Longing for the Academy
In A New Hope, one of the main subjects of dispute between Luke Skywalker and his uncle Owen Lars is Luke’s desire to leave the moisture farm and go to “the Academy.” This offscreen “Academy,” like Tatooine’s twin suns, is representative of Luke’s longing for something beyond the world he has known – a longing that Uncle Owen, who is wholly focused on what is right in front of him, what he can see and touch, tries to deny and suppress.
Befitting the film’s Platonic themes, the “Academy” was the name of the school Plato founded in ancient Athens. In Plato’s allegory of the cave, the soul journeys from ignorance (symbolized as a cave, a hole in the ground, like Uncle Owen’s farm) to enlightenment (symbolized by the sun, like Tatooine’s twin suns). The allegory of the cave represents the kind of intellectual journey that Plato would want to take his students on at the Academy: an ascent out of the material world that can be seen and touched, into the immaterial world of spiritual truths. This is the kind of journey that Luke wants to go on, and that Uncle Owen wants to forbid.
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Characters: Luke Skywalker / Owen Lars
Films: Episode IV: A New Hope
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Concepts: ascent and descent / caves / materialism
Influences: Plato
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