The Radicalization of Luke Skywalker: A Jedi’s Path to Jihad
It&#x27;s 10-12 hours of pulp-grade movie. You can project a lot onto it, because in the end, there isn&#x27;t much there to either draw conclusions from, or contradict your interpretation.<p>This gets squared (or exponentiated) if you, like some people have done, decide that the films may themselves be unreliable narration. Which I think is not a useful decision, because you pretty quickly run smack up into the fact that these are just fiction anyhow in this case; the films were not written to stand up to that interpretation.<p>I think it&#x27;s particularly difficult to draw <i>any</i> sweeping conclusions because it&#x27;s not clear to me that the movie universe is written carefully enough to justify them. For every Jedi epigram, you can find a Jedi violating it, or for some epigrams, it&#x27;s hard to find anyone actually doing the thing. Jedi, for instance, repeatedly act in a way that can be described as &quot;fearful&quot;; is the Jedi proscription against fear simply referring to the brute emotion, or <i>anything</i> that can be described as fearful? Honestly, the best answer is probably that it was not written to be able to answer that. Are the Jedi &quot;hypocrites&quot;, or is the writing just too clumsy? Especially after the prequel trilogy, I can&#x27;t help but think it&#x27;s the latter. (And I do not mean that as a fashionably-snotty thing to say; I really don&#x27;t think they were well-written. But they don&#x27;t necessarily deserve the opprobrium heaped on them; they were not <i>especially</i> bad by Hollywood standards. I&#x27;d call them pretty average on that front. Most Hollywood movies are philosophically and ethically really quite mushy.)<p>One must also bear in mind that from a &quot;hard science fiction&quot; point of view, the concrete and scientifically-proved existence of &quot;The Force&quot; may change things. In our real world, I think almost everything that Yoda says is gibbering nonsense, but in his world it may be entirely true that fear inexorably and directly leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering. There&#x27;s a mechanism for it to do so that doesn&#x27;t exist in our universe, and we should <i>expect</i> that if &quot;The Force&quot; is real that it means that there are things that are perfectly true in Star Wars that aren&#x27;t true here, making it even harder to draw sweeping conclusions.<p>The conclusion I come to is that this is a fun movie series that, in the end, simply doesn&#x27;t stand up to this level of analysis, as evidenced by the fact the analyses always seem to simply be the analysis&#x27; author writing about exactly what they already believe, dressed in Star Wars trappings.