Look, I'm not a sci-fi geek. But one of the greatest stories in pop culture is the story of redemption in Star Wars. When I was a kid, there was one solitary figure that embodied evil. Darth Vader. (Whoever came up with that name, by the way, nice job.) No one, and I mean NO ONE could strike as imposing a figure. And the director did this thing in the original, in Empire, and in the finale, Return of the Jedi, where when he entered the room, it scared the crud out of you.
I'm an adult now and I'm no longer scared of the dark. I no longer run up the stairs of the basement and I don't worry about what could be lurking in the closets. But when the good guys leave a room in Star Wars and just seconds later, Darth Vader comes in, right on their heels, it still gives me a bit of a scare. His entrance onto the Rebel ship in the original was our first glimpse. Then later in the film, Obi-Wan walks around the corner and runs into him and while Obi-Wan knew exactly what he was doing, no one else is feeling real good about being in the room with the baddest dude on the planet.
In these scenes, and again in Empire when Luke fights Vader in the forest and for real in the carbon freezing room, the directors showed us something incredibly profound. That evil SEEMS so much more powerful than good. Only Luke, Obi-Wan, and Leia were unafraid of this guy and watching it, you're saying, "Run, dude! You can't hang with his bad-ness!" (Han was also undeterred but he completely misunderstood the Force and how he stood no chance with his blaster against Vader) To illustrate my point a little further, is anyone really going to get all worked up about Luke? He seems harmless, almost like a child. And yet, in the end, he is the one who triumphs and triumph is total.
In Episode VI, Return of the Jedi, we are shown that there is someone who is worse than Vader. The more wicked, more powerful, and seemingly unredeemable Emperor Palpatine. The Emperor had Hitler-esque, unchecked authority. He had taken over the universe and eliminated the government. In Louis XIV fashion, he proclaimed back in Episode III, "I am the Senate." The lesson here (again, the filmmaker got it SO right) is how unfettered authority will lead to disaster and corrupt, not only outwardly, but destroy the individual inwardly. Palpatine was headed for self-destruction, even had Vader not thrown him into the core reactor. (by the way, what idiot designs his throne room steps away from the "mechanical" room? An arrogant son of a gun, that's who.) In hindsight, perhaps the fact that Vader did NOT have limitless authority left just enough room for a tiny bit of good to remain. Just a theory.
Even serious Star Wars fans might have missed this: the reason Vader (Anakin) had gone dark to begin with was the Emperor had convinced him that the dark side was the only path to immortality. In fact, the Emperor was going down and about to be killed by Mace in Episode III when Anakin intervened. He didn't originally intervene because he was a bad guy. He intervened because he believed the Emperor was right. In that fateful act, he took a leap forward into becoming a really bad guy himself. (Here we could insert a discourse on the flaws of Machiavellian government but this is already too long)
Let's frame the picture. You have this all-powerful, all-evil, and really nasty guy trying to convince Luke, a kind of wimpy, kind of weak-looking, and completely over-matched guy, that the dark side is the only way to fly. After Luke refuses him for the 100th time, he's had it. And he's not all that happy with Vader who has been telling him for years that Luke will join up eventually. The reclamation project has failed. So he decides, he's going to kill Luke (since his father can't) and go on about the business of striking terror into the entire universe, occasionally cackling like a witch. In a glorious moment, Vader is the one who turns. We see that all that evil and power and nastiness was something of an illusion. That Luke had the real power all along. And Vader sees it too. At the cost of his own life, Vader picks the emperor up and tosses him overboard to his demise. The transformation was incredible. Following this, Darth wants to see his son, "with my own eyes". And irony of ironies, as the films conclude, we see Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Yoda. THEY were the ones who would live on immortally.
Here's where I'm going. Darth Vader is perhaps one of the scariest and strangest figures in history, fictional or not. But of all the characters in the Star Wars films, he is the one who is most human. We come into this world thinking we're basically good people. We're not. There's this underlying spirit that is ultimately governed by self-interest. We have all these abilities that we trick ourselves into thinking we know how to use for good and not evil. But we don't. We end up using all our gifts and abilities to feed the insatiable appetite that is the human condition. One day, we wake up and realize, we have really screwed things up. But it's WAY too late to fix it. So we come up with some pretty cool masks and armors to shield us from the pain and struggle that is life. We reason that if we simply ignore the voice telling us that there is a better way, we can make it. "At least I'm not as bad as THAT guy!" we say.
In the end, some of us win. That is, we manage to silence that voice. We manage to exist for self alone. We don't get hurt, we don't become vulnerable, we don't suffer. And we don't win at all, actually. Rather the self and its ravenous appetite eventually consumes us, too.
Others lose in a big way. In a big and ultimately triumphant way! Those who give in. Who become vulnerable. Who engage with struggle and life and who remove the mask knowing it just might kill us ...
Luke 17:33 Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it.
Awesomeness.
ReplyDelete