Destroy All Monsters: Only What You Take With You

The most important scene in the Star Wars canon is the cave scene on Dagobah. It takes place at almost the precise chronological midpoint of the trilogy, at the heart of the second film. Luke's vision of his own face inside Darth Vader's helmet serves as the lever between everything the story has been up to this point (a brash farmboy taking up the call to adventure and striving to become a warrior "like his father"), and everything it will be from here forward (that same warrior reckoning with what being "like his father," may actually mean).

It's a decidedly disturbing scene, second only to Luke's maiming in its potential for psychological trauma for the film's young viewers. The villain emerges from the mist in nightmarish slow motion; the film has been step-printed to achieve the effect, which creates an unnerving strobe to the motion.

To amplify the unreality of the moment, John Williams introduces an electronic keyboard into the musical score for the first and only time in the trilogy's music. What should seem like a victorious moment - Luke beheading the icon of evil that has stood against him for a film and a half at this point - feels wrong from the moment it happens, a feeling that crescendos until Vader's face plate blows off and Luke's dead face stares back up at Luke's live one.

It's a great credit to the filmmaking of the era that this sequence is left to stand almost entirely on its own. There is no subsequent scene where Yoda and Luke debrief the encounter; a passing reference to Luke's "failure" at the cave is the only indication that the pupil ever told the master the contents of his vision at all.

Nowadays, we'd be workshopping the moment for the next twenty minutes of the film, and would probably flash back to it once or twice more during the duel on Bespin; even Lucas' subsequent Star Wars films, sequel and prequels, rarely had the horse-sense to simply let a moment of such pure visual storytelling play out entirely on its own terms and its audience's intuition.

All great Star Wars stories must, I think, reckon with the cave. The trilogy serves as the primary instance; and it is the lack of a similar, pivotal image system in the Prequel Trilogy which, perhaps, most directly sinks Attack of the Clones as a highly programmatic mirror of The Empire Strikes Back.

The Clone Wars made do without the cave for almost the entirety of its run, and then concluded with a Yoda-focused, 4-episode storyline which finally took the little green goblin to the same spirit world he would eventually send Luke into.

One of the most exhilarating levels in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed takes place in the cave as well, perhaps hewing the closest to the true meaning of the place as the Starkiller works overtime to sort out who, exactly, he is. The cave is about identity, which is why it is so useful as a story construct in Luke's journey (and so sorely absent from Anakin's).

I wonder if The Force Awakens, or any of the subsequent Star Wars franchise films, will make use of the cave - and to be clear, I am not necessarily requiring a literal visit to the dumpy swamp on Dagobah, but rather to the notion of a Force-guided spirit walk in general, and Empire's precisely-designed nightmare of identity as both a story point and a key thematic foreshadowing device.

I suspect, sooner or later, one or more of them will have to; or if none of them ever do, we will know that the weight of the next generation of Star Wars stories is on their value as familiar franchise entertainment (pace Jurassic World) rather than as actual Campbellian adventures of substance.

The truth of the scene in Empire, though, comes in the brief dialogue that precedes it. "What's in there?" Luke asks, and Yoda replies "only what you take with you."

When I was a kid, I admit I thought that the subsequent shot - where Luke straps his weapons belt onto himself, blaster and lightsabre included, in spite of Yoda's admonishment not to - was the key to the puzzle, meaning that because Luke brought violence into the cave, violence is what he found there; he fought a duel with his lightsabre-wielding nemesis because he, Luke, was carrying a lightsabre too.

(This of course leads to the fantasy thought experiments of youth: what would Luke have found in the cave if he'd left the weapons behind?)

I no longer think of it so literally. Even if we are to presume that the weapons are the physical representations of the fear that Luke naturally carries with him at this stage in his training - fear is, after all, the path to the Dark Side - the same dark potential would have followed Skywalker into the cave whether he'd brought his guns or no. "Only what you take with you," after all, is about you, not your toys or your clothes. We all - and Luke is certainly no exception! - carry our universes around with us all the time, the sum of all the biases, perspectives, beliefs, needs and fears that make us who we are. And multiply each item on that list times two, for the ones we know about, and the ones of which we are utterly unconscious.

As such, for Luke, some version of the same idea, I think, would have played out, because the truth about Anakin was still out there to be discovered, and with it, the same basic question that Anakin faced, and Luke would have to face. It's the question the trilogy poses to its whole audience: what kind of Jedi do you want to be?

As an adult, the cave has become one of the easiest and clearest metaphors for the fundamentals of the human condition: "only what you take with you" is what follows me into every movie screening; every conversation with a friend or an enemy; every internet comment thread; every mood; every kiss.

Or, put another way: at the end of the second act of The Phantom Menace, on the landing platform on Coruscant, Qui-Gon Jinn kneels down and offers some advice to young Anakin: "Always remember, your focus determines your reality." The older I get, the more Qui-Gon's words sound Yoda-worthy to me. It's another way of saying that those biases, perspectives, beliefs, needs and fears are in fact conjuring up our entire experience of everything, whether we're mindful of it or not - so better to be mindful, given the choice.

It's all a matter of the stories we tell ourselves, and how we tell them; the words we use and the images that fill in the spaces between those words. They're what we take with us into the cave to face our selves.

Destroy All Monsters is a weekly column on Hollywood and pop culture. Matt Brown is in Toronto and on twitter.