The Logos in a Lightsaber: Part II
Why Every Catholic Should Watch the "Star Wars" Trilogies
This post is a continuation of Nico Silva’s ongoing series, “The Logos in a Lightsaber” that began with his May 4th post on our site.
REASONS 3-4: The Importance of Family / The Temptation of Sin
A part of me wants to roll my eyes bombastically at any movie that saccharinely declares in its promotional materials that it contains a story about the importance of “family.” This is not because I’m anti-family by any stretch of the imagination, quite the contrary. No, I usually cringe because these days I don’t really know what ideas of family would really be promoted since “family” means so many things. Is it about the importance of the nuclear family? Forget that! Probably not relevant enough. More often than not, it’s about so-called “found family.” The friends we made along the way; the realization of decades of orphaned main characters in dozens of Disney classics who live to pursue their dreams without constraints of kinship, whose families are often just fussy obstacles on the way to self-actualization. And if there’s any lesson about family, it’s often that the family needs to “get with the program” of whatever the main character wants. Mulan wants to be seen as a soldier by her father, Miguel in Coco needs his family to accept his love of mariachi, King Triton needs to be okay with Ariel leaving his ocean nest for a life on shore, and Nemo’s dad needs to stop being a helicopter parent. You get the picture.
There is some semblance of archetype in all this: a hero needs to venture out of the safety of his upbringing to complete a dangerous quest. Sometimes his family holds him back for fear of the unknown and stands as a symbol of choosing to live an easy life without sacrifice. Even Our Lord said: “There is no one who has left sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel who will not receive a hundredfold…” (Mark 10-29-30). Leaving family ties is fundamental to the human longing for maturity and as Christians it’s often a price to pay for the Gospel itself.
But I think what we’ve lost in the development of this trope in cinema (if it’s even still around most days) is that family isn’t just around to “accept us” at the right time, as if the only thing to know about family is unconditional love; that they’ll come around to loving anything about you with time because Ohana means family and family means no one gets left behind. Neither is family just a restraint to be rid of. As Christians, we might have to leave our families for the sake of the Gospel, but even then we must remain grounded in a more fundamental relation to our Heavenly Father and our identity as sons and daughters of the Most High. There’s no escaping familial relationships entirely, on either side of the veil. And despite what modernity and postmodernity want us to believe about radical individuality, we cannot help but be shaped by the family we come from.
So how does Star Wars get family right when it’s fundamentally about what happens when family goes wrong? This shouldn’t be a surprise after 40+ years of Star Wars’ main plot points being pop culture and “common knowledge” at this point but if you need a SPOILER ALERT for possibly the biggest twist-reveal in cinematic history here it is.
Star Wars could’ve been another story about a hero who leaves behind his provincial life as a farmer with his aunt and uncle and never looks back. And for the first installment A New Hope, Star Wars was fated to be just that. Luke Skywalker meets some droids, scoundrel, a big furry friend, and a princess and it's this group of friends that saves the day. At this point, we are not far from the “Disney” definition of family. It’s the friends all around us, and mothers and fathers need not affect our heroes' exploits. Luke’s father is dead in A New Hope and his aunt and uncle are killed at the end of the first act, setting off Luke’s desire to let Obi-wan take him on a foolish “idealistic crusade” like his father.
The first sequel in the franchise, The Empire Strikes Back, forever changes the trajectory of the franchise’s take on family. Luke discovers his father wasn’t betrayed and murdered long ago by the villainous Darth Vader, who also killed his mentor Obi-wan in A New Hope, but was Luke’s actually real father all along. Suddenly, Luke, who had spent the entire first film wanting “to be a Jedi like [his] father,” now must confront the idea that the man he aspired to emulate fell from grace and became wicked. Luke must decide whether fear of repeating the sins of his father will dissuade him from taking responsibility for his own walk in the ways of the Force or if he can succeed where his father failed.
But Luke’s relationship to his father is not just a motivation to be better, but Luke recognizes that he is forever responsible as the son of his father to call him back to the light. He doesn’t cut off his father. He doesn’t run away from the fallen family from which he came. He sees a duty to be the one to redeem his family, particularly his father. In the last installment of the original trilogy, Return of the Jedi, Luke, in a powerful scene at the climax of the movie I will return to later, chooses to suffer willingly for the good rather than choose evil. His moment of helpless weakness becomes his glory when his father, Darth Vader, sees his son in torment, and the love of his dying son calls him from the coldness of his lust for power and compels Vader to perform his own act of self-sacrifice to save his son.
Star Wars is the family drama of the Skywalkers. The sins of the father haunt the children, but the children work together to save their father. Like Christ, who loved us “while we were yet sinners,” the Skywalker children tap into the power of unconditional love of family not just to accept their father in all his wickedness, but in a reversal of the prodigal son story, call their wayward patriarch from his vices by loving him at great cost to themselves, thus revealing and proving to him in his final moments that the inward, selfishness of the dark side will never fulfill the hearts desire more than the brilliant flame of the the light and its complete gift of self.
This is the message about family Catholics need. Not another saccharine soap-box about acceptance by or “breaking free” from one’s family ties, but a story like the original Star Wars trilogy about the duty, piety, and terrible responsibility of being not only our brother’s keeper, but even our father’s keeper. It’s a message that seems especially countercultural as the message this world keeps sending us is how stupid, obsolete, and interchangeable families are.
We need stories like the Skywalker Saga that take seriously the realities of the human condition like family, but also in another important area: the allure of sin.
In Star Wars, heroes face real temptation and evil exists. Luke has the opportunity to avenge himself upon the Emperor at the cost of tainting his soul with hatred in Return of the Jedi. Han Solo faces the choice to abandon the rebels in their moment of need by prioritizing his self-preservation and greed in A New Hope. Anakin Skywalker in the prequel trilogy is falsely offered immortality for his lover in exchange for blood of innocents. These choices offer the Catholic imagination something akin to an exercise in humility through being reminded that even the most rational calculations and the purest intentions can be corrupted. Star Wars doesn’t offer us the infallible do-gooder without flaws or the predictable anti-hero who only gets it right after a demoralizing streak of vice that makes you question if choosing the good is even realistic. It offers us the struggle with all its blood-sweat tears, fears, and grave choices. It offers us hope that flawed men and women can overcome their faults to choose the good in spite of incredibly strong temptations.
The allure of sin is thoughtfully portrayed in Star Wars. For Luke, the choice to “hate” the evil Emperor in a moment of rage is something that seems almost impossible to avoid. Sitting sinisterly on his throne, while rebel ships vainly assault the Death Star II battlestation, the Emperor tempts Luke with the opportunity to use his lightsaber in a fit of rage to slay him and replace him as the Galactic leader. The Emperor makes himself a willing victim to vent Luke’s anger upon. “Strike me down,” He taunts. “I am unarmed… The hate is swelling in you now. With each passing moment, you make yourself more of a servant to me. It is unavoidable. It is your destiny. You, like your father, are mine.” The villain narrows Luke’s perspective to consider that the “only way” to save his friends is through taking the life of the Emperor: Doing evil that good might arise; eating a forbidden fruit that divine knowledge might be seized. And thus the Emperor does us the favor of shouting the quiet part out loud regarding sin: that it always presents a false choice, one that ends up in slavery anyway.
Luke knows it was fear of loss and eventually hatred that originally made his father a slave to the Emperor. Luke “wants” revenge to be sure, but somehow he knows that this is exactly how the Emperor will take away his freedom. Therefore, Luke opts to save his friends, paradoxically, by turning the other cheek. As David refused to kill Saul, his persecutor, because he was God’s anointed, Luke defies the expectation to destroy his wicked father in a tremendous act of deference to the fourth commandment and suppresses his impulse to deploy the hatred needed to impale the Emperor dead on his throne. He forges a new path to defeat his enemies outside of the false choice. Paradoxical, sacrificial love and a complete gift of himself call out to the light still left in his father’s soul. Luke’s show of love, at reckless abandon to himself, mercifully transforms the heart of Darth Vader to disregard his own selfish good and sacrificially absorb the Emperor’s attacks on Luke until the Emperor is dead and Vader is left barely alive.
As a kid, I didn’t fully grasp what was so hard about Luke’s choice. I assumed Luke could kill the Emperor as easily as I imagine assassinating Hitler and being no less a good person for doing it. But in a striking exposition of Catholic moral theology, for Luke, the ends do not justify the means. The Jedi code forbids striking down an unarmed person and the Emperor delights in reminding Luke of that. Now, while Luke never blinks to defend himself against his own father’s lightsaber blows, throughout the climax of Return of the Jedi, he never goes on the attack except in a brief moment of passion that shocks even himself. Only defensive parries are allowed for the struggling Jedi. But the Emperor wants to change this. He wants Luke to disorder his passions, to seize the outcome Luke wants in spite of his faith in the Force. He wants Luke to eliminate his submission to Jedi code with one act of subversion, one domino that says “when principle gets in the way, I should set it aside to slake my thirst and quell my desire for want I want in the moment.” And thus sin and death will enter Luke’s Eden. Then the rest of the dominoes, the moral qualms, the ethical restraints fall in rapid succession. My childhood self couldn’t conceive how one act of revenge could mean so much to Luke, but then again, how did one fruit cause the fall of the human race? Star Wars seemed to understand this Gospel truth faster than me!
That’s sin in a nutshell. It gives us tunnel vision, disturbs the order of good things in our hearts, corrupts decision making, offers false choices, and wants to make slaves out of us through our unruly passions. I couldn’t think of a better fictional catechism for the reality of sin and temptation than Star Wars and it remains two more reasons why Catholics should give it a try.
Nico Silva is a graduate of Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, CA. He is currently based in New York City and works as a 2nd Grade public school teacher in the Bronx.
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You have explained one of the major reasons why Return of the Jedi is my personal favorite of the Star Wars movies.