Only What You Take With You

So, to start off basic, I'd like to try to give a quick snapshot of what the American relationship with Death is like, through one of the most fundamental myths of the culture. It generates consistent devotion, and that sort of fractal mythologizing that you only see when a story hits on Truth.

And this myth is, of course: Star Wars.

Are these movies dated? Some of them, yes. They're also memorized by children every year, so their dated quality should make them all the more meaningful, because they're feeding old ideas back into the mainstream.

There're two kinds of Death in Star Wars. One is pathos-ridden, hyper-meaningful, and only happens to main characters. There's plenty I could say about any one of those deaths, because those are the stories that Lucas and others specifically crafted to be the most meaningful to the audience. But I'd rather take a moment to look at the faceless deaths that happen in almost every scene in Star Wars, that are glossed over without a second thought.

Star Wars is riddled with Death. The Galaxy Far Far Away has such a high mortality rate it's a wonder anyone goes outside. Think of the largest-scale annhiliation that we know of: Mutually Assured Destruction. Nuclear fire rains from the sky, vaporizing all of humanity and the entirety of civilization. It's the fear that inspired Star Wars, and has left a permanent brand with how we view the End of the World - not only will we cease to be, but everything our race has spent 3,000+ years accomplishing will come to naught. In this nightmare of a nuclear holocaust, as opposed to an apocalypse, there is no God to save the righteous, there is no hope for survivors (unless you're in post-apocalyptic fiction, which should be marketed as one of the most hopeful and upbeat genres around, considering), there is simply dust.

That incomprehensible amount of annhiliation happens twice in Star Wars - in the same movie. First when Alderaan gets destroyed, then when the Death Star gets destroyed. And barely anyone bats an eye. We even root for the latter planet-sized explosion.

Now, granted, there are differences - the Star Wars nerd in me wants to point out that the human race is bigger than one planet in the Galaxy Far Far Away. It's not the end of civilization. Sentient life in the Universe as we know it does not cease to be. Also, a decent population of the Death Star is clones, and they don't have souls, right?

Souls might be a good way to think about it. When there was a shipwreck, or a cataclysm, people used to report the death count not just numerically. The unit of measurement for death was "souls." Think of someone stopping to say, in A New Hope, "Six billion souls were lost on Alderaan." Certainly beats the five and a half tears Carrie Fischer gets to shed for it, which is all the mourning an entire planet gets.

Or look at Dak, Luke's co-pilot during the Battle of Hoth, in The Empire Strikes Back. He gets maybe three lines, if I remember correctly. A plucky young rebel, he assures Luke "I feel like I could take on the whole Empire myself!" as he jumps into the cockpit. The other two lines are just reports of what's happening on the ship. "Detach cable - cable detached!" "Activate harpoon!" I think that might be it. Then a stray shot blasts the back of the ship and Dak is cooked.

Cooked. His body eminates smoke. And Luke has to keep flying.

And Luke's reaction? I wish I could find it on youtube to show you, but instead I'll have to describe it. He slowly turns back to flying, and takes a deep breath.

That's it.

That's the American reaction to Death, because most deaths will happen to people we don't know. Most of them happen on massive scales that we can barely comprehend anyway, and so we don't try. We reduce them to numbers to contain their implications. 150,000 here, 2,000 there. It's like someone somewhere is keeping score. We've gotten very good at counting the dead. And we take a deep breath, and we ignore the smell of cooking flesh, and we keep looking forward. The price of lifting up the Individual is that, in the end, it's every man or woman for themselves. And so, we've also gotten very good at blaming the dead. "He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time," "I told her not to wear that dress," and the like. But blame doesn't change the reality, any more than a fairy-tale or a fable can explain the presence of the sun, or where mannequins really come from. When numbers won't suffice, we build narratives. 'Clones don't have souls anyway.' 'The people on the Death Star were evil.' 'The Haitians died because they sold their souls to the devil,' after the recent earthquake in Haiti, is one of my favorites. Certainly an Emperor-worthy quote.

Because certainly we can't be reminded that someone will treat us as just a number when we go, right? We're going to be remembered. We're going to get a funeral. We're going to get an x-wing fireworks show and a pyre and our son mourning over us as the John Williams score crescendos. Right?

No. If numbers and cultural myths are to be believed, most of us will die like the rest of the stormtroopers.

This is not the last I have to say on the matter, but this entry is getting long.

I'll leave you with one more key moment in Star Wars. It's touches on the idea of this notebook:

One might think of the following entries as a compendium of the things we "take with us," when we go to face Death. They end up saying more about us than almost anything else - which is why I find this topic so unbelievably fascinating.