Darth Vader lives!

Darth diminished
In the final film, “The Return of the Jedi,” Darth gets in an early good line: “The Emperor is not as forgiving as I am.” Then to our horror we find out it’s true. Darth is a diminished figure here. The Emperor muzzles him, and Darth bows before this haggard, cackling creature. He has little to do until Luke arrives, and then Luke kicks his ass. Has Luke learned so much in the interim? When? Where? Their father-son discussions are interminable, not least because the son is a pipsqueak next to his old man. Shouldn’t they have similar body types? It’s as if every attempt Lucas makes to bind his universe together causes it to unravel. So if Leia is Luke’s sister, then in the first film Darth was...torturing his own daughter? Without a clue to her identity? What good is the Force if it can’t fathom that?

“Jedi” is the worst of the “Star Wars” movies because it illogically prolongs the obvious for imagined entertainment value. Thus Luke enters Jabba the Hutt’s lair without his light sabre so at the last instant R2D2 can shoot it to him and he can save the day. And thus, at the climactic moment — for, it turns out, the entire series — Darth Vader watches his son getting fried by the Emperor. What will he do? Oh, what will he do? Witness some of the worst editing in movie history:

CUT TO: The Emperor shooting lightning from his fingers.
CUT TO: Luke writhing in pain.
CUT TO: Darth in close-up, witnessing.
CUT TO: Luke pleading for his father’s help.
CUT TO: Long shot of scene.
CUT TO: Luke writhing.
CUT TO: Darth, in close-up. (Deciding?)
CUT TO: The Emperor pausing to give his final speech: “And now young Skywalker, you will die.”
CUT TO: Darth, glancing back at his son.
CUT TO: Luke, in fetal position, with smoke coming off him.
CUT TO: The Emperor attacking again.
CUT TO: Darth witnessing.
CUT TO: Luke writhing.
CUT TO: Darth turning towards Emperor.
CUT TO: Emperor’s furious face in close-up.
CUT TO: Darth looking back at Luke.

Yes, it’s a long journey back from the dark side but the scene makes Darth appear about as quick-witted as Homer Simpson. Stupid! Pick him up! Throw him over the railing! There you go. Finally.

Seeing the cracked, eggshell face behind the mask couldn’t help but be a disappointment, and this was before he spoke the Queen’s English. So Darth Vader really was a pasty white British guy. No wonder he hung with them. But darkness had returned to light, and Anakin (Sebastian Shaw in the theatrical release, Hayden Christensen in George Lucas’ grubby-handed DVD release) joined Yoda and Obi-wan in a smiling, ghostly afterworld, while, in Luke’s world, Ewoks danced. The horror.

Little evil Ani?

At baseball games, Darth Vader’s theme greeted burly hometown sluggers as they advanced to the plate.

The rumor throughout the 1980s — as much as I cared to listen — was that Lucas was done. Three and out. Game over. “Star Wars” became less a film series than a missile defense program proposed by an actor-president to protect us from “The Evil Empire.” Even as Reagan borrowed Hollywood’s language his subordinates trashed the place, eventually branding Hollywood as “the left coast”; yet whenever they held the White House, Washington D.C. became “the right coast,” a new kind of dream factory that played on our need for good guys and bad guys, that played on our ever-growing wish for purity. Sad when George Lucas is more of an adult than the President.

During this interregnum the other characters rose and fell with their actor-counterparts (good news for Han, less so for Luke and Leia), but Darth was a conglomerate of many actors and was thus untroubled by box office receipts. At baseball games, Darth Vader’s theme greeted burly hometown sluggers as they advanced to the plate. When the American Film Institute listed its 100 greatest heroes and villains, Luke and Leia didn’t make the cut, Han topped out at No. 14, while Darth landed at No. 3 on the bad guy chart. Oh yes, Darth Vader lived.

Which is when George Lucas returned to mess with his greatest creation. Darth Vader, it turned out, began life as a round-headed blonde boy named Anakin, cutefied to “Ani,” who was good at building machines like the one he would become. Get it? He was a slave on Tatooine — the right choice — but seems less slave than suburban kid with an after-school job. If only the Jedi Knights had found the kid living a miserable squalid existence, picked on and tortured, already broken by life, instead of this chirpy thing who likes adventure but has trouble “letting go of things,” in Lucas’ words. As if being unable to say good-bye to your mother forever is a sign of weakness. Increasingly, in interviews about his life’s work, Lucas feels detached and dehumanized, more machine now than man.

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