"Two tears in a bucket, muthafuck it!" Darth Vader

Woke up super early this morning and couldn't get back to sleep, so I ended up randomly putting in "Return of the Jedi," which I didn't properly appreciate when I was younger. I definitely didn't like Empire at all, with its bleak ending and its feeling of hopelessness. But while I was partial to Ewoks (brilliant marketing scheme), I remember thinking that Jedi was too easy -- we all knew that Darth would never kill Luke, believed in his power to save his father, so where was the twist?

Rewatching it now, I really appreciate both the complexities of this seemingly simple film and the deeply problematic racial undertones. I think that Return of the Jedi is an interrogation of both redemption AND race, and can not be read without the other. Now I'm just babbling here taking a break from doing real work, so all this shit is halfbaked, and take it at that. I'm sure others have and will explored it way more eloquently than I have.

But take of course the idea of the dark side of the force and the light side of the force. We all know whose side we want to be on right? Or do we really? First of all, who didn't think that Darth Vader looked fly as hell in his all black power outfit, complete with cape and gleaming helmet? You have to admit that in A New Hope, Obi Won looked kinda pathetic pitted against Darth.

The truth is Darth Vader is clearly the baddest MF in the universe! Who strikes fear into the hearts of everyone who meets him? He's clearly running stuff. And with the deep rumble of bad ass James Earl Jones as his voice, well, it just don't get no badder than that.

And that in itself is interesting. As a child, I knew that Darth Vader supposedly had to be white under that mask, cause he had two white kids. But we are clearly supposed to read him as a black menace, the voice, the outfit, the fear, the evil. He's gone to the dark side all right, negro to the core.

And then in Jedi, when Luke goes to meet him, he's rocking the all black outfit too, with one black leather glove. Now if that ain't a white boy tryna to prove how down he is to his black daddy, I don't know what it is.

Luke loves his daddy, even if he is the Iceberg Slim of the galaxy. (Shoot and Luke may have more siblings than he knows - I'm just saying Lando Calrissian does bear a certain family resemblance). It is this white man's love to a character that is associated only with blackness in every sense of the word and on every level, that allows for redemption to happen. Everyone else acts like there are two separate people: formerly white presumably well-behaved Anakin Skywalker (though when you see the new movies with his whining ass, you appreciate Darth Vader's menacing cool more) and the black heartless brutal buck of a Vader. Obi Won fronts like he didn't lie to Luke when he said Vader killed his father by saying, "When Anakin was seduced to the dark side, everything that was good about him ceased to exist. So what I told you was true, in a way." For him, even for Yoda, definitely for everyone in the Rebel Alliance, there can be no co-existence between goodness and blackness, no chance at redemption or rebirth. Luke is the only one who believes that there is a continuum, that race and redemption can overlap.

Now the kicker is, what form does that redemption take? Darth Vader, through the love of his white son, gets to be white again, one more time before he dies. When he takes off the mask of blackness, we see the whitest man underneath. And instead of James Earl Jones powerhouse tones, we hear a polished British accent. Luke insists that he needs to save Anakin (who gets to go back in our minds to being Anakin Skywalker again), and Anakin says, "You already have." Because we see the burning of the Darth Vader suit on a pyre, the murder of the blackness, and then when we see him as a blue ghost, he's really a white blue ghost, and gets to take his place with the pantheon.

Anyway this is just me trying to avoid actually doing the shit I'm supposed to be doing, but still I had to post up because it was tripping me out this morning. Every time I watch the Star Wars trilogies (again the original, I don't even have the time, energy or the heart to post up about the new ones), I find more to be intrigued by, disturbed by, more to question and inspire and despise. Shoot, at least I'm not bored!