When I was younger, I caught one of the return waves of the Star Wars phenomenon. This was somewhat before the release of the prequels. So I had gotten a good taste of what a genuine saga of heroes and villians is about. This is not to say that that I hadn’t before experienced fictional representations of worlds with good guys and bad guys (and all of the marketing hoopla that goes along with it). I was into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles way before Star Wars. One of the rules is that the heroes win at the end of the story. Another rule is that there has to be some sort of love interest or sidekick of some type, and, unless there’s going to be a sequel, everything in the story should be resolved by the end. I have one overarching question, though. How should we, as makers of worlds, generally portray our heroes and villians, and what should we teach our young in the stories that we tell them so as to prepare them for their specific callings in life?
The beginning of Book III of the Republic deals with this issue. Let’s stick with the Star Wars example for this one. Ok. The first item of business is the issue about what we should say about death and the afterlife. (Don’t read on if you don’t want any spoilers to be revealed.) There is no explicit teaching about the afterlife in Star Wars. The closest we get to something like it is when, in The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda waxes philosophical aboout the Force. Even then, we don’t get an account of what happens after you die in the Star Wars universe. We only see certain things that suggest what might happen. Dead heroes are portrayed as “luminous beings.” We never see dead villians. Perhaps their energy (which is lacking spiritually itself) simply dissipates into the void. In any case, we never see or hear about the realm of the afterlife. However, we ultimately take the living heroes and the dead heroes to be decent “men” and, as Socrates said, “We surely say that a decent man will believe that for the decent man–who happens to be his comrade–being dead is not a terrible thing.”[387d] We eventually see that this is the case when Skywalker, Kenobi, Yoda, and Anakin acknowledge each other at the end of The Retun of the Jedi. The Star Wars saga, though, is all about the hero’s journey, and it traces Skywalker’s path from a young man to a lower level warrior towards a philosopher guardian (a similar path is taken by Anakin in the prequels).
[I'll write more on this and Book III later. Right now I have to get ready for the day's errands.]
