What Anakin's Failures Can Teach Us About Love and Faith This Holiday Season

The heavens do sometimes align. This Holiday season we are getting our first Star Wars film in ten years and judging by the reviews (I'm seeing it a few days after I write this), it is much better than the disappointing prequel trilogy. As we enjoy the action, adventure, and sci-fi fun that the Star Wars franchise brings us this Holiday season, it is also important to reflect on what makes films like the Star Wars franchise such an important part of our collective consciousness.

There are multiple examples I could cite in order to emphasize the importance of the franchise, but in accordance with the Holiday festivities, I will cite one that has prominence as we continue through the holly-jolly month of December: the fall of Anakin Skywalker.

So what do the two have in common? Anakin Skywalker's fall in Revenge of the Sith is hardly festive. The former Jedi Knight and hero slays dozens of Jedi (including children) and eventually chokes his wife and nearly kills their unborn children before being left to die near a volcano by his former best friend and master as he falls to the Dark Side. This hardly seems like it has a redeeming ethic for Holiday festivities other than good popcorn fodder for those wishing to stroll down memory lane before seeing the new movie.

Let's backtrack a little. For all of those who haven't seen the movies and for all of those needing a refresher, let's review the fall of Anakin step by step. 

So basically, Anakin Skywalker is a Jedi Knight and hero in the Clone Wars for the Galactic Republic. Early in Revenge of the Sith (the third chapter of the Star Wars franchise), Anakin and his friend Obi-Wan (also a Jedi hero) save Chancellor Palpatine from a kidnapping scheme and return him back to the capital world of Coruscant. Anakin meets with his secret wife Padme (Jedi are forbidden to marry) and learns she is pregnant. Immediately after, Anakin has a vision in which his wife dies in childbirth. Unable to let this go and unable to tell his Jedi friends, Anakin plays straight into the hands of Palpatine, who is secretly an evil Sith Lord bent on using Anakin in his galaxy-wide power play. Palpatine convinces Anakin the Dark Side is strong enough to save her and after a vicious confrontation between Palpatine and the Jedi, Anakin turns to the Dark Side in order to gain the power to save his wife. He slaughters dozens of Jedi and does Palpatine's bidding, only to strangle his wife in anger after she expresses horror over the man he's become. He becomes in Obi-Wan's words "the very thing he swore to destroy". The rest is common knowledge. He becomes Darth Vader, the man in the suit, after being deformed in a lightsaber duel with Obi-Wan.

But what exactly is Anakin's flaw? He does all of this for his wife, the only person he loves with all his heart. Is saving Padme such a bad thing? Any normal person would understand Anakin's frustrations. He can't tell the Jedi or he'll be expelled from the Order. Padme can't go to anyone else because if the relationship were to go public, their lives would be ruined. Is Lucas making a point about forbidden romance? Doubtful. The restrictions of the Jedi are draconian, probably even in the eyes of Lucas himself. A message about how love clouds our vision? I doubt that's a message Lucas wants to send to young viewers.

I think the answer to that question lies in the nature of Anakin's love itself. Throughout the film, Anakin speaks many times about wanting to save his wife, but we must take notice of the way he phrases it each time he talks about it. When Anakin first tells Padme about the vision, he says "I won't let this one become real" and in an ensuing scene yells in response to Padme promising she won't die in childbirth "No, I promise you!". Keeping in mind that Anakin also foresaw the death of his mother through a similar vision in the previous episode, it is understandable he is so concerned. However, every time he speaks of Padme, he never mentions any concern for her. Almost always, it seems like it is HIM that is the one that will be the most hurt by her dying. This is confirmed when Anakin finally collapses at Palpatine's knees after betraying the Jedi and wails "I can't live without her!".

The point is, while Anakin I'm sure deeply loves Padme, he loves her incorrectly. Anakin is a practitioner of selfish love. Padme becomes more an object than an actual person. Anakin doesn't just want to save her because she's a human being he loves, but rather he wants to save her out of his own selfish desire to keep her from leaving him. 

But why is this such a bad thing? This is where we come to the rub. Anakin has deified Padme in such a way that losing her means losing the only thing that keeps him going. Anakin has put his faith not in the things a Jedi should, but in temporary things. Even though deifying his beautiful wife does not sound like a crime, it is related to a deeper problem. The more we deify the imperfect things of life, the more we suffer when they cannot live up to our expectations. Ultimately, deifying the imperfect means that we don't love them for who they are: human beings. 

There are two things Anakin has done wrong that are important to take note of. He loves her in a way in which she cannot fulfill (as a God) and he has loved her in a way that serves him more than her. There are two types of love in the world: the love we give to God which is true deification and complete trust in perfection and the love we give to others which is unconditional despite the numerous flaws and imperfections that both they and the world present to us. Anakin subscribes to the former and ultimately ends up in a well of suffering for it.

This is the important message for you all this Holiday season. Love God with the trust and faith that we would give to anything that is perfect. Love one another with the expectation of mistakes being made, but always with the open heart to forgive them. Don't confuse the two! If we love God as we love one another, we cannot fully comprehend His greatness and we lose our faith in Him. If we love others as we love God, we ultimately will end up both causing and being caused suffering when they cannot give us the kind of gratification we expect. This goes further than just relationships too! We must acknowledge imperfection when we address material things, money, work, etc. If we deify these things, we end up being vessels of hate and anger from the suffering that we endure when these things cannot live up to the expectation only trust in The Lord can satisfy (or in Anakin's case, The Force).

So this Holiday season, we must love God with the deified love He deserves and love others with the forgiving kind of love that human beings deserve. Let us not just watch Star Wars as entertainment but take very real lessons from it. Anakin's failures serve not to condemn love, but to show us how to love properly. We all suffer from his very real problem. We all put too much faith on the worldly things and we all suffer because of it. From his fictional failures though, I feel we can learn many valuable lessons. And oh yes, may The Force be with you!!!!!

Plato's Allegory of the Cave in Contemporary Film

Philosophy. One of the most widely teased college majors and one of the most misunderstood subjects of study. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people dismiss philosophy as something confined to the wondering minds of introverts or the dusty books of stuffy, old academics. Whenever you mention Plato or Aristotle outside of a philosophy class, you're most likely to be looked at either as a hipster with very pretentious choice of reading or as a person who isn't "hip" at all. But that is where our generation is wrong. Plato and Aristotle are very hip indeed and that's because the lessons learned from their writings are applicable to a whole range of contemporary issues and art works in pop culture.

To prove this point, let's look at two pop culture movies. And let's analyze them as examples of Plato's greatest philosophical allegory: the Allegory of the Cave. So for all the millennials out there who aren't versed in Plato, the following paragraph is a short recap of what Plato's brilliant metaphor is.

The allegory involves a group of men who are bounded and are facing the wall of a cave. There is a fire behind them from which they can see the shadows of men passing them by through the cave. They assume that the shadows are the actual people themselves obviously as they have never seen anything outside of their contained angle of the world. Eventually, one man is pulled out. This man soon finds his way out of the cave and out into the world. His eyes take time to adjust to the light, so that eventually he is able to look at his reflection, his surroundings, and is eventually able to gaze at The Sun itself for a few seconds at a time. When he returns to tell his companions, they would laugh at him when he attempts to explain the real world to them and would kill him when he attempts to bring them to the outside world.

The entire story is of course Plato's way of symbolizing simultaneously the falsehoods brought about by ignorance and the philosopher's quest for truth. It is a brilliant and timeless metaphor that philosophy has only managed to write footnotes to ever since. But how does this myth that Plato developed nearly two and a half millennium ago factor into the entertainment of the 21st Century? To demonstrate the true timelessness of Plato's metaphor, I will cite two films released within the last 10 years: The Mist (2007) and Moon (2009).

Let's start with The Mist. This one is a science-fiction and horror film that fared moderately with critics and was an audience favorite, due primarily to the source material: a novel by Stephen King. The basic plot of the movie is this: a torrential thunderstorm tears into a government facility in which strange experiments are being done and inevitably an army of monsters is released which ravages a small New England town and leaves a few dozen civilians trapped in a grocery store. Of course everyone in the grocery store has no idea what is happening and their ignorance leads to some of them venturing out into the mist to their own undoing and some of them joining a radical religious sect led by the town zealot Mrs. Carmody that eventually tries to kill the main protagonists for attempting to escape.

Without any footnotes to that, you can see the parallels. The mist, in the film, is kind of like the binders in Plato's allegory. Even though indeed creatures lie in the mist that are of supernatural origin, the townspeople, in their blind ignorance reject any rational appeals to truth. They let their faulty senses and their blind vision guide them toward false beliefs. They rely not on rational thought but on their own biases, prejudices, and superstitions brought about by their cave wall perspective to form an interpretation of the events around them. The result is carnage and brutality. The film parallels Plato's myth in showing the dangers of fallacy and the prison of uninformed belief.

Another recent movie that showcases the Platonic mythology is Duncan Jones's Moon. This one deals with an astronaut who has been on a lunar station for three years providing fuel for Earth. He believes that he has a wife and kid back home he's going to return to and that he is just a temporary employee. As the film goes on, he learns he is merely a clone in a series of clones that have been manufactured by the lunar energy company that he works for. Eventually he and his replacement clone hatch an escape plan and one of them is able to get to Earth and is able to obtain justice.

Yet again, we see the perils of a man strapped down facing the cave wall. The impact of false beliefs and the problem of ignorance yet again shows its ugly face. Of course, when he discovers the truth, he has to wrangle with himself (much like the adjusting of the eyes in Plato's myth) and even resorts to violent behavior toward his replacement clone (much like what Plato implies would happen if the Prisoner attempted to free the men). In this film, just like in The Mist, we see yet again the same immortal themes that Plato was pondering in Ancient Athens: the difficulty in accepting truth, the prison of false and uninformed belief, and the trap of ignorance.

So the millennial who rejects the classical philosophy will now say: So what if the themes coincidentally appear in a few contemporary movies? It doesn't make Plato "with it". In fact, it does. The fact that Plato's examples are so clearly reiterated in popular fiction (probably without the conscious knowledge of the creators) shows how important Plato's philosophy and understanding of truth is even within the framework of 21st Century society. As we continue to live our lives in a society increasingly dominated by things spread from the cave wall such as certain sectors of social media and the endless distractions engendered by a culture too entertained for its own good, I for one, am happy that Plato's ideas pop up again and again in the schematics of new art. It's just up to those who keep Plato's teachings alive to inform the cave dwellers of this resemblance and to keep pushing the immortal lessons Plato taught out into the big wide world. Philosophy cannot die, especially not in the crazed world we live in. Good thing some filmmakers are keeping the legacy going, even if they may not be consciously aware of it!