On the way back from Clemson this past weekend, I listened to the soundtrack of Revenge of the Sith and I had a lot of Star Wars thoughts. That led to this Note.
Also I’m a terrible novelist. In case you wanted a NaNoWriMo update.
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The Star Wars prequels don’t do a great job of portraying Anakin Skywalker. Watch Attack of the Clones and what opinion do you get of this guy? Not a very good one, I’d wager: here’s a kid who becomes obsessed with a woman he hasn’t seen in nearly a decade, he’s arrogant to the point of stupidity, brash, loud, and just really, really whiny. We don’t really see that much of his heroic side; and when he confesses to Padme that he’s just slaughtered an entire village of Sand People, down to the last child, and at no point does someone say “That’s a dick move, man,” it’s kind of difficult to understand why Padme falls in love with him at all. He’s an unstable and violent kid, and she’s an accomplished stateswoman?? Why???
Revenge of the Sith does a bit better; he makes some sketchy choices at the beginning, but overall he seems okay enough, but before long we’re watching him turn evil, and all sympathy goes out the proverbial window once he starts murdering actual children. We don’t get enough time to really connect to Anakin before he’s evil, and he turns evil by doing the most horrendous actions imaginable, so we have no chance at ever sympathizing with him.
The thing is that this isn’t actually the picture we’re supposed to be getting of Anakin. For starters, we’re supposed to actually like him, and when he falls to the Dark Side we’re meant to think this is a massive tragedy of a capital-H Hero collapsing into evil. Which doesn’t work at all! Part of this is due to the very nature of the story being told and the way it’s being told--in films, you’ve got to nail the big, cinematic moments of the story, and you don’t have as much time to get all the little character moments that you would in a book or television show. So we’re not getting Anakin in his everyday life, or even as a Jedi on the battlefield most of the time. We’re getting Anakin’s moments of highest emotion, most intense stress, and greatest frustrations. That’s not always a good picture to judge someone by.
Also… George Lucas’s writing was a massive problem. Which I tend to kind of excuse sometimes, because at least Lucas admits that he doesn’t do dialogue well, but in this case his direction and the general writing made Anakin as unsympathetic as humanly possible. I don’t even blame Hayden Christensen’s acting, as Lucas not doing well helping his cast is pretty well-documented. I don’t know if it would have been much better if Christensen’s acting and delivery had been better though, because the dialogue and scripting just don’t make him come across as a very good character. He’s just annoying, and I think he would have been annoying if the most talent performer on the planet was playing him.
I was very surprised then to watch the CGI animated series, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and find myself thinking, “Hey, Anakin Skywalker’s kind of awesome.”
What the eff, man?
To be fair, there are moments in the series where Anakin seems to flirt with the Dark Side. But for the most part, you don’t get the impression that this is an emotionally-unstable jerk that’s constantly getting angry at everyone around him. Anakin, as presented in The Clone Wars, is a friendly, powerful, skilled Jedi, who often bends the rules, but usually to do what he feels needs to be done. He has a temper, but we don’t see him slaughter innocent people, and when he gets upset it is proportional to the grievance in question. He goes out of his way to help people even when it inconveniences him. He’s kind to those lower than him in the chain of command. And he seems well-liked by several other Jedi, officers, and politicians.
Maybe it’s because I haven’t seen all of the prequel movies in a while, but when I think of Anakin Skywalker, I tend to think of the one from the show rather than the one from the movies. And I suspect that Anakin as he appears in the series is closer to Lucas’s original intention.
I ended up looking at the traits of Anakin in the animated series that I listed above: mostly friendly, gets along well with people, has a bit of a temper, a tendency to bend or break the rules if he thinks it’s the right thing to do, but with amazing power and skill, and I thought to myself… that describes a lot of pop culture heroes.
The one that came to mind was Percy Jackson, actually. And that felt weird. That’s not to say that I think Percy’s doomed to become his series’s equivalent of Darth Vader--for one, we’ve seen no indication that Percy, even when his temper flares the highest, has ever shown any sign of being okay with hurting civilians. But I would also totally read the heck out of a story that involved Percy Jackson becoming a supervillain, because there is groundwork there, if you wanted to make it happen.
The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher tries to play with this too, in that Harry Dresden carries a lot of those traits, and because of certain parties taking an interest in him, the White Council of wizards sees that too, and they definitely see him as a potential threat. Jim Butcher’s made it clear in interviews that while many wizards do like Harry, the Senior Council is extremely wary of him, how powerful he is, and basically expect him to turn out to be the next Dark Lord and are preparing accordingly. Yeah, we know that he’s not that bad a guy because we’ve been in his head for fifteen books, but most people don’t have that benefit, they just see this powerful wizard who breaks rules a lot, has connections to some sketchy types, and often leaves flaming wreckage in his wake.
Because of these two examples, and with The Clone Wars I kept thinking that this Anakin Skywalker-type of character, the one that Lucas was going for, is actually a really strong character and one that could be interesting to explore even without said hero (or heroine!) going to the Dark Side. But the examples I could think of where it was done well were all shows or book serieses that gave these characters lots of time to develop. I know I’ve rambled about this before, how movies don’t often give enough time for character development, especially when they’ve got spectacle to deliver.
I’ve seen it suggested before (and I might have done so too, I don’t recall), that the prequel trilogy would have been stronger if the first film focused more on Anakin, rather than picking him up partway through. And I agree; that way we’d get more character development and we’d feel like he’s less of a violent entitled jerkface. Because that’s key to making any character likable or sympathetic: we have to have had enough time to get to know them. So even if we do see their bad sides, we see their good sides too so that we care when they turn evil. That we get it, instead of just writing them off and saying, “Well, that guy was a douche anyway! Moving on!”
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