Hey Wisecrack.
Jared again, and today we’re talking about the most famous cyborg sorcerer laser-swordsman
in the galaxy: Darth Vader.
Perhaps no villain in the history of cinema has been more iconic, or more important to a franchise.
Is it the seductive voice of James Earl Jones?
"I am your father."
His badass sci-fi samurai armor?
His propensity for force choking haters?
Or is it something else?
Perhaps Anakin Skywalker’s descent to the dark side resonates so powerfully because
it represents something we all face - an all-consuming fear of death.
"I will even learn to stop people from dying."
Through Vader, Star Wars explores two different philosophical responses to death.
By exploring these competing ideologies, we can better understand how this whiny lil’ shit
"I'm a person and my name is Anakin."
came to be the Dark Lord of the Sith.
Welcome to the Wisecrack Edition on the philosophy of Darth Vader.
What will ultimately turn Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader is fear—
"Fear of loss is a path to the dark side."
specifically, the fear of death.
In his 1973 book The Denial of Death, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker argued that almost
everything we do is a way of managing the fear of our own demise and the demise of those around us.
This anxiety, known as death denial, is especially present in Darth Vader, and is rooted as far
back as his childhood.
When we first meet Anakin Skywalker, he’s an implausibly wise and articulate nine-year-old
boy genius with superhuman piloting skillz.
He’s the product of a virgin birth,
"Who is his father?"
"There was no father."
he’s smarter than any of the adults around him,
and there’s a prophecy that suggests he might just be the messiah.
"The prophecy of the one who will bring balance to the force. You believe it's this boy?"
Oh, by the way, Force aptitude is now measured in midichlorians just so we can establish,
from the very beginning, that Anakin is objectively more powerful than anybody else.
"His cells have the highest concentration of midichlorians I have seen in a lifeform."
But even young Jedi Jesus isn’t immune to being scared shitless of death.
"I care for you too, only I..."
"Miss your mother."
Anakin’s distress over his mother’s mortality will haunt him.
And as he gets older, this fear will become a fixation.
"I don't sleep well anymore."
"Because of your mother?"
"I don't know why I keep dreaming about her."
Yoda figures out this fear is going to be a problem pretty early on.
"Your thoughts dwell on your mother."
"Afraid to lose her I think."
This could actually explain why the Jedi are so hesitant to train Anakin on account of his age.
"The boy will not pass the counsel's test, master. He's too old."
Although it’s never explained in canon why only young children are trained,
"He's too old."
the dialogue suggests that Yoda and Mace Windu are concerned about death denial and its ramifications for
young Anakin.
See, when kids are youngest, it’s easier to indoctrinate them to not fear death.
Children, according to psychologist James A. Graham, begin to understand death as permanent
between the ages of 5-9, but only as something that happens to lame old people - say, your
mother Shmi.
It’s only later, around the age of 10, that kids realize the permanence of death comes
for us all.
Anakin is 9 - able to understand his mother’s mortality, and likely on the cusp of understanding
his own.
The Jedi council ultimately allows Obi-Wan to train Anakin anyway, but it comes at a
terrible cost.
If Jedi aren’t trained beyond a certain age because of their fear of death, there
may be good reason.
According to Becker, human violence is a natural response to death denial.
As he writes: “only scapegoats can relieve one of his own stark death fear.”
Doling out death gives people a sense of control over it, whether that happens on the battlefield
or as regular ol’ homicide.
For Anakin, that means a one-way ticket to the Dark Side.
Although it never made the final cut, the original script for Episode 1 has Anakin saying
something to Padme that sums up his entire arc: “Fear attracts the fearful.
He was trying to overcome his fear by squashing you.
Be less afraid.”
PADME: “And that works for you.”
ANAKIN: “To a point.”
The script foreshadows that Anakin, fearful of losing his loved ones, will try to overcome
this anxiety by attempting to “squash” death, to gain a sense of control over it,
rather than actually being less afraid.
When Anakin finds that his mother has been mortally wounded by Tusken Raiders, he slaughters
the entire village.
"I killed them. I killed them all. They're dead."
This kind of revenge makes sense according to Becker, who argues that killing other people
gives us the illusion that we can control death, assuaging the fear that the Jedi Council
warned him about.
The more Anakin kills, the more death feels like something he owns.
After Anakin’s mother dies, he starts having anxiety dreams again—this time that Padmé
will die from childbirth.
He’s ready to blame himself for both deaths; his mother died after he left her, and he
believes his wife will die because he knocked her up.
"You die in childbirth."
It’s at this point that Anakin is given a choice on how to deal with death - the Sith
way or the Jedi way.
Anakin goes to Yoda with his concerns.
"What must I do, master Yoda."
"Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose."
Yoda’s answer comes straight out of Buddhism—not surprising, considering that its said Lucas specifically
based Yoda on this Tibetan Buddhist lama.
According to the Buddhist text “The Pali canon” , jaramarana—the desire to escape
old age and death—is a dangerously seductive human impulse.
Nonattachment - or letting go of your desires - is the only way to defeat it.
And Yoda practices what he preaches: when he meets his own death in Return of the Jedi,
he is so chill about it.
"Soon, will I rest. Yes, forever sleep. Earned it I have."
Becker would call Yoda a “knight of faith,” a term he borrowed from the Danish existentialist
Soren Kierkegaard.
According to Becker, having real, authentic faith in something more powerful than death
is a great way to manage our terror.
For Kierkegaard, this meant faith in God.
For Yoda, his nonattachment to jaramarana is grounded in his faith in the light side
of the Force.
"Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the force."
Either way, it’s not something you can choose.
This kind of faith is, in Becker’s word, “a matter of grace and not of human effort.”
Anakin doesn’t have Yoda’s faith, so he goes to Palpatine for an answer.
The Sith approach is to embrace your desires
"The Sith rely on their passion their for strength."
-- in this case the desire to prevent Padme’s death-aka: death denial.
"You could actually... save people from death."
In telling him an old Sith legend about Darth Plagueis the Wise, Palpatine lets it slip
that the dark side of the force may enable you to defeat death.
"Ironic. He could save others from death, but not himself."
"Is it possible to learn this power?"
"Not from a jedi."
Anakin takes sides and becomes a Sith Lord—on one condition.
"Just help me save Padme's life, I cannot live without her."
Anakin sacrifices his name, his loyalty to the Jedi, and even his conscience to learn
how to protect Padmé from death.
In refusing to accept death, Anakin is set down a dark path: he kills children, his wife,
and even tries to kill his mentor.
He has completely sacrificed his personality and values and has become little more than a zombie
trapped in a machine.
This is the terminal point of death denial, according to Becker.
He writes: “the person seeks to avoid death, but he does it by killing off so much of himself
and so large a spectrum of his action-world that he is actually isolating and diminishing
himself and becomes as though dead.”
Left with nobody to protect from death, Darth Vader has become an instrument of power and
little else.
With this in mind, we can finally understand what the hell Obi-Wan was doing in Episode IV.
If The prequels were the story of how the Jedi Order lost Anakin to Palpatine because
of his death denial, then it could be argued that Kenobi’s death was the Order’s
way of confronting Anakin’s ill-fated choice.
Look back at their lightsaber duel on the Death Star.
It’s doesn’t look like Kenobi was actually trying to kill Vader.
They spar for a few minutes, and then he basically offers himself up as a sacrifice.
But not before saying something cryptic.
"If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."
Vader swings the lightsaber, and then Kenobi is just sort of raptured.
We could just say the first movie had a lower special effects budget, but Vader seems confused
by what just happened, too.
Kenobi showed off the fact that he had another solution, that made him, well, more powerful
than Vader could ever imagine.
Seeing that Kenobi was willing to embrace death offered an alternative to Vader’s
death denial.
Meanwhile, the Sith still hadn’t figured out immortality.
At the end of Revenge of the Sith, we find out exactly how Kenobi learned to cheat death.
"An old friend has learned the path to immortality. One who has returned from the netherworld of the force. Your old master."
"Qui-Gon."
"How to commune with him, I will teach you."
This doesn’t quite mean conquering death in the traditional sense, because Kenobi and
Yoda are still technically dead.
It’s more transcending death.
They can interact with living Jedi by taking the form of blue glowing Force ghost entities.
Even Anakin gets to join the squad, after he redeems himself.
We can also see this discrepancy between death denial and death acceptance in how Anakin
and Luke confront death.
Anakin’s most telling confrontations with death was when he indiscriminately killed
the Tusken Raider’s to avenge his mother.
Ultimately Anakin even killed Padmé in his rage.
Or she just died from bad writing.
It isn’t really clear which.
"She's dying."
"We don't know why, she has lost the will to live."
Meanwhile, Luke is willing to give up his own life to avoid turning in the thing he hates.
"You're wrong. Soon I'll be dead. And you with me."
When asked to kill Vader by Darth Sidious, he refuses.
This willingness to accept death is what truly separates a Jedi from a Sith.
It is only when Anakin takes a cue from his son and learns to renounce his own life that
he embraces the reality of death and conquers jaramarana.
"But you'll die."
"Nothing can stop that now."
The story of Anakin Skywalker is one that all of us have to live through.
Jaramarana can rot out our personalities, strip us of our values, and drive us to do
terrible things.
According to Becker, denial of death is responsible for our drive to inflict violence on each
other, to conquer, and to control our surroundings.
Evil Empires, in the real world and in the world of Star Wars, owe their existence to
our inability to accept mortality.
But no matter how much of ourselves we’ve invested in our denial, accepting the reality
of death can give us dignity, build our courage, and expand our compassion.
It’s never too late for Darth Vader, and it’s never too late for us.
As long as you’re still breathing, you can come to terms with the reality of death—or
deny it, and risk giving into the Dark Side.