What Lucas got wrong; or, maybe the Jedi weren't all they were cracked up to be

[pat]

I am going to do something I told myself I would not do: write a serious post about Revenge of the Sith, and about the Star Wars universe in general. As kwalton said once, they're only movies. But they have some interesting messages in them, and the lack of critical thought with which some people -- especially teenagers -- seem to accept to underlying precepts bothers me a bit. Although I have to confess that, while I saw Phantom Menace several times (and IV, V, and VI more than I can count), I have seen the other two of the first three only once. (I intend to see Sith again -- Attack of the Clones I found next to unwatchable.)

(Part of this arose from a discussion with my son, who at fourteen is a more nuanced thinker than I was at twenty. He scares me a bit, but that's another story.)

There appear to me to be two basic messages: there is good and there is bad, and which is which is obvious if only you have all the information; and that denying that which makes us human gives us strength.

The first is a dangerous thought: it creates monsters. Not all injustice is a result of hunger for power: it is also a result of a firm belief in your own righteousness. Much political discord at a personal level in this country is a result of such thinking. Most conservatives I know are not evil people seeking power; they are people who honestly believe that what they are doing is the right thing. Substitute "pro-life" for "pro-democracy" in the Jedi ethos and you get Operation Rescue. The Jedi may be willing to die for democracy, but they are equally willing to spy and kill for it. They may exercise a more benevolent form of realpolitik than the Sith, but it is a form of realpolitik nonetheless. This is not to say that they are equally evil to the Sith: as pecunium said in a recent post, intentions matter. That you intend good matters a great deal -- but it is not all that matters. The ends do not in and of themselves justify the means.

Which brings us to the second point. One of the most gruesome and evil acts committed by Anakin Skywalker in Sith (which fortunately takes place offscreen) is the murder of the "younglings." It is a scene designated to outrage the most hardened viewer -- what is worse than the murder of children?

Yet, it is troubling that the children were in the temple in the first place. As I can gather from the movies the Jedi removed potential recruits from their families so that they could grow up in a monastic environment devoid of fear. It is an idea old as the hills: there is a Jesuit maxim "Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man." From an early age, Jedi are taught to deny basic elements of their humanity: Jedi must not fear, Jedi must not love.

Which is fine for a fairy tale. The problem is, you cannot teach children in a vacuum. You do not teach courage -- moral or otherwise --- by denying fear. You teach courage by showing how to embrace fear: not by saying "you must not fear" but by saying "yes, you are afraid --- everyone is afraid - but do not let the fear keep you from what you need to do." You do not teach love for mankind by denying love for the individual. You do not teach compassion by denying loss: you teach compassion by pointing out that the losses of self and extrapolating to an understanding of the losses of others.

You do not face a nine-year-old boy and say -- "you are unacceptable because you love and you fear." You face the nine-year-old boy and say "you feel fear, you feel loss, you are special because you are in a better position than most to recognize and care for the fears and losses of others."

Passion for social justice arises from a deep and profound sense of connectedness with others, which often results in anger -- or even rage -- on their behalf. A commitment to democracy formed absent that is a pale and bloodless thing. You do not live a good life by denying "the dark side": you do so by embracing and recognizing it and calling it for your own -- and not letting it rule your actions.

I would not wish to live a life under the Sith. But I am not convinced I would want to live under the Jedi either: an oligarchy, however benevolent, is nonetheless an oligarchy.

Comments

[klwalton.livejournal.com]

I love this, using the movies as a jumping off point for talking about the things you talk about above.

If I weren't in the middle of packing and settling things here prior to traveling tomorrow, I'd talk about the merits of calling something Art as it stands, or whether these films qualify as Art because of the way it stimulates this kind of thought (or if they qualify as Art at all :)). But I am packing and completely distracted and feeling totally unable to articulate this in a thoughtful manner.

My comment about them being only movies really was aimed at the people who take deconstruction to unheard-of heights and who angst about minutiae. There are levels, and then there are *levels*.

I would not wish to live a life under the Sith. But I am not convinced I would want to live under the Jedi either: an oligarchy, however benevolent, is nonetheless an oligarchy.

I heartily agree.

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

I'd talk about the merits of calling something Art as it stands, or whether these films qualify as Art because of the way it stimulates this kind of thought (or if they qualify as Art at all :)).

A few years ago, A Beautiful Mind won the Best Picture Oscar over Moulin Rouge. I maintained -- still do -- that Moulin Rouge was the better movie in an Art sense, but that Beautiful Mind was the more *important* movie, because it gave people a jumping off point and a vocabulary for discussing mental illness. I think this is why the criteria for inclusion on the National Film registry are not merely artistic: they also recognize "cultural importance." I also think that "importance" and "art" while not mutually exclusive are not coupled: a few movies manage to achieve both of them -- most notably Schindler's List -- but it's rarer than one might think.

[firecat]

I actually think if you read between the lines, the message is NOT that there is good and there is bad and the ends justify the means. Especially in this movie, everybody behaves appallingly, not just the sith. The Jedi organization is terribly weak and misguided, and Yoda despite his personal power is the perpetrator of the weakness because he doesn't understand that beings less than 900 years old can't necessarily simply give up all emotions and attachments.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I think (and I've not seen the movie) Lucas is suffering from a number of cultural gaps, all stemming from his need for cheap props in the first movie (i.e. IV).

He needed swords. He chose shinai (at the time they were $10 a pop, and unlike aluminum needed nothing else. No design time, and no breakage. I've had some shinai for more than adecade of steady use). He got a whole lot of mileage out of both the swordplay shinai allows (Japanese swordplay is very visual) and out of the psuedo-zen he got from Yoda's speech patterns.

Which led to making the Jedi not just mystics (a la Obi-wan Kenobi and the reclusive Yoda) but masters of a Way.

Zen had/has a number of men like Obi-wan Kenobi and Yoda. The singular mystic who take on the single disciple and teaches him, "The Way". Dennis Schmidt explored this in a four volume story (of which I just discovered there is a fourth), back in the late seventies, Wayfarer, Kensho, Satori,and The Wanderer.

Oddly enough the issue you raise is precisely the one Shcmidt address in the first. The planet is plagued with a species of emotional leech. It feeds on powerful feelings and causes feedback loops, which lead to senseless killing.

People are taught to supress and repress all emotion (a twisted from of the state of mu-shin, or "no mind". This is not all it's cracked up to be.

Why? Because the desires of the flesh are not avoidable, and trying to supress them leads to internal strife. I don't want to spoil the plot, and I'm distracting from my point, so I'll put off further comment on the series for now.

Lucas took the same idea, and has the same problems (without the motivations which caused the problem on Kensho). That sort of teaching can't be properly begun until one is adult. THe Jedi ought not be selecting from children (a la the Tibetan strain of Buddhism) but rather culling those who want to be Jedi, as zen masters do today.

Anyone who wants can pick up zen (a strange philosophy, brilliant, when it works; capable of hideous rationalizations of horrible behaviour when it doesn't) but without a certain mental bent, and some serious introspection one cannot attain the letting go which is satori.

If one accepts some difficult presumptions (that having attained satori the master will do no harm) one can accept such a militant order. But, one must never let such an order have the levers of power, because they will ossify.

Knights errant, must be itinerant, ere they shall become knights arrant.

TK

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Oops, I forgot (I went looking) that I'd read all four. The last is a trifle weak.

Each of the stories is complete, on it's own, but the build on each other, so without the previous, the latter are a bit confusing.

TK

[frankenboob.livejournal.com]

Do you have any of the films on dvd or tape?