Learn From It

Sam and I went to see Revenge of the Sith tonight. It was the first movie we'd been out to in a very long time. Probably we could have picked a better re-introduction than to spend $23.00 on something like this.

I've seen postings where they claim that George Lucas was making social commentary, political current-events commentary, or even playing out a morality tale. I'd also heard that the Sith represented the godless fucks (read: people like me) out there.

Now that I've seen it, I can only ask: are you fucking kidding me with this???

<warning, it's about to get super-geeky in here. put on your propeller beanies...I've got mine on!>

The willful suspension of disbelief is always a requirement when you're about to have a sit-down and watch a scifi movie, but one also expects that the parts of said movie which are not fantastical or science-fictiony to be plausible. Take lava, for instance. Still hot enough to melt rock. Hot enough to cause woods & fabrics to burst into flame. One would think also hot enough that standing a foot away from it might make things a little toasty.

Anyway, to his credit, George Lucas does a far, far better job of meshing the “past” up with an already-known present than the Rick Berman of the Star Trek franchise ever managed. Precursors to imperial cruisers looked “the part”. The build-up to the Absolutely Sinister Vader was reasonable, if bumpy and stilted in places.

As I said, there are contingents on both sides that want to parlay this admittedly powerful cultural phenomenon into a propaganda film for their own ideologies and will stoop to new lows to retrofit their backward-ass mentalities into the film's larger statement. For instance, there's a small fraction of a human being, who goes by 'hoody', who haunts here with his comments while simultaneously banning me from commenting on his pages, who contends:

...In fact, for Sidious, there IS NO EVIL, only power to be used as the power owner sees fit, to use to accomplish his own vision of goodness.

The Jedi focus only on following the good, the truth. For them, the ends never justify the use of evil means. Sidious instead says, in short, that there either is no evil, or evil in the pursuit of what one feels is good is an OK thing. Evil means in pursuit of even a nominal good is fine. Skywalker then gets seduced (as do so many of us) by this simple yet sinister philosophy.

Darth Sidious is an MRT. For him, there are no absolute truths. Relativism is all.

For those of you not tuned in to right wing talk radio, an “MRT” is a “Moral Relativist Tyrant”, so far as I can tell. Our absolutist friend, Hoody, claims the Jedi for Jesus and Pope Panzer, while handing us liberals, us weaklings, us Sithy-boys, the Sith and the Dark Side Entire.

Really, there's better material for making the point he's clearly trying to make, but as far as I recall, there was only one line of dialog dedicated to absolutism/relativism. It was when Vader says, “If you're not my friend, you're my enemy.” To which Kenobi replies: “Only the Sith deal in absolutes.”

Really, what kind of muscle-pulls and whiplash does one get when they bend and twist as much as one must in order to make such ideological claims?

And c'mon folks. It's a crap movie, as movies go.

If you're going to claim motherhood, baseball and apple pie down from their semiotical space, honestly, pick a better movie. This one serves only itself, and does so with appropriate aplomb.

Which is to say, not very much.