A Moment In The Suns

Remember that scene in Star Wars with the two suns sitting on the horizon?

Luke stands there, staring off into the distance, wanting something bigger than the life he’s stuck in. No explanation, no big speech, no obvious payoff. Just a nice shot and amazing music. It lingers long enough for you to feel it, which only works because someone, at multiple points along the way, decided not to cut it. I think about that more than I probably should, given that the stakes in my world are a lot less significant. Most days I’m just trying to get something halfway decent out the door before it gets sanded down into something forgettable.

Some of the rooms I’ve been in would cut that scene without blinking. I know this because I’ve watched it happen to smaller things. A line that had some actual texture to it, rewritten into something cleaner and emptier because someone felt uncertain. Like a joke that landed weird (only ones I know). Nothing dramatic. Just a quiet process of removing whatever made anyone uncomfortable enough to ask a question. In design it can be white space or a background pattern. In video, it’s a dramatic pause or something that has no immediate purpose.

There’s no villain in it. It’s just what “optimization” does to everything it touches. You walk in, read the room, and without noticing, start adjusting. You pre-edit your own instincts, not because they’re wrong, but because you already know how they’ll land, and you’d rather not spend the next ten minutes watching them get politely dismantled. So you shift a little, then a little more, and eventually the slightly more agreeable version of you becomes the one that shows up by default.

Which wouldn’t be so bad if it stopped there. But it changes what you offer at all. If a group rewards execution, you get very good at executing and quietly stop doing anything else. If it feels safe, you stop reaching for things that might miss. You don’t even notice it happening. The ideas are now about, you need to consider this, and we never do that. You just gradually become someone with a narrower idea of what’s possible, and you call it being realistic. The labeling makes it worse. In this kind of work, everyone gets filed into a role fast, and once you’re the visual person or the media person or whatever sticks first, it follows you. You end up playing into it whether it fits or not, working against a version of yourself that someone else locked in early, usually based on the first thing they needed from you.

I’ve cut those moments, too. Like a complete dumbass. I’ve over-explained things that were better left alone, chosen clarity over feeling because clarity is easier to defend.

Maybe it comes down to this: Good work knows what to include.

Great work is knowing when to hold back, when to leave something alone, when to let a moment exist without making it prove its value.

That’s the part that’s hardest to protect, because it’s also the part that’s hardest to justify to anyone who needs to feel certain about what’s being made. Those are the first things to go. For reasons that make total sense at the time.

The two suns just sit there. They don’t explain themselves. That’s the whole point.

Michael is the Creative Director and co-founder of FoxFuel Creative. He loves British music, vintage German cars, and American history, and his sarcasm knows no bounds. #DreamBig