Musings on the Dark Side, or Why George Lucas Shouldn't Have Gone Buddhist

I broke up with George Lucas sometime in 2004. I watched a fan-made trailer for Episode III and decided that it was right. Previous to my watching it, no matter how terrible Episodes I and II were, there was always the hope that George would resurrect his old self and do something amazing and make a great movie. But the moment the title “Episode III: A Lost Hope” flashed across the screen, I indeed lost all hope. I consider that the moment my inner child died.

That’s right. You heard me. George Lucas killed my inner child. (But don’t go looking up that fake trailer on youtube. I first encountered an edited version, and there’s definitely a far-too-long tasteless pregnancy test joke in the original cut.)

I eventually of course did see Episode III, but really only because all my friends were going opening night and Allan bought my ticket as part of my birthday present. I found the movie to be the best of the prequel trilogy, mostly because Anakin is a 2-and-a-half-dimensional character for 10 minutes in the middle of the movie. And then it all goes to pot.

You see, Anakin’s downfall is that he loves someone. (Enough to kill her, apparently, but that’s only one of the major flaws in the plotline of that movie.) So he loves his wife and fears her death above all things, but then in a fit of rage kills her because she doesn’t want to rule the galaxy? Wait? What? Suddenly the genesis of Darth Vader is an abusive husband! Gaaah!

Well, there’s that whole dark side thing, but really he wasn’t in tune with the light side of the Force because he loved her. Because the Jedi are all about non-attachment. And the Sith are all about attachment, assuming the dark and light side are opposites. This is very Buddhist sounding. And it would be interesting for a magic system if it didn’t already contradict, oh, the entire explanation of the magic system that came before it! What happened to “anger, fear, aggression, the Dark Side are they,” right Master Yoda? Suddenly the path to the dark side is about losing your Mom to Tusken raiders and not wanting your wife to die in childbirth.

Lame.

(Sidenote: The light side of the Force was never fully described in the original trilogy. That’s perhaps a post for another day—musings on the light side!)

One reason this particular blog post came about was because I read over the last few weeks two Star Wars books, Darth Bane: Path of Destruction, and Darth Bane: Rule of Two. I know it’s blasphemy to some of my nerd friends out there, but in many ways I like (some of) the Star Wars novels because they’re allowed to get more into the heads of the characters which can make lame scenes actually really psychologically interesting. And one thing I liked about these books . . . the Sith Lords were actually evil! Darth Bane actually kills all of the other Sith warriors to cull the weak and create the rule of two, where there are only two Sith at a time. One to embody the power of the dark side, the other to crave it. Eventually, the apprentice will overpower and kill the master. But not until the time is right and the master’s knowledge has been fully obtained by the apprentice. And I liked that. It was about power, yet control. Rage, yet focus. Evil, but in a non-self destructive manner. At least, not ultimately.

When I had envisioned the fall of Anakin Skywalker to Darth Vader, I had expected something more along the lines of Arthas from the WarCraft series. Arthas has to fight a relentless, never-tiring enemy of the undead scourge, and takes more and more extreme measures to save his kingdom. Eventually he becomes so lost in his search for a way to destroy them that he loses his soul and becomes that which he has been fighting against. Actually, he becomes their leader! I had expected Anakin to gradually give into his rage while fighting the clone wars. He should have been the best, most respected Jedi Knight in the galaxy, not some whiny teenage brat who never grew up. In order to be a tragic hero you need to be a hero first. You’ve clearly failed at that part when the audience largely feels like saying “will you hurry up and turn evil so you can be awesome!” George Lucas should have read Aristotle’s Poetics.

The point is there was nothing evil about his conversion. There was no giving in to rage, or losing control, or gradual anything. He was just suddenly . . . evil. Kid-killing, wife-choking, government-overthrowing, genocide-committing, planet-obliterating evil.

This is frequently a problem I’ve noticed in fiction. We always see the bad guy as the bad guy, but we rarely see how they got there. When we meet him Iago is already jealous of Othello. Lady de Winter is just a cold-hearted bitch. (I really don’t have a better word for her. Most. Evil. Female. Character. Ever.) Dexter is suffering from some serious post-traumatic stress disorder. Voldemort was always a bit odd, even as a magically precocious child.

A notable exception would be The Lord of the Rings. The One Ring tempts each character in a very personal way. Gandalf knows that he would start out using it for good, but would get addicted. Galadriel wants everybody to worship her. Boromir wants to use it to destroy Sauron, but wouldn’t stop there. Only Faramir is immune, a character so virtuous that he doesn’t give it a second thought in the books (a change I heartily disagree with in the movies). Gollum is basically an addict, and we get bits and pieces of his story, but we don’t really see the hero go dark. We are told how that could happen, but it doesn’t.

I suppose the real reason this has been bouncing around my head is for two reasons, aside from just having read the Darth Bane books. First, my friends and I are possibly considering starting an evil campaign in Dungeons and Dragons, where we would play characters of evil alignment. I’ve been doing some research on how it could be done without our characters backstabbing each other and it’s interesting to see how “evil” is defined. It’s also interesting to think of what kind of evil character I would play. I’m drawn to either some kind of cold, calculating, manipulative character, probably a dark cleric or sorcerer, or perhaps some kind of reaver, barely in control of himself and just wanting to go “Hulk Smash!” as a blackguard or something. But really, a Dungeons and Dragon character doesn’t need to have a backstory, though I will probably come up with one. He or she can just be evil.

Second, I’ve been digging up the old fantasy novels I began writing in high school. It’s a project that I’ve been working on for a long time and it seemed the right time to start up again just for fun. However, there’s a problem. I have a character, Agron, who will be a tragic hero. He starts out as one of the good guys, so talented at magic that he is given permission to study the forbidden magic arts. But he ends up being the major enemy of the other magic-users. What I have not decided on is what happens in the middle. How does he become evil? Will he be an addict? A sadist? Insane? Hubristic? A combination of all of the above? It’s a reason I’ve been avoiding writing the second novel in my planned series of seven.

What I do know is that George Lucas’s quasi-Buddhist re-interpretation of the Force for the prequel trilogy doesn’t lead to actual evil. Evil needs to actually be evil.

But how does it get there? What makes one go to the dark side? Is it actually possible to become pure evil? How did little Adolf go from being an aspiring artist to . . . Hitler? Or did he have a mental illness? What about Saddam Hussein? Hutu’s and Tutsi’s? What about the students in my love and sexuality class at Catholic U that suggested the Inquisition wasn’t all bad because at least the love was “properly ordered?” (I had a fit in class, don’t worry, and I am not suggesting the other students and professor were all pure evil.) But where do these guys come from?

P.S. There is one way for Darth Vader to redeem himself. From this year’s Comic Con (just to not end on such a downer note):