matril

I've sometimes seen the rescue sequence from the beginning of Return of the Jedi dismissed as unimportant, just killing time until the real story begins. I thoroughly disagree. Oh, sure, the musical sequence gets pretty silly and overlong in the special edition, but once you dig deeper beneath the superficialities, you realize that everything that happens in Jabba's palace is rife with symbolism, foreshadowing, fascinating character development, and story parallels which evidence a poetical symmetry. There's so much to examine, I can't even cover all of it in one post, so in this one I'm going to focus on Princess Leia's character arc. The second post will cover more of the overall symmetry it presents in relation to Episode III as well as the latter half of Episode VI.

I've mentioned quite a few times before that I love the subversion of Leia rescuing Han. It's a story straight out of a fairy tale - the damsel falls into an enchanted sleep, and the hero overcomes every obstacle to find her and wake her. And the damsel is Han and the hero is Leia. That's awesome enough on its own, right? But consider this. Leia's victory in reviving Han is a pointed parallel, both in comparison and contrast, to Anakin's quest and ultimate failure to save Padmé.

I started to realize the full import of this when I was drawing a picture of Boussh, Leia's bounty hunter alter-ego. I was kind of grumbling about how challenging it was to properly capture the details of her face-concealing helmet, much like when I was drawing a picture of Vader a few days earlier. And I thought - hey! Leia makes her first appearance in this film wearing a mask, which she removes with the words "Someone who loves you" as she identifies herself to a waking Han. Could that possibly be a bit of subtle foreshadowing, not only regarding how she will be revealed as the daughter of Darth Vader, the most famous masked character in the films, but also in that Vader will have his mask removed in a gesture of love for his children? Yes, it absolutely could be. And the parallels between Leia and Anakin don't stop there.

The father/son and mother/daughter parallels are perhaps more immediately apparent. Anakin and Luke are both yearning boys from Tatooine, undergoing their Jedi training against their teachers' misgivings. Padmé and Leia are both political idealists who fall in love in spite of their practical-minded objections. And there's no doubt that Padmé and Leia's confessions of love bear deliberate similarties. After Han is frozen in carbonite, however, Leia begins to walk a path much more like her father's. She is terrified of losing him. She is furious at Lando for betraying them. She watches with righteous fury as Chewie strangles him. Fear, anger, hate, suffering. Jedi or no, Leia is definitely walking the path to the Dark Side.

But she pulls back. Perhaps because she quickly learns that lashing out in anger hasn't done a thing to help save Han - in fact, it probably delayed them and stole their last chance to stop Boba Fett's ship before taking off from Cloud City. Perhaps also her mysterious connection to Luke, as he calls to her in desperation, pulls her out of her angry brooding and sets her on a different path of quiet contemplation. Whatever the reason, when Leia embarks anew on her quest to rescue Han, she will find a better way than the soul-rending choices that claimed her father.

There are stories older than the sleeping damsel fairy tales that probably influenced them, tales of heroes descending to the underworld. There is Orpheus, going down to the realm of Hades in an attempt to rescue his love Eurydice. (The Greeks loved irony-laden tragedy, so he screws up and fails.) The prequels are replete with foreshadowing imagery of Anakin making such a descent. In Episode II, he drops into the valley of the Tusken Raider settlement just before his first major fall to Dark-Side driven violence. Later, in a striking image of things to come, he literally jumps into the hellish landscape of the droid factory on Geonosis (a hellishness punctuated by Threepio's horrified cry of "It's a nightmare!") in an attempt to save Padmé. Not only does he fail to rescue her, he is entangled in machinery and nearly becomes a permanent part of the factory's mechanisms. And there you have a beat-for-beat parallel to the tragic events of Episode III.

Episode III itself has a few significant images reminding us of this fall to the underworld. Anakin becomes Vader not in a bombastic, adrenaline-fueled fight scene, but in a quiet, despairing fall to his knees. He is fallen. He has descended; he will become less-than-human. And what is the fiery landscape of Mustafar if not a visual representation of the hell that has claimed Anakin's soul?

So Leia finds herself in a situation not all that different from her father's. The one she loved is in deadly danger, and she will have to descend into a seedy underworld to rescue him. Again and again we see people descending the stairs into Jabba's throne room, a dark and shadowy place with gruesome-faced, perhaps even demonic denizens.

The difference is that Leia can enter that underworld without partaking of its darkness. She can don the guise of a ruthless bounty hunter, parade Chewie about like a helpless captive, threaten Jabba and his entire retinue with a thermal detonator - yet underneath she is still pure, untouched by the evil around her. The mask she wears is nothing more than that; a disguise she can wear without obliterating who she used to be. Vader's mask, in contrast, is an integral symbol of his brutal transformation from Jedi to Sith, human to cyborg, good-hearted man to cold-hearted machine.

Han's awakening is nothing less than a rebirth - he is helpless, trembling and blind like a newborn baby - but Leia didn't seek for arcane secrets of the Dark Side to try to bring him to life. She is restoring him, not forcing life by unnatural means. And she doesn't fall prey to the violent impulse to engage in a vengeance-seeking rampage. Yes, she strangles Jabba (and among the many things I'll explore in the next post, I'll examine how her apparent helplessness up till that point was nothing but a clever ruse) but if you look at her face during and after killing him, there is no vicious pleasure or bloodlust in her demeanor, only grim determination. She doesn't kill to satisfy some darker urge within her. She dispatches of her enemy so she and her friends can all escape safely. Another striking contrast to Anakin's unnecessary and vengeful slaughter of the sandpeople.

Luke is not just a copy of Anakin. He is his mother's son as well; he carries her dying words back to his fallen father, determined to see his goodness reemerge. Leia isn't just a copy of Padmé. She is her father's daughter too; hot-tempered, passionate to defend the ones she loves, and therefore vulnerable to the temptations of the Dark Side. How does she escape this danger where Anakin could not? Maybe it's partly because Han's danger wasn't the nebulous nightmare-envisioned peril that threatened Padmé, and therefore easier to confront from a practical standpoint. Perhaps you might argue that Leia's latent Force abilities were still deeply buried, thereby protecting her from the truly potent temptations of the Dark Side.

But I think the best reason, and the same thing that saves Luke and saves Anakin in the end, was the sure knowledge that attachments and connectedness are not a thing to avoid or cast aside; that family and friends and loved ones are the very things that give us hope and the strength to hold on to goodness. Leia is not alone when Han is ripped away from her; she has Chewie and Luke and Lando, supporting her, sharing her concern. Anakin is fundamentally alone in his fears for Padmé, afraid to fully confide in Yoda about his dreams (understandably so); too proud or skittish to ask Obi-Wan for help. And his best confidante is Padmé herself, the one he fears to lose! No wonder he is so vulnerable to Palpatine's apparent friendship and offers to help him. No wonder he isn't strong enough to withstand temptation. And no wonder it's his connection to his son and his family that brings him back in the end.