Yoda Is Dead but Star Wars’ Dubious Lessons Live On

I've been saying this for at least a year. Finally, someone else gets it.

Some people really are evil. Some psychopaths, for example, know that what they're doing is negative and do it anyway. (Many more cover it up and try to do the right thing, of course.)

But of course this doesn't apply to terrorists or most criminals. The occasional serial killer fits the bill and not much more.

What really gets me is that if you start taking about terrorists like this, saying you should understand what makes them tick, that they think they're doing the right thing, etc., people freak out. I just think we should understand them better so we know how to stop them, but any attempt at understanding is taken as justification for what they do.

Look at what happened in the UK with the IRA - for years we had the approach of refusing to talk to them. Eventually we did, found that they had some legitimate complaints and when those were addressed we eventually got an end to the Troubles.

Now we have people like Martin McGuinness, a former IRA leader, as active politicians in Northern Ireland.

I don't know why you would think that killing innocent people isn't evil.

If you delibrately disturb harmony, or deny someone their rights, or take away something by force that isn't yours, you need to be stopped. Because one thing would lead to another and life as everyone knows it would become a living hell.

Step back and look at oppressive regimes over the course of history. They all have traces of evil in them. It's that simple. I admit that good for one might be evil for another, but there's a basic set of things, I guess, the majority can agree on about what's good and what's not.

I agree with you that it's more nuanced than the binary thinking often advocated. But I also think that "evil" exists in the world: ISIS is evil, the Nazis where evil, serial killers are evil, and so on. I think the question of "do they think they are doing good or bad" is an interesting question as well.

There's also, like you say, people who do things we perceive as "bad", but it often comes down to misunderstandings of motives, imbalances of power and so on. If somebody steals bread to eat, it's not a good thing, but I can't condemn the act either. As somebody who likes to think they're a force for good, I should probably see what I can do to improve their situation so they don't have to steal in the future.

People like and want heroes and kings. It's not supposed to, but I think the role of US president often satisfies the role of king (much more so than prime ministers of other democracies).

Some radio hosts promote this: I remember in the last election some host (I don't remember which one) was very clearly promoting Mitt Romney as the new king. (Not to say that this is shared by all of the right-wing, it certainly is not- the right-wing would say that the left-wing doesn't want kings, but dictators).

Also, I think this explains a lot of populist animosity towards Obama: How can our king not be one of us?

Anyway Star Wars (and many other fantasy) is all about this kind of mythology.

history and facts are proving you wrong.

you don't think anyone is evil?

from charles manson to josef mengele, from the killing fields of the khmer rouge to the zetas in mexico - if you have no problem, no qualms, when you're taking an unarmed human being, shoving them in a barrel then lighting them on fire - you should qualify as evil.

some people cause harm for fun. they enjoy it, take pleasure from it. if you don't label them as evil, then you belittle all the people that put themselves in harms way to help others.

Effective leadership is difficult. It's relatively easier to whip people into an us v. them frenzy to get a group on your side. Good v. evil is the most basic way to delineate the groups, although there are others.

>But actually nobody is evil, everybody wants something positive

You can't characterize all human motivations along this line of rationale. Psychopathy is real. Even recent history is littered with sadistic madmen.

The two hallmarks of modern blockbusters, the sanitized but intense violence and the simplistic morality, are actually joined at the hip. On the one hand, if your idea of a rollicking good climax is lots of people being killed, you need to make sure that those people are working in the service of some evil power so great and immovable that it can't be dealt with in any other way. On the other hand, if the world is divided between uncompromised good and uncompromised evil, it is actually okay for the good guys to resort to violence.

"I get the feeling this guy takes Star Wars (and probably himself) just a little worryingly seriously."

I was thinking the same thing, but he restores some perspective when he says,

"Does entertainment have to have an outcome? We were doing it for fun."

But it also seems that, for Brin, Democracy is an unassailable good, and pointing out its shortcomings might be a little bit evil.

He says he takes mythology very seriously. Is that really a bad thing? Star Wars is a common dream that a huge percentage of humanity shares. It's the raw material of our imagination at this point. It's as legitimate to take seriously and criticize as the myths of the gods would have been to ancient Romans.

Most of our planet is dominated by worship of mythological sky beings who supposedly existed several thousand years ago.

I think a little fun and rumination over Star Wars is not too worrying, compared to that.

Ummm, the purpose of creative people is to take the world, look at it from different angles, and share that with people. That includes looking at fiction. Brin's playful provocation might not be your taste, but he's not the one taking something too seriously...

If I wanted to understand a culture via their movies, I would not reach out exclusively for their serious dramas, historical pieces, and solemn biopics. I would certainly rope stuff like Star Wars in.

The way I see it, there was a fascinating trend in action movies throughout my life, when the hero went from plain good 100% hero (say, a late 80s hero), to a grizzled guy that's ultimately got his heart in the right place (Wolverine types, Die Hard types), to fairly despicable people that "go out like men" doing epic stuff (Walter White), to completely messed up manipulative people that are triumphant and that's it (House of Cards dude).

People find this kind of analysis very non-rigorous, but I often feel like the fact that these were successively popular with American audiences matches pretty well the changing self-image of America-the-nation. From pretense of full-righteousness to cynical "realism" and taking pride in "somebody has to do it" to "at least we're on top".

So, I think extremely deep reads of fairly shallow but resonant fiction are often very worthwhile.

edit: Of course, someone will point out that these are popular with different demographics and whatnot, that my cohort aged, etc.- I'm not going to turn this into a rigorous statistical analysis. It's just musings.

Destruction of an entire planet is depicted as pure evil. The deaths of everyone on a Death Star is something to celebrate every time it happens. Massive clone slaughter is a demonstration of the goodness of the force because JarJar Binks steps in Poop. The Jedi aren't hauling slave owners off to jail, the only concern is obtaining a child slave with special properties to serve in their army.

It's the casual way in which these elements are bandied about as normal. Even what little nuance there was has gone down the memory hole: now Greedo draws and shoots first.

Some commenters disputed the Han statement, and some others flew to his defense. His own defense of that statement was rather uncharitable to the objectors and he coyly avoided pointing out where exactly it occurred.

I myself reviewed the script several times, and I couldn't find it anywhere. The only time the topic came up with Han and Ben was while Luke was training with the helmet and droid, and Ben definitely does not offer to train him. So I'm confused where he seems to think this occurred.

That's exactly what put me off the most in this latest movie. They completely trivialized the Force.

She sucked it all out of that rod she found in that basement.

The current thought is that she had training from Luke as a kid in the school they mention. But then when the school was disbanded they suppressed her memories and left her on that planet. Then when Kylo used the force on her mind, he broke loose the training.

I'm not certain we have evidence that training is necessary to use the Force, it may be mostly intended to prevent misuse.

The eight year old rugrat in the first prequel was quite remarkable without any training. We have new evil force users, despite the requisite "always being two, a master and an apprentice" both dying at Endor. Luke spent a trivial amount of time training with Yoda and Kenobi, most of which was spent convincing the farmboy that it was a simple matter of "just doing" the impossible.

As far as we know, the rigors of Jedi training in the Old Republic were intended to prevent people from misusing "what comes naturally" and falling to the dark side. That Luke, who didn't benefit from that training, had students who fell to become "Knights of Ren" reinforces that line of thinking.

If we don't know what the training is for, we can't judge if/how Rey is remarkable compared to other Force users. Regardless, given how the movie ends, it seems likely that we'll have illumination on these questions.

Yeah, when she single handedly destroyed starkiller base after very limited training that was just unbelievable.

Wait, I must be thinking of a different film, nevermind.

I got the impression that Kylo Ren was toying with him. The whole chest thumping bit was Ren saying "I'm kicking your ass without even trying."

When Kylo killed Han, how was that an homage to any earlier scene in a SW movie? No character in any Star Wars move had ever killed their parent-Anakin's mom was killed by the Sand People, and Vader/Anakin succumbed to injuries sustained by Palpatine's force lightning, that shorted out his circuitry.

At least TFA tried to go practical effects again instead of all-CGI.

I thought the effects looked amazing. Since the turn of the millennium we've had movies switch over almost entirely to digital effects, but pure cgi still just doesn't look really real. It's missing some ineffable emotional weight that makes its fruit not quite believable. TFA, in trying to recreate some of the look of the original films using practical effects, also had the effect of saying, look what we can do when we combine real things that are actually in front of the camera with state of the art digital effects. I don't think I've seen a big special effects movie that looked so actually real since the golden age of practical effects in the 90s – movies like Jurassic Park come to mind.