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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
I, too, once loved "Star Wars." Then I grew up and learned to appreciate "The Lord of the Rings."
Jan 18, 2002 | It is the climax of the movie, and easily one of the most powerful scenes in the history of cinema. Luke Skywalker, facing Darth Vader at the end of "The Empire Strikes Back," losing both the battle and his hand, crouches precariously on a small bridge over a seemingly bottomless pit. Vader picks that traditional bonding moment to inform Luke that he is actually Luke's father.
Luke's whine of disagreement is understandable: His dad is a genocidal planet-destroying maniac, he just lost one of his more useful evolutionary tools and, let's face it, Luke generally whines about everything anyway.
Darth's revelation takes all the film's previous insistence on the easy dichotomy of good vs. evil and throws it, well, into a bottomless pit. Evil can spawn good, and good can become evil, and the lines in between are fluid and ever changing. Suddenly the "Star Wars" universe is much more real and interesting.
It's all too much for both Luke and "Star Wars" founder George Lucas to handle (they're really the same: Luke Skywalker, Luke S., Lucas), so Luke, too, leaps into the pit to his "death" -- although he instead follows the path of his lost hand -- and gets sucked into some kind of venting chamber to be safely deposited underneath Cloud City for easy rescue access.
What a scene! What a moment! What the fuck? I was 8 and a half years old. And in the debates that ensued among my 8-and-a-half-year-old peers ("Is it true?" "No way!"), we discussed the nature of good and evil and moral ambiguity in ways that made us sound more like Old World rabbis than third-graders trying to figure out how to play with our action figures.
And why shouldn't we? Passion for "Star Wars" is like passion for any religion. Some in Australia are even fighting with their government to have "Jedi" labeled an official religion in that country's census. And I was a budding acolyte. Every night at bedtime, snuggled in my "Empire Strikes Back" sheets and sleeping blanket, I would imagine myself up on that bridge, confronting not just Darth Vader but all of the universe's complexities. I knew there would be no easy answers -- at least not until the third "Star Wars" film -- an agonizing three whole years away.
But I knew there'd be answers. The characters -- and thus the makers -- of "Star Wars" were my heroes. They wouldn't let me down.
I was so hooked.
Twenty years later, I find my mind has wandered back to Cloud City; same bridge, same pit. Again, I imagine myself as Luke, only now it's George Lucas wearing the heavy-breathing Darth mask, standing over my head. And he's reaching out to me, holding some crappy "Pod Racing" video game, contemptuously chanting: "Who's your daddy? Who's your daddy?"
