WE MUST CONSUME BABY YODA AT ALL COSTS by Olivia Tapiero
I try to own up to the fact that I’m a monster — in my life, in my writing, in my relationships.
I’ve been learning to consider it — my monstrousness — an act of rebellion, of detonation; a refusal founded on the very accusation it seeks to outrun. In The Rebel, Albert Camus explains that in revolution there is a volta — that is, an about-face that represents an overturning of the existing power relations: “Le revolté,” etymologically speaking, Camus notes, “fait volte-face.” Where once she walked under the threat of the master’s whip, now she’s turned to face him. There is, in revolt, a revolution — as the rebel turns around to size up her oppressor, this gesture alone transforms the situation, allowing at last for a confrontation. In reading this passage, I felt that when a rebel’s face turned to look her oppressor in the eye, the face itself must undergo a change, too. Now that the rebellion has begun, it can no longer be the same face. It’s in this moment, however brief, that the monster appears.
In October 2019, I had the opportunity to meet feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed at an event focused on the process of filing complaints within institutions — specifically, ones regarding racism and sexual abuse. Ahmed, coiner of the now-infamous term “feminist killjoy,” generously agreed to speak with me after her talk. When I asked her if she thought we — women and gender minorities — needed to become monsters, she said yes, we will be perceived that way. Then, smiling, she reminded me of the etymology of the word “monster”: it comes from the Latin monstrum, from the verb moneo: to show, to warn, to alert. If our anger is monstrous, that’s because it announces the presence of something unacceptable, something dangerous — a border that’s been crossed. Our anger expresses a refusal, a hardened shell. It de-faces us — renders us unrecognizable.
The world, too, feels unrecognizable, defaced, a collection of cataclysms each following the last: forest fires and earthquakes; tsunamis and melting ice caps; mass extinctions at the level of language, species, and community. We say that it’s nature exacting revenge, because we wish nature would do just that, that ‘Mother Nature’ would defend herself somehow, that a kind of justice might be rendered. In fact, since the beginning of the last decade, I’ve noticed what feels like a proliferation of urban decay content growing over the internet like ivy: photos of ghost towns, like the infamous pictures of Kolmanskop, in Namibia, where whole houses have been reclaimed by the shifting sands; or ghost malls, where burgeoning plant life has managed to burst through the concrete.
The human fascination with the spectacle of ruination and destruction is hardly a recent phenomenon, however. The whole Greco-Roman classical style of the 19th century is saturated with it, and this aesthetic, as well as the melancholic affectation that’s emblematic of it, coincides with a historical tipping point — the moment Europe gave way to unchained industrialization. So whether it’s Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings or DSLR photographers documenting ghost malls, we can understand the fantasy of the ruined place, then, as a sort of guilty pleasure — a desire to see human avarice and the ravages of industry finally punished. Therein is a sort of paradox of conflicting desires: on the one hand, the desire to return to a state of nature, that is, a place where creation and destruction meld together outside of moral considerations; on the other, a moralistic search for absolution that might finally grant this destruction some sort of meaning.
Unfortunately, the dream of a return to nature is historically tied to an ecofascism that’s deeply rooted in the anti-industrial Romanticism of the 19th century, whose contemporary offshoots take the form of deeply racist and nationalist thought — notably, for instance, the manifesto of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooter. Ecofascism is effectively inseparable from eugenic and anti-immigration discourse: as Sarah Manavis notes in an article detailing the recent rise in the ism’s popularity, “Underneath the pictures of idyllic country scapes and environmentally friendly rhetoric, eco-fascists are pushing a murderous, racist ideology in the name of protecting the planet.” Images of nature regaining the upper hand are thus anchored in a moralizing perspective and a judeo-christian view of the world structured around notions of culpability, punishment, and redemption; of purity and ancestry.
But if the prospect of humanity somehow restoring the balance between itself and nature can so easily shade into ecofascistic leanings, the two-century-old genre of the urban-ruin-as-art signals more generally a desire for an intervention — one carried out by something beyond the scope of human activity. It’s particularly evident in the popularity of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic film, where the end of the world is typically slotted into one of three broad categories: natural disaster, nuclear catastrophe, and alien invasion. In each of these cases, we’re dealing with forces well beyond our control and which, as a result, function to liberate humanity from its responsibilities to the living world. The desire to disappear, for self-annihilation, for a vengeful nature taking its anger out on us can thus be considered a type of collective escape hatch.
The atom bombs are raining down on the surface of the sea while Godzilla slumbers in the depths. Radioactivity spreads, kills the fish she depends on, rendering her environment unlivable. This is the side of the story we never hear about. In post-war Japan, the movie Gojira (1954) responded to a collective need to process the United States’ nuclear attacks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This isn’t just allegorical — during pre-production, producer Iwao Mori demanded that the creature’s skin be modeled after the keloidal scars that surfaced on the skin of survivors in Hiroshima. Godzilla is a response to a collective sense of dispossession, a re-writing of history, a figure that renders visible a deadly and efficient form of violence — radioactivity, much like capitalism and the patriarchy, is all the more insidious for the fact that it’s invisible and scentless. It manifests itself only in the bodies of its victims.
Apocalypse, like monster, is a word that’s etymologically tied to revelation, to a process of rendering visible. This revelation is one that we could formulate thusly: human beings are the real monsters, and, at the same time, it’s our humanity that we must prove in order to survive. Beings and events that earn the title of “monstrous” are first and foremost the ones that hold a mirror up to our own monstrosity. As Ahmed explains, “When we give problems their names, we can become a problem for those who do not want to register that there is a problem (but who might, at another level, sense there is a problem).” Godzilla, then, is a feminist killjoy.
Before the denunciation, before the roar or the resolution, there’s a place in the depths that’s vulnerable to blows. In her essay “Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect,” poet and author Jackie Wang uses the psychoanalytic concept of “oceanic feeling” to describe this swollen no-man’s-land that absorbs traumas that might threaten one’s sense of self: “people who have been traumatized may be more prone to having oceanic experiences,” she says. According to Wang, oceanic feeling can give rise to popular movements — a group of people who keep absorbing blows will eventually strike back, in one way or another, in order to pierce the membrane of an untenable oceanic feeling.
To my mind, Godzilla is an ecofeminist icon, her body at once a site of a swallowed-up pain and the eruption of a revelation/accusation against human abjection. The monster’s mythical presence is hardly limited to a Japanese context, either: four American Godzilla movies now number among her 36 feature films. If Godzilla has become a permanent fixture of the collective imagination, however, it’s because the anger she radiates isn’t just a jet of focused flame aimed straight at nuclear weapons, but a flamethrower brushstroke extending towards the vast scope of the irreconcilable differences between industrial civilization and its environment. From Godzilla’s destruction of skyscrapers and her literal flattening of cityscapes, a dusty smoke rises — the dream of a tabula rasa, an acceleration towards the dreamt-of era of ruin. I see it as a question of control — we invented a monster to speed up the apocalypse in order to feel like we had some control over it. It’s another form of resolution: a desire to crawl up out of the depths of the oceanic feeling, to escape its amorality, its ambiguity, its irresolution.
Godzilla’s anger is the anger of extinction. She regulates an anxiety tied to the catastrophes that go beyond the scale of human capability, whether it’s nuclear fallout or environmental destruction. Shogo Tomiyama, director of several Godzilla films, notes in an interview that the monster “isn’t seeking to destroy humans, but rather humanity itself.” Like many others, he believes Godzilla has a kinship with kami, a deity or powerful spirit in Japan’s shinto religion: She’s a force from another world whose actions are above and beyond human moral considerations, and whose bloodlust stems instead from the logics of the natural world reverberating within her.
The appeal of Godzilla is intimately linked to this idea of nature defending itself, to an equilibrium imposed by an external force. Underneath the thunderous roar of this proto-ecofeminist figure, which can be heard all across the second half of the 20th century and continues to this day, though, it’s possible to pick up a softer sound — the quiet babbling of the little green man the internet has dubbed Baby Yoda, whose immense popularity is directly tied to the fact that, by contrast, he’s completely harmless.
Known officially as The Child, fans quickly gave the character — who first appeared in the Disney-created Star Wars spinoff TV show The Mandalorian in November 2019 — a more prosaic name. Sought after by the remaining powers of the once-mighty Empire, who seek to destroy him, Baby Yoda is picked up by a bounty hunter who takes him under his wing. At once defenseless and imbued with mystical powers, Baby Yoda’s giant eyes and enormous ears — not to mention his manner of babbling and toddling — quickly made him a viral phenomenon. Even Disney CEO Bob Iger, named businessman of 2019 by TIME magazine, was taken by his baby-like qualities: “As soon as those ears popped up from under the blanket, and the eyes, I knew.” At ludicrous speed, Baby Yoda memes began to take over the internet, to the point where Disney even issued takedown notices for Baby Yoda GIFs. After a fan outcry, however, the GIFs were back in full force.
Since his pop culture debut, Baby Yoda has come to stand for a being of pure innocence and sincerity, like an actual balm rubbed on the soul of the apocalypse and the cynicism inherent to the twitterverse. He’s a messianic figure, at once savior and innocent child, but one who’s also proved useful in online communities made up of parents, BDSM practitioners and stoners, among others, allowing them to express themselves. As a symbol of naivete overwhelmed by an incomprehensibly complex world, he is a being of total vulnerability. He expresses both the powerlessness so many people feel before the steady drumbeat of political and environmental catastrophe, but also a creature that must be protected at all costs, one who incites us to express our own capacity for action: “I WOULD DIE FOR HIM,” someone writes online, and someone else responds “baby yoda is the only gender.” Then, as one: “WE MUST PROTECT BABY YODA AT ALL COSTS.”
In “Our Aesthetic Categories. Zany, Cute, Interesting,” professor and theorist Sianne Ngai analyzes the function of characters and products whose cuteness can be disarming, even paralyzing. In a 2015 interview about it with Australian radio host David Rutledge, she said that the experience of cuteness is ineluctably tied to power relations; that cuteness has a dark side, too. “It’s really important that things that we find cute are more powerless than we are,” she explains: “Things tend to be cuter when they’re passive, when they’re injured.”
In an era of unabashed fascism, of the reign of border police, of deportations and the criminalization of migrants, Baby Yoda toddles towards our watchful eyes, as if to absolve us of our relationship to the alien. It’s no coincidence that that’s the same word used by American governmental organizations to dehumanize those not considered citizens. Baby Yoda represents a pacified relationship to an utterly toothless otherness. It’s a fantasy that we crave because, whether we consent to it or not, we’re complicit in systems of power that function to crush those more vulnerable. The excitement Baby Yoda has generated, then, is a symptom of our collective relationship to otherness: what is alien is only acceptable, assimilable and consumable when it’s injured, defenseless, and, most importantly, mute.
If the foundation of cuteness rests on a power imbalance between subject and object, it must then also be the locus of a great power. According to Ngai, cuteness is culturally and commercially omnipresent, to the point where it’s comparable in scale to the power of the Empire itself — the Disney empire, that is. The power relations implicated in cuteness, as in its commercial role, are all the more insidious for the fact that they’re covered over by an illusion of authenticity. As theorist and author Lauren Michele Jackson explains, the power of cuteness is also due to the fact that “cute commodities let us pretend we have an uncomplicated relationship to something we’ve been sold.”
Cuteness engenders virality when it comes to online phenomena, and, in the case of Baby Yoda, the ubiquity of his cuteness is inextricable from the reality of merchandising, in the service of a company it’s difficult to pretend is non-violent. In fact, Disney is a company infamous for several different kinds of violence: rampant employee exploitation, dystopian biometric security systems, improper storage of toxic waste, environmental destruction (notably on Great Guana Cay island); the list goes on. Just as importantly, however, Disney represents a sort of symbolic violence: an imperialism of the imagination whose reach grows and grows, not only through the unceasing broadcast of sexist and racist stereotypes, but also through the purchase of cultural giants like Lucasfilm (in 2012) and, more recently, 21st Century Fox (in 2017). When it comes to the conquest — both symbolic and economic — of our collective imagination, then, Baby Yoda is just one of the weapons in Disney’s massive arsenal. (Jackson, again: “It is not capitalism that sustains Baby Yoda; it is Baby Yoda who permits capitalism to persist.”)
According to Ngai, cuteness provokes what she calls “non-cathartic” reactions, making it a phenomenon primed to generate a politically and ideologically ambiguous climate. We could, for instance, see in Baby Yoda’s popularity a form of reconciliation, of resolution, of dismantling. During a much-shared red carpet interview, actress Elisabeth Moss said, “I feel like Baby Yoda has united the country in a way that is very necessary.” (Below the video on YouTube, comments like “Baby Yoda for president” proliferate.) This conciliatory aspect also manifests itself when it comes to the gulf between high and low art — legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog, an actor on The Mandalorian, admitted during an interview promoting the show that seeing the Baby Yoda puppet on set for the first time was “heartbreakingly beautiful,” and that “it made you cry when you saw it.”
Baby Yoda fans are no saps, however. A recurring component of many Baby Yoda memes is a certain lucidity regarding the commercial — verging on propagandistic — aspect of the creature. The dissonance between Baby Yoda’s irresistible magnetism and the awareness that, in worshipping him, you’re participating, perhaps despite yourself, in the continued growth of the Disney empire represents a very contemporary irreconcilable paradox. From that perspective, Baby Yoda is the locus of an enormous, worldwide collective experience of oceanic feeling, where the tension of that irreconcilability is never quite resolved.
@elbirdilara: look i know this baby yoda is just another way to sell toys or whatever but i love him so much look at him being tiny with his wrinkles like whats he doin whats his purpose why is he so cute. 16/11/2019
@sloaneolsen: i hate disney and their growing monopoly on the entertainment industry and the obvious franchise cash grabs they keep releasing HOWEVER i take one look at baby yoda and i’m like…maybe capitalism is good. 1/12/2019
@g_mateo2: Mad because capitalism is evil and so is Disney but I think I would take a bullet for baby yoda 30/12/2019
One of the most fascinating aspects of Baby Yoda as a figure that allows us to square up the irreconcilability between a consciousness of the insidious workings of the Disney machine and the overwhelming experience of his genuine cuteness must be the relationship that many members of online indigenous communities have with Baby Yoda.
Indigenous Baby Yoda memes also reflect oceanic feeling, that is, an unresolved tension between the material and symbolic imperialism of Disney and the emancipation of First Nations and other indigenous communities. According to Dani Lanouette, an Anishinaabe woman, Baby Yoda resembles nothing so much as a child on a reserve. Online comments concur: “Baby Yoda is one of ours now,” “Baby Yoda is a child of the rez.” If the NDN Baby Yoda memes — NDN being a term used by many indigenous people to reappropriate and alter the word “Indian” — if these memes are the playful expression of an unresolvable tension, they’re also a means of inverting the power relations between the powerful Disney empire and the material precarity of so many indigenous communities. As @AsdzaniAmanda said on Twitter, “hi disney, nice try but bb yoda belongs to the rez now.”
The indigenous reappropriation of Baby Yoda doesn’t begin and end with pixels, either. Many representations of the character have been carried out using traditional indigenous techniques — in particular, with beading. This technique dates to pre-Columbian times for many indigenous communities, who made beads out of shells and bones, among other materials; during the time of the continent’s earliest reserves, the tradition was kept alive with glass beads, since hunting and fishing, along with using their native languages, was banned in order to facilitate assimilation and cultural genocide. Thus, beading plays a crucial role in the relationship to indigenous survival and the transmission of ancestral knowledge in a genocidal context.
The use of traditional indigenous techniques to pay homage to Baby Yoda evokes, yet again, that oceanic feeling: Here, cuteness functions as a means to explore, with humour and wit, a relationship to the tension between two contradictory elements (in this case, Disney, poster corporation for American imperialism, on the one hand, and on the other, the long-awaited emancipation of indigenous people). Baby Yoda’s cuteness provokes an oceanic feeling that can also create what Wang calls “communist affect,” an affect that can give rise to a complete destabilization of the social order: “Given that the oceanic has the potential to unsettle subjectivity, I argue that the oceanic can be a point of departure for new socialities and political models that do not rely on discrete selves.” The mixture of infatuation and clear-headedness that characterizes the collective reaction to Baby Yoda testifies to a singular relationship to the hidden violence of capitalism and hegemonies, forces that impact the economy as much as they do our collective imagination.
The beaded versions of Baby Yoda call back to the cultural cannibalism that Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade was calling for in 1928 in his Anthropophagic Manifesto: for colonized people to incorporate the oppressor’s culture into their own, thereby inverting the hegemonic (and “civilizing”) relationship of colonial appropriation. Outside of online indigenous communities, however, it’s possible to see a much more literal relationship to the idea of ingesting artifacts from a dominant colonial culture. Far removed from the absolution that the poetics of ruins and the spectacle of Godzilla’s destruction might engender, the Baby Yoda experience ends not with a resolution but with a troubling paroxysm: the impact of the sheer power of Baby Yoda’s cuteness, for many people, is an aggressive reaction. They want to destroy him, to hit him, and, oddly enough, to drink him. Near the end of 2019, it was easy to find some variation of the phrase “i want to put baby yoda in a blender” online, alongside de-contextualized videos of people drinking, often loudly, a thick, green liquid.
@nozomiweaver: dead fucking serious when i say if i have to see baby yoda one more goddamn time i’m gonna lose it fuck that ugly ass thing i’m gonna put him in a blender (2/1/2020)
@lukeorsomethin: I wanna grab baby yoda, shove him in a blender, and drink him like a fortnite chug jug. (3/12/2019)
In a 2015 study, researchers at Yale described a reaction they called “cute aggression,” which occurs when the brain is overwhelmed by strong positive emotions. A person in this state might, when faced with a cute creature, want to squeeze, bite, or hit the thing. According to the study, this aggressive impulse might function as a check against debilitating emotions caused by this cuteness. Reducing our relationship to cuteness to a biological function ultimately denies its political ramifications and the power relations that it implicates, however. As Jackson writes, “These contradictions — adoration to the point of murder — are the toxic runoff of our relations to what we buy and what we’re sold. What feels primordial is actually capital.”
Our most intuitive and intimate desires and our relationship to consumption are profoundly inscribed by violences: social, economic and symbolic ones to which we are all exposed. Baby Yoda might just be one more nuclear test, hitting us in depths, like the call to a revolt at once impossible and monstrous.
This essay first appeared in French as “Il faut manger Baby Yoda” in the magazine Tristesse numéro 5, hiver 2020–21. English translation © Alex Manley, 2021.
