Obscure Father

The way you can't understand your dad is the thing that drives the combat across the firmament.

Sympathy shifts. The years flip past, but certain fundamental elements do change. It’s slow, and unpredictable, and only noticeable upon returning to something familiar.

I recently started watching Star Wars with my son, Walter. He’s three and a half, about the age I was when Empire Strikes Back came out in the theater. Sticky floors and red velvet curtains.

Walter and I are watching the movies and the cartoons on an iPad in bed, jumping around, while he jumps on me. For me, it’s not nostalgic. Star Wars all looks very different to me now.

Troopers on the storm

Walter loves the Storm Troopers - they’re Darth Vader’s friends, and he always gets excited when they’re on screen. In the cartoons and movies you watch the guys in white helmets go from being the Republic’s tragic, competent clone soldiers to being the Empire’s bumbling cannon fodder.

The Empire’s Storm Troopers are awful shots. All they do is miss. It gets to be a little ridiculous. But it may actually be the most realistic part of the movies. Most soldiers mostly miss. Most humans are so reluctant to kill that they’d rather die. Most soldiers deliberately miss, even in the heat of battle. That’s why military training has to be so brutal. That’s why so many murders turn into murder-suicides. On Killing by Dave Grossman is a great book about this.

Through this lens, the rebels are stone-cold sociopaths. The first movie opens with a Storm Trooper asking his buddy to just stun this princess they found hiding. She hears him say it. Then she shoots and kills the guy. And his buddy still just stuns her. And she’s the good guys? How’d that pass muster as a kid?

The years have changed my sense of fair play and heightened my nose for a bad employment contract. And, as a khaki-clad powerpoint jockey, those Storm Troopers look like guys who are just trying to do their jobs and getting absolutely slaughtered for their troubles.

Hit pause, explain death

The Storm Troopers are getting killed left and right, but who cares? Not Walter. Not at first. Then in one of the cartoons a Jedi - a pretty well-developed character - gets killed.

And boom I’m on the spot. Why did he die? Is he coming back? Is death forever?

Oh man. And then later, when he wants to watch an episode from before the Jedi gets killed, I have to explain it all again, along with the differences between recorded media and how time works in reality as we experience it.

And after the Jedi gets killed, Walter wants to know about the other people getting killed, like the Storm Troopers. Is he dead? Why did the hairy good guy kill him? Why didn’t his friend help him? He’s more thoughtful than I was at three and a half.

Darth Vader

My son loves this guy. He’s imposing and charismatic. But why would he be a hero to a child? Walter’s main refrain is more Darth Vader.

So fine. And soon we arrive at the pivotal scene in the infinite gas tunnel of Cloud City, where Darth hacks off his son’s hand, then reveals their relationship, then watches Luke fall down a bottomless pit.

The first time, the scene shocked my little lad, but not in the same way most of us were. He’s a daddy? Walter asked about Darth Vader. I said yes, and he got quiet. This was important information, less about Darth Vader than about daddies. I’m a daddy. And Walter often says that when he grows up, he wants to be one too. So daddy information is very valuable to him.

We go back to that scene often - Walter wants to watch it over and over.

Anakin Skywalker

Who was Darth Vader? There’s been about fifty hours of movies and cartoons devoted to this question. And the answer is a lightsaber-swinging cypher - a dashing and moody nonentity. I don’t say this to knock the cartoons or movies. It’s just that when you ask certain questions, you set yourself up for failure.

Who was your dad before he had kids? Why did he give that up? Were his reasons good ones? Good fucking luck. I can’t answer this.

A cascading mystery

As an audience, we meet Darth Vader first. He’s the first major character on screen in the first movie. He’s hard to read. He’s got a mask. He’s all business.

He’s the magnetic center of the story. The plot of the original movies is a red herring, which is one reason so many of the prequels and sequels fall apart so badly. No one wants to spend a single second in the Galactic Senate. The question isn’t what will happen next. And it isn’t why all this is even happening.

The propulsion of the original movies is a son’s utter incomprehension of his father. This is no hero’s quest. Joseph Campbell got it wrong. The engine of Star Wars is a gaping failure to understand one’s own father, which metastasizes into a failure to understand what one is becoming. And it isn’t resolved, no matter how many Death Stars you blow up.

The victories are cosmetic. The Ewok bonfire isn’t just corny, it’s irrelevant. Comprehension of this towering father is never achieved by any character in the films, nor the prequels that chase the question down a series of colorful but unsatisfying hypotheses.

That guy tried to kill you

When Luke does try to understand the guy, Darth Vader is there to try to cut him in half and throw him out of windows.

This is how it is with a lot of fathers. There’s Kronos eating his kids and Oedipus killing his dad in the Greek version of road rage.

Then there’s Abraham, who, like Darth Vader, is in thrall to a grand design, and who seems more than willing to kill his only son, but doesn’t. The reasons Abraham and Darth Vader are different fail to finish off their sons are different. But both stories prevent us from ever entirely knowing how willing each father was.

Reconciliation in the shuttle hangar

The Return of the Jedi does bridge the gap in a small, nearly adequate way. It basically says:

The past is done. Your dad hacked off your hand and maybe tried to kill you. He chased you across the galaxy, froze your best buddy half to death and threatened to do worse to your sister. Still, your dad’s not a bad guy. You should’ve known him during the war. He’s a company man now. And his job is never done. But he sure as hell won’t let some other guy kill you - not now that you’ve whupped his ass.

How do I explain this to Walter?

Selected bibliography

On Killing by Dave Grossman

An essay about revisiting Snow White with my daughter