Analysis: “The Force” Revisited

I admit it, I’m one of the few who likes the Star Wars prequels more than The Force Awakens. To be clear, I firmly recognize that The Force Awakens is a better film in terms of general storytelling, dialogue, pacing, etc. But it just hasn’t ever felt like a Star Wars movie to me. Since December I’ve been struggling to put my finger on just why that is. After a while I started hating it kind of irrationally, mostly as a reaction to all the love it was receiving. Why I reacted so negatively to that, I couldn’t have told you, but it should have been a clue. I recently saw it a second time in the theater, with my Dad, and I found that it was better than I remembered, but even so, the experience didn’t leave me feeling anything in particular when the lights came up.

I have listened to others’ complaints, including Max Landis, whose arguments stoked me up but ultimately weren’t sustainable. I keep trying to explain my feelings regarding the film and keep coming up empty, which is a bitter pill for someone like me considering that I love movies, I love to write, and I love to write about movies. It’s usually not hard for me to sort out my feelings about a given film, and The Force Awakens isn’t particularly complex, so it shouldn’t be hard for me to decide what it is that puts me off about it, but the struggle has been very real. Finally I think I understand. Because if all Star Wars was to me is a fun movie, I’d probably like Episode VII quite a bit. But that’s not how I watch Star Wars, and that’s the root of my reactions not only to TFA, but to the prequels as well. In 1996, I was a student at Longwood College in Farmville, VA. I had grown up with the original Star Wars trilogy, like a lot of people, but after Return of the Jedi, Star Wars kind of went away. I never forgot it but I didn’t really revisit it, either; moving on to other things. Star Wars had become a fond memory. By the time I got to Longwood I hadn’t seen the original trilogy in more than a decade. I didn’t remember them too well but I knew the characters and the basic storyline, and I remembered how it had fired up my imagination as a kid.

“That’s good. You’ve taken your first step into a larger world.”

Through various circumstances I rediscovered the trilogy at Longwood, and fell in love with the movies all over again: just in time for the 20th anniversary and the Star Wars Trilogy Special Editions. I had been devouring Star Wars video games and novels, collecting the new line of action figures they’d begun issuing in 1995, and generally becoming a full-blown fanboy. My friend Wayne Rankin and I watched the trilogy almost religiously during our time at Longwood. I learned to quote every line.

But it was 1996 that changed it all. I took a class called “World Religions.” Listed as a philosophy class by the college, it was taught by a lady professor who was also an ordained Episcopalian Priest and a one-time Buddhist monk who had studied at a temple in Tibet. While it was just a single course, and while I remain a confirmed United Methodist, I found my thinking and spirituality broadened by this wonderful professor’s class. I read the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagavad Gita, learned about Mohammed, and Buddha, and gained a fresh understanding of my own Christian faith.

I also studied the History of Western Civilization, and Art History, which go nicely hand-in-hand as a study of the western world and the culture that drove it. Through all of these courses, I began to understand Star Wars in a whole new way. I was sitting in Western Civ, listening to the professor lecture about the fall of the Republic of Rome and the rise of Julius Caesar and the Roman Empire, when I realized that what I was hearing was also the backstory behind the Star Wars trilogy. Not that Emperor Palpatine (a not-so-surprisingly Roman-sounding name) is meant to directly correspond with Julius Caesar, but much of what he is, and much of what he does, comes directly from Caesar. He even gets (metaphorically) backstabbed by his right-hand man. Et tu, Vader?

There’s also the matter of the greatest army in the (known to them) world, and the Caesar having a secretive, elite group of soldiers as his personal bodyguard, known as the Praetorian Guard. So I understood even before George Lucas announced the Prequel Trilogy, that should he ever make them, it would be a literal Fall of Rome story, a sweeping epic about a “perfect” society crumbling with age, facing a grave threat and giving more and more emergency power to one man until he reveals his true nature. Knowing that Palpatine was a Sith Lord and that Vader was his apprentice, formerly a Jedi Knight trained by a young, headstrong Obi-Wan Kenobi (which is all information the Original Trilogy gives us), it wasn’t hard to piece together the basic framework of the story. Specific characters and situations were impossible to guess, but that was the fun of waiting for the movies.

As for the spiritual side, Lucas didn’t go into it in much depth in the original Star Wars. It wasn’t until The Empire Strikes Back where that side of the equation really deepened, and the director of that picture, Irvin Kirshner, was a Buddhist. Yoda, in the original script, was more spritely and serious, a weird little blue elf who was a difficult master and whose mood was somewhat mercurial. I suspect it was Kirshner who directed Frank Oz to take the character in a somewhat different direction, and it’s why Yoda is never again quite the same as he was in Empire. Because Irvin Kirshner’s Yoda is the Dalai Lama. He’s playful and curious, wise beyond words, in love with nature, and gravely serious about the nature of good and evil.

“Yes. A Jedi’s strength flows from the force. But beware the Dark Side. Anger, fear, aggression; the Dark Side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you, it will.”

And that’s where The Force lives. Christians often see in it a reflection of our faith, and that element is present, but the Force is intentionally something that is pretty relatable to members of any religion. The concept of the Force itself is drawn mostly from Eastern mysticism. The Qi (pronounced Chee) literally means Life Force, and is the major underlying principle in Chinese medicine and martial arts. It is defined as the vital part of any living thing. Many eastern cultures have a version of the idea, from India all the way to Pacific Islanders. Even certain western philosophies have a similar concept. What Lucas did is take that and make it a kind of superpower that is drawn from channeling the energy of all life. Many of the words Yoda speaks to Luke on Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back, especially those regarding the nature of good and evil, the surrender of your own will, and the power of faith over doubt, would be recognized by both Buddha and Christ as words of wisdom.

I’ve said it here before, but the original three Star Wars movies were always a conglomeration of genres and archetypes. The Empire is like Rome but is also in some ways like Nazi Germany. The Imperial officers look like Nazis. The word “stormtrooper” refers to a Nazi soldier. The story is part cowboy movie, part Kung Fu movie, part Arthurian legend, part swords-and-sandals epic. Why that works is because they’re all the same on a certain, deeper level. Lucas drew elements from all of them and put them together in an appealing way, and added spaceships and lasers.

Around this time, in college, I began slowly losing interest in the Star Wars books, and pretty soon the games lost their appeal, too. I was getting something out of the movies that just wasn’t present in this other stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I like lightsabers and blasters, and spaceships and wookiees. But none of that means anything. What Star Wars is to me, is thoughtful and compelling because of what’s under the hood. It’s something very, very smart, wrapped up in the trappings of something very, very dumb. That’s why big blockbusters that try to ape Star Wars always fail. They don’t see all the layers, and sure as hell don’t contain all those layers.

So when the prequels arrived, I enjoyed them. The storytelling in Episodes I-III wasn’t particularly good, but the movies did what I wanted them to do. They channeled classic cinema to tell a story about the end of the republic, and the rise to power of evil over good, because good got complacent and went to sleep at the switch. It’s political, the big bad uses economics and diversionary tactics to divide the power players and draw them right into his hands. The story may not be well-executed, but it’s well-considered. So I enjoy the films intellectually. They contain the spirituality, historical references, and layers of symbolism that I expect from Star Wars. I stumbled onto Lucas’s playbook in college and I got his vibe, even when a lot of others didn’t.

Somewhere around Episode II I quit the books altogether. All I wanted was the movies. Nothing else mattered. Then years after Episode III, Lucas sells his company to Disney and gives them outlines for episodes VII-IX. I was curious, hopeful that they’d be good, but Disney threw out Lucas’s outlines and did their own thing, and I can tell, because Lucas’s knowledge of history and his interests in art and world religions are completely absent.

Luke Skywalker, who should be the spiritual heart of the film, is entirely absent until the last moments of the film, and he doesn’t say anything or do anything. Rey is on a spiritual journey but doesn’t know it at all until late in the movie. She has no parents. Her family abandoned her on Jakku and the audience has no idea who raised her, or if she just taught herself everything. Which seems unlikely. I get that her origins are a mystery, but it feels very thin, it’s difficult to decide if this is oversight or intentional.

What spiritual journey Rey has is, like her childhood, apparently, largely unguided. She’s being led toward something, I suppose, by the Force, but the film puts Han Solo in the Qui-Gon or Obi-Wan role, a juxtaposition that is interesting but again leaves Rey without any real guidance on what the Force is or how it works. They add in Lupita Nyongo’s Maz Kanata as a wise and mysterious little figure who may remind you just a tiny bit of Yoda, but she’s little more than a barkeep who may or may not be something more. We don’t know about that, either, and Kanata seems only a little more able than Solo to speak to the true nature of the Force. Whatever Rey learns, she seems to learn instinctively. Which again, is fine except that with nobody to give voice to the lessons she’s learning, it all feels very glib.

Yes, Rey fits into the same basic Campbellian archetype as Luke or Anakin, but apart from her being good at stuff there’s not much there to make me latch onto her as a character. And don’t call me sexist, it has nothing to do with gender or I wouldn’t like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, who in the book is much more like Rey than Judy Garland. The thing is, it’s Luke Skywalker who seems modeled very much on Dorothy. Farmer who is raised by his aunt and uncle, horrible thing happens and he flies away. Throw in some Garland Dorothy too because Luke dreams of getting away from the farm.

Luke is basically every kid who ever sat on the porch and looked at the stars and wondered what was out there. He’s every kid who got sick of doing chores and resented the structure of their home life, but was actually enriched by it, even if he, or she, didn’t notice. And it’s telling that Luke, who dreamed of adventure and great deeds, had to surrender his own will to the Force in order to meet his destiny. That is a true spiritual journey. Better still, Anakin’s journey mirrors this because Anakin is called to surrender his will to the Force, and he doesn’t do it. Anakin tries to follow his own will, to control everything in his life, and that leads him to ruin. That, my friends, is also the message of most major religions, and is absolutely the message of Jesus of Nazareth. Heck, Jesus didn’t just advise it, he lived and died by it.

“You can’t stop the change, any more than you can stop the suns from setting.”

And so part of what got me about The Force Awakens is that it undoes Luke’s victory at the end of Return of the Jedi. Not just because the Dark Side is alive and kicking, and the Empire still exists, now as The First Order (shouldn’t they be the second…order…?) but philosophically. Spoilers here, but Luke met his father head-on, willing to let his dad kill him, but knowing in his heart that Anakin wouldn’t be able to go through with it. Han meets Kylo Ren head-on and Ren just kills him. If the message of Return of the Jedi was that selfless love conquers all, the message of The Force Awakens seems to be, “LOL NOPE,” and that is where I check out, honestly. Not because I think it was dramatically wrong to kill Han Solo but because it felt meaningless. Some have tried to explain to me that he was, I dunno, helping Kylo do what he thought he had to do, but that’s just wrong, because Kylo is following the dark path, and no parent, no matter how loving, ought to be supporting that. You don’t buy your kid meth just because they ask, and you don’t help them kill you or anyone else. Star Wars is about morality as viewed through the lens of faith, it just wears the clothing of a science fiction adventure story.

The good news is that this trilogy can get on track, depending on how they handle the next episode. After all, as I just got through saying, even the original trilogy waited until the second film to get into specifics about The Force. That could happen here as well. The Force Awakens just isn’t a setup that interests me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good movie. It’s just not Star Wars. It’s like the books that I quit reading a decade and a half ago. It looks a lot like Star Wars. Musically it sounds like Star Wars, and narratively it borrows story elements from existing Star Wars films. But it just… isn’t Star Wars. Not in the way that matters to me. You can have guys in black cloaks with red lightsabers marauding around, and space Nazis blowing crap up, but without the philosophical and theological underpinnings, and no clear sense of morality, it’s all just misguided fan fiction. And I outgrew fan fiction a very long time ago.