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A valid criticism. Coming from the mouth of something trying to replace it with something worse. A classic villain move.
I did enjoy the old EU Luke being a more reformist and grounded iteration of Jedi teachings. He started by rejecting Yoda’s warnings not to try and save his friends. He put friends over the high minded ideals of Jedi enlightenment right there in Empire Strikes Back. Then in ROTJ he spent the entire movie rejecting the obvious approach of simply killing Vader, instead trying to reach Anakin. Over and over Luke put people he cared about over esoteric codes.
(Remember when the original trilogy and much of the EU establishing Luke was written, the prequels and Clone Wars hadn’t been fleshed out, and Jedi were implied to be even more high minded and classical than they were shown in the prequels).
“You know what would be really interesting to do? Don’t denounce me as a Stalinist but, for example – it’s my old temptation – to rewrote Star Wars… presenting Palpatine and Darth Vader as good progressive egalitarian centralist fighting reactionary feudalist, all the Jedi bullshit. It would tell a completely different story, from the others point. What do they [Jedi] stand for? All that, ‘Republic’, what strange of Republic is when you have a Princess Leila, knights, kings and so on? No, Palpatine the Emperor and Darth Vader, they are - my god - progressive Bonapartist revolutionaries trying to get rid of the old world.”
From: Žižek on Reshooting Star Wars https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_DroaGggbc
But tbh I think that if we take the original trilogy, the Rebels are cleary fighting a reactionary imperialist power, ie. an analogy to the Vietnam war
As ive grown older i find myself disagreeing more and more with the jedi whom as a child i idolised as paragons of good. But palpatine, vader, and the empire are so many things before being “poor good revolutionaries” trying to take down the status quo simply from the good of their golden hearts. Theres always more than 2 choices people :)
Andor did a good job of not giving a shit about the Jedi and also showing how terrible the fascist empire was. The whole prison episodes were really amazing.
Tap for spoiler
And all those prisoners for some hinges in the Death Star cannon.
But tbh I think that if we take the original trilogy, the Rebels are cleary fighting a reactionary imperialist power, ie. an analogy to the Vietnam war
Lucas was very explicit that this was always the intent. It’s not reallt subtle honestly, asymmetric jungle freedom fighters fighting wealthy imperialist?
Agreed but I did sometimes wonder what the ideal galaxy would look like to the rebels? Obviously it’s a fictional world, and they wouldn’t all hypothetically agree anyway, but would it be regressive or progressive?
Disclaimer: I don’t know a lot about Star wars
I think the pre-sequel shows have done a great job of showing the New Republic as a feckless liberal state too afraid to make any actual change. They are too distracted with trying to distance themselves from the Empire with incomprehensible amounts of bureaucracy and trying to reform Imperial Agents. The New Republic is so wrapped up with appearing to be the good guys that they neglect the citizens of the galaxy amd just let everything rot.
I’m convinced that Count Dooku was a character quickly shoehorned in as a villain when the filmmakers got pushback from execs for having Jar Jar Binks as the actual Sith Lord (with Palpatine merely being the Apprentice).
Man, I really wish that all went somewhere.
Sexy padme and sexy Obi-Wan
Somewhat redeeming
I did a rewatch of the prequels just to show a friend all the Darth Jar Jar evidence that never comes to fruition. We were robbed of a better experience.
What execs? The Prequels are basically the highest budget indie film project ever. Lucas had total financial and creative control.
Not execs, read the OP. The theory is GL got scared of fan reactions to jarjar so he didn’t want to make jarjar that central.
Don’t quote the old magic to me @hyperhopper, I was there when it was written.
It’s a fun fan theory, up there with Chewie/R2 being secret leaders of the rebellion and pre-prequel theories about “what actually are the clone wars”, but it relies on George Lucas being incredibly subtle in a trilogy where every other metaphor is written on giant billboards with spotlights on them. I mean the whole thing is a setup to “Jar Jar is Snoke”.
There were similar rumors that Lucas had the entire sequel/prequel trilogies planned out at the end of RotJ from the mid 80s until the prequels came out. Down to the EU books/comics (which he famously doesn’t care about) being Lucas’ plan all along. It was just “the man” keeping him from making the movies. That the man didn’t stop him making the original Star Wars before he was an extremely famous extremely wealthy movie maker was handwaved away.
It’s the fun logic hoop fan version of “No Trump/Musk is actually playing 7D chess! What he actually meant was…”
This is why Dooku made a shitty Sith. His underlying reasons were just, but didn’t stop to think about who he was hooking up with. He’s ultimately a tragic figure of someone who meant well and fucked it up.
Sith ethos doesn’t work like that. It’s a self-centered philosophy; you gain power for the sake of doing what you please. Palatine was never going to have Dooku as an apprentice long term.
Anakin’s reasons were selfish. His relationship with Padme was always toxic, immature, and selfish. Him wanting to save her was fundamentally selfish. It wasn’t for her sake as a person apart from Anakin. That’s exactly the kind of behavior the Sith philosophy encourages.
The Council needed age limits and term limits.
Yoda’s husband Paul was investigated for insider trading because of some extremely well timed trades just prior to battles with the empire.
Damn that’s some crooked lore.
The Sith and the Empire didn’t help anyone either though, they made existence considerably worse for everyone other than a select few. They weren’t saviours or good guys, they were evil despots who sought to use lies to overthrow the existing power structure so they could fill the void with their totalitarianism.
What this meme is pointing out though is that they didn’t just use lies to overthrow the existing power structure, they also used truths.
Any complex truth can be twisted when it is overly simplified and points are selectively chosen to support the bigger lie.
Yeah the Sith here are the type of fascist regime to rise to power on the backs of a frustrated population. Pointing out all the flaws of the current system to garner support with no intention of actually making it better.
To me, the scene that most defined what the Jedi order had become and why it needed to end was at the big fight scene at the end of Attack of the Clones where Yoda and Dooku were dueling. When Dooku pulled a pillar down with the Force and then Yoda used the Force to catch it to prevent it from falling on to Obi-wan. He then made a spectacle of it by spinning it around before throwing it back at Dooku. What he should have done was just use the Force to move Obi-wan and Anakin to a safe position and continued to pursue Dooku. That scene just demonstrated how full of himself Yoda had become. And it took until his duel with Palpatine before he realized that he was a large part of what had gone wrong with the Jedi order. I also always felt that he intentionally withheld a lot of information about the Jedi order from Luke in order to prevent him from rebuilding a similar system.
I have a really hard time separating a character’s decisions and the director/cinematographer decisions
Like, did Yoda do that or did someone decide he would do that because test audiences thought it looked cooler (or something like that). I hope I conveyed that properly
I think you conveyed it excellently - not solely because it was the exact thought I had. I would have used more clumsy wording though.
Putting the right guy in power never worked historically since power corrupts. The power structure is the problem. That’s one of the core ideas of anarchism
I mean, it has worked historically, just extremely rarely. Singapore was one such recent example.
The issue is that people die and the next person usually fucks everything up again.
Anarchy has similar issues.
The real problem is just us; humans.
That’s the next core idea: power structures attract the wrong people. Take Stalin who was worse than Lenin. Lenin had benevolent ideas but got corrupted, Stalin took that position with bad intentions from the start.
Fatalism only serves the status quo.
It’s not fatalism, but fact. Humans are the real issue. We weren’t biologically evolved to deal with such large groups, along with certain other DNA quirks.
That said, with technology and/or time such a flaw could be fixed so that we either are able to overcome our biological shortcomings, and/or technology allows us to achieve structure without hierarchy while also preventing hierarchy from springing up as well.
