The Invisible Player
In Star Wars, events that happen in the galaxy at large often reflect processes that happen in an individual person’s psyche. In his essay “Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious,” the psychologist Carl Jung describes how the collective unconscious – the repository of inherited instincts below the surface of rational, introspective thought – can slowly come to overwhelm the conscious mind. The passage could double as a description of the plot of the prequel trilogy:
The forces that burst out of the collective psyche have a confusing and blinding effect... as the influence of the collective unconscious increases, so the conscious mind loses its power of leadership. Imperceptibly it becomes the led, while an unconscious and impersonal process gradually takes control. Thus, without noticing it, the conscious personality is pushed about like a figure on a chess-board by an invisible player. It is this player who decides the game of fate, not the conscious mind and its plans.
In Attack of the Clones, various unconscious forces that the Jedi have tried to ignore or repress – Anakin’s desire for love, their own instinctual drive towards aggression, the discontentment of certain citizens in the galaxy, and so on – “burst out” in the “confusing and blinding” upheaval of the Clone Wars. At the beginning of the film, Yoda says that “the dark side clouds everything”; at the end of the film, he says that “the shroud of the dark side has fallen.” In other words, the dark side – the part of the Force associated with the unconscious – is preventing the Jedi from seeing into the future with the clarity they are accustomed to.
The Jedi, who are symbolically associated with the conscious mind, respond to this blindness by making fearful snap decisions. Most significantly, they join themselves to the Clone Troopers, representatives of the galaxy’s unconscious drive towards war, who come from Kamino, a hidden ocean planet that symbolically represents the collective unconscious. Despite their conscious opposition to aggression, the Jedi become aggressors and leaders in the Clone Wars, and in so doing they imperceptibly become the ones being led, pawns pushed around the chessboard by Palpatine, the “invisible player” – or “phantom menace” – who is deciding the game of fate.
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Characters: Palpatine
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Concepts: aggression / leadership / repression / sight and blindness
Influences: Jung
Interpretive Tools: Tripartite Soul Theory
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As C-3PO would say, "Here we go again." 😉 This post reminds me of the one I did for the beginning of Attack of the Clones (https://christopherwilbur.substack.com/p/arrival-on-coruscant?r=3ulcqv), especially the Carl Jung quote. I know about him but I haven't read any of his work.