On Darth Vader

This arises from a discussion over at NDNation, wherein someone said that Darth Vader is not the villain of the Star Wars films, and that the Emperor is. This mistakes the entire point of the series, so I thought I'd address it at length.

Vader is the best part of the Star Wars series. This is due in part to his pop psyche significance--the sexuality of the dark father-figure, repressed and mechanized to the point of cold sadism. Layered over that, though, and more significant is the mythic arc of the story--the son's reconciliation with the dark father and the dark father's ultimate redemption, an arc that could be called Christian or pseudo-Christian if we like. The entire point of Star Wars is Vader's character arc--his redemption from evil is Luke's task in the original trilogy, and his corruption is the heart of the, ahem, misguided prequels.

For this corruption/redemption storyline to work, it is vital that Evil Vader actually be, you know, evil. He isn't duped, he isn't led around on a leash, he isn't the Emperor's puppet. He's so evil that his one-time best friend thinks of his good persona, Anakin, as "dead." He didn't become evil by flipping a switch, of course. He started out basically good, like most evil people, and sold his soul, one piece at a time, initially with good intentions but eventually because he couldn't admit he'd make a mistake and finally because he just couldn't stop. That's what evil is. That's why "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions" is a cliche--people do bad things for good reasons at first, then just because they're in the habit, and then because they don't really want to stop. Sin is addictive.

Let's take a look. In Episode II, Anakin goes out to save his mom from Sand People. Good intentions. She's dying anyway, which sucks for him and which is sad. So he kills all the Sand People, including the women and children, some of whom, one imagines, were begging for their lives as a blood-soaked Jedi carved them to pieces. A hideous action by any moral standards, including Anakin's own. In no way, mind, did Palpatine manipulate him into this--his own inability to control his emotions (a cardinal Jedi precept) led him to take this very serious step into the dark all on his own. Still, he had good intentions, he was pretty provoked, and he felt bad about it--he clearly wasn't beyond redemption here.

Early in Episode III, he has a chance to that his repentance is serious--he has disarmed Darth Dracula and has him at his mercy. He kills him anyway. Palpatine is involved here, cheering Anakin on, but in both real life and by the internal rules of the series, we know that that's no excuse--Luke, faced with a much tougher decision later, declines to kill Vader. (Tougher because Anakin knew Obi-Wan was on his way and didn't know that Palpatine was evil--as far as Anakin knew, he was out of danger. Luke, on the other hand, was in deadly peril and knew his friends were in similar jeopardy--killing a downed foe would have given him a chance to beat Palpatine and escape.) What began with an emotional outburst of rage has now become dispassionate murder, justified because the victim is a bad dude.

Well, it isn't too long after that that Anakin is killing unarmed children (likely also begging for their lives) because Palpatine tells him he'll save Padme's life. Is Anakin being manipulated? Yes. Does that make him any less a villain here? No. There's just no moral universe in which this deal is remotely acceptable. It's also not too different from the deal Luke rejects at the end of Empire (more on that in a bit).

Anakin has pretty clearly lost track of his noble intention of saving Padme's life when he force-chokes her a few minutes after his butchering little kids because he loves her so much, but whatever. Even if his intentions were still noble at the end of Episode III and he had just been cruelly used by big bad Palpatine, what excuse is there for him some twenty years later? None. He's not Palpatine's tool anymore--he has enough independent will to propose an anti-Palpatine alliance with Luke in Empire. Let's get that exactly clear:

"Join me, and together we will rule the Galaxy as father and son." This is the dark father seeking rapproachment with the son on his own terms. Vader is very happy with the notion of killing Palpatine, replacing him as Emperor and viscious tyrant. He also wants to take Luke on as his apprentice Sith. At the end of Empire, that's what Vader's moral vision is like--he knows he wants to reconcile with his kid, with whom he's obsessed, but that only takes the form of ambition, not of love or of understanding his son's own moral universe. In fact, Vader thinks it's a great deal for Luke, a real no brainer--become a moral monster, the kind of guy who kills kids who're begging for their lives, in order to save the lives of your friends? Why, that's the exact deal that Vader jumped at himself. Luke would literally rather die than take that deal.

Now, in Return of the Jedi, there are some stirrings in Vader. Possibly we're to think that Luke's rejection of his offer stung Vader and got him thinking. But Vader is pretty honest with Luke when they talk--he doesn't think there's any good left in him, he doesn't think he can stop being evil. The Dark Side has taken him. He's wrong, as we all know, there is a shred of good left and it just took Palpatine torturing his son in front of him to wake it up, etc. But this was a stunning development for Palpatine, who had had a long time to grow accustomed to the notion that Vader was just as much a monster as he was himself. On the level of plot, this is a much bigger change than just an unwilling lackey finally ginning up the courage to betray his master. This is a revolution in Vader's soul.

On a mythic level, it is even more than that--it's resurrection and rapproachment on the terms of the son. Luke has figuratively brought his father back from the dead. We know this because the script tells us so--first, Obi-Wan tells Luke that Darth Vader killed Anakin, a statement he later clarifies as "true in a manner of speaking." When Luke tells Vader that he has to "save" him, Vader replies "You already have"--a line the script gives, not to "Darth Vader," but to "Anakin." Even the darn title of the movie is "The Return of the Jedi"--the Jedi in question in Anakin, returning from his living death as a thrall, not to the Emperor, but to his own dark side. The redemption and the mythic resurrection are identical, a fact highlighted by Blue Hologram Sebastian Shaw showing up at the campfire scene.

The mythic significance of connecting moral redemption with resurrection, literalized in the form of life after death as a blue hologram (but, um, a powerful blue hologram, right?) is lost if we trivialize or minimize the significance of Darth Vader's villainy. Likewise, the moral value of the story is lost if we treat the Emperor as Vader's puppet-master--the significance then becomes, not, "don't give in to your own darkness," but "don't hang out with mind-controlling sci-fi sorcerers." Both are probably good bits of advice, but the former is a bit more practical.