Star Wars Episode One The Phantom Menace (1999) — III: Lazy Fetishization

7 min readDec 7, 2022

*SPOILERS*

Weeb Ass Buddhism

I’m going to be critical of Lucas’s take on Buddhism over the course of my essays on the Prequels. Will I come off as a joyless stickler for philosophy and theology? Sure. But only because I am. And also only because Lucas establishes a tone of seriousness with respect to these ideas. If he would’ve made a trilogy that was primarily whimsical and fun, like the Original Trilogy, I probably wouldn’t be including a recurring section in the essay for each film on his fetishization of a religion. Instead he crafted a story that requires understanding galactic sociopolitics to follow, part of which involves a religious institution. So I’m going to examine the religious part of the Jedi Order seriously to complement my take on its role as a power structure.

The closest published proxy to my understanding of Buddhism might be found in my take on EEAAO. Which is to say I’m not an expert but I’ve put an honest effort into understanding Buddhism on its terms and therefore understand key distinctions between it and other religions. Likewise, I don’t expect every filmmaker to have done this but Jesus fucking Christ, can you use your Hollywood budget to hire a guy? I mainly can’t get past what feels like Lucas taking vague pop culture tropes of Japanese Zen Buddhism as it applied to [non-descript samurai stuff] and illustrating the most interesting religion on Earth using this low-effort approach.

Features of Buddhism

I’ll begin with concepts I would expect anyone representing Buddhist philosophy as a key part of their artwork to understand. You wouldn’t represent Christianity in film and downplay the role of something crucial to the theology (like vicarious redemption), so let’s take Buddhism as seriously. However all of the following concepts don’t need to be found in the film. More intended to be a list of things that shouldn’t be contradicted:

The central problem of suffering
Nirvana as a release from suffering
Meditation as the best tool to achieve nirvana
Impermanence as an unavoidable truth
Atheism
Non-self
Non-duality as the underlying truth of all living experience
The Wheel of Dharma as it relates to Nirvana. This and a few others on this list might seem like nitpicking but you wouldn’t make a movie with Christian metaphors and fuck up the difference between Heaven and Earth
The Web of Karma as it relates to the illusion of free will

Theological Incompatibilities

The first thing that strikes me is that the Jedi embrace the dualistic view of a Light and Dark side of The Force, a core Jedi principle in immediate contention with the core Buddhist principle of non-duality. Now there’s an argument to be made in favor of this by saying that Lucas was trying to create a blend of Buddhism and Abrahamic theology. I mean, whatever. Sounds nice but to want this is to misunderstand how deep the differences between the two are. You can’t blend monotheism with atheism (in a lazy way). You can’t blend non-duality with duality (in a lazy way). You can’t blend non-self with self (in a lazy way). Missing this point paints the picture of a Jedi Order whose core principles actually constitute a mystical variety of Abrahamic theology, only referencing Buddhism in fetishized superficial pop culture tropes. Weeb ass Buddhism.

An honest blend of Buddhism and an Abrahamic religion might involve:

Emphasizing a singular Force as the underlying truth behind seeming dualities like Light and Dark, violence and non-violence — Buddhism has actually done something similar to accommodate its Mahayana sects, which in turn honor many wrathful deities as dualistic manifestations of a non-dual truth
Or emphasizing the overlapping values of the Buddhist focus on reducing suffering and the Christian focus on personal sacrifice. This is also a natural place to work in Dharma

You could also make the argument that the Jedis’ unwillingness to see that deeper non-dual Force underlying their favorite flavor of it is the point of the Prequels. The Jedi have become dogmatic and rigid and arrogant about their understanding of The Force, rather than curious about it. I like this argument better, however if this is the point the Prequels are making, it needed to be made more clearly. Much of the Prequels require a snobby view of film to unpack and even then there’s not a lot of clarity. A well told story would make its points in such a way that even casual movie-goers would understand.

Ultimately, a more clear way to blend East and West would’ve been to look to a spiritual system adjacent to Buddhism that is inherently more compatible with Abrahamic theology — Hinduism. Hinduism is to Buddhism as Judaism is to Christianity, so you actually get a lot of conceptual overlap with Buddhism. But you know, not as sexy to incorporate since there’s no Hinduism fetish in Hollywood despite the fact that it clicks naturally with Abrahamic theology without as many stark contradictions.

Do I think Lucas should have majored in Theology? No. I just think he should have run his script by a content advisor given his stated concern with big ideas like power structures and society. And that one of those power structures is a religious institution with which the protagonist of the trilogy grows disillusioned.

Jedi Bid for Control

Jedi rigidity with respect to their binary view of The Force constitutes a bid for control at the level of The Force. Now there is a valid argument that Zen Buddhism specifically engages in this exact paradox in its assertion that an effort must be made to clear the mind. If the point was that this is intentional and stands in the movie as criticism of the Jedi’s internal inconsistency, it was not made clear. If anything, scenes where Yoda mischaracterizes meditation (by servicing it for analytic purposes, discussed in Segment III of Episode Two Essay) seem to glorify this bid for control.

Additionally, there are other schools of thought like Vipassana that advocate for passively falling back into the state of an observer rather than actively clearing your mind. Strictly speaking, Lucas might have understood such differences, but my money’s on him being a fuckin weeb and giving us a lazy take.

To go along with this, the Jedi exercise a bid for control at the level of galactic politics, forming an institution with a stake in governance, although this is less problematic to me since it’s something Zen monks in the Sengoku Period of Japan might also be accused of. Again however something tells me Lucas neither knew of nor gave a shit about this.

Now on another level, we can look at the last three paragraphs that address the Jedi bid for control at each various level and point out that control presupposes power, as there is no such thing as control without power, either over your mind or over other individuals. Therefore the Jedi have unknowingly begun to embrace Sith principles. Maybe this is the point but a massive philosophical inconsistency like this deserves to be emphasized in order to contribute to the narrative theme of Jedi hypocrisy/vanity. Especially since this type of hypocrisy is what contributes to Anakin’s disillusionment, elevating this issue from one of conceptual importance to one of narrative importance. I don’t see this sort of artistic emphasis, which is plain bad storytelling.

Buddhism and Science

Midi-chlorians. Apparently Lucas was a “Buddhist” and then became an “Atheist.” So The Force could no longer be mysterious and had to become microbes.

If you really want to go full science, get a scientific advisor. She would tell you that fields are a real thing, not requiring extra steps that create new conceptual problems — like needing living microbes as Force vehicles that permeate and survive the vacuum of space while conveying information faster than light. Fleshing out the science of The Force would only require bringing in something analogous to magnetic fields or wave functions
Buddhism is already an atheistic religion. But whatever we can also take the longer route to demonstrate that additional conceptual granularity is unnecessary. Buddhism arrives at its conclusions by taking an experiential approach to empirical inquiry — meditation. Since individuals within a population can separately confirm their respective subjective experiences of reality, the fact that a living thing would experience reality now becomes a feature of life that is objectively verifiable across a population. Thus meditation can be arguably called an objective form of experiential inquiry, hence my preference for internal/experiential viz. external as descriptors, rather than subjective viz. objective. Because of this, science, which arrives at its conclusions using an empirical approach applied to external phenomena, is potentially compatible with meditation, which uses an empirical approach applied to experiential phenomena. Both Science and Buddhism share the core principle of empiricism, so there need not be any conceptual shift from Buddhism to Atheism

There, I’m done bitching (for now).

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Star Wars Episode One Essay —

I: A Status Quo Vulnerable

II: Upheaval Imminent

III: Lazy Fetishization

Star Wars Episode Two Essay —

I: A Welcome Disruption

II: Jedi Vanity

III: Lazy Fetishization

Star Wars Episode Three Essay —

I: The Consolidation of Power