Revenge of the Sith

What can we forgive?

“. . . Each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done… Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others. . . we all need mercy, we all need justice, and - perhaps - we all need some measure of unmerited grace.”

- From Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

Originally marketed as the final film in the Star Wars Saga, Revenge of the Sith is teeming with long-anticipated events. We see the birth of Vader, the volcanic showdown between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker, the birth of the twins, the fall of the Republic, it’s all there, as many of us had been hoping for an imagining for decades. It also tossed in a few expectation surpassing moments, like Yoda smashing up the Galactic Senate in a battle with The Emperor himself, but it’s essentially the tragic story as promised.

It’s also, for the most part, as dark as expected. There’s no way to avoid darkness in a story about the nine year old, found only two films ago, becoming the most dangerous villain in the universe, turning against his best friend and forbidden love, and smashing up the galaxy but good. The Order 66 sequence, a montage of betrayal, is as brutal as it is majestic, scored to the hilt with John Williams-in-mourning, a terrible promise to the audience fulfilled.

But there is one moment in Revenge of the Sith that is more than simply dark.

In Episode III, Anakin Skywalker doesn’t just betray Obi-Wan Kenobi.

He doesn’t just trade in his blue lightsaber for a red one, or change the color of his clothes. And eyes.

He doesn’t only (only?!) Force-choke his pregnant wife.

In Episode III, Anakin Skywalker kills children.

In that appalling moment, Anakin Skywalker goes from fallen to something starker and more challenging. He doesn’t just turn against other soldiers, switching sides in a war. He becomes the functional equivalent of a, well, school shooter.

I wrote a piece about the way identity and redemption are intertwined in Star Wars called “There’s Good in Him” in 2002, and so I recommend readers take that in as a companion to this piece. There, I look into the question of how Star Wars manages identity as a way to manage redemption. I assert that in Star Wars, the person committing harm is not our hero, but someone else. Ben Solo didn’t hurt Rey, Kylo Ren did. Anakin Skywalker didn’t destroy the Jedi Order, that was Darth Vader. That’s the way Star Wars allows us to watch our favorites do the unthinkable, and still root for their return.

Still, it can’t be denied that the experience of watching Revenge of the Sith doesn’t feel like Anakin Skywalker isn’t himself. It looks and plays as if Anakin, clouded by his visions, alienated from his friends, desperate for control, has lost himself in a fantasy of power and, in that fantasy, finds fanaticism. It makes the idea that there’s good in him harder to accept. And it separates Episode III from all the other films in the Saga. It’s the only film my friends hesitate to show their children.

And let’s face it: dramatically, Anakin killing ‘younglings’ wasn’t necessary for him to be seen as betraying the Order. If you entirely remove that action from the film, even if you remove his assaulting his wife, a conversion to evil was entirely possible. To misuse the words of the Passover Seder, if Anakin had merely chopped off Mace Windu’s arm, attacked the Jedi Temple and fought other adult Jedi; if he had merely told Padme he planned to overthrow the galaxy; and then nearly killed his former friend and father figure Obi-Wan in a duel? Dayenu. It would have been enough.

But George Lucas wanted to push the story beyond that point. With this brutal sequence of events, Lucas turns the primary question about Anakin Skywalker on its head. Star Wars is about many things. It’s about faith versus reason; it’s about what makes up a family; it’s about courage; it’s about self-knowledge. But the story of Anakin Skywalker is about redemption. And redemption, more often than not, requires forgiveness. In a story where Anakin commits acts of such horror, the question Lucas poses becomes “What can we forgive?”

I think where I start with this question is to remind myself that Star Wars is a fairy tale, a series of fables, not intended to be taken literally, any more than Aesop wanted us to believe a Tortoise raced a Hare. The characters are archetypes. We’re not meant to wrestle with the death of children as such, we’re meant to layer on a level of distance. ‘Anakin has gone too far, he can’t be reasoned with, and he’s done something he can’t come back from’ is the text’s intention. It’s an unmistakable symbol for ‘beyond the pale.’

But even if we do take this all literally, or give Anakin the distance of having transformed into another character, I think it’s worth confronting the question itself. For many of us, the idea of the forgiveness of sin, of absolution, is threaded into the core of our faith. I also think there’s the secular version, which I quote above by Bryan Stevenson: the belief that none of us is only the worst thing we have ever done, and that we all deserve grace and mercy, not just punishment.

Forgiveness and redemption are beautiful ideals, but are too rarely seen in the real world. Moreover, many of the same people in American society who self-identify as religious vote for the harshest version of justice our system can mete out: they object to welfare programs, food stamps, they support the death penalty and tough on crime laws. Their church says forgive, but their social posture is punitive.

Why is this? I think it’s just a simpler moral calculation: if you do bad stuff, you pay the price. If you want food, work for it. If you get convicted of a crime, go to jail. If you kill someone, an eye for an eye. It feels good to be on the right side of that equation too. A person without financial difficulties and who has never consciously committed a crime feels as if they can sit in easy judgment over those who struggle. There’s a pervasive belief that trouble comes to those who deserve it, that they somehow manifest their own bad fortune, and if those unfortunate were somehow more, I don’t know, faithful or hard working or blessed, everything would be okay.

That moral math is a myth, of course. It leaves out inconvenient truths. That good people who work hard struggle. That people get hooked on medication prescribed by doctors. That mental illness goes untreated. That seemingly unrelated behavior can turn normal people into dangerous ones. That access to firearms makes it easier for someone having an episode to cause more harm. That the death penalty in the US likely kills innocent people. That it’s not a deterrent. That crime is correlated to poverty. And that, as Bryan Stevenson says, the American system of justice treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent. Essentially, if you believe we’re living in a just society where the good thrive and the morally compromised fail, you’re not living in reality.

In an unjust world, forgiveness matters even more because it’s an acknowledgment of life’s nuance and complexity. For example, a friend of mine recently wrote the book for an opera about the Innocence Project called “Blind Injustice.” It tells the story of innocent folks who were put in prison for, sometimes, decades because of overzealous prosecution. I was moved to tears not by the innocence of those unjustly incarcerated, but at their grace. There’s a scene where we watch the person whose false testimony led to a man being incarcerated for decades…forgiven by that same man. We watch as they both lighten and are freed of their pain because of that forgiveness. They are both victims of a system: one encouraged, as a child, to lie; the other sentenced by that same lie.

In the far less real world of Star Wars, we see that Anakin Skywalker’s actions don’t exist in a vacuum. His turn to the Dark Side is portrayed as the product of his experience. We watch how this child, who “knows nothing of greed,” is taught fear and anger by his life experience, by the death of his mother and by the Jedi’s orthodoxy. He is forced to hide who he is and who he loves. And the series’ ultimate villain, Palpatine stokes his trauma and rage until he’s twisted beyond all recognition. Anakin has reasons for his transformation. He believes the Jedi have turned against him. He has recast himself as the victim. He believes his prophetic visions, which were correct about his mother, foresee Padme’s death unless he can find the power to intervene.

Even so, even so, he commits an act that I think we can all agree goes beyond any justification. A crime that causes Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda to agree that he must be, in no uncertain words, killed. In Revenge of the Sith, Anakin is hunted down, burned, trapped in a metal exoskeleton, and told his true love has died by his own hand. He cries out in pain at the end. He suffers for what he’s done. He is not forgiven. He’s punished.

But what does this punishment actually achieve? It doesn’t save the galaxy. It doesn’t stop the Emperor. It doesn’t save the Jedi Order. Anakin actually becomes a more complete version of Darth Vader. Punishing Anakin makes him, in the end, worse.

Luke Skywalker, though, forgives his father. It’s perhaps the most heroic act Luke performs. He acts in a way no other Jedi, none of his mentors, is willing to do. Luke goes to Vader with love and hope. Even when the greatest Jedi in the galaxy tell Luke he must confront and defeat Vader, Luke Skywalker refuses to kill his father. To their despair. Luke wants to bring Anakin back to the light, even when his Jedi mentors believe it’s impossible and say so.

Luke doesn’t do this because he’s come to some deep understanding of why Anakin committed terrible acts. Luke doesn’t explore the facts of the case and try to unearth the underlying reasons behind Anakin’s turn. He doesn’t tie his forgiveness to understanding. He doesn’t need to understand Anakin to forgive him. He senses that there is good in him. He believes it, more or less, despite all evidence to the contrary. And he asks us, as viewers, despite what we have seen, to forgive him too.

Maybe that’s the secret of radical forgiveness: that it’s not for the redemption of the forgiven, but for the betterment of oneself. When we forgive, we transcend. We release what we may want, vengeance or satisfaction, and receive peace in return.

In Star Wars, Anakin’s redemption gives him, perhaps, a moment of peace before he dies. Forgiving him doesn’t remove the harm he’s caused or bring back the children he's murdered. Nothing is the past is undone.

But what surrounds him is healed. The Empire falls. The Emperor defeated. Luke becomes the man he was meant to be. Freedom is celebrated across the galaxy. Luke’s forgiveness of his father, his faith in him, allows Anakin to return in a way that Obi-Wan’s punishment couldn’t. Even Obi-Wan’s apology in the Obi-Wan Kenobi series couldn’t save Anakin Skywalker. Only forgiveness has that power. He is redeemed by forgiveness that comes without an asterisk or qualification.

Perhaps forgiveness that powerful can only be given to a crime so unforgivable. By placing Anakin’s redemption seemingly out of reach, making his actions so revolting, Lucas requires more from the audience. He requires, in a way, faith in forgiveness that goes beyond reason. He require forgiveness that doesn’t match the crime; but instead exceeds it.

As I write all this, I imagine what kind of person I could be if I had Luke Skywalker’s level of forgiveness in Return of the Jedi. I don’t, at present. I’ve got my pettiness and my anger. I can think of people, public figures, historical figures, people I know, that I have trouble forgiving. That’s how it is with fantasies of heroism, isn’t it? The character of our heroes is aspirational, a little out of reach. It’s meant to be. When we reach beyond our grasp, we grow.

But we don’t only learn from our heroes; we learn from the fallen too. Because we all fail, we all fall short of our best selves, sometimes. We’re led astray, or our lives have made us angry or hostile, or we let ourselves down. It’s a comfort to see, in these allegorical tales, the idea that the worst in us can be healed, and our mistakes don’t have to entirely define us.

All it takes, in this galaxy, and in the galaxy far, far away, is some “unmerited grace.”