Hey! Can I ask if George Lucas has ever said anything about the Jedi hate or if you’re supposed to view the Jedi as the bad guys in star wars?
gffa:
As far as I’m aware, he’s never said anything like that, no. The most he really criticizes the Jedi for is that some of them are kind of arrogant, like he put the scene in AOTC in to show that and Yoda also says it in AOTC (and Yoda tends to be one of the most reliable narrators re: the narrative intentions, every time George talks about Yoda, it’s always in the vein of him being one of the wisest voices), but even then he also has Obi-Wan being willing to go ask Dex and listening to him, so, like, it’s not exactly a damning criticism.
Other than that, George’s explanations for how the Force works echo what the Jedi teach in canon. Literally word for word at times, like how anger leads to hate, hate leads to fear, fear leads to suffering, he’s directly said that’s how the Force works and we see it in Yoda’s explanation. He’s said things like, “All my movies are about how the only prison you can really be trapped in is your own mind.” and then Yoda says pretty much that exact thing in The Gathering. The Jedi’s teaching methods reflect what George has said is his view of the best teaching methods. And so on.
When George talks about attachment or Jedi philosophy, he doesn’t specifically address the idea of whether the Jedi are meant to be viewed as the bad guys (I’m not sure if that view was that popular during the time he was really doing a ton of interviews? so he might have even had the idea on his radar), but it is baked into the foundation of how they’re meant to be seen as right.
Like, when he talks about the trajectory of Anakin’s arc, he has never, as far as I’m aware, said that the Jedi were responsible for Anakin’s choices. Instead, he says things like, “Anakin got attached and couldn’t let go, so he made a deal with the devil.” He says things like, “Anakin forced his friends to turn against him.”
Or he says casual things like, “Blue and green lightsabers for the good guys, red lightsabers for the bad guys.” which is a tossaway comment, but shows that fundamentally, yes, the Jedi are the good guys.
If he wanted us to think of them as The Actual Bad Guys, he would not have been subtle about it. There would have been dramatic, ominous music swelling in the background, their Temple would have been shown as cold and sterile like the Imperial ships were cold and sterile. We would have gotten Sheev Palpatine-style music and visuals, if that was the point of the Jedi.
And George Lucas would have said it repeatedly, if that was meant to be the takeaway. But instead he says stuff like, “The fact that everything must change and that things come and go through his life and that he can’t hold onto things, which is a basic Jedi philosophy that he isn’t willing to accept emotionally and the reason that is because he was raised by his mother rather than the Jedi. If he’d have been taken in his first year and started to study to be a Jedi, he wouldn’t have this particular connection as strong as it is and he’d have been trained to love people but not to become attached to them.
“But he has become attached to his mother and he will become attached to Padme and these things are, for a Jedi, who needs to have a clear mind and not be influenced by threats to their attachments, a dangerous situation. And it feeds into fear of losing things, which feeds into greed, wanting to keep things, wanting to keep his possessions and things that he should be letting go of. His fear of losing her turns to anger at losing her, which ultimately turns to revenge in wiping out the village. The scene with the Tusken Raiders is the first scene that ultimately takes him on the road to the dark side. I mean he’s been prepping for this, but that’s the one where he’s sort of doing something that is completely inappropriate.“ –Attack of the Clones commentary
Nowhere in there does he put forth the idea that the Jedi were wrong or bad, when it would have been the perfect place to do it. Instead, it’s consistent with how he talks about Anakin’s fall, that his attachments were what caused him to fall. And that, if he’d been taken in by the Jedi earlier, he would have learned to love without attachment, which is precisely what they’re supposed to do:
“[The Jedi are] not supposed to form attachments. They can love people– in fact, they should love everybody. They should love their enemies; they should love the Sith. But they can’t form attachments. So what all these movies are about is: greed. Greed is a source of pain and suffering for everybody. And the ultimate state of greed is the desire to cheat death.” –Making of Revenge of the Sith
And that’s what went wrong with Anakin at the end, George Lucas has said that, too–Padme backs away from him on Mustafar because he’s become a greedy person. And that greed is of the dark side. Attachment (in the sense of being unable to let go of things when it’s time/to let them be as they are) is of the dark side.So, he doesn’t say it directly that “Yes, the Jedi are the good guys, for fuck’s sake.” but everything in the worldbuilding he talks about supports that they are narratively correct and doing good. I mean, disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer nobody’s perfect, not even the Jedi, nobody should be perfect, that’d make for boring characters, as well as then the slightest thing they did wrong would be equally as bad as someone who murdered a kitten, because that’s how polarization/purity culture works, but also the Jedi reflect all the narrative themes that George talks about his movies being about, so I’m pretty confident that we’re meant to go, yeah, they’re the actual good guys!