16

“A Certain Point of View”: Lying Jedi, Honest Sith, and the Viewers Who Love Them

SHANTI FADER

 

 

 

 

Not long after our second (or was it third?) viewing of Attack of the Clones, my boyfriend and I became involved in one of our not-uncommon debates about Lucas’s galaxy in general and the Jedi in particular. As we argued the finer points of Jedi philosophy and mindset, he commented, “Isn’t it interesting how the Jedi lie so much more than the Sith, and yet they’re supposed to be the good guys?”

Jedi enthusiast that I am, I automatically leaped to their defense—only to be stopped by the realization that he was right. The Jedi do an awful lot of lying and shading of the truth for a religious order that’s supposed to be on the side of virtue. Obi-Wan Kenobi lies to Luke about his father; Yoda misleads Luke when he arrives on Dagobah; and Mace Windu covers up the fact that the Jedi are losing their powers. By contrast, the Sith do a surprising amount of truth-telling for villains. Count Dooku tells a captive Obi-Wan flat-out that the Senate has been infiltrated by a Sith. Senator Palpatine, aka the Sith Master Darth Sidious, worms his way into power without speaking a single literal untruth.¹⁵¹ And, of course, in one of the most famous moments in Lucas’s entire epic, Darth Vader tells Luke the devastating truth that Obi-Wan had withheld.

The more I thought about it, the more it baffled me. Honesty is generally seen as a virtue (except when someone asks you “Does this make me look fat?”), and lying as a terrible, hurtful vice. Why, then, would Lucas have his Jedi lie and his Sith tell the truth? As far back as Plato and Socrates (fifth and fourth centuries B.C.), philosophers have been wrestling with the puzzle of truth and falsehood, in the process coming up with a varied and fascinating array of ideas. I certainly don’t pretend to have the answer to what truth really is, but in this chapter I’ll explore several possibilities raised by philosophers and reflected in Lucas’s intriguing paradox.

Just the Facts

The search for truth is as old as the first human being who wondered about the meaning of existence, and as modern as the movies playing in today’s multiplex. One of the primary purposes of mythology and religion is to seek the truth about our purpose in this life. “What is truth?” Pontius Pilate famously asked Jesus—and philosophy itself might be seen as an endless search for an answer to that question.

But what, exactly, is truth? On the simplest and most literal level, truth is what corresponds to the facts—to be true, a statement has to correctly represent the way things really are. I can say, “The ticket line for The Phantom Menace stretched all the way around the block.” This statement is true if the ticket line did stretch all the way around the block, and false if I’m exaggerating due to my sore feet. George Lucas envisioned the Star Wars movies, Carrie Fisher played Princess Leia, and John Williams wrote the score: these are all facts and therefore when I make these statements, what I say is true.

But is truth really this simple? I believe there’s far more to it. Factual truth is certainly necessary for a society to function. Merchants and craftspeople need to represent their products accurately if they want to keep their customers. No legal system can function without factual honesty—witnesses in court swear to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” and are punished if caught in a lie. On a more personal level, trust is one of the most important ingredients of relationships.

But telling the truth isn’t as easy as simply reporting facts, as anyone who’s had to deal with an opinionated boss, an insecure friend, or nosy in-laws can confirm. People lie for many reasons: to make themselves look better, avoid blame for something they’ve done, protect a loved one who’s fallen afoul of the law, or gain something they can’t (or won’t try to) get through honest means, among others. This is particularly true when a society’s leaders fail their people or commit a wrongful act. Those holding power are usually unwilling to relinquish it, and seldom hesitate to cover up their error. This drama manifests in Star Wars as the decline and fall of the Old Republic-era Jedi Order.

In Attack of the Clones, the Jedi have found themselves in a terribly awkward position: they’re losing their connection to the Force. The Jedi are peacekeepers, an order of religious knights not unlike the Templars of European history or the Round Table of Arthurian legend, and if it became known that their powers were fading, they would also lose the awe and respect previously accorded them. (That the Jedi are indeed viewed this way is established by the Trade Federation officials’ reaction to Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menace.) In order to carry out their duties as the “guardians of peace and justice,” they feel they’re forced (no pun intended) to break their own moral code. How long the Jedi would’ve been able to maintain this pretence is uncertain; the illusion of power seldom lasts very long with nothing to back it up. Later, we’ll examine whether or not this deception is justified; but it’s unquestionably a lie in the simplest and most straightforward sense.

Then there are the Sith. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), who was very interested in both truth and power, and enjoyed questioning traditional morality, could easily have had Palpatine in mind when he wrote:

The intellect . . . unfolds its chief powers in simulation; for this is the means by which the weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves . . . In man this art of simulation reaches its peak: here deception, flattery, lying and cheating, talking behind the back, posing, living in borrowed splendor, being masked, the disguise of convention, acting a role before others and before oneself—in short, the constant fluttering around the single flame of vanity is so much the role and the law that almost nothing is more incomprehensible than how an honest and pure urge for truth could make its appearance among men.¹⁵²

Here we begin to see that truth is not so simple. While Palpatine for the most part doesn’t tell direct falsehoods, his words are always layered with hidden meanings, most of them for the benefit of the audience members who know exactly what he’s really after. (So much of what Palpatine says in Episodes I and II seems directed at the audience, rather than his fellow characters, that I’m tempted to suspect that his Sith powers include the knowledge that he’s fictional and the ability to read ahead in the script!) The best example of this, interestingly, is his acceptance speech upon being granted “emergency powers” by the Senate in Attack of the Clones—the very speech that appears to be his most blatant lie.

“I love democracy,” Palpatine proclaims. Of course he loves it! Democracy is the tool that granted him a smooth and bloodless rise to absolute power. Just because he discards the tool when it’s no longer necessary doesn’t mean it didn’t please him while he was using it. As for his pledge to lay his power down once the crisis was resolved, clearly Palpatine wasn’t thinking of the same crisis as the rest of the Senate. As late as Return of the Jedi, Palpatine (now the Emperor) still sees threats to his power and to the Empire he rules. If he doesn’t consider his “crisis” resolved, he’s being true to the letter of his speech; and if the Senate heard something other than what Palpatine secretly believed, we in the audience know better. Like Obi-Wan, Palpatine lied only “from a certain point of view.”

“Judge Me by My Size, Do You?”

One of the pleasures I took from my first viewing of The Phantom Menace was hearing scattered horrified gasps from the audience when Queen Amidala first addresses that helpful, grayhaired man as “Palpatine.” The kindly Senator is a façade designed to deflect suspicion away from himself while he maneuvers everyone around him (including the Jedi, who really should’ve known better) into liking him, trusting him, and giving him exactly what he wants. Palpatine takes control of the Senate without personally spilling a single drop of blood because he conceals the fact that he’s really a ruthless, power-hungry, and vengeance-seeking Sith Master. The few times we see him as Darth Sidious, his face is hidden beneath a heavy hood.

Then there’s Yoda. When we first meet him neither Luke nor the audience has any idea that this comical, wizened little chatterbox could be the great Jedi Master whom Luke was sent to find. Yoda doesn’t reveal his identity, but keeps up the game until Luke figures it out on his own. How is this any different from Palpatine’s actions?

The difference can be found not in what the two characters are doing but in why—in the intention behind their actions (and of course, their ultimate consequences). The reasons behind a person’s actions can be every bit as important as the actions themselves. And while many philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), would say that lying is never defensible, others, including utilitarians, believe that there are times when lies are harmless or even beneficial, that is, when they would produce the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Nietzsche goes even further, dismissing conventional morality altogether and declaring that truth is nothing but the specific set of lies accepted by a particular society.¹⁵³

Turning briefly away from Palpatine and Yoda, we can now look at the Jedi Council’s decision to conceal the waning of their powers and ask: what was their intention? They may have honestly thought their lie served the greater good, letting them continue to act as peacekeepers and negotiators. Certainly the galaxy becomes a harsher place once the Jedi are eradicated or forced into hiding. In the end, though, however altruistic their intentions might have been, the Jedi certainly appeared to be lying to hold onto power.

Palpatine’s intentions have no such shades of grey about them. He wants to take over the Senate, overthrow the Jedi, and make himself the single, supreme ruler of the entire galaxy; he wants power for its own sake and uses deception to gain it. Yoda, on the other hand, doesn’t deceive Luke for power or personal gain (with the possible exception of Luke’s flashlight, with which he stubbornly refuses to part). His motives are similar to those of the Tibetan Lama Marpa the Translator, who misled and toyed with his would-be student Milarepa for years—demanding near-impossible physical labor and repeatedly refusing to give him instruction or initiations—before finally relenting and taking on the incredibly patient youth.¹⁵⁴ A more modern example would be the old karate master Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid, who commands his baffled student Daniel-san to perform endless chores before revealing that they were actually cleverly disguised lessons (with the side benefit of giving Mr. Miyagi a clean house and shiny cars). To understand Yoda, we need to realize that he, like Marpa and Mr. Miyagi, is playing the Trickster.

Tricksters are found in myth and story throughout the world. They’re usually wise and powerful beneath a playful or even foolish exterior. Tricksters disguise themselves and play pranks in order to test people, disrupt their preconceptions, or jolt them into a new way of thinking. Yoda’s behavior tested Luke, exposing the young man’s faults—his impatience, impulsiveness, and incomplete understanding of the Force—faults which Luke would’ve tried to hide, consciously or not, if he’d known he was facing a Jedi Master.

Yoda’s primary lesson is that in order to use the Force, one must look beyond appearances. Palpatine embodies the negative side of this lesson, with his kindly face and hidden lust for power. Yoda, powerful and enlightened beyond what his wizened exterior would suggest, embodies the positive.¹⁵⁵

Truth and the Marketplace

Truth, then, is less obvious than it initially seems. People aren’t always what they appear, and words that sound honest can be colored by hidden meanings. But this hardly explains or solves the paradox of the lying Jedi and honest Sith, particularly not in the case of Obi-Wan Kenobi, whom we first meet as a wise desert hermit and mentor figure. Why would such a person lie to Luke? From one perspective, this is a terrible act—a betrayal of young Luke’s trust, a way to manipulate him into joining the battle on the Jedi’s team. When Obi-Wan’s lie is exposed, Luke is shattered to the point of very nearly choosing death. But from another perspective, Obi-Wan wasn’t trying to manipulate Luke, but to protect him.

“You can’t handle the truth!” Jack Nicholson shouts at the climax of A Few Good Men. Not all truths are pretty or easy to face. And just as some forms of entertainment are too intense for young children, some truths are simply too much to handle for people at an early stage in their emotional and intellectual development. The Greek philosopher Socrates (470-399 B.C.) compares the seeking of truth to shopping in a marketplace: an inexperienced shopper, who can’t tell good merchandise from bad, may find herself swindled into buying food that’s spoiled, unwholesome, or even poisoned—or, like Luke’s Uncle Owen, buying a droid with a bad motivator.¹⁵⁶ Nietzsche makes the uncomfortable point that we only actually want truths that are pleasant or that help us, and we’re quite tolerant of lies that do us no harm.¹⁵⁷

The Luke that Obi-Wan meets on Tatooine is young and sheltered. He knows nothing more complex than his aunt and uncle’s farm, and sees the Jedi as perfect, shining heroes out of legend, not real people with frailties and human weakness. Obi-Wan feels that this Luke isn’t ready for the ugly truth about his father. As Socrates would put it, he doesn’t yet have the wisdom to keep that knowledge from poisoning him. Most likely, if Luke hadn’t rushed off to face Vader half-trained, he would’ve eventually learned the complete story in a gentler way. But for the time being, Obi-Wan offers the young Jedi a version of the truth that he could handle.

“Unexpected This Is, and Unfortunate”

If Obi-Wan uses a lie to protect, the Sith use truth as a weapon. Vader tells Luke the truth about his parentage at the worst possible time, and in a way that inflicts as much pain as humanly possible: truth without compassion is brutality. In Attack of the Clones, Yoda’s renegade apprentice Count Dooku picks a similarly bad situation in which to tell young Obi-Wan that a Sith has infiltrated the Senate. Dooku even echoes Vader’s dialogue as he invites the Jedi to join him, knowing that he’ll either be believed and gain an ally, or disbelieved, in which case telling the truth actually covers it up.¹⁵⁸

Neither Vader nor Dooku is telling the truth because he wants to increase anyone’s knowledge or understanding, or lead them toward a more authentic life. Instead, they both use truth in an attempt to break a Jedi’s faith in something they know and trust—in Obi-Wan’s case, the Senate, and in Luke’s case, Obi-Wan himself—and in doing so to make them question their loyalty. This, of course, works better in the case of the vulnerable, half-trained Luke. Despite his initial words of disbelief, Obi-Wan passes Dooku’s information on to the Jedi Council (where it’s largely dismissed). But even Luke doesn’t give in entirely. Though shattered in body and spirit, he lets himself drop into the abyss below Cloud City rather than join Vader.

Later, Luke returns to Dagobah, where Vader’s story is reluctantly confirmed first by a dying Yoda, then by the spirit of Obi-Wan in a dialogue that raises the question: was Obi-Wan’s lie really a lie at all? In a strictly literal sense it is—Darth Vader can’t have killed Luke’s father if he is Luke’s father. But as we’ve seen in this chapter, truth is seldom as simple as the literal facts make it seem.

Obi-Wan says, “Luke, you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” This isn’t necessarily the evasive self-justification it appears to be. It could certainly be argued, as Obi-Wan does, that the good man and Jedi who was Anakin Skywalker was destroyed when he chose the path of the Sith and became Darth Vader. Vader says as much when Luke calls him Anakin: “That name no longer has any meaning for me.” To which Luke responds, “It is the name of your true self. You’ve only forgotten.” Changing one’s name is a near-universal way to signal a new identity, dying in a metaphorical sense to one’s old self and being reborn. There’s no denying, however, that Obi-Wan didn’t originally intend Luke to understand his words in this metaphysical sense—any more than Palpatine expected the Senate to see through the layers of meaning in his acceptance speech. That intention makes it a deception even if truth was buried in his words. It also brings the virtuous Jedi Knight uncomfortably close to the wicked Sith Master, one of the shadings into grey of previously one-sided characters that helps make the Star Wars films so interesting.

The question of whether or not Obi-Wan really lied is less important than why he said what he said—his intentions. A parallel can be found in the Parable of the House on Fire, which the Buddha tells to his disciple Shariputra. A wealthy man’s house catches on fire. His children are oblivious to the fire and the danger it poses. They ignore their father’s warnings and continue to play with their toys as the house burns around them. The father finally tells his children he’s got wonderful carts outside for them, carts driven by each of their favorite animals. Delighted, the children run outside. The promised carts are not there, but in their place are carriages that carry them safely away from the fire. Buddha then asks his disciple whether or not the father in the parable is guilty of falsehood. Shariputra says no:

The elder is not guilty of falsehood, for he has only enabled his children to avoid the calamity of fire, and has thereby saved their lives . . . If that elder had not given them even so much as a single small cart, he still would not have been speaking falsely. Why? Because the elder previously had this thought, “I shall use expedients to lead my children out.”¹⁵⁹

So when deception is used to attain noble ends, to assist someone whose awareness and understanding are incomplete, it isn’t really deception. This is surprising, coming as it does from the Buddhist tradition in which one of the basic tenets is “right speech,” which includes honesty. Perhaps Shariputra overstates his case and the elder has indeed told a falsehood, but nevertheless is not “guilty” as no one would argue that lying to save an oblivious child from death is wrong.

Obi-Wan’s intentions are very much the same as those of the elder in the parable. He sees Luke in danger of falling into a life in which his spiritual potential will be squandered or corrupted, or quite possibly even losing that life before it had really begun. He sees as well that Luke is blind to that danger, so he uses “expedients” to lead the young man toward a more authentic life. Plato touches on a similar idea when he relates the story of Socrates and the “Noble Lie.”¹⁶⁰ Socrates is faced with the task of explaining to the people of his hypothetical Republic why they’ve been divided into social classes of craftspeople, guardians, and leaders. To convince them, he invents a fantastic tale of their having been formed, educated, and nurtured within the earth along with their weapons and tools, and that precious metals have been mixed into them—metals that equip each man for one specific task in life. Socrates himself acknowledges that this is a falsehood, and seems reluctant to have told it:

GLAUCON: It isn’t for nothing that you were so shy about telling your falsehood.

SOCRATES: Appropriately so.

Nevertheless, he feels, as Obi-Wan did, that it was a lie necessary for the greater good of his students. If reality fell short of Obi-Wan’s hopes, it’s as much the fault of the impatient student as of the teacher’s lie.

“Trust Your Feelings”

Truth can also mean a spiritual understanding and awareness that’s not provable by cold, hard facts. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Harrison Ford’s Dr. Jones draws a sharp line between the two when he tells a classful of adoring students that archeology is “the search for facts. Not truth.” He then directs any students who are after truth to a philosophy class down the hall. Obi-Wan’s “certain point of view” comment may sound like a bald-faced attempt to cover his former lie; Luke certainly seems to think so. It is, however, an important reminder not to cling too blindly to a literal, mechanistic truth.

According to Joseph Campbell, a mythologist who influenced Lucas, one of the central conflicts in Star Wars is that of man versus machine.¹⁶¹ The Empire, with its bland uniforms, faceless white-armored stormtroopers, a Sith Lord who’s half-robot, and of course the “technological terror” of the Death Star, represents a loss of humanity and with it the ability to see truth from any perspective other than their own—a cold, mechanistic, power-driven perspective that sees no truth beyond bare facts.¹⁶² Machines can’t see shades of meaning and are incapable of intuitive understanding; everything is black or white, right or wrong. Furthermore, by refusing to acknowledge the viewpoints of anyone but themselves, the Empire renders outsiders less than human, mere things to be exploited and conquered.

This is why the Sith are no better for their honesty. Not only is their version of truth a narrow, limited one, but they speak it only to serve their own purposes. Truth-telling for the Sith has nothing to do with increasing wisdom and understanding; it’s just another tool to help them gain power or hurt their opponents. Ironically, in speaking more literal, factual truths, they lose the higher spirit of truth—that integrity that comes when honesty is practiced for the sake of illuminating the human soul. The Jedi try to hold this integrity. When they fail, valuing power above honor, they fall from grace and are nearly eradicated. Yoda tells Luke, “A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack,” and the same could be said about truth. Even if the intention toward a higher truth sometimes fails (as it did in the case of Obi-Wan and even more so in the Old Republic Jedi), it still serves a different and more noble end. Vader’s truth brings Luke nothing but darkness; the same truth, from Yoda and Obi-Wan, brings understanding and compassion.

Luke is finally the one who must sort out these layers of truth and deceit. In Return of the Jedi, he rejects both versions of who and what his father is, and constructs his own truth—one that is at once stronger and more compassionate than either Vader’s or Obi-Wan’s truth.

The symbol of the lightsaber helps illuminate this idea. Lightsabers are one of the most striking and memorable images to come out of the Star Wars films. Obi-Wan describes them as “the weapon of a Jedi Knight,” “not as clumsy or as random as a blaster,” and “an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.” They’re futuristic high-tech swords, and the sword has long been a symbol of truth—the weapon of knights and samurai, in many cases a physical manifestation of their honor. In the Tarot, the Suite of Swords represents knowledge and the intellect, and the Ace of Swords in particular is often interpreted or even depicted outright as a blade of truth cutting through layers of deception and confusion. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” speaks of “His terrible swift sword . . . His truth is marching on.” Like truth, a sword can be used for good or evil, to protect or harm. The only difference between a Jedi’s lightsaber and that of a Sith is the blade color.

In A New Hope, Luke is given his father’s old blue-bladed lightsaber; he accepts it as willingly and unquestioningly as he accepts Obi-Wan’s story. In The Empire Strikes Back, Vader slices off the hand holding that blade, an action as harsh and brutal as the truth he then speaks. Instead of joining Vader and constructing a new lightsaber under his instruction, Luke chooses to build one on his own and (presumably) without instruction. Luke’s choice of a green blade (representing life and growth), rather than a red blade as the Sith all use (representing blood and death), is certainly not accidental.

Later, Luke confronts the spirit of Obi-Wan, who finally tells him the full story behind Anakin Skywalker’s fall and transformation. Interestingly, Luke’s response (once past his initial bitterness) is to insist that there’s good left in Vader. Obi-Wan disagrees: “He’s more machine now than man. Twisted and evil.” But Luke is through with accepting the words of others unquestioningly. Obi-Wan and Vader have given him only part of the story. The rest comes from his own intuition, the “feelings” that Jedi are told to trust above everything else.

This is the truth of the heart, a truth beyond mechanistic facts or even shades of meaning, the final step in the path Luke chose when he turned off his targeting computer on the Death Star run. Luke seeks to build his own truth, trusting what he feels above what anyone tells him, and as a symbol of this truth he builds and wields his own lightsaber. For this reason, he alone is able to move beyond words, appearances, and the dizzying kaleidoscope of individual perspectives. He not only sees the spark of Anakin Skywalker flickering within the mechanical shell of Darth Vader, but redeems him and thereby helps bring down the Empire and the Sith against all expectations. In doing so, he redeems the fallen honor of the Old Republic Jedi and restores their truth to what it should have been.

Philosophers in this galaxy have been debating the question of what truth is from “a long time ago” to this day, and if history is any indication, they aren’t likely to agree on it anytime soon. But at least we finally have an answer to the question of the lying Jedi: they lie because truth isn’t simple, and because they know that truth told without compassion can be brutal. Claiming that truth should always be told, regardless of other ethical considerations, is like claiming that there’s nothing left of Darth Vader to be redeemed—true on only the most superficial level. Fans may not like to see their heroes as less than honor-able, but the lesson of the lying Jedi is that truth depends on perspective, on intention, on intuitive understanding, and finally on a compassion that’s willing to see the whole picture and not just a single “point of view.”