Like My Father Before Me
On identity, Skywalkers, and the fathers we never had
It is human nature to fixate on what we don't have.
Bald men jealously eye those blessed with luscious follicles. People stuck at home vicariously ride shotgun on their Facebook friend’s vacations. The lonely attach irrational hope to weddings, funerals, and trips to the grocery store.
Like a missing tooth, we can’t help but notice the absence. We fixate on it, blowing it out of all proportion until it swells like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon. It becomes a crucial part of our identity.
Sometimes the grip loosens with time and perspective. But some hang-ups can’t be so easily severed. Some have hooks buried deep under the skin, and the scarred flesh is too tough to cut. And even if you could, the barbs are wrapped around your very soul.
I’ve come to realize that Star Wars’ themes of redemption and hope all draw from the same fount — sons trying to fill the father-shaped hole inside their heart.
I know, because I have the same torn through mine.
Star Wars begins as a simple enough story – orphaned farm boy learns his father was a special kind of warrior-monk and resolves to follow in his footsteps.
Luke: I want to learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi like my father.
Everything that comes after – rescuing princesses and space battles and even destroying the Death Star – is Luke attempting to discover his father through shared experiences. It’d be a thin kind of knowing, the faintest sliver of perspective, but as a moisture farmer Luke is used to subsiding on meager succor. And when his father is revealed to be none other than the villainous Darth Vader, Luke’s discouragement lasts about as long as it takes him to get a new cybernetic hand.
Despite a lifetime of being told the contrary, his father is alive, and that overrides everything else. Luke’s love transcends all logic, as does his steady assurance that Anakin can yet be redeemed.
A son will go to great lengths to excuse a father’s bad behavior.
Unlike Luke, I’ve always had a father, though I wouldn’t say I’ve ever really known him. He worked long hours in an automotive factory, and when he had time off he spent it playing beer league softball or fixing up the house or hanging out with his friends. I was present for a lot of it — when we were lucky enough to be with him, it was always on his terms. I was happy to be there though, and stupidly grateful to be included.
My parents divorced when I was 7 or 8. It was not an amicable separation. He blamed her, but since she was forever out of reach, my brother and I bore the brunt. Mostly though, he lived his life and expected us not to impinge on his with ours.
It is not easy growing up thinking you aren’t wanted so much as tolerated.
There was no love in him, only indifference. He simply didn’t care, or couldn’t care, or didn’t know how to show it. Things might’ve been different once, but if there is no memory, did it ever happen?
In my late twenties, I tried to discover some idea of my father from before — before my mother, the divorce, even me. We were estranged by this point, but some part of me still couldn’t quit him.
In search for answers, I turned to the music of his youth, what is now considered Classic Rock — Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, etc. They were the faintest sort of clues, but like Luke, I readily took what was offered. I listened and imagined him years ago doing the same. Did he respond to the same riffs that moved me?
Classic Rock is my favorite genre now. I honestly can’t say if it’s because I like it, or because he did.
Being as Anakin Skywalker has no father, it would seem he should be exempt from this analysis, save for two crucial facts:
- Anakin spends the prequels trying to fill this void.
- Each of these surrogates directly precipitate his fall to the Dark Side.
Qui-Gon manipulates events to free Anakin from slavery and takes it upon himself to train the boy — regardless of the Jedi Council’s stance — in an effort to fulfill an ancient Jedi prophecy. Qui-Gon starts him on the path.
Obi-Wan initially wants no part of Anakin and trains him only because he promised a dying Qui-Gon he would. It’s not a stretch to imagine some of these feelings would bleed into his interactions with Anakin. Obi-Wan is a hard master to please, largely because its not a job he wanted in the first place.
Palpatine is outwardly the nicest of the three, always interested in Anakin’s feelings. Of course, he’s just manipulating Anakin to get what he wants. Palpaltine’s concern begins and ends with his plot to destroy the Jedi, and in that, Anakin is just a tool.
Anakin is impressionable and trusting, and allows himself to be directed according to what they want. And his life is ruined for it.
When I was nearing the end of High School, my father pushed me to enter the military. On the surface, his reasoning was it would be a good way to get college paid for. But under that was the very real accusation that I needed the discipline the military would impart.
I wasn’t a bad kid — he had just never understood me. I was a sensitive introvert, and he an extrovert largely without emotions. I was a dreamer, a Gen X slacker, and he misinterpreted my lack of interest as a dearth of motivation. Self-doubt and the want to please him made for a potent cocktail. I visited recruiters for the Marines and the Air Force and filled out some paperwork.
If he had his way, the military would’ve drilled out of me all the dreams and ground up my tear ducts.
Fortunately, I came to my senses. Went to college. Got married five years younger than he’d deemed appropriate, to a woman he’d never approved of. Had kids and a successful career. Starting writing. It’s been a blessed life.
But the best thing I ever did was cut him out of it.
The deterioration of his relationship with Han is at the heart of Ben Solo’s turn to the Dark Side.
Kylo Ren: And Han Solo. You feel like he’s the father you never had. He would’ve disappointed you.
Sons are hard-wired to emulate their fathers. How much more if your father is Han Solo? But men like Han don’t settle down to raise kids. The very thing that makes them what they are is the same thing that pushes us away.
When repeatedly scorned, adulation becomes ambivalence. At best.
Han does the single worst thing a father can ever do to his children — he walked away. I am convinced that, more than anything else, is what started Ben on the path to the Dark Side.
Like Anakin before him, Ben eventually finds acceptance in the arms of a dark other, someone who appreciates him for who he is (while encouraging and nurturing Ben’s darker impulses). Killing Han is as much about impressing Snoke as it is freeing Ben.
Kylo Ren: I’m being torn apart. I want to be free of this pain. I know what I have to do but I don’t know if I have the strength to do it.
There is nothing so painful as feeling you aren’t wanted.
My mother moved us four hours away from our father when I was in High School, to a one-light town in northern Michigan. A city boy my whole life, I hated it. It was the opposite of everything I’d ever known. The only thing I didn’t miss was seeing my father.
I’d grown tired of how I felt around him. He (and his wife) deployed weapons-grade contempt that was a black hole for joy and self-worth. He half-heartedly masked his criticism behind a screen of biting jokes, the kind in which both people smile but neither mean it. She didn’t even bother joking.
After a lifetime of feeling like I wasn’t up to his standards, I finally had enough. I ended our relationship. If you can call what we had a relationship: meeting for Christmas and a round of golf, seemingly merry occasions where the depths of my dread beforehand was only exceeded by my relief after.
I felt no joy in ending things. Mostly I felt guilty, like I’d done something wrong. Like it was my fault.
It’s been over fourteen years now. I still see him at about the same frequency, at my niece’s birthday parties. We say hi, and good-bye, and that’s about it.
I no longer feel dread about seeing him, though the relief when he leaves is still with me. Mostly I feel numb. At least, that’s what I tell myself.
It sneaks up on me, especially during movies in which father-son dynamics play a major part. Field of Dreams absolutely destroys me.
Aunt Beru: Luke’s just not a farmer, Owen. He has too much of his father in him.
The tears are not from my father. Those are a gift from my mother. And I’m so glad for them.
The song Cat’s in the Cradle is about a son who grows up pining for his father’s affection and never getting it. In a neat lyrical twist too perfect to be real, the son, now fully grown, rejects the father.
It is a modern parable, a cautionary tale about the passage of time and the importance of paying attention to your children while they are still children. It was always something of a personal anthem, a promise of retribution. I perversely looked forward to the day when I could reject his call.
But the song is a lie.
He’s never called.
At its heart, Star Wars is about sons and the fathers they never had, and learning to get by without them. Just like I’ve had to.