While I'm an emotionally healthy young man and this doesn't devastate me, I was a huge fan. God knows I will cry when John Williams dies, but I can keep Mr. Lee's death in its proper emotional perspective. Even so, he meant something to me, and it seemed fitting to write an editorial about him.
My first introduction to him growing up was in the movie The Last Unicorn, where he did the voice of King Haggar. Years later, I found out that he also dubbed the character in multiple foreign languages, but his voicework was easily the best in a film that still holds up today.
However, I didn't really become familiar with the actor himself until Lord of the Rings came out at the same time as Attack of the Clones. There, he made a lasting impression on me, and he became one of my favorite villains. This really meant something, since I was in awe of Darth Maul when he first came out, and I wasn't sure how the Star Wars franchise could top that. However, Darth Tyranus did that, and this was quite impressive considering that Star Wars went from a demonic satanist to a fairly normal-looking human who also went by the slightly less villainous name, Count Dooku. Darth Tyranus succeeded for many reasons, but the main reason is Christopher Lee.
Officially, Darth Vader remained my favorite villain for the longest time. He was the standard, the icon to be aspired to. I'm a creative thinker, and a hopeful writer, and the big question in the back of my head, whenever I set down to write something that I hope will one day have an impact, is "How do I create the next Star Wars? How can I create the next Darth Vader?"
I'm still in the writing process, and of course I know better than to compare what I write directly to Darth Vader, but the question still remains, and I wonder how to create the best possible villain with the best possible presence, and how I can create something that lives up to such a quality standard as everyone's favorite Sith Lord.
Many years ago, though, I noticed something. My ultimate representation of villainy always ended up looking different. He didn't wear a mask, and he often tried to present himself an a saint and a nobleman before revealing his true colors. In fact, before I began to model this villain after the things that I hated in myself, I gave him a face, and I very specifically imagined him looking like Chrisopher Lee.**
Before I made the decision to go out and explore the world like Indiana Jones and write my own stories, I had an active imagination and played with the characters I read in books and saw in the movies. I had Digimon for friends, Lugia as my Jedi Master, and Darth Tyranus was my arch nemesis. For some reason, he was the ultimate bad guy instead of Darth Vader. In this mixed world, some rules got left at the doorstep, and Darth Tyranus wasn't the apprentice of Darth Sideous, but rather the chief henchman of Satan himself. This was quite a promotion.
Maybe he just felt evil enough, just proud enough, that he sounded that he should have come strait out of a Miltonian poem. That's the more profound and and universal way of explaining why he stood out to me, but in reality my connection with the character was more personal. Count Dooku's backstory isn't explained much on-screen, and people have criticized the character for being vague, but Christopher Lee managed to depict the pride of Count Dooku so well that it spoke for itself, and this pride bled into the domineering and patriarchal figure of Darth Tyranus.
This, I think, is the key. Darth Vader explicitly represents the conflict that many of us have with our fathers, and I relate to that narrative, but my father wasn't like Darth Vader. My father was Indiana Jones whenever he was the good guy, but on the many occasions where he scared me, he reminded me of Tyranus.
Christopher Lee is a man with command and power, which are good traits to bring to the table when depicting any good villain. It's what makes Darth Vader good, just as much as it makes Hans Gruber good. Tyranus and Gruber, in fact, are cut from the same cloth. Yet, why do these characteristics work? What is it that on the deepest, most human level makes them resonate and haunt us? Why is it that their presence and personality inspire future characters who take after them? Why do we want to come back to these villains? Much of this is written into the character, but again, this has everything to do with casting Christopher Lee in his place, and how his presence gives a feel for what Dooku's backstory must be like.
As a kid, I didn't know this, but Christopher Lee played Count Dracula. Dracula is one of the most iconic villains of all time, and has appeared and reappeared in countless media. He is also patriarchal. There that word is again, and I use it very intentionally. When I say that a villain with command and power resonates with me, it's because these are two characteristics of a properly patriarchal figure. Dracula obviously fits into this mold, because he's who both seduces women and uses them to carry on his vampiric lineage --- in this sense he's both a husband and a father to them, the head of the household twice over.
In Star Wars, that's a bit more subtle. Yet, because Lucas cast Christopher Lee and therefore chose to evoke Dracula, he added something new and brilliant to the character, and made a major contribution in defining the spirituality of the Sith. There's something vampiric about their master-apprentice relationship. Darth Tyranus is the apprentice of Darth Sideous, but to what end? Christopher Lee was twenty-three years older than Ian McDiarmid, old enough to play his father, and in the grand old tradition of the Sith, every apprentice wants to replace their master. Once disposed of Sideous, he would pursue Anakin as his apprentice, as his chosen "seed."
As a kid, I related to Anakin, and I knew what it was like to have a father who wanted to claim me as "his" and continue on his legacy through me. It was also my father's inherent right to call me my son. Call it the iron law of nature or the stone-carved law of God, but it's inherent that there's a connection between a man and the one who came before him. Dooku had that inherent connection, since he was the "father" of Qui-Gon, the one who first claimed Anakin as his apprentice. Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, and Anakin were a family, and Dooku was its chief patriarch. Even though he was the enemy, I felt it necessary to respect him and properly honor him in spite of his differences with the Jedi.
Of course, he wanted more than respect and honor. I felt as though he wanted both Anakin and Obi-Wan. He wanted more than their respect, but their report. He wanted his family back together again, and to properly lead it --- not just tactically, but spiritually --- as its patriarch.
This is where I always thought Star Wars reached its most Shakespearian of tragedies. Both he and the Jedi lost in this fight. He tried so hard to claim a full relationship with his prospective apprentices that he ended up destroying them, and them finding himself destroyed by them. It was all pointless madness, and I know what causes madness. People descent into it when they believe that following an esteemed code of conduct will give them dignity, and the world descends into it when people like Dooku become Tyranus by deciding that they will follow their heart instead of the rules. Yet, those people who think that they are above rules are still ruled, this time by intuition instead of a comprehensive code, and because everyone is trying to enforce some law or other, the basis of all relationships becomes control. Both the Jedi and the Sith were guilty of this.
Dynamics like that tear families apart, and they never recover. That's the tragedy that Darth Tyranus represented for me, the eternal animosity that was made all the more tragic by having no reason for existing in the first place.
Even so, there is one sane reaction to this situation: compassion. I had a bittersweet relationship with Darth Tyranus. While he was there to help me fulfill my inherent fantasy of lightsaber fighting with the ultimate villain, I also needed to confront my father without actually confronting him. It was useful that I could imagine him with Christopher Lee's face. In that way, it was more like I was fighting a demon within my father. Even so, he was still my father, and I never had an outright hatred of this villain, even when he represented the worst my father could be. Even at his most evil, there was a temptation to join him. The dark side in and of itself wasn't tempting, but the chance to be in complete unity with my father was. In a perfect world, it could happen, but I have to accept that I don't live in a perfect world. Relationships that were meant to be good aren't.
I gave him the most I could, though. Everyone knows that Darth Tyranus is pretty evil, as proud as Lucifer to have fallen from the Jedi order, as tragic as Creon to destroy his own family, and as perverse as Dracula to make a deal with the devil. Yet, I forgave him. He was a great and terrible foe, but a worthy one. Because he was my father, I could never physically destroy him and he was always more powerful than me, but I could destroy him in my heart...and I didn't.
If Christopher Lee had never played Darth Tyranus, I don't know if I would have been able to safely represent the frustrations I had with both my father and myself this way.† I really don't believe any other actor could have done it. It's impossible for me to imagine what my life would have been like if I had dealt with my father differently. Thanks to Christopher Lee, I found an internal language for helping me express my understanding on fatherhood, legalism, forgiveness, and myself.
Now that he's dead, it's time for me to revisit and old belief of mine, one that I once believed was especially true of actors: You never know how much of a difference you can make in the lives of others simply by showing up. ■
*Incidentally, she called me while I was on my way to the premier of Jurassic World, so the day I learned that Tyranus died was also the day that the Tyrannosaurus came back to life.
**I began writing a more original character inspired by Darth Tyranus after I visited Disney World as a teenager and had my face photoshopped onto his. My mother printed the picture, and we had it signed by various Star Wars cast members on during the Star Wars weekends. Some of them didn't realize that the face had been swapped out, which was pretty flattering to me. That signed picture, and a much larger, framed print, are still in my room.
†It helps that I'm named after my father, and his middle name is Lee.
