Only Sith Deal in Absolutes
Oh yea baby. And you thought this was just about the Force…The Latest ‘Star Wars’ Movie Is Quickly Politicized
Course, we may pause for a moment and lament the fact that our government concerns itself with the morality of movies, but hey, there’s already been tinky winky, spongebob and buster….
What would today’s ruling party think of really upsetting movies, like Hotel Rwanda? It seems they kind of ignored that one..
Oh wait…they only care about that crazy liberal media..that Rwanda movie was about some country in the other part of the world. You know, where oil doesn’t matter as much.
But Star Wars, now that’s important stuff. Let’s freak out about the only three good lines of dialogue in the movie….yea, because Americans don’t care about any important stuff.
Idiots.
May 24th, 2005 at 9:26 am
Reading the article, the thing I found sort of chilling, is the ending. The article describes Hollywood studio executives demanding that other upcoming films be scrubbed of any potentially political messages.
Who needs censors, when our corporate sponsors are censoring themselves so rigorously?
What value is any form of storytelling if it refuses to address the most interesting and challenging issues of its time? If we can’t explore our divisions even in fiction, how will we ever resolve them?
I am really frightened by the corporate dumbing down of our music, movies, news, and literature.
May 25th, 2005 at 4:42 am
I find it funny that no one I’ve seen has caught the irony of the inherent contradictory property of the statement “Only Sith deal in absolutes”. It condemns absolutes at the very moment it proclaims to be one. “ONLY Sith deal in absolutes” ONLY being the key word here. Now I’m not sure if Lucas is all that smart if he has a key protagonist unwitingly placing himself in the camp of those he’s condemning. Almost like a friend I had who would jest with others with the ironic hypocritical exclamation “You ALWAYS generalize.” Lucas is placing Ol’ Ben as an interglactic rhetorical equivalant George W. Bush, condeming, unwittingly, himself in a narrow ignorant and rash statement that ricochets faster than light bounces off a reflective surface. In all the vast preperations the man made to make sure the CGI was rendered perfectly he sure didn’t think much about fool proofing his political commentary when he decided to take a few delayed jabs at the conservative legacy from Nixon to ‘W’. But then Hollywood’s never been too hot about having intellectual political dialog. Of course why should they when demagagory is ohhh so much easier, especialy when you have the emotional string tugging power of profesional performers and special effects artists trained in the very deepest science of knee-jerk emotional/hormonal appeals rather than any thing on an intellectualy engaging/rational level.
So Lucas. Is that statement “Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suuufering!” by old Yoda not as solid an indicator as Yoda states it to be? Is Obi a rhetorical dunce or is HE a Sith Lord too? I mean with all his absolutism in that statement about ONLY the sith thinking in absolutes.
May 26th, 2005 at 2:34 pm
Patti,
I agree. Current culture is a tad bit scary. I don’t have the faith that popular media is in the business of causing the current generation to think, create, feel or read…..
I also blame the people eating it up though….
May 26th, 2005 at 2:38 pm
Leviathan,
Excellent point. I’m going to go for Obi being a rhetorical dunce, because I don’t think he gave his dialogue the level of analysis you have….Or his plot.
January 20th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
Not only was the statement out of character, it was weak, out of place, and it was a self-accusation.
“ONLY a Sith deals in absolutes”
Really? I was wondering where all the mathematicians went.
Why not simply:
“You’re talking like a Sith, Anakin!” or
“Only Sith make enemies out of friends.”
It’s because Lucas was obsessed with making political statements rather than with writing a good screenplay. It was yet another jab at Bush and his association with religious right “absolutists”. The irony is that the heroes of Lucas’ story are religious absolutists.
What Lucas really wanted to say was “Only you, Bush, and the Christian right deal in absolutes and blood-for-oil, and you all want to subject the whole universe to your capitalist moralist empire, which is why I’d really love to cut your arms and legs off and let the whole world watch you catch on fire and nearly burn to death so that you can go on living in seething agony till we can let you know that your wife is dead and we’ve kidnapped and brainwashed your two children and taught them to hate you and attack you. Ha, ha, ha, ha!”
Luckily, George ultimately recognized this as a run-on sentence.
March 4th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
God help us from Christians analyzing a movie largely based upon Buddhist thought and archetypes. Go watch Narnia. I am sure you will like that better.
May 28th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Interesting article. Were did you got all the information from…
June 4th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts.
You have a great Blog!!! I just added you to my Google News Reader.
Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
Next month I will go to Paris on Vacations and visit Europe for the first time.
Itīs my first adventure!!! I will update my blog soon!
Keep up the good work.