“I Am Fluent in Six Million Forms of Communication”
In The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas implies that the world is mostly artificial, a world made up simply of interchangeable parts, a view reinforced by the constant tinkering and fixing of all the intergalactic gadgets used in space travel. Nature is depicted as little more than a nuisance, and technology is superior and necessary to repair the mess that nature continually finds itself in, whether it is a lost limb or repeated threats to the safety of the body and the potential extinction of life. This is in sharp contrast to Aristotle’s view of the relationship of art (which would include technology) and nature. While everything in both art and nature consists of form and matter, they do so in very different ways.
Aristotle emphasizes that nature works from within, while art and technology are produced from outside, whether in making a statue with limbs or prostheses to replace them. Art and technology fall outside of the order of nature and aren’t alive. Pygmalion, the ivory statue, which in Greek legend was brought to life by the goddess of Love, is only a story. In the real world, statues don’t live or love; only people do. And anyone who fell in love with a statue would be wasting both time and affection. Technology is not only lifeless; it depends on nature as the basis of both its forms and matter. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle uses the example of a bronze sphere to make this point: “the production is from bronze [matter] and sphere [form]—the form is imported [from outside the matter] into this stuff and the result is a bronze sphere.”144 In nature, form operates from within matter, as, for example, an acorn grows from within to become an oak tree. The difference is that between Sony’s mechanical dog and a real dog. C-3PO is a more sophisticated version of Sony’s mechanical dog. Neither grows from within; both are produced artificially from without.
The issue is not simply one of looking at modern technology with a new admiration. Both real and fictional heroes have famously felt affection for the tools of their trade, admiring the beauty and craft of their weapons, and occasionally speaking to sword or arrow in hoping aloud for victory or a sure hit in the “Don’t fail me now” tradition. Yet, when technology is accorded the capacity to behave in human terms, the relationship between man and tool changes considerably. The transformation is striking in The Empire Strikes Back, as Lucas substitutes robots for some of the traditional secondary adventure characters, and in so doing shifts audience responses by directing affections away from human characters to these ingenious (often cute) products of technology. The human emotion generated on behalf of technology becomes accentuated by the absence of strong feeling for what should be emotionally charged relationships. Despite the inclusion of traditional adventures from epic and romance, along with a budding love relationship between central characters Han Solo and Princess Leia and the depiction of loyal bonds between comrades, the film repeatedly deflects attention and feeling away from these human relationships, particularly by constant deflation of the incipient love story.
Aristotle would take an entirely different approach to droids, clearly distinguishing them from nature and people (who are at the apex of nature’s hierarchy). He would classify R2-D2 or C-3PO as “instruments of production.” In the Politics, Aristotle seems to anticipate the likes of Empire’s futuristic robotics, imagining how an “instrument” (or robot) “could do its own work, at the word of command or by intelligent anticipation like the statues of Dedalus or the tripods made by Hephestus.”145 Clearly, Aristotle does not conceive of them as loveable creatures or like members of a family—something that Lucas is inclined to do.
Placing Empire’s robots in familiar human roles radically alters the nature of the audience experience by blurring the distinction between life and technology. To illustrate the extent to which Lucas preserves the experience of robots as characters, it’s instructive to compare the composition of his group to a set of counterparts in the film version of The Wizard of Oz. The whining, worrying C-3PO is reminiscent of the lachrymose Tin Woodsman, who himself has all the appearance of a robot; the meddlesome R2-D2 sniffs out mischief like Dorothy’s Toto; and, as if to emphasize these similarities, Chewbacca the Wookiee has a mane and a sentimental roar like the Cowardly Lion. And when C-3PO is shattered and then put back together, it scolds its mender in just the exasperated tones of the Scarecrow when Dorothy patiently replaces his straw.
The parallel points up important differences in the way the characters appear to the audience; Frank Baum’s story uses Dorothy’s dream as a framework to distinguish fantasy from reality, as opposed to Lucas’s depiction of a science-fiction fantasy as real, even to the point of eschewing the usual preliminary credits. Instead of framing off the adventure as a fantasy, Lucas goes in the opposite direction by obliterating the frame and drawing the audience into the film’s galaxy—dodging meteorites that fly off the screen, ducking explosions from stereo speakers surrounding them. However real the Tin Woodsman seems, he remains framed off within a dream, one calculated as a reminder that the relationship between Dorothy and her friends, however delightful, remains clearly an imaginative experience from which Dorothy and the audience awake. The Empire Strikes Back strives for the opposite effect, which gives the robots and their human functions and relationships a strong sense of validity—often at the expense of real humans and real human relationships.
“I Thought They Smelled Bad on the Outside”
This background of parallels only highlights the differences in attitude, and nowhere more clearly than in Lucas’s theme of humanizing technology. The theme builds gradually so that through the course of the film the technological marvels—at first so vast and various in this strange new galaxy—seem finally as familiar and indispensable as the family car. Indeed, Han and Chewbacca spend much of their time acting like mechanics tinkering with spaceships as if they were jalopies parked in the driveway. And, like real driveway mechanics, their grease-monkey antics often end in comic frustration and failure.
The function of these comic moments is to give the objects of their tinkering a sense of the familiar and the ordinary. In the film, familiarization promotes acceptance of this futuristic technology, which ushers in an actual humanizing of its products, achieved with spectacular effect in R2-D2 and C-3PO. No longer simply handy pieces of technology, they become more than robots; sometimes Mutt and Jeff comic figures, sometimes endangered and unsuspecting children, they arouse feelings at one moment of amused affection and at the next of concern. Apparently programmed to meddle and fret, C-3PO engages the audience’s emotions in the very act of being an annoyance. It’s as if technology has breathed the breath of life into its products, and not only in the robots. From a distance, what appear to be approaching monsters turn out to be AT-AT walkers, the elephantine troop-transports of the Imperial army. Even their destruction has a curious animal quality as they resist the most sophisticated rocket assault, only to be tripped up at their metal ankles and fall heaving and shuddering on the ground.
With the AT-ATs, technology imitates nature; in the robots, technology evokes responses enabling it to replace the flesh and blood of organic nature. Technology fills the vacuum created when real, living nature gets dramatically shoved aside early in the film, in a scene in which Han Solo, mounted on a tauntaun, rescues the wounded Luke Skywalker.
Realizing that without heat, they won’t survive the night in Hoth’s frozen waste, Han sacrifices his mount by slicing it open so that Luke can use the creature’s body heat by nestling in its opened guts. The sudden unexpectedness of Han’s slashing into the animal’s flesh seems brutal, yet the act is presented as necessary for survival and perfectly proper that man sacrifice beast to save a human life. This attitude accords with Aristotle’s hierarchy of the natural order.
The incident offers a possibility for making a dramatic use of the tradition of great steeds from classics to cowboys—from Alexander the Great’s historic Bucephalus to the Lone Ranger’s fictional Silver. Such horses are justly seen as objects of admiration, and their riders would be
saddened to lose them. Yet, Han expresses a curious lack of feeling toward a living thing, and one that has served him without fail. His only response is sarcasm as he slices open the animal’s belly, remarking, “I thought they smelled bad on the outside.”
At this point, the film turns away from creaturely flesh to the wonders of technology. How different is this view of animal flesh from that of Aristotle, who acknowledges that “there are some animals which have no attractiveness for the senses” and that “it is not possible without considerable disgust to look upon the blood, flesh, bones, blood-vessels, and suchlike,” but who, nonetheless, encourages the study of all animal life, “knowing that in not one of them is Nature or Beauty lacking.”146
“Luminous Beings Are We . . . Not This Crude Matter”
The disdain for creaturely flesh and blood illustrates a view that repeatedly crops up in Lucas’s film: the display of an absence of value placed on physical life or on the goodness of nature, which is replaced by a predilection for technology.
Yoda, though separated from the technological action, speaks for many of the values expressed in the film, and his views give a clue to the basis for this preference. His initial, physically repugnant appearance soon becomes a kind of corroboration for his status as a guru. He has something of the Eastern mystic about him. His isolation appears to be a backdrop for a life of ascetic contemplation, rather than a sign of alienated withdrawal. Yoda is seen finally as an embodiment of unselfish goodness and thus a perfect mentor, under whose guidance Luke achieves a heightened consciousness. But there is something more to Yoda’s isolation; he seems to live in a world devoid of human emotion. Yoda warns Luke against the self-destructiveness of hate, but nowhere does he advocate love. The fruit of Yoda’s training bears this out; though Luke shows loyalty (a quality he has demonstrated before becoming Yoda’s pupil), nowhere does he come to the sort of compassionate insight one might expect from an enlightened mind.
Yoda’s is a life without joy. World weary, perpetually exhausted, he takes no pleasure in reflecting that he has been training Jedi Knights for eight hundred years. Apparently, none of that has given any cause for celebration; he shows no inclination for song or delight in any form. His spirit of renunciation—“You must unlearn what you have learned”—implies a rejection of emotion and comes close to the sort of Buddhist injunction, “Give, sympathize, control,” familiar to modern readers of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land or in its more recent and popular Zen manifestations.147 Such an implicitly dualistic attitude has closer affinities with the legacy of the Puritan suspicion of life embodied in flesh, a view filtered through to the modern world via American Transcendentalism, than it shares with the sense of a unity of mind and body as well as the unity of being, as it does in Aristotle or in the work of J.R.R. Tolkien.
Aristotle takes a holistic approach in conceiving of the relation of body and soul (or mind). In his philosophy, matter and form are indivisible, except for purposes of analysis. Unlike Plato, he doesn’t depreciate matter (or flesh) or denigrate it as a source of trouble or pain. Instead, Aristotle argues that matter joined with form actualizes being, and being is good. Aristotle would have no trouble answering the question posed by an agonized Hamlet, “To be or not to be?” Without matter, form cannot be individualized, that is, there can be no individual beings without it, while matter without form doesn’t even exist.
The same split between mind and matter in Lucas’s film is a familiar feature in much of the thinking about science going at least as far back as Francis Bacon (1521-1626). Science and technology, in this post-Renaissance view, emphasize discovery as a source of power over nature rather than as a discovery of truths about nature and man’s relation to the rest of the universe. Seeking power over nature easily becomes a kind of combat, with man pitting himself against the material universe. Yoda’s teaching Luke to levitate a rock while standing on one hand demonstrates more than training in concentration; perhaps it even shows the same will to overcome matter and gravity that appears in the modern impulse to balance massive skyscrapers on slender fingers of steel and concrete.
More importantly, it’s in keeping with the spirit of nature as an obstacle to be overcome that the robots exhibit mind overcoming the limitations of flesh, and the comic re-building of C- 3PO after having been blown apart by an enemy shot only dramatizes the implied insignificance of the relation of body to mind. In the same scene where C-3PO is reconstructed, the body becomes a series of interchangeable parts. Even as C-3PO comically scolds Chewbacca for getting its head on backwards, the robot evokes pity, as if it were a human patient in an operating room.
Clearly lacking real flesh and life, lacking even that artificial life of a Frankenstein monster patched together from the flesh of unwitting donors, the robot has assumed a completely human role.148 Its dialogue with human characters and their paternalistic feelings toward the incessantly gabbing machine conspire to evoke smiles at one moment, pity and fear at the next, and so confuse the human and the technological. Having taken on the capacity for human interaction, R2-D2 and C-3PO operate like minds severed from organic bodies and installed in machines. As fleshly sense disappears, body is reduced to the status of an automobile—albeit one capable of absorbing and processing data—whose parts are as interchangeable and as valuable as the springs on a car. Aristotle’s inseparability of body and mind disappears. Watching C-3PO’s parts being tinkered with carries the conviction that body no longer has any integral relation to thought, any more than a car can be said to participate in the experience its driver is having. Thus, separating mind and body, and rejecting the latter as insignificant to humans and irrelevant to thought, blurs a proper distinction between humanity and technology and so advances the theme of humanizing technology, giving it plausibility it wouldn’t otherwise have.
Similarly, humanizing technological puppets makes it easier to think of human beings as something like robots with interchangeable parts. The Empire Strikes Back develops this theme to such an extent that in the closing moments when Luke’s bionic hand replaces the real one he has lost in battle, the new appendage appears not only identical with and equal to the original, but even preferable to the flesh and blood hand. This bionic hand, so the film suggests, can be replaced by any number of similar devices. Luke’s expression of admiration as he flexes his new technological fingers marks a triumph over nature. In contrast, Aristotle lavishes several pages of his Parts of Animals to the wonders of natural, human hands. He emphasizes elsewhere that just as a stick in the hand cannot be the source of movement, neither does a hand move itself; instead, its movement has its source and co-ordination in the soul. In The Empire Strikes Back, flesh does not really matter, and the expression of revulsion toward the stink of real flesh actually assists in encouraging a preference for an odorless, mechanical substance. Nature does everything for the sake of something, says Aristotle, for whom nature is the norm.149 In The Empire Strikes Back, that attitude is reversed. Technology exists not only as a subject; technology becomes the norm.
While body parts can be replaced, that isn’t true of the person. For Aristotle—and, indeed, for an entire tradition in Western philosophy that includes Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, and their modern counterparts such as Etienne Gilson, Peter Geach, and Henry Veatch—each person is unique.150 The primary feature of the person is so obvious that a description of a person might well overlook it: a person is unique and thus irreplaceable. The basis for the individual self is in what Aristotle calls “primary substance.” Each person is thus like a fingerprint—unique to that individual in a world in which all individuals share in having fingerprints. However many parts are interchangeable, persons, as persons, are never interchangeable. Human beings share in a common nature; they continue to beget and replace other human beings—all having in common their humanity, as well as physical features like arms and legs. Yet, while limbs can be lost (and artificially replaced), the uniqueness of the person remains.
Rejecting technology as a substi
tute for human norms and rejecting the converse—that humans are the equivalent of machines or computers—doesn’t entail a rejection of the value of technology. The Empire Strikes Back attacks the distinctiveness of human beings by encouraging a view of humans in which the inseparability of mind and body no longer exists. Technology is proffered instead as having the potential for becoming human. Where popular culture has given us a Tin Woodsman who longed for a human heart, technology has now given us a tin heart as a substitute, thus fulfilling that dream in reverse. To regard technology as a contribution to human life is one thing; to think of technology as the means of raising the status of human nature is to repeat the mistake of Jonathan Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver, who returns from his last voyage having discovered a society of beings that look like horses but display a rational understanding that far surpasses anything that Gulliver has experienced in human company, and develops a loathing for the human species. Totally misanthropic, he rejects his wife and children and chooses the company of horses in the barn. A preference for the products of technology must surely have the same result: an actual demeaning of the truly human and a consequent rejection of the company of people in exchange for the barn and the company of horses (or mechanical dogs). The capacity for reasoning and feeling, for choosing and valuing, is distinctly human. Insofar as it blinds us to this human distinctiveness, humanizing technology ultimately results in dehumanization.
Star Wars and Philosophy Page 21