Michael: So I'd like to return to the issue of freedom of choice to ask a question purely
about the plot of the first six movies. You write, "The two trilogies are about freedom
of choice under nearly identical conditions." That had never occurred to me before. Can
you explain what you mean by this? Cass: What the trilogies do that's ingenious, it's really
brilliant, is that in the third released movie, Return of the Jedi, Luke faces a series of
choices, many of the most difficult ones put to him by the Emperor or Darth Vader whether
to go to the dark side. Those choices are put to him under circumstances in which he
can save himself in some literal sense from getting killed, but also embark on a life
of authority and power, and he says at the key moments, "No, I'm not going to do that."
You can see in Return of the Jedi that Luke comes very close to going to the dark side
in his fight with his dad. He comes not just close. He goes there. You can see it in the
movies and the novel. It's unambiguous that the dark side is with him. He goes there,
but at the last moment he retreats and says, "You've failed, your highness. I am a Jedi,
like my father before me," which I think has a claim in the context to being one of the
most moving lines in the history of motion pictures. Even though it's in Star Wars movies.
Michael: It's how you close the book. Cass: Yeah. It's an overwhelming line, I think,
given the entirety of the saga. Anakin, in the second trilogy, the prequels, is in exactly
the same position as Luke with the same interlocutor, Palpatine. That makes it really interesting
to think temporally that that suggests that in Return of the Jedi Palpatine is knowingly
replicating exactly what he did with Anakin. So when he says, "Everything is unfolding
as I have foreseen," he has had an experience that was the same, and Anakin, faced with
the choice, goes to the dark side basically in order to save his beloved, who Palpatine
says, "To cheat death is a power only one has achieved,
but if we work together I know we can discover the secret."
Cass: And that form of attachment
that Anakin has is what leads him to the dark side. Yoda says, "Miss them, do not.
Attachment leads to jealousy, the shadow of greed that is."
Cass: And he had that experience. That was the experience of Anakin.
So it's all mirroring itself. Luke almost goes to the dark side because of attachment
to his sister, who his father threatens. Then he goes dark just like Anakin
Vader: If you will not turn to the dark side, then perhaps she will.
Luke: No!
Cass: But in the end Anakin ends up replicating his own experience
of attachment. That is, he can't bear to see
his beloved die. In this case his beloved is his son. So he saves his soul that way.
It's really complicated stuff, yes, where the dark side is both the place you go because
of intense attachment, and it's in the end the source of salvation, which makes, I think,
the movies have a big Christian theme, but the mirroring of one to the other is extremely
precise. They're almost physically the same, the location of the Emperor and Anakin in
the prequels, the location of the Emperor and Luke in the original trilogy. Michael:
So why do you think Luke was able to surmount that temptation, but Anakin wasn't? Cass:
Anakin's a pretty damaged guy. So he was a slave. He had no father. Maybe that's the
simplest answer. He had no father at all. No male figure. He had a childhood that was
truncated by...He's off with these guys who think he's the chosen one. He adores his mother
and he's severed from her, and then his mother is killed. So he's lost or abandoned or taken
or threatened at all these key moments. Luke has a good nuclear family of a loving aunt
and uncle who raise him, it looks like, in the best possible way. So by the time we see
him at the age of 18 or 19 or 20 he's kind of regular. He's ambitious. He looks up at
the sky with longing, but there's nothing that's kind of taken something out of his
heart.