bbrown6

I love prequel memes. And I’ve been enjoying the sort of Zoomer take on the Star Wars prequels floating around X for the last couple of days. A lot of these takes hinge on the idea of Anakin as representative of the white male experience in a progressive culture, where the good guys are actually the bad guys, and the bad guys are the good guys. And there is a good deal of truth to that. But I think there’s something important being overlooked, something that is central to how I read the story. I see the first six Star Wars movies as essentially being about fatherhood. Anakin has no father. He comes from a single-parent home. Qui-Gon Jinn takes an interest in Anakin as a person. He is a benevolent fatherly presence who advocates for Anakin, sees his potential, and wants to protect and guide him. And part of that protection is even from the Jedi Order itself, since Qui-Gon disagrees with some of its ways. The great tragedy of that first movie is that Qui-Gon, Anakin’s only true father figure, dies. Anakin is left to be raised by a cold Jedi Order and Obi-Wan Kenobi, who functions more like an older brother. Obi-Wan loves Anakin, but he is no father. Without fatherly guidance and protection, Anakin struggles to enter the world of men and is used by two sides: a cold, detached Jedi Order and a manipulative false father in Palpatine. And just as Anakin becomes the one thing he never had, a father, he loses much of his humanity, his wife, and his family. That is the central tragedy of the prequels. Now consider the original trilogy. You have a son who is raised by a father figure in Uncle Owen and eventually finds himself under the care of a much older and more fatherly Obi-Wan. So, Luke was actually fathered, unlike Anakin. The series slowly turns into Luke’s quest to see his father redeemed. In the end, Luke is unwilling to kill his father. And Anakin finds his redemption by killing his own false father to rescue his son. That is the triumph of the original trilogy: a son pulling his father back from the darkness by becoming the man his father once desired to be. And that father, even at the very end of his life, being awakened and doing what it takes to give his son a future. That’s how I read Star Wars. The tragedy of fatherlessness, and the triumph of sonship and fatherhood.

I would also point out that the sequels really turn on a full rejection of fatherhood. In many ways, they invert the story told in the first six movies. Luke fails Kylo. He’s not the father figure he should be. And Han fails Kylo. He’s not the father he should be. And then the son kills the father. Instead of following any sort of redemptive arc, Kylo gives in to his evil side and murders his own father. It’s the exact opposite of Luke refusing to kill his father. And consider what they do to Luke. The man whose greatest heroic act was refusing to give up on his murderous father becomes a man who briefly considers killing his own nephew because he fears what he might become. Then there’s Rey. She doesn’t need Luke. She’s already awesome without him. And Luke has become a bitter old man because he didn’t live up to his own idealism. Yoda pops in, but he’s not really much of a father. He mostly just mocks Luke. And Rey gives herself over to the matriarchy more than anything. The characters she learns from, for the most part, are strong, independent, feminist sorts of leaders. She doesn’t need the kind of fatherly guidance that Luke desperately needed in the original trilogy. So you can see the sequel trilogy as a full rejection of fatherhood. Fathers are either failures, obstacles, or unnecessary. Rey doesn’t need a man, and Kylo is ultimately brought back to the good side largely through Rey’s awesomeness.