NUMBER SEVEN: "That place... is strong with the dark side of the Force. A domain of evil it is. In you must go."

Somehow, this movie hung onto its original slot on the list. In the original post I didn't mention the crucial moment when Yoda lifts Luke's damaged ship out of the waters after the young Jedi cannot do it himself. Yoda uses only his badassed powers and barely lifts a finger in the process. When Luke looks on at what's happened he says he can't believe it. And then Yoda comes on with one of the best lines of the film:

"That is why you fail."

I think so much of that exchange now and I think about it so much more than Luke going into the cave. Yes, we've all got demons and dragons to stare down from time to time but, over the last two years the random happenings of my life have convinced me that believing you can pass through the cave of doubt/evil/bullshit is ultimately so much more important than what happens to you while you're in the cave.

And on to the original post:


NUMBER SEVEN: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK



For anyone born between the mid-1960s and all the way into the early 1980s, STAR WARS, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK AND RETURN OF THE JEDI are cultural touchstones. Few works of art have been more successful at articulating a kind of belief or faith held amongst a generation that didn't depend necessarily on organized religion so much as it did on each person's own empirical and highly personal quest to walk their own path and discover their own meaning in this life.



Part of walking that path is confronting your own shit - some of it rad and some of it not so rad. So I would say just as Luke enters a cave in search of his own identity, so does everyone. The cave can be anything - a quest real or imagined, dealing with some random insanity that seems to fall into your life from nowhere - but Yoda's words will always be the same when one of us enters:



Luke: There's something not right here... I feel cold. Death.

Yoda: That place... is strong with the dark side of the Force. A domain of evil it is. In you must go.

Luke: What's in there?

Yoda: Only what you take with you.

This movie is also eternal for me because it's just so much fun - even amongst all the muck of horrible discoveries and carbon freezing. There's almost nothing better than Han's reply to being told his tauntaun will freeze ("Then I'll See You in Hell!") or Han's farewell to Leia (Leia: I love you. Han: I know.). It's wonderful writing used to tell a story that means something on the screen when you watch it and then means something even more when you think back on it later. The people working on everything from the puppetry of Yoda to the visual effects that set a standard still rarely equalled also made this film the iconic thing it is. Part of the magic of cinema - I think - is that when you have an enormous group of people moving in the same direction with all their creative energies you really do come away with something that is so much more than the sum of its parts.