‘Skeleton Crew’s suburban dystopia speaks to my millennial soul
*scream sings* HEY DAD LOOK AT ME
What was an Upper Middle Class planet with cul-de-sacs and lunch money doing in Star Wars? My initial disgust of the At-Attin suburbs on Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, founded on years of experience and emo/pop punk music, thankfully paid off.
The first trailer for Skeleton Crew on Disney+ put me off with the look of At Attin and its little boxes. When I was a kid, I watched Star Wars to escape a life like that–this didn’t feel right. It seemed so fake. Nothing is further from fantasy than a garage door. And wouldn’t we know about a planet that was relatively “normal” terrain-wise compared to the jungles of Kashyyyk, the sandy Tatooine, the Hoth snow, and Coruscant’s cityscape?
So I breathed the biggest sigh of relief when the clues that something was deeply wrong on At Attin started piling in on Skeleton Crew. This boring society where kids aspire to work 9-5 cubicle jobs was creepy and plastic for a reason.
At Attin is a metaphor for how the suburbs can be a drag.
A metaphor about as blatant as the first couple seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, mind you. When you’re a kid, teachers are boring like robots (or so I’m told). So the teachers on At Attin are literal robots droids. Kids don’t always understand the importance of their parents’ jobs. The grown-up’s jobs on At Attin literally had no point.
The mint was printing Old Republic credits for nobody. The all-powerful “supervisor” was just another machine. The people who live in the suburbs in Skeleton Crew have never seen the stars because of a cloudy barrier. It hid them from the galaxy and it hid the galaxy from them. (And FWIW, that’s the reason nobody knew the planet existed.) Unfortunately, thanks to air pollution, not being able to see the stars a pretty common suburban experience.
At Attin was not as sinister as I originally hoped. But this wasn’t a story about kids trying to get back to their innocent and ordinary neighborhood like I feared, either. They may have been safe, but they were unaware the political turmoil on the planets around them. Isolation is not always a good thing. The kids didn’t dream, save for a few outliers like Fern and Wim. They grew up ignorant. The adults couldn’t defend themselves against the pirates. Whether you life in the real world or a fictional galaxy, that’s dangerous!
Fern says something to her mother that’s going to stick with me for a while. She tells her mom that even the slimiest planets they visited had good people willing to help them. I’m going to have to keep myself from quoting this the next time someone from back home asks me if living in the city is “scary” – that would be too corny even for me. Skeleton isn’t idolizing the suburbs or condemning any other way of life. Even Wim’s BFF Neel, the biggest champion for the At Attin lifestyle at the beginning, changes his tune.
Skeleton Crew‘s take on suburban life is very millennial.
I understood what Luke Skywalker felt like when he looked at that binary sunset in Star Wars and longed to see the world. However, my adolescence looked a lot more like Wim and Fern’s. I didn’t grow up on a farm or a small town. My housing development had homes that were so similar that I could tell you which ones had the same floor plans as mine. (I could also tell you which one was a mirror image!)
It creates its own kind of existential unrest. There’s nothing to do except the same thing every day. Street smarts are something you read about in books. You’re taught how to pass a standardized test instead of how to think for yourself. And everyone buys into the idea that the tests will determine your entire future. Suburban sprawl is our version of feeling stuck on the farm. As millennials move out of the cities, this is more relevant than ever.
Sure, the “Amblin vibes” and references to 80s movies like The Goonies, Stand by Me, and ET: The Extra Terrestrial on Skeleton Crew are Gen X-coded. (Many millennials were young kids in the 80s when these movies were released but whatever, Gen X.) But true suburban despair belongs to millennials. Films from the 90s and 00s including Edward Scissorhands, American Beauty, Little Children, The Ice Storm, Donnie Darko, and even Hook prove that.
We may not all have been latchkey kids like Wim. But we grew to despise those little boxes just as much. We were the ones screaming our little hearts out to Simple Plan. (Fern and KB definitely would have gone to Warped Tour.)
At the end of Skeleton Crew, Wim looks at the departing X-Wings with an excited yearning in his eyes. That’s his binary sunset moment, right there. He’s not going to be to settle for suburban life on At Attin now. One adventure hooked him for life. We must hope that he doesn’t suffer the Star Wars version of millennial burnout.
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