you better go, you know the fire's out anyway

[walkingshadow]

Verdict: Gallstones. They didn't even need to do the last test on Thursday, so I trotted over to the hospital after the bus and the dog and the cat and the garbage were dispatched to bust my dad out of there and take him to breakfast. We popped into my mom's school to say all was well, and then we went home and I took a very long nap omg. Nap! Which translates in my language into "sleeping the afternoon away," though I stumbled groggily out of my room at three-thirty to find my mother was doing the same. We had a huge salad for dinner. Um. I read for most of the rest of the night, offline and on.

I slept in today, iiiiiin. The cat mewed at my door at about one p.m., but I could hear that my dad was feeding him for me, so I drifted for a while longer. I dreamed of . . . something I can't remember anymore, though I think I could earlier, and then I dreamed of planning a robbery with three other girls, at least one of whom was from my Visual Anthropology class, though not in my group. We had different targets and they were symbolic and meaningful, but small and random. We worked in pairs and I was going to steal DVDs from a store that was also a classroom, which was going to involve pointing a gun at the owner-slash-teacher and then hurrying out. I lingered over the DVDs, checking them off a list I had, but the teacher got a little impatient with me, waiting to start class you know, and my partner was angry, because I was obviously having second thoughts and betraying THE CAUSE, whatever it was, but I couldn't do it. I was sure I'd be caught, that the people here didn't know me but would get a good enough look at me to draw a composite and I would be recognized immediately. I've been reading Blue Blood, I don't know. I have twenty pages left and I'm going to be sorry when it's gone.

My dad always wants to go to a movie, but he's had his heart particularly set on it recently, so tonight after dinner we took ourselves off to Revenge of the Sith which surprisingly did not suck as everybody has said it sucked! Part of this I'm sure is because I'm just not that invested in Star Wars, the institution, so while I could have been so bored I was ready to gnaw off my own arm and then repress the entire experience (see: my reaction to Attack of the Clones), it could have disappointed me and wasted my time, but it couldn't break my heart. As it happens, it did neither.

Like I said, my global impression was positive, though it did have its moments of UTTERLY CHEESETASTIC DIALOGUE. Oh god. But I just clapped a hand over my mouth while I giggled and let them get on with it. I can still take or leave Hayden Christensen, but I have to say he was not bad here. Some people at Language Log were annoyed by his speech habits, specifically a perceived clitic problem (sounds so dirty! because I am TWELVE), but I didn't find that: if anything, he tended to go squinty-eyed to convey his deep thoughts and/or serious moments. I still don't find him particularly attractive, but he does have very pretty teeth.

Natalie Portman did nothing for me and neither did Padme. First of all, WHAT WAS UP WITH THE CURLY 1980s 'DO OMGWTF? We go from nostalgic Princess Leia cinnamon buns in their first reunion scene, and then out on the balcony she has this crazy curly hair in this PONYTAIL and yeah. Not the best choice. Plus there at the end, she was nowhere even close to being big enough to be pregnant with twins to give birth at what was treated at the end of term. Especially not to babies that size. I know they're limited as to the newborns they're allowed to use, but come on. And was that pregnancy really a secret? I mean, she was supposed to be a queen or whatever on her own planet, but no one was asking for her, no one was demanding to know who'd knocked her up. Did nobody, seriously, know who the father was?

And while we're talking about pregnancy and childbirth, people are theorizing that Anakin's father was the Sith lord before Palpatine, the one who could manipulate midi-chlorians and produce (or possibly just prolong?) life. It's been a long time since Phantom Menace and I don't remember the story Anakin's mother gave about his birth, but it's a sufficiently cool and creepy theory for me! Here's the other thing: those with high concentrations of midi-chlorians have the greatest potential for Jedi training, and since midi-chlorians are present as a percentage of blood but not, from what I gather, environmentally influenced (like T-cell counts would be, or adrenaline), they sound like they're a genetic trait. And yet—Jedis are celibate (at least in theory), so they're essentially practicing eugenics on the most elite, most highly-valued group in their society. It wouldn't really be surprising if the Siths had turned to artificial insemination, especially for the express purpose of fulfilling a prophecy to their own advantage.

And while we're talking about fulfilling that prophecy (I had both "The Saga Begins" and "Yoda" in my head, intermittently, throughout the entire movie), what's so awesome about prophecy is that it will always be fulfilled. mistful wrote a truly hilarious screenplay-style summary of the movie (read it here! so funny!) in which she gets excited over the fact that people involved with this movie have read Oedipus Rex. She's absolutely right, and one of the key themes of it is that prophecy comes true no matter what you do, whether you attempt to thwart it or advance it. Anakin dreamt portentously that his wife would die in childbirth, and the actions he took to prevent it were the ones that ultimately caused it. Obi-Wan, in the most moving and heart-breaking scene of the whole damn movie, rails against Anakin for betraying what was supposed to be his fate: "You were the chosen one! It was said you would destroy the Sith, not join them—it was you who would bring balance to the Force, not leave it in darkness!" In that moment Ewan McGregor is the best thing that happened to that movie, because he's basically saying, "this is high tragedy, people, are you getting this? Pay attention!" but he's so good that the tragedy is at the same time a personal one, a personal betrayal by his brother whom he loved and taught and defended and believed in. He's bewildered and furious and he's failed his student; the Jedi have lost the war, but this personal defeat is just as staggering. You were my brother, Anakin. I loved you. Obi-Wan almost made my cry. And then he was all, I have the moral literal high ground! and I had to roll my eyes carefully so they wouldn't stick that way. Obi-Wan's mistake is in believing the prophecy will never come true simply because on the face of it the opposite has come to pass. He leaves Anakin for dead but still alive, and in doing so plays his own part in leading fate full-circle.

Question: What was the logic in splitting up the twins? And if, as I think I heard them ("them" being Yoda, Obi-Wan and Jimmy Smits (was there anyone else present?) only—where the hell were Padme's parents/ambassadors/subjects demanding THEIR HEIRS? Are we still pretending they didn't know about the pregnancy?) say in the split-second it took them to make a decision, they needed to keep the children away from prying Sith-eyes, why did they give one child to a high-profile Senator?

My absolute favorite line of the whole movie, hands-down: "Anakin, Chancellor Palpatine is evil!" I would have burst out laughing if it wouldn't have gotten me glares of death and possibly stoned. As it was, I kind of snorted to myself and praised Ewan McGregor for a heroic reading of a truly unbelievable line of dialogue. Like Spike in "A New Man"! He's EVOL.

mistful has a bone to pick with the killing of the younglings: Now that I don't buy. I love how fast it happened, and how Anakin fell all in a summer's eve, and I'm not sentimental about children, but seriously, seriously. Anakin always felt for people on a personal level, and I don't think he'd be quite ready to murder children he knew with his own hands about an hour after turning to the Dark Side. They weren't a threat. Palpatine didn't even specifically have to egg him on. She has a point, but to buy any of Anakin's actions post-embrace of the Dark Side, I think we have to accept a psychotic break. During and then after a traumatic event he makes a decision to betray the Jedi code and all his teachers, casting in his lot with the scary evil guy in the desperate hope that in return for this betrayal and re-alignment he will be able to save his wife. That's psychological motivation, if not evidence; there's evidence that the ceremony of kneeling and naming ("Henceforth, you shall be known as Darth Vader. . . . Rise, Darth Vader.") actually changes Anakin, physically and metaphysically: his eyes glow now, like Palpatine's; Yoda warns Obi-Wan that the boy he knew and trained is gone, "consumed by Darth Vader," and later, Obi-Wan agrees. In the Star Wars universe, that's not necessarily a prop to help Obi-Wan detach from Anakin in order to kill him—it's to be expected that the Force, which affects all people, Jedis more than others and Anakin more than anyone, will leap to meet Anakin when he opens himself to it. The Force affects things physically, moves them and shakes them, and in accepting his new Sith identity, Anakin—now Vader (and remember the power of names and naming)—allows the Force to work both through him and on him. He might have agreed to follow Palpatine for the sole purpose of the eternal life he promised, but he lost control of that decision as soon as he made it.

sistermagpie has great thoughts and discussion on RotS here and here, and in comments some people question whether Anakin ever really had a chance not to turn—strictly speaking, fatalistically, he did not, but there seems to be a bit more than deus ex machina at work here. ataniell93: Am I the only person who, with all those visions of Padme that Palpatine seemed to know about, and Anakin hearing Palpatine's voice even in his own apartment, wondered if Anakin ever really had a chance NOT to turn? . . . I kept thinking, "that's what the Imperius Curse looks like."

I thought about prequels and the general role they play. They are the history of a world, the origin myths that smooth the transitions between great events, that explain how we got here and often reveal how many other places we might have ended up. In this third installment, more than in Phantom Menace or Attack of the Clones, that feeling of inevitability was omnipresent, the sense of things slotting into place and the players falling into the positions we know they will later start from. The fatalism is real. Like a Greek audience attending a tragedy, we know how this one ends—we've seen it. Everyone knows the story. If there weren't practical reasons for the production and release of Episodes IV, V, and VI to precede Episodes I, II, and III, I think this would be a good enough one, Anakin's fate determined not only by a genre's archetypal conventions, but by established fact. Anakin can't turn and fight against Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith because he's Darth Vader in A New Hope. We hold our breath at every key moment and every inevitable outcome makes us sigh, cognitive dissonance fuzzing in our brains when we know that while each decision is the wrong one—is the tragic one that we know will end badly—we also know it is the right one, because we know how it ends. I know I was awed when they sealed Vader's mask over his face and he drew his first breaths. What an extraordinary conclusion! And yet, how could it have ended any other way? I loved the way he was slowly levered upright and then ripped his way off the table like Frankenstein's monster. I loved Obi-Wan's return to Tatooine with an infant Luke Skywalker. And I looked at Luke's young aunt and uncle gazing into the desert sunset and thought, "I have seen you die."

My dad and I talked on the way home from the theater about whether or not there would be more movies to come, Episodes VII, VIII, IX . . . I personally don't think so, but I also think it would be a horrible mistake if there were. The series is complete as it stands, the descent into darkness and the rise up to light, a departure from balance and a return to it, two generations that mirrored each other and chose paths that alternatingly converged and diverged, not canceled out but thrown into sharp relief by the contrasts. To continue the story would require the construction of another arc entirely or risk reducing the entire enterprise to twelve hours of cheesy hijinks in space and thirty years of merchandising.

Comments

[uschickens.livejournal.com]

Several things - nobody was demanding Padme's heirs because if you go back and look at (or see pictures of) her funeral procession, they've totally stuck a pillow under her Hi I'm Dead clothing. That's also why Vader gets to be totally shocked in Empire when Palpatine says, "The son of Skywalker must not be allowed to reach his full potential," or whatnot.

In some ways, watching RotS reminded me of watching a good production of Romeo and Juliet - the entire time I'm hoping and whispering, "Okay, this time the message will make it in time; this time she'll wake up in time, this time everything won't go to hell in a handbasket," and it breaks my heart all over again when it does fall apart. Even as the ending was inevitable, I hoped against hope it would work out this time. (Even as my ears were bleeding from the atrocious dialogue.)

I saw RotS with a whole posse of people, and we've got two competing theories about the prophecy and how Anakin totally fulfilled it either way. Either he brought balance to the Force by the fact that there are only two Force-users on either side (Obi-Wan and Yoda, Vader and Palpatine), or that he brought balance by the fact that the Light side was too strong (if we're operating under the assumption that the Jedi really are good, which I find slightly debatable), and the way to bring balance was to boost up the Dark Side. Oooh, deep ponderings.

. And I looked at Luke's young aunt and uncle gazing into the desert sunset and thought, "I have seen you die."
I thought this, too, but not nearly so eloquently. I like the way you write. :)

[walkingshadow.livejournal.com]

Aha, thank you for the clarifications! I only saw RotS once, and I saw the original series ages ago, plus I'm not All About the Star Wars, so I get muddled on canon sometimes. But you're right, Padme totally still looked pregnant in her funeral procession. So, does all that mean Anakin, et al. (excepting Yoda, Obi-Wan, and Senator Jimmy Smits) believe the children died with their mother? Or child, I guess, since Anakin never knew she was supposed to be having twins. How does Palpatine find out?

Mmph, it is just like Romeo & Juliet. Or Oedipus Rex, or The Lion King. But R&J was my first thought, too, because it's such a classic example of everything going wrong when it didn't have to. There were so many points in the movie when I just wanted to shake people, because they just kept shunting Anakin right toward the Dark Side, and it would have been just as easy to turn his heart the other way. And yet, he wasn't just a helpless puppet buffeted by great forces; his own personality was one of his greatest enemies, and a different person in his place would have reacted differently both to Palpatine (who played on his discontent, ambition, and fear) and to the Council members (Yoda and Samuel L. Jackson especially) who hurt his pride. Events and people conspire to bring about the tragic conclusion, but he certainly meets it halfway.

To all appearances at the end of RotS, Obi-Wan's impression of disaster and thwarted prophecy is correct: the Dark Side claims total victory and overthrows the galaxy, while the good guys die or disappear into exile (Yoda and Obi-Wan). It takes another three movies, but at the end of Return of the Jedi, Vader returns to the Light Side and kills Palpatine. So when Obi-Wan says "you were supposed to destroy the Sith, not join them," he's half-right—he just never entertained the possibility that for Anakin to join the Sith, he would join them for twenty years. Prophecy is a vicious practical joker, man. You can't turn your back on it for a second.

if we're operating under the assumption that the Jedi really are good, which I find slightly debatable

I'm with you, I'm inclined to say they're not. And if the Force is "balanced" once the Sith (Palpatine and Vader) are destroyed, ipso facto, the Jedi would have to be something like morally neutral. I like the idea of needing to boost up the Dark Side—we always think in terms of dispatching the bad guys once and for all, but that can't be what they're after here. Oh god, I might have to go back and listen to all of Yoda's ramblings about a Jedi's responsibilities and how the Force operates.

I thought this, too, but not nearly so eloquently. I like the way you write. :)

*g* Thank you! (though I realize now that in my eloquent haste I sacrificed actual facts—Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru are already dead when Luke gets back to the farm; I think he stumbles over their bodies. And yet, "I have seen you dead" just doesn't roll off the tongue the same way)

[picksthemusic.livejournal.com]

Veddy intevestink.

I think I agreed with just about everything you said here.

It just completely broke my heart, and yes, I admit, I cried. I was still thinking, as uschickens said, that it might not turn out that way. That he might take what Obi-Wan was saying to heart, and listen. Just... GAH.

Frustrating, but satisfying, I'd say.

[walkingshadow.livejournal.com]

It's worse than telling the stupid kids not to go into the woods! At least the kids don't break your heart, right? *fetches you a tissue*

Frustrating, but satisfying, I'd say.

Yes, exactly! Which is paradoxical, because how can it simultaneously give us what we're looking for and keep it from us?

[picksthemusic.livejournal.com]

You know what totally made my heart sing, though? I watched Return of the Jedi last night. At the end when they're having the little party with the Ewoks, and Obi-Wan, Yoda, and now Hayden as Anakin show up all glowy? Gah. Made my entire YEAR. That made it all better. *le sigh*

[tenebris.livejournal.com]

Excellent review! Your thoughts make me want to go see the movie again. Not that this is hard, at this point.

Though it still bothers me, the idea that the Jedi are celibate--if the midis are genetic, which Qui-Gon pretty much indicates in TPM--because aren't you then cutting yourself off from your best resource? Or is it done to limit Jedi power? Which I could almost believe, since the Old Republic apparently doesn't have birth control.

I also really like your idea of Anakin having a psychotic break. I mean, he already had some sort of 'break' in AOTC when he killed those who killed his mother; it's possible that faulting made the turn easier. If this is the case, the pace then doesn't bother me quite as much (I thought the turn scene went WAAY too fast), because Anakin just lost himself.

Obi-Wan's mistake is in believing the prophecy will never come true simply because on the face of it the opposite has come to pass. He leaves Anakin for dead but still alive, and in doing so plays his own part in leading fate full-circle.

Ah, poor Obi-Wan. We know from the first that he has no intuitive understanding of the Chosen One or the prophecy (same with Mace Windu); he takes his old Master's word as faith, and given how Anakin wows him over the years, begins to believe what Qui-Gon believed. But he in no way understands just what he's asking for. (Yoda, perhaps, doesn't either, but he's much more centered in the personality of the boy--'I sense much fear in you.') Obi-Wan's lack of understanding is his tragedy, and while I'm not gonna say that Lucas is making comments about blind faith, you can read them if you want. Also, he doesn't kill Anakin--because he feels he couldn't, or because he just as soon could--which leads to further guilt down the road. And I really wanted that first talk with Qui-Gon. I may have to write that first talk with Qui-Gon. (I just want Qui-Gon to show up, period.)

*is really going to have to see this movie again*

[walkingshadow.livejournal.com]

If you'd asked me just after I got out of the theater whether or not I'd be seeing it again, I would have said no, that once was fine and enough. Everybody's discussions have me thinking though, and if nothing else I'm probably going to end up re-watching the original trilogy.

aren't you then cutting yourself off from your best resource? Or is it done to limit Jedi power? Which I could almost believe, since the Old Republic apparently doesn't have birth control.

Dude, yes. Either these people have no understanding of Mendelian genetics (or don't *have* Mendelian genetics) or someone is interested in keeping the Jedi population severely curtailed—or letting them die out altogether. Who would have been in a position to set up the Jedi Rules of Comportment, and what would have been their motivation?

A psychotic break just seems necessary, to explain how fast the turn happened and to keep the rules of the universe consistent. Plus his eyes glow! We saw them! *Something* obviously happened, and it wasn't just Anakin making a conscious decision to turn away from Obi-Wan (et al.) and toward Palpatine, then blithely slaughtering the younglings and the Separatists because that's in his new job description. You don't just join the Dark Side, you *become* a Sith; Palpatine called Dark Vader forth when he named him.

Obi-Wan's lack of understanding is his tragedy, and while I'm not gonna say that Lucas is making comments about blind faith, you can read them if you want.

God, Obi-Wan. Anakin's story is tragic in the classic sense, but Obi-Wan's is just sad. He loses his master and then takes on his student; the student becomes a brother in whom he puts his blind faith, which is ultimately betrayed, and Obi-Wan must destroy him; and I've never thought about this, but the second part of his story is training up Anakin's *son* to kill his father. You have to think that at the end of things Obi-Wan surveys his life and thinks that somehow he imagined it all playing out differently.

I would LOVE to read that first talk with Qui-Gon. All those years Obi-Wan spent alone on Tatooine, I would love to know what he and his old master talked about. You should totally write it!