Luke arrives on Cloud City, coincidentally just managing to see Han, which gets him shot at by Boba Fett. It’s popular to say that Fett does absolutely nothing in the movies – certainly not to justify the fandom that thought his armour was cool – but it’s not really accurate; he’s the one to catch Han in the first place and he sees Luke coming here. It’s more that what he does isn’t as flashy as everything else. In fairness to his critics, I also forgot these bits.
(Leia screams “It’s a trap!” to Luke, which is very funny given the exact same line from the third film became the meme)
After Artoo is locked out – a very funny way of signalling that the funny times are over and shit just got real – Luke finds himself alone with Vader. The resulting lightsaber fight is significantly less technically impressive than any from the prequels or (I assume, not having seen past the first one) sequels or cartoons or video games or any of the extended media, but I do find it incredibly weighed down by emotion. Marcia Lucas keeps pausing the action, letting us see Luke push past his fear; Vader is a shadow against darkness. The context of the story, as well, makes this feel momentous; Vader can and will kill people without a thought.
Lando frees Leia and Chewie, and of course Chewie throttles him for Han. Again, we’re simply powering through the story here; no moment of reflection (the editing has long taken care of that for us), no big talk, just his goons pulling guns on the stormtroopers and he takes their restraints off. Chewie throttling him is a great moment too, where this is what at least some of the audience is thinking; also love Threepio to represent the ‘dumb’ point of view.
The fight between Luke and Vader is great; Vader has the very clear goal of tossing Luke down the carbonite, and both he and Luke use multiple dirty tricks (including the Force) to try and get one up on each other, with my favourite being Vader simply Force-pulling some boxes onto Luke. Luke is also getting sweatier and more exhausted as the fight has gone on. There’s also a great couple of moments where Luke knocks Vader down to another area, and Luke simply wanders down; again, financially illiterate but great art as we see some sets we only see for those two shots. Vader is actually encouraging Luke to tap into his hatred to destroy him; his practical goal is freezing Luke, but his emotional goal is to bring Luke around to his Dark Side thinking.
As Team Leia are escaping, there’s a moment where Artoo has to hack into a computer to get past (which turns out to be a power socket, damaging Artoo – this really is a movie of failures for the little droid), and I’m struck by how Threepio describes it as ‘talking’ to the computer, as if all technology is sentient and communicates with each other. It feels like an 80’s era understanding of computing, but it’s not completely wrong – what is a driver but a language technology uses to talk to each other? Of course, with the rise of LLM, we know treating a computer as a person is a major error.
The purpose of the area Luke wanders around, looking for Vader again, is completely lost on me, but it does look incredibly cool. A lot of movie scifi these days is heavily quantified in some way – if not realistic, then at least internally logical in a way Star Wars actively defies. I expect this is partly a result of budgets being so astronomically high that realism can be achieved, but I also suspect it’s simply a result of what I’m going to call ‘quantification drift’. It’s human nature to want to quantify and categorize things to make them more rational if not more efficient; Star Wars in particular inspires a cultish reaction that, I suspect, drives fans to make its emotions make sense, but you also see it in Star Trek, superhero comic books, and other things. This is even true beyond the technical aspect – the psychology of characters and diagnosing their motivations, for example.
But this comes at the cost of not just the sense of wonder the original trilogy inspired, but our emotional reactions in general. It would be incredibly hypocritical for me to dismiss this entirely, given what I do and what I’m literally doing right now, but you can do this without undermining your own emotional resonance with a work. When it comes to creation, contradictions and nonsensicalities that creep in are part of what makes a work feel alive and cool; Star Wars inspires such rabid responses specifically because it doesn’t fully make sense or hold together. Again, Andor manages to thread these needles pretty well.
The further I get into this plot, the more I admire Hammil’s performance in this specific moment. He’s realistically terrified – David Prowse matches him, being a force of pure malice and strength – and is starting to crumble before Vader. In the most brutal moment of the trilogy – one that anticipates Game Of Thrones decades later – Vader cuts off Luke’s lightsaber hand. It doesn’t quite come off as emasculation to me – probably because I’ve seen the movie since before I could form conscious memories, so I know he gets a robot hand – but it’s obviously in the vicinity, and more importantly, puts Luke in the most fragile position he’s ever been. Pushing him back on that big thing is a great cinematic presentation of that.
Vader begins appealing to Luke to join him, and I also enjoy James Earl Jones’s performance here; just enough desperation to let us know this is something he really cares about. In general, Jones has dialled back the anger in Vader to convey that he’s become contemplative, perhaps introspective, now that he’s discovered his son is still alive and there’s a chance they could reconnect. To me, the combination of performance and dialogue makes me believe that Vader thinks that Luke coming around to Vader’s view can justify all of this – the evil, the genocidal blowing up of planets, the random murdering of his crew.
Oh, and he reveals he’s Luke’s father.
This revelation was a closely-guarded secret – there’s a great story from Hamill where, at the premiere, Ford turned to him and said “You never told me that, kid!” – and, reportedly, David Prowse was very upset to not be included in it. I’m honestly on his side; his argument is that he would have played it more openly and more vulnerable, and I honestly think his physical performance is playing against the tone of the words here.
But what a moment! There’s been a recurring thing with this series for me where the process of analysis has caused my emotional reaction to become more vivid and intense. This is a moment that rocks the viewer; Vader has subtly shadowed Luke throughout the film, showing a potential future for him if he follows the Force but gives in to hate and anger as motivating emotions. This expresses that idea in a way even a child could understand; it’s as if Luke is infected by Vader’s evil.
And naturally, there’s the fact that Obi-Wan – Luke’s only real father figure, the person he trusted more than anyone else in the galaxy – who lied to him about it. Luke’s entire conception of reality has been pulled from under him. Vader insists – I nearly wrote ‘begs’, but that’s definitely not right – Luke join him to and fulfill a prophecy to destroy the Emperor, and we get one of the best expressions of a choice in a cinematic method: Luke looks down, sees a very long drop, then looks back up at Vader. Vader represents evil safety; Luke heroically drops. I always love when a choice is elevated to such melodramatic levels, and when the heroic choice is pragmatically the impossible one.
One little bit I’d forgotten is that, when Luke is hanging off the bottom of Cloud City, he calls out to Ben for help, which is oddly heartwarming – when we’re in a position like this, it’s usually the people we loved that we think about, and his situation is more dire than any he’s ever been in. When writing up A New Hope, I said that one of the interesting things is how little Luke fits the ‘heroic naive farmboy’ archetype, being closer to the Gen X kids who grew up watching him, and by this point he’s mutated into something else – the closest I can think of right now is a soldier with a strong sense of vulnerability. He then calls out to Leia, with the first real implication of her Force abilities.
One of the criticisms I’ve often seen of Star Wars is its obsession with the Jedi and Force powers over the regular people. This makes sense when looking at the story from a strictly rationalist perspective, I also tend to identify with the regular people over the super special Chosen One. But this overlooks that, from the story’s perspective, Luke (and now Leia) are the regular people, and we should see ourselves as having the Force the same way we can see ourselves as being crack shots or pilots. If the movies can be seen as ‘arguing’ for something, they’re arguing we need to tap into our intuition and gut feelings, and to put our trust in a bigger picture that we can never be aware of.
Once Team Leia spots Luke, the rest of the movie is cooling down, dealing with the immediate consequences of everything that’s happened. The Imperial March and a sad version of the Force Theme dominates much of the soundtrack; Vader’s people have deactivated the hyperdrive to give us one last wrench in the proceedings, and Artoo very quickly deals with it because he spoke to the Central Computer earlier. There’s a very sad shot of Vader watching the Falcon get away that proceeds their last conversation before they get away; one sadder attempt to appeal to Luke. Landoa nd Chewie fly away (with Lando having apparently raided Han’s closet), everyone agrees to meet on Tatooine, and Luke tries out his new robot hand.
When people talk about the catastrophic failure and down note Empire Strikes Back ends on, I actually think they understate it – it isn’t just that Luke had his hand cut off and Han has been frozen in carbonite and Luke turns out to be related to the bad guy, it’s that Vader fails comprehensively at his goal too. One thing that’s clear from this film is that Vader – or Anakin, if you prefer – loves his son very much. In discussions of bad parents and pseudo-parents in fiction, I often find people arguing that especially evil characters don’t actually love their families; an easy example is Walter White of Breaking Bad, where I’ve seen people passionately argue that Walt does not love Jesse, which I disagree with. You could also point to Daniel Plainview and HW in There Will Be Blood.
I think it’s that Vader (and Walt, and Daniel) express their loves in profoundly destructive ways, and that it’s helpful to recognize that this can happen. I was thinking ahead to Return of the Jedi and realizing how much I can identify with Luke’s situation and feelings when I really think about it, and I can look back here and see similarities and things to identify with. My parents raised me the way they did because it made sense to them at the time; even when it was sadistic, they at least did it because they thought it was what they were supposed to do and how one expresses love. Certainly, that goes for stupid, destructive things I’ve done. Our actions coming from a place of love doesn’t make them less destructive; the destructiveness of our actions doesn’t erase the place of love they came from.
I can’t really come to any closure on these ideas, of course, because that happens next movie, which I’ll be looking at next year. There’s a cliche that middle entries in a trilogy – both filmic and literary – tend to be either the best or the worst; the former, when they’re entries in a series (like Spider-Man 2) and the latter when they’re one continuous story, because the first entry introduces a cool world and cool new characters whilst the last entry has the cool climax and the middle tends to kill time inbetween.
I think it’s safe to say that Empire Strikes Back avoids this – genuinely developing the past whilst genuinely setting up the future, and going some weird and sincere places while it does it. You can actually look at is as the second act of a three-act story; dealing with the consequences of the climax of the first act – Luke destroying the Death Star – are developed and head towards a total reversal – Luke is Vader’s son – which ends in the darkest moment before heading into recognition and climax. It’s ridiculous to say the entire trilogy was worked out in great detail with consistent lore and a specific plan (and I think it’s stupid of Lucas to have ever bothered), but it’s correct to say that the emotional arc of the trilogy holds together very well.
See you next year for Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. May the Force be with you.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Happy Endings, Season One, Episode Four, “Dave of the Dead”
“Amongst? Are we doing amongst now?”
“Oh yeah, you were just mentioning that like six years ago.”
“I did that double spit-take to show how insane you are right now.”
“I need sixteen hot dogs and an egg timer.” This works largely because of Eliza Coupe’s determined face before she says it.
Dave imagining himself as a zombie is this show diving into its weaknesses – Making A Point that’s mildly funny as a loose observation but is too trite stretched out that far. The show is better when it’s not trying too hard. The hipster plot is in the same ballpark. Something like Community or even Scrubs would go far further with it and make it funny by taking it far more seriously than you really should.
“Rockefeller over here, too good for free underpants.”
“You just switched movies at the end there, bro.”
“There was a band made up entirely of Speak-n-Spells.”
“And that was fun?”
“… Yeah!”
“She can dance. Look at how much fun that is.”
Max knocking over the drink before staying still is great. “God, you gotta clean that up.”
“By the way, I have no idea whose boxers those are. Oh wait, I do. Gary, my Polish neighbour.”
“I’m in a dark place. Like ‘applying to grad school’ dark.”
“I’m not at a point in my life where I can be taken seriously.”
I laughed hard at this, because I could relate.
“Are any of these people adults?”
“They will be after the bot mitzvah.”
The zombie plot is working much better for me because it’s just a dumb idea with funny character concepts – one guy who cannot take life seriously, one woman who can’t not take anything seriously – allowed to play out.
“Could you imagine what would ever happen if we were to ever have a real conversation?”
“Whatever, I don’t know car stuff.”
It occurs to me that this is the closest this show has ever resembled How I Met Your Mother. I will admit the food truck thing is actually cool.
“Definitely hit something on the way over here – was it a man, was it a log, was it a beast? Who knows!”
Matlock, Parts of Season One
My original plan was to marathon the whole first season – the second season isn’t coming to Stan until later this month – but that quickly fell away. The show isn’t just quite good, it’s straight up genius – effectively, to try and artfully mix metaphors, a Rube Goldberg Machine made up of a lot of plates spinning. The writers are maintaining, at once, the mystery that Maddie is trying to solve, the individual episodic Problem O’ The Week plots that she solves, and the developing relationships between her and the rest of the cast. Individual moments are simultaneously individually entertaining and terrifying and part of a bigger picture; I think of, like, Maddie having to get past that bureaucrat and using a fake dead dog, which is hilarious (especially given it goes against the actress’s type, which she had been playing up to that point) but also gets us closer to the mystery.
My disinclination to marathon is less to do with the quality of the show and more to do with my just not feeling the motivation to marathon shows these days. I had other stuff I wanted to do.
Hmm, it seems like you’re seeing the show in production order rather than airing order. Upon further research, this seems to be preferable, at least for season 1. Season 2, there’s far less variation, and any such variation may or may not be on purpose.
Perhaps it is now making more sense why I suggested going through season 1 pretty quickly so you can get to the, uh, savory stuff.
I will have to take more time to think about Matlock comments, but if I’m remembering correctly, the actress you’re talking about is Patricia Belcher, who’s shown up in quite a few things you’ve probably seen: the superintendent on A.P. Bio, Janet on Better Off Ted, and, as a cafeteria worker in the Community pilot, gets one of the more memorable lines of that episode. “Were you conditioned to pay for your damn tacos, Seinfield?”
Fifth Avenue Girl – Down on her luck Ginger Rogers meets unhappy industrialist Walter Connolly, and he hires her to help shake up his troubled family life. There are some interesting ideas here about marriage, family, capitalism, and the Depression, but nothing entirely comes together. Plus Ginger’s character is dyspeptic and distant, and while she does a good job with things, she always feels like she is in another movie. The rest of the cast, also featuring Verree Teasdale and Tim Holt, is quite good. Gregory La Cava directs (and ghost writes) things well enough.
Elementary, “Dead Man’s Switch” – Holmes is brought in to find a blackmailer only to see the blackmailer murdered. The plot is a bit all over the place if interesting enough. But the highlight here is Sherlock reacting to his first anniversary of being sober, his rejection of the anniversary chip, and a stunning admission about falling off the wagon after just one day. Jonny Lee Miller’s performance is stunning.
Doctor Who, “Robot,” parts one and two – My wife said she wants to watch more classic Doctor Who, and after she rejected one of the animated Second Doctor serials (the animation was not even a little to her liking), I chose something a bit more conventional: the start of the Tom Baker era. The FX at once amuse her and confound her, but she is liking this so far. Really hard to go wrong with the Fourth Doctor, or Sarah Jane, or the Brig.
Frasier, “Farewell, Nervosa” – Frasier and Niles quit their favorite coffee bar when a noisy folksinger is hired to perform there every afternoon. Because all 40 seats coffee bars think adding live music on a weekday afternoon is a good idea. There are many harder to watch episodes of the show, but I don’t think there is one I would call dumber. Plus, it turns out that the place is owned by a woman with the last name of Nervosa. Not sure what is sillier, that this is here name or that she’s been the owner all these years and we never met her. Elvis Costello is the folksinger, showing why he’s never made any of his own Elvis movies. There is a subplot where Frasier wants to warn Felicity Huffman that his friend and accountant, now her new lover, is married, and I think it is only meant to set other things up. John Hannah, continuing his tour of every TV I have ever watched, plays the accountant.
Hacks, “Who’s Making Dinner?” and “D’Amazing Race”
Lots of benchmarks in these two episodes for how far Deborah and Ava’s relationship has come, with Deb unofficially greenlighting Ava’s reboot of her old show (able to recognize she doesn’t want to be involved in it but encouraging Ava to go ahead with the idea anyway) and Ava’s salt and pepper shakers plot (which she fully explains to Deb on Deb’s return). The show’s doing a good job working out what a better-adjusted status quo looks like for them, even thinking through how Ava could inhabit her role of being attached to Deborah’s life and career while also using it to make something of her own. I feel like there’s a certain kind of portrayal emotional healthiness that’s flattening or at least unrealistic, and then there’s working out better, happier versions of your particular situation. It accommodates for weirdness, and Deb and Ava are weird about each other; I can’t root for them to be cured of that, since it’s part of why I’m watching the show, but I can root for them to find a fulfilling and functional weirdness.
The salt and pepper shakers plot comes a little at the cost of Kathy’s previous characterization–she feels like she gets flattened into a shrieky obstacle here, which is unfortunate. However, with Kathy, QVC, antiques guy, Marcus, Marty, etc. all returning and getting significant roles here, this feels like the last season of The Shield in its efficient, plot-relevant tour of the past.
Kaitlin Olson is always a fucking delight, and she has some of my all-time favorite moments on the show as DJ, but the Amazing Race plot didn’t entirely gel for me, and the catharsis that comes from it doesn’t hit as hard as some of the emotional outcomes of her previous episodes, especially “The Roast of Deborah Vance” and “D’Christening.”
Without Honor
Rewatch, as it was my pick for Movie Club. Since I’ve already written this up, I’ll just say that the discussion was great. I loved delving into the comedy and also learning more about how the movie reflects the LA suburbs of its era.
Mikey and Nicky
Emotionally intense, with my understanding of the characters and the particular distribution of my sympathy shifting as the film goes on and things get more complicated–though it ultimately comes down to the best kind of uncomfortable split where I understand and feel exactly what’s happening on both sides of that door at the end. Falk and Cassavetes are unsurprisingly terrific, especially with regard to how Falk’s initial weary, warm paternalism fractures into a thousand small, nursed resentments and Cassavetes’s initial Withnail-like nerviness firming up as he flirts and fucks and remembers he’s the man. They’re two lines crossing going in opposite directions, and the film successfully makes it a tragedy that they can’t intersect more or even run in closer parallel: Mikey feeling the weight of setting up the one person who remembers his dead younger brother, getting ready to lose this last connection with his past, hits hard.
Usually breaking down a door in a movie is a trivial task, and considering the onslaught two doors here withstand, I’m going to conclude this movie was sponsored by the influential door lobby.
In the Mouth of Madness
Definitely not peak Carpenter, but an appealing funhouse in a likable “what if you ripped the covers off every ’80s horror paperback and tried to adapt all the artwork and blurbs at once?” way. Accordingly, it has a lot of fantastic moments and images: Sam Neill and all the crayoned crosses, the lost time on the drive to Hobb’s End (I am forever a sucker for lost time and mysterious drives), “Do you read Sutter Cane?”, the changing painting, the reveal behind the hotel owner’s desk, etc. Those don’t gel into anything, but again, it’s easy to enjoy the ride through the funhouse.
The Station Agent
Writing it up, so I’ll hold off, but I liked this a lot.
The Sea Wolf
I believe Simon recommended this? This could easily have been made for me, with an incredible claustrophobic set-up–Edward G. Robinson is the brutal, tyrannical, sadistic captain of an ill-fated ship; John Garfield, Alexander Knox, and Ida Lupino play three people newly under his control, all bringing different potential catalysts to the table (Garfield has an inner core of self-respect that Robinson’s Wolf Larsen can’t seem to touch, which makes him almost hypnotically cool throughout the film; Knox’s writer can analyze and explain Larsen to himself, which Larsen is fascinated by; Lupino, the least developed of the three on the page, is unfortunately mostly stuck with being a woman and therefore vulnerable, stirring up heroic instincts in the others, but Lupino makes her feel real). Wonderful performances, great sea action, and a lot of very effective darkness: Larsen instigating the bullying and humiliation of his one-week sober ship’s doctor, who’s just clawed his way back to some semblance of pride, is genuinely hard to watch.
Fascinating how much of what you would assume is the lurking main plot–Wolf Larsen vs. Death Larsen, surely a battle for the ages–isn’t even on-screen. It doesn’t matter: it keeps us with our central trio and makes Wolf Larsen the terrifying but also pathetic monster who’s been affecting them all, and Robinson excels in the role, making him a villain-with-pathos for the ages.
I can’t believe I’ve been unaware of John Garfield all this time: this is clearly a gap in my film knowledge I must correct.
I did recommend it, but interestingly my logs show that I wasn’t as into Garfield as you were.
“NICKY! NICKY!” Incredible movie and they shot the cemetery scene at a spot in Philly I’ve been to many times. (There’s also the kind of inside-Philadelphia joke of Ned Beatty getting lost around the narrow corners and bends of South Street.)
As Elaine May, writer/director of Mikey and Nicky, put it, after a screening of the film, “Nobody fingers you but your best friend.”
I once saw someone affectionately refer to In The Mouth Of Madness as baby’s first postmodernism, which about sums it up for me – I’m with you in thinking it’s second tier Carpenter, but that would be anyone else’s first tier, and the movie functions well enough to be a lot of fun.
This season of Hacks does have a real victory-lap feel, huh?
I don’t know that much about old movies, but I know John Garfield starred in the original The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Red Sonja (2025) – This is terrible to be sure. The post-LOTR cgi is awful. The pacing is terrible. The script is filled with labored exposition. The main villain is as menacing as a plate of plain tofu. The acting is bad with the cast made up of beautiful twenty and thirty year-olds. Everyone is too clean and modern with clean hair, well shaved, proper diction and the proper holding of eating utensils. Nobody looks grizzled, savage or primal as drawn by John Buscema. None of them would survive in the Hyborian Age. Matilda Lutz gives the best performance and is better than Brigitte Nielsen, that isn’t saying much. She isn’t the character from Robert E. Howard’s The Shadow of the Vulture. This is very much the Roy Thomas interpretation of the character with the chainmail-bikini. However, bad effects, terrible pacing, poor scripts, a ridiculous villain is true of 80s sword and sorcery and I still love those films. This easily fits in with those. It did give me some nostalgic feels. I liked the backstory of Lutz and the villain. The characterization of the villain’s lover was interesting as well. As crappy as the cgi is, there are a few cool shots and creatures.
What did we play?
Eh, I’m playing a little more Ender Magnolia here and there just to see what all I can get out of the New Game+, but I’m also having to play less and less often as too much gaming just ruins my left wrist. So nothing exciting to report.
Wait, Darth Vader is Luke’s father? How did I not know that??
Keep it under your hat.
I love what you say here about the bit with Luke letting go and dropping from Cloud City; this would be one of the all-time greatest Star Wars moments if more people fell in line with my particular vision, but alas. You’ve highlighted its melodramatic appeal very well.
Also very much agree on not ceasing to define love as love when it starts being destructive; it’s almost like a No True Scotsman vision of human feeling and action, and I’ve never found it all that helpful. Or, more to the point in any kind of appreciation of fiction, all that interesting: that Vader is driven by genuine, if uninformed, love for Luke here is part of what makes him compelling.
Year of the Month update!
This May, we’ll be opening the doors for your writing on any movies, albums, books, etc. from 2014!
TBD: Cori Domschot: Earth to Echo
TBD: Cori Domschot: Jack Ryan
May. 17th: Tristan Nankervis: Whiplash
May 23rd: Ben Hohenstatt: Plowing Into the Field of Love
May 31st: Tristan Nankervis: The Imitation Game
And in. June, you can write up any of these movies, albums, books, etc. from 1958.
Jun. 5th: Gillian Nelson: Paul Bunyan
Jun. 12th: Gillian Nelson: Grand Canyon
Jun. 14th: Tristan Nankervis: Vertigo
Jun. 19th: Gillian Nelson: Elfego Banca
Jun. 26th: Gillian Nelson: Disneyland Gay Days
Jun. 28th: Tristan Nankervis: Touch of Evil
I’ll do Whiplash for May 17th, The Imitation Game for May 31st, Vertigo for June 14th, and Touch of Evil for June 28th.
Sorry for missing my expected 1984, I got caught up in the excitement of my Empire Strikes Back series.