Cloning the World - Page 3
© Paul F. McDonald
In such a self-conscious world, terms must be dictated to nature, and there is no real relationship where there is dictation. Operating with that mindset, the only thing that can be understood is divide and conquer, to go in and "straighten out" things. But as Alan Watts eloquently points out in many of his books and lectures, when seen as a whole, nature in its purest form wiggles. The shapes of mountains, clouds, trees, shorelines, and everything else is wiggly. This is because the universe is not a fixed thing nor a concept about something, but an ongoing process. This can be metaphorically understood by the Force, as well as the various approaches to it. The Sith are the negative powers because they come at it to control, whereas the Jedi are positive because they are willing to "let go," and not dominate.
So the symbolism of the Empire is quite obvious. When Darth Vader talks of bringing "order to the galaxy," he's speaking of the Imperial agenda to basically reduce the universe to nothing but a series of straight lines. Hence the angular wings of TIE fighters, the sharp, rectangular edges of Star Destroyers, the endless corridors on the Death Star, and the rows upon rows of faceless stormtroopers. The problem with this is that once everything becomes straight, it also becomes rigid, lifeless, and inanimate.
This is an approach to life that is antithetical to life, and because of the backwards nature of the Star Wars trilogies, we've seen how the clone armies meet their end. Surely one would be hard-pressed to find planets less alike than Kamino and Endor, but the two basically collide in Return of the Jedi.
Endor is a wonderful green moon, made up of great forests and bursting with natural life, including the ewoks. They live not on colorless space stations, but in fantastic tree houses, obviously in perfect symbiosis with their environment. As Mary Henderson pointed out in "Star Wars: The Magic of Myth," the ewoks are the only creatures in the old trilogy that have babies and young offspring, which obviously is very important here. For these reasons, it is perfectly fitting that the stormtroopers are defeated by those furry little teddy bears, representing as they do the spontaneous wisdom of nature freed from the rigid, overbearing excesses of human self-consciousness.
If one feels that their common sense is being insulted while watching as Ewoks successfully hit, pound, impale, and trip up the great war machines of the Empire with little more than sticks and stones, I would say the symbolism succeeded by leaps and bounds.
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