Mirroring and Symbolism

The philosophic intelligence and all-round thematic grounding of Star Wars never cease to amaze me. It's a phenomenal work of edutainment: teaching people -- young minds in particular -- an impressive degree of visual literacy, introducing them to aesthetics and symbolism, and inculcating a cardinal set of life values and ways of seeing the world. And beyond all that, it's some bloody great escapism. Seismic charges! PWWWWWAAANG!


I love how you assert that with such crystal clarity and unselfconscious openness. More beautiful than the originals? Yes -- I'll have me some of that! The fact that Lucas put these movies together undaunted, and got to say what he wanted with very little compromise or outside interference, is quite remarkable and worth celebrating. It repeatedly makes these films so satisfying to watch and parse through in our own ways. The prequel well never runs dry.


Obscure is good.  Don't forget the full name of the basic cinematic capture device; or the full name of its ancestor: 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_obscura

This is also an interesting little read:

aphelis.net/camera-obscura-ideology-guy-debords-spectacle/

But yes -- more neat parallels! Loving all the Anakin-Threepio stuff. Loving it all. 

Thanks, Cryo. I'm always impressed by your ability to see connections in everything. 

smittysgelato

I haven't seen TRoS and I planned not to, but this really makes me want to watch it just for that moment. Seems like such a bizarre yet cool idea, and there weren't that many in the other sequel films, in my opinion.

Of course, C-3PO also had a replaced arm in TFA.




The parallels just keep coming. 

I thought this was a cool dialogue link.

"This path has been placed before you, the choice is yours alone."



"You're going down a path I can't follow."

I've been sitting on this observation for a while now and this is the perfect spot to finally share it.

At the end of ROTS's staggeringly beautiful but tragic rumination sequence between Anakin and Padme in the Jedi Temple and Padme's apartment, respectively, Anakin makes his fateful choice to ally with the newly revealed Sith Lord Palpatine and exits the frame - or frame-right, to be exact. In the following shot, Threepio enters from frame-right and bows to Padme. In light of the elaborated upon link between Anakin and Threepio in this thread, this pair of shots suggests that Anakin, in deciding to interfere in Mace's seizure and potentially save Padme's life, has seemingly transformed into or re-entered the cinematic space, albeit briefly, as a subservient (again, Threepio bows) machine-man before Padme, the principal catalyst for Anakin's ultimate metamorphosis from man to machine. It's a nice touch.

Somny

I think your observation may also explain why 3P0 claims to feel helpless as Anakin flies off to Mustafar. Anakin is trying very hard to be in control, but in the end is helpless, unable to save Padme.

"It is the name of your true self. You have only forgotten."

Padmé still calls him Anakin just prior to this. This is when he is fully transformed into Vader. 

"What? I couldn't have. She was alive, I felt it. NOOOOO!"



"What? Oh, no."

True, perhaps. Since the model for Artoo and Threepio (and their "lowly" characters being the ones the story is told through) was the bumbling peasants in "The Hidden Fortress", it feels inherently incongruous to compare either of them to the cold, glowering, deep-voiced wraith of Darth Vader. Their personalities could scarcely be any different; and on the moral axis, they are about as equally estranged. But that's also the genius of it: the genius of Lucas, the genius of Star Wars. His creation has always had these extremely contrasting, playful overtones -- and to heck with anyone that denies it!

Jar Jar is more or less a synecdoche for that idea, in fact. Indeed, Jar Jar is rather explicitly equated with Threepio in some ways. When Jar Jar is helping to get Anakin's podracer in racing condition, for example, Artoo and Threepio chat between themselves, and it's Threepio who remarks, showing his propensity for dishing judgements against alien lifeforms (like the Jawas in ANH: "Disgusting creatures"), "You know, I find that Jar Jar creature to be a little... odd." Artoo then apparently backs him up, echoing his consciousness, and Threepio doubles down, "You're quite right. He's very odd, indeed."

It's quite amusing that Threepio, of all people, is the one quietly commenting on Jar Jar's awkwardness, given who the "Jar Jar" of the OT actually is! That's another thing. I just referred to Threepio as a person. But Lucas has said several times that droids aren't really people; more like toasters. I've always found that comment "a little... odd" myself. But in formulating this response, I just realised it could be a bash of Darth Vader. Lucas has bluntly said that when he turns into Darth Vader, Anakin essentially loses his humanity. In other words, he is a shell of a person; a flicker of what he could have been. And therefore, in a way, he is barely a person anymore at all. Thus, paradoxically, the droids are imbued with vivid personalities in a kind of mocking contrast to Anakin. One can also read into the droids a similar critique of the PT Jedi -- they, after all, largely "make" Anakin into the awkward lump of clay that Palpatine then distorts/molds into Vader for his own purposes.


Well, to sum up the Anakin-Threepio connection here:

Threepio is very clearly an analogue for Anakin in various ways, from starting off “naked” and half-blind, to getting covers and becoming a bit more competent and sure of himself; even poignantly on the verge of conquering his fear of spaceflight. Only to “fall from the sky”, in a manner of speaking, and lose his wings in the Original Trilogy, gradually proving himself once more, until he is revered as a god by the Ewoks in the final chapter -- much as Anakin falls and is remade as Darth Vader, ultimately assisted in his ascension by his son, Luke, and becoming one with the Force at the end of the final installment.

Artoo, on the other hand, is clearly the keeper of the flame -- the flame of Padme. He's the one that starts off on the queen's ship in Episode I, while Threepio is made by Anakin (one is in the service of royalty, the other is a work-in-progress peasant boy's creation -- but their designs and personalities are conspicuously "inside out"). They meet up in Episode I, but are then separated once the heroes leave Tatooine (for Episode I is, in many ways, a preview of what is to come) -- much as Anakin and Padme are separated (if misleadingly "joined in symbolic matrimony" at the celebration on Naboo) after the events of that introductory movie.

In Episode II, something interesting happens: Artoo and Threepio meet up again, much like Anakin and Padme, and now start to emerge as the classic bickering duo of the OT (but only once Anakin and Padme head into the skies, working as a team, for Geonosis). They even "swap" places: in Episode III, Artoo is now essentially Anakin's droid, while Threepio stays with Padme. Further, Artoo is more of an action hero than ever, zapping and setting on fire any droids that dare take him on, while Threepio seems to have found his place in the opulent surroundings of Coruscant and the Coruscanti. But then tragedy hits and the whole thing falls apart, and a great big "reset" happens at the end of the movie -- yet all is not lost: Artoo effectively remembers everything (and maybe, deep down, Threepio does, too).

Of course, it's symbolically apt that Artoo plays the message of Anakin and Padme's daughter, who is following in her mother's footsteps, to Obi-Wan, to bring him and Luke into the wider galactic situation (and Obi-Wan is going by the name "Old Ben", of course, and denies all knowledge of Artoo until Artoo plays the message and then his demeanour dramatically changes). 

All of these story choices are obviously quite deliberate by Lucas -- regardless of what he may have come up with or tweaked along the way. He legitimately wanted the droids to play a part in all six movies; and maybe go through the fuller nine. And they are clearly offering indirect commentary on the proceedings as they go. Anakin assembling Threepio in Episode I and switching him on (to show Padme) should have been the big knock-down clue to what Lucas was up to. Unfortunately, all most people could do was complain that he had "shrunk" the SW universe with too many implausible connections (showing an ignorance of mythological storytelling and the general motifs of this form of social/metaphysical commentary).

Lucas himself placed some of the blame not on the final realisation of Threepio under Anthony Daniels (who did, yes, steal the show -- you couldn't have asked for a better choice), but rather on Darth Vader and the "icon of evil" he turned into. I don't mean Lucas specifically commented on people not "getting" the PT with this quote; but I certainly find his framing of the problem useful. Indeed, Vader's iconicity didn't just overshadow this connection between boy and droid, but also seems to have played a role in people struggling to accept Anakin's circumstances and personality in the PT. Of course, this mismatch was also exploited by Lucas (remember the Episode I teaser poster?) -- again, he was trying to indicate: "The prequels will be different to what you experienced before." Or in the words of Yoda: "You must unlearn what you have learned."

I think a bigger issue here is that people tend to deny interconnectivity much more than they're willing to look for or accept the inexorability of it. They're rather like Boss Nass shunning the notion that the Gungans and the Naboo form a "symbiont circle"; and that what happens to one of them "will affect the other". We see that playing out right now in our contemporary politics and in the attitude and conduct of many on social media. "Social media". Those words seem very ironic. We often hear that human beings are "social animals", but we spend a lot of time ridiculing societal notions and tearing each other down. Indeed, the root word means "comrade" or "companion". The word "media" has the root meaning of "middle" or "central". But there's nothing particularly centered or moderate, let alone comradery, about the way we hector and dismiss one another; almost now as a matter of daily routine.

This sickness seeped into prequel discussions early on -- indeed, before there even was any "social media" (excluding message boards) as we now understand the term. If, as a prequel fan, you earnestly tried to argue for some connection, or some deeper meaning to something, you'd often be greeted with a lazy disavowal like, "Nah, bro, that link can't mean anything". Or worse: "You're an idiot. These movies are for babies. You can read this deep meaning into the ingredients on a soup can." There's a hostility to the idea that things go together or echo one another. I don't know if materialism is to blame for this malady or what (science, at the least, does recognise connections between things, and is finding new connections all the time, on all scales of nature). I just think the prequels uniquely fell victim to it. But actually, virtually all items of popular culture are victims. Most, however, are quiet victims -- the prequels, by contrast, glow white-hot with all the disdain people have projected onto them, yet they give such a warm glow for people who understand. In other words, the more opprobrium they receive, the better they answer that opprobrium: they absorb it, reflect it, metabolise it, re-emit it... but as useful light... providing plenty of illumination and guiding its fans to ever greater depths of discovery.

Ultimately, prequel bashing is -- dare I say it? -- a failure of the imagination; as, perhaps, is all pain and suffering in the universe.



Guy Davenport tells us the "Good News": "These boundaries can be crossed". And we don't just call him Brer Rabbit. We also call him Jar Jar Binks. 

They exchange droids the way most couples exchange rings? Cool!