The Noble Futility of Lightsaber Duels

I rarely (never?) spend an entire post responding to a single article, but this article was about Star Wars, more specifically the lightsaber duels, more specifically their comparative quality, more specifically the way they reflect (or fail to reflect) the moral themes of the films. To say that such an article is in my wheelhouse would be useless, because I don’t know what a wheelhouse is or why it would be relevant, but longtime readers (all six of you) will know that the linked article addresses points that comprise 95% of my Two Thumbs Sideways posts.  To top it all off, the article is good (what were the odds!). But I think he misses one key point. This will be fun.

The article is spot-on in its diagnosis of the thematic impact of the Original Trilogy duels. To be sure, it fails to give the ESB and ROTJ duels the credit they deserve as sumptuous visual feasts.  The ESB duel, in particular, is the closest that Star Wars comes to surrealism (the carbon-chamber platform is more of a dreamscape than an actual physical location), which is pitch-perfect because the duel—as is true of all Star Wars duels—is an expression of a battle of wills, not a mere physical exercise. Nevertheless, the point remains: the OT duels are superb because they mirror and catalyze the character arcs and central moral dilemma: how does one respond to evil? The Original Trilogy’s answer was, of course, love, i.e., sacrifice, self-gift. In A New Hope, Obi-Wan sacrifices himself not only to save the younger heroes but to show Luke—and, to some extent, Vader—that physical dominance is not the path to salvation.  In ESB, Luke refuses to let his friends sacrifice themselves for the Cause; accordingly, he winds up in a disastrous, damaging conflict that, in a stroke of poetic justice, puts his friends in greater danger by requiring them to reverse throttle and rescue him.  Finally, in ROTJ, Luke is willing to sacrifice himself for his friends and his cause, only to be goaded into a violent frenzy—but then, he controls himself and, as acknowledged by the hyperlinked raison d’être for this blog post, he can finally, accurately, name himself a Jedi. And that sacrificial act saves his father and brings down an empire.

The article is also generally correct on the prequel duels, in terms of their failure as thematic points, but the author misses the mark when he suggests the failure owes to the duels’ incorrect themes as opposed to their poor execution.  The author argues that the prequel duels are discordant because they valorize war-like strength and triumph in a saga that, at its core, is about rejecting a might-makes-right worldview. 

But the prequel duels were meant to play directly into those themes.  The leitmotif of the prequels, poorly executed but perceptible in their better moments, was simply an inversion of the Original Trilogy: if self-sacrifice and a rejection of the eternal Jedi-Sith war leads to salvation (OT), selfishness and an attempt to win that war through force of arms leads to destruction (prequels). The most obvious example here is Anakin’s fall, but the more interesting (and lesser developed) failure of the prequels is that of the Jedi. They see the Sith as a violent threat that requires a truculent response. They even hide their own inadequacies from the Senate, the public (and their own members) rather than show “weakness.”  Accordingly, the prequels should show the futility of the flashy, attractive, hyper-violent, and aggressive duels in which the Jedi engage.   

The prequel duels fail to achieve that purpose, but it is a failure of execution, not intent. The most obvious illustration is the utter failure of the climactic Episode I Duel of the Fates.  This is a horrible, rotten, no-good, dumb, disastrous lightsaber conflict.  It is interminable for no reason; has not one word of dialogue (well, okay, it has one: "Noooooo!"); and pits unfamiliar characters against each other.  (I fail to understand even why people think it is visually arresting—the choreography is clunky, the sets are silly and unmemorable, everything is too bright, the whole thing is absurdly contrived—but I digress.)  At the same time, the idea is present that anger, aggression, a will to win at all costs, etc. are, in fact, advantages in a Jedi-Sith duel.  Obi-Wan triumphs only because he gets pissy.

It is easy to take that point—Obi-Wan “wins”—and draw the conclusion that the duel mistakenly grants honor to a might-makes-right aesthetic. But the failure was one of execution, not concept.  For instance, in ROTJ, Luke also  triumphs over Vader due to a sudden fit of sibling-protective belligerence. Yet few viewers would come away from that duel thinking "gee whiz, good thing Luke got all riled up!" Luke's subsequent introspection and rejection of violence, Vader's suddenly pitiable countenance, the Emperor's goading, etc., make clear that Luke's outburst was a mistake, or at the very least, futile. By contrast, Episode I fails to establish adequately that Obi-Wan’s “triumph” over Darth Maul was a pyrrhic victory; if anything, Obi-Wan's aggression in Episode I is accidentally lauded. The ending of Episode I is “happy”—there’s literally a parade—even though later films would reveal that, in actuality, the Jedi, Amidala, the Senate, etc., played directly into Palpatine’s hands. The denouement of Episode I was a triumph for the Sith, not the Jedi. That the movie fails to make this apparent is a fault but not a fault particularly attributable to the duel.

The lightsaber duels at the conclusion of Episode II suffer similar failures.  Obi-Wan’s attempt to tangle with Dooku is a somewhat stilted affair, but if it is seen as a misguided-yet-noble attempt to eliminate the Sith, it has a kind of tragic aspect to it. Obi-Wan loses because he will never win this battle. He is, in a sense, too virtuous to triumph. Unlike the impetuous, emotional Obi-Wan of Episode I, the mature Obi-Wan has control of his emotions; but he cannot overpower Dooku’s sadism and years of darkly festering self-aggrandizement. Obi-Wan has not—yet—discovered the key to defeating the Sith, and so he fails, plain and simple.

Anakin’s attempt to meet Dooku’s aggression with his own is an interesting parallel to Luke on Cloud City. Both father and son hope to “save” their friends, both rely on emotion and physical prowess in combat, and both lose appendages. Each has given in to a Hobbesian, might-makes-right, amoral landscape, and each, being weak, is irreparably damaged. (Both get a second attempt, and their responses are diametrically opposed, but we’ll get back to those.)

These two Dooku duels would probably look better on reflection if not for the disaster that follows them. There is perhaps no more disturbing non-Jar-Jar sequence in Star Wars than that of a ridiculous, two-foot-tall CGI whirlwind out-maneuvering Dooku.  I have no defense for the practicalities of this duel.  Yoda never should have had to duel. His strength in the Force is such that Dooku should have trembled in his wake and never been able to move.

But if we set aside the logical incoherence, the duel is another example of a Jedi in the prequels failing to achieve anything through physical combat.  Yoda is the superior swordsman, but what does that fact accomplish? Dooku escapes, the Clone Wars commence, etc. The major failing of the duel on screen is that it lionizes this failure in its celebration of the “coolness” of seeing Yoda do something other than limp. And for those who wonder why anyone ever thought this was cool, remember that people burst into applause during the original theatrical run. The audience, too, was suckered into the notion that the satisfying and efficacious response to evil is superior physical power.

Returning to Anakin’s parallels with Luke, in Episode III Anakin obtains a rematch with the man who owes him a limb—much as his son would decades later.  Anakin, like his son, is now stronger and more experienced.  Anakin, like his son, deprives his antagonist of a limb(s) in a duel before Palpatine. Of course, the major difference is that Anakin goes where his son refused to go and murders Dooku. This is not exactly subtle stuff, but it is thematically correct. But this duel fails, too, because the trappings are so light as to blow away. The set is obnoxiously fake, the duel arises so early in the film that no stakes of any kind have set in, the score is so unmemorable I barely even remember if there was a score--and, most hideously, Dooku, formerly a scion of elegant, oily, evil nobility, is ruined forever by his entirely unnecessary introduction through a CGI somersault that I wish I could unsee.

The prequel duel that comes the closest to achieving its intended themes is the Anakin vs. Obi-Wan contest on Mustafar. There remains the deeply tragic aspect in that Obi-Wan, paragon of virtue though he is, can never win this duel. He “wins,” but in doing so accomplishes little more than unleashing Darth Vader on the galaxy. Moreover, this duel does a serviceable job of establishing the absurdity of what Obi-Wan is doing. The duel is chock-full of the same acrobatic, whirling, choreographed, samurai-esque skills as the other prequel duels, but on this occasion they are revealed, rightfully, to be pointless. The duel choreographers tried to make it look like the two combatants were essentially mirroring each other—they knew every move, jink, and juke the other had, and no one would ever get anywhere. Reasonable minds can differ, but the heavily-stylized Anakin/Obi-Wan dance number plays that tune for me.

When Obi-Wan and Vader duel on the Death Star almost two decades later, they are still locked in the same never-ending combat that they began on Mustafar and that no one will ever win.  But at this point Obi-Wan finally breaks the standoff by giving his own life, saving the young heroes and proving that he did learn the lessons of the last war. To physically challenge the Sith is, in some sense, to lose. The Sith made conflict their weapon and conquered the galaxy. Obi-Wan, Yoda, and through them, Luke, were only victorious via a rejection of power-plays; it was in giving up material power that they restored the potential for peace.

No doubt, some of the prequel duels are simply indefensible on any level (let’s pretend the Obi-Wan/Grievous thing just never happened), and none of them perfectly strike the nails they were meant to strike. But the seeds are there. As with everything prequel-oriented, it could have worked, which makes it all the more frustrating that it did not.

~Right Thumb~