of her son (get that sexist crap out of here), it’s because she knows that this is the tipping point of everything she’s worked for over the past three decades, and she is terrified that something could go wrong and it may have to continue into a fourth. She leaves no question about the severity of the situation, she offers no joy, no revelry, because she is one of the few people in that room who remembers what the galaxy was like without war, and she has not enjoyed it for a single day. Mon Mothma is an ardent pacifist who has been forced to play the game of war for most of her life, and she proved to be a far more formidable opponent than one would expect a senator to be. She didn’t fight her battles with fire-breathing toys or armored battleships, but with fulfilled promises and unfaltering courage.
She also never once lost perspective on how valuable each and every member of the Rebellion was, from the lowest soldiers to the civilians they fought to protect. We didn’t even need her beautiful cameo in Lost Stars or her exhausted sympathy in Aftermath–she prefaces the attack on the Death Star by informing the gathered forces that many of the Bothans who gathered this information died in the process. No sacrifice is too small for her to forget it.
And it’s because the Rebellion had a senator leading them, not a soldier, that they were able to sway the galaxy against the Empire and remain the “good guys”. Overthrowing the Empire with military might, breaking their backs and demanding that they pay for all their crimes…that would never be Mon Mothma’s way. Indeed, we see in Aftermath that she uses her Emergency Powers as Chancellor to demilitarize the New Republic by ninety percent. She does not only seek to end the Empire’s reign, but she also intends to make it so nothing like this can ever happen again. Or at least, not for thousands of years.
As for her fashion, and the fact that you find it odd that she looks almost exactly the same decades later–thank you for pointing out this important piece of symbolism. She hasn’t changed. Or rather, she has not let the war change her. She still supports the Republic, she still supports democracy, and so every morning she wakes up and dons the robes she would wear upon the Senate floor. Every day for twenty-five years she continued to go about her business as a Senator, even when she had been chased from the Senate floor and watched everything begin to burn. She does this because she must remind herself every day what it is that she stands for and what she believes in, and to lose sight of that would be to risk losing everything. She is Senator Mon Mothma, leader of the Alliance to Restore the Republic, and until that day comes she will not allow herself to relax.
She’s the woman who survived two wars, the senator the Emperor could never silence. You could probably tell a hundred stories of failed assassinations against her and never see her raise a blaster, because she has armored herself with loyal followers and careful planning. She is Mon Mothma, the woman who watched the Emperor claim his title, and then watched the exploding Second Death Star claim his life.
I wouldn’t want them to change a thing.
Yassssss. You shut that anti-Mothma shit down!
For someone who’s username is “overanalysingstarwars” you haven’t been paying any fucking attention.
