Before the pandemic restored the old meaning of viral, Star Wars was already afflicted by hypertrophy. This out of control mass replication is now a constant traffic pile up on the media interstate. And like a wild game of catch-up, the unruly overmultiplication of backstories, prequels and what they now call Urquels seems like a vain attempt to match with sheer overwhelming quantity what had once played at cultural significance. However much they try, nothing can make up for the lack, or more accurately, the disposal of a compelling philosophical leitmotif with a clear moral charge.
We feel instinctively that something was irrevocably lost with the close of the original trilogy. In short, this one crowning myth of the post-Vietnam generation has been disenchanted, and now become nothing more than a bureaucracy of entertainment. To put a name to the change, there is a four-letter word culprit: SITH. The notion is as silly as the name sounds. Opposing the Jedi (a term with a genuine Japanese provenance from samurai films) the proposition of an opposing knight-like lineage-based order that is distinct, parallel and existentially demonic undercuts the entire narrative arc of the original story. Darth Vader as we originally came to fear him, was no SITH but rather a Jedi turned sour, which made his presence and betrayal all the more ominous. The secret at the heart of the narrative was that evil was up close and personal. It could be your very own dad. The post-facto identification of Darth Vader as a SITH disables and undermines the compelling meditation on the nature of evil which lies at the heart of Star Wars.
After the initial excitement of the adventure ride of the original, the heart skipping revelation of The Empire Strikes Back was that the evil antagonist was indeed the father, presumed dead, of the rapidly maturing ingénu hero. Darth Vader is Dark Father. Return of the Jedi, the poignant if maudlin denouement of the (first) series culminates in the redemption of Vader and his apotheosis as a guiding angel in the world of spirits. Evil has not so much been vanquished, as Luke withholds the death blow, but rather redeemed. (I am just old enough to have seen Return of the Jedi in the theater as a small child. The impact upon my psyche was profound, and lifelong.Yes, I was one of those kids lucky enough to have both an Ewok Village and Millennium Falcon (still do!)) I was nearing the end of college when I enthusiastically erupted in shouts of joy in the theater for the first of the prequels. That joy was shortlived; disappointment in the subsequent films has remained rather consistent.
The “SITH” myth fundamentally compromised what was so gripping about Star Wars to begin with, namely, that evil was real and embodied, but came from inside of us and could ultimately be redeemed. A violation of all of these principles, with one fell swoop beginning with the prequel reboot (The Phantom Menace), evil emerged as a distinct species-being, ontologically independent, from the noble, the entrusted and the good. Instead of the fundamentally complex, morally ambiguous, internally vulnerable Jedi (“good night, good knight”) the only thing they had to fear was a real, existing evil power, potentially much greater than their own. Star Wars, one might say, has moved in the opposite direction of the development of Christianity, away from a morally complex multi-dimensional Godhead to the neat Manichean dualisms of Gnosticism. The former was a fundamental part of the Judaic heritage with which the young religion had to grapple and ultimately claim as its own.
The narrative conceit of the temptable, seducible Jedi (“the power of the dark side”) echoed out so loudly to baby boom America especially given the historical context out of which the original trilogy emerged. Firstly, Star Wars burst upon the heels of the last flowering of post-secular religiosity of the 1960s counterculture. This “fourth great awakening,” of new, alternative or “non-churched” religions provided a sustaining spiritual universe for a DIY, self-management ethos mistrustful and even fed up with another Manichean narrative - the Global Civil Clash of the post-war order. Such post-protestant religious reform movements usually recoil from the idea of evil, the most “establishment" and elite of which, Christian Science, held that evil was an illusion, just a figment of mentality. “It’s all in your mind.” No wonder that so many were taken with the Hindu concept of Maya which holds that the entire phenomenal world is an illusion perpetrated upon us. By the late 1960s, political reality had in fact literally become opaque and disenchantingly blurred, a game of the shadows with a clear moral high ground elusive at best. The netherworld of Cold War spy games and proxy wars de-centered any compass tracking for evil in the world. Unsurprisingly, the new generation in cinema, the so-called American “New Wave,” heavily influenced by the counterculture, reflected this moral ambiguity filled with subversive anti-heroes from Bonnie and Clyde to Chinatown and so on.
With a vengeance George Lucas crashed back upon his generation a forceful embodiment of evil, genuinely terrifying. His was an evil that was positively sublime, phallic and para-human, so awe-inspiring as to be incomprehensible and overwhelming. Star Wars was all about the confrontation with Vader, and any attempt at explaining or rationalizing him would inevitably fall short. In retrospect, given the post-war period overall, it seems surprising that the field was left so clear for Lucas to tread with such a big statement on evil. After all, observers as astute as Hannah Arendt averred that evil would be the fundamental problem of post-war life. Yet she would remain rather lonely in her willingness to tackle the issue and has recently been relentlessly criticized for her much misunderstood notion of the “banality of evil.” (She never claimed that evil itself was banal, but rather that evil could be found and was perhaps most highly concentrated in the anonymous, unprepossessing hallways, desks and offices of modern corporate, bureaucratic life.) Arendt’s point of reference of course, the corpse factories of the wartime SS state in occupied Europe, was easily mentally marginalized from the American mainstream. Yet between their protected childhood and young adult flirtations with revolt, much had transpired to challenge the baby boomers. For they grew into adulthood in a world where whatever capital had been garnished by the Allies from the defeat of fascism was soon squandered by the liberal west.
The salvage wars of colonial empires, the French in Algeria, the Dutch in Indonesia and the US in Indochina, all with their widespread atrocities, hollowed out the moral high ground and revealed that no one was safe in their own home, as if to say, Yes. It could be your father too. The good man who may have stormed the beaches at Normandy might now be dropping napalm on defenseless Vietnamese villagers. Long before the first Vietnam War films even tried to show the other perspective (and few ever did) Star Wars was a tale of anti-colonial guerrillas told from their perspective (Lucas revealed as much recently to the musician and filmmaker Boots Riley, saying he had the Viet Cong in mind in his early drafts of the script.) Indeed what makes the only truly compelling of the non-original films (Rogue One) is that it adheres to this conceit and aesthetic; to a confrontation with evil that is remorseless, complete and profound).
The problem of specifically moral human evil, rather than the force majeure of natural disaster, is that it implicates human free will and rational choice theory. Even amongst the Abrahamic monotheisms there are divergent tendencies on this account. The romantically inclined Christian imaginary has tended toward Satan as an adversarial demonic king with a distinct power source, there to indict until the end of days, while Judaism has adhered to the discipline of the demonic as an always potential inward inclination for all humans (Yetzer Ha-Rah). What made Star Wars great was that it was fundamentally in line with the enlightenment project of assuming responsibility and maturity for the world, a bildungsroman, a tale of maturation, wherein the son is father to the man. (This literary genre is basically the coming of age plot which translated philosophical ideas of the Enlightenment into Romantic literature.) The film emerged just as the 60s generation settled down to become fathers themselves. And here they received a myth that enshrined their rebellious fantasies of blows to the empire. But since that time, the whole point of the Star Wars project has been serve exactly the opposite end, namely, to domesticate evil via over-explanation, safely “othering” evil as the 1950’s did with the Nazis. Like the other great special effect mythic franchise, the 19th Century “Music-Dramas” of Richard Wagner, especially the Ring of the Nibelungen (which also inspired Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings), Star Wars started out for vicarious disappointed revolutionaries, but ended as just another narcissistically satisfying non-threatening fantasy world for the complacent bourgeois. The failure to sustain this confrontation has made us all the less prepared to face up to and meet the challenge of the potential of real existing evil to flower ever more in our midst. The original Star Wars does provide a model for the process of redemption. It is however worth reminding ourselves that change must start where the heart is, at home. It is through generational assertion within intimate and highly personal relations. The security and comfort provided by affect and love is the handmaiden to action, so a revolt within families to effectuate genuine change, like Luke to Darth might just be the way to turn darkness into light. To quote from someone whom I can think of, with respect intended, as our very own genuine American Jedi Master, Martin Luther King,
Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that
Adam J Sacks holds an MA and PhD in history from Brown University and an MS in education from the City College of the City University of New York. He is currently a Lecturer in the Faculty of History in the University of Hong Kong.
