You Must Kill Vader
In the third episodes of both the prequel trilogy and the original trilogy, a Jedi master urges a younger Jedi to set aside his love for Anakin Skywalker and kill Darth Vader.
In Revenge of the Sith, Yoda tells Obi-Wan Kenobi that he must kill Anakin, who has fallen to the dark side. Obi-Wan protests, using familial language to describe his attachment to Anakin: “He is like my brother. I cannot do it.” However, Yoda argues that Anakin no longer exists, having been eclipsed by the persona of Darth Vader: “Twisted by the dark side, young Skywalker has become. The boy you trained, gone he is, consumed by Darth Vader.”
In Return of the Jedi, Obi-Wan tells Luke Skywalker that he must kill Vader, and argues with the same logic that Yoda once used: “Your father was seduced by the dark side of the Force. He ceased to be Anakin Skywalker and became Darth Vader. When that happened, the good man who was your father was destroyed.” However, Luke objects, as Obi-Wan once did, by appealing to his familial attachment to Anakin: “I can’t kill my own father.”
Yoda and Obi-Wan both paint a black-and-white picture in which Anakin Skywalker is gone and Darth Vader has taken his place. Instead of a "good man," to whom Obi-Wan and Luke were tied by bonds of fraternal and filial love, he is a less-than-human enemy: "He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil." Luke, however, resists the binary thinking of his teachers and insists on the more complex reality that Anakin still exists behind the mask of Vader. Because he holds both sides of his father's identity in tension at once rather than concluding one must eclipse the other, and pursues Anakin with love rather than concluding he is irredeemable, Luke is ultimately proven right in his belief that "there is still good in him."
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Characters: Anakin Skywalker / Darth Vader / Luke Skywalker / Obi-Wan Kenobi / Yoda
Films: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith / Episode VI: Return of the Jedi
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Concepts: attachment / duality / family / fathers / good and evil / love / teachers and students
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