Balance of the Trilogies
By: Rory Leahy
Tags: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars Saga, Star Wars, Skywalker Saga, Star Wars Prequels

Balance of the Trilogies

Christmas is a time of year when I tend to have lots of Star Wars Thoughts. I have lots of Star Wars Thoughts year round but this seems like a good time to share them. On the one year anniversary of The Rise of Skywalker, received poorly by both fans and critics (there’s a lot I enjoyed about the film personally, I don’t consider any Star War “bad”, but I recognize it as a very unsatisfying conclusion to the Skywalker Saga) I find myself thinking of what the Sequel Trilogy should have been. No I’m not going to rewrite it here, that might be a project for another Christmas, but I wish it had accomplished something it failed to do, which was resolve the thematic differences between the Original and Prequel Trilogies.

The Prequel Trilogy, whatever its flaws, represents George Lucas’ vision at its least compromised. With the obvious benefit of hindsight, he decided at some point that his six film cycle was The Tragedy of the Fall and Redemption of Anakin Skywalker and set about structuring the three prequel films accordingly.

The great theme in the Prequel Trilogy is that Anakin’s fall is caused by “attachment.” Lucas appears to have been influenced by the Buddhist idea that attachment, i.e. a preoccupation with holding on to that which you have, causes human suffering. Indeed Lucas equates attachment with greed, which is repeatedly denounced throughout the trilogy. Once you have something, Yoda says in so many words several times, you fear to lose it and the fear of loss makes you batshit. Paraphrasing obviously, I’m not looking it up but the exact quote is probably closer to “Batshit the fear of loss makes you”.

There’s a lot of merit to this, if we’re talking about attachment to material wealth. But the Star Wars universe takes this a step farther and suggests that attachment to people is bad, at least for Jedi Knights anyway.

This is why the Jedi are forbidden to marry. They must unselfishly serve the common good of the galaxy without particularly favoring anyone in it. This makes a certain amount of sense…for an institution. An institution, collectively should treat everyone equally, without passion or prejudice. But trying to impose that rigidity on everyone who serves that institution is simply impossible for human beings, as the story demonstrates.

Anakin falls to the Dark Side because he falls in love with Padme and because he’s terrified that she will die violently, as his mother did. It’s a pretty clear conclusion to draw that his disregard for Jedi teachings, and indulgence of his base human emotions massively fucked up the galaxy. Thanks a lot Attachment.

So the message is crystal clear. We know what we need to do. Attachment is right out, at least if we want to become Jedis and we all want to become Jedis right? Reject emotions, don’t form bonds, love humanity in an abstract sense but don’t love any actual humans. Surely the Original Trilogy, the classics, the sacred texts, all reflect this message as well? Hell no they do not.

The Original Trilogy celebrates and centers the formation of human bonds. Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie and the droids come from disparate walks of life and through circumstances, through mutual cooperation and shared ideals, become family. (Luke and Leia turning out to be biological family in a third act twist is beside the point)

So much of the joy of the OT is seeing the love these characters have for each other and watching it grow. The most satisfying moments in the OT come from “Attachment”, Han returning at the last moment to save Luke at the Battle of Yavin, then risking his life to rescue him from freezing to death on Hoth, Luke disobeying Yoda and Obi-Wan’s orders to rescue his friends on Bespin, then his successful rescue of Han from Jabba the Hutt.

And how does the big event happen? The moment that all of this is supposed to be building up to? The redemption of Anakin Skywalker happens through his attachment to his son, the last thing he has left of Padme.

A related sidebar: What message are we to take about Obeying Our Elders from the OT? It’s not stated explicitly but Empire Strikes Back is arguably the root of the idea that Attachment Is Forbidden. When Luke intuits through the Force that his beloved friends are in danger he knows he must go to help them. Yoda and Obi-Wan make pretty rational utilitarian arguments about why he should stay put and complete his training, (The cause they fight for is more important than your friends’ lives) that I find far more convincing than the more extreme “don’t care about anyone or miss or mourn anyone you lose” stuff that their prequel incarnations would spout but Luke still rejects them as we would want our hero to.

It’s ambiguous but Empire more or less lands on the idea that Luke should have obeyed. His intervention on Bespin does nothing to help Han, who gets frozen and taken away, or Leia, Chewie and 3P0 who are rescued by Lando. Meanwhile he fights Darth Vader, loses a hand and receives the Big Revelation he’s not emotionally prepared for. You know the one. “You’ve been paying too much for car insurance! Obi-Wan never told you the truth about your potential savings!”

Return of the Jedi however, invites the opposite conclusion. Luke is again told by his mentors to suppress his emotions for the greater good. “Just fucking kill Vader already”. But Luke feels the good in his father (I hope that genuinely comes from the Force and isn’t just an excuse based on the revelation of the familiar bond because if so it’s a decent justification, if not kinda lame, he didn’t stop being a mass murderer because you found out he provided your genetic material) and he will try to redeem him.

Luke is of course, definitively proven right here. He was right not to kill in anger, to throw his lightsaber away, to passively resist the Emperor, and this finally leads to Anakin’s redemption.

Another sidebar: the relationship the franchise has to violence and killing. The good guys in the saga kill metric fucktons (many, many parsecs) of people unreflectively. Dialogue in The Mandalorian confirms there were millions of people aboard the Death Stars. This is almost always portrayed as totally fine and not worth thinking much about. And from a rules of engagement point of view this is mostly correct. We never see the good guys kill in anything but self defense, it’s just that as an old joke about a Wild West gunfighter goes, they are defending themselves almost constantly.

The “Greedo shot first” thing is stupid for a number of reasons, one is that there’s really not much actual moral difference between killing someone who has a gun pointed at you and is explicitly threatening your life and killing someone who is actively shooting at you.

This was of a piece with Lucas’ middle aged realization that wait, maybe a film franchise aimed at children shouldn’t have quite so much casual mass slaughter, hence replacing stormtroopers with battle droids.

You know what I would have liked instead of gestures like that? An explicit acknowledgement that killing people is bad. Maybe it’s necessary sometimes but it’s always a horrific thing and always a last resort.

Instead we get the odd dissonance of Luke resisting the temptation to do violence against the Emperor. And his restraint and mercy in the face of evil are shown as admirable. Luke, my man you have personally killed millions of people. Remember when you destroyed Jabba’s sail barge killing everyone aboard, not all of whom were necessarily irredeemably terrible people, like, an hour ago? But when confronted with Actual Space Hitler, the genocidal, planet destroying, democracy overthrowing architect of all the galaxy’s suffering? Now is the time to be a gentle pacifist.

Rey repeats the same beat in Rise of Skywalker when she also resists Palpatine’s same “strike me down with your weapon” taunt by…using her lightsaber to refract his evil lightning powers back on to himself, killing him indirectly instead of directly because that’s uh, better somehow.

One message we can take from the saga as a whole is that killing is bad only if you get all emotional about it. Anger, fear and hate are bad but it’s totally cool to cut a guy’s arm off in a bar fight as long as you are all cold blooded about it. This is…dubious.

So what would I have liked to see more of from the Sequel Trilogy? I would have liked Rey to have proven that Luke Was Right, that the themes of the Original Trilogy were right. Attachment is good. Friendship is good. Love is good. Family is good. These things don’t lead us to evil but save us from it.

There was plenty of opportunity to do this. Rey, the lonely castaway growing up without friends or family finally finds them, Finn, the soldier who finds the humanity and compassion within him to resist his indoctrination…these were great characters who deserved a better conclusion.

I’m a fan and defender of The Last Jedi but I wish Luke’s disillusionment with the Jedi had run even deeper. I wish he rejected cold blooded violence and stayed out of the fight partially because he was traumatized by all the violence he had done and didn’t want to kill again. And maybe he tried the orthodox teachings of forbidding attachment and that’s why Ben Solo fell to the Dark Side, the opposite extreme of Anakin’s fall.

Because Anakin’s flaw wasn’t attachment, it was obsession. He didn’t fall because he loved Padme but because he became obsessed with possessing her. But love doesn’t have to be like that.

Rey could have brought the balance. She could have rejected the dogma of non-attachment without falling prey to the hubris of trying to control everyone’s fate.

Ah well, these are pretty good movies anyway. Merry Christmas.