Luke Skywalker, Prince of Denmark

In the last post, as seemed appropriate for the Christmas season, I opined that The Force Awakens was an enormous turkey. Although it may make me sound like a grinch, I’ll say it again; The Force Awakens is a giant turkey. The original trilogy was mythic, even archetypal; the new sequel is simply a sequence of action scenes glued together by allusions to the original movies, references that feel gratuitous because they are based on coincidences and lack grounding in any kind of believable universe. The Force Awakens is a film about nostalgia, a film in search of an earlier era in filmmaking. Even the villain is motivated by nostalgia: he wants to return the days of the Empire and emulate his maternal grandfather Darth Vader. He is no new villain, simply a more enfeebled shadow of the original archenemy. By making a film that not only panders to nostalgia but is narratively-driven by nostalgia, the filmmakers have created a truly self-reflexive film – rather than going beyond the originals to make something new, they have made a film about the search for the original films, for the period of lost innocence represented by the first trilogy. The narrative they have created embodies this retreat. The Force Awakens, in its exploitation of the power of nostalgia, is an exercise in cowardice rather than true creativity.

The original films were something different. Lucas created something original. At the same time, he drew extensively from mythic archetypes to refashion old myths for a new era. The idea of the Force is indebted to Plotinus’s notion of the World Soul and Jung’s theory of the Collective Unconsciousness. More than this, the original films are very Freudian. The light sabres, for instance, are surely phallic symbols. You don’t believe me? In the Star Wars parody Space Balls by Mel Brooks (in which the Force is re-termed the Schwartz) at the point when Lone Star squares off against the evil Dark Helmet and they kindle their light sabres, Dark Helmet tells Lone Star, “I see your Schwartz is bigger than mine”. This is definitely a dick joke. In A New Hope, the Death Star is like a giant evil female breast and the Tie Fighters seeking to destroy it are like sperm vying to fertilize an ovum. Sometimes destruction is a form of creation. By trying to tap into a universal unconscious symbolism, Lucas sought to create a work that would resonate at many psychological levels simultaneously, something Abrams utterly failed to do in The Force Awakens.

In this post I am going to interpret the original Star Wars movies with respect to a very important kind of ‘myth’, the Oedipal complex. This has surely been done before but, if so, I haven’t read about it. I hope in interpreting the films this way to show the depth of Lucas’s (probably instinctive) understanding of human nature.

The Oedipal complex is the fundamental myth or developmental narrative described or invented by Sigmund Freud early in the 20^th Century. According to Freud, some time during psychosexual development, male children enter into a rivalrous relationship with their fathers for possession of their mothers, a conflict that creates in boys a fear known as castration anxiety. The successful resolution of the Oedipal complex involves an identification by the boy with his father and an internalisation of the moral laws that the Father represents. This complex is central to Freudian psychoanalysis. I feel it important to point out by the way that, according to Freud, the Oedipal phase occurs between the ages of 3 and 6 – not, as one might expect, at puberty. Despite their youth, Freud was inflexible in contending that the feeling young children have towards their mothers is a sexual desire, a view that perhaps explains why the adjective Freudian is virtually a dirty word today.

Personally, I disagree with Freud, as I disagree with him about many other things, when he proposes that the Oedipal complex is based on sexual desire. A mistake I believe Freud often makes is the conflating of love with sex. I believe love and sex are two separate things. Nevertheless, something like the Oedipal complex surely underlies the three original Star Wars films – Luke is at war with his father and the trilogy arguably resonates with the young men who first saw it because it spoke to their own ambivalent feelings toward their dads.

The Oedipal drama does not manifest itself straight away. In the first Star Wars, A New Hope, Luke is simply a farm-boy on a desert planet, plucked from obscurity to become an accidental hero in the war between good and evil. In this first film, nothing suggests that Darth Vader has any special connection to Luke and the pair do not battle directly. It is the second film that begins to suggest that Luke has a unique destiny, that he is no accidental hero. He is strong in the Force and his fate is to become a Jedi like his father before him. He trains under Yoda on the planet Dagobah and while there experiences something like a dream in which he fights Vader and decapitates him. Vader’s helmet visor disappears to reveal Luke’s face. This moment is a foreshadowing not only of the end of this film but of the end of The Return of the Jedi as well, both occasions when Luke and his father battle each other.

How is a boy supposed to resolve his Oedipal feelings towards his father when his father is evil and it is impossible to identify with him? In the second and third films of the trilogy, the Oedipal complex descends around Luke like fate. At the end of The Empire Strikes Back, Vader and Luke fight and Vader removes both Luke’s light-sabre and hand. This is a castration anxiety made brutally palpable. Vader reveals that he is Luke’s father (a surprise to both Luke and audience) and says, “Join me and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son”. Luke screams out, “I will never join you!” and chooses instead to fall into the abyss. Luke’s reaction is understandable. He has been put into an impossible situation. Either he fights his father and risks castration or death, or he chooses to identity with his father and goes over to the Dark Side.

Luke is in a double bind and, in this respect, he is like Hamlet in Shakespeare’s eponymous play. In Shakespeare’s story, Hamlet is solemnly enjoined by the ghost of father to take bloody revenge on the usurper Claudius. Unfortunately, Claudius is Hamlet’s uncle and now husband to Hamlet’s mother Gertrude. To obey his spectral father’s command, Hamlet must symbolically kill a type of father figure. He is caught in the vice of fate. No wonder he dithers and procrastinates, contemplating suicide rather than face the consequences of patricide. To kill Claudius is anyway simply another form of self-murder. Luke is very much like Hamlet here, except that Luke is far more active, not indecisive as Hamlet is. Both nevertheless are trapped by similar dilemmas.

Alert readers of my argument may believe they have spotted a flaw in it. If the original Star Wars trilogy is a dramatization of the Oedipal complex, where is Luke’s mother in all this? Who are Vader and Luke fighting over? True, Luke has no mother in these films – but he has a sister, Leia. In The Return of the Jedi, Luke learns from Yoda and the ghost of Obiwan Kinobe that Leia is his sister and later, on the third moon of Endor, reveals this to her. During much of the three films, Luke has been in love with Leia – and now this passion has been revealed to be incestuous. In the sense that it is an incestuous love, it stands as a metonym for a son’s incestuous love for his mother; in this way as well, the Oedipal complex descends around Luke like fate. It is perhaps not surprising that Luke’s most violent onslaught on his father at the end of the film is provoked by Vader sensing that Luke has a sister and suggesting that he convert her to the Dark Side instead.

Luke, Leia and Han, for much of the time, form a love-triangle. This conflict is only fully resolved at the end of the last movie when Leia reassures Han about her feelings towards him, telling him that Luke is (only) her brother, and she and Han kiss. The possibility of incestuous relations has been finally foreclosed; the natural order of legitimate, non-incestuous relationships finally established. Familial love has been successfully discriminated from erotic love. The love triangle between the three characters relates to the Oedipal complex in complex ways: at one level, from Luke’s point of view, Han stands for his father, Leia for his mother; at another level, from Leia’s point of view, Luke is her father and Han her beau, a father substitute. It is a sign that the Oedipal complex has been successful resolved that normal, natural loving relationships can be recognized.

But the resolution of the Oedipal complex does not occur on the third moon of Endor but in the depths of the Death Star. For the second time Vader and Luke fight but this time the fight is different – Luke now has a good chance of winning. The ghost of Obiwan had told Luke that he must fight Vader again (as the ghost of Hamlet senior told Hamlet that he must take revenge on Claudius) and now that ultimate battle is taking place. The evil Emperor encourages the fight, enjoining Luke to give into his hate. Luke is once again caught in a double bind – this time, it is a choice between destroying his father and going over to the Dark Side, or dying and allowing the Light Side to lose. In a moment of weakness, he attacks Vader ferociously, cutting off Vader’s hand. Luke’s own artificial hand turns into Vader’s glove. Luke changes his mind, turning off the light sabre. He chooses to let himself die rather than usurp his father’s position as the Emperor’s right-hand man. Perhaps a person may escape the Oedipal complex by symbolically or actually killing his father but this, as the film suggests, is far from being the best way out. Death is preferable. The Emperor attempts to dispatch Luke with psionic lightning – but this is still better for Luke than going over to the Dark Side. By killing his father, Luke would have done so (and I leave it to the reader to imagine what the Dark Side represents in terms of psychosexual development).

The best resolution of the Oedipal complex is for the son to identify with the father (and in this way diminish the rivalry between the two). Luke is unable to identify with his father because Luke is one of the Good Guys and Vader is the leader of the forces of Evil. Morality runs against the grain of familial relationships in the Star Wars universe. Either Luke must buckle – or Vader must. In the end, it is the father who turns apostate, deciding to save his son and destroy the Emperor instead. Vader picks up Emperor Palpatine and throws him down the well. The son redeems the father and Vader comes over to the Light Side. Although many critics at the time it was released disparaged the end of the film in which Vader removes his helmet, I think it is fitting, at this point, for Luke and Annakin to see each other face to face. The father’s decision to identify with the son has freed Luke of his Oedipal Complex.

I don’t know if the notion that the Oedipal complex is a universal aspect of the human condition has merit or not, but the supposition that it does certainly helps elucidate the Star Wars films. Suppose for a moment that the theory is true. No son can completely identify with the father. There are always points of difference. Every boy’s father is Darth Vader to some extent and, to this same extent, the original Star Wars continues to resonate. (I myself am a socialist and have a neo-conservative for a father; this is why the films appeal to me.) It is because father-son conflict is a constant that gives Star Wars its enduring appeal. An appeal I hope remains despite the efforts of Abrams and co to trash the franchise.