I don’t know what they’re drinking over at MSNBC, but I’ll not have what they’re having. In a recent segment about the upcoming Star Wars VII host Melissa Harris-Perry went off on the fact that Star Wars has always bothered her:
I know why I have feelings — good, bad, and otherwise — about Star Wars. And I have a lot. I could spend the whole day talking about the whole Darth Vader situation.
…
Yeah, like, the part where he was totally a black guy whose name basically was James Earl Jones, who, and we were all, but while he was black, he was terrible and bad and awful and used to cut off white men’s hands, and didn’t, you know, actually claim his son.
…
But as soon as he claims his son and goes over to the good, he takes off his mask and he is white. Yes, I have many, many feelings about that, but I will try to put them over here.
Clearly Ms. Harris-Perry is late to the Star Wars party, and when she did finally show up, seems to have come half-drunk and looking for a fight, then passed out before the prequels. Evidently she also believes Scar from The Lion King is a white Englishman while his brother is a black American and his nephew, Simba, is a white American, while African hyenas have a Hispanic subspecies.
What seems to have eluded her is this: Darth Vader is a composite. His body was played by David Prowse. James Earl Jones, one of the most-loved black actors out there, got his start voicing the part. Jones was never credited as Darth Vader, voice or otherwise, until Return of the Jedi, in which Darth Vader was played by three people: Jones, Prowse, and Sebastian Shaw as the unmasked face of Vader. So clearly Darth Vader was never said to be black beneath his mask, and while it’s Jones’ iconic voice we most remember, voicing is no more relevant here than it would be in animated movies. Harris-Perry is going out of her way to read something into this.
What she also clearly misses is that Star Wars is just a story, not some great allegory on race relations in America. By going the route she does, Harris-Perry reveals her own racism. She somehow reads into it that Darth Vader knew Luke was his son and didn’t want to take fatherly responsibility and seems to equate this with social commentary on black men. Anyone who knows anything about Star Wars knows that Darth Vader didn’t even know he had a son until after his son blew up his Death Star and made his name famous. But once he did know he accepted it and tried to bring Luke into his world where he could protect/exploit him. Instead Vader’s love for his son proves to be the lifeline that leads to his redemption. This is not social statement on unwed mothers in Black America. Harris-Perry is only revealing how twisted her own world view has become by even dragging the rest of us there.
What she also completely misses is that the series’ one black character, Lando Calrissian, is a total good guy. He comes from the same shady past as Han Solo, but appears to have cleaned up his act entirely on his own and well before our story begins. Yes, when our heroes show up he cuts a deal to essentially stab them in the back, but as the administrator of Cloud City he was also responsible for thousands of lives. The Empire held all the cards, and they had a reputation for unparalleled ruthlessness (remember Alderaan?), so he had no reason to believe he wasn’t sacrificing his friends to save all the people who depended on him for security. Not the popular choice with viewers, but completely understandable, and even laudable in its own way. And of course, once it becomes clear the Empire has no intention of keeping any agreements, he devotes himself and as much of his resources as he can to getting his friends back out of the mess he’s made. And, unlike Han, once Lando is in with the Rebellion, he’s all the way in.
In short, Lando is perhaps the most complex and noble characters in the entire series, motivated by something other than altruism, power, or money. Fans picked up on that, and the outcry over his dying in the last movie was severe enough to make Lucas change his mind (and leave it changed). And she completely misses this, evidently. (ie. You see what you look for.) She was looking for something to dislike Star Wars over, looking for negative statements about black people, and completely overlooked one of the best black characters of the early 1980’s.
I suppose I shouldn’t be too hard on her, though. She undoubtedly is a product of a modern liberal education, which teaches a very narrow brand of literary analysis. Such people find it impossible to believe that a story is just a story, and must always be about something else. No one can create for entertainment, and writers cannot help but write themselves and their worldview into their work. But the fact was, George Lucas was creating epic myth, a timeless tale of good and evil in a setting so removed from our own as to defy analogism. Humanity is humanity, of course, and it’s almost impossible to create a story without real world parallels, but even though Lucas was occasionally unable to remove his own system of morality entirely, he was not trying to write social commentary.
But the author’s intent is irrelevant to the modern literary critics. They will force a worldview on the author if need be. They will assign motives to everything they can. They will essentially pick something apart until they can either force it into a defense of their own worldview or a refutation of a worldview they despise. In essence, in their suspicion that someone else is trying to force a worldview on the reader, they will impose their own worldview on the work. This is likely how Harris-Perry was taught to think, and she’s never questioned it. She dutifully went into Star Wars knowing that it was the series that made several black actors household names, but perhaps even hating the fact that such low-brow entertainment made all this fuss and money. She went looking for something to fit her worldview and found it in the form of Darth Vader, no matter that the actual facts don’t fit the story she made up about that particular story. She found her reason to turn up her nose at Star Wars.
(That’s not hard, mind you. Even die-hard fans can nitpick the thing to death, even without having to resort to social commentary. But for all its failings, Star Wars was pure, unadulterated fun and adventure, a form of story that has a hard time existing these days when the Harris-Perrys of the world have the bullhorn.)
This is not to say that Star Wars isn’t full of all kinds of symbolism. Movies, like any other medium, have limitations. Directors and screenwriters will resort to symbolism to communicate complex ideas quickly. Black equals evil, white equals good (except when it’s stormtroopers). Blue lightsabers are Jedi, red lightsabers are Sith. Questionable people hang out in dim locations. There is certainly plenty of room for literary analysis of symbolism and message in Star Wars. There could even be room for social commentary. But if you’re going to go there, I’m going to have to insist you ground your analysis in what’s actually there, not what you brought to the table yourself.
In that regard, modern literary analysis is perhaps symbolized by The Cave, into which Luke Skywalker goes in The Empire Strikes Back to be tested. When he asks Yoda what’s in there, he’s told, “Only what you take with you.”
