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swan_towerLet's talk about Star Wars and The Force.
Episode III, Revenge of the Sith, forever changed the way I think about the Force -- in a fashion I'm still not convinced that George Lucas intended. You see, I walked out of the movie theatre convinced that this whole "light side" and "dark side" business is just Jedi propaganda. There are two sides . . . but they aren't innately moral. There is simply the path of attachment, which gets called the dark side, and the path of detachment, which gets called the light side. And both of them can lead to good or to evil.
What persauded me of this? It's been long enough since Episode III came out that I probably don't need to put the answer behind a cut-tag, but just in case -- and because I'm headed toward The Last Jedi spoilers, and because I'm about to get wordy again -- I might as well.
It was the moment when Obi-Wan Kenobi walked away from the screaming, mutilated remnants of the man he had once called "brother."
You cannot convince me that was the action of a good guy. Ideally the detachment of a Jedi should be Buddhist: compassionate without being ruled by your emotions. But Obi-Wan comprehensively failed the compassion test in that moment. He left Anakin in unspeakable agony. He turned his back on suffering, because he'd cut himself off too much to care. I'd already had problems with the way the prequels discussed the two sides of the force, ever since Yoda's terrible lines about "fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering" -- hey, kid, did you know that being afraid, when you're put in frightening situations, means you're on the road to evil? But it all made sense when that moment in Revenge of the Sith reconfigured my thinking. The Jedi preach detachment; the Sith preach attachment; morality lies in what you do with it.
I'm starting to think the sequel trilogy agrees with me.
A friend of mine commented that Rey is a good-aligned dark side user, and Kylo is an evil-aligned light side user. I think that's exactly right. Rey is unabashedly, unapologetically driven by her passions, while Kylo strives constantly to eradicate all human feeling in himself. Look at the results. Now tell me again how giving in to your emotions leads to bad things, while letting go of them leads to good ones?
It's clear that, at a minimum, the sequels are not wholeheartedly Team Yay Jedi. Luke is deeply critical of them -- I know Mark Hamill disagreed with Rian Johnson's take on the character, but I haven't looked up details, because I don't want to muddy my thinking on this matter so soon after seeing the movie. So looking only at what we have in the actual text, we've got Luke saying the time has come for the Jedi to end, saying it's "vanity" to claim that they are necessary to the continuation of the light side of the Force, and pointing out the comprehensive failures of the Jedi as an organization. He doesn't question the moral valence of the two sides, but he does undercut the simplistic valorization of that label. And he complicates the label itself when he tells Kylo that Rey is the continuation of the Jedi, because see above re: she is so not detached at all.
Then you've got the team-up between Kylo and Rey, and its aftermath. I'm very interested to see if the trilogy winds up supporting some of what he says to her . . . because if you strip away the megalomania of "we could bring a new order to the galaxy," he might be right about needing to destroy past structures and get beyond them. The two of them are already failing to fit into the old molds. How far will the story go with that? Will it go all the way to my headcanon, or something in that vein?
(As an aside: I love the device of having Kylo and Rey able to sense and communicate with one another. Not only does it put Chekhov's Astral Projection on the mantel so it doesn't come out of left field when Luke uses it to buy time for the handful of surviving Resistance members to flee, but it solves the age-old problem of "how do we have a meaningful relationship between the hero and the villain when we can't put them in a room together without problems?" Taking violence off the table opens up space for the two of them to talk and develop a bond. While still leaving room for me to go, "uhhh, I am really not sure whether this will turn out to be a good thing or a bad one." Survey says: both, and also I came out of the movie really kind of shipping that pair.)
I also wonder what's going to happen with the books. There's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment at the very end, when Finn opens up a drawer on the Millennium Falcon and you see the sacred texts of the Jedi tucked in next to whatever he's grabbing or stowing -- which implies either that Rey stole them, or Force Ghost Yoda put them there. Either way, Yoda is such a wanker, with his line to Luke about "there is nothing in those books that Rey does not have already" -- I'm pretty sure he was laughing up his sleeve when he said that, because what he really meant was that Rey had the books. And he nuked the tree to keep Luke from going in and discovering they weren't there for him to burn. What's going to happen with those in the long term? Will it reveal a different understanding of the Force, one that got lost as the Jedi became too entrenched in their own propaganda? Or something else? I don't know.
But I'm very keen to find out.
Episode III, Revenge of the Sith, forever changed the way I think about the Force -- in a fashion I'm still not convinced that George Lucas intended. You see, I walked out of the movie theatre convinced that this whole "light side" and "dark side" business is just Jedi propaganda. There are two sides . . . but they aren't innately moral. There is simply the path of attachment, which gets called the dark side, and the path of detachment, which gets called the light side. And both of them can lead to good or to evil.
What persauded me of this? It's been long enough since Episode III came out that I probably don't need to put the answer behind a cut-tag, but just in case -- and because I'm headed toward The Last Jedi spoilers, and because I'm about to get wordy again -- I might as well.
It was the moment when Obi-Wan Kenobi walked away from the screaming, mutilated remnants of the man he had once called "brother."
You cannot convince me that was the action of a good guy. Ideally the detachment of a Jedi should be Buddhist: compassionate without being ruled by your emotions. But Obi-Wan comprehensively failed the compassion test in that moment. He left Anakin in unspeakable agony. He turned his back on suffering, because he'd cut himself off too much to care. I'd already had problems with the way the prequels discussed the two sides of the force, ever since Yoda's terrible lines about "fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering" -- hey, kid, did you know that being afraid, when you're put in frightening situations, means you're on the road to evil? But it all made sense when that moment in Revenge of the Sith reconfigured my thinking. The Jedi preach detachment; the Sith preach attachment; morality lies in what you do with it.
I'm starting to think the sequel trilogy agrees with me.
A friend of mine commented that Rey is a good-aligned dark side user, and Kylo is an evil-aligned light side user. I think that's exactly right. Rey is unabashedly, unapologetically driven by her passions, while Kylo strives constantly to eradicate all human feeling in himself. Look at the results. Now tell me again how giving in to your emotions leads to bad things, while letting go of them leads to good ones?
It's clear that, at a minimum, the sequels are not wholeheartedly Team Yay Jedi. Luke is deeply critical of them -- I know Mark Hamill disagreed with Rian Johnson's take on the character, but I haven't looked up details, because I don't want to muddy my thinking on this matter so soon after seeing the movie. So looking only at what we have in the actual text, we've got Luke saying the time has come for the Jedi to end, saying it's "vanity" to claim that they are necessary to the continuation of the light side of the Force, and pointing out the comprehensive failures of the Jedi as an organization. He doesn't question the moral valence of the two sides, but he does undercut the simplistic valorization of that label. And he complicates the label itself when he tells Kylo that Rey is the continuation of the Jedi, because see above re: she is so not detached at all.
Then you've got the team-up between Kylo and Rey, and its aftermath. I'm very interested to see if the trilogy winds up supporting some of what he says to her . . . because if you strip away the megalomania of "we could bring a new order to the galaxy," he might be right about needing to destroy past structures and get beyond them. The two of them are already failing to fit into the old molds. How far will the story go with that? Will it go all the way to my headcanon, or something in that vein?
(As an aside: I love the device of having Kylo and Rey able to sense and communicate with one another. Not only does it put Chekhov's Astral Projection on the mantel so it doesn't come out of left field when Luke uses it to buy time for the handful of surviving Resistance members to flee, but it solves the age-old problem of "how do we have a meaningful relationship between the hero and the villain when we can't put them in a room together without problems?" Taking violence off the table opens up space for the two of them to talk and develop a bond. While still leaving room for me to go, "uhhh, I am really not sure whether this will turn out to be a good thing or a bad one." Survey says: both, and also I came out of the movie really kind of shipping that pair.)
I also wonder what's going to happen with the books. There's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment at the very end, when Finn opens up a drawer on the Millennium Falcon and you see the sacred texts of the Jedi tucked in next to whatever he's grabbing or stowing -- which implies either that Rey stole them, or Force Ghost Yoda put them there. Either way, Yoda is such a wanker, with his line to Luke about "there is nothing in those books that Rey does not have already" -- I'm pretty sure he was laughing up his sleeve when he said that, because what he really meant was that Rey had the books. And he nuked the tree to keep Luke from going in and discovering they weren't there for him to burn. What's going to happen with those in the long term? Will it reveal a different understanding of the Force, one that got lost as the Jedi became too entrenched in their own propaganda? Or something else? I don't know.
But I'm very keen to find out.
no subject
Date: 2017-12-20 10:02 pm (UTC)Doylistically, I think the sequel trilogy may have to agree with you, because the alternative is to throw out the canonicity of the prequels when it comes to the precepts of the Jedi and the nature of the Force.
Will it go all the way to my headcanon, or something in that vein?
What's your headcanon?
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Date: 2017-12-22 05:58 am (UTC)The bit at the top of the post, about the light side and dark side not actually having any inherent moral valence. They aren't good and evil respectively, no matter what the Jedi claim. As per some comments below, I absolutely believe that George Lucas intended us to see the Jedi screwing up; I'm just not sure he intended for me to think that this Manichean "good vs evil" thing is nonsense.
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Date: 2017-12-22 05:59 am (UTC)Check. I could not tell from context if you meant some headcanon about Kylo and Rey.
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Date: 2017-12-22 06:02 am (UTC)Ah, got it. No, I meant my Force headcanon, which I think Kylo and Rey are kind of supporting.
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Date: 2017-12-22 06:21 am (UTC)So I was not one of the people who discovered Star Wars as a child. I was in high school when I saw the original trilogy for the first time, and then I didn't see it again for about ten years, at which point an LJ-conversation got me interested enough to dig out the ancient video cassettes (the original, unaltered versions of the films, blessedly) and rewatch the whole thing in one blast over, actually, the solstice. I am not going to look for or link to the epic comment thread that followed, but since I keep e-mail copies of comments and replies, I can just apologize for eleven-year-old prose and quote myself:
"The first time I saw [Return of the Jedi], I had a much stronger sense of Luke Skywalker as a sort as a sort of half-trained, almost renegade Jedi, whose abandoned apprenticeship had left him with the proper skills but an incomplete understanding of their implications or legitimate uses, and who was therefore much more in peril of slipping over onto the Dark Side . . . Where Vader in The Empire Strikes Back tempted Luke with the promise of the Dark Side, all the emphasis in Return of the Jedi seems to be on its unavoidability: that there are certain acts that irrevocably commit one to the Dark Side, regardless of their intention. If Luke kills the Emperor out of fear and hatred, then he has turned. If Luke kills his own father (with maybe bonus points for the fear and hatred, I don't know), then he has turned. Every time he loses his temper, or listens to the Emperor enough to be rattled, he endangers his own foothold on the Light Side of the Force—the way he hacks at Vader's lightsaber and then wrist when he has his father pinned against the rail, he's practically berserk, taking an almost blind vengeance for the hand that Vader cost him, and that is clearly what the Emperor wants to see. I don't think at that moment Luke has any thought of sacrificing himself to save Leia. I think he's just trying to kill Vader before the Dark Lord can get to her, which would be an otherwise prudent act except for the moral weight it carries here. Only Darth Vader can kill the Emperor, because murder is the province of the Dark Side. I have no idea how this squares with Luke's destruction of the first Death Star, of course. I think Yoda mentions at some point that a Jedi's warrior skills should be used only in defense, and clearly Luke disregards this bit of advice. (See his failed self-confrontation in the cave, which I still think is a magnificent scene.) . . . which frankly leads me to believe that a Jedi should learn not to draw on only the Light Side of the Force, but to balance between the passion of the Dark Side and the reason of the Light in ways that allow the healthiest use of one's skills—Anakin Skywalker in the prequels is a textbook case against the traditional Jedi's elimination of emotion, because all that results is a delayed and more drastic explosion. But I'm not so good with dualism, I suppose . . . It just struck me that Vader does attempt to use these [positive] emotions to reroute Luke to the Dark Side—he says that the only way for Luke to save his friends is to yield to the Dark Side, implying that Luke will never be able to defeat Vader or the Emperor with only the strength of the Light Side at his command. Again, it's not sacrificial; it's the temptation of the right tool for the task at hand, no matter the repercussions."
I'm not sure it was only in your head, is what I'm saying.
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Date: 2017-12-23 01:03 am (UTC)Heee!
Yes, the whole "balance" thing -- if the light side and the dark side really do equate to good and evil, then the idea that there has to be balance between them is really disturbing. (That reminds me far too much of the "if two sides disagree, then the truth must be somewhere in the middle" bullshit that has plagued this country for quite some time now.) For balance to be desirable, both sides have to offer their own benefits, and counteract the weaknesses of the other.
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Date: 2017-12-23 01:16 am (UTC)Yes. You can have a balance between light and dark. Most mythical systems are built around it, not to mention our astronomy. You can't have a fifty-fifty split between good and evil. That's bad theodicy and a worse way to live.
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Date: 2017-12-23 04:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-01-04 10:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-20 10:26 pm (UTC)THANK YOU. I was crying off and on through the whole movie over Carrie Fisher and I wasn't sure if I'd hallucinated that.
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Date: 2017-12-22 05:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-12-21 01:30 am (UTC)It's also definitely true that the Jedi need to go a different way in the future, and Luke represented that promise by the end of ROTJ--he doesn't have the same hang-ups that Yoda and Obi-Wan did, and he could have changed the Jedi for the better. He would have, if not for Kylo Ren. I nearly screamed in the theater when Yoda showed up in TLJ and had learned his lesson about letting go of strict adherence to the rules and valuing people over principles. And I do think that Rey is now in the position to create a new kind of Jedi that blends the good parts of the old with the good parts of the new.
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Date: 2017-12-21 01:41 pm (UTC)Getting back to the new movies, I'm not sure if I'd agree that "Kylo strives constantly to eradicate all human feeling in himself". Ben's certainly bought into Snoke's teaching about compassion being a weakness, but he keeps feeling and acting on it (in addition to his obvious soft spot for Rey in both TFA and TLJ, he also lets Finn go at the beginning of TFA instead of turning him in, even though it's clear he's both seen and sensed Finn's horror and refusal to fire on the villagers -- and then of course we have him weeping over Leia and unable to kill her in TLJ). But it seems to me that compassion and self-doubt are really the only emotions he's been striving to eradicate; passion and anger, not so much. He's pretty much a hot mess of emotion all the time, except in those few quiet moments with Rey.
Speaking of Reylo shipping (which I've been doing since January 2016, conditional on Ben's repentance and redemption, and it being a sincere change of heart rather than a ploy to impress Rey), it's been pointed out to me that Kylo's "you're nothing, but not to me" speech to Rey is an awful lot like Mr. Darcy's first proposal to Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, where he insults her family and her social status and implies that he's fallen in love with her in spite of his better judgment. Which might seem like mere coincidence -- except that when Eddie Redmayne auditioned for the role of Kylo Ren back in 2014 they didn't give him a mock script to read from, they gave him a speech from P&P. Possibly that very same speech?
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Date: 2017-12-22 05:54 am (UTC)Mmmmm, fair. I guess I read him as trying to get rid of the passion and anger -- or rather, to get rid of the things that cause him to feel that way, i.e. his family (before Rey comes along).
Which might seem like mere coincidence -- except that when Eddie Redmayne auditioned for the role of Kylo Ren back in 2014 they didn't give him a mock script to read from, they gave him a speech from P&P. Possibly that very same speech?
Huh -- that's fascinating! I hadn't heard that, but yeah, I can see a parallel there.
I should say that when it comes to Reylo shipping, I don't for an instant think we're actually going to see him repent and earn redemption. I think the third movie is going to say, look, he had choices, and he made bad ones; the end. But that doesn't stop me from noticing the intensity between them . . .
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Date: 2017-12-22 02:51 pm (UTC)It's possible you're right about that, and indeed I fear it, considering the way things were left at the end of TLJ. But it seems like an odd narrative choice to me given the amount of emphasis both in and out of the movies that Kylo has never been (or at least not up until this point in the narrative) free of Snoke's influence, not even in the womb, and that he is still tormented by the pull to the light.
Even at the end, when he's screwed up in just about every way possible with his frenzied attack on Luke (thus giving the Resistance a chance to escape and survive, when he could have eliminated them easily if he hadn't got distracted by his personal demons), we're still given that last glimpse of the Force Bond between him and Rey -- which apparently didn't die with Snoke after all -- and Kylo kneeling with a haunted look on his face as he watches her leave. It's not the defiant, "I'll get you next time, Gadget" stance or expression I'd expect from someone now fully committed to villainy. It looks an awful lot like regret and even shame.
Ep. 9 will be the first time we see Kylo unfettered by Snoke's influence and without the obsession for revenge on Luke to drive him. If he wants to eliminate the Jedi he now knows he's going to have to kill Rey, and despite all the yelling he does about destroying her with all the rest, I don't think he's going to find it remotely easy to follow through when it comes to it. Which doesn't necessarily mean redemption on his part, it could just mean a fatal hesitation which gives Rey the chance to kill him, but... honestly, I hope not. I still hope that Leia's faith in TFA (and Rey's in TLJ) that Ben could still come back to the light isn't mere feminine sentimentality, and I think the implications will be kind of horrible if he doesn't at least take some decisive step in that direction, even if he dies trying to do it.
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Date: 2017-12-23 01:10 am (UTC)True -- but when he kills Snoke, his immediate impulse is to megalomania. Yes, Snoke's influence wouldn't vanish, etc etc, but when he's free at last to make his own decisions, he immediately makes a bad one. He may be tormented by the pull to the light . . . but so far his response, at every turn, has been to repudiate it and actively seek the darkness.
I still hope that Leia's faith in TFA (and Rey's in TLJ) that Ben could still come back to the light isn't mere feminine sentimentality, and I think the implications will be kind of horrible if he doesn't at least take some decisive step in that direction, even if he dies trying to do it.
I definitely hope it isn't "mere feminine sentimentality." But TLJ also felt to me like a film that would reject the simplistic morality of Return of the Jedi, where a single act (Darth Vader turning against the Emperor) followed by death is allowed to suffice for redemption. The parallel act here -- Kylo turning against Snoke -- explicitly does not redeem him; it just unshackles him to be the chief villain. So I feel like a third film face-turn, with Kylo making some grand gesture toward goodness and then dying, would come across as very facile in the context of what has gone before. If he's going to get any kind of redemption I can believe in, it would need to be a complex process . . . and fitting that into a single film will be easier said than done.
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Date: 2017-12-23 01:16 am (UTC)I'd love to see it, though, because I hate death-by-redemption. Fire of a thousand suns.
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Date: 2017-12-22 05:51 am (UTC)The part I'm not sure he would agree with is that the so-called "light side" is not actually good, and the so-called "dark side" is not actually bad. It's the moral valence of that entire ideology that I question.