Kenobi Ep. 3: Emotions from the Dark Side
I HATE YOU!!!
Anakin’s final words to Obi-Wan, roared as he writhed on the broiling shore of the lava river on Mustafar, have rung unspoken in the air since the moment Anakin’s eyes snapped open at the end of Episode 2 of Kenobi.
When Anakin Skywalker hates you, you do not want to pop up on his feed. Just ask the last folks he hated. Oh – you can’t. And not just the, but the and the too.
Anakin’s rush of hatred toward the Tusken Raiders in Attack of the Clones surprised him as much as it did the rest of us. Up to that moment, the most severe emotion he ever expressed regarding his lifelong enemies was admitting that he didn’t like sand.
Distraught at his hate-fueled act of revenge against the Sand People, Anakin brushes aside Padme’s consolation that “to be angry is to be human.” “I’m a Jedi,” he responds, “I know I’m better than this.” Padme has nothing further to comfort him with but human touch.
Anakin’s lack of ability to cope with his dark emotions carried into Revenge of the Sith and ultimately led to his turn to the Dark Side. Yoda’s warnings marked his path: “Fear leads to anger…anger leads to hate…hate leads to suffering.”
Anakin feared, and the galaxy suffered.
Fear leads to anger…anger leads to hate…hate leads to suffering. [Take II]
In Episode 3 of Kenobi, it was Obi-Wan’s turn to fear, and to suffer. In the episodes to come, I expect that Obi-Wan’s success or failure in coping with Darth Vader and Reva, and in rescuing Leia, will all hinge on his ability to cope with his own dark emotions.
How do Jedi deal with emotions, and are they indeed “better” in any way for it, as Anakin suggested? There are many moments in the Star Wars movies in which we see Jedi coping with emotions, or receiving guidance on this issue. [There are even more explicit descriptions of Jedi emotions and emotion management in Star Wars books; I think you’ll begin to notice these more often, after reading this post!]
In Star Wars and Conflict Resolution, Gert-Jan Lelieveld and Welmer Molenmaker, both social and organizational psychologists at the University of Leiden, wrote a chapter exploring whether emotions – particularly, negative emotions - are necessarily a path to the Dark Side.
They explain that the Jedi code is quite clear on the issue of emotions: set them aside, stuff them deep down, or ignore them. Its first rule is “There is no emotion, there is peace.” They explain this approach further, and highlight its shortcoming:
“To minimize the influence of emotions, Jedi Knights are ordered to master their emotions.
However, conflict resolution research has shown that suppressing or controlling your emotions, as the Jedi seem to practice, can backfire. Suppression of emotions can lead to poor well-being, the experience of stress, and ironically to the experience of negative emotions. The advice that Jedi like Yoda, Obi-Wan, and Qui-Gon give to control your anger and to not think about your fears may thus have detrimental consequences. In fact, in social settings, suppressing emotions tends to create mistrust in other people and lowers the feelings of connectedness. Maybe it then is better to experience emotions, instead of suppressing them, before you start down the dark path and your social groups bursts into a supernova like the Death Star.”
Read that quote again, as you think about Obi-Wan, ten years into his recluse on Tatooine. Just as he is suppressing his connection with the Force, he is suppressing his emotions. He is devoid of “connectedness” with others, as if he were a droid with a bad compassion module. He distrusts everybody.
Obi-Wan’s situation stems from his suppression of the dark emotions he bears inside, emotions strong enough to take on a gundark on their own. He only lightly taps his devastating grief at Palpatine’s success and the Jedi’s downfall in explaining that “The fight is done. We lost”. He is burdened by shame and guilt, silenced since he told Anakin “I have failed you, Anakin” until Bail Organa relentlessly dragged them out into the open: “You’ve made mistakes. We all did. Move on. Be done with it. You couldn’t save Anakin, but you can save her (Leia).”
To Be Angry is Human
As Obi-Wan is discovering, our capacity to engage in conflict, to stand up for our interests, values, or needs, requires us to work through and recognize our emotions, including those extremely negative ones. Often, we try to circumvent these, finding reasons to let sleeping emotions lie. Even conflict resolution professionals sometimes gloss over sharply negative emotions by intentionally downgrading them into something more manageable. Again, recall Padme reframing “I hate them!” into “To be angry is human.” Anakin was about eight parsecs past ‘anger,’ but it’s easier to deal with anger than it is with boiling hate.
Whether Obi-Wan fully knew about the Sand People episode or not, he now knows that Anakin is back and has unfinished business with him. “He’s alive, Obi-Wan,” Reva taunted him, “Anakin Skywalker is alive. And he’s been looking for you for a long time.”
Obi-Wan’s primary negative emotions of shame, guilt, and grief are suddenly joined by a newcomer: fear. As Yoda always pointed out, of all the negative emotions, fear is a biggie. It was the root of Anakin’s downfall. Upon learning Anakin survived and was hunting him, Obi-Wan felt deep, ongoing, unshakeable fear, perhaps for the first time in his life. It’s as if he’d suddenly learned that for the rest of his life he would be trapped in a speeder with Anakin at the wheel. Fear leads to anger, and we see him immediately vent this toward Leah, responding with disproportionate anger and aggression to every action or suggestion of hers.
Obi-Wan’s fear spikes when he encounters Darth Vader for the first time in a decade. Compare Obi-Wan of “Hello there” notoriety and “Oh, I don’t think so” moxie in Attack of the Clones, to Ben Kenobi turning off his lightsaber and running scared to escape Darth Vader. Recall the raw panic on Kenobi’s face as he scrabbles away from Vader’s lightsaber swings. “I’ll lead them away” might have been one of his intentions, but just as Bail Organa had pointed out about his earlier protestations that his task was to protect Luke, it was mainly a cover for the deeper, unaddressed emotion driving the transport. Then, it had been shame; now, it is fear.
What does Obi-Wan fear? Well, I’d fear simply being on the pointy end of Darth Vader’s lightsaber. But we can experience more than one type of fear at a time, with multiple sources. Perhaps he fears for Leia. Perhaps he fears that the mission – the one task keeping him from jumping into a Sarlacc pit for the past ten years – is on the brink of discovery and failure. Toward the end of the third episode of Kenobi, Obi-Wan realizes that Vader doesn’t simply want him dead, but wants to rake him over the coals, literally. He might now fear a lifetime of pursuit and pain. Finally, he might fear that even the most successful resolution to this new nightmare would require him to kill his brother… again.
We Meet Again, At Last
The meeting between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan in Episode 3 of Kenobi brought their two sets of dark emotions to the table. Vader was fueled by hatred and revenge, and was clearly implementing a scenario he had played out in his mind a thousand times before. Obi-Wan was crippled by his fear, horrified by what Anakin has become, and shame-ridden at being the cause of it, whether in his sense of failing Anakin or in Darth Vader’s sense of “I am what you made me”
Lelievend and Molenmaker have compiled some good advice for working with emotions and conflict, in the Star Wars universe and our own. However, as our book on Star Wars and conflict resolution isn’t coming out in a few months and the next episode of Kenobi is dropping tomorrow, Obi-Wan will need to hang in there on his own. One thing is clear: Obi-Wan will need to go beyond the Jedi code and its approach to emotions in order to face up to the challenges that lie ahead of him.
— Noam Ebner