Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

In Soul Calibur IV, the latest iteration of Namco’s unparalleled fighter, you can play as Yoda and Darth Vader. Wielding a lightsaber in a world that is otherwise set in the Enlightenment era may strike you as nonsensical, but it simply doesn’t matter. There’s no need to invent some elaborate justification for the presence of Jedi and Sith in this antique universe, although you can try. Namco inserted Vader and Yoda into its game simply because that was the awesome thing to do.

Exposed to Vader in this fresh context, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the Dark Lord of the Sith. Oddly, Star Wars occupies an august position on this site. I purchased this domain name and installed Wordpress way back in May of 2005, and my first real post was a lengthy diatribe about Revenge of the Sith. It remains one of the most heavily commented posts on my site, suggesting that I might be more successful if I killed Harry Knowles, gained roughly 600 pounds, and assumed his identity. Anyway, it occurred to me recently that in all my carping about The Prequel Trilogy, I missed what is probably the most damning flaw in the whole mess.

Before we get there, allow me to reveal to you that I sometimes suffer from sleep paralysis. It’s not an uncommon phenomenon, but I probably experience it a little more frequently than most other people. Sleep paralysis occurs when your brain wakes up but the rest of your body does not. Your fully conscious mind is temporarily trapped in a completely unresponsive body. The effect is frightening, if for no other reason than your respiratory system is still taking the slow, shallow breaths of sleep, and it constantly feels as if you’re in danger of suffocating. It’s also fairly common to experience hallucinations in this twilight state, although I personally don’t get that too often. The form of the hallucinations are surprisingly universal across cultures, most often taking the form of a demon or witch sitting on the chest (the “hag attacks” of Southern folklore). People will also sometimes glimpse or hear dark figures in their periphery, in our culture mostly commonly the Grim Reaper or Darth Vader.

I say again: most commonly the Grim Reaper or Darth Vader. That’s right, Darth Vader is a villain of such cultural importance that he pulls about even with Death. It’s not hard to see why. Vader’s costume was designed to evoke the most threatening elements of samurai and Nazis. His cloak and armor make him into a swirling vortex of darkness. His mask is skull-like, impassive, and dehumanizing. James Earl Jones’s godly voice is pushed even further beyond the realm of mere mortals through digital enhancement. Vader’s large frame is made even more imposing by his body language, which is a perfect blend of corpse-like rigidity and robotic, iron-enforced certainty.

The Vader of the sleep paralysis hallucination is the Vader of the original trilogy. When this monster chokes an unworthy bureaucrat simply for being skeptical about the power of the Force, we are hardly surprised. Is it any wonder that he shows up in a hallucinatory state where we fear suffocation? In the original trilogy, Darth Vader is, almost note for note, Lucifer. The Great Adversary. Here was a Jedi who, possessed of immense power and an abiding arrogance, betrayed his teachers, slaughtered his brethren, and went on to sow evil throughout the Galaxy. His mortal body became twisted and deformed in direct proportion to his unrelenting anger and hatred. While the Emperor induced men to evil acts, to look upon Darth Vader was to see the physical, horrifying embodiment of evil itself. If fear of a battle station will keep the local systems in line, as Tarkin says, then it is fear of Vader—the huge, dark monster whose very breaths seem to project an aura of death and destruction—that keeps everything else in line.

Now consider the young Anakin Skywalker. Young Anakin had an annoying habit of shouting “Yipee!” at odd moments, but it’s hard to find fault with this stage of the character arc. A happy-go-lucky kid born into slavery on a desert world, who might have remained an innocent had the Jedi not come along and, blinded by the boy’s sheer potential, recruited him into the warrior caste against their (meaning Yoda’s) better judgment. The seeds of a great tragedy are there.

Episode II is the most frustrating to watch, because it comes so close to getting things right before completely going off the rails. We see the teenaged Anakin: recruited too late to be fully indoctrinated into the Jedi mindset, trying so hard to uphold truth and justice while fighting against the seduction of his own overwhelming powers. He wants to follow the Jedi rules, but really, when you’re so powerful why should you? Why restrain yourself for the sake of lesser beings? Why render yourself impotent simply for honor’s sake? Here’s the trouble. Where we should be seeing a palpable contempt for the Jedi Code, we instead get an angsty obsession with Padme Amidala. Yes, it works thematically that, rules be damned, he’ll take his woman, but the courtship scenes are too cartoonish to be believed. Still, the character can be salvaged because Padme is just a symptom of the underlying darkness. The Vader we knew and feared really goes south when it is implied that what pushed Anakin over the edge, the precipitating event that led to the psychotic break, if you will, is that his mommy never said “I love you.” Apparently refrigerator mothers really are to blame.

Alright, fine. Even with all of this in the pot, it’s still possible to believe that Darth Vader is eventually conceived out of unfathomable personal power and unbridled rage. He’s obviously not playing by the rules, and the great Jedi massacre still awaits him in the future. I walked into Episode III still hoping to see the genesis of the merciless horror I knew and loved. I should have known better.

The most galling thing about Episode III is that it fundamentally changes the very core of Vader’s personality. The soon-to-be Emperor manipulates Anakin into slaughtering the Jedi Order by insinuating that this will allow him to eventually save Padme’s life. He murders children out of a misplaced sense of love, and the wounds that put him in the big black suit are the product of a series of accidents. Put simply, Anakin is tricked into becoming Darth Vader. He doesn’t embrace the Dark Side so much as desperately cling to it. The ruthless right hand of the Emperor is reduced to a misguided dupe. The awesome power of a being who was evil for evil’s sake is transformed into a frustrated adolescent who, what? Mistakenly thinks he killed his girlfriend? When Vader finally tosses the Emperor down that conveniently placed reactor shaft, it’s no longer about personal redemption. Instead, he’s just getting revenge on a passive-aggressive boss.

It is amazing that Darth Vader could survive a character assassination of this magnitude, and his presence in Soul Calibur IV is a testament to the strength of the persona. For me, the original and prequel trilogies are entirely separate ventures. There is no reconciling them. I think that many people feel this way. Despite the prequel trilogy, Vader remains a being who has the power to haunt our nightmares.