In all the excitement surrounding the long-awaited release of The Phantom Menace, Episode I of George Lucas’s Star Wars saga, one of the most eagerly anticipated figures was the new villain, Darth Maul. Months before the film’s release, Maul’s horned and tattooed visage could be seen glowering from book jackets, promotional posters, and behind-the-scenes stories in magazines and on television. Fans of Star Wars imagined that this striking character would dominate the new film and its forthcoming sequels the way the infamous Darth Vader did the previous trilogy: a figure at once awful and compelling, a dark force for the heroes to struggle against and overcome. But when the film finally opened, those fans were shocked and disappointed: Darth Maul appears in a bare handful of scenes with spoken lines in only two of them and is killed after a long and spectacular lightsaber duel with the two Jedi knights.

Most irregular, if Darth Maul were in fact the real villain. But he isn’t. For all his sinister appearance, Maul is far from being the major evil force in The Phantom Menace. He is a red herring, a gaudy and obvious distraction sent to keep the heroes busy and to take them down if he can, while the true villain does his work quietly, behind the scenes, and utterly unsuspected.

The true villain, the real face of evil, is Senator Palpatine, who is also the Sith Master Darth Sidious.

As ancient as myth and story is the evil figure who hides behind a friendly face: from Aesop’s wolf, who dresses in a sheepskin so as to devour the flock undetected, to Milton’s Satan, the most beautiful of all the angels (so compelling that Blake was moved to write in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Milton was a true poet, and of the Devil’s party), to Shakespeare’s smiling, damned villain (Hamlet, I, v), to all the hags and demons of fairy tale fame who disguise themselves as maidens to steal the true heroine’s prince. Mara, the Hindu god of illusion, sent lovely young girls to tempt the Buddha as he sat under the Bo tree in search of enlightenment; the folklore of the British Isles is filled with seductive faerie creatures whose bodies are hollow or bestial behind their beautiful façades.

Deception is a splendid tool for evil; after all, if you don’t know that the soft-spoken, gray-haired man beside you is in fact a power-hungry Sith Master, you are less likely to turn on him and foil his plans. The devil, Hamlet muses, hath power: To assume a pleasing shape (II, ii) all the better to seduce. And vision in and of itself is not always trustworthy. As Jacques Lusseyran says, "It establishes a relationship with the surface of things. With the eyes we pass over furniture, trees, people. This moving along, this gliding, is sufficient for us. We call it cognition. And here, I believe, lies a great danger. The true nature of things is not revealed by their first appearance." We accept surfaces, and if there is no break in a pleasing facade, we often do not bother to look deeper. We believe what we want, rather than searching for an unpleasant reality.

Certainly deception is not always a tool for evil: myth and folklore are filled with disguised heroes, tricksters, angels, gods, and wise women. But where they use deception to instruct or protect, the villain uses it for personal gain and to inflict harm on others. The game Palpatine plays is a deep one. He arranges a trade embargo on his own homeworld of Naboo, causing much suffering, then counsels Naboo’s young queen to sign a treaty with the Trade Federation. Queen Amidala refuses, taking her plea instead to the Galactic Senate. But when she finds her request inextricably bound up in bureaucratic red tape, as Palpatine knew very well would happen, the Senator convinces her to call for a vote of no confidence in the current Chancellor. Elected in his place is none other than Palpatine himself, who will later disband the Republic and proclaim himself Emperor, much like Julius Caesar in ancient Rome.

Then there is Darth Maul. Unlike Darth Sidious, Maul has all the subtlety of the bludgeoning tool from which he derives his name. His horns and glowing yellow eyes recall the Christian devil, and the red and black tattoos covering his face (colors which frequently represent blood and death) were the result of extensive research by Lucas and his team into demonic and fearful figures from many of the world’s cultures. Darth Maul is the monster who terrifies, who gets what he wants through brute strength and violence. He is the obvious evil and he is a tool, used and discarded. Meanwhile, Darth Sidious, in the guise of friendly, concerned Senator Palpatine, maneuvers the heroes into liking him, trusting him, and giving him exactly what he wants.

Appearances can often be deceptive in Lucas’s universe. Wise and powerful Jedi Masters may look like shriveled, green-skinned gnomes; old friends can strike treacherous deals with the Empire. What seems like a clean shot at an unfinished Death Star may in fact be a carefully laid trap. Is that Queen Amidala or her handmaiden beneath the elaborate robes and makeup? And what threat could the Jedi council possibly see in innocent, angelic-looking little Anakin Skywalker?

Sometimes deception works the other way as well, hiding virtue behind an evil façade. As Darth Vader lies dying in Return of the Jedi, he asks Luke Skywalker to take off his mask; beneath it is the marred but human face of a man who has just sacrificed himself to save his son’s life. And it was Luke, alone of all the heroes, who was willing to look beyond the terrifying, impersonal black mask and believe that there was still good in Vader.

When confronted with a Darth Maul, we know instinctively that this is something to be shunned, and depending on the circumstances and our character we either flee or fight it. But how do we fight a Darth Sidious; how do we fight the evil that seduces rather than threatens us? In many ways, the wolves in sheep’s clothing are far more dangerous than obvious foes their work can be done quietly, unnoticed and unchecked. The knight with the shining sword may take down dragons, but is helpless against the rot eating away at the castle’s foundation. A different sort of hero is required for this foe, for it is a completely different battle.

What is needed is the clarity to see through the pleasing mask and more importantly, the understanding to know that that mask is not the villain’s real face. Buddha, sitting in meditation, was able to dispel the illusions sent by Mara; he knew them to be unreal and so they had no power to harm him. The false Una is exposed by the true one in Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, and Gandalf breaks the power of Saruman’s insidious voice in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Most disguised villains have a crack somewhere in their fair seemings, and if we are aware and attentive enough to find it, the whole thing crumbles away. Frequently, the very act of exposing a hidden foe is enough to defang it, as with the Japanese demons who flee upon being revealed in their true forms.

Alas, the heroes of The Phantom Menace do not learn this lesson; or if they do, it is too little and too late. "Focus on the moment," counsels Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn, but the Master forgets his own advice, instead chasing after the future he sees in young Anakin. As we know from the events of the previously released chapters of the Star Wars saga, all the wisdom and strength of the Jedi cannot stop the fall of the Republic and the dark Emperor’s rise to power. Those Jedi not destroyed flee into hiding, waiting for a new hero to appear who can undo the damage. All that is salvaged is a hope for the future. The Phantom Menace is the first act of a tragedy — one that might have been averted had any of the heroes been able to focus on what was real, rather than on what they wished to see.




From Parabola: The Magazine of Myth and Tradition, Winter 1999. Used by arrangement with the author and Parabola.
Copyright © 1999 by Shanti Fader

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