There is a lot of opinion and analysis written about why George Lucas wrote Star Wars Episodes I, II, & III, thereby eviscerating the story of the first three movies and ripping their iconic magic to shreds before our collective eyes. The critiques could literally fill volumes. Here is a recently published rant about the sheer wrongheadedness behind the invention of the concept of midichlorians. link
To sum up the argument, the Force went from a universally understood concept laid out in Episode IV with a few succinct lines of dialogue, (“It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.” ) to stupid and unexplainable wharrgarbl (microscopic life-forms inside the cells of all living things. Little go-betweens used by those who wish to manipulate the Force.)
Some say he wrote in the concept of midichlorians after he cast the part of young Anakin Skywalker (or miscast, if you will; I cannot help but think this choice was made in a room full of marketing executives intent on maximizing the profit of the toy sales. The actor was a jarringly too young kid of six or seven, forced to say dialogue obviously written for an adolescent or at least a pre-teen) and then had to justify the kid’s rejection by the Jedi council as being too old through the use of the midichlorian argument.
Is it possible that George was trying to rip off Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, hoping he could write Anikin as an Ender clone, brilliant, calculating, pragmatically ruthless, who believes the ends justify the means, bent on surviving at all costs? An unfortunate choice, if this was his source, as the reader of Ender’s Game can overlook Ender as a killer and still love him because Card puts you inside his mind so that you understand his unassailable innocence and know intimately how torn and conflicted Ender becomes, a thing almost impossible to communicate using the media of cinema and using young actors unable to portray the subtleties of that particular kind of angst effectively
It is hard to understand the source of the whole excruciatingly ill-conceived script of Episode I. The midichlorian concept stands out amidst all the other dreck as a sign post pointing down the track to the impending train wreck to come. Personally, I think it came about because George was faced with a truly daunting task. He had invented the ultimate bad guy in Darth Vader, bad to the bone, embracer of the Darkside, dealer of death without remorse, quintessentially evil in the beginning but watered down later to become repentant in the end, redeemed and restored to the Lightside by the love of his son. With Episodes I thru III, he needed to give Darth a backstory in which the audience could connect with the character of the young Anikin and care enough to sit through three movies knowing at the end he would be seduced by the Darkside and lose his soul.
Perhaps he couldn’t do it. I can imagine the writer’s block. George, sitting there in front of a blank screen, trying to imagine what kind of accident of luck or what series of bad choices would lead a child, firmly entrenched in the innocence of childhood, safe and secure in the Lightside, to go to a place so Dark that the Force could become a tool of death. Oh, mind you, it is not hard to imagine, because we see it every day on the nightly news, but remember, he had to keep the content innocuous enough for a PG rating.
On the other hand, perhaps the words flowed like water out of his fingertips but what ended up on paper was too close to home. Perhaps he wrote about the seduction of power and wealth and the almost sexual pleasure one got from holding people hostage with that power. It is a heady thing, having the power of life and death over those in need of one’s beneficence. George need only write about his own ascent into the halls of the powered elite of Hollywood, place a thin veil of scifi over its bones and he would have had a viable script. I am sure everything he wrote became painfully autobiographical.
Oh, it is not like the Darkside got George all at once. I am sure he could not point to any one decision and say, yeah, that was a mistake, that is when the Darkside won. In the beginning, after the original Star Wars movie, he fought to maintain his autonomy tooth and nail. He succeeded for a while. His only mistake might have been that he thought he could play with the big dogs of the Darkside and not walk away with their dung stuck to the bottom of his shoes.
Poor George. His alter ego, Luke Skywalker, never resolved the paradox, never understanding that the Lightside and the Darkside are two sides of the same coin and that one cannot exist without the other, that death is just as seductive as life, and that to truly own great power one must embrace both without reservation. Perhaps that is why Luke comes back from Jedi training with an almost sinister arrogance that George must excise with the loss of a hand. Even George could not imagine someone with all that power not being corrupted by it.
Perhaps, as he wrote Episode I, he looked in the mirror and did not like what he saw. He needed to come up with an idea that would justify what he perceived as his own failures. He needed something that would buffer him from the responsibility of his own actions. He needed a fall guy, something he could point at and say, hey, it wasn’t my fault, it was all those pesky things that I could not control. He invented a middle man. He invented the midichlorians.
With a single brush stroke, George Lucas transformed the Star Wars world from a magical place where anyone could embrace his own godhood to a universe where only the special few might control all the power, those few being the ones who were genetically endowed with the ‘right stuff’ in the shape of these unseen midichlorians. A universe full the haves and the have-nots in which the haves had justification for any abuse that might follow. Hitler would have been proud.
There is a place in Hell for those kinds of beings who justify their actions with the argument: ‘If the universe didn’t want me to do it, it would not have given me the power to do so’. Ask any man with power, why he abuses it and the universal response will be “Because I can”.
Do you not think that the purveyors of death, destruction, famine, and poverty, on some subconscious level, blame the people who are their victims? If only they had not opened the door and invited the apocalyptic horseman in, thereby becoming co-conspirators in their own demise, then I would not have needed to destroy them, they think. Is it not the common cop-out of any conman as they declaim their innocence, that one cannot con an honest man? Do you not think that Hitler, if he had lived to come to trial, would have tried to turn the tables on his victims, blaming the Jews for allowing themselves to be herded into the gas chambers?
The only time George Lucas is comfortable with portraying power is in the writing of the elder Obi Wan Kenobi in Episode IV. There he was, living out in the wastelands of Tatooine, as far from temptation as possible, using the power of the Force to open an occasional pickle jar but not much more. Powerful yet having no compunction to use that power, innately aware of the subtleties of shifting the whole universe with a thought, yet content to do nothing.
See. It is easy to think of a thing being good when its exists in a vacuum. Why do you think monks who take vows of celibacy and/or silence shut themselves up behind the cold austere walls of monasteries, far from temptation? Because the minute your will meets the will of another, conflict arises. People are like stars. We come into existence by consuming the stuff that birthed us, and then immediately set up housekeeping by clearing our personal space and organizing all the crap around us into planets and orbits and belts of debris. The violent act of will that births us sets up a series of consequences that ripple out through the Oneverse like waves in an infinite sea, rewriting the history of everything. Being alive is an act of ruthless will. There is nothing kind and gentle about it. Neither is it wrong or evil.
Perhaps it is time we as a species stopped apologizing for our inherent nature, stopped hiding behind the midichlorian veil of false innocence, and owned up to the fact that we are powerful beings whose very existence causes collateral damage. The only difference between the Lightside and the Darkside is that the Lightside owns up to the responsibilities that go with being powerful beings in a powerful universe and the Darkside invents midichlorians so they might pretend at innocence and blamelessness.
Maybe that is why we think of it as the Darkside. Where as the Lightside lives their lives in open, honest introspection, the Light of the Oneverse passing through them unhindered, those of the Darkside must operate in shadows and subterfuge, lest they look into the depths of their own souls and are destroyed by what they find there.
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