[ESSAY #3] It?s So Easy Being Evil: Star Wars and The Dark

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<ul><i>The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins.</i></ul>This is how Matthew Stover begins the third section of his “Revenge of the Sith” novelization—the section entitled, “Apocalypse.” The phrase is ominous enough, and it sets a nice, dread-filled tone. But then, the evil in “Star Wars” has always been particularly delicious—a deep, velvety blackness that allows the heroes’ deeds to shine out like blazing stars. Viewers take a shivery delight in “the dark” precisely because they want to see it wiped out. If only victories in real life were as sweet!
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<br> Any child who gets a good look at Darth Vader knows he is seeing something horrific, and therefore fascinating, but what is “the dark,” exactly? After six films, the Force remains the most enigmatic aspect of the Star Wars universe, and its dark aspect is the most mysterious of all. What does it mean to “fall to the dark side?” How is the dark “generous,” and why does it “always win?” Could we tell light from dark if we didn’t have John Williams’ film score cueing us?
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<br> There have been those who have claimed we could not. In a 2005 essay that appeared on Beliefnet, Orson Scott Card, a noted Christian fantasy and science fiction author, wrote:
<br> <ul>When the evil Palpatine says, “Good is a point of view--the Sith and the Jedi are almost the same,” we can dismiss this moral relativism as part of the deception of the dark side.
<br> But in a pivotal scene, Obi-Wan says what amounts to the same thing: “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”
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<br> Isn’t that odd? The only thing both sides agree on is that people who believe in absolute good and evil are bad! </ul>Card is not so far off; on the very first page of the “Revenge of the Sith” novelization,

 

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So really what you are saying is that darkness cannot always win. In fact darkness cannot ultimately win at all because Love Wins.

No matter how often hate and malice and deciet seem to win darkness cannot ultimately be the victor because at any point that love exists the darkness must flee.