How the Dark Side Twisted Anakin

One of the common points of contention by many people, including its admirers, of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith has been the sudden jolt of Anakin's turn to the dark side, which was such a dramatic swing of the pendulum that he went from being a hero to slaying children.  Normally, this is something I would agree was bad, but I never saw it that way.  I always admired the subtlety of Episode III, and to this day is still remains to me the quintessential story of a man's descent into darkness.

There were a great deal of reasons for him to turn.  They aren't the subject of this article, but for the sake of being thorough, let's get these out of the way as quickly as possible:

1. Anakin was no stranger to killing children.  He had already committed this crime in the face of his mother's death.  This is huge, and people keep on forgetting this.
2. He had every reason to believe that if any Jedi survived, even a small child, that they would come after him and Padme.
3. The Jedi Council was becoming genuinely corrupt, and Anakin genuinely felt endangered and betrayed by them.  Between his ideological disputes and his personal conflicts with the council, he lashed out with a deadly combination of righteous anger and personal vengeance.
4. He had been on the outs with the Jedi for a long time, ever since he married Padme.  Therefore, he had never fully identified with them.  Furthermore, this would have been a difficult secret to hide, and I can only imagine that the subconscious stress and paranoia would have built up over the years.
5. The spirituality of the Jedi was devoid of love or any genuinely human expression of compassion.  It was disingenuous and corrupt.  This isn't just his perspective; it's mine as well.
6. That having been said, Anakin did not believe in the spirituality of the Sith, either.  He thought that both were corrupt, and planned on completely overthrowing both.
7. He desperately wanted to save her using power only Sidious could provide him, and presumably also only the dark side.
8. Padme was keeping secrets from him that he could vaguely sense, so he was converting to the Dark Side to save the life of someone he wasn't even sure was worth saving.
9. Once Palpatine confessed his Sith identity to him, he was at that point the only person in the entire galaxy who was being fully honest with him.
10. If we want to bring psychology into this, experiments have shown that people will do extremely unethical things if an authority figure commands them to do something.
11. The reasons pile up, and they are only more numerous and more explicitly detailed when you take into account the novelizations.  Among other things, the hyporisies of the Jedi were more apparent, and Palpatine told Darth Vader that only by killing all of the younglings could he become strong enough in the Dark Side to save Padme.

These all add up.  Of course, there was one main reason for his turn to the dark side that I always saw, that was always clear to me and made it all seem to obvious and inevitable, even the killing of the Padawans, and Master Yoda explained it with one simple sentence:

"Twisted by the dark side, Young Skywalker has become."

Anakin's transformation into Darth Vader, and in fact the entire narrative of Star Wars, is presupposed around a spiritual narrative that progresses from judgment to compassion, from piety to humanity.

Let's look at the first episode, shall we?  The Jedi Order is at its prime and efficiently enforces peace throughout the galaxy.  However, their members seem alien and impersonal.  There's no humanity to them, or at least none that they haven't suppressed.  Yoda, for all his wisdom, seems to care more for order than he does for people, and they're all about the status quo.

There is an exception, however, that being Qui-Gon.  He's a spiritual man, someone whose idea of peace doesn't entirely align with the Jedi Order's.  He does things that aren't always in keeping with the letter of the Jedi Code because he first follows the directions of the Force, which often leads him to see a things that others don't, but most importantly makes him care for human beings that might otherwise be irrelevant to his mission.  Although he doesn't express it through emotion, deeply cares for people.

Enter Anakin, a young boy who has grown up with personal connections.  He still remembers his mother, and he has a reason for living that extends beyond the peace that the Jedi often talk about.  He wants to have love in his life, but he often finds this discouraged, because it gets in the way of the Jedi's utilitarian purpose of enforcing peace, both across the galaxy and within the heart.  However, to him, this Jedi peace is no peace at all, but he's willing to accept it for a while in order to someday come back and free his mother and all the other slaves, because he wants to do good.

Suddenly, the Sith, the Jedi's old rival's, reemerge, and the Jedi are shocked.  The one person who seems the least bit surprised is Qui-Gon, but otherwise, the Jedi wonder how this could have passed under their radar.  Although they won't admit it, the reason they didn't sense the Sith was due to their own arrogance.  They believed they, through the strength of their codes, had become unchallenged over the course of the last thousand years.  I always interpreted this as a sign of the times, that the Sith had reemerged partially because the Jedi had reached a point where they were spiritually at their weakest.

Now let's look at the second episode.  Some of the first seeds of doubt are placed.  Count Dooku reveals that he left the Jedi order because of their hypocrisies, and though Anakin doesn't pay much attention to him, he still hears Dooku's criticisms.  They're there.  He factually knows them, and knows that they're fallible, or at least that an old, respected member of the Order saw fault enough in them in order to leave.  And these aren't words that he can ignore completely, since Dooku trained Anakin's would-be Master, Qui-Gon, whom Anakin always admired and wished he could have had.  Qui-Gon was also ever-so-slightly rogue, so Anakin had never quite felt all too ashamed of his personal disagreements with Obi-Wan and the Jedi way.

Meanwhile, he himself is struggling with Obi-Wan, the far less intuitive counterpart to Qui-Gon.  From first-hand experience, Anakin knows that the Jedi are all about rules.  He understands that they have a point, but ultimately his relationship with Obi-Wan seems meaningless.  It's just a means to an end in order for him to become a full Jedi Knight.

He also knows that the Jedi order forbids love.  Some people think that this only refers to romantic love, but given their stiffness and refusal to be attached to anything or anyone, this clearly means all sorts of love.  People are expected to instead act out of peace and serenity, and be guided by the force.  Their reason for helping others has more to do with Isaac Asimov's three rules of robotics than anything.  There's nothing intimate there, and Anakin knows there's something wrong here.  He's known this all along, because he was never able to stop thinking about that one time he saved a planet with Padme, and this memory emotionally resonates with him.  When he encounters Padme again in person, he knows with absolute certainty that there's more to life than merely always doing your duty, and that he needs to have an intimate human relationship with this woman.  He knows that the Code forbids it, and that he would be forced to live a lie, but it doesn't matter, because he can't go on knowing that there's meaning and purpose beyond that code and not live accordingly.

So he and Padme marry.

For the third episode, the Jedi Order has become incredibly powerful, and Jedi Knights are generals.  People in power rarely ever give up power, and there were subtle ways in which the Jedi began abusing it, and rationalizing it away using their utilitarian ethics.  They still refused to act out of passion, but they acted out of judgment and a sense of superiority.  They always assumed, by default, that they had the moral high ground.

Darth Sidious knows better.  He knows that they look at humans and don't see humanity.  They're the equivalent of physicists who can only work with spherical cows in a vacuum.  They're blind to what's really going on, and he turns their inhuman rise to power against them by convincing the galaxy and their greatest Knight against them.

Anakin by this point knows that there's something wrong with the Jedi, on a deeper, more spiritual level.  He knows that the philosophy of the Order has become obsolete, and there has to be a more acceptible way of living life, so he takes a leap of faith.  He makes a swing from a morality that's purely based off of code to a morality that's based off of passion, because it's more human.  He allows himself to completely give in to it, and though it feels good, it actually only corrupts him further, because it draws him inward.

Yoda begins to realize that something is wrong, too.  In the novelization, he fights Sidious and realizes that the Jedi order is lacking...hope.  Simple, naked humanity.  He realizes that the Sith had grown, that they studied themselves and Jedi lore.  He knew that the Sith understood something he didn't.  He realized that he had lost the fight before he had even started, in fact before he was even born, because the Jedi had grown more powerful and yet were stuck in the ways of meaningless tradition, and he realized that though he fought for order, he didn't necessarily fight for truth.  He wasn't necessarily the avatar for the Light Side that he had always figured himself to be.

So he flees, and takes this revelation with him.  And then, realizing what he had missed, he discovers the ghost of Qui-Gon, who says to him "The ultimate goal of the Sith, yet they can never achieve it; it comes only by the release of self, not the exaltation of self.  It comes through compassion, not greed.  Love is the answer to the darkness."

Anakin, meanwhile, destroys himself.  Having fallen so far into his savior complex, everyone has become an enemy.  He knows that the Jedi are corrupt, but he's not stupid, and he knows that he must overthrow the emperor.  He's essentially on his own side, but then Padme dies, and he believes that it is his fault.  He falls into despair, and chooses a side.  He accepts the fate he made for himself, and ultimately, instead of being someone who's above the conflict between the orders, his impossible savior complex ensures that he's a member of either one or the other.

We knew that he had a savior complex.  We knew it from the very beginning, because he said that one day he would free all the slaves.  To some extent, he felt morally responsible for all of the good and bad within the universe, and wen he began listening to this voice, it was inevitable that he would turn to a philosophy that would rationalize some way for him to take extreme action.  Either the Jedi or the Sith could have fulfilled this purpose for him.

Nineteen years pass.

It's the fourth episode.  Grand Moff Tarkin tells Darth Vader something that's surprisingly insightful: "You are all there is left of your old religion."  He says this in such a way as if this one religion covers both the Jedi and the Sith, and of course, it makes sense.  They were, all along, two sides of the same coin.  The Sith had passion, but it was still part of a code.  It was still part of a grand plan to becoming a proper practitioner of the Force.  It still, ultimately, drew its adherents inward.  Whether he was Anakin or Vader, Luke's father would have been confined to a religion obsessed with power or perfection, two sides of the same coin.

Anakin's son starts a similar journey, introduced to the ways of the Jedi later in life and filled with hopes and aspirations beyond their code of spirituality.  Obi-Wan introduces him to the Force, but explains little in the way of the Jedi.  He is in fact secretive.  Without even becoming a Jedi, Luke learns to use the Force, and its name is evoked now no longer by an exclussive order, but by the common man of the Rebel Alliance.

In the fifth episode, Luke trains under Master Yoda, who teaches him to reach out with his feelings and to feel the life surrounding him.  He doesn't teach him much of the Jedi way, and focuses more on the Force.  He's still vague and mysterious, though, not sure what to tell him.  Luke isn't receiving the standard training given to a Padawan because Yoda has always trained his pupils a certain way, but has never gone beyond the traditions of the Jedi order.

Luke realizes that there was something that the Jedi were withholding from him when Darth Vader reveals his fatherhood to him.  He escapes with Leia and disappears for a while.

In the sixth episode, he finally returns.  Without ever being officiated, he now claims to be a Jedi Knight.  He identifies with the cause of the Jedi, but he was never instructed in the ways of the order.  His identity is, ultimately, with his friends.  Like his father before him, he chose to have intimate relationships in his life, and he chose allow for people to come close to his heart.  In this case, he risks himself to save Han Solo, and reunites his close circle.

Yet, his desire for intimate, meaningful relationships isn't satisfied yet.  He selflessly identifies with his friends, but there's one more relationship that he must establish, out of love.  He desires to have a connection with his own father.  This was never the Jedi way, since Padawans were taken as infants from their parents.  Now Luke, like his father, wants something that he seemingly cannot have.  Anakin wanted his mother, and Luke wants his father, which at this point seems even more impossible, given that his father is also his enemy.  Yoda has begun to see in the power of love, but he doesn't have enough faith to tell Luke to treat Vader as Anakin Skywalker.  Luke ignores this advice, because he's become more compassionate.  He begins to see others as more important than himself, and places his identity in their needs.  As far as he's concerned, Anakin needs to be freed of Darth Vader.

Through his persistence, through his sincere heart for him, Luke's reaching out and calling his father by his name changes Anakin's heart.  Darth Vader dies, and Anakin is reborn.  Realizing that he has hope for something meaningful in his life again, he sheds the Sith identity that he had accepted in defeat, and saves his son from Sidious.  He himself dies, but becomes one with the Force, and Luke lives on as a new sort of Jedi, as someone who was defined by his friends, his family, and by the love they all had for each other, not by the hopeless, faithless traditions artificially enforced upon the old Jedi Order.  The Skywalkers didn't just destroy the Sith; they brought balance to the Force.

And now we have a seventh episode, which reveals something interesting.  I'm not huge into spoilers, and know almost literally nothing about this future movie, but I do know the title.  A title like The Force Awakens suggests that the Force isn't entirely impersonal, that it might be something of its own entity (personally, I hope that it's played by John Williams).  So this begs me to look back at Revenge of the Sith and remember my original interpretation of Anakin's transformation.

Reading the novelization, the clash between Yoda and Sidious was described as a moment when the fundamental forces of the universe itself confronted each other.  There's more going on here than just the human human players.  They are merely avatars for something much larger.  This is also how I saw the fight between Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, and Darth Maul, as an expression of spiritual warfare.  It had always helped that there was quasi-religious music playing for these encounters.

So let's step back for a moment and think about this religiously.  I'm not going to evoke real-world religions here, but I'm going to assume for a moment that the Force is real.  Luke didn't just bring balance to the affairs of man, but to the Force itself, which suggests to me that there was a conflict going on in another realm.  Maybe there are two manifestations of the Force, or maybe the Force is one entity divided within itself as it is evoked in different ways.  Generally speaking, it has been treated as one thing, just with two known sides.

The Sith like to think of themselves as people who direct the Force, but by and large it can't be controlled.  Still, Sidious was a mystic, the type of person who dabbled with the dark arts of the Force.  He studies it and realized that there was more to it than what the Jedi ever realized.  Suffice to say, the Force has mysterious qualities and, I believe, acts at times as if it has a will and a wisdom of its own.

When he changed Anakin's name, the novel says that he searched the Force itself in order to come up with "Vader."  Ergo, the Force named him, and if a new name from the Force itself indicates the creation of an entirely new being, then this means that Anakin was literally transformed.  Exactly what this means is something of a religious mystery, but I do believe that he was no longer driven by normal psychology at that point.  The Dark Side of the Force was alive in him and burning.  On one hand, yes, he still held on completely to his human identity, but in some sort of symbiotic way, he was also an entity of the Dark Side.

This isn't necessarily something I would consider a possession, but it was still a supernatural influence, something very mystical.  Darth Sidious had learned to cloak his evil using the Dark Side, and I am also sure that he was able to seduce Anakin through more than just intellectual argument and psychological play, but by bringing him into the presence of the blacker end of the Force.  Most people know that the Force can be used to cast simple mind-tricks that render people intellectually fooled, but I believe it to be more than that.  The Force can interact with someone spiritually, and transform their spirituality.  When that happens, their priorities change, their decisions change, they change.  I believe that Anakin was under that influence.

And it's not as if Sidious had nothing to go on.  He can transform someone's spiritual directives, but it isn't mind-control.  He merely brought out the culmination of all the darkness that was already in Anakin and united it with the momentum of the Force.  Anakin already had a savior complex driving him, demanding a utopia at all costs.  He already had passion.  He already had resentments.  All it took was for him to confess to himself that he had a change in faith, and once his faith changed, the way his inner spirit interacted with the Force changed.  With these darker confessions connected to the Force, darkness both came to the surface and rushed into him.  Like I said, with the Force guiding him, he wasn't subject to the normal laws of psychology.

This is how I always saw it, that he was under this influence.  Some people might think that I'm over-analyzing it, but no, these were my immediate thoughts even as a kid.  I honestly thought that Anakin was taken in by the Dark Side and twisted into the unnatural Frankenstein's Monster of Darth Vader.

To think, so much of this could have been avoided if he had known the difference between passion that draws our humanity inward and compassion that extends our humanity outward.  But you know, maybe he never would have become one of the few people ever to become one with the Force, and without him, maybe Yoda and Obi-Wan never would have discovered it, either.

Let's see what happens now when the Force awakens.  Make it look like John Williams, please.