PT Revenge of the Sith: Comedy and/or Tragedy?

"They have many names...Yin and Yang...push and pull...may I introduce you to the mysterious Ocean and Moon spirits?" - The Last Airbender

"Comedy." *Etymology.* "Revel." *Etymology.* "Rebel." *Etymology.* "War!"
"Tragedy." *Etymology.* "Goat." *Etymology.* "Kid!"

Aesthetically and philosophically, I believe that Revenge of the Sith may be the greatest original comic text this side of Kill Bill and The Matrix Reloaded.

What makes something comic and/or tragic? I once took and successfully passed a cultural studies/comparative literature course in college called "Comedy: Text and Theory," and the answer is...

Revenge of the Sith?!

Given everything I've learned on the subject of Comedy and the object of Revenge of the Sith, it's as if this movie was designed to teach the class. This is my personal observation. I don't think the movie ever came up. LOL.

I have access to writings/readings of/about Adorno, Bakhtin, Bergson, Buck-Morss, Chekov, Cixous, Freud, Frye, Kafka, Meredith, Moliere, Nietzsche, Nisker, Olsen, Rowe, Schiller, Stallybrass, Steinem, Sypher, etc. and I would love to have an ongoing discussion on the topic!

Where to begin? I don't know. My old notebook from the class is literally the only one I'm missing. Uh...I'll throw these terms out there via Bakhtin:

Carnivalesque
Ambivalent
Grotesque
Universal

OMG...

*CHALLENGER APPROACHING*

Darth Vader, is that you?! No, it's Michelangelo's The Last Judgment!

An example of Comedy! Darth Vader's face is a comic structure. My friend noticed this one several years ago. It even has Yoda swinging a giant spoon on a boat and Palpatine wrapped in tentacles...on a Hell!

 

this thread has gone right over my head( )....unfortunately.

 

11:11 - 11:22

MisterVader as Anakin Skywalker
Dandelo as Obi-Wan Kenobi

 

Hmmm, yes.



I like the cut of your jib.

 

Comedy as the Senate is somehow convinced a massacre on the entire Jedi order, including the children was necessary to protect the Republic and also to have someone as Emperor for life.

 

No republic in the history of the world has ever been able to justify the killing of children during wartime, especially not ones who could reasonably be portrayed as combatants. Nor has any republic ever willingly transformed itself into a dictatorship.

I'm with you on this. These are major plotholes.

 

The question is wheter The Senate knows about the deaths of those children. Because Palpatine never mentions that.

 

This kind of transition has occurred throughout history - including early Rome, Germany, Britain, and France.

 

Britain,
-------
??

when?

 

Yesterday. The bombing starts in five minutes.

 

Is this sarcasm? Virtually every republic in history has killed children and justified it - particularly the larger ones that have had more interests beyond their own borders. And several of the Axis powers (the archetypal "dictatorships") were transformed republics.

As for the OP, I can't say follow..

 

Yes, it sometimes saddens me to see such arrogance in people like us who share the privilege to live in an age with the ability to learn from past's mistakes.

Nevertheless, what about drone attacks? There are plenty of children killed by drone attacks in middle east and it's totally accepted by almost every Western government and parliament. They are considered "collateral damages" in service of "more security", which isn't too far from the Younglins' fates. Anakin obviously doesn't "want" to kill the children, but he and Sidious (and the Senate) consider it a "necessary evil" in service of more security ("civil war with no end").

I'm not intending to "judge" anyone, but it's easy to laugh at things (past or fiction) from the outside whereas it's completely different when you're in the middle of it. Questioning ourselves is more challenging than judging others.

 

Or, for a more serious answer - Britain was a Republic for a short time after the English Civil War - and then it became a dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell.

 

well that's debatable Iron Lord (the dictatorship thing) but I suppose this is not the thread for that

 

Probably not. I got the impression that "Cromwell The Military Dictator" was a pretty widely accepted description of him, even by his fans, though.

 

I got the impression that "Cromwell The Military Dictator" was a pretty widely accepted description of him
------

well, by that you are correct, yes.

So this is going way off topic isn't it?

 

The quote that first brought "republic leaders giving away their power" up:

And the response (sounded a bit sarcastic to me):

All in all I'd say that ROTS doesn't cross the line into comedy just because of Senatorial stupidity - though there are slapstick moments in it (Artoo and the super battle droids spring to mind).

 

Palpatine's hammy performance during the whole Mace sequence could be seen as comedic too

 

Am I the only one who got that The_Phantom_Calamari was being sarcastic?

Centralized state power -- without a million checks and balances -- is a cancerous configuration of the human social ethic. We all suffer under its yoke.

But some suffer more than others. Drone attacks are a particularly appalling (meaning apt/well-chosen by you) example.

As David Begor wrote in his sharp analysis of AOTC in 2002: "every democracy is part Republic and part Empire."

An axiom with chilling implications.

 

So could be his no less hammy performance in Return of the Jedi.

 

Let me try to get it back on-track!

Anakin never experiences a "downfall" like an ordinary, unchanging tragic hero.

A loss of power? Opposite!
A loss of prosperity? Opposite!
A loss of status? Opposite!

Anakin turning into Vader is a comic success story!

 

*shrug*

The eggplant toward an anomaly If the tornado defined by the customer assimilates a chain saw, then the frozen crane hibernates.