The Zen of Qui-Gon Jinn
The esoteric Star Wars warning of a New Normal where “Your focus determines your reality.”
A long time ago…
Before Disney was under never-ending fire for having woke-raped Star Wars by pushing feminism and tweaking Lando’s sexuality, George Lucas’s first prequel film, “Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace,” released in 1999, was accused of being racist.
It is within the realm of possibility that the twisted birthplace of wokeism itself can be traced back to Star Wars Episode I—a film that was attacked in the press for being intentionally populated with Asian and Arab stereotypes and with a character that’s “a racially offensive throwback to Stepin Fetchit.”
But keep your focus here and now where it belongs, and DON’T center on your anxieties, because although also criticized, especially by fans, for lacking a main character/protagonist (as in what’s thought to be the hero’s journey imperative of Star Wars films while ignoring their episodic structure)—The Phantom Menace does indeed have a main character if not an outright (and archetypal-by-design laid back) leading man...
Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn
If there must be a single hero in the first episode of the sprawling space opera (before the dark times of Disney), I’m nominating Liam Neason’s Qui-Gon Jinn. The coping habits of Jedi Jinn are worth revisiting today while our world is in the grips of a New World Order takeover.
Because it is through all film, art, and creative expression that guidance is forever being transmitted to us by the Force. So naturally, Star Wars—at least the Lucas efforts—are brimming with such mystical dispatches.
In fact, it is Qui-Gon Jinn’s first of many sage quotes, just minutes into the film, that is perhaps a warning to an entire generation of youth facing the fear-porn notion of owning nothing while being happy...
“Don’t center on your anxieties, Obi-Wan…Keep your focus here and now where it belongs.”
And it is indeed the future that’s worrying young Obi-Wan Kenobi (Qui-Gon’s apprentice) when he openly admits to stressing over “something elsewhere…elusive.” But before you can yell back at him and your LED screens that it’s Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates!—Qui-Gon rebukes his padawan’s feeble defense that Yoda said he should be mindful of the future with, “But not at the expense of the moment.”
—And such is the Zen of Qui-Gon.
Mundane persistence hits cavalcade of stumbling blocks
Within minutes after this dry exchange between Jedi master and pupil, the film collapses into a Sith wish list of impossible roadblocks, Qui-Gon’s apparent lifestyle preference.
As the mediator of a mundane trade dispute, Jinn and Kenobi immediately face assassination attempts by poisonous gas and then by ray-shielded cannon robots. After hiding in ventilation shafts, stowing aboard invasion army military craft, being nearly killed when accosted for dear life by the rubbery amphibian-platypus man, Jar Jar Binks, then traveling (only by the grace of “Don’t worry. The Force will guide us”) through a treacherous underwater planet core in a leaky submarine which gets attacked by one giant fish after another (“There’s always a bigger fish”), Qui-Gon remains noticeably unfazed.
Even after he manages to pry the young queen of the film (Amidala) from the hands of her keystone-cops-style droid-army captors to whisk her away on her sleek starship, which gets—instantly!—crippled in combat and needs to land on an outpost planet controlled by gangsters in search for parts, Qui-Gon Jinn never breaks a sweat.
It’s as if he mildly enjoys being inconvenienced at every turn and relishes the forging of untrodden paths in the face of an angry cosmos that forever pushes back at him.
15-minute city slave friends
Joined by tag-along Jar Jar and a duplicitous handmaiden (…Jinn has a reputation for collecting “pathetic lifeform” groupies), Qui-Gon’s Jedi mind tricks fail to trick a junk dealer into accepting Republic CDBC-social credits for the parts needed to repair the queen’s broken spacecraft.
Never willing to let a chance encounter go to waste (“Nothing happens by accident”), Qui-Gon latches onto 15-minute-city slave and future Darth Vader, Anakin Skywalker. Little Anakin and his mother have “transmitters placed inside their bodies somewhere,” that will blow them up if they tread beyond their allotted neighborhood.
Seeing an opportunity to gamble everything, including the queen’s ship, Qui-Gon bets slave child Anakin in a treacherous, to-the-death style podrace on the hunch that it might finally get him somewhere. After ten seconds of celebration and a brief refusal by the sore-loser junk dealer (to which he responds, “Whenever you gamble, my friend, eventually you lose”) and a near-lethal run-in with a satanic-looking, supposed-to-be-extinct-for-a-millenia Sith warrior, Jinn is finally able to whisk the queen to the capital of the galaxy where he’s wanted her for the last hour.
Bucking a lucrative, quiet retirement
If, indeed, only one hero must exist in a universe that is going to shit, Neeson’s character is the perfect protagonist for The Phantom Menace because the movie concerns the last moments of an epoch.
What was once a grand republic—represented by Amidala’s home city, Theed, a World-Exposition style, over-the-top capital built for giants (easily the Tartaria of a galaxy far, far away)—the Star Wars universe is on the brink of a great reset.
Only a wise rebel like Jinn could navigate such a collapsing state of affairs when everything is one staged crisis after another.
When Qui-Gon implores the Jedi council to realize that Anakin is the prophesied legend of the Jedi-version of the Book of Revelation, to Obi-Wan’s normie criticism, “Master if you would just follow The Code, you’d be on The Council,” Qui-Gon has waited the entire movie to finally say, “I shall do what I must, Obi-wan.”
In other words, Qui-Gon Jinn is not a sell-out; he is genuinely Awake.
A larger view of The Great Awakening
The most prophetic moment of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace is the one most arguably despised by fans.
It is during an innocent transition scene when Qui-Gon breaks the hearts of millions when he appears to attribute the ability to use the Force to a simple DNA test when he explains to annoying Anakin that midi-chlorians are a microscopic life form that lives inside our cells:
“Without the midi-chlorians, life could not exist, and we would have no knowledge of the Force. They continually speak to us, telling us the WILL of the Force. When you learn to quiet your mind, you’ll hear them speaking to you.”
Not only does this seemingly insignificant moment allude to an unknown at the time, esoteric backstory that would have led to George Lucas’s unfulfilled vision of the third and final Star Wars trilogy (not the Disney version)—which Lucas has leaked would have featured the exploration of the meaning of destiny, of God himself, and its interplay with “free will” in the microbial world of The Whills (synonymous with “will” as in the will of God), it sets up a key line of advice for today’s so-called Truther community:
“Always remember… Your focus determines your reality.”
A seemingly minor moment, the scene foreshadows the greater meaning behind the tragedy of Darth Vader himself.
One of the striking final images from the prequel’s third episode, Revenge of the Sith, features a burn-to-a-crisp Anakin’s point of view of the mask of Darth Vader descending over his eyes before it is hermetically sealed in place. The eyes of the mask are fiery red with digital-display guides, like combat goggles.
Anakin’s point of view “has been sealed” inside a dungeon realm, where hereafter, he will forever see reality as combative—as his enemy, his oppressive opponent—a reality where he will, in fact, always “see red.”
It is not until the leap-forward-but-filmed-backward (a metaphor in itself!) final episode of George Lucas’s original trilogy’s Episode VI: Return of the Jedi that Darth Vader finally pleads with his son (Luke Skywalker), after having fulfilled his twisted destiny and returned to coherence:
Darth Vader: Luke... help me take this mask off.
Luke: But you’ll die.
Darth Vader: Nothing can stop that now. Just for once, let me look on you… with my OWN eyes.
Whether it’s paranoid predictive programming—or what I prefer to think of as the Will of the Force speaking to us through film—it is these three moments...
Qui-Gon’s “Your focus determines your reality.”
the hermetic sealing of the mask (with its combat specs)
and the eventual removal of the mask, coupled with the caveat, “Nothing can stop that now” (…death)
…which warns us of a future in which a large portion of our society might tragically but willingly surrender itself to a Dark Side, which might include a reboot of reality itself—inside what amounts to the cosmic metaphor of a metaverse VR headset.