"Search your feelings. You know it to be true."
I was 19 years old the first time I saw EMPIRE. I loved every second of that movie... but when we got to this part, the infamous "I am your father" scene, my bullshit detector went into overdrive.
"Search your feelings. You know it to be true."
What does this even mean?
The only feelings Luke can reasonably have at this point for Darth Vader are hatred and revulsion and anger. All Luke knows about the guy is that he blew up his friend's homeworld, captured her and his other friends and had them tortured, and, according to his Jedi mentor, he killed Luke's dad.
So what 'feelings' is it Darth is urging Luke to 'search' that will validate this outrageous claim?
This seems to presume that there is some kind of basic, essential bond between them. Because they are father and son, Luke will 'feel' something towards Darth -- 'feel' that Darth is actually his biological father (Darth certainly didn't raise him or parent him in any meaningful emotional or social way).
This is the same spurious nonsensical horseshit that causes our judicial system to always give preference to biological parents over adoptive ones, and it's just fucking stupid.
Leaving that aside, and staying strictly within the context of STAR WARS canon -- if there is some mysterious 'feeling' between Luke and Darth that exists simply because of blind biology and genetics, why doesn't Darth feel it for Lea? Or Lea feel it for Darth? Why don't Luke and Lea get a big hit of it when Lea's tongue is in Luke's mouth?
I'm aware, at the point that Darth gives this speech, Lucas hasn't decided that Luke and Lea are siblings yet. But I don't care. That's meta shit. This 'search your feelings, you know it to be true' bit of business is the only hard evidence Darth is offering Luke -- and us, in the audience -- for an utterly insane, unbelievable claim. That it is very nearly a melodramatic necessity within the hoary tropes of the kind of pulp fiction Lucas is pastiching with STAR WARS is beside the point -- if you're going to reveal that your big villain is actually your hero's biological father, you need better evidence to support the claim than this.
For years afterward, right up until 1983's RETURN OF THE JEDI (those three years were my college years, so they seem much much longer than three years seems now that I'm verging on old age), my friends and I would talk about whether or not Darth was really Luke's father, or it was just a scam. On the one side, of course, we'd argue that George Lucas never met a cliche he didn't immediately want to incorporate into fourteen different projects. On the other, though, we'd come back, it's SUCH a cliche, and it makes so little actual sense, and God we hoped Darth was lying.
It was the Late Great Jeff Webb (at that time Great, but not yet Late) who came up with what I thought was the most brilliant idea -- that Darth was both lying and telling the truth. That the 'Clone Wars' referred to but not explained in any detail had actually been a plot by the Emperor, before he ascended to that lofty post, to take over the Galaxy by substituting evil clones under his command for powerful figures in the Galactic government. That his first success in this ploy had been the substitution of an evil clone for influential Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker.
And once the Emperor rose to power and replaced the Republic with the Empire, his first cloned minion had shaken off the name of his biological template and taken a new name -- Darth Vader.
So Darth isn't Luke's father, he's an evil clone of Luke's father. He DID kill Anakin Skywalker -- he had to, to take his place.
Obviously, Lucas chose not to go that way... given that the idea is a novel and original one no one would ever have seen coming (except the Late Great Jeff Webb) , it's something that never would have occurred to the monstrous hack known as George Lucas. Lucas instead embraced his idiotically trite piece of corn, and then heaped more corn on top of it -- not only was Darth the father of Luke, but Lea was Luke's twin sister! Never mind the fact that Luke was raised at one end of the Galaxy and Lea at the other, never mind that Luke and Darth apparently share 'feelings' they can 'search' to prove their relationship when Darth and Lea had no such similar feelings while she was spitting on him or he was torturing her, or that Luke and Lea also had no such family feelings for each other when they were making out in front of Han. (And don't even get me started on the Ewoks.)
People talk about moments when a certain fictional franchise 'jumped the shark'. To me, that moment with STAR WARS comes with establishing the father-son relationship between Darth and Luke. It's just fucking nonsense. But Lucas compounds it with his later determination that Luke and Lea are also twins. And that particular bit of canon has informed and corrupted everything done in the STAR WARS franchise since then, running both forwards and backwards in time.
If only they'd been smart enough to let the Late Great Jeff Webb do their plotting for them.
Or anyone who was capable of actually writing something.
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