This is going to be a long one.I'll gush about it after, but first I'm going to type out a brief excerpt of the book from my hard copy of it. This is how Stover describes the final scene, where Anakin is sealed into the Vader suit, and realizes Padme is dead.This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, forever:The first dawn of light in your universe brings pain.The light burns you. It will always burn you. Part of you will always lie upon black glass sand beside a lake of fire while flames chew upon your flesh.You can hear yourself breathing. It comes hard, and harsh, and it scrapes nerves already raw, but you cannot stop it. You can never stop it. You cannot even slow it down.You don't even have lungs anymore.Mechanisms hardwired into your chest breathe for you. They will pump oxygen into your bloodstream forever.Lord Vader? Lord Vader, can you hear me?And you can't, not in the way you once did. Sensors in the shell that prisons your head trickle meaning directly into your brain.You open your scorched-pale eyes; optical sensors integrate light and shadow into a hideous simulacrum of the world around you.Or perhaps the simulacrum is perfect, and it is the world that is hideous.Padme? Are you here? Are you all right? you try to say, but another voice speaks for you, out from the vocabulator that serves you for burned-away lips and tongue and throat."Padme? Are you here? Are you all right?"I'm very sorry, Lord Vader. I'm afraid she died. It seems in your anger, you killed her.This burns hotter than the lava had."No... no, it is not possible!"You loved her. You will always love her. You could never will her death.Never.But you remember...You remember all of it.You remember the dragon that you brought Vader forth from your heart to slay. You remember the cold venom in Vader's blood. You remember the furnace of Vader's fury, and the black hatred of seizing her throat to silence her lying mouth—And there is one blazing moment in which you finally understand that there was no dragon. That there was no Vader. That there was only you. Only Anakin Skywalker.That it was all you. Is you.Only you.You did it.You killed her.You killed her because, finally, when you could have saved her, when you could have gone away with her, when you could have been thinking about her, you were thinking about yourself...It is in this blazing moment that you finally understand the trap of the dark side, the final cruelty of the Sith—because now yourself is all you will ever have.And you rage and scream and reach through the Force to crush the shadow who has destroyed you, but you are so far less now than what you were, you are more than half machine, you are like a painter gone blind, a composer gone deaf, you can remember where the power was but the power you can touch is only a memory, and so with all your world-destroying fury it is only droids around you that implode, and equipment, and the table on which you were strapped shatters, and in the end, you cannot touch the shadow.In the end, you do not even want to.In the end, the shadow is all you have left. Because the shadow understands you, the shadow forgives you, the shadow gathers you unto itself—and within your furnace heart, you burn in your own flame.This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker…Forever…Now that you've finished reading it, I'll just say that I absolutely love this book. Stover is a AAA-writer of prose, he has serious chops for imagery, he's stylish as hell without being obnoxious about it, and he's very adept at teasing out the emotions and subtleties from the films and emphasizing them while keeping their essence. I chose this particular passage for a handful of reasons (and it wasn't easy to just pick one passage), but let me go through them one by one as I connect them to the broader themes in the book.1. Style.The prose of this passage is the first thing that stands out, for obvious reasons. Stover's using classic writing techniques ("less is more", "show don't tell", etc) to describe a scene in rather broken, semi-clear ways that are just transparent enough for us to tease out what's happening (e.g. Vader crushing the droids at the end, or referring to Palpatine as "the shadow"—which is done several times earlier in the book, to cast Palpatine as the actual, final avatar of the Dark Side). In this way, he's not only doing what any competent writer should do and "cut the fat" of the story (i.e. remove any unnecessary descriptions of the scene that might bore or distract the audience), but he's also heightening our connection to Anakin in a broader way. Not just because this passage is a fourth-wall break to the audience, but one that's done in second-person (e.g. "You feel" instead of "I feel" or "He feels").Just for some context: Stover uses these asides to the audience, prefaced with "This is what it feels like to be Anakin Skywalker, right now/forever", several times throughout the story (when Anakin is landing the Invisible Hand, when he reunites with Padme, when he realizes Palpatine is Sidious, among others) as a way to describe Anakin's mental state in stressful or highly-emotional situations—sort of like a soliloquy in a stage performance. This isn't the only time that Stover uses these asides for poetic or stylistic flair (just wait until you read his poems about "the Dark"), but they're the only ones told from a second-person perspective.This perspective is rare in novels (though it's becoming more popular) for a good reason: it tends to be clunky, can get confusing for the reader, and generally doesn't feel as engaging as time goes on. But Stover uses it relatively sparingly, and only ever for Anakin's thoughts. He uses other fourth-wall breaks a couple of times for Obi-Wan and Padme and even Count Dooku, usually to describe their characters more frankly, but he always describes them in third-person and with significantly more personal detachment (i.e. he focuses more on stylishly telling us their personal histories and how those shaped who they are, rather than their deeper feelings in the immediate present). In this way, he keeps it clear that Anakin is the central character in the story, and (more importantly) that we need to understand his emotional state to "get" the point of the story, which is reflected in how he chooses to use that style to explore Anakin's...2. Deeper Character.When you think about it, Yoda and Mace Windu were right all along: Anakin Skywalker is a terrible idea. Qui-Gon brought a rural 10-year old boy, who was raised in slavery with no father and an enslaved mother that he had to abandon, to an huge and urban institution that actively discourages and even outright forbids examining your own emotions or mental state. After all, the reason younglings are adopted into the Order so young is that the Jedi can isolate them from the world and make sure they're mentally serene and sound enough to use the Force in the way the Jedi deem fit. Anakin, the emotional-pressure cooker that he is (as a boy and into his teens), is the worst possible element to introduce into that environment: jealous, impatient, angry and lonely—if not outright mentally traumatized. Worse still, the only companion he's allowed to confide in or express his emotions healthily is Obi-Wan, who functions more like a stern older brother or distant tutor than he does a father figure, and is specifically meant to enforce the Jedi way of "Don't express your emotions".But needless to say, the way this is explored in the films is somewhat... clumsy. All the ingredients are there for a really, really strong message about the Jedi being an institution that actually harms children (specifically, young boys) by demanding that they repress their deeper emotional needs and harms by never, ever confronting them (e.g. Yoda never says "Why do you feel afraid to let go?" to Anakin; he says "Train yourself to let go", or basically just "Ignore your problems, and you'll realize they don't bother you"), and might actually be more damaging to Force-users than the Sith on an emotional or mental level, but this is rarely—if ever—mentioned in the films (to be fair, it is implied, but to varying degrees and not very consistently).Stover, however, picks up on this and teases it and other themes out of Anakin's character in the book, by putting a significant emphasis on his psychological state and mental competence. This is pretty clear in the passage, where Stover chooses to add the non-canon element that Anakin realizes that it's his selfishness (not just his actions) that killed Padme, not his altruism or even his anger—he didn't just kill his wife physically, he mentally made her death inevitable. In the broader story, Stover consistently makes Anakin express his doubts and frustrations, using lines from the films and new lines that Stover adds, and makes it very clear that this is Anakin's driving motivation: he's an unsure, fearful and untempered young man, who is so desperate to protect what he loves, that he ends up causing the harm he sets out to prevent (Oedipus, anyone?).You may also have wondered about the "dragon" that's mentioned about halfway down in the excerpt: that's another thing that's added by Stover. In the earlier stages of the book, Anakin's doubts, anger and fear of losing Padme are all described as a "dragon" inside him, literally speaking to Anakin and telling him that he can't save Padme and that he's powerless to stop her death (and as mentioned in the passage, part of the internal reason why Anakin chooses to become Darth Vader is to crush the Dragon's voice—though it doesn't work, as the voice plagues him even after he becomes Vader). You could argue that this is a pretty clear metaphor for Anakin's obvious mental illness and the overall futility of his well-intentioned journey due to his self-destructive character (and I would), but it's also interesting because it also displays Stover's ability to commit an effective...3. Triaging of Lucas's Work.You may have noticed that the big line here (Vader's "NOOOOOO") is absent, and just described as a "scream through the Force". IMO, that line is pretty goofy and ham-fisted (like, many would argue, a lot of lines in the prequels), so cutting it out was just good adaptation technique. But Stover takes this pretty significantly to the next level, throughout the story: most of the big goofy lines that we all know (and maybe love; e.g. "General Kenobi, "Do it", "It's treason, then", "I am the senate", "UNLIMITED POWER", etc.) are missing from the story or changed to make them match better with Stover's style or to just make more sense within the story. For example, "it's treason then" and "I am the senate" are scrapped entirely, and the scene with Mace and the Jedi confronting Palpatine in his office is actually shown to be recorded in audio-only by Palpatine, and he's careful about his words while the audio is on in order to make it seem to the listener like he's being attacked by the Jedi (and use the tape as evidence to convince the Senate that the Jedi have actually staged a coup d'etat). That's probably a more sensible move and explanation of why the Senate actually listens to Palpatine over than the film's handwave of "Well, he's just super-popular and has also mind-controlled everyone".Stover even uses this to bestow some character where none existed before, like when, in the book, Obi-Wan's dragonmount that he rides on Utapau (named "Boga") gets a bit of attention that goes a long way—even a personality. Here, Boga actually is shown to actually have some affection for Obi-Wan (by coming back for him after Greivous tries to run away from their fight, even though Obi-Wan dismissed her) and even ends up saving his life by twisting her body to block the clone trooper's treacherous shots from killing him. In the movie, I don't believe the dragonmount is even named, and has no role other than as a simple mount.This is all fairly straightforward stuff for an adaptation (e.g. make a film's story fit for a novel), but this sort of strategic editing and adding new dimensions to the story is used effectively enough that it really helps Stover with his broader tools above: teasing out the motivations of the characters, and making the story, as a whole, more engaging thematically and emotionally. In a way, he makes Revenge of the Sith a much more grounded, sombre and emotionally serious story just through his small edits and cuts—even before we get to his fantastic style and sense of character that turns the book into a genuinely great adaptation and really good story in its own right.TL;DR:I should probably stop now because we all have stuff to do today. Point being that Stover's novelization is simply a fantastic piece of work: it makes a story that was just decent into one of real depth and character. It reveals Revenge of the Sith as a genuine tragedy, rather than just tragically flawed. The way Stover paints it, the story is not just about plot or even a simple ironic vengeance for a romance: it's a story about an inadequate young man's immense wrongs for all the right reasons; it's a story about the deep failures and mistakes of everyone involved; and it's a story about how, even though the Dark "always wins", as he reminds us, "love can ignite the stars."If you haven't read this book yet: buy it, take a week, read it all the way through. You won't regret it. via /r/StarWars http://ift.tt/2vTIlD1
No comments:
Post a Comment