Star Wars on Trial (20 page)

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.)

There is nothing in the Jedi Code, or the religion, morals or ethics of Star Wars, that make any sense of Obi-Wan's action of turning his back on a severely wounded Bad Guy and walking off to go tell Nayland Smith that Fu Manchu must have died in that explosion. No one could live through that!

But Obi-Wan walks away because the script requires it.

And that's all there is to the Force in Star Wars, both in this scene and all the others. The Force is not about religion or ethics or anything. The Force is what the script forces.

John C. Wright is a retired attorney, newspaperman and newspaper editor, who was only once on the lam and forced to hide from the police, who did not admire his newspaper. In 1984 he graduated from St. John's College in Annapolis, home of the "Great Books" program. In 1987 he graduated from the College and William and Mary's Law School (going from the third oldest to the second oldest school in continuous use in the United States), and was admitted to the practice of law in three jurisdictions (New York, May 1989; Maryland, December 1990; DC, January 1994). His law practice was unsuccessful enough to drive him into bankruptcy soon thereafter. His stint as a newspaperman for the St. Mary's Today was more rewarding spiritually, but, alas, also a failure financially He presently works (successfully) as a writer in Virginia, where he lives in fairy-tale-like happiness with his wife, the authoress L. Jagi Lamplighter, and their three children: Orville, Wilbur and Just Wright.

THE COURTROOM

DROID JUDGE: Mr. Stover, do you wish to cross-examine?

MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: Absolutely. Mr. Wright, first I suppose I'd have to ask about your definition of a "real religion," which I quote here: "A real religion addresses metaphysics, spiritual powers, martyrdom, ethics, fate, salvation, miracles and life after death." Are you aware that by a strict application of this definition, you've disqualified the bulk of our world's spiritual traditions? Was this Christian/Islamist bias intentional?

JOHN C. WRIGHT: Objection; leading the witness. Mr. Stover is trying to palm off an assumption on the jury by making a logically impermissible statement in the form of a question.

DROID JUDGE: (apologetically) Mr. Wright, you cannot object. You are a witness, not counsel.

JOHN C. WRIGHT: I'm not asking that the counsel's question be ruled out of order; I'm merely pointing out a logical flaw in the question. Mr. Stover states that non-Christian religions on Earth do not have metaphysics or views about life after death, or the other qualities listed here. If he means that a non-Christian religion can be found that lacks one the qualities listed, the statement is correct but irrelevant; if he means that all non-Christian religions lack any of the qualities listed, the statement is false.

Certain religions on Earth are more complex or simple, depending on their history. All real religions have at least some of these properties I list: I do not make the statement that all religions have all of them. Some do not revere martyrs, for example, and others do not attribute spiritual powers to their practitioners. For the purpose of my argument, I need but show that the Force in Star Wars does not address any of the items on the list, to show that it is not a religion.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, do not be deceived by a crass rhetorical trick of calling my position a "bias." Obviously the honorable counsel for the Defense has nothing else to present to you by way of argument.

MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: So the short answer is, "I meant `or' instead of `and' (maybe 'and/or')," and no bias was intended. Fine. You could have just said so.

Moving on.

Would your reaction to the "religious" aspect of Star Wars change if the goal of the "religion" involved was not reward in a life after death, but rather a virtuous life in this existence, as in Judaism? Would your reaction change if the issue were not Salvation, but rather Enlightenment, as in Buddhism? If, in fact, the most profound realization of the spirituality involved was the tat tvam asi-thou art that, the great spiritual principle of non-duality, the fundamental unity of All That is (that "binds the Galaxy together") -which is the goal of religious and spiritual practice from China and Japan through India and the Middle East to nearly all Western mystic traditions?

JOHN C. WRIGHT: The question again contains a logically impermissible inference. Mr. Stover is trying to attribute to an argument a conclusion not in the argument, a rhetorical trick called a "straw man argument"; instead of addressing the questions raised, Mr. Stover rails against an imaginary opponent constructed to be weaker than his real opponent.

If I had made this following argument: "All real religions are about winning afterworldly rewards, and Star Wars lacks this and ergo is not a real religion" then his comment would counter that argument. But that is not the argument I made; ergo his comment is irrelevant.

There is some palaver in the movies about avoiding anger, but no hint that the goal of the Jedi is to become "one" with the Force after death, or to abide by the laws honoring the covenant God made with his ancestors, or to escape from the woes of reincarnation into detachment of Nirvana.

Nowhere in my article do I mention one "goal" for religion as opposed to another. I merely point out that the "goal" of studying the Force is to do way-cool ninja-leaps.

MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: For the record, the goal of studying the Force is to become a Jedi, which by definition involves oneness with the Force (not in the afterlife), and adherence to a strict code of conduct developed over 25,000 years.