I was recently asked whether I liked the original Star Wars trilogy or Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy better. I had to give it a lot of thought but, much to the chagrin of the person I was talking to, I had to narrowly put it in favor of Lord of the Rings. Here’s why: if showing the Lord of the Rings to a viewer for the first time, I apologize for nothing. I just press play and let the movies sing. If the viewer doesn’t “get it”, that’s on them. It’s probably the most consistently excelling trilogy of movie history.
For Star Wars, on the other hand, I proudly press play for A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, both of which rightly earn their place as icons in the history of American films. But then I feel slightly embarrassed for Return of the Jedi and for good reason:
The segment with Jabba the Hut is uninspired, the introduction of a Second Death Star is unimaginative to the point of lazy, Han Solo’s and Leia’s character have nowhere to go after the last installment, the plot twist with Leia as Luke’s sister is pointless, the climax of the movie features three epic battles happening at the same time with wildly conflicting tones to the point of being frantic and unfocused, and the Ewoks nearly burn away whatever goodwill is left after all that. And no, Ewoks don’t suddenly become “deep” just because they’re supposedly a metaphor for the Vietcong fighting American imperialism or whatever. The fact of the matter is George Lucas was exhausted after years of working on Star Wars and eager to wrap things up to move on from the franchise and it shows.
But after all that, even after it single-handedly knocks Star Wars out of the running for Best Sci-Fi or Fantasy trilogy of all time, there’s still something to love about Return of the Jedi.
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The true genius of George Lucas (the only genius that lasted through the prequel trilogy) is his judgement with setting and character design. Darth Vader is the prime example. If the Galactic Empire is based on Naziism (foot soldiers are literally called Stormtroopers) then Darth Vader is based on the myth that Nazi Germany told of its own past. Hitler was trying to revive a lost era of glory for the German people. The First Reich (or empire) to Hitler’s Third Reich was the Germanic Holy Roman Empire from Medieval times. By wearing signifiers of feudalism like a samurai helmet and knightly armor design, Vader echoes the glorious martial feudal past of this same Holy Roman Empire that Hitler sought to emulate.
Accordingly, Darth Vader has a commanding presence as a military leader. As we’ve heard ad nauseum, he dominates both the room and the screen upon his very first appearance storming a rebel ship. What’s interesting, is he doubly-functions as a phantom hiding in the shadows. He regularly startles heroes by appearing where he shouldn’t (Obi-Wan in Hope and Han and Luke in Empire). Similarly, in the opening of Return, he emerges from a dark room as though emerging from a shadow, and the dark, eerie lighting when Vader confronts Luke in Empire is all too perfect for him. Combined with his bulbous, vacuous eyes and vertically lined ventilator on his mouth, he gives the ever-subtle appearance of a grimacing skull. It’s as though Vader is a ghost from the past summoned to lead the current Reich. In A New Hope, one of the Empire’s high commanders scoffs at Vader as an outdated relic of the past yet is unable to shake his authority. Like many historic regimes, the Empire is led by a mere, but seemingly all-powerful myth.
And yet Darth Vader’s seeming omnipotence is a lie. He is, in essence, a walking coma patient. Perpetually hospitalized. Kept alive and mobile only through the miracle of hyper-advanced super-technology that regularly, and almost effortlessly, executes lightspeed.
When repressive political agendas justify their narrative, they are prone to do so by calling upon a great and glorious past of military conquest, whether its Hitler’s Holy Roman Empire, Putin’s Russian Empire, or the American cowboy and frontiersman. In each case, the spirit of the past is revived for the purposes of great violence and repression. Yet these myths are never suited for the times they are called upon. They must be persistently and artificially maintained through propaganda that usually falls apart upon independently minded and honest scrutiny. Underneath, they are as sickly as Vader. Indeed, when Luke Skywalker finally confronts the supposedly all-powerful dark lord as a focused and mature person in Return of the Jedi, he easily outclasses him in combat.
The original Star Wars trilogy is fundamentally a conservative story. Luke Skywalker, like the Galactic Empire, also seeks to revive a lost era of society and the narrative is framed so his success brings peace and liberty to the galaxy. So, what separates Luke from Emperor Palpatine?
The fundamental difference is Luke Skywalker’s relationship with violence.
For decades now, our culture has had a strange relationship when it comes to violence in entertainment. To give a slightly current example, the first Hunger Games’s movie came out around the same time as the first Avenger’s movie in 2012 and the former was considered far more controversial for its cynical premise and stark portrayal of violence. Yet of the two of them, Hunger Games was a far more effective anti-violence story. In The Avengers, violence is hardly graphic which makes violence more easily premised as unquestioningly necessary and without meaningful consequence. Captain America and the gang mow down waves of sentient aliens and enemy soldiers to triumphant music that assures us the enemy is foreign enough to not be worth consideration.
Meanwhile, Hunger Games makes violence awful, not only in how it is inflicted on others, like Rue, but in how it affects those who themselves inflict violence. Katniss is deeply traumatized by the violence she inflicts on others and is kept awake by nightmares. Haymitch, her mentor and preceding victor in the games, spends his years drowning his anguish in alcohol. The only way to escape their inner torture is by sacrificing a part of their humanity like the Capital’s enforcers or willing tributes of the wealthier cities.
And that brings us to Luke Skywalker. Having severed his father’s hand in a fit of righteous anger, he experiences the ecstasy of violence when confident of its justice. But the stump left behind is machinery and wires rather than bone and sinews – the loss of humanity that comes from a lifetime of violence. “He’s more machine now than man,” Obi-Wan assured Luke: killing him wouldn’t be immoral anymore. But Obi-Wan was missing the point. The question wasn’t whether Vader deserved to die (he does) but what effect committing violence will have on Luke.
That's the fatal flaw with political leaders who seek a glorious past to justify modern violence. What they revive is a mangled abomination. What they do to their own people is rob them of their own humanity (like in Hunger Games). Darth Vader is a representation of both.
Here we find Emperor Palpatine the ultimate chess-master. Having trapped Luke in a situation where he can either submit to his authority or he can obey Yoda and Obi-Wan by killing Vader, in which case he will be so demented by the act he will inevitably become Vader’s successor. Either way, Palpatine wins.
These seem like the only options because of what theologian, Walter Wink, called “The Myth of Redemptive Violence”. The centrality of our narratives around an overall good character confronting an unambiguously evil character and triumphing by combat in order to secure liberty and peace. In the opening of his essay by the same name Wink says,
The belief that violence “saves” is so successful because it doesn’t seem to be mythic in the least. Violence simply appears to be the nature of things. It’s what works. It seems inevitable, the last and, often, the first resort in conflicts. If a god is what you turn to when all else fails, violence certainly functions as a god. What people overlook, then, is the religious character of violence. It demands from its devotees an absolute obedience unto-death.
Luke does something truly transgressive in Return by taking a third option and adopting a strictly non-violent route. His more grounded mentors dismissed this path as naïve and self-defeating but, at the end of the day, it’s the only option that didn’t play right into Palpatine’s hands. If there’s anything compelling about the prequel trilogy, it’s in how it shows Palpatine puppeteering all forces of “good” by compelling them with the Myth of Redemptive Violence. Whether it’s through a war that drew the attention (and forced the begrudging compromise) of all politicians, or concentrating the jedi on a violence-obsessed “prophecy” bent on “destroying the Sith” to bring balance. What makes Luke Skywalker the hero of the original trilogy and, in my humble opinion, one of the best heroes of pop culture, is how he understands violence is its own master and something more transcendent is necessary. By doing so, he reawakens the humanity of Vader so that he, in turn, ceases to be a slave of his own violent authoritarianism.
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I don’t mean to put too much weight on this film. Obviously, there’s only so much that can be expected from a film franchise whose ultimate goal was to sell toys and then video games. Nonetheless, between the Bush-era imperialism of the Transformers franchise and the Obama-era imperialism of the Avengers franchise, it’s nice to know there was once a franchise that didn’t fall for this gimmick of violence that neither confused nor frustrated audiences and is still celebrated today. In any case, it was one of the few parts of the film that I found redeeming.
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