Star Words: Episode IV, Part 5

While Threepio luxuriates in his oil bath and Luke cleans up Artoo, their conversation reveals more of our young hero's character. He's not just hoping for a trip to the local station. He wants to escape the humdrum farming life entirely.

Oh, this scene is replete with quotable lines. Why not echo Threepio's relief whenever you're lowering yourself into a bath, murmuring about your bad case of dust contamination? Or if someone asks if they can help you, offer the sarcastic, Not unless you can alter time, speed up the harvest or teleport me off this rock. If someone asks your name, tell them they can call you Luke, adding with a self-effacing laugh, Just Luke. But perhaps the most eloquent is Luke's reply to the droid's inquiry of what planet they've stumbled upon.

"Well, if there's a bright center to the universe, you're on the planet that it's farthest from."

I don't think we give Luke (or Lucas) enough credit for his snark. What a marvelously sardonic way to describe the middle of nowhere in every sense of the phrase. Also, it's curious to me that Tatooine is never actually named in this film. Not till the end of Episode V do we hear it spoken. But this description works quite as well as any name. The planet farthest from the bright center of the universe.

And what an archetypal paradigm we have. A scruffy boy from nowhere, longing for greater things, knowing somehow that he is destined for so much more. Straining against the authority figures of childhood, yearning to become a man. It is a transformation that will enact far more suffering than he could ever imagine, but in this moment he cannot think of anything he wants more.

Next, a sober exchange between aunt and uncle...