Welcome back to Arcana ad Mortem, where we go really in depth on something that doesn’t matter too much (but might be extremely fascinating nonetheless!).
This past year, I got the chance to watch all 6 of the Lucas-era Star Wars films with a friend who had never seen them before, nor had she been exposed through video games or friends. (She didn’t even know who Luke’s father was — more on that later.) I made the unconventional decision to begin our journey with The Phantom Menace and proceed in numerical order, because I knew that the faster pace of the prequels would appeal to my friend’s heavily Marvel-influenced moviegoing sensibilities. It turns out it was a good decision; she was completely hooked by the time Podracers roared across our screen.
Is there a lesson here for the way we fans should evangelize Star Wars to modern audiences? I think so. But more importantly, I’d prefer to discuss the fresh perspectives that a “canonical” viewing brought me, a seasoned Star Wars veteran.
“From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!”
Typically, when I watch Revenge of the Sith on its own, I see Anakin’s fall to the dark side as more of a farce than a tragedy. I’ll admit it’s an easy conclusion, given the stiffly written dialogue of the prequels (although I’d remind the cynic before they feel too vindicated that “I was going to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters!” isn’t exactly Oscar-worthy, either). But boy, has my opinion changed by watching the series in canonical order. Now I don’t just feel for Anakin — I see dude’s got a point. In fact, when Anakin tells Obi-Wan, “From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!”, I kinda agree with him…
Setting Expectations
Let’s start from the beginning. The Phantom Menace operates a lot like the opening monologue of Hamlet, where it doesn’t explicitly connect to the rest of the saga, but it does set the stage and establish the backdrop of the impending drama. As soon as the opening crawl, we learn that the Jedi are a sect of Force-users who are the Chancellor’s ambassadors negotiating a trade settlement.
But these Jedi are very different than our image of old Ben Kenobi led us to think — rather than being the “guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy”, they spend their time in internal squabbles (“the boy is too old to begin the training”) and in seeking to quantify the unquantifiable Force (midi-chlorians, anybody? even Master Yoda has subscribed to an over-scientific, demystified view of the Force, and is not in touch with the “living Force”, as Qui-Gon calls it). Even worse, the Jedi punish differing views like Qui-Gon’s by hindering those dissenters from achieving any recognition within the Order (as Obi-Wan hints at when he pleads with Qui-Gon that “you could be sitting on the Council by now if you would only follow the code”).
Phantom doesn’t just tell us about the Jedi, though. The audience learns that the Senate (including its current Chancellor, Valorum) is completely powerless to stop the shenanigans of the greedy Trade Federation (this is why Queen Amidala goes back to Naboo, because her people’s fate is being debated in a committee). Slavery still exists in the Outer Rim, despite the Republic outlawing the practice. That’s the state of the galaxy that young Anakin Skywalker is initiated into — a galaxy characterized by corrupt bureaucrats, inept politicians, and a Jedi Order so concerned with doctrinal purity that they somehow missed that their sworn enemies the Sith were at large in the galaxy.
Peacetime Hubris
This is the status quo that Attack of the Clones continues and deepens. The galaxy has gotten so bad that a group of Separatists led by Count Dooku are building an army in secret. The Jedi, meanwhile, including Anakin and Obi-Wan, continue their prosaic lives as bodyguards for politicians. Obi-Wan stumbles upon the hidden planet of Kamino by accident, and learns of the existence of “the Grand Army of the Republic” (GAR), a clone army commissioned by none other than a paranoid Jedi Master named Sifo-Dyas. (Astute viewers will recognize, though, that Dooku has killed Sifo-Dyas and taken over the project.)
When Obi-Wan proceeds to investigate further, he’s captured by Dooku, who tells him, truthfully, that the Republic is under control of a Sith Lord (which is true! but Obi-Wan doesn’t believe him). At this point, the Jedi are so surrounded by deception, so blinded by peacetime hubris, that they cannot perceive the truth of the Sith, nor the lie of their clone army. Episode II ends in a barrage of laserfire as the galaxy erupts into war and the Jedi take up their place as generals of the GAR.
So far, so typical action movie. But Lucas does a good job of seeding dialog throughout Attack that illustrates the beginnings of the Jedi Order’s failure. For example, Jedi Master Mace Windu begins Attack by telling Chancellor Palpatine that “we [Jedi] are keepers of the peace, not soldiers”, and yet in a little under an hour, he’s lopping heads and taking names at the head of a platoon of clone troopers! The moral foundations of the Jedi Order begin to crumble at this moment, I think, as they take up arms for the Republic rather than preserving peace and justice.
Hypocrites on Both Sides
And it only gets worse during the Clone Wars. I’d recommend watching the entire TV series if you get a chance, but here I’ll specifically reference the book Dark Disciple, in which the Jedi Order decides that the only way to end the war is to assassinate Count Dooku. This unorthodox method is almost certainly against the Jedi Code’s stricture on nonviolence (as Yoda says in Empire, “A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack”), but what is unambiguously wrong is that their chosen assassin is a Jedi named Quinlan Vos. The Council tells Vos to literally turn to the dark side in order to gain Dooku’s trust and then kill him. (Vos fails, because he still retains enough of his morality to know that the dark side is the worst.)
Oh yeah, there’s also the whole thing about Jedi leading cloned humans into war zones, despite nominally following a way that respects all life. Suffice it to say that the Clone Wars strips away the civilized veneer of the Jedi, exposing an Order whose foundational principles are completely compromised.
By the time we get to Revenge of the Sith, the Jedi are not just generals, but they have become attached to political power. Again, Mace Windu represents the worst of the Jedi in this regard. First, he appoints Anakin to the Jedi Council, but only so that Anakin can spy on the democratically elected Chancellor. (Sure, the audience knows that Palpatine is really the Sith Lord, but no one in the Jedi Order does, so in-universe this is just blatant political espionage.)
Later, after another Jedi says concerning the Chancellor, “if the Chancellor doesn’t give up his emergency powers after [the last Separatist general] is destroyed, he should be removed from office”, Windu replies that the Jedi would then need to “take control of the Senate” so that they could replace corrupt Senators. THAT IS LITERALLY A COUP, Y’ALL. No wonder Palpatine spun the Jedi Purge as the natural consequences of Jedi treachery — because that’s what it very nearly was!
If some of you aren’t yet on board with this reading of Revenge, it’s likely because you’re thinking to yourself that Windu was right — Palpatine was in fact a Sith Lord and, once the Jedi were gone, instituted tyrannical rule over the galaxy for decades. But the reason it was so easy for Palpatine to assume absolute power was that the Jedi abused theirs, going outside the due process of the law. We see this explicitly, when Windu raises his saber to kill Palpatine in Revenge, saying “he’s too dangerous to be kept alive!”
“I have brought peace to my new empire!”
So when Anakin raises his saber in defense of Palpatine, it is too simplistic to say that he acts solely out of a selfish curdled love for his wife Padme — Anakin also sees deep corruption in the Jedi Order, a corruption that turned peacekeepers into soldiers and monks into executioners. The Jedi Order that Anakin overthrows is an Order that has failed to bring the galaxy peace, has failed to dignify life in all its forms, and was so jealous of its power that it would seize control of the entire Republic to keep it.
Of course, we know how Revenge ends — Anakin is enslaved by Palpatine just as he was manipulated by the Jedi Council. Once he suffers his defeat at Obi-Wan’s hand, he is utterly friendless and dependent on a cruel Master of the dark side. It is a tragic fate, all the more sorrowful because in some ways, Anakin was right that the Order was corrupt! Watching Star Wars in canonical order helped me realize that.
And it also helped me contextualize the actions of old Ben Kenobi and Yoda in the original trilogy. No wonder Yoda and Ben are hermits — they had some soul-searching to do. It’s clear that these characters have changed a lot since their time as Jedi generals, as if they learned too late the lesson that Anakin knew ever since he was a boy — Jedi knights are guardians of peace and justice, not soldiers. Ben and Yoda learn this lesson well, and teach it to Luke, who redeems his father, not through prowess with a lightsaber, but by casting aside the pursuit of power once and for all. It is then that father and son finally achieve peace.