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I can’t kill my own father.
They’re both so hurt and broken in this scene. I could never get over how lost they both were, and how badly they needed to look into each other’s faces. For what, exactly?
I can imagine what Vader was looking for. He wanted a clear sight of one good thing he’d done for the universe, or maybe the sign that someone could still love him past his crimes, or even still see just him as human.
Luke? I’ve never been clear on what Luke was looking for in all this. In the beginning, he wanted adventure. He wanted to be a hero. By this movie, he didn’t want either of those things, so much. He’d gotten them both and they turned out to be full of friends dying and being hunted down and menaced by galactic supervillains.
By this time he really is a Rebel, in the way Leia is. He wants to see all that suffering end. He wants to see people free and at peace. But he’s looking for something very personal too—something he still thinks he can find in his father, and I’ve never been sure what that is. If it’d been redemption he was looking for, that’d make sense, but Luke never needed redemption, did he? I mean granted the black outfit and in-your-face Vader parallels seem to imply otherwise, but from what?. Luke was a bit stupid now and then, in a normal human way, but he never did anything he needed…or that I can even imagine he personally felt he needed punishment for. He was just a kid. Even at this point in the trilogy, stumbling through the last bit of his trial by fire, he’s still barely more than a kid. Maybe, ever since Obi Wan died, he’s been hurt by the realization that his craving for adventure—that just being who he is—cost other people their lives, but that’s such an innocent guilt. Such a gentle thing compared to anything you could find in Vader.
So I’ve never been sure what he was looking for in Vader. Why, from the moment he heard about his father, he cleaved to the very idea of him so fiercely. Whether maybe it’s a Force thing—an instinctive knowledge that the two of them are part of one another in some deep, prophetic way. Or maybe it’s just good old-fashioned family love: that in honor of what should have been, Luke will help him in the best way he can.
Either way, that pyre scene was so lonely that I was never sure Luke had really found whatever he was looking for. I always wondered what he saw in that fire. Maybe just an ending. That’s pretty lonely, but you don’t really find any answers there.
One of the reasons grief sucks so much is because you feel like something that consuming should at least have some sort of cosmic significance. But it doesn’t. Exactly the opposite, really. You discover that what was miraculous was the person who’d filled the empty space that’s left. That’d be a pretty weird concept to reconcile with Darth Vader.
I guess that’d explain why it was so lonely. Who else in the universe is going to grieve that bastard?
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1bWoOn1