An interesting observation re: the prequels

I had an interesting thought just now watching Infinity War again.

Namely - you're sad to see your heroes vaporized.

Revolutionary, I know.  But here is the extension of that thought.

In Episode 3, when the Jedi are literally being slaughtered en masse: betrayed by their soldiers and comrades that they fought side by side with...you, as an audience, feels...

Nothing.

No animus.  No regret.  No empathy, no pity.  You feel absolutely nothing.  Shot in the back, tossed down a cliff.  You shrug.

You feel nothing for two reasons.  One, obviously, is that the average Jedi in the prequel trilogy has as much backstory as a stormtrooper.  They're nameless, faceless, personality-less.  You don't know anything about them that could possibly cause you to relate to them in any way.  They are just extras in funny robes that happen to have glow-wands in their hands.  You spent 30 years thinking that Jedi were the baddest mofos of them all, and then the Geonosis fight disabuses you of that notion and Lucas turns them into cannon fodder.  They're running into blaster fire like infantry men in WWI facing machine guns for the first time.

And two, and more startling is: George Lucas doesn't show them doing heroic things.  He doesn't seem to have any interest in driving home the point that the extermination of the Order is a bad thing.  Or at a minimum a less worse thing than the Sith takeover of the Republic that leads to an authoritarian regime that starts building planet destroying superweapons.  

Ki-Adi Mundi, Plo Koon, Shaak Ti.  Granted Star Wars has never been about large ensemble casts.  But the Jedi High Council are apparently supposed to be the wisest, most formidable people in the entire Galaxy - they ARE the Avengers.  And not only do you not see them do amazing, heroic shit, most of them get a single line in three movies.  In three movies, the Jedi Council overtly save fewer lives than Superman did in Man of Steel, a movie notorious for Superman not really giving a crap about massive losses of life.  And they are the best of the best.  So what pathos are we supposed to muster for nameless Jedi number 217 when his number comes up and the clone troopers go "Sonny Corleone on the causeway" on his non-descript ass?

This is the nagging curiosity that has followed me about the prequel series.  Not that it is bogged down by trade disputes and diplomatic intrigue - Game of Thrones pulls that off.  But rather that, really, in a series defined by archetypes of good and evil, the prequels don't define anything very well.  You aren't really rooting for anything while watching the car crash that is Anakin in slow motion.

This curious bloodlessness in a story that is ostensibly about the downfall of a legend due to his hubris, his corruption by insidious forces and a forbidden love is not merely down to the absurd acting that Lucas settled on in his pictures.  It is also typified in three narrative decisions that mystify me even to this day whenever I should chance to see a couple of scenes here and there.

The first is obviously the problematic reality of Palpatine and Sidious being the same person.  It would have been so simple.  The story is about the Clone Wars.  What stretch of the imagination would it have been for Sidious to have cloned himself, used the Force to plant suggestions in the mind of his clone, and assiduously opened door after door, through manouever and assassination, until his puppet clone was the Supreme Chancellor?  Created the moral quandary of a person, more or less innocent, being used beyond their control, to do the bidding of evil?  How do the Jedi prove it?  Does the Clone find the will to resist?  What machinations lead to the discovery of the truth?  The compromise of the Supreme Chancellor, fighting for the soul not just of Anakin but also Palpatine, creates the emotional, ethical, practical and the Light vs Dark side conflict that opens the mind and frankly deepens the weight of the Jedi's actions.

What do we get instead?  Palpatine and Sidious are one in the same, and the Jedi are just fucking rubes.  Literally the most powerful Dark side user in the history of the Galaxy is sitting right next to them - and they are clueless.  Now you don't want to say that it runs contrary to the often self-contradictory canon represented by the Original Trilogy.  And with the inclusion of Midichlorians, Lucas basically reduces your strength in the Force to a number on a blood test - no doubt Palpatine had all those numbers altered.  But you have Palpatine saying that Luke is strong in the Force - something that he can evidently sense - so it gives the strong, if not unmistakable, impression that yeah, someone who is sensitive to the Force can sense when someone else is sensitive to the Force.  And yet Sidious is working side by side with the High Council - FOR YEARS - and they have nary an inkling?

What benefit could the insight provided by the Force be if someone that sinister, that evil as to be plotting mass executions of people, could go completely under the radar?  If that kind of hatred could be totally masked?

It raises the question why Sidious didn't just become a Jedi serial killer.  If they can't sense him or see him coming, what danger was there in doing some if not most of the dirty work himself?

The second dovetails into the first and at the same time is a separate entity.  So the Jedi are rubes.  They take custody of a clone army that happens to be available at the same time that galactic hostilities break out.  Yoda - least and most dumbass of them all - is incredulous when Obi-Wan calls the Battle of Geonosis a victory.  "Victory?!?" he says.  We're clearly being played.  The Clone Wars is part of that game.

Fine.  Lucas doesn't revisit this simple idea that this whole thing is fishy, an idea birthed literally on the first day of the Clone Wars, until Anakin tells Mace that the Sith Lord that they've been looking for since Naboo is Palpatine.

But Dave Filoni does.  Episode 10 of the 6th season of The Clone Wars, "The Lost One" finally pulls at the loose thread, when the Jedi reveal that Dooku was behind the creation of the Clone Army.  

So just mostly rubes.

But Filoni is hogtied.  The movies are still the movies.  Order 66 still has to happen. So what did the Jedi do when having ultimately discovered that their mortal enemy programmed and gifted them the army that they are trusting with their lives?

"If this was known," says Mace, "public confidence in the war effort, the Jedi, and the Republic would vanish.  There would be mass chaos."

"Cover up this discovery, we must," Yoda concludes.

Uhhh...what?

You have two armies.  One is working for your enemy.  The other was given to you by your enemy.  Mass chaos is already here.  I get that it's a different galaxy and it happened a long time ago and they've never heard of a Trojan Horse.  A gift given to you simply to destroy you when your guard is down.  But when Mace is saying that he senses a plot to destroy the Jedi in Revenge of the Sith - yet according to Filoni they already knew that they couldn't quite trust their own army...honestly, it just kinda hurts your head.

You've already lost.  The only question is how many people are going to die before you can get the target off your back.

It just seems like a small amount of thought would lead to the conclusion that if both of two options -  fight with the Clone Army or abandon the Clone Army - will lead to defeat, the only chance you have is to do something that your enemy wouldn't expect you to do.  But there's no discussion of this, no depiction of the Jedi thinking in strategic or unconventional terms even as they collectively get fitted for the noose.

Maybe its supposed to be some expression of the calcified nature of Jedi culture.  But through Lucas's insistance on characterizing the Jedi as borderline developmentally delayed and Filoni's engaged but irrational characterization, we again get this sense that the Jedi aren't allowed to have a brain.  Who is the council member that agrees that we should conceal the truth of the clones from the public but quietly look into dismantling their programming?  Who is the one who concludes that the future of the Jedi is at risk and the Younglings have to have a means of escape?

Who's the Jedi who insists that with an existential threat to the Order upon them, every Jedi has a right to know that they are at risk and what is at stake?

The Jedi are like a group of German Jews in 1940 who've been informed that the Holocaust is coming and are concerned about public support and appearances.  It's not a reflection of what the Order canonically stands for.  It's just poor characterization and poor writing, diametrically opposed to how real people would act in an equally precarious position.

You can feel the tension of this incredulity in the last lines of Filoni's 6th season, when Yoda admits that this war is probably already lost and that they have to play for a different, longer victory.  It's meant to foreshadow "A New Hope" that the Sith can't anticipate and the only victory that is left to them.  But again, if you know that a war is going to be lost by doing what you are doing, doesn't that suggest that you should do something, anything different rather than pinning your hopes to 'something that might happen years from now that I may have seen during a hallucination'?  Filoni is trying desperately to redeem the High Council in a canon that can't allow that to happen.  And in his effort to make the Jedi 'not-complete-idiots' in the Lucas vein, he causes them to be something even worse: incompetent and, effectively, accomplices in their own annihilation.

But these are mere quibbles, no?  How can they compare?  What are they - nothing, really - in comparison to maybe the least scrutinized, most unheralded decision that a Jedi has ever made on film?  A decision that has so much weight and magnitude, so much potential for the saga at large, that its insignificance to Lucas and to most Star Wars 'fans' speaks to a level of obliviousness that really spelled the death of the entire franchise to me. 

What plot point, line of dialogue or setpiece can speak more to the value of Star Wars as a cultural product than the momentousness, the ineptitude shown, the callous disregard for the decision by Qui-Gon to use the Force to determine Anakin's fate.

In a game of chance that was to decide the freedom of Anakin or his mother, Shmi, Qui-Gon Jinn - 'Grey' Jedi, wise master, & devotee of 'the Living Force' (whatever the fuck that means, honestly it sounds like something that a Jedi came up with while high on weed)...

a) allowed the die cast to roll and land on its own, leaving the outcome up to the uhhh...will of the Force?

b) accused Watto of using a loaded die, proved that he was cheating, and used the attempt at deception as a pretext to free both mother and child from the yoke of bondage?

c) decided that the will of the Force was not something that was determined by the conventions of the Jedi Council or the Senate and started a rebellion on Tattoine to crush Hutt rule, destroy the odious practice of slavery in the Galaxy for all times and serve as an iron clad indelible memory to the impressionable Anakin Skywalker of the Jedi's commitment to equality and justice?

or 

d) used the Force to roll the die in his favor to secure the release of the boy, not his mother, separating the child from the only family he'd ever known to much more easily satisfy his own selfish desire to train the boy as a Jedi as a vindication of his belief that the child was the Chosen One, to assuredly thumb his nose at the Council and their conventions of not teaching a child past a certain age, to definitely abandon his commitment of mentorship to his current padawan Obi-Wan Kenobi and without knowing, condemning Shmi Skywalker through his decision to her eventual, painful and untimely death on Tattoine which led to Anakin's start down the Dark path that would be the final precipitating factor in the annihilation of the Jedi order and the installation of a Sith Regime bent on everlasting rule resting upon the threat of ultimate mass destruction in the form of a planet destroying superweapon.

d) sounds bad...and is bad, and is the correct answer.

Did I watch the same movie as everyone else?  In what world would using the Force in such an obviously self-serving way not be a path to the Dark side?  You could say anything.  You could say that I only cheated in this hand of cards because the money that I'll make will partially go to charity.  That I only warped your mind so that I could have sex with you so that I could relieve some personal stress that I would have otherwise had to relieve by getting into a fight with someone.  You could justify anything after the fact as the lesser of some other evil.

It really isn't that hard to believe that Qui-Gon's decision, should Anakin have discovered it later on, would have, could have, should have, played a massive, believable role in his descent to evil.  Feelings of guilt that he left his mother.  Compounded by anger that his life was worth saving to the Jedi but hers apparently wasn't.  Compounded by resentment that the Jedi wouldn't let him save her himself all those years of his own training.  Compounded by fear of Padme's impending demise.  The noble Qui-Gon cheating in a game of chance that ultimately condemned his mother would be a fracture to every idea that Anakin ever had of the Jedi - they'd just be fucking hypocrites.  They didn't believe in the will of the Force; the Force was merely a tool to make their own will a reality - just like the Sith.  The only difference between them is that the Jedi tell themselves that they have good causes.  Whether Watto was himself cheating would be totally fucking irrelevant.  Anakin was led to believe that the Jedi were above that...that being a Jedi was a calling worth abandoning his mother.

You can't tell me that Sidious dropping the fact of Qui-Gon's act on Anakin wouldn't have been a plausible push.  A wedge between him and Obi-Wan who never told him, to protect the memory of his murdered master.  The shit writes itself.

But that decision, so artful, so human, so pointed (I mean, Lucas really just didn't have to put it in there) amounted to...nothing.  Not so much as a single mention of it ever again.  I just shake my head.  I thought Star Wars was supposed to be about good and evil.  How can George Lucas have no interest in whether or not that decision was right or wrong?  It's one thing to let the die fall as cast.  It's another to deny that the decision should be left up to a roll of the dice.  But to make the decision yourself?  Decide who should be free and who should remain a slave?  Decide based on which one of them is more useful to you?

I mean, I get the Jedi are dicks but...come on?!?

And so it is that, the lasting impression that modern audiences have of the Jedi Order, the bulwark against...well, fucking Death Stars, is that they were 1) kinda dicks that got what they deserved and 2) so bad that Luke Skywalker eventually warmed to the idea that they should go extinct.

A view that always made me shake my head.  Kinda like blaming the Holocaust on European Jewry.  They got outmanoevered by someone working a plan that was hundreds of years in the making.  Give Sidious some credit.

Like, okay, maybe the Jedi are dicks.  Maybe they shouldn't be fighting in wars, or condoning slavery, or accepting clone armies that appear out of nowhere or trying to be an extension of the Democratic Galactic Republic...

So by extension, it would be better if say, the Trade Federation and an endless droid army allowed part of the Republic to secede?  But um...if that massive Separtist army succeeded in seceding, who's to say that they don't take that army and just, take over the Galaxy, putting a swift end to any democratic persuasions.  Are the Jedi just supposed to sing a song and stand off to the side while that happens?  Are they not supposed to defend the status quo, if that status quo stands for some modicum of law and order and representation?

And let's say that status quo makes an uneasy alliance with the Hutts and turns a blind eye to slavery in their systems.  Are the Jedi supposed to start a war for moral reasons when the rest of the Galaxy doesn't care?

And if the Jedi are supposed to fight against the Separtists and defend the democratic status quo, are they not supposed to use a Clone Army that is waiting for their command?

And if the Jedi aren't supposed to be affiliated with the Senate and the established rule, do they fashioned themselves as outside of the rule of law?  Above it?  Are they supposed to be judge and jury, guided by the Force?

I get that they are standoffish and dicks.  But remember, Yoda is like 900 years old.  He could be the wisest person in the universe and still make the mistake of thinking he's seen it all.  Mace Windu can kill anyone in the galaxy one on one.  Why exactly should he take shit from a politician?  They can read your thoughts and your emotions.  They know when you are sleeping and they know when you are awake.  They literally have command of the forces of nature at will.

If you had those powers, you'd probably be a little bit of a dick yourself.  The real question isn't whether you'd be a dick.  The real question is whether having all that power and insight and knowledge wouldn't just cause you to see other people as so inferior that you came to the conclusion that you should be at the top of the food chain.  That it was your right to rule over all of them.

Which is exactly what the Sith think.  That the Jedi don't immediately or even eventually think and act that way makes them, frankly, fucking saints.  Actually, real saints did more questionable things with less opportunity to do them than a Jedi ever did.  That would put them a tier above saints.  

Maybe we should call that tier "laser-sword space wizard" tier.  Or, like, Jedi, or something.

Really think about it.  One - ONE - Sith Lord was able to use the Force to manueover his way to being the 'legally' elected Chancellor of the Republic.  That's what it looks like when a Force user wants to be on top and plays nice.

What could the Jedi - any Jedi or the order as a whole - do, left to their own devices, if power was their endgame?

That's the reality of the Jedi.  Superman.  Someone who has the power to rule the world spending his time saving cats from trees.  Serving as an example to others when, by all right, they should just expect everyone to bend the knee.

It would take a writer as good as George Lucas to make Luke Skywalker - a hero that defined an entire generation.  Incredibly it would also take a writer as bad as George Lucas, as derivative as JJ Abrams and as vainglorious as Rian Johnson for the entire world to be unsure whether Luke and the Order that he stands for is actually heroic.  To feel absolutely no way about a Jedi being shot in the back and shoved off a cliff.

But the mad bastard and what's left of Disney Star Wars actually pulled it off.