There's a lot more weight to this exchange after the other half of the saga showed up and we learned just what had helped pull Anakin all the way over to the Dark Side. (In the "Annotated Screenplays" book, it's mentioned that during "story meetings," there'd been concern removing Vader's helmet just amounted to killing him.)
As for the whole issue of "turning back," I suppose you did bring up a wrinkle I don't often seem to notice among the burbling indignation about "so how is one good deed supposed to make up for all that villainy?" (A part of me got to remembering something in J.R.R. Tolkien's "On Fairy-Stories" saying "For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy," although when I looked it up I realised it was a quote from G.K. Chesterton.) I suppose I keep reflecting on how my own religious background was such that I'm ready to think "salvation is a matter of universal grace, not 'earned' by some sufficient quantity of deeds (or, as it sometimes goes, believing hard enough in just the right thing)," although I guess immediate cautions have to follow that to not bother with good deeds is to turn down and deny the grace. As for the movie itself (and steering back onto safer ground), a part of me keeps thinking Vader had cast down the Emperor without any sort of "so what's in it for me?" calculation, tying back in a sense to how Anakin hadn't expected any sort of reward for himself when entering the podrace. (Maybe I'll push it all the way to "he's not calculating his way through it the way fans with too much time on their hands seem to...") I've also pondered whether "being saved through doing something for one person" is a better counterbalance to "falling through self-centred selfishness" than to old speculation and current dissatisfaction that "the fall should be a matter of 'trying to do something widely good through unfortunate means."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2021-11-04 11:06 pm (UTC)As for the whole issue of "turning back," I suppose you did bring up a wrinkle I don't often seem to notice among the burbling indignation about "so how is one good deed supposed to make up for all that villainy?" (A part of me got to remembering something in J.R.R. Tolkien's "On Fairy-Stories" saying "For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy," although when I looked it up I realised it was a quote from G.K. Chesterton.) I suppose I keep reflecting on how my own religious background was such that I'm ready to think "salvation is a matter of universal grace, not 'earned' by some sufficient quantity of deeds (or, as it sometimes goes, believing hard enough in just the right thing)," although I guess immediate cautions have to follow that to not bother with good deeds is to turn down and deny the grace. As for the movie itself (and steering back onto safer ground), a part of me keeps thinking Vader had cast down the Emperor without any sort of "so what's in it for me?" calculation, tying back in a sense to how Anakin hadn't expected any sort of reward for himself when entering the podrace. (Maybe I'll push it all the way to "he's not calculating his way through it the way fans with too much time on their hands seem to...") I've also pondered whether "being saved through doing something for one person" is a better counterbalance to "falling through self-centred selfishness" than to old speculation and current dissatisfaction that "the fall should be a matter of 'trying to do something widely good through unfortunate means."