The Quantum Mirror Archives — Part V of V
Recovered retrospective — December 1986
Nine years have passed since the original Star Wars appeared in theaters.
During that time, a modestly budgeted space fantasy has grown into one of the most ambitious cinematic sagas ever attempted.
Six films now tell a single story, extending from the final years of the Old Republic through the fall of the Galactic Empire.
Yet as we look back upon the completed series, something unexpected emerges.
The story is not principally about the triumph of good over evil.
It is about the dangers of believing that the distinction between them can be suspended whenever circumstances become sufficiently desperate.
Two trilogies, one argument
The original three films follow Luke Skywalker, a young man from an obscure desert world whose courage eventually helps bring down an Empire.
The three newer films tell the story of his father, Anakin, whose courage helped create that Empire.
This might have been little more than a clever narrative reversal.
Instead, it has become the moral architecture of the entire series.
Both men possess remarkable abilities.
Both are impatient with injustice.
Both feel a powerful responsibility toward people they love.
And both eventually confront an authority that promises to reward them with the power to prevent terrible suffering.
Anakin accepts the bargain.
Luke refuses.
The distinction is more important than anything either man accomplishes with a lightsaber.
A civilization worth mourning
Perhaps the prequels' most important contribution has been showing us a Galactic Republic that deserves our admiration.
It is not a utopia.
Its government can be slow, self-interested and unjust. Its citizens often disagree about the obligations they owe to one another.
But it has survived for centuries without requiring unquestioning loyalty to a single ruler.
It possesses extraordinary cultural diversity, great centers of learning and diplomatic institutions capable of resolving disputes that might otherwise lead to war.
Its destruction matters because the films have allowed us to understand what has been lost.
When Princess Leia speaks about freedom in the original trilogy, she is not defending an abstraction.
She is preserving the memory of a civilization whose destruction began long before she was born.
The Jedi were never infallible
The new films have also altered our understanding of the Jedi.
In 1977, Obi-Wan Kenobi seemed to be the last surviving representative of a vanished order of heroic guardians.
The prequels reveal something more complex.
The Jedi were wise, courageous and generally well-intentioned.
They were also capable of grave misjudgments.
They accepted military command while hoping to preserve peace.
They tolerated extraordinary government powers while expecting those powers to be relinquished.
And finally, some considered using their own abilities to remove a government they believed had become illegitimate.
Their tragedy is not that they failed to recognize evil.
It is that they became accustomed to compromising their principles in order to contain it.
The man behind the mask
Darth Vader has always been one of the most striking figures in popular cinema.
The black armor, mechanical breathing and ominous physical presence made him instantly recognizable.
But the prequels have changed the nature of his menace.
The young Anakin Skywalker was not born to destroy civilizations.
He helped people.
He made friends. He fell in love. He served institutions he believed were honorable.
When those institutions began committing injustices, he persuaded himself that preserving them was more important than confronting their corruption.
By the time he realized what he had become, he had invested too much of his identity in the system to abandon it.
The mechanical suit is consequently more than a visual symbol of evil.
It is a prison made from the accumulated consequences of his own decisions.
The influence of an earlier age
These new pictures have a character quite different from many contemporary adventure films.
Their imaginary worlds are physically convincing, filled with weathered machinery, imperfect technology and societies that appear to possess histories independent of their principal characters.
The writing has been shaped by the political anxieties of the previous decade.
The lessons of Vietnam and Watergate are never explicitly announced, yet the films are consistently concerned with military authority, public trust, institutional secrecy and the responsibilities of citizenship.
There is also a literary quality to the saga's treatment of power.
The temptation is not simply to seize authority for selfish reasons.
It is to believe that possessing sufficiently great power will finally allow one to accomplish good without compromise.
The danger, as Anakin discovers, is that the attempt to impose a perfect outcome can destroy the very qualities that made the desired outcome worthwhile.
Why the ending matters
Watching Return of the Jedi after seeing the prequels is an unexpectedly moving experience.
Luke confronts the Emperor and is offered the same fundamental bargain his father accepted.
He can defeat his enemies by surrendering to hatred.
He can obtain power by embracing the methods of those he opposes.
He can tell himself that the good he hopes to accomplish will justify what he must first become.
Instead, Luke throws away his weapon.
He accepts the possibility of death rather than submit to the Emperor's terms.
His decision makes little strategic sense.
It is, in the language of the prequels, an act of extraordinary moral courage.
Darth Vader witnesses something he has not seen in decades.
A man who understands the consequences of refusing power, and refuses it anyway.
The Emperor's hold over Anakin is broken.
And for a brief moment, the man beneath the armor becomes the person Obi-Wan Kenobi once believed he could be.
A final consideration
When the original Star Wars appeared in 1977, audiences were invited to believe that one young person might make a difference in a vast and frightening universe.
The completed saga has not abandoned that optimism.
It has explained why such optimism matters.
Civilizations do not survive merely because their citizens possess good intentions.
Nor can freedom be guaranteed by powerful individuals who promise to protect everyone from danger.
The Republic failed because too many people accepted the substitution of authority for responsibility.
Anakin Skywalker failed because he could no longer distinguish protecting those he loved from controlling the world around them.
Luke succeeded because he refused that substitution.
And perhaps that is why these six films will outlast their spectacular effects, elaborate machinery and extraordinary imaginary worlds.
They remind us that the most important choices are sometimes those in which we refuse to become what circumstances appear to demand.
Epilogue: Returning Through the Mirror
The archival records end here.
In the universe observed through our Quantum Mirror, the Star Wars prequel trilogy was completed by 1986.
Its audiences had seen the rise and fall of the Republic, the destruction of the Jedi, and the redemption of Anakin Skywalker before the end of the decade.
In our universe, those films were never made.
Different writers, different production schedules and different artistic priorities eventually produced the prequels we know today.
Neither version can erase the other.
But there is something fascinating about the possibility that stories, like histories, might branch at moments that initially appear insignificant.
A different screenwriter.
An earlier production decision.
A studio willing to pursue a darker, more literary interpretation of an immensely successful adventure.
And suddenly, a familiar galaxy becomes a different place.
The Quantum Mirror cannot tell us which universe made the better films.
It can only offer the tantalizing possibility of what might have been.
And perhaps that is reason enough to keep looking.
The Quantum Mirror Archives will return. There are, after all, a great many stories waiting on the other side.
The Quantum Mirror Archives is a work of speculative fiction and alternate cultural history. The imagined Star Wars productions and reviews presented here are not historical discoveries. Star Wars and its associated characters and settings belong to their respective rights holders. This is an independent, unofficial fan-fiction project.
