Instead of watching a childhood classic for the billionth time or checking out a show in one of Disney’s large blockbuster franchises, I decided to take a peak around the digital library for something new.
After all, with the second price hike in one year coming, I’m not sure how much longer I’ll have Disney+. So, I dedicated this time to trying lesser-known shows and movies. Here, I stumbled upon National Geographic’s miniseries A Small Light. The biographical drama follows the radicalization and bravery of Miep and Jan Gies during WW2. The Gies helped hide and rescue many Jewish people during the German invasion and occupation of the Netherlands. These families includes Anne Frank’s, the van Pels, and others.
By centering the Gies, this show has the trappings of a very common trope of Holocaust media. That is, making the white savior film centering “Righteous Gentiles.” These are stories that center non-Jewish heroes (both real and complicated) who aided Jewish people during the Holocaust. While not always inherently bad, it’s a trope that has continued to allow movie goers to think antisemitism and Nazism are bygone beliefs—also, that most people would stand up and do the right thing in the face of genocide.
While A Small Light definitely centers two non-Jewish heroes, I don’t have cultural authority or the expertise to make the call whether this was problematic or not. However, what I can say is that the show does something rare in media against the backdrop of fascism. It shows the mundanity of this ideology creeping and the various ways people come to terms with it. A Small Light isn’t the only Disney+ show to do this. Another political spy thriller does something similar in a galaxy far, far away.
Setting the emotional start
The first season of Andor released fall of 2022 and tackled a lot of issues like the prison industrial complex (neo slavery), wartime capitalism, imperialism, and genocide. The Mary Sue’s Rachel Leishman—who covered this show before the rest of us realized its brilliance—touched on this. Additionally, Jesse Earl (Jesse Gender), Sage Hyden (Just Write), and Damien Walter crafted excellent video essays on these topics.
While important and related, I also think it’s interesting to explore how Andor and A Small Light show people processing the power structures and making the choice to fight back. In doing this, I’ll refer to real people (in A Small Light) as characters sparingly for clarity and to talk about narrative. Please remember the Gies and others in that story were real people, even if NatGeo dramatized elements for TV.
**Spoilers ahead for Andor and A Small Light.**
In both shows, we have leading characters slowly realizing it’s impossible to exist outside of politics. They slowly come to understand that to remain apolitical in the face of growing authoritarian violence is complicity. They take different, illegal routes to fight fascism, and that’s in part because both stories are based in real history.
Both Cassian and Miep Gies were removed from their families and sent to new places at a very formative age. Gies’ family sends the Austrian child to the Netherlands due to WW1-caused food shortages. Born indigenous on Kenari (a planet heavily mined for resources by the Empire), Cassian is separated from his community adopted by scavengers who raise him on Ferrix. Both Gies and Cassian have been forced to adapt quickly, learning new languages and new customs. While both have grown up in a loving family, the violence of imperialism and colonialism has remained a part of Cassian’s life.
The person in Act 1
On Cassian’s new home of Ferrix—another planet ravaged by an occupying military and developed for resource extraction—he never left the violence of colonialism. This includes witnessing the public hanging of his adoptive father. Then came prison after Cassian lashed out in grief. These moments shaped his life, leading him to work as a smuggler and part of the criminal underclass. This understandably made Cassian a pessimistic person. While loved, he had a hard life growing up and through adulthood. Andor’s setting is more reflection of life from an empire’s colony.
However, with Gies growing up in Europe (instead of one of its colonies) and adopted into a large, fairly well-off family that could afford to take in more children, she grew to see people as fundamentally good. These beginnings shape how they each respond encroaching fascism. That perspective also indicates how much convincing it takes for Gies and Cassian to be active in the fight. They eventually both come to that moment when they realize they can’t exist outside of politics.
When their participation in resistance goes from slightly passive to active, they begin to feel the weight of each moment become heavier. They get a clearer picture of stakes and scale beyond individual interactions. Every time the Gies help anyone, they must consider how that might put the families they’re harboring at risk. Even in helping the Franks and van Pels, the Gies consider their own lives in a world that’s much colder than they initially expected pre-occupation.
Until the death of Cassian’s adoptive mother Maarva and the capture of Bix, he’s steeled with indifference by the suffering. With no hope, Cassian thinks he has nothing to live or die for—that is, until one person does actually die and another comes close.
Absence of evil characters
Just as these two protagonists are fleshed out and wholly made human, so are the villains. These shows (especially Andor, because it’s fiction) don’t just make mustache twirlers willing to commit unspeakable acts and lackeys “just following orders.” For the most part, all soldiers are people also weighing out their choices. The people performing incredibly brave and perilous actions are just as average as those committing unspeakable acts. They are human, too, even if we may call them monsters or invoke “evil” to avoid confronting the circumstances that led to their decisions.
In Andor, the audience follows the characters Deedra Meero and Syril Karn. Their motivations aren’t bloodlust, but common feelings of jealousy, ambition, revenge, and more. The consequences unfold as we watch the exploitation of Cassian’s home and others. Emily Kavanagh put it best when she wrote in Collider article about what’s worse than the Sith in Star Wars:
The Empire is not just made up of villains who shoot lightning from their fingertips, it’s the countless officers that maintain their power, and the callous systems that will maintain their shape through the continued subjugation and oppression of the countless people it presides over. These more mundane acts of oppression and tyranny create unease through their clear parallels to structures existing in our own world. This is not an organization full of a few powerful individuals committing massive atrocities but rather interlocking systems of bureaucracy that will maintain the status quo at any cost.
In A Small Light, obviously the Nazis are the bad guys, and we understand that—even more so because Amsterdam is under occupation. However, the lines for Miep Gies blurred momentarily when she notices her best friend, Tess, in the company of Nazis. Gies sees Tess as unaware, but it seems that Tess is meant to represent a common reaction: willfully looking the other way. In both shows, we see normal people complying with fascism and their reasons for doing so. It’s almost always from a place of fear and insecurity.
The power to overcome it lies with everyone making a choice
Both Disney+ programs remind us the part that everyone plays in fighting fascism, too. The Gies and Cassian are nobodies. Cassian is a good smuggler, but not a Jedi or someone in power even in his own community. The Gies work as a social worker and a secretary. Neither story shows the authoritarian structure completely crumble over one act or thanks to an organized army. It’s chipped away at by ordinary people realizing the power they hold. In A Small Light, this realization comes to Miep in conversations with Otto, but also with her husband Jan.
The title of the show comes from a Miep Gies quote mirroring this sentiment:
“I don’t like being called a hero because no one should ever think you have to be special to help others. Even an ordinary secretary, housewife, or teenager can turn on a small light in a dark room.”
Miep Gies
In Andor we see this with Cassian’s mother, his neighbors, the various personalities from the Aldhani heist (especially Karis Nemik), and the prisoners on Narkina 5. As a work of complete fiction (inspired by world history), Andor had the opportunity to give one good “stand up” speech. However, they decided to do many from various perspectives of people who all have different motives.
Three great ones come to mind from very flawed people: Kino Loy’s monologue about freedom during the prison break, Luther Rael’s monologue about sacrifice to an extorted a double agent, and more relevant to the topic of political awakenings and radicalization against fascism, Maarva’s pre-recorded monologue about solidarity that played during her funeral.
But I fear for you. We’ve been sleeping. We’ve had each other, and Ferrix, our work, our days. We had each other and they left us alone. We kept the trade lane open, and they left us alone. We took their money and ignored them, we kept their engine churning, and the moment they pulled away. we forgot them— … because we had each other. We had Ferrix. But we were sleeping. I’ve been sleeping. And I’ve been turning away from the truth I wanted not to face.
There is a wound that won’t heal at the center of the galaxy. There is a darkness reaching like rust into everything around us. We let it grow, and now it’s here. It’s here and it’s not visiting anymore. It wants to stay.
The Empire is a disease that thrives in darkness. It is never more alive than when we asleep. It’s easy for the dead to tell you to fight, and maybe it’s true, maybe fighting is useless. Perhaps it’s too late. But I’ll tell you this, if I could do it again, I’d wake up early and be fighting those bastards from the start! Fight the Empire!
Officers cut this message short after kicking over the projector. This sparked a full riot from the community of Ferrix. After being told to essentially “stay woke,” workers raged against the machine. It couldn’t be any more clear. These people became radicalized.
A miseducation in fascism
I don’t throw around “radicalization” lightly or derogatorily. As seen in the series and many historical records, the choice to aid Jewish people in hiding or escaping was not popular nor common. To act was to be extreme. While the Netherlands did have protests and resistance, an estimated 75% of the Dutch Jewish population died from 1940-1945. Leaders fled and many people simply ignored what happened to their neighbors. To this day, the ambivalence or outright hostility towards Holocaust survivors remains an issue in the Netherlands and abroad.
A growing number of young people don’t believe the basic facts about the Holocaust, or anything about the Netherlands’ involvement. Latest polling suggests American students knowing more about some basic facts of the Holocaust than students in the Netherlands even though the country had four concentration camps in its borders. This is very alarming given how American students stand at a disadvantage overall due to privatization and slow-defunding of public education post-Brown v. Board of Education.
Many Americans leave high school, and in some cases college, with the idea that Americans in the 1940s weren’t aware of these camps. We also graduate unaware of that our concentration camps for Japanese Americans (“internment” was a euphemism adopted much later) took place simultaneously.
What does all this have to do with Star Wars and a Nat Geo dramatization of Mies’ story? That general perspective even with the benefit of hindsight purposely dissolves the impact of fascism. It’s not far off from the way we narrowly view genocide only through the context of the Holocaust while leaving out the millions Congolese murdered by the Belguims at the turn of the 20th century. Or the many genocides since and currently.
(featured image: Disney+)
