Diagnosing Darth

June 4, 2010 8:54 PM

The Dark Side is like using drugs. "It feels really good when you use it, it alters your consciousness and you know you shouldn’t do it." A psychiatrist diagnoses Anakin Skywalker.
posted by Chocolate Pickle (22 comments total)

Science has never been softer!
posted by boo_radley at 8:55 PM on June 4, 2010 [2 favorites]

Let's not discount the possibility of a midichlorian defect. This is a scientific journal, after all.
posted by Burhanistan at 8:58 PM on June 4, 2010 [1 favorite]

We should really have the psychiatrists working on healing the PTSD all the Star Wars fans got from watching those crappy movies.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 8:58 PM on June 4, 2010 [2 favorites]

C'mon. This was just a character summary about Willow in the sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with some terms from the DSM thrown in to dress it up a little.

We will keep getting squishy-squishy "science" articles and none of us have the midichlorians to stop them. Bored now!
posted by adipocere at 9:02 PM on June 4, 2010 [8 favorites]

What if the Sith were right?

"What the Jedi call the Dark Side, and what came to be known as the Dark Side, these people believed that life should be about emotion. They believed you should be unrestrained, that the galaxy wants us to love and lust and kill and make art and cry and dream..."

posted by Pronoiac at 9:19 PM on June 4, 2010 [1 favorite]

"They believed you should be unrestrained, that the galaxy wants us to love and lust and kill and make art and cry and dream..."

...and dominance and butchering anyone who disagreed with you....
posted by Nice Guy Mike at 9:22 PM on June 4, 2010 [2 favorites]

Well, if Anakin were around today he'd probably end up like this.
posted by ooga_booga at 9:29 PM on June 4, 2010 [3 favorites]

It feels really good when you use it, it alters your consciousness and you know you shouldn’t do it.

Bit of a derail, but I can't help noticing how, in the sort of diluted psychobabble that makes it to the tabloid level of science journalism, you can pretty much replace any reference to drugs with a victorian-era reference to masturbation.
posted by treepour at 9:30 PM on June 4, 2010 [2 favorites]

"It feels really good when you use it, it alters your consciousness and you know you shouldn’t do it."

Is this really about the Dark Side, or about George Lucas finally coming to terms with abusing CGI?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:38 PM on June 4, 2010 [3 favorites]

Second Star Wars FPP within two hours of one another. Shouldn't this trip some Metafilter Defcon 1 code alert or something?

-Luke SkyGazer
posted by Skygazer at 9:42 PM on June 4, 2010

"It feels really good when you use it, it alters your consciousness and you know you shouldn’t do it."

Blazecock Pileon: Is this really about the Dark Side, or about George Lucas finally coming to terms with abusing CGI?

Yes, and LSD and THC?
posted by Skygazer at 9:44 PM on June 4, 2010

I've been trying to come up with anagrams for ANAKIN SKYWALKER and so far the best I've found is A SNARKY WEAK LINK.
posted by twoleftfeet at 9:51 PM on June 4, 2010 [7 favorites]

It feels really good when you use it, it alters your consciousness
posted by homunculus at 10:07 PM on June 4, 2010

"It feels really good when you use it, it alters your consciousness and you know you shouldn’t do it."

He says that now but I bet we catch him down the line hiring a smooth young Jedi to lift his luggage.
posted by fleetmouse at 10:07 PM on June 4, 2010

Now, their letter to the editor titled "Is Anakin Skywalker suffering from borderline personality disorder?" is slated to appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychiatry Research.

This would imply that he's a human being, which I think even a casual viewing would decisively rule out.
posted by clockzero at 10:15 PM on June 4, 2010

Any deep inspection of Annakin would have found that he is just a card board cut and any resemblance to a thinking person is strictly coincidental.

Maybe someday someone will redo the series and really show how the darkside can seduce you.
posted by psycho-alchemy at 1:10 AM on June 5, 2010

"I had watched the two prequel movies ["Attack of the Clones" and "Revenge of the Sith"], and it was during my residency in psychiatry while trying to explain borderline personality disorder to medical students that I thought of Anakin," said Eric Bui, a psychiatrist at Toulouse University Hospital in France.

JOKES:

1) Why would someone in psychiatry torture himself?
2) Apparently he's blocked out memory of the Phantom Menace entirely.
posted by delmoi at 2:24 AM on June 5, 2010

Nice Guy Mike: What choice do the Sith have? You think the Jedi are just going to let them sit there and enjoy their epicurean alternate paradigm? No way!
posted by absalom at 7:32 AM on June 5, 2010 [1 favorite]

Therapy you should get. Help you it will. Yes.
posted by w0mbat at 8:53 AM on June 5, 2010 [1 favorite]

He says that now but I bet we catch him down the line hiring a smooth young Jedi to lift his luggage.

that's the training sequence from Empire
posted by grobstein at 1:04 PM on June 5, 2010

Having worked as an editor, I have a long-established theory: when writing falls below a certain standard, the writer always looks half-crazed no matter how sane they actually are. This is because writing creates a facsimile of reality, bad writing creates an incorrect facsimile of reality, and mental disorders likewise frequently involve interpreting reality incorrectly. Being stuck in the mind of a bad writer is like being stuck in the mind of someone ill, in that reality doesn't resemble itself in either place.

Whether or not one can apply this theory to characters, I shall go away and reflect. :-)
posted by Kit W at 1:53 PM on June 5, 2010 [1 favorite]

That Ars Technica link is great... it's a shame how much good and interesting content is out there under the "Expanded Universe" which will probably never get made into "canon" film. Pity Lucas did such a horrible job with the prequels.
posted by butterstick at 5:08 PM on June 8, 2010