Star Wars on Trial

by David Brin

  The first is clearly driven by script considerations. Yoda and ObiWan are forced by the script into the awkward posture of having to explain, in Return of the Jedi, why no one told Luke in the first movie who his dad was. Well, Obi-Wan did not know who his dad was back in the first movie because George Lucas had not made it up yet. Originally, Anakin Skywalker was a Jedi Knight, a cunning warrior and ace pilot killed by the evil Lord Vader during the Clone Wars. Later, in The Empire Strikes Back, this past is amended to the much more interesting (and, yes, even brilliant) idea of making Vader Luke's father.

  The absurdity of crabby Uncle Owen complaining about his nephew having too much of his brother in him, when that brother is Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith, is not mentioned. As if Sam Gamgee the gardener turned out to be the cousin of Sauron the Great. ("Aye, Mister Frodo, my cousin has a big place down south aways, but he don't tend it right like I do my potater patch here.")

  But now Luke demands why Obi-Wan didn't tell him, and ObiWan has to make some lame excuse. But it is not Obi-Wan's fault. The Way Cool idea that Luke is Vader's long lost son has to be retrofitted in.

  Likewise for the scene when Princess Leia gives Luke a big smooch to make Han Solo jealous. At that time, she was not Luke's sister. The idea that she is, invented later, is backfilled, and so the scene which was originally quite cute is now in hindsight quite gross. Maybe George Lucas will computer-edit future rereleases of the film, so that in this scene Leia has the features of Hayden Christensen, and Han will shoot first before she kisses him.

  Let us turn to the ethics of the Jedi Code itself.

  What is the Code? In The Empire Strikes Back, we find out from the frog Muppet Yoda that the dark side involves anger, fear and ag gression. It is faster and easier than the light side, but not necessarily stronger. Don't give in to the dark side or forever will it dominate your destiny!

  Still later, in The Phantom Menace, the Muppet has been replaced by CGI, and clarifies the previous words of wisdom: Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. This is all about as profound as saying "Mean people aren't nice."

  But the idea that Fear is the only source of Evil is the only theme that runs consistently through all six films.

  Even in The Phantom Menace, the only reason to doubt that Anakin should be trained is that Yoda "senses much fear in him." Had Yoda sensed that Anakin, as an ex-slave, was burning with the desire to strangle Watto, his ex-owner, with psychokinesis, and kill the Jedi who left his beloved mother in her slave-chains back on the Sand Planet, this would have made sense. (It would also have been interesting.)

  But Yoda's misgivings, such as they are, have no support. At no point does young Anakin display even a twinge of fear, neither in a Ben-Hur-style chariot race, nor while blowing up enemy starships during combat. Since I know boys his age afraid of the school bus or the neighbor's dog, kids who have never been under fire in combat, to me it looks like the fatherless moppet suffers from psychotic recklessness, not cowardice.

  Had the little boy destroyed the space station while laughing with maniac bloodlust, shooting paratroopers as they bailed out, and picking off women and children in the mess hall, shooting down hospital ships and giggling while the nurses died of lingering radiation burns, this might have served as a hint of the dark side to come, and Yoda could have said he sensed "much aggression" in him. (It would have also been interesting.)

  But no. The plot requires that Yoda express misgivings to foreshadow the corruption and downfall of Anakin, and since fear and hate are the emotions condemned in the sketchy Star Wars ethic as bad, fear must be attributed to little Anakin whether this makes sense or not.

  If taken literally, the injunction to avoid bad emotion means that even One Moment of Bad Emotion would instantly turn one into a loyal minion of the dark side. This idea is so dumb that no one could take it seriously.

  But this is exactly the idea that governs the Star Wars universe. Both the attempted seduction of Luke and the successful seduction of Anakin to the dark side are provoked and culminated by One Moment of Bad Emotion.

  The Evil Emperor in Return of the Jedi attempts to seduce Luke to the dark side by the simple expedient of taunting him. If Luke kills the Emperor in anger, you see, forever will the dark side dominate his destiny! The fact that countless millions of worlds would be free of tyranny is held to be of no account here. And killing the Emperor in a moment of icy calmness does not, for some reason, seem to be in the cards either.

  If the Dark Emperor makes Luke angry, even for one instant, then Luke is immediately transmogrified to the cause of Badness, and presumably loyal to the Emperor. Ergo Luke gets taunted by the Emperor. The Emperor is trying to piss him off. To show he is not getting angry, Luke tosses his weapon aside, so that he can be martyred, or something, I guess. The whole moral calculation involved here is not clear to me.

  Darth Vader is overcome by pity for his long-lost son (or maybe noticing that the withered old freak was trying to get the boy to kill him) and so Vader throws the head of the imperial government down one of those electrified pits Evil Villains leave lying open in their throne rooms, and into an atomic reactor. For some reason, the Emperor cannot save himself with his immense psychokinetic superpowers from a fall down a shaft. The Emperor is short-circuited or something. He dies.

  So the moral of the story is that good guys cannot be morally allowed to kill bad guys, except when they can. Or something.

  But in any case, a single moment of anger will turn you Evil.

  FATE: NO MAN ESCAPES HIS SCRIPT

  Now, before you scoff, I must point out that in Revenge of the Sith, this is exactly what happens to young Anakin Skywalker. He wants to save his wife, whom he foresees will die in childbirth. The Evil Emperor has promised him the secret of resurrection of the dead (way cool!) if Anakin joins the dark side.

  Now, I know what you are thinking, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Earlier I argued that the prophetic powers in Star Wars serve no plot function, and are merely present for atmosphere. But that is not the case here. Here, the vision of Padme's death in childbirth is indeed like seeing the ghost of Hamlet's father, and is not here just for atmosphere, or foreshadowing, or like the Bat-Signal: it is the main driver of the plot. The vision produces fear that drives Anakin to his treason and his downfall.

  It is a plot point: in fact, it is the main plot point. It honestly has something of the stature of a real Greek tragedy. The husband's attempts to save his wife are what drive him into madness and evil, which in turn drives the wife into such deep despair that she gives up the will to live and perishes on the operating table. His own acts, trying to avoid fate, bring his fate upon him.

  The moral of this Greek pessimism is that knowing the future does no one any good: it merely tells you enough to torture you with fear and doubt until your own actions bring about what you most fear. Perfect passivity and renunciation of all emotional attachment would be the only logical response to such a universe. That would and should be the moral point of the story, if the story were making a moral point.

  It does appear that the story is making exactly this moral point and no other. When a tormented Anakin comes seeking comfort for his fearful vision, Yoda intones in his Frank Oz voice: "Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Mourn them do not. Miss them do not. Attachment leads to jealously. The shadow of greed, that is." This is the only explicit statement of the Jedi Code in all six movies: it is a doctrine of utter renunciation and detachment.

  But appearances can be deceptive, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Your eyes can deceive you. Don't trust them. What looks like a moral point is actually one more case of something being forced by plot requirements.

  The plot requirements in the Anakin trilogy are different from those in the Luke trilogy. In the second trilogy, Anakin himself is the wizard-helper and the main character. Like in all wizard stories, he has to delve too deep into the Things Man Was Not Meant To K
now and get corrupted. In this case, his curiosity drives him to delve into the ultimate mystery of all human life: he wants to know how to turn aside Fate and Death, and save his wife from the Grim Reaper.

  The plot requires this ambition to be portrayed as immoral or irreligious. So a moral code utterly irrelevant to anything else in the plot or story has to be cobbled together to condemn this ambition.

  Given the thin and sketchy nature of the Force religion, a sort of pseudo-Buddhism is about the best any writer could come up with to say why meddling with What Is Meant To Be is a bad idea. You should not discover the "unnatural" means used by the Sith to resurrect the dead because, well, being in love is too much like jealousy. Attachment to loved ones is bad, for some reason.

  Of course, if the Sith had come up with a safe method of performing a cesarean section, the moral conundrum would lack the overtones of Anakin's making a devil's bargain to save his wife's life.

  So letting the beautiful young bride die in childbirth has to be "a natural part of life" and wanting one's wife to live (what ordinary people call "love, honor and cherish") has to be cast in terms of "the shadow of greed."

  But perfect passivity is not really the moral point of the tale. The point, the one hammered home, is that Fear and Anger and Aggression are Bad Things, and One Moment of Bad Emotion Turns You Bad.

  So all this prophecy and angst and Anakin whining is all set up for when, in a moment of fear and anger, Anakin strikes down Mace Windu from behind. (We all know this scene is pure fantasy, because really, Samuel L. Jackson can kick anyone's ass. I mean, really.)

  Now, the motives of young Anakin have been established: he is half-maddened by understandable human fears for his lovely young bride, and fears she will die. He is a good guy, a little whiny, but basically good ... until the One Moment of Fear and Anger. It is like getting bit by the Werewolf. One bite and you're a monster. No shades of gray here: suddenly Anakin is as evil as evil can be.

  Not five minutes after his Moment of Bad Emotion, Anakin, now crazy as a bedbug and his eyes glowing wolf-yellow, is slaughtering groups of waif-eyed little muffins known, for some dumb reason, in the Star Wars universe, as younglings. Then Anakin is strangling and beating his young bride, the one for whom he sacrificed his honor and his position, and blithering on about ruling the universe.

  Why does he kill children, strangle his wife and want suddenly to rule the universe? Why does this have nothing, nothing at all, nothing at all in the slightest way remotely related, to do with his previously established motivation? Because he had One Moment of Bad Emotion, and gave in to the dark side, and forever it will dominate his destiny.

  Let us pause for a deep breath to appreciate the utter and perfect shallowness of this idea. Out of all the moral complexity of human experience, of bad guys doing good things for bad reasons, good guys doing bad things for good reasons, guys who are partly bad and partly good doing things for mixed reasons, we get this: mad is bad. One second of anger or fear, and you are lost, that's it, game over.

  SALVATION: THE BLOOD OF VENGEANCE WASHES SIN AWAY

  Ah, but a second murder can utterly wipe out the stain of sin! In Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader is redeemed (I guess) when he suffers One Moment of Love and Pity for his son, who is being tortured to death before his eyes by electrical shocks. He kills the Emperor, and then for some reason not clear to me, croaks out a last word of affection and immediately dies. Later shows up as a blue ghost to show that the Force forgave him. Or something.

  Because killing the Emperor in a moment of anger is okay, if it is an act of treason, but not if it is an act of war.

  I am sure all the murdered folk on the planet Alderaan are happy in the afterlife now because Darth and his boy had a moment of father-son bonding. Or something.

  MIRACLES: THOSE PESKY MIDICHLORIANS

  I should mention that the only other fact known about the Force is that that midichlorian bodies in the bloodstream give an accurate and scientific reading on how powerful a student will be.

  The midichlorians can also create a fertile baby out of nothing when Fate determines the need to restore balance to the Force. This is the account of the mechanism by which miracles occur in the Star Wars universe.

  Once again, this is not a religious or ethical idea, or even a science fiction idea. This is driven by the plot.

  The plot required that Qui-Gon have a means to confirm that young Anakin was Destined To Be Big Stuff, and so the plot required that Qui-Gon have a Destined To Be Big Stuff detector. The Big Stuff detector needs something to detect, and ergo there needed to be Stuff.

  Ergo the destiny-meter, which detects whether you have a significant amount of Force-Flowing-Through-You microbes in your bloodstream. The midichlorians flow through you literally along with your white blood cells. The scene was only a few lines long, and so the explanation had to be short.

  The fatherless birth of Anakin was one of the clumsiest bits of Star Wars lore ever. There are other myths where, for example, Juno gives virgin birth to Vulcan, but only one religion in the modern occidental countries in the world where the Virgin Mother makes an appearance. The child she bears is not the Evil Magic Ninja Boy.

  But once again, the fact that Anakin was conceived of the Holy Midichlorian, and Born of the Blessed Virgin Shmi, has no plot point and tells us nothing about the religion of the Force. It is here for atmosphere, to make Anakin seem to be Big Stuff.

  The prophecy that "The Chosen One Will Bring Balance To The Force" is the same kind of purely pointless atmospheric gesture. The prophecy turns out to be false, as best anyone can tell, but the writer was too lazy to give it that tragic ambiguity like the prophecy about Oedipus killing his father.

  What is meant by "balance" is never mentioned, or why we should want it, or who did the choosing, or what it all means. There is no plot point here. If the movies were edited and revised (yet again) by George Lucas at some future point, and all reference to the prophecy removed, no action by any characters would change or would need to change. There is simply no evidence that the Force was "out of balance" at the beginning of The Phantom Menace.

  Now, if that movie had started with the Jedi Council (perhaps because they involved themselves too much with the compromises and betrayals of politics) finding their control over the Force slipping away, their prognostication going dim, their way-cool psychokinesis powers getting all butterfingery, worrying about how to get their vanishing powers back, it would have made sense. If then the Jedi Council discovered this Anakin creature who had been created without a father in a lab by the Sith, and agreed, despite omens and warnings by Yoda that this would end badly, to train the Sith boy hoping his better nature could be reached, then this talk of the Force being "out of balance" would have made some sense (and it would have been interesting). The decision to train Anakin would have meant something; it would have been a moral decision with consequences: an act of arrogance and ambition on the part of the Jedi Council, which would have led directly to their downfall.

  LIFE AFTER DEATH: RETURN OF THE BLUE GHOST

  We saw earlier that Anakin's desire to save his wife had to drive him to the study of Things Man Was Not Meant To Know: the black magic of necromancy and of survival after death. We also saw earlier that having the wizard-helper of the child-hero showing up after death to whisper encouragement was Way Cool.

  There is a throwaway line in Revenge of the Sith where Yoda tells Obi-Wan to study the technique of surviving bodily death. Surviving bodily death is apparently a learned art, like the Flying Unicycle of Death Rotary Kick Technique. It is ninja-magic, not anything that is part of an ethical, mystical, metaphysical or religious structure.

  Yoda obviously knows the Technique, too. There is a scene in Return of the Jedi where he dies for no reason, lying down because he is tired, and then vanishing. More atmosphere. He had to be dead so he could not answer any follow-up questions, and croaking out a riddle as your dying words is very atmospheric. Now, he shows up as a blue ghost
later on because he has other lines to say. But there is no point to his dying and no point to his reappearing as an apparition, except that the script requires it.

  Apparently it is okay for Obi-Wan to study the death-surviving technique, so that he can return as a saint after martyrdom and make lame excuses to Luke over that whole fibbing-about-your-dad thing, but Anakin's desire to look into it is horrific and unnatural. This contradiction is never explained.

  Of course, Vader, once he redeems himself by killing the Emperor, is granted ghosthood, even though he has not studied this tech nique. No: the ghost of Anakin Skywalker appears after the death of Darth Vader so that Luke can smile in solemn happiness at his father, and not for any other purpose. It is there for atmosphere. The happy ending must be happy.

  And the Evil Emperor obviously does not know the technique, because he dies and stays dead. (Unless someone hits Lucas over the head with a bag of money and holds him at fanpoint until he makes a seventh movie. Palpatine could return as a blue ghost and possess the body of Leia's daughter St. Alia-of-the-Knife. That would be Way Cool.)

  Had the Emperor actually known necromancy, we could have seen the final, dramatic confrontation on the Volcano Planet between Anakin and Obi-Wan end in a fashion that made sense: Obi-Wan should have and would have killed Anakin, and stabbed him once or twice or fifty times to make sure he was dead, shouting out through his tears, "Younglings! You killed the younglings!" and leaving the corpse to rot. The Emperor would have arrived to take the burnt corpse and Brought Him Back To Life, with the help of the horrifying Doctor Doom-style mechanical suit to sustain the artificial mockery of unnatural vitality. Anakin's undead brain, swimming with midichlorians, could have been moving his mostly dead limbs through psychokinesis. That would have made the scenes in the first trilogy somewhat eerie and chilling in hindsight. It would have made sense. (And it would have been interesting.)