George Lucas knew what he was doing with the prequels. Don’t get me wrong, he made a lot of mistakes, which are mostly owed to the fact that he rushed through the scripts and didn’t take time to fully develop the ideas he was putting into them. It’s no secret that he didn’t write Empire or Jedi. What you may not know is that he wrote at least four drafts of A New Hope, and probably had some uncredited assistance from others, including his wife at the time, Marcia. Not only that but Harrison Ford, and, if my instincts do not deceive me, Carrie Fisher, re-wrote much of their own dialogue.
But the prequels are largely unfiltered Lucas, and not properly polished, so the issues that the scripts have live in that realm. However, I want to talk about Anakin Skywalker, and his arc, and why it’s actually very cleverly conceived, despite not being well-executed. Especially, people complain about Anakin being a creeper towards Padme in Episode II: Attack of the Clones. I can’t believe I have to float this out there, but did you ever consider that Anakin is SUPPOSED to be a creeper? He’s Darth friggin’ VADER.
Oh, I know, he wasn’t Vader at that point, but a turn to the Dark Side can’t be a snap decision. It has to be built around a character flaw, a flaw which sinister forces (no pun intended, although…) can exploit in order to compromise him. Lucas spent a lot of time discussing this in interviews, particularly as the prequel years went on and criticism of his choices continued to mount, but he laid a lot of it out there from the start.
With “The Phantom Menace,” he said that he made Anakin a young boy because it was important to the story that he should be at an age where being taken away from his mother would cause trauma. So old enough to feel the pain, young enough not to handle it effectively. And although we didn’t see much of what it meant to Anakin to be a slave, this was significant, too.
We are given to understand that the Jedi take force-sensitive children from their parents as soon as they are born, before bonds have formed between them. This sucks for the parents but makes life easier for the kids, who are raised in a temple, essentially as monks, right from the start. They are indoctrinated. And if you think that sounds like a bad idea, well, good, you’re catching on to what ol’ Tio Jorge was up to.
So Anakin demonstrates his deep compassion and unselfish love towards others, does so repeatedly, and also has a pretty much instantaneous crush on teenage Natalie Portman. What little boy wouldn’t? Little boys always catch feelings for their teenage babysitters, which was basically her role in much of that movie. Anakin also has a good relationship with his mother, and so he knows how to behave towards women at this point. But it’s all about to go wrong.
It turns out that Shmi conceived him without partaking in any kind of horizontal dance party, and she has no idea how to explain it. Qui-Gon reports to the Jedi Council that he “may have been conceived by the midichlorians.” He manages to convince Shmi to let him take Anakin away from her, away from his life of slavery, and train him to be a Jedi because he believes that Anakin is the figure spoken of in an old prophecy about the Chosen One who will “bring balance to the Force.”
So now, Anakin’s one good relationship in life is taken from him, and he is dragged out into a galaxy full of ulterior motives and killer robots, paraded before a council who is skeptical that he belongs there. His presence creates a rift between Qui-Gon, his newfound father figure, and Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon’s Padawan learner. Then Qui-Gon is killed in battle with a Sith Lord and Obi-Wan promises he will train Anakin. The council reluctantly agrees and promotes Obi-Wan to the level of Jedi Knight.
So flash-forward a decade. Padme, no longer serving as Queen of Naboo, is instead serving as Naboo’s senator, and is in her mid-20’s. Somebody is trying to kill her and the Supreme Chancellor asks the Jedi Council to assign Obi-Wan and Anakin to look after Padme, as they are familiar faces and will likely put her at ease. Seems like a reasonable request, but of course it’s the first time Anakin has seen Padme in a decade, and he not only is carrying brokenness from his severed relationship with his mom, but he never fully made peace with his feelings for Padme, and now here she is, grown up, more mature and more beautiful, and he is now himself a man.
Add to that his growing frustration with the Jedi Order: he was not indoctrinated from birth. He was a slave, and now he’s a monk; he owns no property other than his clothes and his lightsaber; he goes where he is told and does as he is commanded. He is a student, essentially feeling his manhood challenged by the fatherly guidance of his big brother / mentor, Obi-Wan. A nineteen year-old man still being told what to do, his heart is full of rebellion and his hormones are going nuts, and his life experience is that the people he loves he is always forced to abandon, or they are killed in battle.
Padme being back in his life is, for him, like a gift; she’s water to a man dying of thirst. But for her, life has gone on and she has lived it, fully, and well; Anakin is just a fond memory and an unsettling presence, lecherous and a little too solicitous. His heart is clearly somewhere hers is not, and she has no wish to hurt him but he does make her uncomfortable.
Sadly, much of her line of reasoning was cut out in the final edit, though the deleted scenes do exist on some of the various home video releases. Some of it, however, in still in the film: Padme says she has been serving her world since she was fourteen; while not the youngest queen ever elected she does believe now that she was too young. Hers has been a life of service, and she too is restless, hungry. Though Anakin’s advances are not encouraged, and though she’s not sure she likes the tone of them, nor does she believe it appropriate, part of her does at least appreciate the possibilities.
The deleted scenes show that she has an older sister, who has children, and she watches wistfully while her sister’s kids play in the yard at their parents’ homestead, thinking how much she has given up in service of her world. And her sister points out that Anakin is a very handsome young man who clearly is into her. She does, after all, have options.
Anakin’s dreams about his mother’s suffering lead him back to Tattooine, with Padme in tow, but he is too late. Shmi has been taken by Tuskens and, it’s a Star Wars movie so we don’t know what they did to her, but the parallels to “The Searchers” should be enough to telegraph it to anyone who knows that movie. One thinks of John Wayne saying, “don’t ever ask me that again.” Now Anakin has lost his mother twice, and forever. His anger, then, is about the repeated pattern of loss in his life. The loss of everyone who loves him, his having in effect nobody to love. That his love is somehow a force of destruction when it ought to be a force for good.
As he and Padme face almost certain death at the end of the movie, Padme confesses a love for Anakin that may or may not be genuine; her life might be about to end and she is aware of all that she has never had. When they do survive, she decides to throw caution to the wind. There are a million reasons why they shouldn’t be together, but they almost died and all either of them can think about is what it would mean to die without having known love.
George Lucas said in an interview around this time how that was Anakin’s character flaw, that his inability to let go was what would be his undoing. He talked about how true love is unconditional, and when you can’t let go, that’s selfishness, it’s a kind of greed; and that leads down a dark path.
So in Revenge of the Sith, Anakin begins having dreams about Padme’s death as he once did about his mother, and he knows how that story ended. He can’t countenance letting the same thing happen to Padme. Note how carefully the Chancellor has escalated the tension between Anakin and the Council, stroking Skywalker’s ego and making political moves that piss off the other Jedi and encroach on their authority. Finally, in a quiet moment at the opera, Palpatine tells Anakin that he knows of a possible way to stop people from dying using the Dark Side of the Force. Notice that in that speech, as Palpatine tells the story of Darth Plagueis the Wise, he tells Anakin that “it is said he could even influence the Midichlorians to…create…life…” and the pregnant pause and meaningful look the Chancellor throws in Anakin’s direction.
The implication being that perhaps Anakin was created by the Sith in the first place. You can’t trust Palpatine, of course; he’s evil. He talks out both sides of his mouth and his schemes, from TPM on down, have always been about playing two sides against each other to weaken them both and strengthen his own position. But he’s exploiting Anakin’s love for Padme, pushing him to hold onto her ever tighter, to compromise himself and all that he holds dear. For fifteen years, Anakin has been serving the Jedi Council. Before that he was a slave of a junk dealer named Watto. His whole life he has been doing the bidding of others, never allowed to have anything for his own. Now, if he has to choose between Padme and the Jedi Order, the fogies in the monk robes are going to lose.
In making this choice, of course, he unknowingly signs her death warrant; it is his treachery that breaks her heart, and her own sense of loss that weakens her to the point of death during childbirth. The battle with Obi-Wan is Anakin’s final rejection of the last fifteen years of his life. No more Jedi, no more giving away what is precious to him; no more letting go. Except when Padme dies, he’s permanently gutted: he’s lost it all anyway, and now it’s his own fault and there is nothing left for him to do but help his new master force the galaxy into some kind of order that he can understand. Gathering power unto himself.
That’s a lot of anger for a person to carry around inside, and it’s the kind of anger that burns cold, the kind that would totally fuel a guy to do the things we saw in Rogue One…or across the Original Trilogy. The anger of a perpetual loser who never learned humility from defeat. There’s a lot of things in the Prequels that are not done well, but Anakin being a creeper isn’t bad writing. It’s emblematic of the real problem with the prequels: it’s a clever idea, poorly executed.
