Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I would say The Phantom Menace is probably the sixth-greatest movie ever made, but it’s also the sixth best of the movies, which is to say the W word. It’s the least good of those movies. But Return of the Jedi I think is terrific. And the reason it’s terrific is, the redemption scene is a triumph, where what Lucas did in the original trilogy was to borrow on Joseph Campbell’s idea of the hero with a thousand faces. Many myths and religions have an arc of a hero, and Lucas described Campbell as “my Yoda.” And that was his model. But there’s a twist here that involves freedom of choice and redemption concretized in the idea of a father whose life course had been dedicated to terrible things repudiating that life course and choosing to save his child because he can’t bear that loss. And that scene is, I think, one of surpassing beauty, where Vader, now called Anakin, says, you know, “Let me see you with my own eyes.” And Luke says, “But you’ll die,” takes the mask off, and Luke says, “I can’t leave you. I have to save you, Father.” And Anakin says, “You already have.” I think you’re more of a sentimentalist than I am. [laughter] But let me get to what I view as our point of deepest disagreement in all of political philosophy, and then you respond to it. If I ask myself, “What are these movies as a set really about?” to me the core message is how hard it is to exercise freedom of the will, and that evil is both stronger and more attractive. The central character is Darth, who is mostly evil. There’s some redemption at the end, but he never sets things right. He just stops there from being further destruction. Even in Episode VII, there’s a terrible amount of murder. Nothing is set right in the galaxy. Episodes I through III, which we both admire — they’re all the Darth story. Luke ended up doing voices for children’s cartoons. Even Han Solo is a bit of a scoundrel. And if you look at Anakin, right, he becomes Darth, the evil guy. He gets Natalie Portman. Luke kisses his sister once and is sent to live in some netherworld that looks like New Zealand, and then he looks like he has an opioid addiction. And that’s good. To me it’s all about the potency of evil. And that’s why Lucas picked the Leni Riefenstahl scenes for Episode IV when it’s the triumphant rebels coming at the end. It’s taken from Nazi cinema, right? We all know that. So I have this deep and dark view of them. And then it’s not surprising I would find Return of the Jedi, number six, to be the weakest and really admire Episode I. Now, you totally disagree with that and consider that to be absurd. So tell us what you think. I don’t consider it absurd. I think one of the, you know, sources of awesomeness in these cartoonlike, improbably awesome movies is that an interpretation like the one that you offered is eminently plausible, and there’s material there that justifies it. And let me say a little bit in favor of your interpretation and then say why, in the end, it’s not mine. William Blake said of the greatest religious poem, I think, in the English language, Paradise Lost — said of John Milton roughly this. He said, “The reason Milton wrote in fetters in speaking of God and Heaven, and at liberty when speaking of the Devil and Hell, is that he was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Now that’s a “wow” sentence. It’s about Blake’s — I don’t think this was Blake’s considered view — but Blake’s flirtation, let’s say, with the view that Satan runs away with Paradise Lost because a true poet is more Dionysian than Apollonian. And the kind of wild System 1 eroticism or something of Darth Vader or Satan is ultimately what is sublimely powerful. Something like that.…

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