Our Hero, Darth Vader

Some people don’t understand my generation’s obsession with Star Wars and comic heroes.

When I was about four years old, Star Wars came out. Now just try to imagine what kind of impact a masterpiece film like that would have on a four-year-old. Think about it; the world is new. You are new. You know nothing but what your parents tell you. All you’ve seen of the world is a few weird streets, some shopping marts, and a school you don’t like. You’re still not even sure who your Grandparents are, you’ve only seen them once or twice in your life that you remember. You’re still trying hard to figure out what toes are for.

Then suddenly one day, mom and dad take you to this dark mysterious building full of the smell of popcorn and candy and other seductive delights of the Dark Side, and suddenly the lights dim… and your brand-new, untouched, impressionable, clean-slate consciousness is permanently imprinted with the most mind-blowing experience you could have possibly had as a human being. You are suddenly in Outer Space, looking through a giant window of light that looks more real than the real world, and hearing Darth Vader’s theme-song rumbling your seat cushion with the power of the Force in spine-melting jaw-dropping ecstasy.

I swear, I don’t think I blinked for two hours. I certainly don’t remember breathing.

I lived a whole lifetime in those six hours it took to watch all three movies during my young childhood. I grew up in ways, in the corners of my mind, that I never imagined I would. I developed a hunger for fearlessness, power, courage, justice, respect, and a world worth living in. I saw the Rebellion and I knew it was my own; I knew if the world refused to change into a world we could be proud of, we could MAKE it change, even if we were just a little ragged force and the Empire looked vast and official and undefeatable.

But most of all, I loved Darth Vader.

Adults I talk to sometimes don’t understand why my generation latched onto the ‘bad guy’ so strongly. They saw the scene where Darth Vader is choking the life out of an underling using the Force and are horrified. My generation sees that and all of us uniformly grin in feral glee. Is it because we were permanently warped by our collective childhood awakening? No. It’s because as children we saw something in that great film that perhaps only a child could see. But watch out: children see things sometimes more clearly than adults do.

The fact that George Lucas himself didn’t understand his own inspired message was clear to everyone who saw his attempts as a prequel. He ripped Darth Vader apart and made him into just another pre-fabricated bad guy, and a pathetically weak one at that. An insult to the very name of Vader, like pissing on his funeral pyre. Obviously the entire revelation of Lord Vader had been completely lost on his creator. Perhaps Vader had been a message from God to Lucas trying to teach him a lesson that Lucas never learned.

The thing about Vader was that he was just as much the good guy, perhaps more so, than Luke was. In fact, nobody liked Luke. He was weak, sniveling, whining, a little spoiled brat child who reminded everyone of the kid who eats paste in the back of the room. There was no role-model there. As a four-year-old, I remember a vague sort of pity for him and a grudging sympathy that yes, everyone wants to get off of Planet Dirtball, and we were a little bit proud of him that he actually had some kind of mystic power that redeemed him from being a complete and total waste of flesh.

But that was all. Nobody liked Luke. Why? Because he was a coward. I suppose the story was supposed to be about him coming to grips with being a coward and getting over it, but from our perspective he was forced (no pun intended) to ‘get over it’ by pure circumstances, and never did it of his own free will. Thus, he never got over it in truth; he just somehow managed to grit his teeth and temporarily endure his obvious cowardice long enough to do a few ‘hero’ like things in the war, as if by accident.

But he was no hero; he was certainly nothing we wanted to follow. He reminded us too much of the rest of the ‘can’t we just get along’ whiners who would rather give you a flower than pull out a light saber; the proof was when in the end he threw his weapon away and refused to fight. Hippie. Bah. And we all knew that as soon as he got the chance, he’d crawl into a shack somewhere and become one of those old Nam War Vets who boobytrap everything, live in a bottle, and are afraid of their own shadow.

Luke, in our mind, was merely a mechanism of the plot who existed only to show off Darth Vader’s glory.

Totally the opposite of Luke, Darth Vader was literally the embodiment of fearlessness. He was the physical representation of power, magnificence, confidence, even justice and honor. He never flinched, he never feared, he never looked back. He forged ahead, a dark god in a universe that needed to be spanked real bad. And in the end, even his unshakable loyalty to his master (something we could totally understand) had to fall to his true heroism: doing what was right and killing the Empire itself in the form of the Emperor, and everything he represented.

Why did Vader represent justice? Because his nasty, sniveling underlings were so truly puerile, they deserved to be choked to death. We’d all seen snot-noses like those guys ruining our parent’s lives at work, and we dreamed of a Darth Vader coming to the office and doing the death-grip thing in order to give them what they deserved, and save our parents. Everyone my age knows to the core of their being that in this society, at least since 1970, there’s been no justice. The arrogant criminals get away with everything, and everyone turns a blind eye from bosses to city administrators, and your parents repeat like a chant that we have to “grin and bear it”. But Vader didn’t. Vader had a light saber, and knew how to use it. Vader was like the Angel of Justice, the Angel of Death.

And why honor? Because Vader always, always, always, did what he said he’d do. In an age when all of our fathers always lied about every promise they ever made, and no promise was ever kept, we knew that when Darth Vader swore that he would come after you and hunt you down, you were a gonner. We felt true love and admiration. Yes: here was a man who would do what he said. He was our father figure. Love, after all, is not kindness. Love is doing what is right, no matter what it costs.

My generation grew up in a world without heroes, without defenders. All of the men who were held up to us as “great” were just talkers and hippies. Martin Luther King Jr. might have impressed our parents, but all we ever saw him do was yell at people to be nice to each other. We learned that in Kindergarten. So what? This is our hero? The same old black and white worn-out clip, over and over. He sounds like our dad giving a lecture.

And the hippies were guys who invented… what… a new kind of eco-friendly toilet paper? A new type of fluorescent light? Some of them got Nobel Peace Prizes for something. I have no idea what the hippies ever did that was useful.

In other words, every adult in our world was blowing a lot of hot air about inventing esoteric stuff nobody needs, talking about making rocket ships, saying ‘why can’t we just all get along’ and pointing fingers at one another accusing each other of not being nice... while they all totally ignored the REAL problems. Things like crooks running all the businesses, and every boss keeping double books and overlooking scams. Things like landlords who could destroy you if they felt like it. Things like rapists and gang members on the streets so kids were terrified to ride their bikes home from school every day of their lives.

These were the problems no airbag or hippie could ever help us with. We needed Darth Vader; we needed him, his light saber, his unwavering determination to kill anyone who annoyed him, and his god-like invincibility. We could all imagine him taking on every freak on the face of the earth and just slaughtering them, and the world would be healed.

For the same reason, we loved the Terminator. These were our fathers. These were our heroes. These were the men we looked up to, the kind of men the boys wanted to become. The kind of men that don’t exist in our father’s generation. Fearless, knowing what just had to be done, and able to do it with mighty unstoppable power.

No rules, no red tape… every kid my age knows that the world-wide culture of bureaucracy and law only exists in this age to give the criminals a nice big webwork of cover, and to screw every single law abiding citizen until they have to pay more in taxes than they have food money for, so their families go hungry. Perhaps once, law was excellent and protected the people, but increasingly today law is becoming hypocrisy; again and again it ignores the misery of us, the normal people, and it spins webs of intrigue that cover evil men’s scamming everyone else. This is because the law is amoral, and headless; it has no leader and no police. Whomever is most clever makes policy, and the criminals are the most clever, so the criminals are the only ones who are not touched. Just look at the insurance system.

They say the law is blind; we saw that the law is a blindfolded marionette.

But Vader didn’t follow law. Neither did the Terminator. They ignored “keep out” signs, which shut us kids out of every place we could go to play and trapped us in a prison cell world. They did what we must not, what we can not; they were freedom, they were truth. They did what needed to be done at a fundamental human level, basing their decisions solely on their gut instinct, totally ignoring today’s crooked web of politics which is just a shadow of the law-web.

They were like Punisher, and Wolverine, and a variety of other comic “anti” heroes. They were of the people, they were normal people like us, tired of being thrown in jail or having our cars taken away because we forgot to dot an “i” or cross a “t” in some paperwork somewhere, or getting handcuffed and thrown in jail for an overdue parking ticket. But unlike us, they were able to fight back.

A generation has been born, and has now risen to their maturity, who grew up waiting for Vader to come. We grew up waiting for the Terminator, and the Punisher, and Wolverine. We are all looking for them to arrive; and when they do, we will have our Rebellion. Because we cannot destroy this system of increasing corruption until it has been judged by the One who is master over all; but the judgement is coming. When Heaven hands this world over to us, we will know, and we will take up our light sabers. 

We want to run free in the world. We want to be able to walk down the streets without fear. We want to buy a car and be able to keep it all our lives if we want, without asking anyone’s permission and without paying protection money to the legal mob. We want to work for a living and actually keep the money we make. We want to be able to live in a house we own forever, that nobody can kick us out of and make us and our children homeless overnight. We want… we NEED… freedom. 

Be comforted. The judgement will come. The Empire will fall. The red tape will burn. The system of corruption will be replaced by honesty. All the paperwork that so cleverly stole our lives will vanish forever like a bad dream, and we will have a government that really is for the people. The land will belong to nobody again. The water will belong to nobody. The air will belong to nobody. All the criminals who take our food money and take our cars and houses away will die and pass away like a bad dream. And finally, finally, we will be free as human beings for the first time in our lives.

We will be fearless. We will BE Vader.