Themes, Motifs, and Symbols
Themes
The Mystery and Power of the Force
As Ben and Yoda explain it to Luke, the Force is an energy field created and
sustained by all the life in the universe. The Force is omnipresent, binding the
universe and everything and everyone in it together. It can be manipulated
and controlled by a trained Jedi (and by their evil counterparts, the Sith) and is
the source of a Jedi’s remarkable powers. The Force can also take a more
active role, guiding a Jedi’s actions, as when Luke allows the Force to guide
his aim and destroy the Death Star. The Force is largely represented as
nurturing and benign in nature, but it has a dark side as well. This dark side,
the side of aggression, anger, and hatred, empowers the Emperor and his
apprentice, Darth Vader. The Force provides a spiritual dimension to the
action of the trilogy and has been the subject of much speculation and
theorizing by fans of the films. George Lucas is careful not to spell out in any
specific way what the Force is and what, exactly, the Jedi believe.
As Lucas presents it in the Star Wars series, the Force is a rather vague
entity, serving primarily as a vocabulary for good and evil and as a way to
explain the “magical” powers of the Jedi. Clearly, however, the Force cannot
be identified with the God of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, as it is
impersonal, created by life and not the creator of life. Rather, the Force is a
new-agey amalgam of various eastern religious and western philosophical
sources. One such source is Taoism, an ancient, nontheistic (without a
personal deity) Chinese religion that teaches simplicity and conformity to the
Tao, or “Way,” of nature. In the concept of “light” and “dark” sides of the
Force, there is an echo of Manicheism, an ancient near-Eastern religion that
claimed the physical universe was the result of the combat between two
equally matched spiritual forces, one good, the other evil. There are also
elements of Romantic nature worship (as in the essays of Ralph Waldo
Emerson), Pantheism (a belief that the universe itself is God), and Westerninfluenced Buddhism in the way characters speak of the Force. Yoda’s lecture
to Luke on the importance of mindfulness in Empire is reminiscent of Buddhist
teaching, for example. These are just a few interpretations, and though the
Force is clearly central to the action of the Star Wars films, it ultimately
remains mysterious. Lucas seems to intend a general life force with which one
can be in harmony or conflict, and the details can be safely left to the
imagination.
The Superiority of Nature over Technology
The Jedi strive to live in simplicity and in harmony with nature. They are not
averse to technology, but they do not rely on it alone, at the expense of their
own senses and feelings. When Luke encounters Ben and Yoda in their
homes, he finds these Jedi masters living austere lives, close to the land. And
when Luke must destroy the Death Star with one shot, Ben’s voice
encourages him to shut off his targeting computer, relying on his own senses,
his intuition, and his connection to the Force. A stark contrast to the way of
the Jedi is the behavior of their dark-side counterparts, the Sith. Darth Vader
is, as Ben puts it, “more machine than man,” a walking hybrid with robotic
limbs and built-in life support. The Emperor’s deformed body seems to be in
revolt against life itself, and he is seen exclusively in an overwhelmingly
manmade, technological environment, the new Death Star. Clearly then, there
is something soul destroying in an over-reliance on technology. Significantly,
Darth Vader’s last request is for Luke to remove his mask, so that Vader may
see Luke directly, without the technological filter.
Nature proves to be superior to technology when the Ewoks rise up against
the Empire on Endor. Despite the primitive nature of the Ewoks’ weapons—
sticks, stones, arrows, and spears—they are able to defeat the technologically
advanced Imperial troopers, with their walking tanks and laser blasters. Lucas
himself has said that he intended this sequence to be reminiscent of the
Vietnam War, in which the less technologically advanced side was ultimately
victorious. Again, Lucas is not trying to say that technology is bad in itself.
Indeed, this would be an odd thing to claim in films that are themselves the
product of the most advanced technology available at the time (some
characters are completely computer-generated in certain scenes). After all,
R2-D2 and C-3PO, two of the best and most beloved characters in the films,
are, by their very nature, completely products of technology. Lucas’s point is
that we must not allow the machines that surround us to make us less than
human ourselves, as Darth Vader does but Luke does not.
The Myth of the Hero’s Destiny
Joseph Campbell, in his classic study of world mythology The Hero with a
Thousand Faces, makes the case that all mythology about heroes is really a
symbolic retelling of a basic “monomyth” about the growth and personal
development of the individual. Drawing on the work of psychologists Carl Jung
and Sigmund Freud, Campbell argues that the hero of myth must struggle
against society and culture as he finds them in order to define himself both
outwardly and inwardly. Outwardly, the hero struggles to find his place and
role in society even as he struggles inwardly to understand his own nature.
Symbolically, these struggles take the form of an orphaned hero who
discovers the secret of his birth (often that he is of royal blood) and must
make his way in the world. Along the way, the hero encounters resistance in
the form of monsters he must battle (which symbolize his own fears or
failings), and he receives aid from wise older counselors. Ultimately, the hero
aspires to rise to full maturity by taking his place as a figure of patriarchal
authority, often by displacing or destroying a faulty father figure who occupies
the hero’s rightful place. Classic examples of heroes who fit Campbell’s
pattern include King Arthur and Oedipus, though in each case the specifics
and outcomes of the hero’s quest will vary.
The case of Luke Skywalker can easily be seen to fit this mythic pattern. Luke
is an orphan, uncertain of his place in the world and even of his own identity.
He is cast adrift but is guided along his path by Ben and by Yoda, who share
the wise elder counselor function. Luke faces many adversaries, but his
greatest challenge is in learning self-mastery, and with each battle Luke
grows in wisdom and self-understanding. In the end, however, Luke must face
his own father in order to take his father’s (abandoned) place as a Jedi Knight
and as the symbolic head of his family. Note that Luke fights Vader in the end
primarily to defend his sister, Leia. Ultimately, the son overthrows, and saves,
the father, achieving the full maturity and goodness that the failed father figure
could never achieve himself. In this sense, then, the story of Luke Skywalker
is the story of any man’s maturation and self-definition, told symbolically
through the structure of myth and adventure.
Lucas himself claims to have been influenced by Campbell’s ideas as he
wrote. However, according to Campbell’s theory, such influence would not
have had to have been conscious, as he claims that all mythic stories work in
essentially the same way. Incidentally, later editions of The Hero with a
Thousand Faces have featured a picture of Luke Skywalker prominently on
the cover.
Motifs
Color Used for Characterization
Certain characters in the Star Wars trilogy are closely identified with certain
colors, with Darth Vader’s all-black outfit being the most obvious example.
Vader’s black makes a stark contrast with Luke’s all-white clothes in A New
Hope, hearkening back to the serial westerns of the 1940s and 1950s, in
which the good guys had white hats and the bad guys wore black. Leia wears
an all-white costume in A New Hope as well, signaling the goodness of her
character and linking her visually with Luke, her (unknown) brother. The Jedi
Masters Yoda and Obi-Wan favor brown, a warm color recalling a monk’s
robes and the earth itself. Han Solo, meanwhile, wears a white shirt with a
black vest for much of the trilogy, in an apt reference to the initial ambivalence
of his character. Luke’s outfits continue to emphasize his characterization in
this way throughout the trilogy. In Empire, for example, when Luke journeys to
Bespin to rescue his friends, his fatigues are a light gray, showing that Luke
has traveled a bit from the innocent idealism of his youth and that he has
placed himself in peril of straying to the dark side. By the time we get to
Return of the Jedi, Luke has adopted an all-black wardrobe, though this does
not mean that he has gone over to the dark side. Instead, the black robes he
wears recall a priest’s garb and link him visually to his father, with whose fate
he is so deeply concerned.
Orchestral Soundtrack
John Williams’s thematic compositions for the Star Wars trilogy have been
justly acclaimed, and the films use the soundtrack expertly to heighten the
drama and intensify the mood. In many ways, the full orchestral
accompaniment provided by Williams and powerfully performed by the
London Symphony Orchestra is a throwback to the symphonic scores of
classic Hollywood films, at a time when pop music was being used more and
more in film soundtracks. There is an intensity and excitement in the Star
Wars music, especially in the heroic opening theme, with its instantly
recognizable fanfare, which contributes greatly to film’s overall effect. Another
dramatic musical moment is the Imperial march introduced in The Empire
Strikes Back as the theme music for Vader’s pursuit of Han and Leia. The
march’s rhythm is driving and relentless, capturing Vader’s own relentless
progress through the story. Williams’s score can also be delicate and
humorous, introducing themes for tender moments and minor characters and
mixing in passages from the main themes in minor keys to emphasize crucial
moments of dramatic tension.
Speed
Although it may be hard to believe now, one of the things that set the Star
Wars movies apart from the very beginning was the speed with which the
stories moved and the speed with which certain scenes took place. Each of
the films has at least one set-piece moment that is meant to make the
audience members grab their armrests to steady themselves. In A New Hope,
it is the trench runs during the attack on the Death Star—this scene was like
nothing else that had come before, and it had theater viewers swaying as if
they were on a roller coaster. Though this scene is comparatively slow by
today’s standards, it is the reason no action movie seems complete now
without one super-fast air trip shot from the pilot’s point of view. The Empire
Strikes Back featured Han’s vertiginous flight through the asteroid field, while
Return of the Jedi sent Luke and Leia zooming through the forest of Endor on
speeder bikes. Such scenes had many critics comparing the films,
disparagingly, to amusement park thrill rides, but for George Lucas, such a
comparison was hardly a criticism—more like an indication that he had
achieved the effect he was after.
Symbols
Luke’s Cybernetic Hand
At the very end of The Empire Strikes Back, Luke’s right hand, sliced off by
Darth Vader during their duel on Bespin, is replaced by a cybernetic
prosthesis that looks, on the surface, just like a real hand. Symbolically,
however, Luke’s mechanical hand moves him one step closer to being like his
father, a full-fledged hybrid of man and machine. Early in Return of the Jedi,
we are reminded of Luke’s hand when it is damaged during the fight on
Jabba’s barge. Rather than having the hand repaired, Luke simply pulls a
black glove over it, and from then on, the glove serves as a reminder of
Luke’s connection to his father. At the climax of Jedi, Luke beats Vader to the
ground and slices off Vader’s own right hand in a flurry of blows. Vader cries
out in pain, but only wires and circuitry dangle from the wound. Luke looks in
horror at his own right hand and back to his father, making the connection
once again and realizing that he too has the capacity within him to turn to the
dark side. With his father’s example before him, however, Luke abstains from
revenge, becoming a true Jedi Knight.
Lightsabers
The lightsaber is, as Ben teaches Luke, the traditional weapon of the Jedi. In
contrast to a blaster, Ben tells Luke, the lightsaber is elegant and precise, an
eminently “civilized” weapon. By passing Luke’s father’s lightsaber on to Luke,
Ben is beginning Luke’s initiation and symbolically placing him in his father’s
footsteps. When we add in the fact that the final stage of a Jedi’s
apprenticeship is the creation of his own lightsaber, the symbolism of the gift
becomes even clearer. In order to attain full maturity, Luke will have to release
his father’s lightsaber and take up his own—symbolically moving from a
position of dependence on the father to a position of independence. Of
course, Luke doesn’t relinquish his father’s lightsaber willingly, as it is literally
severed from him by Vader, who is, of course, the very father Luke wishes to
replace.
A Freudian interpretation would read the lightsabers in this scene as phallic
symbols and Luke’s amputation as a symbolic castration by his father, but one
needn’t go quite so far to see the symbolism. Once again, Luke’s two father
figures are placed in opposition, with Ben as the giving father and Vader as
the domineering, taking father. Ultimately, Luke does create his own
lightsaber to replace the lost one, and this is a major step on his path to
becoming a Jedi and his own man. Note that another example of the
expressive use of color involves the lightsabers: Jedi lightsabers are cool
blue, whereas Vader’s Sith blade is angry red. Luke’s own blade is green,
perhaps in allegiance to the green-skinned Yoda who trained him.
The Death Star
The exact symbolic meaning of the Death Star is ambiguous, though it is
certainly a symbol of evil. On one hand, the Death Star is a virtually
blasphemous instance of the worship of technology over nature. The station is
the size of a moon, an artificial world with enough firepower to obliterate a real
planet with one shot. When its commander makes the mistake of calling the
station “the ultimate power in the universe” in Darth Vader’s presence,
however, Vader swiftly corrects him, first by reminding him that his
“technological terror” is nothing compared to the Force, and then by forcechoking the man into submission. On the other hand, Vader himself is
something of a “technological terror,” and the Emperor, the ultimate voice of
the dark side of the Force, seems quite fond of his new Death Star, so the
opposition is not complete. In the end, the Death Star represents the innate
fragility of even the most potent technology. Just as the Ewoks are
unexpectedly able to defeat the Emperor’s legion, so are the Death Stars
destroyed by unsuspected forces technology could never prepare for.
Star Wars: A Cultural Phenomenon
The original Star Wars films remain some of the most popular movies ever
made, having achieved a level of recognition in American and worldwide
culture rivaled only by such classics as The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Gone
With the Wind (1939). Indeed, the similarities between these two particular
films and the Star Wars trilogy go beyond simple popularity. The Wizard of Oz
was the special-effects masterpiece of its era, showing new ways to bring
fantastic vistas to the screen. Gone With the Wind was the original
blockbuster production, famously over-the-top in its design, scale, and sheer
visual sweep. It was, in fact, the box office record holder until the original Star
Wars dethroned it. In a way, the Star Wars films were throwbacks to this
earlier era of resplendent production values, epic scope, and the pursuit of
sheer entertainment.
After the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period during which the studio system
that had made Hollywood into the entertainment capital of the world was in
steep decline, George Lucas, along with his friends Francis Ford Coppola and
Stephen Spielberg, gave the old studios a new reason for being. No
independent production, no matter how dedicated, could produce the kind of
effects-laden, flashy, bright, exciting, and simply spectacular creation that
Lucas, and Spielberg especially, wanted to create. After Star Wars came
Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and the LucasSpielberg co-production Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), starring Harrison
Ford, both effects-heavy spectaculars that became international megahits.
The race was on: every summer brought the studios’ latest attempts to
manufacture some of the blockbuster magic—that quality that makes people
pay to see a movie again and again—conjured up by Star Wars back in 1977.
Another remarkable aspect of the Star Wars phenomenon that continues to
influence the movie business today is the aggressiveness and pervasiveness
with which the films were marketed. Today it is commonplace for every
summer film to have its merchandising tie-ins, such as cups emblazoned with
a film’s characters, for sale in store and fast-food chains. Such marketing
schemes had been around before Star Wars, such as with the Beatles craze
and the 1960s Batman television show, but Star Wars turned such tie-ins into
a major aspect of a blockbuster film’s profitability. The Star Wars line of toys,
especially, remained popular even in the three years that separated each of
the episodes of the trilogy, a highly unusual circumstance. Even today,
original Star Wars toys sell at a premium among collectors. Anyone who was
a child in America in the years between 1977 and 1983 can tell you, for
example, that the snow monster that attacks Luke on Hoth is called a
“wampa” and that the giant lizards the Imperial troopers ride on Tatooine are
“dewbacks,” even though these terms are never used in the films and don’t
even appear in the credits—all thanks to the toys and the omnipresent
marketing of these films.
Many other examples of the penetration of the Star Wars world into our
culture spring to mind. When President Ronald Reagan proposed a spacebased missile defense program in the 1980s, it was officially called the
Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI—but the program was universally known,
to friend and foe alike, as the “Star Wars” program. Reagan also made a
famous speech at the height of the cold war in which he identified the Soviet
Union as “an Evil Empire,” and even if he wasn’t thinking of Darth Vader and
stormtroopers at the time, everybody else was. “Darth Vader” became an
instant synonym for an evil boss or high school principal. Many of Yoda’s
catchphrases (“Do or do not; there is no try”) remain easy laugh-lines after all
these years.
With cultural phenomena come cultural myths. The famous line “Luke, I am
your father” does not actually exist—the actual line is “No, I am your father,”
and is perhaps the most misheard movie line since the nonexistent “Play it
again, Sam” from Casablanca (1942).
Genre
The Star Wars films are deeply derivative in terms of plot and character, and
they are completely reliant on generic conventions of storytelling—and saying
so isn’t insulting. After all, the original Star Wars film began as a deliberate
attempt by George Lucas to capture the feel of the old science fiction and
adventure serials that used to run before the feature films in movie theaters. A
hallmark of these serials was that the audience usually had not seen the two
or three preceding episodes of the story and had to be caught up on the
action. So when Lucas begins his film trilogy with Episode IV: A New Hope
and with a long, scrolling explanatory text, he is clearly trying to evoke that
same sense of being thrown into the middle of the action. However, one
problem Lucas faced in trying to do a big-budget science-fiction film was in
fact a lack of generic models on which to draw for inspiration—there had
simply been no similar films made except for the very B-movies whose corny
look Lucas was striving to avoid. The only previous respectable science-fiction
films Lucas could conceivably turn to for inspiration were Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky’s
Solaris (1972). Both of these films, however, were slow-moving, philosophical
art films, not at all the kind of high adventure Lucas was after.
The genre that seemed to offer the best combination of high adventure,
expansive setting, and classic characters was the western, a genre that
includes both serial shoot-’em-up adventures and epic tales set in a grand
landscape. For example, the rowdy cantina at Mos Eisley spaceport is a
setting—the frontier saloon full of gamblers and rowdies—that could have
been lifted from any number of western films. Han Solo himself bears a strong
resemblance to the classic western gun-for-hire, with Chewbacca, perhaps,
standing in for the sidekick. And of course there is a strong whiff of the blackhat/white-hat morality of a generic western in the opposed figures of Luke and
Darth Vader, especially in the earlier parts of the trilogy. The western isn’t the
only genre Lucas draws upon. In the end, the Star Wars films are in a sense a
collage of elements taken from several genres, with the laser guns and
rockets of serial sci-fi, the gunslingers and dusty towns of the western, and
the dogfights and radio chatter of Hollywood fighter-pilot flicks.
Part of the reason Lucas is so comfortable poaching from these disparate
sources is that “originality” in terms of plot and character was, in fact, the last
thing he was after. Lucas was going for classic situations and a mythic sort of
resonance, and he was able to attain this effect by keeping close to his
generic models. He could then place these familiar sorts of characters—the
young, unproven hero; the wise counselor; the villain—with their familiar
motivations, in incredible, highly unfamiliar settings, while still packing an
emotional punch in his story.
Influences
Among the more specific influences that guided Lucas as he made the Star
Wars trilogy, one of the most important was the samurai films of Akira
Kurosawa. Kurosawa’s classic samurai movies, such as The Seven Samurai
(1954) and Yojimbo (1961), often feature members of the warrior class of
samurai who try to live their lives according to the honorable code of bushido,
the way of the warrior. The samurai of The Seven Samurai, for example, are
very like Jedi Knights in that they are a separate caste devoted to justice and
to protecting others. Obi-Wan’s robes (not to mention his Japanese-sounding
name) seem to suggest those of the poor samurai of Kurosawa’s films, just as
the Jedi’s two-handed lightsabers seem like a sci-fi version of the samurai’s
katana.
Kurosawa’s influence on Star Wars is even more specific than that, however.
Lucas has said in the past that the inspiration for the characters of C-3PO,
R2-D2, Han Solo, and Princess Leia could be found in Kurosawa’s The
Hidden Fortress (1958), in which two bumbling friends help a roguish hero
rescue a brave princess from captivity. More specific still, Lucas includes a
direct homage to Kurosawa in the scene in which Ben defends Luke in the
Mos Eisley cantina. The shot of the ruffian’s arm on the floor, severed by
Ben’s blade, is a reference to a similarly severed arm, filmed in the same way,
in Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.
Another direct influence on Lucas, above and beyond the influence of the
genre itself, was John Ford’s classic western, The Searchers (1956). The
scene in which Luke approaches the burned-out farm and finds his aunt and
uncle murdered is shot in such a way that it echoes a similar scene in Ford’s
film, in which the young hero also returns to his family’s farm to find the
buildings burned and his aunt and uncle murdered. Like Luke, the hero of The
Searchers is drawn into a relationship with a relentless father figure, bent on
evil. And like Darth Vader, the father figure in The Searchers, played
unforgettably by John Wayne, experiences a last-second moral regeneration.
Like the Star Wars trilogy, The Searchers is essentially a quest story, one in
which the son must ultimately redeem the father, and it also approaches the
grandeur of myth.
Special Effects
The truly innovative aspect of the Star Wars trilogy, in purely filmic terms, was
the quantum leap it represented in special visual effects, production design,
and sound effects. While most of the techniques used in the trilogy, such as
digital matte painting and blue screens (when the actors perform before an
empty screen only to be edited into a painted or filmed background later on),
stop-motion animation, and computer-generated images, had been used to a
certain extent before, never had they been used so extensively throughout the
picture. Practically every frame of a Star Wars film has some sort of effect
added in, whether as part of the main action or merely in the background.
Lucas also combined the latest high-tech effects with classic Hollywood
techniques, such as elaborate creature costumes and even puppetry. Yoda,
for example, is performed and voiced by the master puppeteer Frank Oz, who
worked for years with Jim Henson’s Muppets.
A typical scene in the trilogy could feature a relatively normal-looking actor
interacting with another actor in costume, with another being operated by an
off-screen puppeteer, and with yet another who was added in later with a
computer—while the scene itself takes place before a matte painting giving
the illusion of an alien landscape. With the Star Wars films, special effects
became a box office draw in and of themselves, as viewers were willing to pay
just to see the amazing things Lucas’s team at Industrial Light and Magic
(including such famous effects wizards as John Dykstra and sound designer
Ben Burtt) were able to come up with.
This highly artificial approach to filmmaking has not been without its critics.
From the beginning, there have been those who have condemned the films as
little more than eye-candy or as coldly technological artifacts with a lot of
spectacle but little in the way of true wonder. Lucas himself has been
dismissive of such concerns and has often seemed eager to dispense with the
formality of having actual human actors. As the technology has improved,
Lucas has continued to tinker with the films, adding more creatures and more
detail to the backgrounds and even reshooting certain scenes to get them
closer to his ideal vision. With the new Star Wars trilogy, Lucas again is
striving for a quantum leap in what can be done with special effects. Now, the
digital revolution has allowed him to create entire landscapes and settings
without relying on stage sets or location shots at all. Soon the concept of
“special effects” will no longer apply, as every aspect of the films will be in
some sense an “effect.” The irony is that one of the themes Lucas plays with
in the original trilogy is of the dangers of surrounding oneself in a completely
technological environment—even as he creates just such an environment in
his recent work.
Analysis of Major Characters
Luke Skywalker
Luke’s quest to become a Jedi Knight is the main engine driving the plot of
Star Wars Episodes IV–VI. Indeed, all of the epic battles and cosmic events
going on around him are in a sense only the backdrop before which Luke’s
inner struggles are played out. When we first meet Luke on Tatooine, he is a
callow youth, dreaming of adventure and escape from the backwater setting in
which he finds himself. The classic image from A New Hope, in which Luke
stands looking out at the horizon as the twin suns of his home planet are
setting, captures perfectly this romantic, dreaming quality of his character.
Early in A New Hope, we also see the reckless, impetuous side of Luke’s
character as he races off after R2 without telling his uncle and as he spies on
the Sandpeople, almost getting himself killed thanks to his immaturity.
However, Luke is also motivated by a strong sense of duty and a desire to be
a part of something larger than himself. In the person of Ben Kenobi, Luke
finds this desire answered, as Ben offers to help Luke become a Jedi Knight.
Through Ben, Luke gets the opportunity to travel, to help the Rebel Alliance
against the evil Empire, to feel closer to the father he never knew (who was
also a Jedi), and to grow as a person through contact with the Force. In this
way, Ben becomes a surrogate father to Luke, replacing Uncle Owen, who
mainly wants to keep Luke safe, close to home, and, in that sense, in a state
of immaturity. Ben is soon taken from Luke by Darth Vader, the man Luke
believes killed his real father, repeating before Luke’s eyes the act of parricide
for which he already hates Vader. The irony, of course, is that Vader actually
is Luke’s father, a truth that devastates Luke when he learns it. Disappointed
in Ben for hiding the truth from him and horrified at what Anakin Skywalker
has become, Luke must learn at last to be his own man, moving out of the
shadows of his various father figures and even learning to stand apart from
the “grandfather figures” of Yoda and the Emperor, who are also fighting for
Luke’s loyalty.
In the end, Luke saves his father’s soul, gains a sister, and sees Yoda, Ben,
and Anakin (his whole paternal set, as it were) united in the afterlife. Much of
his success is thanks to Yoda, who encourages Luke to examine himself and
to judge how much he has been motivated by a desire for glory and how
much by a true devotion to others. Through Yoda’s teaching, Luke finally,
after many missteps, learns to master his own feelings and gains a deeper
insight to the feelings of others. By the end of the trilogy, the eager youth,
constantly in over his head, has become the confident Jedi Knight, coolly
strolling unarmed into Jabba’s palace and, even more challenging, refusing to
take the easy, dark path of hatred and anger. Though actor Mark Hamill aged
in the role over the course of the seven years it took to make the trilogy, it is
impossible to imagine anyone else as Luke Skywalker—and to the detriment
of Hamill’s later career, it became impossible for audiences to imagine him as
anyone else.
Darth Vader (Anakin Skywalker)
Darth Vader is one of pop culture’s universally recognized figures. His
respirator-enhanced breathing, massive frame, and intimidating armored
costume, as well as his tendency to enforce discipline in the Imperial ranks by
summary execution, combine to make him the baddest of cinematic bad guys.
Voiced by James Earl Jones, Vader is a truly awesome presence onscreen,
easily one of the most convincing monsters ever to menace a princess and
her rescuers. From the beginning, Vader represents the antithesis of the
warmly human Ben Kenobi, who is full of wisdom and slow to anger but quick
to defend others. Vader, on the other hand, lashes out casually at those who
displease him, though he does so as if motivated by a cool, almost rational
anger, rather than a raging fury. Vader’s conscious goal is to inspire fear
wherever he goes and to use the anger and hatred this fear stirs up to control
those around him. However, the surprising thing about Vader is that the
monster turns out to be human after all.
For all of A New Hope and most of The Empire Strikes Back, Vader is a static
character: the relentless foe of our heroes. At the end of Empire, however,
comes the revelation that stunned twelve-year-old moviegoers everywhere in
1980—namely, that Vader is Luke’s father, whom Luke, up to that point,
believed to have been slain by Vader himself. Much of the subsequent drama
of Return of the Jedi hinges on Luke’s efforts to awaken the good that Luke
believes, on rather little evidence, to be dormant within Vader’s soul. The
change finally comes when Vader is at last beaten and spared by Luke, who
is then nearly killed by the Emperor. Vader’s mask, impassive up to this point,
is now lit cleverly in the glow of the Emperor’s force-lightning so that pained
expressions seem to flit anxiously across Vader’s face. Finally, Anakin
Skywalker reemerges from within Darth Vader, and he destroys the Emperor
and saves his son. His last act is telling: he asks Luke to remove the mask so
that he may see Luke with his own eyes—a rejection of the sinister
man/machine aspects of Vader’s being. In the end, Anakin Skywalker stands,
purged of Darth Vader, with Yoda and Obi-Wan, the masters he once
rejected.
Han Solo
Han Solo, the brash smuggler captain with a heart of gold, is the character
that made Harrison Ford Harrison Ford. Before Solo, Ford had appeared
onscreen in supporting roles exclusively—after Solo, he was a bona fide star.
Ford’s Han Solo is charismatic and sexy, the funniest character in A New
Hope, and likable despite his apparent arrogance and selfishness. A major
key to understanding Han’s character is the clue provided by his last name.
Han is used to looking after only himself, with the Wookie Chewbacca as the
lone exception to the rule. If Luke starts out as the romantic dreamer, still
immature but eager, Han is the wised-up cynic, willing to fight but only in it for
the money. (Ben, with his quiet dedication to the cause of right, stands as a
rebuke to both Han and Luke.) Another clue is the connection between Han
and his spaceship, the Millennium Falcon, a small freighter to which Solo has
made extensive modifications in order to boost her speed. Like the Falcon,
Solo is temperamental, something of a misfit, and distinctly untrustworthy in
appearance. But over the course of the trilogy, Han, the quintessential loner,
finds himself drawn into friendship with Luke, into a leadership position in the
Rebellion, and into a romantic relationship with Leia.
Throughout much of the trilogy, Solo tries to resist commitment, whether to a
person or to a cause, but finds his instincts overruled by his affection. For
example, Solo initially leaves once he has his reward, but he returns to help
Luke take on the Death Star. Later, he is set to leave again, but he delays his
departure first to help rescue Luke and then to make sure Leia escapes
during the evacuation of Hoth. Similarly, Han constantly needles Leia in order
to get her to admit her affection for him but would never dream of being the
first to express his feelings. Solo is later captured and held by Jabba the Hutt,
giving his friends the chance return his loyalty, and Han is the one rescued.
From this point on, Solo is a changed man, still cocky and brash, but now
clearly committed to the Rebellion and to the woman he loves.
Princess Leia Organa
Carrie Fisher was still a teenager when she was cast as Princess Leia, and
George Lucas gets a lot of mileage, especially early in the trilogy, out of the
contrast between Leia’s youthful, sweet appearance and her sharp tongue
and forceful manner. Leia is a post-feminist sort of princess, equally
comfortable firing a blaster or piloting a ship as she is conducting a medal
ceremony. Toward the end of the trilogy, we also learn that Leia has the
potential to become a Jedi, just like Luke. Leia is a Senator, a princess, and a
leader of the Rebel Alliance, and her devotion to duty and to the cause of
freedom is one of her defining characteristics. This devotion prevents Leia
from acknowledging to Han her growing love for him, and it even prevents her
from admitting it to herself. Leia tells Han that he is needed as a leader and a
pilot, but never that she needs him herself. Han, of course, tries to goad an
admission out of her, but his efforts only cause her to bottle up her feelings
even more, though she does make some efforts to inspire jealousy in Han by
kissing Luke (before she learns that they are brother and sister). Leia finally
tells Han that she loves him, just when it is almost too late and he is about to
be frozen alive.
Leia takes part in the rescue of Han Solo from Jabba the Hutt, freeing him
from the carbon freeze, only to be taken captive herself by Jabba. Up to this
point in the trilogy, Leia has dressed modestly, favoring practical, functional
clothing over anything fancy. Now, however, she is forced by Jabba to don a
revealing harem outfit, complete with gold bikini, and to wear a chain around
her neck. Leia’s reaction to the situation is thoroughly in character and reveals
the way her character smashes the adventure-fantasy stereotypes about sexy
princesses. In the confusion caused by Luke’s surprise attack, Leia hops
behind Jabba, loops the chain around his massive neck, and strangles him to
death. Leia then helps Luke destroy Jabba’s barge before escaping with the
others. The scene is a perfect summation of the kind of reversal of
expectations typical of Leia throughout the trilogy.