In recent years, the Star
Wars’ franchise has happily revealed itself as a faith-finding exercise for
many pop culture enthusiasts. But this was not always the case. As a child of
the ‘80s, the spiritual signposts that helped give meaning to my own world in
the Catholic Church did not translate favorably to pop culture expressions,
where Star Wars, with its aberrant talk of holistic oneness with an unseen
power, disrupted the frailty of my theological speculations, which were limited
to Sunday sermons about personal and individual relationship with God.
As I grew older and
developed an interest in theology and the religions of the world, I enjoyed the
theoretical application of faith-dialogue concerning movies like Star Wars.
From time to time, I would run across an article claiming George Lucas’ vision
of Star Wars came from his Buddhist convictions, later only to read that no
such conviction existed. But it did get me thinking. Was there a religious
vision here that burrowed its way into the world created by Lucas and continued
with J.J. Abrams and should such a vision include the prequels as well? Then I read Marc Barnes’ article “Rogue One and
the Return of Reverence,” and it got me thinking again. What became clear was
that Barnes suffers no love loss for the prequels, as if Lucas inhabited two
different worlds, never once thinking between stories, and this quickly became
a problem for me.
One of Barnes’
strongest criticisms is the idea that the prequels were the manifestation of a
world grown weary of the Force. In blaming the crass, mechanization of the Force
on the move from its mystical basis in the first movies to its more immanent presence
in the prequels, Barnes, like others before him, challenges a coherent
narrative—and I suppose one could justifiably argue that part of a perceived
breakdown in spiritual decorum would have to do with the same problem already recognized
by other pop culture critics; namely, the massive failure of the prequels in
general to win over audiences. What the original movies and now the new movies,
however, share in common is their reverence for a picture of the world, cleared
of wrongdoing, that has lost its roots and must reclaim a kind of neo-orthodox
Force that can only be found through the fog of veiled and often cryptic
references. It’s enough to make a Barthian blush, resonating with the echoes of
C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra.
For Barnes, the
problem rests in the disconnect between the application of the Force as a mystical
power and its once-rife, even obnoxious, presence in the world. Yet this
presence, one might protest is what is really at stake here. The problem however
is that no one really knows what the Force is. Only when one accepts the idea
of the Force does the function of myth-making project itself into the world as
a spiritual experience, including all the various ways those individuals
claiming the Force reshape themselves around what they do not know. If anyone
embodies this in Rogue One, it is the
character of Chirrut Îmwe, who Barnes regards as a true adherent of the Force,
but who only approximates a concept of the Force (even his staff is meant to
mimic the elegant features of a lightsaber), not knowing entirely what it is
even while making his own unique attempts to put it into practice, a question
that largely remains open as to its success. This point is made brilliantly in
one scene in which he thinks himself protected by the Force while his partner Baze
Malbus helps provide cover fire. Where Barnes sees prayers, I see the
repetition of mantras that focus the mind.
The dilemma we face is
that what Lucas would like us to accept is that the Force was defined in the
articulation of the community in the prequels. Everything runs the gamut from
bad (the dark side) to less-than-ideal (the post-purge Jedi). Under such
conditions, Luke Skywalker’s eye of faith, as Barnes calls it, should be no
different than Finn’s over-zealous attitude for which he is rebuked by Han Solo
in his best Aquinian imitation, who only tells him what the Force is not. The
same is true if we compare Rey’s way to the Force, found largely on her own and
coaxed by non-practitioners, to Luke’s way. If action is an indication of
intention, we only know that Lucas intended the prequels and willed them into
existence. It is left to us either to make attempts at understanding or
rejecting them. Unlike Barnes who rejects them, I think a more traditionally Eastern
approach largely structures the content better to answer our most pressing
questions about the Force, for instance, in the idea that knowledge once known can
be lost. This is not just true in a galaxy far, far away, but also in Buddhist
canon. In the Kali Yuga tradition of Hinduism, humans individuate themselves
from the moral authority of the gods and suffer after a deterioration of spiritual
and moral wisdom. Nostalgia, not boredom as Barnes notes, is characteristic of
the prequels as Yoda speaks of Luke as the last of the Jedi even though he
encourages him to pass on what he has learned and even Luke who overlooks his
father’s past to remind the Emperor that he is a Jedi “like my father before
me.”
Within the Church, supercessionism
became the dominant feature of the Christian tradition over and against a
general knowledge of God in the world. The way Paul has been read in the Church
moving forward since the Reformation has certainly been towards a personal,
privatist view of faith, and I think this view underlies Barnes’ analysis of
the Force. Barnes’ sees the reverencing of the Force accomplished where it is
least likely to be found; namely outside the Temple walls (compare to Jesus’
rebuke of the Samaritan woman who longs for the Temple with the Jedi Temple). In such a case, Barnes’ ideal Jedi is the
epiphany-seeking Skywalker, not the communally minded Mace Windu. So too, we
realize that it is rebellion to the Force and the order under which it is
supervised that allowed Qui-Gon Jin and Obi-Wan Kenobi to set in motion a path
of destruction that brings about the victory of the Dark Side through Anakin.
Is the return to
reverence a recovery of something lost or a new experience altogether? Barnes
of course is talking primarily about the act of storytelling—an indictment of
Lucas’ own incoherence. But assuming we enter this universe as a place willing
to grant us our creative interpretations, and imagine a time when the Force was
an awe-inspiring encounter before the universe ground into boredom, what kind
of recovery are the new brand of roaming Jedi discovering? Is it partial, or
like the dark side, a corruption that cannot fully grasp the significance of
other features, one such being the community upon which it was instantiated.
Given Barnes’ criticism of the prequels, it is hard to understand how one’s
encounter of the Force does not change the very nature of the Force if the
community is essentially the channel through which the Force was practiced.
Perhaps there never was one type of encounter. For every Anakin, there is a
Yoda. For every fabled practitioner, there is a weak-minded fool with a high
midi-chlorian count.
Monastic doctrine in
Buddhism is seen as a divine order reverencing the community as the ongoing
authority and life force of the Buddha. One does not use the community but is a
part of it. Ignoring the obvious undertones of Eastern philosophy in the ideas
of oneness, samsara, or nirvana, the mandate to preserve the Jedi order and the
nostalgia that follows its destruction is a coherence Barnes does not find between
the prequels and the original movies. In the Buddhist tradition,
Buddha-knowledge (buddha-jñāna) which is
rife in the world for a time eventually gives way to its corruption, it
requires a new Buddha form to emerge (the Maitreya) in the world to recover the
wisdom which was lost and impart that vision to a new generation of followers. It
is also open, constantly shaped by the users’ own premonitions and experiences
and weaved in as a way to make a larger tapestry. Such an eschatological
framework acts as a bridge between the prequels and the original movies.
Furthermore, part of this Buddha wisdom is that the natural order is one in
which we are all a part, an idea Barnes dismisses as the secularization of the
Force. To revisit his own example, midi-chlorians
as the chemical building blocks of a Jedi’s identity are also the chemical
building blocks that exist in everything. The idea that midi-chlorians
existing at the most basic level of life need not suggest that the spirituality
of the prequels is somehow deficient to those of the latter movies.
Midi-chlorians instead are symbolic of the way the Force pervades all of
reality, and not one that was inaccessible or outside oneself. The content of
faith is not outside the individual. It is when one learns that what is outside
is also inside that the Force takes hold. One could condition his mind and body
and achieve harmony through the discipline of both—a message that suggests a
non-supra-interventionist spirituality, rather than a metaphysical faith that
appeals to a concept of mind and body that was dualistic at best. The rigors of
Eastern religions that have made their way into canon, including vocalizations,
meditative positions, and bodily contortions (asanas), all play a role in reinforcing the way the body and mind
work in harmony. Such dualisms were not
limited to material reality, but constantly became features of the prequels in
their ideological presentations. The good vs. evil dualisms of the original movies
could be problematized when suddenly complex motivations came into play in the
prequels and actions that came from seemingly bad places achieved positive
results, such as Anakin braving dangers to his own life and resisting his own
code to save Amidala.
I agree with Barnes that reverence appeals to our sense of
holiness as something that points away from the individual to the intangible.
But there is no radical transcendence in the Stars Wars universe. The Force is
always about participation in varying degrees, from the mundane to the
mystical, and even light and dark are substitutes for a language of good and
evil. In fact, without god-figures, one of the more solid parallels in Star
Wars to the act of reverencing the Force is found in the context of time. As
ways of participating in the Force, Master Yoda advises Obi-Wan to reflect on
the future. Luke tries to make real an ancient past by looking backwards to
Anakin. Obi-Wan is reminded by Qui-Gon that the present moment represents the
more difficult task. If we are presented in the prequels with feats of ease
concerning the Force to the point of making it common, there is at least an
acknowledgement by those Force wielders that even this participation is limited
if one does not mind the present. That is to say one’s reality is determined by
its perception. I think Qui-Gon is right. The real danger to reverence occurs when the past or future is revered as
some far-away thing at the expense of participating in the present. This is why
so many non-Jedi characters who “get it” can run around and say “may the Force
be with you.” It’s not an empty trope, but a safeguard against turning its
reverence into something mythical. Participating in those words in the mundane
has the opposite effect of allowing the present to pass for something familiar.
It is precisely when the Force becomes a fairy tale after it has been forgotten,
that reverence becomes open to a wide and indefinable range of expressions that
potentially risks self-negation.
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