Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

I think Emily Bazelon might know how to perform the Jedi Mind Trick. She recently wrote an article for Slate detailing how a single viewing of Star Wars: A New Hope transformed her three year-old son into a feverish Star Wars zealot. The article is a trip through a young boy’s Jedi obsession as told from a parent’s point of view, but there are inconsistencies in the narrative that leave me feeling as though Obi-Wan Kenobi himself might have waved his hand at my brain while saying something about droids.

This might suggest that I am confused by the content of Bazelon’s piece, but I suppose that isn’t quite accurate. Rather, it’s what Bazelon doesn’t say that I find most intriguing, because the gaps in the story are perhaps more revealing than the story itself.

In a moment of what Bazelon describes as parental weakness, she allows her three year-old son to watch Star Wars. To her surprise, this triggers in him a truly epic sci-fi obsession. Why this causes Bazelon so much anxiety is unclear, but even more perplexedly, she does everything she can to try to rid her home of Jedi Knights and Sith Lords.  Tellingly, the effort at censorship fails, and her sons happily construct lightsabers from rolled-up newspapers while incessantly discussing the goings-on of that galaxy far, far away.

Pause to consider why a mother would try to squelch such an obvious source of entertainment, fascination, and creativity, rather than encourage it. This is my first point of confusion.

My second point of confusion comes when it is revealed that her son, who has not seen any Star Wars beyond this one fateful viewing, this three year-old, has somehow accrued an impressive knowledge of all six movies. Bazelon notes that her sons were given a Fandex, and this child, who had to have the Fandex read to him by his older brother, still managed to absorb “Emperor Palpatine’s other name (Darth Sidious).” The truly mystifying thing—the thing that Bazelon Mind Tricks out of the narrative—is that the kid could not possibly have known who “Palpatine” is in the first place, at least not solely from watching A New Hope. Throughout the entirety of the original trilogy he is simply The Emperor. The name “Palpatine” is never spoken.

This means that her child must have been seeking out other sources of information; friends with less puritanical parents, or perhaps one of the Clone Wars shows on Cartoon Network. Either way, he’s learning to synthesize multiple sources of information into a cohesive whole, and probably making friends in the process. Again I must ask: Why would you, as a parent, respond to these healthy developmental milestones with anxiety?

Time passes.  Faux lightsabers continue to woowrrrnn and zzZAKT at birthday parties and toy stores.  Bazelon agrees to let her son have a second viewing after his sixth birthday. Let me channel Joe Biden for a second and say that again: She made her son, who is clearly obsessed with Star Wars, wait half his life before he was allowed to watch the movie a second time, and even then, only as a Netflix rental. That is one hell of a Mind Trick.

How could Bazelon deprive her son of something he so dearly loved, something he was so wholeheartedly invested in, for so long? And on what grounds? That Star Wars is violent? Please. While there are studies showing that exposure to violent media as a child correlates with aggression later in life (one of which Bazelon cites), there are many reasons to be skeptical of that entire vein of research. Never mind that any such effects (if they even exist) would be negated by a properly attentive parent, which Bazelon is to the extreme. Was this the only pretext for denying her child something that appeared so integral to his intellectual, social, and emotional development? If so, then lady, I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Puzzling over the strength of the obsession, Bazelon chalks the whole thing up to the relentless marketing of a large alternate universe “cunningly designed to lodge in the heads of small boys.”

I would offer an alternative explanation that has nothing to do with marketing.  Children are different from adults. They are just beginning to learn that there are rules governing everything from gravity to who gets to talk in class.  The things in the world that can be known, and the connections between those things, are endlessly fascinating to a young child. So give them Star Wars, an entire galaxy for them to ponder, organize, and enumerate, down to the number of buttons on Vader’s suit and the exact length of time Luke spent in the trash compactor.¹ If I’m making it sound as if all kids have obsessive-compulsive disorder, that’s because, in a very real sense, they often do. It eventually passes and bears no relationship to any later mental illness, but while it is manifest, it probably helps them learn how to organize their reality.

Then there’s the alternate alternate explanation: Star Wars is just special. It’s a pretty boilerplate myth, really; a young, flaxen-haired nobody from a farming village turns out to be the Chosen One. He will confront the darkness, which turns out to be his father (of course), and in the process captain the armies of Good and bring peace to the Galaxy. Lucas’s deeply weird obsession with meaningless details is, much as we deride him for it now, what set Star Wars apart in the first place. It’s the special sauce that Mind Tricks you into thinking you aren’t watching the same hero epic that’s been around for 4,000 years.

Bazelon’s article brings one other thing to mind, something that I am loathe to admit. To her children, the Prequel Trilogy is no less a part of the Star Wars universe than the Original Trilogy. These kids will grow up idolizing all six movies in equal measure, and they will all become part of these kids’ concepts of the Star Wars Universe.  I hate the prequels in part because of the way they fracture the picture I had developed as a child.  For instance, I had always assumed that the Emperor and Vader had been in power for at least a century, the Jedi Order having been destroyed just outside the reach of living memory.² But no, it turns out that Anakin and Palpatine been in power for twenty years, tops. Such inconsistencies pose no cognitive threat to children who are using all of this material to build a fantasy world.  They’ll take only what is most important to them, overlooking Jar Jar Binks and the word younglings just as easily as I overlooked Mark Hamill’s acting and the Ewoks.

1. Don’t tell Darth Vader that he’s got a one-eyed snake in his trash compactor. He’ll misunderstand and kill you. ∧
2. “Don’t try to frighten us with your sorcerer’s ways, Lord Vader. Your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes, or given you clairvoyance enough to find the Rebel’s hidden fortress…” ∧