The release of Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi has sent shockwaves of emotional heft throughout known space. Scores of Simeons awaiting the consolation of geekdom have found it in this latest installment, a truly surprising tour-de-force that delivers a similar blend of space opera wonder and classical tragedy the justly revered Empire Strikes Back administered thirty-seven years ago. Whether you left The Force Awakens wanting more or just wanting, rest assured: you will catch every one of the feels from The Last Jedi. The fact remains, however, that Force Awakens isn’t the dumpster fire some cavilers made it out to be. It recapitulated certain key themes and images we’ve seen before in the inaugural episode of the Skywalker saga, true: but charity demands we await the conclusion of the sequel trilogy before we deride it as a tired Xerox of A New Hope.[1]
Mike Klimo has utilized ring composition technique to examine intertextual patternings across the first six Star Wars films and finds significant instances of “inverted parallelism” that links each episode together into a single narrative movement that is wholly interdependent upon the cooperation of all six episodes.[3] In theory, this would make the first three episodes the mirror images of the original three, creating a chiastic structure of binary pairs. The twist here is that the ring shape of the story also means that Episode I links to and mirrors Episode VI in significant ways; episode II still mirrors Episode V, and episode III complements episode IV. The chiastic pyramid unfurls into a ring shape that renders the climax of Luke’s story as the climax of Anakin’s and brings the ordeal full circle. The structural binds between each installment form the curve of the ring and situate the repetition of patterns and types within the single saga of the Skywalker family.
But as interesting as the ring theory of Star Wars is, it essentially amounts to an attempt to salvage the prequels with the question, “But don’t you see what he was trying to do?” To which it can only be replied: “Yes, and that makes their failure all the more heinous.” The challenge evaporates the moment it encounters the problematic evidence of the films themselves. I have no doubt whatsoever that Lucas deliberately framed parallel moments in a chiastic swooping down and arcing up that is meant to envelop Luke Skywalker’s quest within the fall and redemption of Anakin Skywalker. I’m even persuaded that specific images such Anakin being brought before the Jedi Council in their tower at the heart of the Temple are meant to correspond to ones such as Luke being brought before the Emperor within his tower on the second Death Star. The similarities are too striking to be haphazard. I only wish that the end result was something more than merely structural ingenuity. Can a highbrow formal intention really terraform the coarse sands of Tatooine into the soft and smooth lake-country of Naboo? (Come on, Anakin– no one likes sand.) Or transform criminally poor dialogue into the speech of compellingly alive characters? Of course not. Nor can it invigorate performances that seem to have been shot inside a hungover fishing net. So let’s face it: it’s more than a little silly to counter the judgment the prequels have received with the would-be elixir of ambition. “But this was supposed to be brilliant!” doesn’t make a five car pile-up into a parking garage.
The truth is, fans have been eager to see Anakin Skywalker’s legendary fall from the light side to the dark for a long time. But we’ve yearned to see it portrayed with the logos, pathos, and ethos that made the original trilogy such a satisfying and relatable unity. It’s easy to invest in episodes IV-VI because all of the archetypal figures are sympathetically rendered and the intensely personal passage from awareness of darkness within to self-surrender in love is cast upon a tableau as enormous and epic as the galaxy itself. Conversely, it is nigh impossible to walk a mile in Anakin’s penny loafers and inhabit his struggle because, well- he doesn’t have all that much of a struggle to endure. Anakin, we are told time and time again, is conflicted, pulled in divergent directions by his unbridled feelings as they are tested by irreconcilable loyalties. But the problem is that we’re told this: we never actually see this in action. Whatever else he is, Anakin isn’t inundated and rent apart by antithetical pressures. A storyteller with giftedness would orchestrate that inundation and depict the protagonist’s suffering of it with verisimilitude and sympathy. But nearly none of that takes place in episodes I through III.
Having him slaughter a clan of Sand People is a step in the right direction but it’s never developed into anything weighty as he can pivot around moments later and call Count Dooku a “monster” for instigating the Clone Wars. But we never see him experience guilt over his murder of those Sand People- he’s super okay with it and this is consistent with the boisterous, hot-tempered miscreant we’ve had to endure for the last hour and change. We never go on to witness the Jedi Council directing Anakin to take a course of action that contradicts either the training he has received from them or even the normal bounds of decency we reasonably expect from the human race sentient life forms in general. There are no trials inflicted upon Anakin that render his internal division understandable or pitiable. I would dare to say that nothing transpires that even makes such a division visible in the first place. Apart from being told so, we would be far more likely to interpret his disposition as “sulking adolescent egotism.” But this option is cordoned off from us. Instead, he supposedly suffers the aforementioned “division” because he needs to in order to become Darth Vader, badass champion of all things twisted and evil.
Now it’s true that he’s asked to observe and report on Chancellor Palpatine’s goings-on, but lest he and we forget, this is the Chancellor who has extended his appointment to supreme executive office in the Republic for many years through questionable maneuvers, even employing blatantly totalitarian language of “the duration of the emergency” to legitimate it. He unilaterally appoints Anakin to a post he holds no authority to grant. He erodes Anakin’s confidence in the Jedi by calling into question their integrity with all the aplomb of an Iago before singing the praises of a Sith Lord. For crying out loud, he attends concerts with eerie throat-chanting that sounds like the overture to a Penderecki necromancer cantata to do so! (The giant bubbles floating above the main stage don’t mitigate the pore-clogging bizarreness of it all, either- they only amplify the overall “What the flip is even happening right now” freak-out quotient inherent in the proceedings.)
Anyway, all those spooky-soapy vibes aside, what we do see is a legal adult nursing fourth grade suspicions such as, “My mentor is jealous of me! He’s holding me back!” complete with cantankerous throwing-toys-around-the-room fit. We capture a glimpse of an immature young man not receiving a promotion he has very obviously not yet merited. We are also treated to him griping that he was not given a task (pursuing General Grievous) that would interfere with the task he’s, you know, already been given. And we see him believing LIKE AN ABSOLUTELY INSUFFERABLY STUPID IDIOT Palpatine’s hideously obvious bluff that Mace Windu and the other Jedi are staging a coup d’etat because… who knows. They must just crave power like the rest of us. But we’ve seen nothing in three films that would corroborate such an accusation even in the slightest. Palpatine’s maxims about the temptations to seize and fortify power ring hollow because they are so manifestly self-serving and do not illuminate the contaminated corners of our hearts that pathologically pant after wickedness. They’re cheap, cynical quibbles that pack all the insight of Andrew Dice Clay jokes. At no point are we ever beset by a fear that perhaps Palpatine is on to something and that the dividing lines between the Jedi and the Sith are more arbitrary than either side would care to admit.
The main course Lucas serves us is a trivialization of how idealistic human beings shipwreck their ideals by slowly, imperceptibly surrendering their convictions over time in hurried moments of unreflective instinct and reaction. That’s what we’re supposed to take away, anyway. There is little in the way of tragedy in the prequels because all of the necessary pieces are set up to topple beforehand and in their over-zealousness do so before the push is actually staged. Anakin was never all that noble to begin with and his arrogance begins to bloom nearly the moment he becomes aware of his abilities. I cannot recognize the old friend Obi-Wan describes to Luke to A New Hope in the brash man-child who broods and performs an uncanny number of flips throughout episodes II through III. The Senate is already essentially the sycophantic applause meter it’s supposed to become under Emperor Palpatine. The Jedi themselves are oddly comfortable with being largely clueless about the swelling tide of the Dark Side and die in droves from droid soldiers and clone troopers and bounty hunters and the common cold and Lord knows what else. Sure, they can jump really high (they jump so much) but man do they get lit up like Christmas trees when their names aren’t “Yoda” or “Obi-Wan” or “Anakin.”
If we were feeling very generous we could say that what we witness is not so much the consequence of any single sin but instead the outcome of a prolonged and frighteningly unconscious embracing of a path. There is a way in which Hayden Christensen’s perpetually stunned countenance bespeaks the sheer insanity of Anakin’s plunge into darkness: there is a distance we see projected in his gaze that makes him seem like a spectator to the events of his own transformation. But this is a backhanded way of saying it’s no secret Christensen had not yet honed his skills so as to even partially redeem his character’s choices and dialogue. [4] A great actor can redeem a poorly written sequence, as evidenced by certain stretches of Ewan McGregor’s performance in episodes II and III. There are moments that simply can’t be rescued by anyone (“It’s over, Anakin- I have the high ground!”) but there are also unexpected gems ensconced in volcanic muck: you need only fast forward to the aftermath of Obi-Wan’s duel with Anakin in Revenge of the Sith to witness some truly tremendous acting on display in Obi-Wan’s dismay at Anakin’s defection to the dark side. But even that is spoiled by Anakin’s grade school tantrum afterwards. It’s a failure of tone that robs a poignant scene of its power and reminds you, “Man… I spent $10 on this at Target.”[5]
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_YozYt8l-g?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
Besides nagging issues of presentation there are substantial issues of consistency that threaten Star Wars‘ story-world with self-referential incoherence. Inconsistencies plague the saga as a whole due to the prequels’ flippant disregard for what has already been established in episodes IV through VI. Which is it, George: has the Republic been around for a thousand generations? Or a thousand years? There are no sentient species’ life cycles that would satisfy that conundrum. But it never had to be a conundrum in the first place: Lucas could’ve simply remembered what he had Obi-Wan say in A New Hope! Was Anakin already a great pilot when Obi-Wan met him, or was he an precocious little mechanic with delusions of grandeur? Why are there microscopic parasites responsible for Force connection- I thought all living things generated the Force? Or take the matter of Obi-Wan’s Jedi master. Was it Yoda? Or Qui-Gon Jinn? Well, Obi-Wan and Yoda both say one thing in the original trilogy but then, all of a sudden we are introduced to (an admittedly righteous) Liam Neeson Jedi Knight who’s training a young, rat-tailed Obi-Wan. What is even happening here? What is the rationale behind this? For that matter, why in the world would Leia remember the mother she saw for all of three seconds as a literal newborn whereas her Force-sensitive brother has absolutely no recollection of her whatsoever? In what galaxy does any of this make sense?
These are not impertinent trifles, either. They are all links in the logical chain that answers our questions and makes our investment worthwhile. Why are these persons doing what they are doing? What set all of this in motion? What is motivating him to break with convention in this way? Why is he willing to risk so much? What are these people fighting for? The inconsistencies opened up by the prequels problematize the answers we already had for over twenty years! And when the structural integrity of the story-world is compromised the suspension of disbelief is jeopardized in such a way that the viewer is no longer able to immerse herself in the narrative. The labor of disregarding the tale’s own self-violations becomes too burdensome to allow us to indwell it. It becomes a constriction rather than a release and an escape, one more yarn demanding your attention and unable to reciprocate any of what you put into it.
Even worse than these ill-advised lapses in logic is the fact that Lucas evidences a basic unfamiliarity with how human beings experience, like… life, I guess. I can’t recognize human experiences of emotion in the prequels. For instance, I understand that the phenomenon of “falling in love” is highly idiosyncratic and peculiar to each of its instances, and yet there is a fundamental form that undergirds and unites all of them as occurrences of “falling in love.” And in no occasion in human history have two bozos ever fallen in love the way Anakin and Padme supposedly do. It’s not that it’s implausible- it’s so vapid and stale it couldn’t possibly be real. Anakin’s and Padme’s relationship is what children imagine love is like. It comes into existence for the sole reason that Anakin needs to marry her and have Luke and Leia with her- there is nothing latent within the story’s logic that makes their “love” a rational outcome. Padme’s right every single time she asserts that she and Anakin can’t be together, that it has no hope of ever working. Her judgments are consistently sober and wisely-considered, so her sudden about-face in the coliseum on Geonosis shrieks with inauthenticity. It makes as much sense as her request to Anakin in Revenge of the Sith that he hold her like he did by the lake on Naboo before the Clone Wars erupted. Except… that never happened! How does Lucas not realize this? Possibly because he’s too busy forcing this relationship into the story, committed as he is to hurling the prequels’ locomotive towards the conclusions it needs to justify its existence. Besides foisting yet more awful dialogue upon us (“No, it’s because I’M SO IN LOVE WITH YOU”) we are repelled from the stupidity of what is unfolding before us and more than a little amazed that Anakin’s infantile infatuation for Padme never matures into genuine adult love, into a commitment to her good that surrenders self to nurture and protect that good.
And this is where the critical shovel strikes bedrock. The question emerges: how could a world-conjurer who claims to love his creation so grossly fail to honor its consistency? More pointedly: don’t you care about this stuff at all? If you do, how is it that you can decide to wash your hands of what you have previously set in place? Really, this is the inverse of the critique we’ve just leveled at Anakin with respect to love as self-giving. Anakin’s selfish refusal to give himself matches Lucas’ refusal to listen to his own creation and empty himself to bring what he hears to fruition. In fashioning a story-world you grant a dignity to its settings and characters and events and when you dismiss the continuity of those things you strip them of that dignity. At bottom, I am deeply upset at Lucas’ apathy towards his creation. As an appreciator of his and other fictional worlds and an aspiring architect of such worlds I feel nothing less than disgust at the indifference on display in the disaster that is the Star Wars prequels.
Do not say, “He’s its maker- he can do whatever he wants with it.” No. Do not make this Ockhamist move and dangle the creator’s fidelity to his creation over the abyss of capricious spontaneity. That way lies nominalism and the petty gods of the nations who make rules of their liking and then break them whenever it suits their self-centered purposes. Every maker is obligated, if they make what they make with integrity, to seek to emulate the work of God who creates a space for his creatures and imbues with a fundamental consistency with themselves and with other creatures. He establishes them in proper domains and sees to it they can exercise their gifting in a network of relations that contribute to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. He pronounces their particularity “good” and sustains them in their quiddity. He doesn’t make a duckling out of dolphin or arbitrarily command nocturnal creatures to switch to daytime hours. In the same way authors and imaginers must honor their makings and preserve them from dissolution and exploitation.
At the end of the day I don’t know what else to say except that, as far as I can tell, Lucas exploited his own creation. Whether it was as crude as a desire to flex his technological muscles and make a few billion in box office and merchandising revenue or simply imaginative incompetence, he failed in his aim and failed his creatures in the process. I can believe that some part of him wanted to continue the tale of the Skywalkers but I cannot believe he thought the finished product we now have was the tale that needed to be told. J. R. R. Tolkien spent his entire lifetime revising and fine tuning his legendarium with the consummate, loving attention of a parent. Tolkien sought perfect consistency and coherence between the eras and locations and genealogies of Middle-Earth because he loved his creation. He spent decades sculpting, smoothing and binding the manifold elements of his secondary world to ensure its unity and integrity. Making is nothing less than a work of love for in giving yourself to the work you give an aspect of yourself concrete form and offer it to the primary world (i.e., our world). But what you make is only partially you and partially something else entirely that has never been before. That synthesis of vulnerability and self-awareness and care for the unconsciously formed Other-ness in the work ought to foster the kind of compassionate stewardship we see in Tolkien’s efforts. It’s a high standard, but that’s what love looks like: a faithfulness that sacrifices and surrenders for the good of the creature. And that is what is so frustratingly absent in these installments.
It’s difficult to pinpoint where everything went wrong. The Sophoclean tragedy of the original trilogy aims at Euripidean transformation in the prequels. But the tragedy of it is that it runs aground on the types of mistakes freshman filmmakers make. The Phantom Menace was very clearly not George Lucas’ first rodeo, so how is it that so many cinematic sins could have slipped through quality control?
When Lucas set to work on the follow-up to A New Hope he brought Lawrence Kasdan aboard to help him finalize the story for what is widely considered the finest installment of the franchise. Importantly he also stepped down from the director’s chair and handed off the responsibility to his former professor, Irvin Kershner. Kershner brought an eye for the dramatic power of the human face and a musical sense of movement to this crucial adagio section of the original trilogy’s sonata. Flush with success after the brilliance of Empire, Lucas made a similar decision with Return of the Jedi by having Lawrence Kasdan return to collaborate on the script and by assigning the directing duty to Richard Marquand. Although not as revered as its predecessor, Jedi nevertheless succeeded in bringing the original trilogy to a satisfying conclusion and features moments of transcendence Empire could not go after due to its unique purpose in the saga’s structure.
The trouble is that Lucas no longer permits himself the grace of a co-pilot. In the empire of George, there is one overlord, and it’s no coincidence that the quality of the films has plummeted without the oversight of an armor-bearer to help sift out the bad and even inject some ingenuity of his own. As excellent as some of Lucas’ ideas can be and are, he still needs someone to walk alongside him and whisper out of everyone else’s hearing, “Don’t do that, George- that’s stupid.” But there was no such person to save the galaxy from Jar Jar Binks and a host of other absurdities. But just as importantly there was no one there to see to it that the thematic and emotional threads of the new parent story were all tied together and not left dangling. As the Star Wars saga revolves around the Skywalker family’s connection and service to the Force and their role in defeating the Dark Side, there simply needs to be a stronger correspondence between Anakin’s and Luke’s temptations toward the dark side for their twinned stories to yield emotional dividends. As Jesus is the greater Abel who cannot be who he is apart from his murderous brother Cain, so the heroic Anakin Skywalker cannot be who he is apart from his son Luke.
Character traits aren’t enough to clinch the typological parallel: there has to be a decisive moment in which one of them, when presented with the irrevocable choice of right or left, reward or desert, fails, and that moment must be undergone by his successor and set right. There must be a second Adam. I believe that second moment comes in Return of the Jedi when the Emperor commands Luke to kill Darth Vader and assume his place as Palpatine’s apprentice. In that moment Luke recognizes that the surface of this encounter conceals something deeper than the rush of his victory over Vader might suggest. He looks at his own machine hand and intuits the cruciality of this moment, the analogical Now that he shares with his failure of a father. He gathers himself, shedding his vitriol, and interrupts the Emperor’s seemingly unstoppable schemes with a speech-act.
“I am a Jedi, like my father before me.” These are some of the most beautiful words uttered in cinematic history because they are the only instance of mythic conflict in which imputation occurs by showing rather than telling. An entire history of faithfulness is spoken into existence and credited to what is, in reality, a bloodthirsty monster. Luke positions himself between the Emperor and the hulking derelict he has just bested and throws aside his weapon to taunt the Emperor with what appears on the surface to be a lie. “I’ll never join you. You’ve failed, your Highness.” How? How have the Emperor’s apparent omniscience and seemingly omnipotent machinations failed? Because Luke is a Jedi like the wheezing, humiliated cyborg behind him, the Dark Lord of the Sith he has been battling this entire time. And in this creative word he rescripts Anakin Skywalker entirely, releasing him from the frozen predestinings of his master.
This is what George Lucas is capable of when he submits even himself as creator to the oversight of other wise creators, all of them intent on actualizing the potential of their creations. But the enormous potential of the prequel trilogy is squandered precisely because that love was never actualized. And I fear that that is because that love never actually existed.
[1] Star Wars has always traded in the popular collective unconscious’ traffic between myth, romance, and high and low mimetic, and the series’ aspirations of wedding Flash Gordon to Joseph Campbell myth analysis makes the repetition of patterns a vital component of its form. Variation is just as integral, however, and The Force Awakens accents its variations of patterns and types by first emphasizing recurrence. By presenting us with familiar types and then varying their content or outcomes we are presented with something new when, for instance, Ben Solo succumbs to the Dark Side and murders his father. (A very sad “for instance.” Farewell, Han.)
[2] “Why I love the ‘Star Wars’ prequels (and you should too)“
[3] “Ring Theory: The Hidden Artistry of the Star Wars Prequels“
[4] I’m sure Hayden’s a great guy in real life, so please, don’t call him up or send him a messenger pigeon as though I’m saying he’s a lousy person, okay?
[5] I really am sorry to remind you.
[6] I just can’t when he stares in amazement at the blazing Executor with those big, watery eyes and plops down in his command chair in utter astonishment. Or when Nien Nunb does that muted, amazed chuckle of his. Or Lando’s glorious “YEEEEEEE-HAWWWWW!” as he races through the wreath of flame hurtling out of the dying Death Star. Oh man. #shook
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One response to “The Failure of the Prequels and the Fidelity of Creators”
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Film is fascinating, isn’t it? I’ve watched these films countless times, and love them more each time. A prequel-hater told me the other day that I just don’t understand what “objectively” makes a great film because I’m not a filmmaker like they are. Maybe that’s true. I don’t know. I just love these films. I have no problem with the dialogue, acting, or plot. I can reconcile the possible plot inconsistencies too.
I see the Gospel… grace, one-way love, as what redeemed Anakin in ROTJ. This theme is enhanced, IMO, by the prequels. Anakin lives in fear of being unable to save those he loves. He always wants to fix things. He succumbs to the Dark Side in order to try to do just that. He can’t. I see a lot of myself in him. This makes ROTJ much more powerful, because only the one-way love of his son lets him know that forgiveness, redemption, absolution is possible.
Appreciate your article, and love this site. Even if I feel the opposite of you about the prequels. Lol.