[Industrialblog,
May 24, 2005]
ROTS, Part the Nine Billionth
Chris takes issue with my interpretation of ROTS. Fair enough. He's wrong, though.
He writes:
No, I'm afraid you'll find it is you who are mistaken. About. A Great. Many. Things.
Vader enjoys the hell out of being evil. He loves the fear; he loves the authority; he revels in his power.
"I find your lack of faith disturbing."
"Apology accepted."
His threats to general in charge of building the Death Star. He loves it. He can't get enough of it.
The rest falls under the Space Opera criticism. If you're gonna give me eight hours of film, the conversion has to be more than it was. But part of the problem is this: There is nothing inherently interesting about the character of either Anakin or Padme. Padme is a queen. She is a nice person. She wears funky hair. Anakin's a sulky jock who is made entirely of mydol chloride or something. That's about it.
And while you make a plea for the "banality of evil," in Hannah Arendt's phrasing, Lucas didn't manage that, either.
I do agree, however, that Luke did spend a lot of time explaining he could un-Sith.
Still, it's a great world that the flat characters inhabit.
I guess that's the problem ... the characters are flat, not round, as E.M. Forster wrote. A flat character will never surprise you. And in three movies, neither Padme nor Anakin did anything surprising.
He writes:
Bill,
Ok, you've got this rather wrong, though understandably so. Anakin's conversion to the dark side was rather more realistic than believable, but that's because people like to think of evil as something big and obvious and foreign; in reality evil is none of those things. People really become evil for trifling reasons, generally in a slide down a slope padded by lots of small bad reasons for it.
Anakin, like many, noticed his choice only really after he made it, and then thought it irrevocable when it actually was revocable. Indeed, this is almost the point of the last third of RotJ; Luke eventually convinces his father that his decision to be Sith is not permanent.
I don't know where you get the idea that Vader enjoyed being evil; he never seemed happy throughout the entirety of the three original episodes. Vader rather seemed resigned and very heavily task-focused; he was always in the process of accomplishing something (in the later movies obviously at the command of the emperor). Vader didn't enjoy evil; no one really does (except psychopaths, which Vader wasn't).
Lucas, perhaps unconsciously, captured the truth that Evil is not nearly as glamorous as the costumes it wears, and is far easier than anyone would like to believe.
(Incidentally, it's really silly to describe all evil as being rooted in a lack of faith, since God's good doesn't come from his faith, and we're made in his image. Moreover, it's perfectly possible for a selfless love of Padme to lead to evil; have you never heard of the sin of worshiping graven images?)
No, I'm afraid you'll find it is you who are mistaken. About. A Great. Many. Things.
Vader enjoys the hell out of being evil. He loves the fear; he loves the authority; he revels in his power.
"I find your lack of faith disturbing."
"Apology accepted."
His threats to general in charge of building the Death Star. He loves it. He can't get enough of it.
The rest falls under the Space Opera criticism. If you're gonna give me eight hours of film, the conversion has to be more than it was. But part of the problem is this: There is nothing inherently interesting about the character of either Anakin or Padme. Padme is a queen. She is a nice person. She wears funky hair. Anakin's a sulky jock who is made entirely of mydol chloride or something. That's about it.
And while you make a plea for the "banality of evil," in Hannah Arendt's phrasing, Lucas didn't manage that, either.
I do agree, however, that Luke did spend a lot of time explaining he could un-Sith.
Still, it's a great world that the flat characters inhabit.
I guess that's the problem ... the characters are flat, not round, as E.M. Forster wrote. A flat character will never surprise you. And in three movies, neither Padme nor Anakin did anything surprising.
That's halfway to ridiculous, Bill. Vader does occasionally display a very muted sense of humor, but the tone of his voice is almost invariably angry, not happy. Yes, he threatens people in very understated ways sometimes, but to take like 4 times ("I find your lack of faith disturbing", "Apology accepted, admiral Diet", "I would like you to join us for dinner", "the emperor is not as forgiving as I am") and generalize it to 3 movies in which the guy always sounds somewhere between frustrated and angry is bewildering.
I mean, name one time Vader laughed. Hell, name one time he actually sounded like he was enjoying himself! Yes, he made a few funny but extremely understated jokes. He would be essentially a cardboard cutout if he never displayed any trace of a sense of humor; but if a character is chained in a prison and beating beaten daily, cracking a joke or two doesn't prove that he enjoys the beatings. Occasionally joking doesn't prove that Vader enjoyed being evil.
I mean, come on. Listen to the guy. Ask yourself, "does this sound like a happy man?" His voice always has an angry edge, besides which he generally seems unhappy with the failure going on around him, by himself, and by his subordinates.
The emperor — now that's a very different story. The emperor liked being evil. The emperor smiled; the emperor laughed.
And, incidentally, padme was barely a real character; I frankly consider her to be more of a prop than a character (though I once heard a stage crew guy refer to all actors as "props with lines", but sitll). But even there, in real life people are generally more flat characters; at least real people generally are predictable. Lucas was in some ways making a fairy tale, not a modern movie, and so he put fairly realistic people into exceptional circumstances (with great special effects to make it believable).
That's the thing; if you take it as a modern fairy tale, rather than a modern movie, it makes more sense (and is more enjoyable). The dialog was lousy no matter how you take it, but the characters were all very unrevealed; they're flat because we never get a chance to look around them to see if they're cardboard cutouts or more. It's a different sort of storytelling than is common nowadays, certainly, but then nowadays emotional conflict and character depth are handled so badly that I find it a somewhat refreshing change.
That being said, I found the scene in which Anakin cuts off Mace Windu's hand to be surprisingly well done; the way that Anakin holds of on making a decision as far as possible and then sort of concludes that he'd already made it, and can't take it back, etc. That's quite realistic to an awful lot of wrong-doing. As C.S. Lewis once observed, the safest road to hell is one very gently sloped down, without sign posts, without markers.
It's never made explicit, but one does almost get the impression that once Anakin cuts of windu's hand (which was a defensible act from the Jedi perspective, recall, as Anakin was very much fence straddling at that point), he figures that since no one will believe him anyway, it's better to be hanged a sheep than a lamb. Which is, incidentally, a very real temptation to vice which many people succumb to.
But I do think that you should first lay out the standard against which RotS should be judged, and then judge it accordingly, or leave off the effort if you intend to judge it as something it's not. For example, it's not a good chick flick, it's lousy christian theology, and it's absolutely terrible and cooking rice without burning the bottom.
The questions are whether (1) it's good as what it is and (2) whether what it is interests you.
To give a different sort of example, a movie that I saw at an indie film theatre was a fairly good movie in the genre of french films with miserable lesbians who eventually kill themselves by swallowing broken glass. I happen to think that people who make movies like that should be shot, but that doesn't justify calling it a bad movie, only a bad thing. And the people who made it were good movie makers, just bad people. (note: I'm saying that last part for rhetorical effect rather than as a judgement against the actual people who made the film.)