Turning to the Dark Side: What Star Wars Teaches Us About How a Good Person Turns Bad
My new book, Turning to the Dark Side: What Star Wars Teaches Us About How a Good Person Turns Bad, is now available for preorder in ebook and audiobook format. Paperback and hardcover will be available when it releases on May 4th (May the Fourth Be with You!).
What does it mean for someone to "turn to the dark side"?
Discover a profound real-world interpretation of the Star Wars saga, exploring the seminal story of how a good person can lose themselves and what it takes to bring them back. Through a close analysis of Episodes I–VI, the parallel arcs of Anakin and Luke Skywalker reveal how someone who feels too deeply can either surrender to fear and unresolved anger or rise above them.
This unauthorized guide demonstrates that the Dark Side of the Force is not just cinematic evil. It represents emotional unconsciousness, resentment, and unintegrated trauma in real people, while the light symbolizes consciousness, self-awareness, and moral maturity. The tragedy of Darth Vader offers a vital warning for everyone: Do not give in to hate. Do not choose the quick and easy path. Do not let fear and insecurity define who you become.
For millions around the world, George Lucas' vision became a meditation on mentorship, family, identity, compassion… and the fragile line between villain and hero. This modern myth endures in our culture because it reminds us that no matter how far we fall, returning to the light and remembering who we are is always possible.
Please enjoy the introduction to the book below. If you like what you read here, I encourage you to check out the rest of the book and email me your honest review. Beware, spoilers ahead for Star Wars Episodes 1 through 6!
"Turning to the dark side" is an idiom derived from the pop culture success of Star Wars, referring to someone starting to act in a way that is harmful, destructive, or evil, as exemplified by Anakin Skywalker's transformation into Darth Vader. The meaning is easily inferred even by people who have not seen Star Wars. But even among those who grew up with and love the movies, few are able or willing to unpack exactly what happens to the story's central protagonist/antagonist as he adopts his dual identity (and how a less melodramatic version of the same thing happens all the time to people here in the real world when they surrender to emotions that inhibit their own consciousness).
What does Star Wars have to say about how a good person turns bad? How does someone begin to act in ways completely contradictory to how they did before, so set against what they claimed to care about and identify with? In Star Wars, the Force represents the spectrum of emotional influence experienced by sentient life forms, conscious beings like you and me. The dark side of the Force is an emotional state of resistance to vulnerability that suppresses consciousness and choice. If wholly indulged in, it leads to long-term personality distortion. The light is the opposite, consisting of the emotions that enable consciousness, self-awareness, and self-control. The Sith and Jedi are two opposing religious orders in the Star Wars universe that draw strength from these opposites, characterized most directly as the extremes of either greed at the lowest end of the spectrum or compassion at the highest.[1] The Sith represent the spiritual path of passionate indulgence in desire, and the Jedi the spiritual path of dispassion and denial. The war between the two sides, within the individual and out in society, is what we see play out across the films.
In cross-cultural myths and philosophies, light is associated with consciousness, while darkness is linked to unconsciousness. Light is the primary input to our sense organs, specifically our eyes. Where there is light, we can see. Thus, we are aware of what is going on. Where there is darkness, the ability to see is compromised or negated entirely. There is no more awareness. Those on the dark side are unconscious, unaware of what is going on within themselves, in their memory, and in the world around them. Those who remain in the light maintain their self-awareness and the ability to accurately assess reality through reflection upon their thoughts, emotions, and actions. As Yoda says to Luke on Dagobah, one can know the difference between the good side and the bad when their mind is calm, at peace, and passive.
In my opinion, Star Wars Episodes 1 through 6 contain the greatest narrative ever told on film concerning the transmission of themes and warnings essential to human character development. These films set the standard for the rest of Hollywood with Luke Skywalker's Hero's Journey a la Lucas' eventual friend, comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, which provided a map of personal growth that reflects, in a universal way, the inner voyage a person takes as they expand beyond their present state of awareness and integrate deeper truths.[2] That's why it is so important to have emotionally resonant examples of its application, like Luke Skywalker, ingrained in our cultural consciousness. Campbell called his template the monomyth, indicating oneness or unity. Lucas applied his intimate knowledge of that pattern to craft the most effective practical application of it known to man.[3] I call Lucas' application a metamyth: a myth that encompasses and updates older myths, and a myth that stands above others in its scope and influence[4] for what has likely amounted to billions of people since 1977 by tapping into the universal experience of maturation (i.e., growing up) as a conscious being. His work is an ongoing demonstration of how myths evolve and recombine to remain relevant in the ever-changing human psyche.[5]
Star Wars does not just follow a predefined pattern, though. It also masterfully subverts the very expectations it helped establish about how the journey of a hero occurs by showing us the dark backstory of Luke's father, but not arbitrarily so. Anakin Skywalker does not fall to the dark side to be contrarian or just for the sake of it. The context of his fall illuminates and informs Luke's eventual triumph over the dark side and ascension to the state of self-determined hero.
As such, the experience of Star Wars is significantly influenced by the order in which one first watches the films, which is complicated by the fact that they were produced out of chronological order. Lucas began halfway through the story in 1977 with Episodes 4, 5, and 6 (collectively known as the original trilogy), and then returned two decades later to tell the beginning of the story with Episodes 1, 2, and 3 (collectively known as the prequel trilogy). I just think of them as the second and first half of the same integrated whole: a unified hexalogy rather than two separate trilogies.[6] Whatever other sequels, prequels, sidequels, and spinoffs might continue to be produced in the generations to come, these six will remain integral to the foundation that resulted from one man's evolving vision as a filmmaker and storyteller. Although your understanding of the characters and setting may differ, the story remains effective whether you start halfway through and then go back to the beginning (as many viewers did before the prequels were released) or watch them all from the chronological start to end. And though Lucas has stated he intends for audiences to experience the story beginning with Episode 1 and ending with Episode 6,[7] I have my own tested theory about an unexpected viewing order that, I believe, optimizes the Star Wars experience for first-time viewers who go into it completely ignorant of what's in store. I have included a detailed explanation of my preferred viewing order for first-time viewers in the appendix at the end of this book.
Star Wars is designed to reward repeat viewing, as long-time fans still discover new aspects of the highly intentional and reused dialogue (many such instances of which have been underlined throughout this book for emphasis),[8] visual, thematic, musical, and editing choices.[9] There are more layers of narrative meaning than casual fans or people who geek out over spaceship models, alien species, and droid designations are likely to ever notice. These six films, taken as one long and integrated narrative, remain engaging viewing. Like any great work of art, repeated exposure to it, under differing contexts, reveals more depth to the artist's vision.[10]
At the most obvious level of analysis, there are connections between the first, second, and third movies of each trilogy, showing up in Episodes 1 and 4, 2 and 5, and 3 and 6, respectively. At a deeper level, there are connections that are mirrored symmetrically at either end of the series, appearing in Episodes 1 and 6, 2 and 5, and 3 and 4, respectively.[11] Beneath all this, a throughline of metadevelopment emerges, beginning with Episode 1 and continuing uninterrupted until the closing moments of Episode 6, which depicts the childhood, adolescence, adulthood, eventual death, and afterlife of Anakin Skywalker.[12] It reaches through the screen and speaks to our evolving perspective across the six films as we have grown and matured alongside them, serving as their metatextual observer.
Even the music of Star Wars plays a crucial role in conveying subtle meaning. It provides emotional context and plays a significant part in indicating how we are supposed to feel about the events on screen. Ever since I was a boy, watching the original trilogy on my father's faint and grainy Betamax cassettes in the early 90s,[13] I have been fascinated by how John Williams' musical compositions conveyed the story's characters and themes. I found that I could listen to key portions of the soundtrack from all three films on vinyl record and recall with a high degree of accuracy when each musical cue occurred, what was happening on screen at the time, and which characters said which lines of dialogue to accompany it. It was like watching the movies and experiencing the story all over again just through the music. Later, I studied music theory and music history. I began to appreciate on a deeper level all the work that went into various leitmotifs and allusions to classical pieces by famous composers. With the release of the prequel trilogy and its many new musical compositions by Williams, it became evident to me how closely he must have worked with Lucas to ensure every single piece of music captured the nuances intended for the story.
Leitmotif, a practice originating in traditional opera, involves the use of a short piece of music that represents a recurring theme or character. When we hear it, we're being deliberately reminded of that person, feeling, concept, or event, which contributes to narrative cohesion of the story across the films. The intentional insertion of musical leitmotifs can even reveal intended connections from the creator that might not have been obvious from the visuals and dialogue. Once you associate The Imperial March with Darth Vader or the Force theme with Luke Skywalker looking longingly into the binary sunset of Tatooine, you can't remove the psychological connections. Would the same effect hold true for someone who had never seen the Star Wars movies but had heard the music? Could such a person derive the intended thematic representations without knowing the story context?
I had the opportunity to test this with a friend who is a classically trained opera singer. At 30, she had never seen any of the Star Wars films and had only vague familiarity with their plot and characters. Before showing her the movies, I had her listen to some of Star Wars' most narratively important pieces of music. I wanted to see her interpretation of what they represented, including the themes conveyed and the kinds of actions that might be happening as each piece is played. Until she heard the musical score, she had been convinced she would not enjoy the movies. The quality of the musical score convinced her to give the movies a chance, especially when she learned that Star Wars was considered to be a "space opera" due to its melodramatic storytelling style, grand thematic scope, and over-the-top character arcs and archetypes. Once we finished Episode 1, she wanted to binge-watch the next five films with me over the next two days.
After we finished, she went back to listen again to some of the same musical pieces she had heard before, now with the context of having seen how they are used in the films. She was stunned by how intricate and intentional some of the musical clues and connections were. For instance, though The Imperial March is first played in full military form in The Empire Strikes Back as the Imperial fleet searches for the Rebel base on Hoth, pieces of Vader's leitmotif had been present throughout Episodes 1 through 3: first in Anakin's Theme, the sweet, hopeful, and innocent piece that plays prominently in The Phantom Menace when little Ani is introduced and contains hints of a positive, major-key variant of the Vader theme. It then grows more prominent and distressed, transferring from major key to minor, as Anakin's dark side emerges within him in Attack of the Clones and especially as he betrays the Jedi in Revenge of the Sith. It closes out, with somber overtones, the physical transformation into Darth Vader as Anakin is entombed in the Vader suit, with clear allusions to Chopin's funeral march, showing that Darth Vader represents both the archetypal evocation of the death of the individual and the doling out of death to anyone who stands against him. Adopting Vader's musical cue as the march for the entire might of the Galactic Empire (or rather, vice versa, considering the production order of the movies) indicates an important connection between Anakin's personal spiritual corruption and the Republic's large-scale societal corruption. Musically, it represents not just Darth Vader, the man, as a terrifying villain, but the Vader persona slowly growing within Anakin's shadow,[14] only to eventually take over in his most desperate moment. "Vader is written more like an insidious spiritual force than an actual person," my friend realized.
Mythological stories, such as Star Wars, influence human development by providing children (and adults, to the extent that they can maintain childlike curiosity and wonder) with narrative familiarity of developmental states they may not have directly experienced. Hero narratives prime the mind for new challenges, making them feel familiar ahead of time, as if it is a path someone has walked before. We remember simulated experiences as more manageable and familiar. Children cannot easily distinguish between reality and fiction, the real and the unreal, so the storyworld of Star Wars becomes indistinguishable from memory. If they grow up feeling a sense of fulfillment when they see the good guy save the world from the bad guy, or Luke Skywalker resisting the temptation to fall to the dark side and redeeming his father, that's who they will think they're supposed to be. That's the principle around which their ideas and emotional associations will self-organize. And no matter what else happens to them, even if they face extreme hardship, even if there's social pressure for them to act a certain way or be a certain thing, if their emotional associations with this grand heroic image that preceded the hardship are stronger, they will return to that as their standard for self-identification and resist the pull to the dark side.[15]
And it's the same if they grow up with Anakin Skywalker as a gruesome warning of what not to allow themselves to become by being trained to have a conscious negative reaction to the mistakes he makes, including seeing him burn alive in a literal hellscape of his own making as he proclaims his hatred for his mentor.[16] I have seen grown men start to reflect on the anger they harbored and emotionally rewire themselves after being exposed to the emotional imprint of Anakin's fall and realizing they didn't want to go down the same path, unraveling decades of generational hate and cultural conditioning in the process. These mythic stories steer moral development in the right direction, pursuing what is good in the world and avoiding the hot skillet of evil, thereby avoiding the risk of being burned along the way. Star Wars is exceptionally good at conveying heroic, mythic imagery to ordinary people who do not deliberately study such things, but are still sensitive to its mythic elements.
Young people watching Star Wars for the first time will identify most strongly with Anakin and Luke as the primary point-of-view characters at the start of their respective journeys. They are supposed to learn the same lessons as they watch the Skywalker boys grow into two very different types of men through the parallel narrative structure between the two trilogies. The first films (Episodes 1 and 4) represent the protagonists' first steps out of childhood innocence. The second films (Episodes 2 and 5) represent the trials of growing up in adolescence and having our naive perspective challenged and inverted. The third and final films (Episodes 3 and 6) represent the burdens of adulthood responsibilities and how we either crumble under their weight or rise up to meet them, ultimately shaping the kind of people we will be for the rest of our lives. That is where Anakin and Luke's paths diverge; understanding why makes all the difference.
For everyone's benefit, the setting of these movies is not limited to one earthly time or culture. It is an intentionally eclectic remix of influences from classic cinema and television, world history, and mythology, somehow old-fashioned and futuristic at the same time. That's why we can still watch the original trilogy today, some 50 years after its inception, and still feel immersed in it (some dated visual effects aside). The storyworld of a galaxy far, far away, I believe, will continue to prove to have more durable relatability and influence than almost any other provided on film, no matter when and where one experiences it.
Because I have had the opportunity to live in parts of the world where Star Wars is not as ubiquitous in popular culture as it is in the West, I have been able to introduce new audiences to the metamyth, people who have no cultural biases or preconceptions about it. Experiencing Star Wars vicariously through their virgin eyes has made me more sensitive to many things about it that those who grew up with the story take for granted, such as the central plot twist of the dual identity of Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader (i.e., that the protagonist you thought was going to be the hero of the story instead turns out to be the antagonist and the villain) and the brutal realism of the Republic's corruption into a totalitarian empire.
In the West, where the sovereignty of consciousness is highly regarded, dictatorships and empires are often viewed as fantastical threats and exaggerated versions of our minor political problems. They are like dragons to us. We only know they are meant to represent the height of all danger, the hyperbolic apex of apex predators. None of us ever expects to face a dragon in real life. Viewers in parts of the world that have lived through or are currently living through totalitarianism respond to Star Wars' depiction of large-scale political corruption in a more immersive way due to their recent personal and cultural memory. The Galactic Empire is a real antagonist to them, and Palpatine's manipulations of the Senate are a real political threat to overcome.[17]
The long-term, cross-cultural success of Star Wars reflects an important universal truth about the human experience: the moral struggle to become and remain the people we are meant to be, which is to say who we are when we are fully self-expressed. I view it as the story of how individuals surrender to their insecurities and forfeit their heroic potential to enact their passions and values, and what it takes to avoid falling into that trap as we mature. Star Wars is a universal type of myth that can be identified and appreciated by people from any time or place.[18] Lucas believed that heroic stories matter for future generations, so we must continue to update and retell the myths that shape our collective sense of morality. Luke Skywalker saving the galaxy and overcoming impossible obstacles is a tale that we will pass down in our cultural mythology for generations to come, because, on some level, we believe it matters too.[19]
Recently, we have entered an era where it is popular to demythologize iconic characters and storytelling. Once larger-than-life mythic beings who broke past cycles and transformed their social order (including even Luke Skywalker) are being intentionally brought down to a more normal, human scale, repeating the same old struggles of the past and leaving us without ideal standards to compare ourselves to. Thus, it is even more important now that we work to understand the myths that have brought us here and keep them alive in our hearts and culture. In addition to this book's primary purpose of helping readers understand how the dark side of the Force manifests in their lives and in the lives of those they love, I hope it also allows fans of the saga to discover more hidden depth as they rewatch their favorite films. Perhaps it will help future generations derive greater personal meaning for so long as Star Wars endures in human culture, not just as a cinematic work of art but as part of a grand unifying myth of personal development.
Endnotes:
[1] "The film is ultimately about the Dark Side and the light side, and those sides are designed around compassion and greed. And we all have those two sides of us and that we have to make sure that those two sides of us are in balance." George Lucas, interviewed by Bill Moyers, "Of Myth and Men," Time, April 18, 1999.
[2] The idea that different cultures' myths share common features, to be explained either by a shared origin or a form of convergent evolution toward the same destination in the human psyche, long predates and influenced Campbell's formation of the monomyth, notably the work by psychoanalysts, sociologists, and folklorists like James George Frazer, The Brothers Grimm, Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Carl Jung, Émile Durkheim, Lord Raglan, and many others. Lucas certainly understood and was influenced by this: "The drama is archetypal. Its roots go deep into the mythic past we all share." George Lucas, interviewed in From Star Wars to Jedi: The Making of a Saga, directed by LeVar Burton (Los Angeles, Calif.: Lucasfilm Ltd., 1983), documentary film.
[3] The spread of new ideas has often depended on the successful implementation of those ideas by someone close to the discoverer or innovator. Professor Andrew J. Galambos, in Course V-50 (Sic Itur Ad Astra, San Diego: Spaceland Publications, 2024) referred to this as "the disclosure barrier," citing the historical example of Isaac Newton identifying universal laws of motion and gravitation for the first time, which unified previously disparate sets of ideas about the physical world (much like how Campbell's monomyth unified separate cultures' mythologies). It took Newton's friend, astronomer Edmond Halley, applying his work to predict the timing of the return of a comet, a feat previously thought to be impossible, for the public to accept Newton's ideas. One man was an inventor of an intellectual tool or framework; the other was a craftsman who used that tool to accomplish something of cultural significance that no one had ever done before. I see the relationship between Campbell and Lucas as similar, and I wonder if Campbell's work might not be nearly as known and respected today were it not for Lucas and the success of Star Wars.
[4] "There's a mixture of all kinds of mythology and religious beliefs that have been amalgamated into [Star Wars] and I have tried to take the ideas that seem to cut across the most cultures because I am fascinated by that. And I think that is one of the things I really got from Joe Campbell. What he was trying to do was find the common threads through the various mythologies, through the various religions." George Lucas, interviewed by Bill Moyers, "The Mythology of Star Wars," PBS, June 18, 1999.
[5] "If [Star Wars] is a tool that can be used to make old stories be new and relate to younger people, that's what the whole point was." George Lucas, interviewed by Bill Moyers, "The Mythology of Star Wars," PBS, June 18, 1999.
[6] "I do see [Star Wars], tonality-wise, as two trilogies. But they do, together, form one epic of fathers and sons." George Lucas, quoted by Jim Windolf, "Star Wars: The Last Battle," Vanity Fair, February 1, 2005, 110.
[7] "You gotta remember this is one movie, and it's meant to be seen one through six. So I think when you watch the actual movie in order, the story will become very clear…" George Lucas, interview in The Chosen One, featurette on Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (DVD, Lucasfilm Ltd., 2005).
[8] "It's very, very clear in the two trilogies that I'm putting the characters in pretty much the same situations, sometimes even using the same dialogue, so that the father and son go through pretty much the same experience." George Lucas, commentary on Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (DVD, Lucasfilm Ltd., 2001).
[9] Rick Worley's Every Time Star Wars Quotes Star Wars video on YouTube offers a comprehensive two-hour montage of hundreds of instances across the six films of characters repeating or paraphrasing lines of dialogue or the framing of shots being reused in different contexts. His Every Time Star Wars Quotes Other Movies video accomplishes a similar task for references and homages to George Lucas' primary cinematic influences. Furthermore, his How to Watch Star Wars series elaborates on the importance of these inclusions in how we ought to interpret Lucas' movies according to his intentions as an auteur filmmaker.
[10] "There's a lot going on [in Star Wars] that most people haven't come to grips with yet. But when they do, they will find it's a much more intricately made clock than most people would imagine." George Lucas, quoted by Jim Windolf, "Star Wars: The Last Battle," Vanity Fair, February 1, 2005, 116.
[11] The bookended and mirrored connections across the films was first brought to my attention by Mike Klimo's Star Wars Ring Theory essay, written in 2014. His analysis attributes this to an ancient storytelling technique called ring composition, also known as chiastic structure, in which a narrative's elements are arranged in a symmetrical pattern, with the central idea placed at the core around which everything else revolves. The beginning reflects the end, and the two meet in the middle.
[12] "It has the epic quality of following one person from the time he's nine years old to the time he dies. It's Anakin's story, but obviously there are many other characters in that story – his children, his best friend – and their stories carry through." George Lucas, quoted by J. W. Rinzler, The Making of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (New York: Del Rey, 2005), 221.
[13] The original trilogy films were first released on retail VHS in 1984 (Episodes 4 and 5) and 1986 (Episode 6), before I was born in 1988. My father, who worked for Blockbuster Video, used his connections in the movie rental industry to obtain early pirated copies of the 1982 rental-only Betamax releases of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, years before the public could own the movies on home video. Thus, my earliest memories of watching Star Wars came from old Betamax cassettes with handwritten labels. I recall it being a pretty momentous occasion when we finally upgraded to the THX remastered VHS box set (the one featuring the faces of Darth Vader, a stormtrooper, and Yoda) of all three films for Christmas 1995, and we finally had the real deal for seven-year-old me to watch on a loop and wear out. That was the first time I got to see how the unexpected and culturally defining way Luke and Vader's story ended, not knowing then how that mythic, emotionally resonant image would stay with me and influence my understanding of relationships and self-actualization in the decades to come.
[14] In Jungian psychology, upon which much of Campbell's Hero's Journey is based, the shadow is the part of personality that contains traits a person rejects or fails to recognize in themselves because it does not fit who they prefer to think of themselves as (or who they are supposed to be). Under stress, the unconscious aspects of personality can surface in a chaotic manner, just as we see happen when Anakin faces situations that he is unprepared for the burden of calmly dealing with, such as with his mother in the Tusken camp, or when forced to side with either Windu or Palpatine in their duel. In Anakin's case, the shadow takes over as Vader once he lets it out completely in Episode 3. It's especially fitting then that marketing for Episode 1 featured the silhouette of the Vader suit in young Anakin's shadow, and that the outline of the Vader helmet can be seen in Anakin's side profile shadow in the light of Tatooine's setting suns.
[15] "Storytelling is about imparting the wisdom of the previous generation onto the children who are becoming adults and giving them a context for how to behave and how to learn the lessons of the past without making the mistakes on their own." George Lucas, quoted by Jon Favreau in "Jon Favreau Shares Advice George Lucas Gave Him About His 'Star Wars' Show." Uproxx, July 25, 2019.
[16] "Societies have a whole series of stories to bring adolescents into adulthood by saying, 'Don't worry, everybody thinks that way. You're just part of the community. We don't quite talk about it, but if you act on some of your notions, here's what will happen: Zeus will reach down and smash you flat like a bug or the entire Greek army will come and crush your city and burn everybody inside of it, including your heroes.'" George Lucas, interviewed in"George Lucas on Star Wars, Fahrenheit 9/11, and His Own Legacy," Wired, May 31, 2005.
[17] "I only hope that those who have seen Star Wars recognize the Emperor when they see him." George Lucas, interviewed by Bill Bradley for American Voices, November 15, 2015.
[18] "I really tried to take the psychological motifs from mythology all over the world. As a result, I was able to take ideas that go through all societies, through all the ages, and bring them down and put them into a razzle-dazzle Saturday matinee serial action-adventure film." George Lucas, interviewed by Bill Bradley for American Voices, November 15, 2015.
[19] "I'm hoping that Star Wars doesn't become too dated, because I think its themes are timeless. If you've raised children, you know you have to explain things to them, and if you don't, they end up learning the hard way. In the end, somebody's got to say, 'Don't touch that hot skillet.' So the old stories have to be reiterated again in a form that's acceptable to each new generation. I don't think I'm ever going to go much beyond the old stories, because I think they still need to be told." George Lucas, interviewed in"George Lucas on Star Wars, Fahrenheit 9/11, and His Own Legacy," Wired, May 31, 2005.