Cynthia Smith

The Force of Star Wars

19 October 2015
Essay #2

Of the relationship between the original and prequel trilogies of films, George Lucas says, "It's
like poetry. They rhyme."
In his book The Star Wars Heresies, Paul F. McDonald makes the following observation about
the film Attack of the Clones:
In A New Hope, Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke Skywalker that for a thousand generations the Jedi
Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Republic. At least before the Dark Times,
before the Sith had ascended to power once again. As it turns out, the story was rather more
complicated than the legend, with the Jedi not simply being hunted down and betrayed, but
actually allowing themselves to be subverted from within and transformed from a peacekeeping
force to a full-blown military organization.... After all, audiences' first experience with Yoda was
probably the old master on Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back solemnly instructing Luke how
'a Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.' Yet in a scene that almost
achieves a kind of cognitive dissonance, he is most emphatically leading and attacking, giving
the film its finally ironic title.
How does Attack of the Clones relate to what came before it? Is the cognitive dissonance
McDonald describes in fact a kind of poetic internal rhyme? If so, to what end? How does Attack
of the Clones' portrayal of the Jedi revisit and resonate with what we know (or thought we knew)
from the original trilogy of movies? What do you think is the larger message embedded in this
stanza of Star Wars poetry, and how does the irony described above affect or enhance it?
Star Wars is indeed like poetry, but it is of a very specific kind of poetry. In Ring
Theory: The Hidden Artistry of the Star Wars Prequels, Mike Klimo makes a very strong
argument that the poetry of Star Wars is a chiasmus (parallel structure coming to a midpoint,
then reversing itself and going back to the beginning but with differences), with The Phantom
Menace related to Return of the Jedi, Attack of the Clones related to The Empire Strikes Back,
and Revenge of the Sith related to A New Hope. (Klimo Introduction)
And George Lucas himself expanded on this theme: The two [trilogies] will beat against
each other Ones the fall, ones the redemption. (Klimo Part VI) So the prequel trilogy is
about the fall of Anakin, and the original trilogy is about his redemption. But as Klimo points

out, it is not only individuals who can follow this trajectory, but also institutions and societies.
And this is true of both the Republic and of the Jedi order. And looking at Clones in this way
helps it make sense with regards to the Jedi in terms of both the original trilogy and the other two
prequel movies as well.
Going back to the overall structure, one could say that Star Wars is about the fall and rise
of the Jedi, which brings about the prophesied balance to the force that was made so much of
in the prequels starting with Menace. But this was all foreshadowed way back when A New Hope
was first filmed. In that movie Obi-wan says, For over a thousand generations the Jedi were the
guardians of peace and justice. Before the dark times. Before the Empire. A thousand
generations of (mostly) peace is quite an impressive record. Something happened to change this
state of affairs. Since in Hope the Jedi are all but extinct, something caused the Jedi to fall.
We learn more about the Jedi in Empire where Luke encounters the ancient Jedi master
Yoda and is trained by him. Here, Yoda tells Luke that a Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and
defense, never for attack. Given that Yoda (and Obi-Wan before him) would have known that
their time to teach Luke how to be a Jedi would be limited, it is a pretty safe assumption that
anything they taught Luke would be the core of what they considered Jedi philosophy to be.
In Jedi, Lukes battle with Darth Vader ends on a particularly aggressive note he cuts
off his fathers hand. In so doing, he realizes the only way for him to not turn to the dark side in
this instance is to refuse to fight at all. This is taking Jedi philosophy as we know it to this point
to an extreme, but these are somewhat unusual circumstances as well with Luke as the last of the
Jedi at that point.
Then we come to the prequels. In Menace, Qui-gon and Obi-wan are sent to Naboo only
to negotiate a settlement between Naboo and the Trade Federation. They attack fairly
aggressively, but only after they are attacked first by battle droids. When Queen Amidala decides
to return to Naboo after a bid for quick action in the Senate fails, Qui-gon tells her, We can only
protect you. We cant fight a war for you. True, it is difficult to say who attacks first in the battle
with Darth Maul, but that is a different matter as is Darth Maul is a Sith. Also, they are protecting
the Queen by keeping the Sith busy.

So far, nothing we have seen so far in the prequels directly contradicts what we have been
told so far of Jedi philosophy. Clones is where all of this changes.
To be fair, things start off in some ways reasonably well. When discussing with
Chancellor Palpatine the problem of the Separatist movement, Master Windu says, We are
keepers of the peace, not soldiers. But even in the crawl, we are told that all is not well in the
Republic. This Separatist movement has made it difficult for the limited number of Jedi Knights
to maintain peace and order in the galaxy. This is damaging the Republic, and the Jedi Counsel
knows this. Something has to change, but what?
Then Obi-wans investigation into the assassination attempts on Senator Amidala leads
him to startling discoveries on the ocean world of Camino: supposedly the cloners there were
commissioned ten years to create an army of the republic by Jedi Master Sifo Dyas. Convenient
that Master Dyas died at about the same time. This is confused even more by his conversation
with Jango Fett, the clones original, when he says he was hired by someone named Tyrannus.
The one thing that is clear is that this clone army was not authorized by the Jedi Counsel.
It is well that the Jedi Counsel now knows about this clone army. So what do they decide
to do with it? Launch an attack against Separatist forces as soon as the Senate has given
Chancellor Palpatine emergency powers to do just that. At the same time, they send all available
Jedi ahead to rescue Obi-Wan (and Anakin and Padme) who has been captured by the
Separatists.
By the end of the Battle of Geonosis, the Jedi have attacked first and find themselves the
commanders of various segments of the clone armies.1 This is the opposite of everything we have
heard about Jedi up to this point. How did we get here? There are several factors.
The first really is the Sith. Lord Siddious, aka Chancellor Palpatine, has been
manipulating everyone and everything from the beginning of Menace. As Yoda admits to himself
in the novelization of Sith, by playing the Siths game at all, the Jedi lost. (Stover 426-428) And
all through Clones at least, the Jedi have been playing the Siths game just by becoming an army.

1 Nice parallelism here instead of Rebels evacuating Hoth, we have Separatists evacuating Geonosis.

Second, there is the Republic, which even in Menace is showing strains. By the time of Clones, it
is actively fracturing. The Jedi are worried about this maybe a bit too worried. They are the
guardians of the Republic, but their first duty should be to the Jedi code and to the Force.
Perhaps the Jedi and the Republic have become too intertwined. By subverting the Republic as
far back as Menace, this has given Palpatine an opening to subvert the Jedi as well.
Finally, though, the Jedi brought this on themselves. Obi-wan makes a telling comment
about Anakin in Clones: His abilities have made himwell arrogant. Yodas reply is even
more telling: Yes. Yes. A flaw more and more common among Jedi. Too sure of themselves they
are. Even the older, more experienced ones.
Yoda is completely right, of course. But this is also a matter of pot calling kettle. Even
back in Menace we see this arrogance during Qui-gons report on the Sith when Master Ki-Adi
says, Imposible. The Sith have been extinct for a millennia, and Master Windu agrees when he
says, I do not believe they could have returned without us knowing. These are two of the
highest ranking Jedi, both on the Jedi Counsel, and both are quite wrong.
In Clones, the situation is no better. When Obi-wan cannot find where the planet Camino
is and asks Jedi Archivist Jacasta Nu for help. When she cannot find it either, she believes this
planet must therefore not exist since everything that does exist is in the Jedi archives. It takes
younglings to find the planet for Obi-wan. Later Obi-wan doesnt believe Count Dookus claims
that the Senate are now being controlled by the Sith.2
This arrogance is almost a front. Master Windu and Master Yoda know that the Force has
become clouded, but Master Yoda insists on not informing the Senate of this. Again, it is for
good reason. The Jedi currently have enough problems to worry about. But it is both ironic and
tragic, pulling the Jedi further downward on the spiral that will lead to Order 66 in Sith.
So is what we learn about the Jedi in Clones (and Sith) dissonant with what we learned
about Jedi before? Yes. In Clones we have Jedi being soldiers and aggressors. Granted, it is for
the very best of reasons from their point of view, but it goes against the Jedi philosophy of
knowledge and defense. And that is the point. By the time Clones ends, the Jedi are not what
2 Which is supremely ironic because Count Dooku is a Sith, Darth Tyrannus, but he is also telling exactly
the truth on this point at least.

they should be anymore, and yes, we should feel uncomfortable about it. This is part of the
overarching structure of the Jedi plot a fall, and then a rise in parallel structure. If the way the
Jedi is portrayed is also in parallel, almost opposite, structure also, that is only poetic.
Bibliography
Attack of the Clones. Dir. George Lucas. 20th Century Fox, 2002. DVD
The Empire Strikes Back. Dir. Irven Kershner. 20th Century Fox, 1980. DVD.
Klimo, Mike. Ring Theory: The Hidden Artistry of the Star Wars Prequels. Star Wars Ring
Theory. October 31, 2014. http://www.starwarsringtheory.com/. Online. Retrieved October 13,
2015.
A New Hope. Dir. George Lucas. 20th Century Fox, 1977. DVD.
The Phantom Menace. Dir. George Lucas. 20th Century Fox, 2000. DVD.
Return of the Jedi. Dir. Richard Marquand. 20th Century Fox, 1983. DVD.
Revenge of the Sith. Dr. George Lucas. 20th Century Fox, 2005. DVD.
Stover, Matthew. Revenge of the Sith. New York: Del Ray Books, 2005. Print.