SH Comments
Reged: Feb 16 2004
Posts: 1056
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This thread is for comments about We Must Love One Another or Die: A Critique of Star Wars, by Athena Andreadis
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applez
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Thanks for your Critique of Star Wars ... it does lead one to automatically wonder what you thought of 'Serenity'?
Please note: "coalescent" drove me to post this. Thank you.
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Athena Andreadis
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I loved Serenity. It was what ROTS should have been at every level: dialogue, plot, character, ideas.
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Niall
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Hey, I didn't *make* you do anything. I just pointed you in this direction. And then prodded you a few times.
(Great article, by the way.)
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danperetti
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Reged: Oct 04 2005
Posts: 1
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Really great article, though I don't think it had the effect on me that you intended. It actually made me like the prequels more.
Well, perhaps your article made it possible to like the prequels more. If I forget that I have absolutely no faith in George Lucas as a storyteller and just look at the movies as you've described them, I might find that "the haunted eyes of the boy entombed within that carapace, still smoking with need and loss" in Darth Vader's mask is exactly the point. In that light, the cautionary tale becomes not a warning against "the dangers of wanting to be fully human" but a story about what happens when someone gives up on becoming fully human and instead becomes a jedi. The jedi don't give Anakin what he needs, and he becomes incapable of truly bonding with Padme, and in message boards all across the internet fans rant about how useless the jedi actually are. What if all that is precisely the point? The Republic fell because of its own flaws.
Does that made the story of Luke the story of giving the jedi the humanity they required? By throwing down his light saber at the end of Return of the Jedi, Luke reaches the emotions of Anakin that had been suppressed and twisted. Is that the point of it all? Not redemption for Darth Vader, but the cultivation in Luke of all that Vader failed to make possible? Did he fail because he was failed by others, just like Obi-Wan indicates?
Just thought I'd throw that out there. It's what your article made me think.
Thanks.
Dan
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Athena Andreadis
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Niall, Dan, I'm glad you liked the article.
Dan, my intention was not to make you dislike the prequels, but to think about their premises -- and it did.
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Valin Kenobi
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I believe danperetti is correct. In my view, one of the lessons we are supposed to draw from the self-righteous prequel Jedi is that they fell because they had become so far divorced from normal emotion and caught up in sort of an elite echo chamber separated from the rest of society.
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Anonymous
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It's interesting as well that Luke perpetually questions authority and sets off on his quest--driven by love for his friends--against the recommendation of the "old school" Yoda.
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Anonymous
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Some points that you may or may not have been intending is well-made.
"To put it succinctly..." - Relationships do tend to be hierarchical. I can't think of a single one in my life or that I observe that's not, gender notwithstanding. Even when an illusion of equality is maintained.
"Revenge of the Sith essentially asserts that submitting to the normal biological and social instincts catalyzes one's destruction and ultimately makes one subject to depthless evil." - I don't see that when I watch the films. What I see is a fairly average writer and director trying to find something so powerful that it could make a Jesus/Ghandi/Martin Luther King Junior type fall. You've clearly never been a young man :). I've seen young men give up scholarships, great jobs, and life dreams for the girl that they're in love with.
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Athena Andreadis
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The points of Valin Kenobi and Anonymous about Luke rescuing his friends, and the Jedi falling because they had become arid navel-watchers were in my mind when I wrote the article.
Regarding the comment just above my post: Although I have not been a young man, I have been a young woman and subject to all the temptations that you list, and more. The point I am trying to convey is that emotion can be fused to thinking, instead of the two being horses driving the cart in different directions. By leaving their charges unloved and unschooled in this aspect, the old Jedi invited their destruction.
As for GL being average in the two domains you name, I'm with you.
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