I don’t believe in universal experiences. The experiences we term universal—birth and love and death—are the experiences that individual cultures and individual people treat most differently. But I do believe that in broad terms this is what it means to become an adult: first, you have a flash of insight into the pain that drives the people whom you spent your adolescence blaming for everything that’s wrong with your life. Gradually, that sympathy takes on cosmic proportions and evolves into a kind of Weltzschmerz—not existential despair, exactly, but a conviction that the world should be better than it is, that everyone should have had a happier childhood.
Finally, you realize the solution and are awestruck, almost physically exhausted with wonder at its elegance and simplicity. You can’t beat your opponent at this game. Even if you cheated, you’d only be the reigning champion for a short time before the next generation of challengers wore you down and finally unseated you.
So you make a third way. You stop playing the game. On many levels, it’s a dissatisfying conclusion. It’s also our only hope as individuals, as nations, as a species.
That’s why it unsettles me a little when fans complain that Boba Fett should have avenged his father (well, father figure) by killing Mace Windu, and that Han shouldn’t have killed Boba Fett by accident, and that this or that character should have taken more enemies down with him when he died. I sympathize with these complaints to a degree, but fundamentally, good stories are not about who kills whom.
Never mind that there is a perfectly valid narrative reason that Boba Fett isn’t more prominent in the Saga, namely that he’s nothing more than a cool-looking background character. The more important point is that unless we choose to conceive of our lives in terms of violence—that is to say, in terms of cycles of defeat and victory—their causes and effects are so much vaguer and more multivalent, and that vagueness is liberating, because it allows us to grow. In fiction, too, we need resolutions that are both more open-ended and more all-encompassing than this wretched arithmetic of lives that says, “Kill the bad guys or be killed by them. Kill them to counterbalance the evil they’ve done, although mere revenge won’t undo it.”
I’m not arguing for absolute pacifism. War isn’t even the central problem here, merely the most dramatic manifestation of the same dynamic that turns conversations into shouting matches and politics into character assassination. Besides, in real life, we don’t get a lot of opportunities to cast down our lightsabers dramatically. Sometimes it’s enough to listen instead of becoming defensive when someone accuses you of cruelty. Sometimes it’s enough to try to understand people’s opinions instead of formulating the perfect counterargument. In that sense, l’esprit de l’escalier is really a blessing: it prevents us from winning when victory would be to our cost. The problem is that winning, even for a good cause, makes the entire conflict about our personal fulfillment instead of about helping people.
Isn’t it strange and wonderful that in the Christian tradition, the Apocalypse is also called the Revelation? I like the idea that all-consuming conflict is, from the right point of view, just another way of learning.
I’ll conclude on a tangentially related footnote: do yourself a favor and see Rian Johnson’sLooper before it leaves theaters. It transcends the kill-or-be-killed dynamic but still manages to satisfy our desire that action movies end with a decisive death. I read one review that called the ending “a cop out”, and I frankly worry for the author’s spiritual health. We would be lucky if all of our action movies ended with similar cop outs.
