House of Eratosthenes

Last year, there was this movie that came out. It was the final installment to a science-fiction space-opera movie saga/franchise that started 28 years previous called “Star Wars” and this chapter was called “Revenge of the Sith.” People have been split right down the middle about whether Star Wars is any good or not, with the loud noisy voices of movie reviews and Hollywood trend-setters and amateur critics saying it sucks, and people who actually purchase movie tickets finding it to be a wonderful and rewarding experience, unable to get enough.

Star Wars has been like the Cinderella of movie-making, with “real” movies playing the part of the ugly stepsisters. The more orthodox gliteratti “A-list” celebrities/directors/producers continue to cogitate on how wonderful they are, pumping out such classics as………… I don’t know, “Oceans Twelve” or “Dogma” or “Steel Magnolias” or “Natural Born Killers” or “Erin Brockovich” which we’re told are highly enjoyable, and if we don’t see the wonderfulness we must be stupid or something. While, like Cinderella, “Star Wars” has done the real work of keeping us awestruck, entertained, mystified, and enchanted by wonderful stories of good versus evil. And earning criticism. Lots and lots of criticism. Mostly over stupid crap that really doesn’t matter.

Anyway, someone at Star Wars apparently decided the time was right to ratchet up the effort of marketing, and it would be okay to insert some effort-toward-marketing within the movie script itself. And they did something which I think is extraordinarily clever. Yes, they tossed in political commentary, but that’s not clever, it’s done all the time now. But what political commentary? It’s a matter of opinion. Purely. People see what they want to see. So tighty-righties who want to make it a felony to have sex in the wrong position or use the “F-word” in public and want to bomb every country that isn’t Christian, think Star Wars endorses all their ideas, and lefty-loosies who want to spit on soldiers and butcher babies and pay criminals money to not misbehave, are quite sure Star Wars agrees with them.

The latter of those two, the Bush-bashing liberals who want to blame our President for freaking hurricanes, have been much louder in the forums where people try to figure out Star Wars’ political leanings. This is because you have to do a lot less thinking in order to divine their perspective from the movie script itself, and boy howdy, liberals are very good at not doing much thinking. The scene in which they find support for their position, comes a half-hour before the end of the film. in this scene protagonist-and-antagonist face off for the final climactic duel over a river of deadly lava:

Anakin Skywalker (bad guy): If you’re not with me, then you are my enemy.

Obi-Wan Kenobi (good guy): Only a Sith deals in absolutes. I will do what I must.

Skywalker: You will try…YEEEAAARRRGGGGHHH!

There you go. In just two lines the bad guy as-much-as directly quotes not only President George Bush, but also Howard Dean, current Chairman of the Democratic party. So the movie is saying quite plainly that President Bush is nuts.

No, that’s not the liberal argument, because of course in liberal-land you can’t slander anything that’s liberal even when it cries out for slamming like Chairman Dean has been doing for two years straight now. They’re just saying that the bad guy here is a metaphor for President Bush’s statement in November of 2001 that “You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror.” So it’s settled. Star Wars movies don’t like President Bush, and neither should the rest of us.

Okay, point made.

First sign of trouble for that paradigm, is this perplexing question: If the Star Wars stands as a saga lecturing us on the various problems with moral absolutism, how long does this lecture stand? And the answer is, about eleven minutes. Yeah, that’s right. Put the DVD back in the player and watch the movie again…aforementioned good-guy-and-bad-guy are fighting real hard, this time floating down the lava river on some kind of whatchamecallzem hovering platform thingies, and it goes like this.

Skywalker (bad guy, remember): I should have known the Jedi were taking over!

Kenobi (good guy) (exasperated): Anakin! Chancellor Palpatine is evil! (Like, duh! C’mon!)

Skywalker: From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!

Oopsie. Good guy stands for absolutes, bad guy stands for moral relativism. Just like the Republicans keep telling us.

I pointed this out already, back in November when the movie first came out on disc. To be fair about it, the Star Wars saga is indeed trying to say something philosophically deep about moral relativism, and the message is a lot more complicated than “it sucks”. There are passages in the older movies that appear to endorse the moral relativism, or at least to imply that this is the way the universe works and it would serve us well to simply adapt to it.

But it’s obvious that, assuming we’re inclined to take our moral and political lectures from Star Wars, the franchise would caution us from getting too cozy with relativism. Indeed, in the newest chapter referenced above, about an hour earlier in the film, the head, top-notch, Godfather, big-master-honcho bad guy, whose job it is to represent evil itself, actually comes out and says “Good and evil is a point of view.” You can’t get plainer than that. Evil works to seduce us by whitewashing over its own definition, causing us to doubt its existence and thus to question our wanderings into its perimeter. People have been saying this for thousands of years.

Well, enough of that rant, it’s been done before. Pull up Google and ask the “innernets” how we’re supposed to interpret “only a Sith deals in absolutes.” Opinions here are cheap. The web is fairly dripping with them.

But this one is worthy of special recognition, I think. I find the reasoning to be unsually sound.

…nowhere is this parallel alleged to be seen more than in Obi-Wan’s response to Anakin’s earlier statement – “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.” Really?

And the Jedi don’t?

Why then must Anakin hide his marriage to Padme if the Jedi do not make absolute moral judgments on the character of their numbers?

Why then is it not the Jedi way to kill an unarmed prisoner?

What then does “The Chancellor is evil!” mean? Is that not an absolute moral judgment?

If the Jedi do not deal in absolutes, then what is Obi-Wan doing on Mustafar in the first place?

Things that make you go hmmmmm…

This kind of logic is solid because it supports an abundance of parallels to real life. How many times have I seen a liberal lecture everyone around him that nobody is deserving of hatred and nobody’s outlook on life or religion is absolutely wrong…and then go on to direct hatred toward Republicans, and wax eloquently about how Christianity is absolutely wrong. Not that liberals have a monopoly in that kind of hypocrisy. It just goes to show that to a weak mind, it’s easy to say “you shouldn’t be putting out negative energy, man,” and then go on to put out negative energy in certain directions where it’s somehow okay to put it out.

Thing I Know #30. A lot of people who crusade against absolutes, employ absolutes quite frequently, especially while crusading against absolutes.

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