Meandering through the halls of the school from which he’d graduated just a few short—terribly short—months ago, Richard Dreyfuss’ Curt Henderson pops into the gymnasium where a throng of teenyboppers sock-hop the night away at the school-sponsored end-of-summer bash. There, he encounters a former teacher, Mr. Wolfe (Terry McGovern1), playing the begrudging chaperone. Waving Curt over, Wolfe flirtatiously excuses himself from his students, a pod of “sexy little… I mean, young ladies.”
From the other side of the school’s chainlink fence, we watch Wolfe chastise two delinquents for smoking on the school grounds before Curt, acting the newly-minted adult, offers Wolfe a cigarette. It’s Wolfe who remembered to carry matches, though. He implies that he sees a lot of himself in Curt: a talented kid from this dead-end town, bound for college “back East.” Of course, Wolfe admits, he wasn’t the “competitive type,” and returned home after only one semester. Already uneasy about his flight out the next morning, Curt wonders whether he’ll really make it out there. While Wolfe encourages him to “experience life—have some fun,” their conversation is quietly interrupted by the polite imposition of an extremely nervous looking young lady, who glares at Wolfe as she asks to speak with him in private, presumably to tell him that her period is very late.
As Curt departs, to his credit and to our relief, it’s clear he finds Wolfe’s comparison discomforting. We know he’s reluctant to leave, but seeing this pathetic vision of what might await him is an early affirmation of his final decision to depart. Only a few months out of high school and his favorite teacher already reveals himself—does Curt just now recognize it, or had he always known?—to be a total loser. A one-semester-college-educated, adult big man on an impressionable and underaged campus. If American Graffiti (1973) is a kind of mosaic of heroes’ journeys, it’s significant that this meeting with Mentor—like the inverse homecoming that concludes with Curt’s liftoff—is itself inverted, or perverted.
It’s not the teacher’s wisdom, but his failure, that drives the protagonist to his destiny.
For his part, Lucas would spend the next three decades reflecting on, refracting, and reframing this theme over the course of six films whose insistence on the dialectic of master-apprentice is such that a word made up for the story treatment for what would become Star Wars (1977), unuttered on film for more than 20 years, has become effectively synonymous with “student.” So what is a “Padawan,” anyway?
The Jedi, of course, are an order of warrior monks devoted to a mystical power called the Force. Their faith in and employment of the Light Side of the Force puts them in eternal conflict with those who use the Dark Side, most notably their twisted rivals the Sith. Most Jedi are Knights, whereas the most experienced earn the title of Master, and the apprentice of a Jedi of any rank is known as a Padawan. But although these titles become hierarchized and formalized in Lucas’ later work, the original Star Wars trilogy makes little of their distinction. In large part, this is because, taken as a cohesive whole, Lucas’ Star Wars saga2 introduces us to the Jedi as a forgotten chivalric order; only decades later, in the prequels, do we see the Jedi as a powerhouse of spiritual, political, and military influence on the galactic stage. That is to say, when we first meet Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guiness) under the alias “Ben,” he enters precisely like one of those mythic mentors born from Lucas’ abiding interest in Joseph Campbell’s comparative mythology. And he even arrives almost exactly the same distance into the film as Old Mr. Wolfe.
The lessons imparted by Ben Kenobi to young Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) have become the stuff of cliche: “Use the Force, Luke. Let go.” But the singular moment of Kenobi’s pedagogy in the original film occurs when he allows his former student Darth Vader (David Prowse, voiced by James Earl Jones) to vanquish him in a duel to the death. “If you strike me down,” Obi-Wan warns, “I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” He parries Vader’s strikes with steady poise until the precise moment he spies Luke rounding the corner to witness him, whereupon, with a wry smirk, he raises his lightsaber in resignation. Whereas Lucas would eventually develop a somewhat overwrought mythological explanation as to how and why Obi-Wan is soon able to return as a spirit to the world of the living, in this originary moment we can already see an echo of the anxiety over a teacher’s failure that animated Curt and now animates Luke. Only here, what initially looks like defeat is not quite so simple. True to Obi-Wan’s warning, it’s an intentional failure: a defeat designed, on the one hand, to bewilder the fallen student (Vader), so self-assured of his own mastery that he disbelieves his teacher’s final lesson—and, on the other hand, to prove to the incredulous new pupil (Luke) the hidden power of the Force that he must, for the sake of the galaxy, come to believe in and wield.
As Lucas drops out of the director’s chair and lets slip the screenwriter credit for the sequel, now styled in a called shot as Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), his continuing story starts to recharacterize Obi-Wan’s mentorship in surprising ways. Still dead, and urging Luke to track down the living Jedi Master Yoda (Frank Oz), Obi-Wan takes on a role not unlike a graduate student’s dissertation committee member: involved but not overly so, and perhaps more inclined to meet in private with the student’s official advisor to discuss where the student’s progress is falling short. Specifically, Obi-Wan and Yoda conspire among themselves to train Luke as a Jedi with one specific and all-important task in mind: kill Darth Vader and the Emperor (Ian McDiarmid), thereby defeating the Empire. As the historical-materialist Star Wars watch-along podcast A More Civilized Age puts it, Yoda and Obi-Wan seem to want to turn ingenuous Luke into a Dark Side-seeking missile. And they very nearly succeed.
Arriving on the secluded swamp planet of Dagobah where Yoda has exiled himself, amid the space snakes and intergalactic iguanas creeping through the brush, Luke learns how to control his natural aptitude for the Force—and how to do a front flip. The koans continue: “Do, or do not. There is no try.” Luke even confronts a psychic manifestation of his deepest fears—that his powers (and, implicitly, Obi-Wan and Yoda’s teachings) will lead him to the Dark Side like Vader (whom he does not yet know is his father) before him. But the one thing he can’t seem to grasp is detachment.
As Luke undertakes his training, an infamously unspecified period of time elapses that sees Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) and the gang set adrift in space until they are rescued, betrayed, and captured in short order on the planet Bespin. Through the Force, Leia calls to Luke, who immediately wants to abandon his training to save his friends. When Yoda and Obi-Wan attempt to intervene—arguing that Luke has come too far to lose the big picture for the sake of personal relationships, even of the deepest kind—Luke remains resolved. “Luke, I don’t want to lose you to the Emperor the way I lost Vader,” Obi-Wan pleads, to no avail. Setting off in his X-Wing starfighter to Cloud City on Bespin, Luke leaves his teachers aghast. “That boy is our last hope,” Obi-Wan says to Yoda. “No,” the ancient master replies. “There is another.” Already thinking of his replacement, are we?
What we can glean from this drama returns us once again to Lucas’ perennial concern: that a teacher can never be unimpeachable. Indeed, the student must contravene the teacher, or else what exists individually as a flaw in character or as an error in judgment soon becomes, as Star Wars takes pains to portray, practiced as pedagogy or entrenched in dogma. Obi-Wan and Yoda err in their conjecture about what Luke’s rescue will bring, thinking that he will be fueled by the desire to avenge the suffering of his friends. Instead, a climactic duel sees Vader reveal his true identity and leaves the defeated Luke to be rescued in turn by the unquestionably loyal Leia, heeding her own intuition.
Returning, not yet a Jedi, to Yoda’s hovel in Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983), Luke confronts his master about his hidden parentage, kickstarting the conclusion of the pedagogical drama Lucas has constructed thus far. Luke believes he can redeem his father. His masters are not so sure. Ironically, his father believes nearly the same thing: that he can corrupt his son. It’s an idea that the Emperor himself even warms to, figuring that, since Vader would surely seek to overthrow him and take the throne alongside his son, he need only convince Luke to kill his father in order to damn the more powerful youngster to the anger and guilt that is the essence of the Dark Side. Oddly enough, then, the Emperor and the Jedi Masters who oppose him all want the same thing. But as Luke and the Emperor alone realize, and as Luke’s vision in the swamp (behind Vader’s mask: Luke’s own face) forewarned, killing the good that he believes remains in Vader along with the evil is tantamount to killing the good that remains in himself.
In this sense, Lucas couldn’t be more obvious about the flaws inherent to the Jedi teachings. If Luke doesn’t break off to Bespin—if he chooses his training over his friends, dedication over attachment—he never learns that Vader is his father (the Jedi surely weren’t going to tell him), and therefore never believes him to be anything other than totally evil. So blinded by their defeat at the hands of the Empire, the old Masters nearly close off the singular possibility of their redemption. In his characteristically roundabout manner, Yoda even acknowledges their miscalculation on his deathbed, affirming that Luke already has all the training he needs, even if he had rather Luke hadn’t rushed off to confront Vader before Yoda deemed him prepared. Nonetheless, Yoda dies revealing to Luke that “there is another Skywalker” (his secret sister Leia), and that as the last Jedi, the responsibility falls to him to pass on the order’s knowledge. It’s as close as Yoda or Obi-Wan get to admitting that they themselves were wrong.
In the film’s final confrontation, refusing to take the last swing against the vulnerable Vader and accordingly suffering the Emperor’s electric wrath, Luke awakens in his father a kind of love he had convinced himself was lost to him. Taking the brunt of the Emperor’s lighting, Vader tosses him into an iconic bottomless pit, succumbs to his wounds, and takes his place beside the ghosts of Obi-Wan and Yoda just before credits roll. The teacher and the student stand reunited, in spite of the student, young Anakin Skywalker, having failed the young teacher Obi-Wan Kenobi—in spite of the elder teacher, Obi-Wan, having failed young Luke by trying to convince him to betray his convictions. In the end, Obi-Wan’s most effective pedagogy was, in fact, his instinctive opening move: to employ his own fallibility. His missteps emerge, contra the Jedi philosophy, from fear, deriving ultimately from his past failures—in trying, alongside Yoda, to reclaim control over Luke’s intuitive attention to the very Force that he endeavored, by his defeat at Vader’s hands, to show him.
Anyone who’s ever taught a kid to ride a bike understands the difficulty and the necessity of letting slip the guiding hand, of trusting a student with the possibility of their own failure. Still more difficult, though, is owning up to the imperfection of one’s own understanding. Even in my own several years of leading undergraduate class discussions, I’ve found the most challenging yet illuminating experiences to be precisely those moments when I admit to myself and the class that—teaching some reading or other a dozen times—I’d never thought of that. There, in that instant, the dialectic begins. And reckoning with their own dialectical assumptions, the Jedi emerge victorious not through dogma, but in its absence—not in spite of, but because Luke’s training was incomplete—a notion that Lucas would continue to complicate over the course of the prequel films, decades later.
As the mythic tenor of the original films gives way to the plottier, more political, and altogether more Jacobean melodrama of the prequels—igniting decades of debate over the artistic merits of an uneven and often awkwardly executed, yet nonetheless extremely intentional, trilogy—we are reintroduced in Episode I (1999) to Obi-Wan (now played by Ewan McGregor) as a (now canonical) Padawan apprentice himself. Here, he is a serious and even somewhat dour student of Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson), an understated loose cannon with a powerful faith in a mysterious prophecy that speaks of one who will “bring balance to the Force.” Marooned on the planet Tatooine, Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, and Queen Padme Amidala (Natalie Portman) of the besieged planet Naboo encounter a mother and her son, Shmi (Pernilla August) and Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd), enslaved to a junk dealer whose spaceship parts they desperately need. Taking an interest in the boy’s preternatural aptitude for high-speed “pod racing,” Qui-Gon secretly samples Anakin’s blood as he cleans a cut on the boy’s arm. The boy’s mother, perhaps sensing his intent—and framed not unlike the student stepping out of the shadows in American Graffiti—silently stares on. The test results confirm to Qui-Gon that the boy’s “midchlorian count”falls within the range of the prophesied chosen one.
Qui-Gon quickly hatches a scheme that proves to be the original sin of the series’ Jedi—the singular failure from which their demise and the rise of the Empire spring. He wagers Anakin’s freedom on a pod race, sweetening the deal by leaving his mother off the table, and thereby ensuring that she will agree to see him freed and under the noble auspices of the Jedi, who will train him as one of their own in spite of his relatively advanced age and established familial bonds. It remains a distinct possibility that this very moment, and Lucas’ directorial decision to portray it in an outwardly neutral light, albeit awash in the heroic glow so essential to the portrayal of the Jedi thus far, is the singular origin of decades of misunderstanding surrounding these films. Rescuing the enslaved boy for reasons no one will explain to him and damning his mother to ensure the two will be separated is a bad thing done by Qui-Gon—and, by extension, the Jedi Order—in the name of righteous enlightenment. The boy must be trained, mustn’t he? Yet although his plan succeeds, Qui-Gon is killed, and it’s Obi-Wan who has to take on the role of Anakin’s master.
Losing his mother to his own freedom, and his would-be father figure to a Sith lightsaber, Anakin gains the mentorship of something like an older brother who proves especially unsuited to the particular anxieties the powerful Padawan will struggle against. In the following Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002), after the Jedi insist that he ignore the horrific visions of his mother’s torturous death, Anakin mounts an unsanctioned rescue mission only to find his mother on death’s door by the time he arrives. Wracked with guilt after his subsequent slaughter of the raiders who abducted his mother, he feels too distant from Obi-Wan and his strict adherence to the Jedi code of emotional detachment to go to him for help, relying instead on the comfort (and immediate avenue for a kind of Freudian transference) offered by Padme. The two soon fall in love and, in violation of the Jedi’s implied oath of celibacy, marry.
By the time the opening text of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005) crawls across the screen, the relationship between Anakin and his teacher Obi-Wan has been strengthened by years of fighting in a galactic civil war that has pulled the Jedi out of the role of peacekeepers and into the role of generals. At the same time, the longstanding tensions that underlie their camaraderie threaten to break their bond, as Anakin begins to have familiar premonitions of Padme’s death in childbirth. But to go to his master with this matter would mean admitting his sins to the Jedi Council—the massacre he wrought, the attachments that led him there, and the lie he has lived as Padme’s husband. What would Obi-Wan have done had Anakin come clean? Lucas leaves us with little to judge; suffice it to say that even the brotherly relationship the two men share, as far as Anakin believes, would be irreparably broken. He would choose Padme. And, falling under the influence of the newly elected Supreme Chancellor Palpatine—secret Sith Lord and soon to be Emperor—Anakin does choose her, right up until the moment he catches her throat in the dark grip of the Force, believing (wrongly) that she betrayed him, as Obi-Wan, having stowed away on her ship, descends to confront his apprentice.
True to Lucas’ classical inspirations, the scene is oedipal: Anakin’s lover now falls victim to the very rage from which their love was born following the loss of his mother—and his mentor, a brother ill-suited to the role of father figure left absent after their shared loss of Qui-Gon Jinn, now comes into focus as the object of his libidinal angst, the axis separating him from his desire. Anakin sees no way out. “If you’re not with me,” he says, “then you’re my enemy.” “Only a Sith deals in absolutes,” Obi-Wan replies, spoken as a true believer yet expressing succinctly the logical fallacy that has both ensnared the Jedi Order into a war they could only ever lose and blinded him all along to Anakin’s internal uncertainty. What have we seen the Jedi teach, if not absolutes?
The climactic duel that concludes the film finds Obi-Wan standing victorious over Anakin’s dismembered and crawling figure as the planet Mustafar’s lava sears his flesh and hatred sears his heart. In its melodramatic brutality, the scene underscores Obi-Wan’s admission, back in 1977, that Vader was indeed the end of Anakin. More importantly, it represents Lucas’ most dramatic framing of the Star Wars saga’s central pedagogical dialectic. Is this a student who, failing to trust that his teacher would forgive him, betrayed everything the two once stood for? Or, is this a teacher who, failing to recognize the pain his student carried with him, cannot bring himself in this desperate moment to forgive him?
As far back as that awkward pep talk behind the gym in American Graffiti, Lucas has posed the conundrum of teachers who fail their students. With Star Wars, he complicates the issue, considering students who fail their teachers, who fail their students, who grow into teachers whose students fail them and whom they likewise fail. And yet, what no Star Wars film since Lucas’ departure from the franchise3 has managed to articulate is the complicity of the Jedi and their ethical code in this cycle. The Republic falls not because of the Sith, but because of the Jedi Order’s insistence on its own righteousness. They mistake genuine connection and the strength it affords for perilous material attachment—and, by that same token, they ignore their own transformation into the vanguard of imperialist power at the twilight of the Republic. The Empire, likewise, falls because Luke refuses to accept what the remnants of the old order remember as the way things were done.
Whereas the Sith maintain a strict “rule of two” that mandates only one master and one apprentice may coexist at any given time—thereby animating an intricate dance of deception and sabotage whereby the apprentice must train an apprentice of their own in secret, alongside whom to overpower their master and usurp the title—the drama of the Jedi reveals the instability of rigid institutional structure. What was needed, for Luke and for Anakin, was neither the scarcity of the Sith nor the grandeur of the Jedi, but plain and simple trust, forgiveness, and above all—ordained by Lucas’ retroactive addition of a prophecy that the father, sharing with his son the burden of their mutual teachers’ failures, was destined to fulfill—balance.
- McGovern returns for his second collaboration with writer and director George Lucas, having debuted in Lucas’ first studio picture, THX 1138 (1971), a few years prior. He would later inspire the word “Wookiee” and voice a Stormtrooper unable to recognize the droids he’s looking for.
- Meaning, the first six movies (1977-2005), the 2008 animated theatrical film Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and the first six seasons of the animated television series of the same name (2008-2014), for which Lucas served as creator and executive producer.
- Rian Johnson’s Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017), to its credit, excepted.