The God of the state was a lie. Our hero was determined to find the truth behind all religions.
“There must be something independent,” said THX 1138. “A Force.”
Lucas wrote those lines in 1968, as he was adapting THX 1138 4EB into what would be his first-ever feature film. The echo from Arthur Lipsett’s 21–87 could still be heard. Sometime in the following year, he decided to cut the Force scene from his THX script. But the Force would continue to flow through him, demanding to be born as a concept. In 1977, it would explode into the minds of millions; thereafter, Francis Ford Coppola suggested to Lucas that the two of them actually start a religion using the Force as its scripture. Lucas feared for his friend’s sanity. But it wasn’t out of character for Coppola, a man who once joked that he was modeling his career on Hitler’s rise to power—and who, Lucas often said, had a habit of finding a parade and jumping out in front to lead it.
Even if Coppola had his tongue in his cheek, it wasn’t an unprecedented idea. Science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard had by then spent three decades building his religion, the Church of Scientology. Lucas has more adherents than Hubbard could ever have dreamed of. If he had let the charismatic Coppola build a church of Force-ology, there seems little doubt we’d be living in a different world.
But Lucas’s intent in the movies had been to distill religious beliefs that were already in existence, not to add a new one. “Knowing that the film was made for a young audience, I was trying to say, in a simple way, that there is a God and that there is both a good side and a bad side,” Lucas told his biographer Dale Pollock. “You have a choice between them, but the world works better if you’re on the good side.”
The Force is so basic a concept as to be universally appealing: a religion for the secular age that is so well suited to our times precisely because it is so bereft of detail. Everyone gets to add their own layers of meaning. Lucas, through a long process of trial and error, seems to have deliberately encouraged viewers’ unique interpretations. “The more detail I went into, the more it detracted from the concept I was trying to put forward,” Lucas recalled in 1997. “So the real essence was to deal with the Force but not be too specific about it.” In Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi explains the Force to Luke Skywalker in just twenty-eight well-chosen words: “The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.”
Other than that, the Force is largely a mystery. We learn that it has a strong influence on the weak-minded; that there is a Dark Side of the Force that seduced Darth Vader. We know that Vader believes the Force to be far superior to the technological power of the Death Star and that he can use it to choke people he disagrees with from across a room. Luke is taught to “let go your conscious mind” and “reach out with your feelings.” He is told the Force “will be with you, always.” Han Solo believes the Force to be a “hokey religion,” no substitute for a good blaster, but later grudgingly wishes for the Force to be with Luke. Obi-Wan disappears when Vader’s lightsaber strikes him; audiences presumed this had something to do with the Force, but it was left unexplained for five more movies. Luke was able to destroy the Death Star because he puts his targeting computer aside and relies on the Force—you might just as well call it intuition.
And that’s all he wrote—Lucas, at least. The explanation provided by Jedi master Yoda in the next movie, much of it written by Lawrence Kasdan rather than Lucas, may have been more poetic, more spiritual (“luminous beings are we, not this crude matter”) and more demonstrative (Yoda lifts an X-wing fighter out of a swamp after explaining that the Force is connected to all things). But we learn little more from this than we did from Kenobi’s twenty-eight words.
Indeed, later attempts to examine the Force in more detail seemed out of keeping with the movie’s space fantasy origins. The moment Lucas decided to add a kind of rational, scientific component to Jedi knowledge of the Force, in Episode I—the infamous “midi-chlorians,” microscopic organisms that are supposed to help the Force bind to living beings—long-time fans revolted. It didn’t matter that, as Lucasfilm protested, the midi-chlorians are not supposed to be what the Force is actually made of—just a biological indication of its presence. If you dig deep enough into the Lucasfilm archives, you’ll find Lucas talking about midi-chlorians as early as August 1977. “It is said that certain creatures are born with a higher awareness of the Force than others,” he said during a role-playing exercise designed to help him flesh out Star Wars concepts after the original movie. “Their brains are different; they have more midi-chlorians in their cells.” This didn’t matter either. What fans actually want, it seems, is as little detail as possible. They want twenty-eight words, and nothing more.
Lucas, by that stage, may have been trying to use his powers for the good of science education; as much is suggested by the midi-chlorians’ homonymity with mitochondria, the energy source for most of our cells. That’s commendable, but if we want to see the Force of the movies manifest in real life, you have to look to religion and art, not biology. The Force is a Navajo prayer, an echo of a comment in an art-house film, and many more things besides. “The grandest form of active force / from Tao come, their only source,” says the Tao te Ching. The Tao, like the Force, is the basis for a form of martial arts. So are the concepts of chi, or energy, prevalent in traditional Chinese Buddhist culture, and prana in India, Sanskrit for “life force.”
The Force is all of these things; it is none of them. The Force has been embraced by Jews and Hindus and Wiccans. Everyone sees what they want to see in it, especially if—like those kids watching Flash Gordon—they first encountered the Force at the right age.
Just how widely the Force has been embraced by people from different walks of life became clear in 2004, when Dr. Jennifer Porter, a religious studies professor from the Memorial University of Newfoundland, conducted a survey at a Disney World Star Wars Weekend. “When I was 12, something about that universal connection to the Force really grabbed something within me,” said one Jewish respondent. “That and the concept of the Jedi respecting and protecting all life and developing mind, body and soul reflected my own path in life. From that point I made it my personal journey to become a Jedi. I wasn’t counting on being able to move objects with my mind and the thought of creating a true functioning lightsaber didn’t even cross my mind, but I did seek to control my emotions, to be more aware of the consequences of my actions, to honor and respect all life in both people and creatures, and to find peace and serenity and beauty in everything around me.”
That was a surprisingly representative sentiment. “The theme that emerges most strongly in the comments,” says Porter, “is that of the Force as a metaphor for godhood that resonates and inspires within them a deeper commitment to the godhood identified within their traditional faith.” In other words, the Force is like an Instagram filter through which to view any established religion. It isn’t oppositional enough to even appear to attempt to supplant any traditional religion, the way John Lennon had his brief flirtation with the notion that the Beatles had more active supporters than Christianity. The Force is friendly and enhancing to all. Therefore, the Force conquers all.
Christianity could easily have set itself up in opposition to a theology that appeared to embrace Eastern culture. Instead, for the most part—except for isolated locations like Albin Johnson’s Sunday School—Christians embraced the Force. It was ethereal enough to be construed as the Holy Spirit. “May the Force be with you” sounded an awful lot like the dominus vobiscum of traditional liturgy: “the Lord be with you.”* Indeed, the earliest attempt to layer a contemporary earthly religion over the Force—one of the earliest books written on Star Wars, period—was a Christian one. In 1977, Frank Allnutt, a former Disney publicist (he worked on Mary Poppins) turned evangelist, rushed out a book called The Force of Star Wars. Rather than being an escape from reality, Allnutt wrote, Star Wars was a signpost to something more real. “It says to the viewer, ‘Listen! There’s something better in life than wallowing in the mud of pornography, dope, materialism and vain philosophies. You have a higher calling—a calling to be somebody, to do something. You have a date with destiny. You have potential in you that you haven’t begun to develop. There is a Force in the universe that you need to be plugged into.’” Lucas was pointing toward Jesus, Allnutt wrote, “perhaps unknowingly.” He said that when Kenobi talked about the Force, “his eyes sparkled like he was talking about a dear old friend, not an impersonal Force.” He compared Kenobi’s sacrificial moment of death to the crucifixion. (In later years Allnutt would refine his philosophy, pointing out that “Jedi” could be a contraction of “JEsus DIsciple.”)
Allnutt’s book became an instant bestseller and resonated with both fans and the broader Christian community. When I mentioned Allnutt’s book to Albin Johnson, he laughed nostalgically. “I devoured that book,” he said. “It was plain English enough that I followed along; I must have read it three times.” It allowed young Albin to reconcile Star Wars with his parents’ Christian faith and made him resolve to “stick it out and harbor a secret love for Star Wars.”
Lucas himself was never much of a Christian, as much as he had been raised Methodist. He certainly carried around a concept of God—“I’m simply struggling through life, trying to do God’s bidding,” he told Dale Pollock in 1982—but his use of the G-word diminished in later years as his views evolved. In 1999, Lucas was told by the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, “You sound awfully Buddhist to me.” Lucas responded: “My daughter was asked at school, ‘What are you?’ And she said we’re Buddhist Methodists. I said, well, I guess that’s one way to describe it.” A few years later, he elaborated to Time magazine: “I was raised Methodist. Now let’s say I’m spiritual. It’s Marin County. We’re all Buddhists up here.” *
Much of what we learn of the Jedi in the prequel trilogy follows this part-Christian, part-Buddhist theme. We see an order similar to the Knights Templar or celibate warrior monks. We hear a lot about nonattachment, a key Buddhist tenet; we learn that “anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering”—suffering being the result of all attachment, according to the Buddha. Anakin Skywalker becomes a fallen angel, the Satanic Vader. But this biblical downfall happens because he is too attached to the idea of defeating death and saving his wife.
The prequels complicate our notion not just of the Force but of the Jedi knights themselves. We see the Jedi in repose, in what looks like prayer or meditation, depending on your point of view. But we also see an order that is too rigid, an order destroyed, like the Templar, because it was dragged into war by its attachment to being “guardians of peace.” Everything in the original trilogy tells us the way of the Jedi is the last hope of the galaxy. But everything in the prequels tells us the Jedi themselves had flaws that were all too human. It’s as if Lucas built a religion by accident and then decided to tear it down at its foundations.
At the same time as Lucas was making the prequels, a grassroots effort to create a kind of Jedi church was under way—but in a far less serious sense than you might think.
In February 2001, New Zealand was one week away from its usual once-a-decade census. Someone in the country, anonymous to this day, took a look at question 18, which dealt with religious affiliation, and saw a chance to have some fun. “We are trying to encourage people to tick the ‘other’ box and then fill their religion in as Jedi,” said an anonymous email. “All Star Wars fans will understand.” The writer claimed, falsely, that the country would be forced to recognize Jediism as an official religion. His or her second objective: “it’s a bit of an experiment in the power of email.”
It’s safe to say the experiment succeeded. With one week’s notice, some 53,715 New Zealanders ticked the “Other” box and wrote in “Jedi.” The government refused to recognize it as an affiliation—but unofficially, “Jedi” became the country’s second largest religion.
For the census in Australia that August, the same email was overhauled. This time it was claimed ten thousand was the official barrier to a new religion. There was a new incentive: “Remember, if you are a member of the Jedi religion then you are by default a Jedi Knight.” In some versions, there was a coda: “If this has been your dream since you were 4 years old . . . do it because you love Star Wars. If not, do it out of badness.”
The Australian government struck back, warning that anyone who went to the Dark Side by putting a false answer on a census form was liable for a penalty of $1,000. Though the idea of the government issuing a fine to any or all of the self-declared Jedi beggars belief, census officials were in earnest. “For a group to be included in the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ classification of religion, it would have to show that there was an underlying belief system or philosophy,” said Hugh McGaw of the Census Processing and User Services. Some seventy thousand Australians risked the fine and wrote in Jedi anyway, perhaps in the hope that someone would come along and reveal that underlying belief system. (Nobody was ever fined.)
New Zealand and Australia were just the beginning. Jediism spread to Canada courtesy of a couple of DJs in Vancouver; twenty-one thousand Canadians wrote it in their census. Subsequent counts in Croatia, the Czech Republic, and Montenegro all found thousands of Jedi living in their country. Ireland has refused to divulge how many Jedi live on the Emerald Isle. But the all-time prize for the Jedi chain-mailers was the United Kingdom, which reported more than four hundred thousand Jedi within its borders, after the government made it clear that nobody would be fined for writing it in, and indeed embraced it as a method to increase census response rates among teens and twentysomethings. Those four hundred thousand respondents represented 0.7 percent of the population, making Jedi the United Kingdom’s fourth largest stated religion after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism.
So far, so amusing. But how much of this was a real reflection of the spread of Jediism, rather than just done to annoy officialdom or to make a point about having to put your religion on your census form? Turns out, not so much. Consider that in the 2001 census, 14.7 percent of the United Kingdom put down “no religion.” For Star Wars–loving atheists and agnostics, “Jedi” may be simply a more interesting personal statement than “no religion.” Consider also that the largest percentages of Jedi in the United Kingdom seemed to live in major college towns: Brighton, Oxford, and Cambridge all had roughly 2 percent Jedi. Much of the response was essentially a student prank.
Still, there followed an onslaught of Jedi headlines. Politicians found they could get attention by latching on to the notion of a Jedi religion. In 2006, Labor’s Jamie Reed used his maiden speech in Parliament to declare himself the first Jedi MP. His office confirmed that this was a joke; he was trying to prove that religion, in the context of a parliamentary bill on hate crimes, was a hard thing to define. But the headlines didn’t hurt. Nor did they for a Conservative MP who brought up a possible Jedi exclusion to a religion bill in 2009.
Ordinary UK residents also made the news by claiming affiliation with the Jedi. A couple of Londoners calling themselves Jedi delivered a petition to the United Nations Association calling for the forthcoming UN International Day of Tolerance to be renamed the UN Interstellar Day of Tolerance; the Daily Mail couldn’t resist doing a photo feature. Then, in 2009 in Bangor, North Wales, a man named Daniel Jones was asked to remove his hoodie in a Tesco supermarket; he claimed he was the founder of “the International Church of Jediism” with “500,000 followers worldwide.” Newspapers reported this without comment; in fact, Jones’s church has little more than 500 followers on Twitter. “It states in our Jedi doctrination [sic] that I can wear headwear,” Jones said, after he had presented the Tesco manager with a church business card and was ejected. A Tesco spokesman put his best spin on the incident: “If Jedi walk around our stores with their hoods on, they’ll miss lots of special offers.”
The closest thing one can find to a Church of Jediism is the website Jedichurch.org; this international umbrella group currently claims 6,300 members on Facebook. That may be the same size as the 501st Legion, but the group has none of the 501st’s coherence. The content is largely the same as any Facebook group: jokes, news items, inspirational images, the occasional political cause. A member writes that they’re getting the Jedi Code as a tattoo. Someone posts a quote from the Dalai Llama; another posts a video of lightsaber twirling; yet another updates us on a unicycling Darth Vader in Portland, Oregon, who plays flaming bagpipes.
More power to them all. But having a fun Facebook group does not a religious order make. The Wikipedia page on Jediism says it all: “Jediism has no founder or central structure.” Imagine a religion with no religion. As Lucas’s third mentor, Joseph Campbell, put it: “All religions are true. None are literal.”
The number of Jedi in censuses since 2001 has also risen and (mostly) fallen. In her research, Jennifer Porter draws a distinction between “Jedi realists,” who call themselves Jedi but reject the religion label and prefer to think of Jediism as a philosophy of life, and Jediists, who claim to follow an entirely new creed. Some Jediists claim to follow something called the Twenty-One Maxims (Prowess, Justice, Loyalty, Defense, Courage, and I’ll spare you the rest) gleaned from the now inactive website jediism.org. Porter estimates that there are at least five times more Jedi realists than Jediists. “There was an ideological power struggle,” she says, “and the Jediists got stomped.”
That sounds about right. The Jedi I’ve encountered are very postmodern about the whole thing. Things are just as one Presbyterian respondent to Porter’s survey wrote: “I suspect that all or most of these Jedi are not really practicing the faith they profess to believe in anyway. They just want cool lightsabers.”
I can’t seem to spin my lightsaber forward. This is a problem. Spinning your lightsaber forward is the first thing you learn in lightsaber class. If I can’t master this basic move, my training will be limited indeed.
Alain Bloch, our instructor, is doing his best to show us. Looking the part in robes, long leather Jedi boots, and feathered hair à la Anakin Skywalker, he points out what he’s doing in the studio mirrors. “Forward spin, thumb and forefinger. Forward, open up your palm, palms open out.” My wrist doesn’t want to turn like that. I can’t even see how his is turning. It’s a blur. “Just let the momentum of the blade carry you through the spin. Now you can go a bit faster.”
Regardless of my poor ability, the class moves on. Soon we’re practicing spinning our sabers backward, slashing them in figure eights with each hand, and whipping them out from behind our backs. Bloch has Star Wars soundtracks playing in the background, accompanied by the occasional echoing clunk as another lightsaber falls to the floor.
We’re at the regular Sunday afternoon meeting of the Golden Gate Knights, a three-hour Jedi training school held in a dance studio steps from the start-ups of San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. Bloch’s two-year-old class was featured on the websites of the BBC and Los Angeles Times. Then the BBC turned to him for comment when a Scottish clergyman expressed fears that the disestablishment of marriage in the UK would lead to people “being married by a Jedi.” Bloch declined to contribute: he’s a Jedi realist. “All of it is rather crap,” he says of Jediist tracts. “I tell people, just go to the source: Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, whatever. Because all of the pseudo-religious philosophy in Star Wars is just that.”
I found a surprisingly diverse crowd in Bloch’s class—about as many women as men, young as old, Caucasian as not. There was a healthy stream of couples on dates, gay and straight. Every week, we had visitors from foreign climes. One guy came all the way from Madrid; it turned out he had started leading a similar class there. If you want a snapshot of the Star Wars audience, it’s right here. It looks like everyone.
Lightsabers, in short, are a global obsession. There’s an annual worldwide contest for the best lightsaber video on YouTube called Sabercomp. (The results are spectacular and well worth looking up.) In Germany, I met the Saber Project, a large and earnest group of fluorescent lightsaber makers that performed a mass battle demonstration before a thirtieth anniversary screening of Return of the Jedi. In 2013, Harvard and MIT scientists were able to bind together tiny molecules made out of photons. “Scientists Create Lightsaber Technology,” the headlines screamed. In Shanghai, one company has gone so far as to sell an extremely powerful handheld laser as a “lightsaber”—it might not be able to slice off someone’s arm and cauterize the wound, but it will certainly take your eye out.
But who wouldn’t want the chance, at least once, to swing something you can convince yourself is a real lightsaber? The sabers the Golden Gate Knights use are a vast improvement over the $10 telescoping kind found in Toys “R” Us. Bloch offers blades in abundance, all custom built by groups similar to the Saber Project as well as assorted online individuals. Each handle has a different style, a different grip, a well-honed metal sheen. They emit just the right hum; some are modified with accelerometers and impact sensors and make the famed clashing sound when they meet. A tough translucent tube houses a beam from a powerful florescent LED; it’s enough to feel there’s a laser blade in front of you when the lights are on and to make everyone in the class go “ooooh” when the studio lights are dimmed and the mirrors reflect our blades into infinity.
The easiest way to describe lightsaber class is that it’s one part fencing, one part yoga. The goal is to learn a numbered system of fight choreography worked out by Bloch and his cofounder Matthew Carauddo, who runs the same class in a studio in Silicon Valley. You and I could meet for the first time with our lightsabers at a Comic-Con, say, and I could utter a string of numbers and you would know that I was going to slice around your body in a star formation and parry appropriately. We could even throw in flourishes such as the figure eight, or something more elaborate Bloch calls the “Obi-Annie” (but which is actually a move called “plum blossom” from the martial art Wushu). We would for one moment shed our nerd shells; we would look cool.
It’s a far cry from the rolled-up newspaper and “zhoom, zhoom” noises my friends and I would employ as kids. I was delighted to learn that everyone—even Ewan MacGregor and Liam Neeson, when they began training with sticks for their lightsaber battles in Episode I—makes the noises when they start out. As kids in the 80s, Bloch and his friends would battle with flashlights in darkened rooms. “We had our rules about it,” he says. “Usually we would have to stop and decide if someone had blocked the blade in time. I suspect we spent more time refereeing the fights than actually fighting.”
Bloch came to learn the way of the lightsaber after an unusual experience at the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada in 2006. One attendee, in an act of the kind of bizarre generosity that permeates the event, handed out ten thousand lightsabers, with the instructions to “meet at sunset for an epic battle royale.” Two sides, each hundreds strong, charged at each other in the middle of the desert, in the nerd version of a giant pillow fight.
The experience changed Bloch. He felt inspired to start walking the streets of San Francisco dressed as a Jedi. One day in Dolores Park, the palm tree mecca of the Mission District, a man came up to him and said, “I see you have two lightsabers.”
Bloch, who indeed was carrying two lightsabers for the first time—red and blue, Sith and Jedi—said, “Yes I do.”
“Well,” said the man thoughtfully, “we should do battle, then.”
And battle they did. Bloch came armed with rules: if you touched the other guy’s torso three times with the lightsaber, you won. Later Bloch met another man at a party who challenged him to a duel and asked if he remembered the epic battle royale at Burning Man. This was Hib Engler, the guy who handed out the ten thousand lightsabers in the first place. They fought twice. Both men won a duel. The circle was complete.
Bloch tried to brush up his skills through fencing class, stage combat class, and martial arts. But nothing on offer was quite like being trained to use a lightsaber. Finally, Bloch found Carauddo through a YouTube video demonstrating his technique and his custom sabers. Carauddo gave Bloch one lesson, and Bloch said, “You know, people would pay to do this.” He found the studio and started to prove himself right. The guy from Dolores Park was one of the first; two years on, Bloch estimates he’s had nearly a thousand students. The suggested donation (ahem, Lucasfilm) is $10.
A few more lightsaber-spinning exercises—doing a reverse figure eight behind your back, letting the lightsaber leap from hand to hand—and then we move into the fight choreography. “First, chamber your attack,” Bloch says, meaning pull the blade into your side, held with two hands (always hold your lightsaber with two hands unless you’re doing a spin or flourish), pointed up and ready. Then swing at your opponent, pivoting the handle with your higher, leading hand at its fulcrum, using the back of the blade as a lever with your lower hand. If you get it right, it should snap to a halt just before it hits them.
When you watch experts like Bloch and Carauddo do this, it’s a marvelous, energetic whirlwind, very much in the style of the movies; Carauddo, short and stocky, moves like a Jedi Tasmanian devil. But when I look at myself in the mirror, trying to remember whether attack 3 or attack 4 is on the left or the right, I don’t see a Jedi. I see Ghyslain Raza.
Ghyslain Raza is probably the best-known figure in the world whose name almost nobody knows. In November 2002, he was a heavyset fourteen-year-old attending St. Joseph’s Seminary, a private school in Trois-Rivières, Quebec. There was a school play coming up, and Raza was directing a Star Wars skit. He needed to work on some moves for the actors.
Raza was also in the school AV club. So one day he grabbed a golf ball retriever, took a VHS tape with an old basketball game on it, and decided to record his lightsaber moves. The retriever was too long to act as anything other than a double-headed lightsaber, of the kind that martial arts expert Ray Park wields as Darth Maul in Episode I—very advanced moves, in other words. Raza didn’t care. He would swing the retriever around for about twenty seconds, huffing and grunting with serious purpose, then stop, pause the video, and try again. In his final pass, he got so animated he almost fell over. In total, Raza recorded one minute and forty-eight seconds.
“I was just goofing around,” Raza told Canada’s Maclean’s magazine in his one and only interview on the subject, eleven years later. “Most 14-year-old boys would do something similar in that situation. Maybe more gracefully.”
Raza put the video back on the shelf and thought nothing more of it until the following April, when he found a friend in the AV club had taken a still from the practice footage and was using it as his desktop background image. “There’s a video doing the rounds,” the friend explained. “Didn’t you know?” One classmate had found the VHS tape; another transferred it to digital format; a third posted it on the web. Right away, Raza got a sinking feeling—but he had no idea how bad it was going to get.
It’s hard to estimate how many people have seen the video, now universally known as “Star Wars Kid.” Visit it on YouTube today, and you’ll see it has racked up almost twenty-nine million views, adding a million views every six months or so. But “Star Wars Kid” went viral in May 2003, two years before YouTube was even founded. The video did the rounds on the now-defunct file-sharing service Kazaa, where it was downloaded a million times in its first month. It hit the nascent blogosphere, which was hungry for just this sort of quirky content. A popular website called waxy.org posted it, alongside a version with Raza swinging the saber at superspeed, and from then on it was shared by email. The New York Times did a story. Parodies aired on Family Guy and Arrested Development.
Today, the remixes are almost as popular as the original. In “Drunken Jedi” (thirteen million views), a special effects company called Kalvascorp turned Raza’s golf ball retriever into a real lightsaber and showed it fending off blaster fire. There are versions showing Raza battling Yoda (four million views) and Agent Smith from The Matrix (two million views).
In November 2006, a marketing company called the Viral Factory estimated that “Star Wars Kid” had been seen nine hundred million times in its first three years. That would make it the second most popular Internet video of all time, behind only Psy’s monster 2013 hit “Gangnam Style.” By 2014, it seems fair to say that “Star Wars Kid” in its many forms has been seen at least a billion times—in other words, as many times as all tickets sold for all Star Wars movies.
Raza went through some very dark times. So many reporters called after the New York Times story that the family had to unplug the phone. At school, students clambered onto tabletops to imitate him. The crueler side of the Internet was out in force; a commenter called him a “pox on humanity”; more than one suggested he commit suicide. He never considered it but “couldn’t help but feel worthless.” He did his exams in a high school affiliated with a local hospital, sparking rumors that he’d been sent to a psychiatric ward. His family hired a lawyer that sued the three kids responsible for uploading the video. They sought damages of $160,000, but the settlement they got didn’t even cover the lawyer’s costs.
Raza got his school life on track with the help of a private tutor and was able to return to St. Joseph’s Seminary for his senior year. He studied law at McGill University and became the president of a local conservation society. He decided to speak out against cyberbullying after another Canadian teen committed suicide when pictures of her rape were posted on the Internet by her accused rapists—a truly horrific case that rather put Raza’s experience in perspective. His message for kids who fall victim to cyberbullying: “You’ll survive. You’re not alone. You are surrounded by people who love you. You have to overcome your shame and get help.”
It was entirely understandable that Raza was as mortified as he was. What he never quite appreciated, or cared about, was that he had a posse. As soon as the video went viral, before the New York Times had even written about it, far more readers were apologizing for the behavior of the minority. Waxy.org got remorseful and helped organize donations to Raza as a way to apologize. The blog asked for enough to buy him an iPod; 135 readers immediately contributed a total of $1,000.
Alain Bloch, for one, appreciates Raza and his moves. “We weren’t laughing so much at him as much as we were laughing at ourselves,” Bloch says. “We’ve all picked up a broomstick and waved it around like a lightsaber. That’s why his video became so popular: it was funny and awkward, but ultimately we connected to him. He made us feel more comfortable with our own awkwardness. Our own dreams of being a Jedi.”
At the end of the Golden Gate Knights class, Bloch gathers everyone into a circle. We sit meditation-style, lightsabers balanced on their ends in front of us, painting our faces in the dark. Luminous beings are we.
“Take some deep breaths,” says Bloch. “Close your eyes. If you can’t keep them closed, just look at your blade. We have a little Jedi oath, a mantra. So if you want to be a part of it, repeat after me.”
This is what we repeat:
There is no emotion.
There is only stillness.
There is no thought.
There is only silence.
There is no ignorance.
There is only attention.
There is no division.
There is only perception.
There is no self.
There is only the Force.
This mantra turns out to be the Jedi Code—or rather, Bloch’s version of it. There seems to be some disagreement, on planet Star Wars, about exactly what the Jedi Code is. At the Jedi Academy in Disney World, Orlando, instructors tell young padawans to repeat the following “Jedi Code” before they are given their “trainee lightsabers”:
A Jedi uses the Force,
For knowledge and defense,
Never for attack.
If I disobey these rules,
Into the crowd I will go back.
(The kids usually get very quiet on the last line.)
In Star Wars lore, the Jedi Code is supposed to go back to an ancient order that embraced both the Dark and the Light Side of the Force, called the Je’daii—which means “mystic center,” according to Wookieepedia, a crowd-sourced online encyclopedia—and the code has since changed over time. Here’s its best-known iteration, as used in a hip-hop track called “Jedi Code,” by Rapsody:
There is no emotion, there is peace.
There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.
There is no passion, there is serenity.
There is no chaos, there is harmony.
There is no death, there is the Force.
Bloch says he changed his version of the code for two reasons. First, the original is licensed Lucasfilm material, and you do not want to mess with Lucasfilm on matters of copyright. Second, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Couldn’t you call peace a kind of emotion? The lack of passion is kind of a downer; why rob yourself of that? Plus that “there is no death” line might make the casual visitor think they’d stumbled into a religious cult. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned about the Force, it’s that it keeps resolutely refusing to turn into a religious cult.
Several months after my first class with the Golden Gate Knights, I was asked to participate in Course of the Force. A charity relay race organized by the website Nerdist, it would charge runners with taking a single lightsaber from Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch in Marin, in the north of the San Francisco Bay Area, all the way down to San Diego Comic-Con, the biggest event on the geek calendar. All proceeds were to go to the Make-a-Wish Foundation. Participants would run behind a replica of Jabba’s sail barge one at a time, each taking a leg of the marathon distance, swinging a lightsaber for multiple video cameras.
I’m self-conscious at the best of times, and I shuddered to think of myself caught on video with a lightsaber. The mirrors at Bloch’s studios were bad enough; this would be a broadcast on one of YouTube’s most popular channels. I’d have to run and spin a lightsaber at the same time. Was I setting myself up to be the next Ghyslain Raza? I would have used that old mainstay “I have a bad feeling about this,” the ominous phrase that features in all six Star Wars movies, but that would hardly be in the spirit of Lucas’s positive thinking. The key to that phrase is that it only ever makes the expected disaster more likely to happen, according to Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi cowriter Lawrence Kasdan. “It’s certainly been true in my own life,” he says.
Kasdan, it turns out, is kind of the Saint Paul of Force-ology. He may have kept his in-screenplay descriptions of the Force to a mysterious minimum, but he has plenty of his own thoughts on the matter. He believes the Force really exists in terms of being “the combined vibration of all living things,” something we humans contribute to. His personal religion, so far as it goes, is to believe that there is “so much more going on than we can see or perceive, that we’re not alone in this space, that everything that has happened in this space is still there.” It was Lucas and Kasdan together who came up with the immortal line “Try not; do or do not, there is no ‘try’”—the fact that these words came from the mouth of a green puppet does not diminish the fact that they form a profoundly useful dictum that marries purpose and mindfulness, and sticks in the brain for life.
A lot of pronouncements in Lucas’s philosophy have this kind of straighten-up-and-fly-right feeling to them. He’s warned us about the selfishness and self-destructiveness of the Sith, the Jedi’s mortal enemies. He’s beaten the drum for years on the importance of empathy and our responsibility to one another. Frank Allnutt’s Christian tract was right in one respect: Lucas eschews wallowing in mere pleasure for a higher calling—the joy of doing good for others. But he does so in very humanist language. Take this secular sermon Lucas delivered to the Academy of Achievement in Washington, DC, in 2012:
Here’s something I learned along the way. Happiness is pleasure, and happiness is joy. It could be either one. Pleasure is short lived. It lasts an hour, a minute a month, and it peaks very high. It’s like drugs, like anything—whether you’re shopping, engaged in any pleasure, it all has the same quality to it. Joy doesn’t go as high as pleasure, but it stays with you. It’s something you can recall. Pleasure you can’t. So the joy will last a lot longer. People who get the pleasure say, “Oh, if I can just get richer, I can get more cars. . . .” You will never relive the moment you got your first car. That’s the highest peak. . . .
Pleasure’s fun, but just accept the fact that it’s here and gone. Joy lasts forever. Pleasure’s purely self-centered. It’s all about your pleasure. It’s about you. A selfish, self-centered emotion created by a selfish moment for you.
Joy is compassion. Joy is giving yourself to something else, or somebody else. It is much more powerful than pleasure. If you get hung up on pleasure, you’re doomed. If you pursue joy you’ll find everlasting happiness.
This, as most of us know, is a hard rule to follow; there are far too many temptations to pleasure. But he’s right: the moments we want to remember are the joyful ones, the things we do with and for others. Take, for example, the time I ran behind Jabba’s sail barge in full Jedi robes, holding a lightsaber high for charity, numerous cameras on the barge capturing every second for Nerdist. And all I could think was I needed to do a forward spin of the lightsaber without messing it up, while running. I felt as alone as Ghyslain Raza. Then I realized I wasn’t alone, because I was running with the hardcore of the Golden Gate Knights, who’d offered to drop everything on a weekday morning and have a jog in the cold San Francisco fog, accompanying me in violation of the rules.
I thought about the joy of doing dumb things for a good cause; I thought about the kid who lost his dignity, and the billion people who had laughed with or at him. I hoped that he too, someday, would experience a moment of joy from having been Star Wars Kid. Then, after flailing around with the thing, I suddenly executed a perfect forward spin of the lightsaber, and I thought, That’s for you, Ghyslain.
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* Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz remembers that comparison was exactly the intention.
* Indeed, Lucas’s long-time assistant, Jane Bay, is a dedicated follower of the Dalai Llama and has written books about her experiences of traveling to Tibet, adopting a daughter there, and then dealing with the grief of losing her.