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| Return of the Jedi, 1 hour 28 minutes in. |
I'm re-watching Star Wars, partially because I'm trying to capture the child's interest1 and partially because it's just awesome. I got into Star Wars as a child, and while I'm not so hardcore a fan as others -- I do love 'em.2
Today we have Return of the Jedi on, and there's a moment that never caught my attention before. About an hour and twenty-eight minutes into the movie, Luke says (and I'm paraphrasing), "Soon I'll be dead, and you along with me." Then I thought about this. How does the story change is Luke dies?
Darth Vader renounced the dark side by killing the Emperor and saving his son -- and dying in the process, because who was going to forgive him if he lived? (Can we say Nuremberg, anyone?) Luke lives and goes on to bring back the Jedi order. Balance is brought to the Force (except not, but whatever) and the heroes get to settle down and have relatively normal lives.
It's not a bad ending -- don't we want to see the heroes win? But lets let's take it -- let's kill Luke a couple times.
| Death the First: Darth Vader takes just a moment too long to stop the Emperor from frying Luke like a tasty morsel, and while the Emperor is dead, so is Luke. It makes his words prophetic, and Vader dies in the explosion of the Death Star a changed man, but too late. | Death the Second: Vader just doesn't stop the Emperor from killing Luke. Total bummer. However, the Emperor and Vader are still dead men, because while they were busy fucking with Luke, the Rebels still get the shield down and they explode while congratulating themselves for a job well done. | Death the Third: Luke is saved as scripted, but holds through when he says that he won't leave Vader for dead -- and Luke dies with his father's corpse. (If you happen to be a Supernatural fan, think the death of Ellen & Jo.) |
Death the Second sucks. I love seeing a main character bite it now and then, but Star Wars is as much as story about the redemption of Vader as it is a rebellion story. Moreso, if you consider the flow of the story from Episode I instead of Episode IV -- its a story about Darth Vader, told through other character's eyes come later in the story. It's why the whole final scene works -- the rebel story is peripheral to Vader and the family of characters in his life. If Vader isn't redeemed, the ending is largely unsatisfying -- or at least as I interpret it.
If Luke were going to die, I'd lean toward Death the First. It satisfies the need to see Vader redeemed as a father and a character, and ramps the angst up to an 11. And I'm in love with the symmetry of death and loss. First Anakin loses his wife, which fuels his transformation into Darth Vader; then Darth Vader fails to save his son, the act that brought him back to being Anakin.
Imagine it: redeemed, Darth Vader dies with his son. The Rebels win at a terrible cost; the Rebellion loses a fighter, Han loses a dear friend, Leia never gets the chance to really know Luke as her brother. The Force becomes balanced, because the Force is no more -- the last of the Jedi bloodline is in Leia, who has no training and is about to dilute that blood further. Order is restored to the universe.
Were Luke the only child of Vader, or if this were the story of Luke Skywalker, this would work. But in order for Vader to be wholly redeemed, he has to be redeemed to both his children. He did Leia a terrible wrong in being complicit in destroying her home and killing her father in a New Hope. If Vader is only redeemed to Luke in a death that no one knows about, it doesn't count.
And really: downer ending. We the movie-goer don't want to see the hero die; we don't want to be reminded that sometimes there really is no hope. We want to see Luke take his father's body to be honored in death, want him to tell his sister that in the end, their father saved his life. We like knowing that when Leia has a son in a decade or so, she's going to honor her father in naming him Anakin, even though she never saw this man as anything other than a tyrant and a murderer.
I'm not bagging on the ending as it stands -- I like it. Anakin goes to Jedi heaven, Han and Leia get married, Luke and Leia get to be a family, and the Light Side wins. It's a solid ending. It's satisfying. But it's interesting to consider how the story changes if you fiddle with that one detail.
1. He's obsessed with the moon, so I figured it can't hurt. And I cannot physically handle another round of Shaun the Sheep.
2. I even like the prequel movies. Maybe Lucas just caught me at the right age, but they came out when I was a teenager. My mother used to talk about seeing the originals in theaters, and it felt like an opportunity to get involved in something similar. Even if it wasn't quite, not really.
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