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The Son of Skywalker Must Not Become a Jackass

(Not my own work, but I think this essay by Sci-fi writer Scott Lynch is great.  It really made me think about Star Wars.)

THE SON OF SKYWALKER MUST NOT BECOME A JACKASS

or: Finding the Ethical Core of the Star Wars Films by Ignoring the Ghosts and Muppets

by Scott Lynch

I had to lie during my interview with the evaluation board of my first volunteer fire department.  Because of Star Wars.

​Or perhaps it was more of a calculated omission.  In response to the question, “Why do you want to be a volunteer firefighter?” I rattled off a string of boilerplate platitudes – it seemed like it might be fun and interesting, a chance to serve the community, nobody likes to see his neighbors screaming and on fire, et cetera.  The members of the board nodded sagely, examined the line on their evaluation form that read Possible Raving Freak Y/N, circled N, and that was that.

​How might they have replied if I’d cleared my throat and said, “I’ve wrestled with a deep-seated desire to be a Jedi Knight ever since I was old enough to tie my own shoes, and this seems my best chance to act on that desire in some fashion”?  Replied?  Hell, they would have pinned me to the floor and helped the nice men in white coats jab the needle into my arm.

​Nonetheless, it’s true.  I have a Jedi complex dating back to that fateful afternoon in 1983 when my father took the five-year-old version of myself to see Return of the Jedi, a film that was to my brain what an industrial electromagnet is to a handful of iron filings.  Some days, I might as well be standing on a street corner holding a hand-lettered cardboard sign: Will deflect laser bolts with lightsaber for food.

​It could be said that the Jedi represent an ideal I have never been able to forget – an ideal that, in my own bent and silly and imperfect fashion, I still try to cherish.

​The Star Wars films, like the first Matrix film (my much-abused brain recoils from acknowledging the existence of the later two), possess what I often refer to as “opt-in philosophical depth.”  They can be enjoyed, without diminishment, as nothing more than amiable, fast-moving action/adventure pieces overflowing with visual innovation.  They can also be divertingly dissected on a deeper level – the level of Campbellian journeys, mythic resonance, political allusion and ethical argument.

​It is this last quality, the ethical components of the Star Wars films, that I credit in hindsight with cementing them as the cultural cornerstone of my early years.  My childhood was filled with flashy media – transforming robots, laser blasts, gun battles, spaceships and so forth – but only the Star Wars films seemed to provide instruction in something to aspire to.  I was raised atheist in a home pleasantly free from political, philosophical or theological dogma, and I am unashamed to admit that most of my initial notions of high virtue were shaped by the actions of fictional rebels – and one fictional knight – in a galaxy far, far away.

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            WHO ARE YOU GOING TO BELIEVE, ME OR THAT OTHER TRILOGY?

​

The two Star Wars trilogies were filmed nearly two decades apart, and it’s fair to say that there is a significant difference in the ethical substance of each set of films.  This raises the question of which trilogy should be considered to have, for lack of a better term, precedence in the presumed articulation of the series’ ethical vision.  The original trilogy, for being the chronological culmination of the six-episode story?  Or the prequel trilogy, for being George Lucas’s more recent work, and for the fact that he conceived and directed it from a position of commanding influence, effectively able to do whatever he damn well pleased?

The latter argument might make for intriguing speculation, but for the sake of my argument I’m going to go with the former.  After all, we’re discussing the ethical content of the films as expressed within their fictional narrative; clearly the chronology of that narrative deserves to win out over the chronology of film production.

With that settled, I can begin to lay out my position that the critical ethical development – the moral articulation which can be considered “victorious” over all others in the Star Wars narrative – is the manner in which Luke Skywalker becomes a Jedi Knight.  Lucas has said that the twin trilogies are about the fall and redemption of Darth Vader, but I believe that’s only true to a point.  Vader is indeed a primary lens through which the events of the films are examined, but if we want to uncover the strongest, most consistent and most admirable thread of virtue in the tapestry, we should pay less attention to the father’s journey, and more to the son’s.

​   

    FIRST WE GOT PUNKED BY THE SITH, THEN THE LITTLE BASTARD FACT-CHECKED US

To understand Luke’s struggle (and his triumph), one might begin by reflecting on the Jedi who instruct him in the birds and the bees of Force sensitivity.  The Star Wars films establish beyond a glimmer of all possible doubt that Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda, wise and well-meaning as they are, are not the sort of guys you’d want to trust with the management of your mutual fund.  The venerable Jedi Masters are actually quite the pair of shifty-eyed sons-of-bitches, and the web of guilt, lies, and manipulation they construct over the course of the two trilogies is epic.

Detractors of the films (and of the personal vision of George Lucas) enthusiastically seize upon this point as though it were a revelation – as though the series’ writer/creator and its fans might somehow be surprised to learn that the two older Jedi are frequently evasive, selfish and dishonest.  But while some second-guessing of Lucas’s judgment in the construction of his films is justifiable, in this instance it seems both uncharitable and easily refuted.  Lucas clearly worries a great deal about the ethical image his characters present – in at least one instance, he worried far too much.

​In the original version of A New Hope, Han Solo is accosted by Greedo in the Mos Eisley cantina.  Han keeps the Rodian bounty hunter talking long enough to stealthily unholster his blaster pistol beneath the table and caramelize the poor fellow like a glazed ham.  Apparently, Lucas fretted about Han Solo’s image enough to design an infamous alteration in the 1997 special edition of A New Hope.  In the modified film, Greedo actually snaps off a blaster shot split-second before Solo does and misses, ludicrously, from the distance of two and a half feet.

​Not only does the added blaster bolt look silly, it wasn’t necessary in the first place.  There is absolutely no doubt that Han shoots Greedo in clear self-defense, immediately after Greedo tells him that he doesn’t care about bringing him to Jabba the Hutt alive:

​HAN SOLO: Even I get boarded sometimes.  Do you think I had a choice?

​GREEDO: You can tell that to Jabba.   He may only take your ship.

​HAN SOLO: Over my dead body!

​GREEDO: That’s the idea… I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.

​

Yet even this supremely justifiable preemptive blasting was deemed unwholesome enough to warrant a jarring change.  Now, with that under his belt, does George Lucas strike you as the sort of writer/director who could plow through six films blithely unaware that two of his central characters like to fold, spindle, and mutilate the truth?

​Sure Obi-Wan and Yoda are a pair of liars (and wouldn’t you feel like fudging the facts a bit if the alternative was to admit that the Sith played the Jedi like a cheap trombone, and that your bad judgment helped usher in decades of bloody tyranny?).  Obi-Wan and Yoda are liars because their deceptions set them up in direct opposition to Luke, for the sake of the story.  Materially, the two elderly Jedi are Luke’s allies.  Morally, the two of them are villains – yes, villains – that Luke must confront and overcome on several occasions in order to bring about a true and lasting victory over the Sith and their Empire.

​Make no mistake: Luke’s saga in the original Star Wars trilogy isn’t a rediscovery of the ways of the Jedi of the Old Republic.  It’s the story of how he puts himself on an escape trajectory from almost everything they stood for.

​​

OLD REPUBLIC JEDI: AMBULATORY OUIJA BOARDS WITH SWORDS

​

Consider the Jedi of the Republic as presented in the prequel trilogy.  By and large, they’re as decadent (in their own fashion) as the slowly dying government they serve.  Insular, ascetic, pompous, detached, overconfident and indecisive – even the better ones display some or all of these traits at various points.  Again, critics seem to seize on this as though it were an accident – “How can we completely sympathize with this pack of arrogant space hippies?”  The only reasonable response is: What makes you think you’re supposed to completely sympathize with them?

​The list of moral screw-ups perpetrated by the last generation of Old Republic Jedi is pretty overwhelming.  Ponder:

• When presented with the most powerful Force-sensitive being in centuries, they decide not to guide him in any fashion.  Apparently, leaving him to run around and discover his powers on his own (or under the tutelage of interested third parties like the Sith) is a much better idea.

• When presented with clear evidence that a Sith is behind the Republic-shaking events on Naboo, they dispatch the same Master/Padawan team that has already failed to beat the Sith once, with no reinforcements.  Apparently, the thought of sending three dozen bright young lightsaber duelists to beat Darth Maul like a dirty carpet doesn’t occur to anyone – and as a result, Qui-Gon Jinn is slain.

• When presented with the massive ethical quandary of a huge army of sentient beings cloned to serve as blaster fodder, the Jedi shrug their shoulders and put the poor suckers to immediate use without discussion.

• When they become suspicious that someone or something is manipulating Chancellor Palpatine, the Jedi Council continues to place the burden of spying on Anakin – a Jedi known to be insubordinate, proud and volatile, with possibly compromised loyalties.  We all know what happens next.

When Obi-Wan meets Luke Skywalker in A New Hope, he speaks wistfully of the Republic era as “a more civilized age.”  He neglects to mention, of course, that the tragedy of the Old Republic Jedi was at least partially self-inflicted.  He begins his association with Luke not just by lying to him about his father’s fate, but by attempting to inveigle him into an undeservedly charitable view of the Order that Obi-Wan accidentally helped destroy.  The message is clear in the prequels, and Obi-Wan’s behavior only amplifies it in Episodes IV-VI: the path of the Old Republic Jedi is something Luke must shun, not celebrate.

​     

      ETHICS 101: A FRIEND IS SOMEONE WHO’LL STUFF YOU INTO A GUTTED TAUNTAUN

So much, then, for the prequel trilogy, a murky series of events in which few characters, even the survivors, manage to cover themselves in glory.  The Jedi display an almost callous disregard for the emotional comfort of the boy who grows up to lead their slaughter – even Anakin’s closest friend, Obi-Wan, is capable of turning a remarkably cold and dismissive shoulder toward him.  Consistent ethical behavior is nowhere to be found… and the Galaxy suffers for it.

By contrast, the ethical core of Episodes IV-VI is almost ebullient; the unpretentious message enshrined at the heart of the original trilogy’s story boils down to “stick with your friends and loved ones even when the whole universe seems to have it in for you.”  In A New Hope, Luke rushes off alone the moment he realizes his aunt and uncle might be in danger – a foolish but highly compassionate decision.  He then elects to stay with the Rebellion and participate in a suicide mission rather than escape with Han.  In the end, his example inspires Han to return as well, postponing his vital reckoning with Jabba the Hutt for the sake of saving his friends and their cause.

The displays of loyalty in The Empire Strikes Back are heartbreaking.  Han risks a bitter, lonely death in the cold for a slim chance of finding Luke alive.  Luke stubbornly ignores Yoda’s pleas to finish his training in favor of rushing off to help his endangered friends.  Lando Calrissian, in the hope of redeeming himself, gives up his entire Cloud City mining operation while trying to save Han, Leia, and Chewbacca.  Most strikingly, Luke chooses to fling himself to possible death rather than accept Darth Vader’s offer of a partnership to rule the Galaxy – a partnership that would surely destroy his friends and everything they’ve fought for as members of the Rebel Alliance.

Luke’s moral resolve is an inarticulate and even shortsighted thing, but it shows him to be ethically superior to his teachers – he will not allow his friends to suffer while he stands by and does nothing for them, and he won’t even consider using them as chess pieces in some far-ranging game of Jedi versus Sith in which the lives of the non-Force-sensitive do not count.  The Jedi of the Old Republic discouraged the emotional connections of love and friendship; Luke is defined to his very core by those connections.  The efforts of Luke’s mentors to mold him in the fashion of their generation of Jedi – more ascetic, more detached, more aloof – fail continually, and while they are cranky about this failure, events prove them wrong in every respect.

Luke, driven by compassion, holds out hope for the redemption of his father in Return of the Jedi even as a ghostly Obi-Wan grumpily continues to assert that Vader isn’t worth redeeming.  Kenobi seems to want Luke to atone for hismistakes in the quickest, crudest way possible – by killing Vader so Obi-Wan doesn’t have to think about the problem anymore.  Of all Obi-Wan’s faults, this one seems the most petty and grievous.  Even after the full revelation of every lie Obi-Wan and Yoda previously fed to Luke, Obi-Wan continues to begrudge Luke the feelings that define him: steadfast love, undying loyalty, and unquenchable hope.  Nowhere is the contrast between the Old Republic Jedi and Luke more apparent; never is Luke’s commitment to his own ideals more critical.

A more arrogant and detached Luke, an Old Republic-model Jedi such as Yoda and Obi-Wan might have forged out of a more complacent young Skywalker, would surely have met with disaster in his confrontation with Vader and Palpatine aboard the second Death Star.  Palpatine’s superiority over Luke is readily apparent: the young Jedi has no defense against the Sith Lord’s dark lightning.

Killing Vader outright or disclaiming him as beyond redemption would have done no good; then Luke would have died or been suborned to the will of the Emperor in Vader’s place.  Struggling against Palpatine would have been to no avail, with Luke so overmatched.  Only Luke’s feelings for his father – his decision to spend what might be his last few breaths pleading for Vader’s aid – succeed in turning Vader against the Emperor.  The Sith Lord dies by his apprentice’s hand, but it is Luke’s love and loyalty that put that hand in motion.

At the end of the cinematic Star Wars saga, Luke Skywalker inherits the mantle and powers of the Jedi without the hang-ups that brought the Order down at its nadir – the pompous senses of entitlement, superiority and emotional detachment that his mentors failed to truly kindle in him.  Luke faces his destiny as the first of a new breed of Jedi, compassionate and sociable, a more faithful friend and a more honorable foe than the Knights of old.  The practical moral qualities he articulates by example are immediately applicable in the real world, and worth aspiring to.

With great power must come a certain amount of healthy self-doubt, and a certain amount of trust in the people closest to you.  In embracing this, Luke’s personal triumph becomes the Saga’s ethical vindication.

Ferris Bueller is just in Cameron's Mind

There’s a theory going ‘round the Internet regarding the John Hughes movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (1986).  The theory is: there is no Ferris.  Ferris Bueller is just a figment of Cameron’s imagination, another identity, an idealized alter-ego, a voice in Cameron’s head.  This “Ferris is in Cameron’s imagination” theory has a remarkable internal consistency, however, I should mention up front that I don’t think John Hughes ever intended such a thing.  Still, watching the movie with the Theory in mind is an entertaining way to see a film you’ve already seen 58 times, like watching “Wizard of Oz” while listening to Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.” 

The “Cameron’s Imagination” theory would explain the more fantastical elements of the movie, such as a whole major city rallying behind one sick boy (Cameron wishes that were true!), and how everything goes impossibly Ferris’s way.  Still other things in the movie give the viewer goosebumps when seen from a Ferris-is-in-Cameron’s-mind perspective.  Cameron’s tirade in the car before leaving his house (“He’ll keep calling me… he’ll keep calling me...  he’ll make me feel guilty”) now appears to be Cameron raging about the voice of “Ferris” in his head; he then starts punching the car seat to quiet the voice.   Ferris: “You can find yourself a new best friend!”  Cameron: “Ha!  You’ve been saying that since the fifth grade.”  Has an imaginary Ferris been “speaking” to Cameron for that long?  Wow!  Cameron really needs a psychiatrist! 

After all the imaginary fun in Chicago with the imaginary Ferris and Sloane, Cameron goes into a catatonic state, which could be seen as Cameron’s internal psychological process of re-aligning the disparate “Cameron” and “Ferris” identities within himself.  Shortly after Cameron emerges, he says he was “thinking about things” while he was under: how he puts up with everything and doesn’t stand up for himself.  Now he’s ready to change that. 

Ferris: “I made you take the car out.”  Cameron: “I could’ve said no.  It is possible to say no to the great Ferris Bueller, you know.”  Ferris looks surprised and skeptical about this.  Until now, Cameron couldn’t say no to the “Ferris” in his head, and his Ferris Side could always make him do things.  This climatic scene is Cameron reasserting his own identity.  He says he’s able to quiet “Ferris” and is also prepared to stand up to his father, the person who gave him the psychological need for a “Ferris” to begin with.   He can now deal with reality and confront his father without needing a “Ferris” to do it for him, and he tells Ferris so. 

Again, I don’t think Hughes intended any of this.  Still, it’s entertaining to watch the movie again with the Theory in mind – just for fun, just to find all the “clues” which support it. 

A Grumpy Old Man

Dana Carvey used to appear on the “Weekend Update” segment of Saturday Night Live as a character called “Grumpy Old Man.”  Grumpy would begin each of his comically cranky commentaries with “I’m old, and I’m not happy.  I don’t like things now, compared to the way they used to be.”  He’d then give a few examples of “progress” (movies, Kleenex, ATM machines, bottled water, etc.), accompanying each example with a ridiculous story of how they handled life without those things “back in my day” – usually by substituting the not-yet-invented “progress” item with something else, something archaic.  And he’d punctuate his commentaries with the occasional “That was the way it was, and we liked it!”  (One example: “Back in my day, we didn’t have Kleenex.  When you turned 17, you were given the Family Handkerchief.  It was brown and crusty and full of disease, and it stood on its own!  But that was the way it was, and we liked it!  We loved it!”) 

I once met a real Grumpy Old Man who could’ve given Carvey’s fictional one a run for his money.  I was working at a small Radio Shack in a strip mall at the time, and was often the only employee in the store.  (The only employees were me and the manager, and he needed his time off the same as anyone.)  One morning I arrived at work and proceeded to replace some burned-out ceiling lights before opening the store.  As I was changing the lights, from atop a ladder, I noticed an old man come to the front door and pull on the handle a few times.  The door was locked.  We weren’t open yet.  I ignored the old man and continued my work as he shuffled away.  Ten or twenty minutes later, after I put the ladder away and had opened the store for business, the old man returned.  “Good morning, sir!  Can I help you?”  I was all chipper, but he wasn’t.

“Yeah, you can help me!  I was here goddamn earlier!  You were on that goddamn ladder; wouldn’t open the goddamn door for me!”  I swear: his exact words. 

“Well, I’m sorry, sir.  We weren’t open yet; we open at ten.  Can I help you now?”  I was still playing Mr. Friendly Retailer to his Angry Customer.

“I need a goddamn part.  Show me a goddamn catalog, I’ll show ya the goddamn part I need!”  I put a Radio Shack catalog on the counter and he opened it to the parts section.  He proceeded to tell me about the little project he was undertaking at home, putting the word “goddamn” before every noun he spoke.  I’m not exaggerating his angry grumpitude. I immediately thought of his similarity to Carvey’s Grumpy Old Man character on SNL.  

When I started at Radio Shack, I knew nothing about electrical parts and such, but over the course of a year I became an expert.  The part which Grumpy pointed to in the RS catalog was the incorrect part for the task he described, and I told him so.  “That’s you not the right part.  You don’t need one of those; you need one of these.”

He lost it.  “Don’t tell me what I goddamn need!  You think I don’t know what goddamn part I need?!  I worked for Ma Bell before I retired; I put a whole goddamn phone company together and took it apart again!”  (Exact words.)

I played Diplomat, gently suggesting that I still believed he had the wrong part, yet retrieving and selling him the wrong part anyway, because he insisted.  He was still harrumphing through the entire check-out process, when – apropos of nothing – he added, “Back in 1965, I lost my brother to a John Deere tractor.”

The whole interaction with Grumpy had already been so dramatically confrontational and uncomfortable, and then this.  Such a non-sequitur, and such a bizarre thing to say to a stranger; was he putting me on this whole time to get a reaction from me?  Again I thought of Carvey’s character.  I wanted to laugh but stifled myself; if the thing about his brother was true, it wouldn’t be polite to laugh… but he caught me smirking.  “You think that’s funny?!”   

I apologized.  Grumpy harrumphed and said “goddamn” a few more times before leaving.  This happened about 24 years ago, so he’s most likely dead by now, gone to join his brother, run over by that tractor in ‘65.  When I think of Carvey’s SNL character, I always think of my meeting with the real Grumpy Old Man.  Such an angry crankpot! 

Album cover in the "Adele 21" style

Maybe to sell millions of albums, all you need is to follow a proven formula.  *wink*

Project Runway's Tim Gunn once met Vivian Vance... or did he?

A story from Tim Gunn (Project Runway) which is too funny not to share... 

“I was a big I Love Lucy fan. I still am. And… my sister and I would visit dad at the FBI headquarters about once a year and we would have the whole tour. On this one particular day, Dad said to us, 'You're going to get the biggest kick out of this. Guess who's in Mr. Hoover's office?' 'Who!' 'Ethel Mertz. Vivian Vance!' 'No! Really?' He says yes — would you like to meet her? And of course, I would love to meet her. So, my sister and I were escorted in, and we met Miss Vance, who was lovely. And I never forgot it. However in the late '80s, when these stories were coming out about Hoover and the cross-dressing… I turned to my sister [at Thanksgiving] and I said, 'Do you remember the time we visited Mr. Hoover's office and met Vivian Vance?' And she said yes. And I said, 'You know, it strikes me now as really weird that Mr. Hoover wasn't also in the office!' And those of you who know what Hoover looked like — picture J. Edgar Hoover. Picture Ethel Mertz. Picture them side by side.”  Hmmm.  Gunn’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, had a legal team that "did their due diligence with this story. They researched the guest logs at the FBI — no Vivian Vance. They talked to Vivian Vance's two biographers. They'd never heard the story. Interesting.  I can't prove it — but it was odd."