Everything about the films, from the opening text crawls to the out-of-order production of the two trilogies, foregrounds the question of plot. As an audience, we grapple with not just the intricate clockwork of a complex and interwoven narrative, but, in postmodern fashion, with the fundamental mechanics of storytelling itself.

As Star Wars works to make us aware of its own narrative structure, other odd things about the films start to come into focus. Most significantly, we start to notice that the films are an elaborate meditation on the dialectic between chance and order. They all depend upon absurd coincidence to propel the story forward.

The Force is the power of plot.

If the Force is Plot, then what is the difference between the Light and Dark Sides of the Force? As Qui-Gon tells the young Obi-Wan, "Feel, don't think. Trust your instincts." Obi-Wan instructs Luke that the Force "binds the Galaxy together," and Yoda teaches him that the Force manifests its power most strongly "when you are calm, at peace, passive." Luke puts this doctrine of existential surrender most famously into practice when he turns off his targeting computer and "uses the Force" to blow away the Death Star. The Light Side of Plot, then, seems to involve the willing submission to chance, to imagination, to inspiration—a formula familiar from epic narrative, where poets like Homer announce their surrender to the possession of "the Muse" in the service of a story beyond themselves.

The Dark Side, on the other hand, is all about conscious control, structure, order, and design. Emperor Palpatine, the embodiment of the Dark Side, taunts the despairing Luke in Return of the Jedi, "Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design," and we are led to understand in Sith that it was Palpatine himself who set the entire plot in motion by manipulating the Force toward Anakin's virgin birth. Palpatine is the emblem of the artist as clockmaker or puppet master, the omniscient manipulator of his hapless characters for the purposes of a satisfying narrative payoff. At the end of Jedi, in a scene out of Pirandello or one of Ashbery's own plays, the characters assert their autonomy and kill their author.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 12:49 AM  |