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The tragic downfall of Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) into Darth Vader (Daniel Prowse, voiced by James Earl Jones) is primarily an emotional one. Because he is too closely attached to Padmé (Natalie Portman), literally the girl of his dreams, his sworn commitment to the Jedi Order begins to fade, which leads to him being denied specific knowledge of the Force and him being not completely trusted by the Jedi Council. This sense of isolation causes him to bond with Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) — who’s been manipulating Anakin for some time — and eventually paves the way for his betrayal of the Jedi. All of this is deeply emotional in nature: Darth Vader is the literal embodiment of a man caged in his suffering (notice the use of the word “suffering” here: it directly derives from Yoda’s (Frank Oz) famous quote in The Phantom Menace (1999, George Lucas)), and there have been books and video games — unfortunately retconned when the franchise was bought by Disney — that explored the intrinsically hateful relationship between Vader and Palpatine: look, for example, for James Luceno’s Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader book (2005) or the video game series The Force Unleashed (2008, LucasArts; sequel in 2010).
Signs of this deeply emotional way in which the character of Anakin is constructed are best visible in the second film episode, Attack of the Clones (2002, George Lucas), which firmly establishes the romantic bond between him and Padmé and where his transformation into Vader slowly begins. For this prequel trilogy centered post, I thought it would be cool to do a case study around Attack of the Clones, and look at how this romantic love relationship is built up. As we’ll see, this relationship is very layered and has way more meaning than initially meets the eye, as we’ll draw specific parallels to examples from ancient literature that must have inspired George Lucas when he wrote the dialogues. Let’s go!
After yesterday‘s post and the post the day before that, it shouldn’t be surprising anymore that Lucas used specific examples from age-old literature as an inspiration for his love scenes in Attack of the Clones. I’m talking specifically about Ancient Greek and Roman love poetry, which was a veritable genre in its own right and made it into literature history through the works of such authors as the Greeks Sappho (one of the few female poets of antiquity) and Alcaeus, or the Romans Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and others. Elements of antiquity are, in fact, very often present in the prequel trilogy, as they show the transformation of a Republic into an Empire (i.e. exactly what happened to Rome in the first century BC), contain gladiator fights, and a pod race sequence that is completely modelled after the chariot race in William Wyler’s 1955 Ben-Hur. (If you don’t believe me about that last one, have a look at this video.) In the first post of this #StarWarsWeek, I already talked about how Lucas essentially wanted to tell a mythological story. To do so, searching for inspiration in classical antiquity is of course one of the best things you can do.
The scene that is the most important here is one of the so-called Lake Retreat scenes. Anakin and Padmé have been sent to Naboo, to protect the Senator from assassination attempts. Anakin, who’s been interested in Padmé ever since he first saw her and asked if she was an angel from the moons of Iego, slowly acknowledges his feelings for her. They kiss, and some time later they sit on a couch near a fireplace. In the official script found on the Internet Movie Script Database, the scene goes like this (the underlined passages are parts of dialogue that didn’t make it into the final film, but still contain traces of the artist’s intention):
The eventual movie scene (available on YouTube here) makes some minor changes (it changes “a day hasn’t gone by” to “not a day has gone by”, “I’m close to you” to “I’m with you” and adds a “please” before the final “tell me”); the biggest change is obviously the omission of the two lines I underlined. Like I said, I think we can still use these lines in our analysis because they are still part of the path George Lucas wanted this scene to go, and we will therefore not leave these in fact crucial lines out of our case study. (Bonus: listen to John Williams’s fantastic Across The Stars love theme while reading this post for the full experience!)
What we find here is that Anakin’s emotional development and his love for Padmé pains him on two levels. It hurts him on a physical level (his stomach turns over, his mouth goes dry, he feels dizzy, can’t breathe and feels like he is scarred), and on a more mental, psychological one (his soul is tormented by her presence). For each of these two levels, Lucas seems to have used a different classical text. For the physical pain, it looks like he took inspiration from one poem by Sappho (poem 31 LP), and in terms of the psychological torment there is a striking resemblance to the famous 85th poem of Catullus (odi et amo). Let’s look at both individually, while using English translations of the texts.
Sappho’s poem goes like this (the translation is one by Anne Carson that I found here):
The poetess describes how a godlike man sits near her, and how his presence disrupts all of her bodily functions. She feels a fire burning underneath her skin, can’t breathe nor can she talk, she’s sweating and shaking all over. Somehow, she feels distant from the man, even though he’s sitting right in front of her. When we compare the ancient poem to the 2002 film script, the similarities are uncanny. In both situations, it involves one lover sitting close to the person she/he desires, despite being hurt by this proximity and feeling the physical consequences of it. To fully grasp the similarity in this theme of “proximity” between the two texts, we should bring the film scene into context with the one preceding it. In that scene, Padmé and Anakin share dinner and are sitting on the opposite ends of a long table. Padmé laughs at Anakin’s “aggressive negotiations” joke, and continues smiling when Anakin force grabs the pear she wants to eat and cuts it for her. The result is very similar to the way in which Sappho’s lover is “lovely laughing” while he’s listening to her.
Some of the physical consequences Anakin is experiencing are remarkably similar to Sappho’s, such as being unable to talk (“mouth goes dry” and “no speaking is left in me”) or not feeling a sense of grogginess or unsteadiness (“I feel dizzy” and “shaking grips me all”). Anakin doesn’t mention the fire underneath Sappho’s skin, but it is to be noted that the entire scene takes place next to a fireplace (it is, I think, the only Naboo scene where both characters interact that doesn’t take place during the day). This way, I believe it is clear that the physical level of these scenes directly derives from Sappho’s famous poem.
The psychological, more mental layer of the love dialogue can, like I said, be looked at in comparison with the following famous poem by the Roman poet Catullus that he wrote about his love called Lesbia (the translation is one minimally adapted from one by Leonard Smithers that I found here):
The similarity to the film script here mainly concerns the lines “You are in my very soul, tormenting me”. Both Anakin and Catullus feel the pain happening, and both are merely passive observers to a painful active process taking place inside of them. Anakin doesn’t go as far as saying he “hates” Padmé, but his feelings of love are considerably more painful than the cheery, joyful ones we might encounter in romantic comedies or in romantic pulp fiction. Both lovers use imagery of torture, and locate it somewhere in the confines of the human soul. Again, the similarities are striking.
Having this film romance be inspired by classical literature considerably ups its level of artistry, and makes that it becomes a unique way of portraying love in a Hollywood industry where every film “needs” to have a romantic subplot, no matter the film’s individual genre. Those typically Hollywood romantic intermissions often feel forced, and while they might bring in more audiences, they might also estrange others or bring others out of their immersive filmgoing experience. The downside of basing your inspired love plot on age-old texts, is that it might become alienating or feel unrealistic to contemporary 21th century audiences (as was, for example, a recurring critique of the prequel films). However, I do think that Lucas made these scenes available and enjoyable to us, and that they work in the overall feeling of the franchise.
With this post, I hope to have shown that the prequel films — which have always been thought of as inferior to the originals or, put more bluntly, as bad cinema (though there nowadays seems to be an evolution to a more positive evaluation of them, which will be the subject of tomorrow’s post) — are much more layered than we would think. I haven’t even spoken about the romantic motifs in Anakin’s inner “passion vs. reason” conflict, but since we’re already at 1.600 words I’ll have to cut it short here. I’ll get more in-depth tomorrow into my personal feelings towards the prequels, but I will say that I identify myself as a so-called prequel defender, and “hidden” meanings like the ones I talked about in this post are part of the reason why. Did this analysis somehow change your personal views about the films? Let me know in the comments below, or on Facebook!
Written by Alexander Vandewalle. For the featured image, click here. Click here for the Anakin and Padmé wedding picture, the picnic picture, the dinner picture and the morning meditation picture. Give us a like on Facebook and follow us on Instagram!
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