Being a good person is worthless. That’s all – no notes, caveats or exceptions. Everything we need to know is in those 6 words.
Unfortunately, it’s not a lesson you can just be told – luckily The Dark Crystal (1982) drops some hints on how we can learn it. Right from the very beginning it’s clear that Jim Henson had a real problem with “good”.
Not so much with evil though. Evil’s magnificent.
Show me a kid who didn’t have a visceral reaction to the Skeksis, and I’ll show you a hen with teeth. Everyone remembers the Skeksis – which, obviously – because they’re utterly grotesque and theatrical with it. They drain the life force from innocent creatures and wipe out an entire species over a prophecy, cackling and overflowing with menace and dark comedy.
And every single one of them is more compelling than anyone on the “good” side.
The Mystics, on the other hand, are the most boring puppets put on film. I’d put actual money on most people (except the most die-hard fans) being completely unable to recall a good Mystic quote without looking it up. Hmmmmmm? Although I don’t think that’s surprising – their whole ethos could be summed up in a motivational poster – preferably one with a cat hanging off a branch.
They say nothing interesting and decide the best possible use of their time is to sit in a valley for 1000 years while their other halves commit genocide. The most active thing they manage is taking in a single orphan and vaguely pointing him toward the plot. What does surprise me is how rarely that’s questioned. We accept that they’re the good ones because, well – they’re not doing anything wrong.
But they’re not doing anything right, either. Which should bother us more than it does, because there’s something very pointed in that premise. What it’s poking at is the effort we’ve made to redefine good and evil into something… easier… to live with in our modern, complicated, post-truth world. It’s even embedded deep in the language, all in an effort to stop us examining the uncomfortable and feel better about ourselves.
The Skeksis though – those guys are busy.
They have to be for the story to work. After all, that’s how we define bad – in terms of action, harm, consequences. So when we see an evildoer we can spot them a mile away from – you know, from all the evil they’re doing. Someone blameless and passive isn’t bad, but we don’t feel weird calling them good. You’re a good person. She’s got a good heart. They mean well. See? No actions required and no proof needed.
There’s something wrong when being good has no barrier to entry. Just don’t be bad.
Which is also where the language we use gets a bit wonky as well. We’ve created an english-speaking world where we treat “bad” like it’s a verb but “good” like it’s a noun. Bad is active, it needs effort and intent – an evildoer. People do evil, or they *are* good – a concept that’s been diluted into a vague label for those who haven’t done anything visibly terrible.
Once you see the asymmetry you can’t unsee it. It explains why we don’t side-eye the Mystics and ask what they’re doing with all that wisdom. We’re told, explicitly, that the Mystics and the Skeksis are two halves of the same beings and the Mystics feel everything the Skeksis do – including every podling drained or gelfling hunted.
But the passive “good” label lets us empathise with the pain the Mystics experience – instead of wondering why they do nothing to prevent it. We also forgot to check whether “passive” is always aligned with “good”. The Mystics are wise and know they have leverage: the Skeksis can’t kill them without dying too. But even that demands too much of them so they choose their valley.
I was going to call it moral complacency but that’s too generous – the mystics are complicit.
You’d think that, when they finally reunite into the luminous and enlightened Urskeks, they’d be able to use that injection of energy and effort to fix the problems they caused but, nope. They just… leave in an appropriately superior manner. Well, they restore Kira and make stuff green so, I suppose that’s something. But the Gelflings are still functionally extinct, and Jen and Kira are left to rebuild their society from the ghosts of the past. Completion and reunification was the final goal: merging fragmented wraiths into fully realised beings healed the urskeks and ended their exile. For everyone else, the net outcome of all that work is “bad stuff happened then it stopped”.
Anyone who watches the urskeks check out and wander off – without a sense of unease – is either a very small child or someone avoiding a question they don’t want to answer – which makes me think that the oddly unsatisfying ending is implying more than it says on the surface. Because there are characters in the Dark Crystal that do good, instead of righteously sitting behind the label.
For me, Aughra’s the GOAT (how do you do, fellow kids?) No joke, she’s my spirit animal – I want to be her when I grow up.
She’s cantankerous, ugly, loud and full of opinions. She complains that the Mystics sit around waiting for destiny instead of acting and she faces down the Skeksis because she’s too bloody-minded to be afraid. She’s rude to everyone.
Aughra rocks being a Karen so hard that all the managers ask to speak to her. She is not, by any easy definition, a good person but, what she does is infinitely more valuable than being good. She DOES good. Being a good person is utterly worthless because it doesn’t feed anybody or fix any injustice. Being a good person helps precisely one person – the one in the mirror.
Doing good – now, that’s the stuff. That means something. And, you know, we have a tendency to put “good works” as some aspirational thing that’s just out of touch for most people. We look at someone who volunteers and say to each other things like: “Oh, isn’t he amazing? He spends so much time working at the homeless shelter. It’s so inspiring, I just wish I had the time and energy to do what he does”.
See what we’re doing with the language? Bad people are evildoers. But I *am* a good person.
Even the phrase “do-gooder” isn’t positive – we’re normally talking about busy-bodies or white knights or, at worst, someone who virtue signals. We give ourselves permission to call ourselves good without any effort – purely because we’re not being bad. And we put “doing good” on a pedestal so high we don’t feel bad about never reaching it.
Crab-brained nonsense.
Doing good is important, no matter the scale. For many of us, it can be small and daily and boring: showing up for your kids when you’re exhausted, helping someone who’s struggling, treating people with dignity even when it costs you something. Good isn’t a label, or a grand gesture – it’s a habit. And it’s about time we started holding “good” to the same standard we use to define “bad”. Measure yourself – and other people – by what we do, not what we are.
And, sure, we all have times when we’re more like the Mystics: sitting in our valleys, feeling the right feelings but doing nothing.
It happens, and it’s fine – as long as we don’t get confused about how it defines us.
We don’t get to break stuff, sort ourselves out and waltz off calling ourselves good. That’s a very different type of person. The Urskeks aren’t good – they’re complete – then they’re absent. kthxbai.
Aughra’s the one who rolls up her sleeves and gets shit done.
– Mom