![]() Our understanding and appreciation of these films is dependent upon what has come before and what we know is coming or anticipate coming later in the saga. In his book Truth and Method (1960), Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote, “The circle of whole and part is not dissolved in perfect understanding, but, on the contrary, is most fully realized.” Correspondingly, each of the Star Wars films needs to be interpreted in terms of the whole story cycle. It’s lmost as if, in order to help the audience overlook the much-derided prequel trilogy ( Episodes I-III), Abrams wanted to reassure everyone that “This is your father’s Star Wars.” Running Circles This fact has troubled many fans who left the theater exhilarated as John Williams’ latest score thundered away, only to reach home feeling cheated by the lack of originality in the plot. ![]() Some complain that Abrams simply retells the original story, with the First Order as ‘Empire 2.0’, and the Starkiller weapon as a bigger Death Star, among other direct parallels. The Force Awakens as a whole is itself a double of the original Star Wars film (now known as Episode IV: A New Hope), with some key elements of Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back thrown in. In The Force Awakens, a new masked villain, Kylo Ren, addresses the burnt-out helmet of his grandfather Darth Vader, promising to “finish what you started” but later, the film’s heroine Rey discovers that Kylo Ren is afraid that he’ll never be as strong as Vader. As Bryan Seitz of Babson College puts it in his article ‘Philosophy and the Double’, “Philosophy finds power and security in the double but from it simultaneously inherits countless forms of dependence and instability.” The same inheritance of dependence and instability is true of Star Wars. DuBois, the ‘Other’ in existentialist literature and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and in many other philosophies. The ‘doubles’ theme also appears in the ‘double consciousness’ of W.E.B. Think for instance of Plato and Aristotle’s use of the idea of mimesis – artistic creation understood as the re-presentation of nature. ![]() The idea of doubles is a recurrent trope of fiction, which has taken basic problems of reality and appearance from the very start of philosophy. Critics have pointed out how in The Force Awakens Rey doubles for Luke Skywalker, Finn – as both comic relief and a source of moral ambiguity – doubles for Han Solo, and once again we have a wise, short, and comically odd character in the form of Maz Kanata ( cf Yoda). The internal mythology of Star Wars rests on a kind of dualism, with the dark and light sides of the Force, but Episode VII also deals with a lot of doubles. Luke Skywalker image © 20th Century Fox 1977 Seeing Double ![]()
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