I want to love The Matrix. I really do. But on my first viewing of it as a trilogy (My fifth time watching the original, third time for Reloaded, and second for Revolutions, for those of you keeping score), I’ve decided that I just can’t do it. At one point I became acutely aware that I was reaching my maximum tolerance for philosophical doublespeak… and then I realized that I had a whole other movie to go.
I’m going to go ahead and assume that if you’re reading this, you know the story. Well, let me try and encapsulate it in a few sentences: A computer hacker named Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) learns that the real world is really an illusion, a virtual reality fed into our brains by a massively intelligent computer that has taken over the world, turned humans into living batteries to power itself, and has created a fake world for our minds to live in so that we continue to survive and produce said power without knowing anything’s wrong. A small group of human rebels “unplugs” the hacker, and he tries to lead them to victory in a war against the machines, hopping back and forth between the blasted wasteland of reality and the “normal-world” illusion of the Matrix, where – if you know that it’s all fake – the laws of time and space can be bent to produce some spectacular action set pieces. How’s that?
The first film, as a stand-alone, holds up just fine. The prospect that the real world is only what a computer is telling our senses really cranks up the turn-of-the-millennium conspiracy paranoia. It ends with the main character Neo (Keanu Reeves) realizing that is some sort of Messiah, and has more control over the machines than any other person in the world. In effect, it’s a superhero origin story. The idea, it seemed, was that we all could be living in a Matrix right now, and maybe if we simply allow our minds to accept the impossible, we can actually change the world.
But in the second and third films, we learn that’s not really the case. Things start happening that couldn’t happen in the real world, not without people noticing. People start flying, others get randomly taken over by agents of the central computer that runs the world, gigantic fight scenes take place in broad daylight in front of hundreds, if not thousands, of witnesses. By the end of the third film, everyone in the world has been possessed by a man who is technically a computer virus. Okay, so this is some other world, not ours. The empowering idea that we have more control over our world than we think has been effectively snatched away. I suppose it’s something like how people felt when we learned that a Jedi gets his ability to channel The Force through some kind of cellular symbiote called midichlorians. Suddenly, this idea that we can mentally affect the physical world isn’t the product of the right focus and training. People don’t like it when their superpowers are promised, then suddenly pulled back out of their reach. The Jedi thing I’ve somehow been able to forgive, but the Matrix’s back-pedal seems somehow more underhanded to me.
On top of that… In between all the wire-fu and bullet-time special effects, the whole subtext of the movie is put forth in lines that go by so fast you’re still thinking about what was just said when you realize you’ve missed five other things. Outside of the first film, there’s not a lot of overlap between the action and the words that explain what’s actually going on. You’re sometimes forced to endure interminable stretches of dialogue that are full of lines like this:
Neo: I have come here to ask some questions.
Oracle: I know.
Neo: What are those questions?
Oracle: The questions you wish answered are irrelevant.
Neo: If that’s true, then why am I here?
Oracle: That’s the question you should be asking.
Neo: Okay, why I am I here?
Oracle: That question is also irrelevant. The bigger question is, why did I want you to come here?
Neo: I came here of my own choice.
Oracle: So you say. But what about the choices you made earlier? You decided to come because of a series of choices you made in the past, which began long before you knew who I was.
Neo: I’m going to go punch many things very fast now.
Scenes like this seem rigged with what video game designers call “replay value”, which they use to describe elements that make you want to undergo the experience again. It’s stuff you will either miss or not fully understand the first time around.
Another thing that bugs me is the fighting. And there’s a lot of it. With a catalogue of kung-fu styles available for direct download into the human’s brains, the weapon of choice in the Matrix is their fists. But most of it seems oddly slow and bloodless. Maybe it’s in the editing… the Wachowksi brothers (who wrote and directed all three films) clearly took pride in extended takes of sequences of karate moves, but the result is that it looks like most of the punches weren’t designed to land, or wouldn’t cause any damage if they did. A lot of it looks like choreography. And I can understand that… as much as they may have trained for the films, Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, and Hugo Weaving aren’t primarily physical actors.
There’s also no real understanding of the film’s main antagonist, Agent Smith. He starts as a computer “agent”, a program that is intent on finding the human resistance inside the Matrix and wiping them out. He hates mankind with a passion, and has a famous monologue proving the theory that humans are, technically, a virus. However, once Neo “destroys” him he goes renegade, and eventually becomes a virus himself (why?), taking over every human presence in the Matrix. While it’s clearly established that he is a computer program, he’s inexplicably found a way to take over at least one human in the real world. Both those things don’t make a lot of sense to me, and kind of feel like acts of convenience, especially when there’s no explanation given. And there’s also no solution put forth about why he immediately self-destructs after assimilating Neo at the end of the trilogy. I think it’s a mistake for a film that has been building up to a final confrontation between two characters end so ambiguously.
In the end, it’s mostly the philosophy of the trilogy that I find hardest to plug into (like I said, the original takes its stand and sticks to it. However, since it’s widely held that the Wachowskis conceived of the entire trilogy as one piece, I’m not sure how that works.). To me, it seems kind of disingenuous for a movie to put forth a philosophy that is so heavily rooted in the idea of fate, and yet trumps it with the importance of personal choice at the same time. It’s like they’re purposefully throwing so many motifs and methods of faith at you that, no matter what your spiritual persuasion, you’ll find something that matches up with yours. Like the Matrix itself, it somehow smacks of self-conscious design.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
9/12/01: Ten Years Later
There’s been a quote floating around the last few days… “It’s not what happened on 9/11 that defines America, but what happened on 9/12.” The meaning here is that it’s not the tragedy itself that should be memorialized, but the way we as a people reacted to that tragedy. If that’s true, I think we’ve created a legacy of embarrassment to pass down to our children.
Don’t get me wrong. There was a lot of good that people did those first few days. Professionals and civilians alike diving into the rescue effort, others across the country donating time and money, the whole country rallying behind the government, confident that any steps they would take would make us safe from further attacks and avenge what had been done to us. One of the things that actually gave me hope on that day – when we still didn’t know whether there were more attacks on the way – was the fact that I went to the local Red Cross blood donation center, only to be turned away because so many others had shown up, unable to think of anything else they could do.
Unfortunately, that sense of rallying together, the days when every American was a friend and we were all on the same side, lasted only a few days. In our search for answers to the question “Why would anyone do this?”, we began looking for people to blame.
The government needed someone to hate too, and something to do. But how do you go about attacking an enemy that isn’t a particular country or a particular race, but is only people with a certain belief system? Given a carte blanche by the people, with the only edict being “Do what you have to – don’t let this happen to us again”, the government chose to blame a country that had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden. Iraq, they announced, was not only funding the Taliban, but building weapons of mass destruction. It’s easy to see why the ruse worked… the thing we were most afraid of was a replay of what had already happened, maybe a similar attack on an even more monumental scale. I’ll admit, when I saw the satellite photos and was told what our intelligence purported to be was true, I believed it and supported the decision to invade Iraq. What I didn’t know – what none of us knew – was that the ones we trusted with our military’s course of action either flat out lied, or merely saw what it wanted to see. There were no weapons, but at least there was a dictatorial regime that we hadn’t been quite able to root out ten years previous (on the watch of our current president’s father, no less). Not only that, it gave us a focus to our hate. Saddam Hussein was the culprit, and had to be deposed.
The paranoia didn’t stop there, of course. Because that’s not how paranoia works. It’s a virus that occupies an area and then expands, finding something new to fixate on. The easiest targets were Muslims, simply because they were the same religion as the man who perpetrated the attacks. And even that wasn’t true – anyone familiar with Islam will tell you that what Osama bin Laden practiced can hardly be called Islam at all. It’s ridiculous, like blaming all Christianity for Timothy McVeigh’s bombing in Oklahoma. But Muslims has factors working against them… they’re recognizable for their manner of dress, and they’re a minority in America that no one paid much attention to. And why? Because they hadn’t done anything to merit negative attention. But thanks to the government and media reportage, all of a sudden people everywhere in the country thought that Islam routinely preached hatred and violence against America as one of its basic tenets. The racial profiling and bigotry persists even today.
Next came the people who criticized the government’s actions. Even the slightest hint that you disagreed with how the United States was handling the decision could garner death threats – look at what happened to the Dixie Chicks. That door swung both ways too… people with extreme right-wing ideas and evangelical Christians with their rhetoric about the “end times” suddenly were gaining credibility and followers. (But really, why does a terrorist attack in America herald Armageddon any more than all the other daily atrocities in the world?) It’s something we’re seeing now more than we did even in the midst of all the “national security” fervor, and it makes me worry that something so far away from real-world facts is actually being taken somewhat seriously.
So we have a lot to answer for, this generation that lived through 9/11. I wish I could say that I was always above it, but I can’t truthfully do that. I’m reminded of the time in late 2001 when there was a series of photographs being passed around via email, in which a Middle Eastern man sets fire to an American flag, but then drops it, and accidentally sets his own clothes alight. This was being virally sent around *as* *comedy*. And I passed it on, just like almost everyone else.
Recently I heard a point made on the radio, and restating it is the best I can do at ending this with any kind of silver lining. The question posed was this: Would the people’s revolutions in Egypt and Libya have occurred, if they hadn’t been shown that their dictatorial leaders weren’t entirely unassailable? I suppose if they had happened in 2005 instead of 2011, I’d be more inclined to say yes.
Don’t get me wrong. There was a lot of good that people did those first few days. Professionals and civilians alike diving into the rescue effort, others across the country donating time and money, the whole country rallying behind the government, confident that any steps they would take would make us safe from further attacks and avenge what had been done to us. One of the things that actually gave me hope on that day – when we still didn’t know whether there were more attacks on the way – was the fact that I went to the local Red Cross blood donation center, only to be turned away because so many others had shown up, unable to think of anything else they could do.
Unfortunately, that sense of rallying together, the days when every American was a friend and we were all on the same side, lasted only a few days. In our search for answers to the question “Why would anyone do this?”, we began looking for people to blame.
The government needed someone to hate too, and something to do. But how do you go about attacking an enemy that isn’t a particular country or a particular race, but is only people with a certain belief system? Given a carte blanche by the people, with the only edict being “Do what you have to – don’t let this happen to us again”, the government chose to blame a country that had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden. Iraq, they announced, was not only funding the Taliban, but building weapons of mass destruction. It’s easy to see why the ruse worked… the thing we were most afraid of was a replay of what had already happened, maybe a similar attack on an even more monumental scale. I’ll admit, when I saw the satellite photos and was told what our intelligence purported to be was true, I believed it and supported the decision to invade Iraq. What I didn’t know – what none of us knew – was that the ones we trusted with our military’s course of action either flat out lied, or merely saw what it wanted to see. There were no weapons, but at least there was a dictatorial regime that we hadn’t been quite able to root out ten years previous (on the watch of our current president’s father, no less). Not only that, it gave us a focus to our hate. Saddam Hussein was the culprit, and had to be deposed.
The paranoia didn’t stop there, of course. Because that’s not how paranoia works. It’s a virus that occupies an area and then expands, finding something new to fixate on. The easiest targets were Muslims, simply because they were the same religion as the man who perpetrated the attacks. And even that wasn’t true – anyone familiar with Islam will tell you that what Osama bin Laden practiced can hardly be called Islam at all. It’s ridiculous, like blaming all Christianity for Timothy McVeigh’s bombing in Oklahoma. But Muslims has factors working against them… they’re recognizable for their manner of dress, and they’re a minority in America that no one paid much attention to. And why? Because they hadn’t done anything to merit negative attention. But thanks to the government and media reportage, all of a sudden people everywhere in the country thought that Islam routinely preached hatred and violence against America as one of its basic tenets. The racial profiling and bigotry persists even today.
Next came the people who criticized the government’s actions. Even the slightest hint that you disagreed with how the United States was handling the decision could garner death threats – look at what happened to the Dixie Chicks. That door swung both ways too… people with extreme right-wing ideas and evangelical Christians with their rhetoric about the “end times” suddenly were gaining credibility and followers. (But really, why does a terrorist attack in America herald Armageddon any more than all the other daily atrocities in the world?) It’s something we’re seeing now more than we did even in the midst of all the “national security” fervor, and it makes me worry that something so far away from real-world facts is actually being taken somewhat seriously.
So we have a lot to answer for, this generation that lived through 9/11. I wish I could say that I was always above it, but I can’t truthfully do that. I’m reminded of the time in late 2001 when there was a series of photographs being passed around via email, in which a Middle Eastern man sets fire to an American flag, but then drops it, and accidentally sets his own clothes alight. This was being virally sent around *as* *comedy*. And I passed it on, just like almost everyone else.
Recently I heard a point made on the radio, and restating it is the best I can do at ending this with any kind of silver lining. The question posed was this: Would the people’s revolutions in Egypt and Libya have occurred, if they hadn’t been shown that their dictatorial leaders weren’t entirely unassailable? I suppose if they had happened in 2005 instead of 2011, I’d be more inclined to say yes.
Friday, September 9, 2011
My Dad’s Journal
My mother has been cleaning out a lot of old papers lately. There’s actually a lot of stuff there I wanted to see… she kept her old day planners from the eighties and nineties, and there’s info about the day-to-day activities of my childhood in there I wouldn’t have otherwise. But the most interesting thing I’ve found so far is a journal my father kept as a class assignment his freshman year of college. This was back in the fall of 1960…
Of course, I had to flip to the back page and see what kind of grade he got even before I read anything else, and of course it was an A. Underneath it, the professor’s comment was (I’m paraphrasing) “Very elegantly, and sometimes beautifully written, but not much personal insight. I still don’t feel I know much about you after reading it.” And to some degree that’s true. That reluctance to expose one’s feelings is a trait that I’ve inherited from my dad, and have been actively trying to fight against most of my life. I like to think I’ve risen above it to some degree.
My mother has her own thoughts about where this comes from… she once told me the story about how, after high school graduation, my father and two of his friends exercised some of their teenage freedom and took a cross-country drive. They drove all the way from Ohio to California – no mean feat back when the national highway system was practically brand-new – and came back about three weeks later. But when he came back, no one in his family asked him how he was, or had any questions about his trip – what he saw, what he felt about it. He felt as if he had achieved something and had stories to tell, and no one was interested. My mother said that from that point, he was so disappointed that really putting forth the effort to communicate wasn’t worth it. Or maybe it just exacerbated his usual tendencies. His college journal would have been written that very fall, mere months after that event.
In addition to this, as my father has gotten older and his multiple sclerosis has taken deeper hold, he’s had a whole other wall that has been erected around his psyche. This time, it’s part of his disease… one of the traits MS has in common with Alzheimer’s is the creation of “plaques” in the brain, which are small areas that have essentially hardened and aren’t usable anymore. Recently, this has been a little more evident in my dad… my wife says that once when she was visiting my parents she found him staring into the upper corner of a room until he was called out of it. Once he phoned me saying he wasn’t able to use the TV remote, and no amount of my talking him through it could get any results. From his comments and the sounds I heard, I think he might have been holding the other phone extension instead of the remote.
Being so familiar with what my dad is like today, I felt compelled to sit down and read about he was like back fifty years ago, when he was 18. My first impression of the journal was its physical appearance -- his handwriting is so tiny and neat. He wrote in cursive, so cleanly and uniformly that it almost looks like a printed font. It’s a mile away from today, when his hands are too numb to hold a pen for any length of time, the letters huge and scrawled. Even when I was small, his handwriting was already larger and shakier than it was in college. And his choice of words are slightly flowery, just the way I remember him speaking when I was little.
The content of the entries themselves aren’t too remarkable for the most part – it really does seem like what a teenager would write about to make an English professor take note: evocative phrases about the weather, stuff he did over the weekend, etc. But I can also see a few places where glimpses of his opinions do shine through. In one entry, he talks about how he never thought rock and roll would last so long (about five years at that point, I figure). He wasn’t (and never became) a fan of popular music, and hearing him call what was then modern music “artless” and full of “gimmicks” is kind of entertaining. In another, he talks about the inept tiling work on some columns in his dorm, and he puzzles over what the uneven green triangles and squares are supposed to evoke. At the end, he says that every time he walks by he’s tempted to take a chisel and tear them all off himself, so that he can do the job correctly. It reminded me that my dad was a pretty handy guy in his day – he could build theater sets, upholster furniture, and during at least one summer when I was little he spent his days painting apartments. There’s one really well-written entry where he is frustrated because some mold has grown on a piece of his mother’s pumpkin pie he had been saving. But when he takes out a magnifying glass and really takes a look at the mold, he comes to appreciate how beautiful the tiny white forest and greenish patches really are.
He does talk about his family a little too… he spends one entry marveling at his mother’s generosity and kindness. Just before this particular entry was written, he explains, one of his uncles was struck almost entirely deaf, for no apparent reason. With his wife and five kids to look after, it sounds like my grandmother helped them out, especially in terms of keeping everyone fed. He talks about how he hopes that one day he’ll be as well thought of by others as she is by members of her family. He also weighs in on JFK’s presidential election right after it happens, and while he clearly dislikes all the Nixon supporters who say that the new president is going to literally lead to the destruction of the world, he talks about feeling somewhat removed from government politics in general, and how little it appears to affect his everyday life.
I think my father, as he is today, is even more disassociated from the outside world than he was back then. Partly that’s due to his introverted inclinations, which were apparently forming even back then, and it’s partly due to his illness. Now, it seems to extend to a disassociation with himself. He just seems to go through his day, not thinking about why does the things he does, or why he feels the way he feels (if he feels anything, that is, since he doesn’t share that with the rest of us). I’ve learned to accept him as he is, but the journal entries his college professor saw as “impersonal” back then are, by comparison, some of the deepest insights into my dad that I’ve seen since I was young.
Of course, I had to flip to the back page and see what kind of grade he got even before I read anything else, and of course it was an A. Underneath it, the professor’s comment was (I’m paraphrasing) “Very elegantly, and sometimes beautifully written, but not much personal insight. I still don’t feel I know much about you after reading it.” And to some degree that’s true. That reluctance to expose one’s feelings is a trait that I’ve inherited from my dad, and have been actively trying to fight against most of my life. I like to think I’ve risen above it to some degree.
My mother has her own thoughts about where this comes from… she once told me the story about how, after high school graduation, my father and two of his friends exercised some of their teenage freedom and took a cross-country drive. They drove all the way from Ohio to California – no mean feat back when the national highway system was practically brand-new – and came back about three weeks later. But when he came back, no one in his family asked him how he was, or had any questions about his trip – what he saw, what he felt about it. He felt as if he had achieved something and had stories to tell, and no one was interested. My mother said that from that point, he was so disappointed that really putting forth the effort to communicate wasn’t worth it. Or maybe it just exacerbated his usual tendencies. His college journal would have been written that very fall, mere months after that event.
In addition to this, as my father has gotten older and his multiple sclerosis has taken deeper hold, he’s had a whole other wall that has been erected around his psyche. This time, it’s part of his disease… one of the traits MS has in common with Alzheimer’s is the creation of “plaques” in the brain, which are small areas that have essentially hardened and aren’t usable anymore. Recently, this has been a little more evident in my dad… my wife says that once when she was visiting my parents she found him staring into the upper corner of a room until he was called out of it. Once he phoned me saying he wasn’t able to use the TV remote, and no amount of my talking him through it could get any results. From his comments and the sounds I heard, I think he might have been holding the other phone extension instead of the remote.
Being so familiar with what my dad is like today, I felt compelled to sit down and read about he was like back fifty years ago, when he was 18. My first impression of the journal was its physical appearance -- his handwriting is so tiny and neat. He wrote in cursive, so cleanly and uniformly that it almost looks like a printed font. It’s a mile away from today, when his hands are too numb to hold a pen for any length of time, the letters huge and scrawled. Even when I was small, his handwriting was already larger and shakier than it was in college. And his choice of words are slightly flowery, just the way I remember him speaking when I was little.
The content of the entries themselves aren’t too remarkable for the most part – it really does seem like what a teenager would write about to make an English professor take note: evocative phrases about the weather, stuff he did over the weekend, etc. But I can also see a few places where glimpses of his opinions do shine through. In one entry, he talks about how he never thought rock and roll would last so long (about five years at that point, I figure). He wasn’t (and never became) a fan of popular music, and hearing him call what was then modern music “artless” and full of “gimmicks” is kind of entertaining. In another, he talks about the inept tiling work on some columns in his dorm, and he puzzles over what the uneven green triangles and squares are supposed to evoke. At the end, he says that every time he walks by he’s tempted to take a chisel and tear them all off himself, so that he can do the job correctly. It reminded me that my dad was a pretty handy guy in his day – he could build theater sets, upholster furniture, and during at least one summer when I was little he spent his days painting apartments. There’s one really well-written entry where he is frustrated because some mold has grown on a piece of his mother’s pumpkin pie he had been saving. But when he takes out a magnifying glass and really takes a look at the mold, he comes to appreciate how beautiful the tiny white forest and greenish patches really are.
He does talk about his family a little too… he spends one entry marveling at his mother’s generosity and kindness. Just before this particular entry was written, he explains, one of his uncles was struck almost entirely deaf, for no apparent reason. With his wife and five kids to look after, it sounds like my grandmother helped them out, especially in terms of keeping everyone fed. He talks about how he hopes that one day he’ll be as well thought of by others as she is by members of her family. He also weighs in on JFK’s presidential election right after it happens, and while he clearly dislikes all the Nixon supporters who say that the new president is going to literally lead to the destruction of the world, he talks about feeling somewhat removed from government politics in general, and how little it appears to affect his everyday life.
I think my father, as he is today, is even more disassociated from the outside world than he was back then. Partly that’s due to his introverted inclinations, which were apparently forming even back then, and it’s partly due to his illness. Now, it seems to extend to a disassociation with himself. He just seems to go through his day, not thinking about why does the things he does, or why he feels the way he feels (if he feels anything, that is, since he doesn’t share that with the rest of us). I’ve learned to accept him as he is, but the journal entries his college professor saw as “impersonal” back then are, by comparison, some of the deepest insights into my dad that I’ve seen since I was young.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Star Wars: Things Pondered on the Way Down a Reactor Shaft
Okay, now that I’m falling to my death, I can admit it; I lost focus. I was so intent on killing that Skywalker punk that I completely left my back open. Curse that Vader! Who would have thought that the little kid I first met on Naboo would one day be the best apprentice a Sith Master could have hoped for, much less that he would turn on me just as I was about to cement my victory against the Rebellion? All because his son wouldn’t give up on the idea that, somewhere deep in the metallic soul I worked so hard to forge, there was still a little bit of Anakin left. Luke is just as much a fool as Qui-Gon, who had such empathy for the most ridiculous, insignificant creatures. But then again, he turned out to be right in the end, didn’t he?
All those years of work, undone because I underestimated the sentimentality a father always has for his son… not that I would know first-hand about any of that (at least, not in a way I’m ever going to admit to anyone). I never had the time for a conventional family, simply because I was setting my sights higher. You see, I wanted the entire Galaxy to be my children. I wanted to be the stern Godhead that everyone needed, but no one else was stepping up to become. And like all good fathers, I would keep my children in line with an iron fist. But some kids just won’t respect you because they’re told to, so the only way to get through to them is by a show of force... so to speak.
Forty years I was working on this plan… and I was so close to completing it! If I remember the Death Star blueprints correctly, this is quite a deep shaft, so I guess I have a little time left to marvel at my own cunning. People seem to forget that I, almost singlehandedly, overturned an entire Galactic government! The easiest part was becoming Chancellor. Valorum was easy enough to unseat… it just took some intricate and well-placed deals with the Trade Federation and the banking clans (which in themselves took years to weave) before I could get enough systems to lose faith in him, and then I swooped in to take over. How they all trusted me!
The Jedi were a much bigger problem. I always knew they would be the biggest obstacle. An independent police force, with thousands of years of history and respect. How would one even attempt to discredit and depose them? Well, it became clear very early on that the only way to do it was to get rid of every last one! That would have to be the penultimate step toward my goal… but I also realized that it would take a significant portion of an army even to assassinate one Jedi. My mind went into action, moving on to the next rational step… it would have to happen all at once, so that none of them had any warning. Not only that, but it would have to be done by the most massive galactic army ever assembled! I would have to spread them out, and then literally stab them all in the back simultaneously.
So I had established that I needed a massive supply of trained manpower. But what could I possibly do to justify such an action? Could I push the Jedi into a position where the galaxy would turn against them on its own? Unfortunately, the answer was no. I couldn’t come up with a single idea that seemed even remotely plausible. Ah, but then… How well I remember the moment when the idea clicked and fell into place! I was brooding over this plan that seemed like it was never going to get off the ground, and then a question suddenly occurred to me: What if, instead of being the targets, the Jedi were the *leaders* of this army I was cooking up? That would at least put them in close proximity to the weapons that would slay them. And if I played it correctly, I could even weaken their psyches before I dealt the death blow.
You see, up until that point, the Jedi had ruled through wisdom, fairness, and benevolence (ick). By definition, they’re not warriors. But I could force them to become so! I’d put them in charge of my yet-to-be-determined army; turn them from teachers into fighters. And if this war I was whipping up actually encompassed the entire galaxy, they’d be thinned out, separated. Who knows? My “noble cause” could even require their presence in such great numbers that they would be forced to elevate their younger members to the level of generals, so that war would become all they knew as full-fledged Jedi. I would turn the order against the very things it stood for!
Still, I wasn't going to underestimate them. Doing all these things would only weaken them, but I wasn't kidding myself about how many soldiers it would take to deal the final blow. There was only two words I could think of that could carry out such a synchronized mutiny: droid army! They can't be bargained or reasoned with, and won't think twice before shooting someone in the back. But Jedi would never lead a droid army against any living beings, no matter how evil they were.
Living beings, yes, but what if it were another droid army? A good idea, but I had to take a moment to assess. I still didn't have a "noble cause", and now I needed not one, but two massive droid armies. I have admit, this is where I almost gave up. Anyone else would have. But did I stop when my plan suddenly required a doubling of effort? No! Hey, I've taken over a galaxy and coordinated the building of two Death Stars. I'm nothing if not a great project manager.
I couldn’t just create two droid armies fighting against each other. That would be ridiculous. Who would care? That's when I realized that what I needed was the human element. I needed clones. Lots of clones to support the Jedi side of the battle. It was a necessary ten-year delay in my plot, but it couldn't have been done any other way. They were real live beings, but could be sneakily programmed, loyal until I was ready to strike. My plan kept getting more and more complicated, but more and more insidious as well (sorry for the pun, but I’m about to die, so what the hell).
The Jedi fell for that like a bag of spanners... all I had to do was place the clone order under a false name, drop a few hints, and lead that idiot Kenobi right into "discovering" the clone army, just in time to use them against the encroaching droids! Did he really not realize how convenient the timing of that was?
Then pieces just fell into place. All I had to do was introduce a few Separatist plants -- every one under my thumb, of course -- in control of a droid army, and I had a fully prefabricated war. I let the scenario play out as long as necessary, and then excuted Order 66.
And what fun it was to hear the reports of the Jedi falling everywhere! I wish I could have been everywhere at once, when the clones suddenly turned around and opened fire on their former masters. I tried so hard to pretend to be horrified, devastated. But inside I was turning cartwheels. In a matter of minutes, my decree had effectively flipped how the galaxy worked… clone armies became stormtroopers, the separatists were suddenly a negligible alliance of rebels, Republic became Empire. The benevolent Chancellor was suddenly an Emperor to be feared and heeded!
And do you see how cleverly I planned it? My enemy, the Jedi, had already expertly removed every tie I had back to the Separatists, and all other Dark Side practitioners – Dooku, Grievous, Maul. By the time the Jedi Scourge was over, only he and I stood on the dark side, and Kenobi and Yoda on the other (if only I had known that at the time!) And that was how it stayed for almost twenty years, just long enough for that cursed young Skywalker kid to grow up and learn about his past.
Which brings me to where I am now. I’m not going to answer the question of whether I created Anakin myself out of pure midchlorians the way Darth Plagueis theorized, but I will say that I never guessed he would have killed me when I tried to destroy his son. At least I know I pumped him full of enough lightning that there’s no way he can survive -– I’d rather leave one last good Jedi alive than to run the risk of Anakin turning back...
And here's where the Force exerts its glorious, beautifully symmetrical nature again. By effectively killing Vader in my last moments, I am ultimately the one balancing the Force, the one the ancient prophecy told about! Because I have one final surprise waiting for the young Luke out there. He will soon find out that there are two Jedi left -- one light, one dark -- himself and Mara, my Hand, who even now waits nearby, ready to pounce.
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