The following is the fourth part in a seven part column appearing in The Peak. I talk about Star Wars a bunch in it. This one is all about daddy issues, because George Lucas was pretty blunt about things of that sort. Check it out.
Pour out a bottle of Algarine for the ladies in the audience, because if the startling innocence rate of its fans didn’t tip you off, Star Wars is about as male centred as flicks come. Both trilogies give us dashing young protagonists with some pretty heady paternal issues right when most their age are just, you know, totally getting into Led Zeppelin.
But by representing one of the worst possible such scenarios, fathers in absentia, Star Wars encapsulates a paternal tension as old as time. Show me a man without unresolved issues with his father and I’ll show you a liar, and George Lucas seizes on that. And as I would rather loofah my balls with steel wool, I’m not going to use the word “heteronormative†even once in talking about it.
George Lucas’s evocation of Jesus Christ with Anakin Skywalker is about as subtle as Greedo shooting first. His mother was immaculately impregnated by the Force, and in so doing gave her son some built in neurosis to go with his raw talents. I’m not stating that not having a dad around will screw you up, but having your mom say you were willed into being and then having a shadowy league of battle monks insist you are their messiah might inflate your ego a tad. I can’t help but think the scene at the Mount of Olives might have played out differently with lightsabers.
Anakin cum Vader has a lot in common with notable movie badass Bill from Kill Bill. Both spent their time collecting father figures, and both ended up with a fairly nifty villain resumé. Anakin drifted from his slave master Watto to The Worst Jedi Ever, Qui-Gon Jinn, where Bill went from pimps to samurai sword makers. Anakin was a little more attached, however. The trauma of having his saviour and preferred figure cut down by a bad L.A. Ink experiment stayed with him to the end, whereas Bill just went along shooting people in the face.
Anakin’s revolving door stopped the longest on Obi-Wan Kenobi, but it was a role that was constantly denied by his Jedi master. His constant quest for approval was met with more pedagogy and fraternity than his desired paternity. The Jedi council just served as an institutional body for condemning his adolescence, and the moderating effects of indoctrination from birth was lost on him as he joined the order at such an old age. Anakin wore this failure to find a male role model like a Tauntaun sleeping bag, and damn if it doesn’t smell worse on the inside.
The loss of his mother and his orphaning is just enough to send him to an exploitable edge that Darth Sidious seizes upon. Sidious as Palpatine gives him everything he wants from a father, and just enough validation and cajoling to convince him that the Jedi council deserves to be rebelled against. Naturally, with a new father promising him the moon, he has to annihilate any other fatherly pretenders. Like any confrontation with one’s father, this ends with him losing three-quarters of his limbs.
Lucas’ allegory is brilliant. The tension between any two fully realized adult males in the same family is palpable. While I don’t envy the mother/daughter dynamic, the father/son dynamic is fraught with testosterone and performative masculine crap, a dangerous cocktail of pride and competition. And blaster rifles, as the case may be.
Lucas describes the two ways the story can end. With Anakin, it ends terribly, through violence and loss. Even as he lays dying, Obi-Wan denies his paternal role, screaming at Vader, his “brother.†His failure to recognize the needs of his Padawan in this way is his greatest failing as a master, something that The Worst Jedi Ever Qui-Gon Jinn saw Anakin needed right away and satisfied as best he could. Rebuilt with a sexy new helmet, the death of Obi-Wan becomes the singular reason for Vader’s existence. The death of his “father†pulls him farther away from his duties as a father to his own child. The cycle begins anew.
Luke’s father figures meet with Vader’s at Obi-Wan, so his “death†is doubly significant. Han Solo and Yoda fill in for Luke’s paternal figures, but the entirety of Luke’s life becomes the defeat and violent death of his father, Vader. So when Vader sacrifices himself for his son and Luke lifts away his father’s armor to be met with a frail, dying old man, it represents the other end of the story: noble death, and the absolving of sin. The story that goes back to cavemen is unchanged by parsecs and protocol droids. Just conflict, love, and family insanity ending in death.
Confused? You should be. It reads like some Freudian psychoanalysis with a heavy dose of Orson Scott card sci-fi and Christian values. Lucas stops short of shaking you by the shoulders and screaming “the nuclear family unit is the salvation of the universe†like some sort of interstellar Tipper Gore, but just short. That the man without a father would go on to become a tyrannical psychopath is just horribly steeped in heteronormativity oh God dammit.
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