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12/31/10(Fri)13:14 No.13809090I
wrote a short essay about how the prequels might have gone. In it, I
try to conceive an alternate Anakin whose motivations are pure and whose
fall to the dark side is truly tragic.
Anakin's fall from grace
is not caused by a deficit of humanity, but an excess. The reasons for
his greatness and the reasons for his fall are the same.
The heroic Anakin is controlled by a trinity of passions:
the
pursuit of knowledge, the pursuit of love and unbearable pity for the
suffering of humanity. Basically, he's a space-Bertrand Russel.
Although
these are all admirable qualities, which together form highly
principled and proactive people, in terrible contexts they can have
terrible results. For Anakin, the hideousness of the war in which he
found himself caused a surge of these feelings.
Witnessing suffering and feeling guilt at not having the power to ease it causes a knot of self-loathing to form in Anakin.
From
this sympathy for others, his guilt, self-loathing and desire for power
grows. As he sees incompetence and bureaucracy all around him, he
wishes to break from these confines so that he may properly protect the
weak and enact justice.
Thus, from his love of humanity comes
Anakin's first will to power - which intoxicates over time and finally
corrupts completely.
They kinda' try and do something similar in
the prequels, but I don't think they succeed. When we first meet Anakin
he can have no principled reasons for leaving Tatooine because he's a
child. He's also evil in the second film, because he kills women and
children when he's angered. His reaction might make some sense if all
the evil were coming from a single enemy or organisation, who he finally
loses patience with and tries to destroy, but that's not what happens
in the prequels. Arbitrary difficulties just seem to leap on Anakin, so
he loses it. |
