A straight line can be drawn between the characters of Star Wars and those in George Lucas' previous film, American Graffiti. Luke Skywalker has his roots in Curt, played by Richard Dreyfuss, the young man who doesn't want to leave home... until he receives encouragement from a mentor. (And the mentor, who'll remain nameless in case you haven't seen Graffiti, bears an interesting resemblance to Obi-Wan.) Han Solo is clearly modeled on John Milner (Paul Le Mat), constantly boasting about the speed of his hot-rod, while insecure Terry (Charles Martin Smith) forms the basis for bumbling and worrisome C-3PO. There's even an argument that Princess Leia follows the same path as Steve (Ron Howard), the student leader whose greatest adventure is to fall in love.

Truth is, most other Star Wars characters, both sequel and prequel, would also fit within the high school setting. The Jedi are clearly the jocks -- talented, popular, always committed to playing by the rules and looking out for the team. The bounty hunters are those brilliant kids who think school is beneath them, but they're so darn cool that they still get all the chicks. Jar Jar's the awkward adolescent who always shows up late and gets beaten up for his lunch money. And Padme's the overachieving class president who gets knocked up by the quarterback, and figures nobody will notice if her sweaters are baggy enough.

The Sith? Unfortunately, we know them, too: misfit kids who stay in the shadows, seething with unseen anger... planning, plotting, and preparing for revenge.


A few weeks ago, while preparing an obit for Charlton Heston, I revisited Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine. It's an unfair portrait of Mr. Heston, who was almost certainly suffering from Alzheimer's at the time of his interview. Still, the movie raises some good points, mostly about the media and its connection to violence, while Mr. Moore smartly avoids tackling the central question: what caused the Columbine massacre? Why did two friends wake up one morning and commit mass murder? The film details our national search for answers in the aftermath of tragedy. To this day, we're still searching.

But after recent school shootings -- two separate attacks within one year -- the explanations came fast and furious. The quick consensus was that a deadly cocktail of isolation, martyrdom, and mental illness caused these men to lash out. Nobody's making a movie trying to understand what happened. Nobody's asking any questions. So what changed?

Last week was the ninth anniversary of the Columbine massacre. Perhaps coincidentally, the attack occurred on April 20th, Hitler's birthday. In the nine years since, we haven't become numb to violence. We're no more sophisticated in our diagnoses than we were in 1999. The difference between now and then, perhaps, is that these last two massacres were each carried out by a single person. Fairly or not, the perpetrator assumed the status of the Lone Gunman, the villainous archetype of a guy who just plain snapped. Columbine isn't as easy to dismiss. We're still grappling with it because the shooters weren't isolated. They didn't act alone. There were two of them. Always two.

After viewing the surveillance footage of the Columbine killers, I couldn't shake the image of Anakin Skywalker marching up the Jedi Temple steps. His look of determination... the merciless slaughter of children... all within a house of learning. The scene became less tragic and far more chilling, not just because it's suddenly relatable, but because Star Wars has a way of painting things in stark black and white. George Lucas conceived the Force, in his words, "based on the premise that there is a God and there is good and evil." So two individuals, working together towards a premeditated attack -- in Star Wars terms, they're the Sith. They no longer need to be explained. They represent evil. It's tempting to say that they simply are evil.


But... high school students?