The meta-dialectic of Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan
Jun 24, 2021 8:16:38 GMT
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Post by Cryogenic on Jun 24, 2021 8:16:38 GMT
Something I was just thinking about.
We need the prequels, in my opinion, to properly orient ourselves and make sense of the polite -- almost trite -- fairytale simplicity of the Original Trilogy. In a manner of speaking, the divide between the two trilogies is somewhat embodied by the clash of outlook and mentality between Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan themselves. The Prequel Trilogy, it could be argued, has a “Qui-Gon”-ish comportment: It is Lucas’ older, wiser, more rounded take on the cruder, less developed, more youthful qualities -- and the George Lucas who made it -- of the Original Trilogy. Obi-Wan was where he started. Qui-Gon was a far-off place he arrived at.
But there are many other layers to this x-y dialectic between the two characters. One I just realised is that the two Jedi in TPM form a kind of commentary, or "player point of view", on the movie entire. That is: You put your interpretive or aesthetic coin in the machine and you can sort of "pick" which one to "play" as.
But without getting too abstract about it, I'm just trying to indicate how Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan embody different fan attitudes toward the movie. If you're Obi-Wan, you're by-the-book, doubting, rigid, cold. You expect the movie to conform to the OT, or to a conception of fantasy cinema you're familiar with, and the movie constantly veers off-course. You see time-wasting distractions and pathetic lifeforms everywhere. Your go-to response is basically "What's this?" If you're Qui-Gon, however, you're much more open and cognisant to the esoteric and unusual properties of the movie; and while a creature like Jar Jar may throw you for an instant, you're able to adjust your perceptions and bend to the new world fast. You move comfortably through the moviespace with little apprehension or frustration. You're calm and collected and even amused by what you see and hear.
What I'm saying is that the movie has this knowing layer of recognition -- even, perhaps, ambivalence -- about its own extroversion and interiocity ("tis a hidden city"). It presents two powerful Jedi ("not to be underestimated") that work as a unit; albeit a somewhat dissonant one (particularly once Qui-Gon starts placing all his faith in Anakin, which causes a good deal of friction to begin to manifest between the two). In the blood test scene, Obi-Wan simply processes the signal and reads the chart. Qui-Gon is the one pushing and dictating and probing into the fine matter of the movie. But even Qui-Gon isn't sure what Anakin's count means when Obi-Wan asks him. In other words, there is even an aesthetic frame that exists beyond Qui-Gon (though what that frame is, or might be represented by, is perhaps best explored in another thread). Or perhaps unknowingness is an essential part of Qui-Gon's frame I'm not sufficiently valuing. To go beyond the Jesus-looking Qui-Gon? Hard? Virtually impossible?
Originally, before Lucas had "weirded up" the movie, he wrote an Obi-Wan-centric screenplay, where Obi-Wan proceeds through the movie on his own, performing all of Qui-Gon's roles until the main characters get to Coruscant. Qui-Gon then tags along, somewhat superfluously, and is killed by Maul as in the film. Then something strange happened. Lucas brought Qui-Gon forward as the main Jedi character and demoted Obi-Wan to a secondary role, and made him much more square in the process. Perhaps, among other reasons, he saw an opportunity to provide a symbolic commentary on the movie (and the PT itself). Many fans would unconsciously assume the role of Obi-Wan after TPM was released and stubbornly cling to Obi-Wan's frame for many years. Becoming Qui-Gon is fun, but requires a little more investment. You have to have an underlying trust in and regard for what you experience -- it's the difference between embracing the Living Force and retreating to an ivory tower, hoping the movie will end and the OT will be back shortly.
Ergo, implanted in TPM, at a high level of narrative organisation, is a commentating device on the partnered up clash-of-frames that erupted all across the Internet (albeit unbalanced in Obi-Wan's direction) after the movie debuted. Lucas anticipated the feverish debate/denunciation to come by embedding a sly "meta" layer, and he used one of the OT's most recognisable characters to do it. If you watch the PT AOTC, ROTS, and then TPM, it's like Lucas is saying, "Here is the growth in Obi-Wan's character (via Qui-Gon) that's still missing" -- the weirdness you still haven't seen or properly embraced yet.
Star Wars is this strange perceptual machine. It's about the perception of structure and the structure of perception. By doubling his Jedi "negotiators" in the film, Lucas created a two-headed guide that frames everything we see and plays as commentary on the movie's oddness and the divided reaction to that oddness. The theatre of the absurd was paid homage to both sides of the movie screen with two movie-lensing Übermensch.
The fact that they have such similarly-structured names is also interesting and feels like a deliberate echo of the narrators/commentators that Lucas purposely used to similarly shape the narrative of ANH and the OT: R2-D2 and C-3PO. Their names can even be read in an equation/algebraic form: Qui-Gon + Obi-Wan = SOMETHING. Like saying JAR JAR BINKS. A particular type of repetition, combined with sweet variation of tone/inflection, creates a "BINKS" state (whatever that state actually is). Note also this means that JEDI turn into ROBOTS (again, this subject is probably better dealt with in another thread). It also suggests you can treat all characters like robots, or bots, and interface with the films as a kind of discursive cybertext.
In any case, I think there is one inescapable conclusion here: The film needs both of these Jedi to really work. There really is a clever rhythm and musicality to their presence and their precise power relationship with one another. It can't just be Obi-Wan or Qui-Gon. It must be both. And yet the conspicuous intelligence and wisdom of Qui-Gon, as well as his "ideal father" qualities, provide a strong grounding to the movie that Obi-Wan, in this iteration as mere Padawan learner, cannot hope to match. The film uses more than one character to frame its own metascape, even as you're encouraged to think a little more green than blue -- well, from a certain point of view. All in all, it's a very cool storytelling choice, in my opinion.
We need the prequels, in my opinion, to properly orient ourselves and make sense of the polite -- almost trite -- fairytale simplicity of the Original Trilogy. In a manner of speaking, the divide between the two trilogies is somewhat embodied by the clash of outlook and mentality between Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan themselves. The Prequel Trilogy, it could be argued, has a “Qui-Gon”-ish comportment: It is Lucas’ older, wiser, more rounded take on the cruder, less developed, more youthful qualities -- and the George Lucas who made it -- of the Original Trilogy. Obi-Wan was where he started. Qui-Gon was a far-off place he arrived at.
But there are many other layers to this x-y dialectic between the two characters. One I just realised is that the two Jedi in TPM form a kind of commentary, or "player point of view", on the movie entire. That is: You put your interpretive or aesthetic coin in the machine and you can sort of "pick" which one to "play" as.
But without getting too abstract about it, I'm just trying to indicate how Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan embody different fan attitudes toward the movie. If you're Obi-Wan, you're by-the-book, doubting, rigid, cold. You expect the movie to conform to the OT, or to a conception of fantasy cinema you're familiar with, and the movie constantly veers off-course. You see time-wasting distractions and pathetic lifeforms everywhere. Your go-to response is basically "What's this?" If you're Qui-Gon, however, you're much more open and cognisant to the esoteric and unusual properties of the movie; and while a creature like Jar Jar may throw you for an instant, you're able to adjust your perceptions and bend to the new world fast. You move comfortably through the moviespace with little apprehension or frustration. You're calm and collected and even amused by what you see and hear.
What I'm saying is that the movie has this knowing layer of recognition -- even, perhaps, ambivalence -- about its own extroversion and interiocity ("tis a hidden city"). It presents two powerful Jedi ("not to be underestimated") that work as a unit; albeit a somewhat dissonant one (particularly once Qui-Gon starts placing all his faith in Anakin, which causes a good deal of friction to begin to manifest between the two). In the blood test scene, Obi-Wan simply processes the signal and reads the chart. Qui-Gon is the one pushing and dictating and probing into the fine matter of the movie. But even Qui-Gon isn't sure what Anakin's count means when Obi-Wan asks him. In other words, there is even an aesthetic frame that exists beyond Qui-Gon (though what that frame is, or might be represented by, is perhaps best explored in another thread). Or perhaps unknowingness is an essential part of Qui-Gon's frame I'm not sufficiently valuing. To go beyond the Jesus-looking Qui-Gon? Hard? Virtually impossible?
Originally, before Lucas had "weirded up" the movie, he wrote an Obi-Wan-centric screenplay, where Obi-Wan proceeds through the movie on his own, performing all of Qui-Gon's roles until the main characters get to Coruscant. Qui-Gon then tags along, somewhat superfluously, and is killed by Maul as in the film. Then something strange happened. Lucas brought Qui-Gon forward as the main Jedi character and demoted Obi-Wan to a secondary role, and made him much more square in the process. Perhaps, among other reasons, he saw an opportunity to provide a symbolic commentary on the movie (and the PT itself). Many fans would unconsciously assume the role of Obi-Wan after TPM was released and stubbornly cling to Obi-Wan's frame for many years. Becoming Qui-Gon is fun, but requires a little more investment. You have to have an underlying trust in and regard for what you experience -- it's the difference between embracing the Living Force and retreating to an ivory tower, hoping the movie will end and the OT will be back shortly.
Ergo, implanted in TPM, at a high level of narrative organisation, is a commentating device on the partnered up clash-of-frames that erupted all across the Internet (albeit unbalanced in Obi-Wan's direction) after the movie debuted. Lucas anticipated the feverish debate/denunciation to come by embedding a sly "meta" layer, and he used one of the OT's most recognisable characters to do it. If you watch the PT AOTC, ROTS, and then TPM, it's like Lucas is saying, "Here is the growth in Obi-Wan's character (via Qui-Gon) that's still missing" -- the weirdness you still haven't seen or properly embraced yet.
Star Wars is this strange perceptual machine. It's about the perception of structure and the structure of perception. By doubling his Jedi "negotiators" in the film, Lucas created a two-headed guide that frames everything we see and plays as commentary on the movie's oddness and the divided reaction to that oddness. The theatre of the absurd was paid homage to both sides of the movie screen with two movie-lensing Übermensch.
The fact that they have such similarly-structured names is also interesting and feels like a deliberate echo of the narrators/commentators that Lucas purposely used to similarly shape the narrative of ANH and the OT: R2-D2 and C-3PO. Their names can even be read in an equation/algebraic form: Qui-Gon + Obi-Wan = SOMETHING. Like saying JAR JAR BINKS. A particular type of repetition, combined with sweet variation of tone/inflection, creates a "BINKS" state (whatever that state actually is). Note also this means that JEDI turn into ROBOTS (again, this subject is probably better dealt with in another thread). It also suggests you can treat all characters like robots, or bots, and interface with the films as a kind of discursive cybertext.
In any case, I think there is one inescapable conclusion here: The film needs both of these Jedi to really work. There really is a clever rhythm and musicality to their presence and their precise power relationship with one another. It can't just be Obi-Wan or Qui-Gon. It must be both. And yet the conspicuous intelligence and wisdom of Qui-Gon, as well as his "ideal father" qualities, provide a strong grounding to the movie that Obi-Wan, in this iteration as mere Padawan learner, cannot hope to match. The film uses more than one character to frame its own metascape, even as you're encouraged to think a little more green than blue -- well, from a certain point of view. All in all, it's a very cool storytelling choice, in my opinion.
