Preston Kussmann
6/05
The Failure of the Force
The now-complete six-part Star Wars series is a long, epic saga covering numerous impressive topics; the short-term successes and eventual failure of evil, the ultimate seductress, the inherent inability of power to remain in power, and the triumph of nature over technology. Within this work of literature, there is chronicled the overall failure of the use of, and knowledge about, the Force as a loose form of religion governing the galaxy. Outside of this galaxy far, far away, this failure can be illustrated as the battle of passion, feelings, and emotions, constituting the Dark Side of the Force, with rationalism, serenity, and peace, which makes up the Light Side of the Force. It is the simple conflict of Romanticism versus Rationalism.
The Light Side of the Force is categorically heralded throughout the six-film series as the side of good, while the Dark Side is the side of evil. The black-and-white dichotomy between the Light and Dark, Jedi Order and Sith, is undeniable and central to the movies as a whole. As such, the victory of the Jedi Order, personified by the sole remaining Jedi, Luke Skywalker, over the Sith in the sixth movie is the spiritual victory of good versus evil-- the single paramount theme in Star Wars.
The problem with the Force arises from this principal division of the Force into two sects. There is but one force that binds the universe and all living beings together, but yet, there are two seemingly incompatible viewpoints as to how to properly use it. This gulf in the Force is what makes the Force an ultimate failure in Star Wars.
The schism in the Force, which took place approximately 25,000 years before the fourth movie starts, dooms the Jedi and Sith to a mutual, inevitable failure. Taoism teaches us of the Yin-Yang, or the opposing, yet complimentary forces that make up the universe. Such forces are inseparable, all-powerful, and serve each other while they serve themselves. In the Star Wars Universe, the Light Side matches with the active, masculine Yang, while the Dark Side matches with the mysterious, feminine Yin. Unlike the Tao, however, the Jedi and Sith fail to recognize that they need each other, that they are wholly interdependent, and that the two can never truly be purified of the other. Such is the undeniable, indubitable nature of the Force. Yet, each side actively seeks to destroy and rid the universe of the other in a futile battle of ideologies that has taken up almost 25 millennia. There is no middle ground given in this galactic battle of philosophies. Such a rupture ruins both sides, and weakens them by the very nature of their interdependence.
The failures of the Dark Side are obvious. Passion, emotions, love, and ego are vilified as the actions of weakness, fear, and hate. Romeo would be a Sith Lord, and Juliet his apprentice, and their hasty, double suicide would justify such a labeling. Emotions and passion are the workings of the unsettled, immature mind, and serve only to pervert people into incorrigible beings of lust and yearning, a la Luke who‘s “head was never on where he was, what he was doing,” to paraphrase the Master Jedi Yoda. Such a perversion of good into evil is the primary fault of the Dark Side. In the words of Yoda, "Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering." The third movie shows this path, as well as Anakin’s descent into Darth Vader and the Republic’s transformation into an Empire.
Unlike the shadowy, passionate Dark Side, the Light Side rejects emotions and passion. They embody a cold rationale based in meditation, inner peace, and selflessness. They reject their own personal wants and desires, their urges for survival, love, intimacy, control and power, and even their will to exist for nothing more or less than the public good. They are the blind altruists that failed to save the Republic, failed to bring down the Empire, failed to thwart Palpatine‘s ambitions, and failed to escape their own annihilation by General Order 66. The automatons known as the Jedi failed in all of their most important objectives, and when the Sith is finally defeated, it is by Luke Skywalker, whom was almost denied training by Yoda in exile on Degobah for his own failures.
As two separate forces, the Dark Side and Light Side are utterly inept. Such is proof of the Yin-Yang concept. Because of that, there must be a middle way. It is Palpatine that tells Anakin in the third movie that "one must study the entire Force, including the Dark Side, in order to truly understand it." The inability for victory in the struggle between both sides of the Force is clear evidence that there simply must be one unifying theory, that combines the rationality of the Light Side with the emotion of the Dark.
Star Wars is the epic tale of politics and religion on the surface, and love, hate,
technology, and power beneath that. But above all of these themes and concepts portrayed in the epic movie series, one stands out. That theme is that the battle between good and evil is a destructive, never-ending fallacy, and the only way that triumph can be achieved from that battle is a philosophy that walks the thin grey line between the Light Side and the Dark Side. That is the true fulfilling of The Prophecy.
[It got an A, by the way.]