owl | Anakin Skywalker: Evil Incarnate? (Reply)

Second essay salvaged from the wreck...

I've noticed this attitude (roughly paraphrased) from a lot of people:

Anakin isn't KEWL enough in the PT...We hate Jake Lloyd 'cos he's cute and annoying...AotC should have been Ep 1, Ep 3 should have been Ep 2, and Ep 3 should have focused on the Jedi Purge and young Vader being an evil badass.

Instead, what we have is a generous button-nosed kid who loved his mother and had a rough time of it as a slave, and a hot-headed teenager who got in a strop with his father-figure and used cringe-worthy pick-up lines to hit on his first crush And that is hated with a venom usually reserved for Nazis and paedophiles.

My theory is, they never wanted to see a sympathetic Anakin in the first place. I think it hits too close to home--I'll bet they used cringe-worthy lines on their girl too. They don't want to identify with this angry kid who's on his way to being Vader. They don't want to see how he gets there.
And so they attempt to blacken Anakin's grey areas, to make him out worse than he yet is. They call him 'a brat' in TPM and 'a creepy psychotic stalker' in AotC. I think if we watched the films without the knowledge of who Anakin turns into, the prevailing view of him would be quite different. Think of it; were you rooting for Luke to turn at the end of ESB? Or did you want him to do the right thing?

I think people wanted to see Anakin as a bad seed, a demon child, someone you could hate unconditionally and without reserve. Because one can distance oneself from that in a way that one cannot from the boy with the pick-up lines and the kid who built a pod-racer in his backyard (isn't that every geeky kid's dream?)

p>But the child has already the fatal flaws that will lead him down the dark path, and the boy is a mass-murderer before he turns twenty. The realisation of how thin the line is between Anakin-the-good-kid, the one you identify with, and Anakin-the-raging-murderer is chilling. It pinpoints our own human frailty too closely.

But it should have been expected. Someone said to me recently, 'The big surprise in the PT was that Darth Vader was once an innocent little kid.' But it shouldn't have come as a surprise. The clues were all there in the OT. Obi-Wan talks about 'the good man who was your father', the good that Luke alone had the faith to see was still there. If there was a good man called Anakin Skywalker once, why is it so outragous that he was once a good kid too? Nothing is evil in its beginning. Even the devil was an angel once. Even Sith Lords with the blood of hundreds on their soul were sweet little blond boys once.

Anakin, with his faults and his sins, and, yes, his compassion and humour and generosity, is representative of humanity in general. The thought that we also could be capable of becoming what he became is not one we like to look at. We flinch from it.

Think about this: If you were holding a gun in a camp full of people, armed only with spears, who had brutally tortured your mother to death over a period of a month, what would you do? We all like to think that we wouldn't do what Anakin did, but I for one say I never want to be put to that sort of test.

It doesn't surprise me that many proponents of this view think that Vader's redemption in RotJ was a wimp-out. It all hangs together. But once you accept the events of RotJ, the PT follows logically enough. If there is something good in Vader that he can turn back to, why is it so shocking that Anakin is shown to be loving, generous, brave, funny, handsome, heroic, likable? Good?

Luke loved Anakin, the good that he could sense in his father. I think we are meant to also, or we won't receive the full impact of his fall. We should feel hurt and saddened and betrayed by Ep III. We should be angry at what he is allowing himself to become, at the atrocities he is committing, because we care about him, and we want him to take the other path, to make the right choices, the ones that Luke makes.

No one is irredeemable until they are dead. No one is incapable of becoming something as terrible as Vader. And therein lies fear, and hope, for us all.

Notes:
I am not advocating moral relativism. Evil is evil and good it good, and Anakin does a lot of terrible things. I would like to add that he also does a lot of good things too.

I am not using 'redemption' in the Christian sense of the word, because that's a whole nother can of bantha entrails.