Star Wars and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy Series) - Kevin Decker [42]
The Fate of Evil after the Overthrow of the Empire
Does the following plot-line for a Hollywood movie sound familiar? Hero emerges. Hero shows promise in battling evil, but suffers some temporary setback because of a lack of knowledge and experience. Finally, hero blossoms in a way that surpasses all hopes, and everyone—except the villain, of course—lives happily ever after. And at least for a while, we as movie-goers are lost in the possibility that we too might one day live happily ever after. That evil can be roundly defeated is an assumption driving almost every Hollywood movie (not to mention some great works of literature).
The Star Wars saga has its Hollywood ending too. We’re left with the distinct impression at the end of Return of the Jedi that the Dark Side has been vanquished by the Jedi once and for all. Not only is the Emperor overthrown, but Luke has refused to do what his father and so many others had done before him: give in to the temptation to use the Force to serve the darker side of our nature. He’s done what others could (or would) not do. The film ends with nothing less than Anakin Skywalker’s own redemption, largely inspired by Luke’s filial love and devotion. Although three of the six Star Wars films end with a victory celebration, there’s something different about the party on Endor. After all, consider who shows up: Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Anakin, complete in their other-worldly, luminescent attire.55 Without explicitly saying so, Return of the Jedi leaves the viewer with the distinct impression that “everyone lived happily ever after.”
Perhaps films that intend to entertain must have their Hollywood endings. An epic like Star Wars would seem incomplete without it. But maybe there is some deeper significance in the universal human desire—codified in the stories we choose to tell ourselves—that everything will turn out alright in the end. Although the young and selfish Han Solo can’t quite believe it, perhaps there is some “all-powerful Force controlling everything.”
Will we always be at the mercy of evil and its effects? If evil is a necessary part of reality—the “flipside” of goodness, so to speak—then the answer to this question must be “yes.” Evil will always be with us, at least as a very real possibility. The Emperor may be dead and all may seem well, but somewhere out there another Emperor-like figure is already scheming and angling for power. And there will always be plenty of Anakin Skywalkers in the world—persons of great talent and potential who could, at any moment, fall from grace and give in to the Dark Side’s temptation to believe that power is more important than moral purity. If evil has the nature envisioned by Plato and the Manichees, then the most that we can reasonably hope for are longer periods of time when the Dark Side lies dormant.
Imagine that the fall of good and the rise of evil is something inevitable—that evil is really a necessary feature of the universe. If this is the case, one might well wonder, what’s the point of fighting evil at all, if it can’t be completely defeated? Can we really be expected to fight evil without any hope of victory in the end? What’s so good (for me) about being good? Providing satisfactory answers to these questions is at least one reason philosophers such as Augustine think it’s important to defend the notion that God exists and is omnipotent. Human beings have a need to believe that everything will turn out alright in the end. Augustine’s defense of the existence of a perfectly good and all-powerful Creator is one important and influential philosophical attempt to show that the human desire for closure in the saga that is our universe is a well-founded one.
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