/travel/usa/The Dark Side
So work rented out a bunch of screenings of Star Wars. I ended up with 9pm tickets, no one to go with and no ride. Seth was going to the 8:30 show, and had to come into work, so I figured I'd catch a ride with him and sort it out from there. He and his girlfriend and I went out for dinner, then went to the cinema. Just as we were going in, I must admit, I turned to the dark side...I decided to try to sneak in to the wrong showing. Daring, I know. Shocked, you must be. We stacked our tickets in a pile, and handed them to the ticket ripper. She didn't notice, and we were in! Easy, this dark side stuff is.
But then, an unexpected problem! There was another ticket checker, just for that cinema. His job was to block people who were doing exactly what I was doing. I considered waving my hands and saying "These are not the tickets you are checking for," but instead I just held my ticket from afar and didn't give him a hook to stop me. Plus Seth had to fumble around for his ticket. It was genius.
The movie was quite good. I found it intellectually and ethically engaging. I had read some of Lucas's discussion about how he had studied the failure of democracies in making the film, and I think that showed. The political storyline seemed authentic, and only incidentally topical. The prescient (presumable) coincidence with assassination attempts leaving people deformed was striking. The plot holes weren't gaping, and the writing was only occasionally weak.
The problem with the dark side is that it fails to account for a wide swath of externalities. It's pretty clear that under true cost accounting, embracing the Dark Side just doesn't make economic sense.
