PT Do you Consider Anakin Being placed inside the Darth Vader Suit an Iconic Star Wars Moment?

Are you always so literal in your interpretations of message board posts? I say Anakin's an idiot, and you say he is instead a fool. And then you went on and on about the pyschopath comment as if you were writing a research paper on the subject to explain how Anakin doesn't fit the scientific defintion of that term.

My opinion is that Anakin is a big-time head case and that his turn to the Dark Side was poorly done and unrealistic. I have stated all the reasons why I feel that way and have nothing further to add. Gonna move on from this thread.

 

It was not that article in particular, but I do recall reading that a diagnosis of psychopathy could only be made at age 18 and on a person with a history of serious behavioral disorders. I'll see if I can find that article, but if not, I'll retract that particular point.

I wouldn't say that Anakin showed a history of genocidal tendencies. He hardly went and slaughtered all the Tuskens on Tatooine. And he did not hate the Tuskens for their culture or race. He hated that particular tribe because those individuals had captured his mother and tortured her to death, which is quite a different thing. Even in the OT, when Anakin has significant political power, we see that the Tuskens are far from being wiped out. Hardly an example of genocide. An evil act -- no doubt about it. But not genocide.

Additionally, Anakin recognized that what he did was wrong at the time, but felt powerless to control his hate and rage against the Tuskens whom he blamed for killing his mother. This actually works against the contention that Anakin is a psychopath because he would not care that his mother were suffering -- he would feel no empathy towards her and her situation. And he certainly wouldn't have snuck into a camp to try to rescue her. The Tusken slaughter was primarily an emotional response to overwhelming pain (pain that Yoda could feel from across the galaxy) and a psychopath -- who experiences shallow emotions -- would never have felt the loss so deeply.

In regards to the Jedi -- now that is genocide -- but, again, that's not indicative of psychopathy. There are countless examples of genocide (particularly in the 20th century) and they are large-scale government-sponsored operations. Not only psychopaths participated in such heinous acts.

I'm not saying that the children in the article didn't have their reasons for doing what they did, but their behavior is starkly different than Anakin's. They are highly manipulative and they have extreme emotional control (and display only shallow emotions). They exploit others readily and without guilt. Anakin, despite his many and extreme flaws, does feel guilt over his actions and is extremely emotional.

One thing I think is important to point out too is that one of the defining characteristics of a psychopath is that they do not possess the physiological response to anxiety or fear that other people experience. Anakin, it seems to me, possess a plethora of anxiety and fear.

I do think Anakin experienced a bought of temporary insanity -- a psychotic break -- when his mother died. That situation was extremely traumatic, not just because he helplessly feels her dying in his arms in terrible pain, but because there has also been a month-long intensive build-up of stress and anguish.

Edit: Here's a link to an article regarding a history of conduct disorder and antisocial personality disorder. It's not exactly the same thing as psychopathy, but most psychopaths will meet the criteria for ASPD.

http://forensis.org/PDF/published/2009_AssessingAntiso.pdf

In regards to ASPD, it states thus:

"A clinician arrives at a diagnosis of ASPD by verifying that the patient meets specific criteria outlined in the DSM-IV-TR (APA, 2000), which include (a) a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others since age 15; (b) a history of conduct disorder prior to the age of 15; and, (c) age 18 or older."

Additionally, the Hare Psychopathy Checklist lists early behavioral problems as an indicator of psychopathy.

Okay, that's cool. I just thought we were, you know, discussing our various points of view and interpretations. This is a discussion board, after all.

I just noted the psychopath point because it's something I often see brought up when discussing villains. People say "so and so" villain is a psychopath. And it seems to me that, in part, this is said to make the case that there is something wrong with the villain. Not just in terms of how he or she was raised but that he/she was born "broken" and "different" from other people. I just find it an interesting topic to ponder because I think it says a lot about a person's worldview and how they look at media.

 

I like this scene for the most part. But the "DO NOT WANT" ruins its iconic status for me.

 

Ah, but you don't have to slaughter all the people on earth to commit genocide either. Not all tusken tribes were exactly the same, or they would all group together. If you kill all of blackfoot native Americans, you're still committing genocide. The blackfoot don't see themselves as the same people as the redfoot native Americans. Also, I don't think the children had anything to do with kidnapping and holding Schmi hostage. But Anakin hated them all the same.

I'm not quite so sure psychopaths don't feel much. Although, from what I've read about it, (which granted, isn't much) what you're saying seems to be the truth. I've been in much the same position that Anakin was in. I lost my mother, who was the most important person in my life, I filed a law suite, and there were lawyers and judges involved. I hate the people who I viewed were responsible for my mother's death, but no way could I ever consider murdering them and their families. What shows me that he is closer to a psychotic person than not, is that there is no line that he won't cross in order to get what he wants. That makes him more than just evil. If he had to kill everyone else so that he and Padme could live together forever, he would do it.

I personally would consider anyone who takes part in genocide a psychopath. Genocide is systematic, premeditated, and unnecessary murder of a society. People can blame it on the government and spread it down through the chain of command, so that what they did doesn't seem so bad, but if you're purposefully wiping out an innocent society full of noncombatants, you've got mental problems so far as I'm concerned. A lot of these same people would blast Hitler for what he did.

The problem is, Anakin never comes out of that psychotic break. He goes back to it again and again, until it is a part of his psychological makeup. Anakin was not exactly like the children in that article. True. But the article didn't necessarily prove that a psycho has to follow the exact behavior those children displayed. It didn't really even prove that those children were in fact psychotic.

 

I agree with the post that Anakin's fall, and the purge of the Jedi seemed to happen too quickly. ROTS suffered, in my opinion, from the fact that the first half had too many cartoony elements (cough cough Grievous) similar to the prior two films, while the second half strove to tie to the OT and match its style and tone. It was kind of a disjointed experience for me. Regardless, those final moments where Vader exhaled from his mask and then Force tantrumed made me nerd all over the floor.

And Rachel In Red, I would totally go all Darth Vader for you. It would be just you and me, and my new Empire.

 

In regards to genocide, though, motive plays an enormous role. The intention with genocide is to destroy a culture or a race simply because one is of that culture or race. Anakin did not hate those Tuskens because they were Tuskens. He hated them because they killed his mother. Because they kidnapped her, tortured her, and stood by and did nothing to help her as she died. And he flew into a blind rage and slaughtered them. An evil act to be sure. But there was not systematic planning. And that's pretty key.

For example, do you remember in 2012 the American soldier who was drunk and murdered 16 Afghani men, women, and children? His actions, in this case, were premeditated and they were murder, but they weren't an example of genocide. Genocide has an intended purpose -- to destroy a culture. Anakin's actions weren't reflective of that.

In regards to the children, that was undoubtedly wrong no matter which way you cut it but, again, the act was committed in a rage, not with a focused intention to destroy the Tusken culture and nation.

Also, I have to admit that I dislike the use of the term genocide to describe what Anakin did because I find it denigrates victims of genocide. The Jews weren't targeted by the Germans because they were kidnapping, torturing, and killing German women. And the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide certainly weren't conducted by a single mentally unbalanced individual who broke under intense stress in the heat of the moment.

From what I've read, psychopaths are neurologically different and don't experience fear and anxiety. They don't have a "voice in their head" telling them that they shouldn't do things because those things are wrong. If Anakin were a psychopath, I can't imagine him confessing his crimes to Padmé for example. Note that I'm not saying that what Anakin did was right by any means. It wasn't. But the larger point I'm trying to make is that people in general can do truly awful things (without being psychopaths) and that circumstances and past experiences often play a huge role in how we respond.

I would say that Anakin is not necessarily a psychotic person in AOTC, but that he does suffer a bout of psychosis -- a loss of his faculties -- with his mother's death, which is induced by a stressful ten-year separation (during which she is in slavery and he has no contact), a month of horrific visions, stressful discussions with the Larses (and the dehumanization of the Tuskens during this conversation), and him sensing her terrible pain while being powerless to prevent her from dying -- failing to save her. All this pushes him over the edge and he snaps at that point.

I would also say that the fact that Anakin feels the need to justify his actions -- to link them to the greater good through ending the war and establishing the Empire -- indicates that he is not completely lost. He still wants to be the good guy and help people. The trouble is, he's not willing to sacrifice for it and is psychologically incapable of handling the fallout. What I think it comes down to, in many ways, is Anakin looking at himself and wondering if he would rather live as a murderer or know that he let someone he loved die. And I think that's a very difficult thing for him to live with after what happened to his mother.

Ah, but that's the disquieting nature of genocide -- those who committed such acts were capable of love. There's a famous quote concerning the Holocaust where a survivor questions how a man could love and protect his own child while at the same time striking and killing a Jewish child. And it's a difficult thing to reconcile.

And it's not just genocide. A survey in South Africa, for example, found that 25% of men in that country admitted to having committed rape.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/17/south-africa-rape-survey

I don't deny (and in fact I quite agree with you) that such individuals have mental problems. But I don't think they're psychopaths. I think they are people whose behavior reflects their submission to and acceptance of an immoral worldview.

I would say he comes out of it following his mother's death when he resolves to fight in the Clone Wars to protect the Republic. But the threat to Padmé's life causes a resurfacing of that imbalance. And when Palpatine offers him an intellectual framework in which to justify his atrocities, I think he readily succumbs because he is too weak to resist at that point.

The children in that article aren't psychotic in the sense that they have lost touch with reality. But they do have severe psychological issues due to neurological deficiencies. I don't think that Anakin had those deficiencies. I think he was mentally unwell and unbalanced, but not due to a lack of proper "circuitry."

 

I think what the tuskens did, pushed Anakin to hate them because they were tuskens, and did what tuskens were known for doing. Had tuskens of a different tribe been near at hand, I believe he would have murdered them as well. Anakin wasn't making any distinctions between guilty and not guilty in this instance, even after he murdered them and justified it all to Padme. "They're animals, and I slaughtered them like animals!" He would do it all again.

It's unclear how many tuskens Anakin had to kill in order to extinguish the entire tribe. But somehow I doubt that there were only 16 Afghani people in that society where the American soldier found himself drunk. The tuskens formed individual and unique tribes. Usually when a tribe breaks off from another, they form a new culture over time. I don't think the 16 Afghani were an example of this, though I'm unfamiliar with that incident.

And yet Anakin expressed the same distaste for those people even after he brought his mother's body home, even when his rage should have passed. I see nothing in him that makes me believe he would have ceased murdering if another tribe were near enough. It just so happens that Anakin did not have the means, nor the time, to hunt down every tusken across the world. But if he could push an automatic KILL ALL TUSKENS BUTTON, I think he would have. And I think he knew Padme would definitely not approve of such a course. If you take Anakin's actions as Darth Vader into account, you can see what he will do when he does have the means, and the time, and no need to justify himself to Padme, when he hunted and killed former jedi knights long after the empire had established itself, simply because they showed up on his radar. He wasn't one for leaving well enough alone.

The German's had their reasons for targeting Jews. Just because we don't agree with their reason's, and some people might agree with Anakin's reasons for killing tuskens, doesn't mean that he did not commit Genocide. The different tusken tribes were not all one culture. I'm part Cherokee. I am not part of the same culture as someone who is Sioux. Though some people might like to group all native Americans into a tidy box called "Indians" it's not the case. If you kill one tribe, one society, one way of life, you've committed genocide. It would be like saying that killing all people in France is not genocide because there are still people who are similar enough in England. Just because a people is European, doesn't make them all part of the same society. It's the same with native Americans, and the same with tuskens. Anakin couldn't kill them all, but I think he would have liked to.

As I've noted earlier, I don't know the finer points of what it is to be a psychotic. I haven't done much research. But I'm also not sure anyone completely knows what a psychotic feels or doesn't. The most I can think anyone would be able to say is that psychotics don't feel fear and anxiety the same way most people generally do, and therefore their reactions are different. I think when people display a pattern of inexcusable and horrendous behavior, there is no justifying it. Anakin eventually came to the point where he didn't even try to anymore. After Padme's death, he considered it pointless to justify his actions, and he felt nothing for those he hurt. That sounds like a psychopath to me because all his reasons for committing atrocities were gone. In AotC what he wanted was for Padme to love him. He wanted that more than anything else. But he suspected she wouldn't condone genocide under any circumstances. He ended up getting her sympathy, however, which ended up getting him what he wanted. He influenced her point of view over what had happened, by crying. I can certainly understand feeling sympathy for him in that moment, but I don't think she necessarily agreed with his justification of it all.

I would say his actions in AotC was a step toward him becoming a true adult psychotic. He displays similar actions several times throughout his life, and each time he cares less and less.

I never got the sense that he cared for people and the greater good, if those people and the greater good stood in the way of what he wanted. I've always seen Anakin/Vader as someone who did whatever it took to achieve his own personal goals above all other things.

I believe Hitler, who supposedly loved his wife, ended up killing her before he killed himself. There was really no purpose in killing her, so far as I understand. In that sense, I can't really say that he loved her. But I would be interested to find out if it has been proven that it is impossible for a psychotic to feel love, or if they experience it on a totally different level. To me, Anakin's love for Padme was a bit off the wall. Some people don't take his comment that "i can't live without her" seriously, but it's not something you admit to the Dark Lord of the Sith unless you truly mean it. I don't think he knew what kind of person he would be without her. His love was revealed as something more akin to a warped possessiveness.

Our definitions of what makes a psychopath are different, which is why we seem to keep going in circles, but there seems to be some dispute over what makes a psychopath in professional circles. I'm not positive on what exactly makes a psychopath a psychopath, and not something else. But I don't personally believe that one has to show intense behavioral problems as a child. I, for instance, think it may be possible for a person to develop into a psychopath. Vader, especially later in life, seems to be a perfect example of this. There is no justification for the things he did, and there is no remorse behind his mask. The PT is something of a documentation of his fall into madness. I don't really even think it was any submission to an immoral world view on his part. Even 20 years after Padme's death, I think he was still trying to "make things the way he wanted them to be" regardless of what was right.

I don't really see him coming out of it. I think because Padme was willling to live a lie with him, he was somewhat comfortable dealing with a life of facades. when his comfortable facade was disrupted, his problems began to show through the cracks in his personality, and soon things began to fall apart, and he fell apart with them.

Is it a 100% sure thing that all of those children would end up psychotic later in life? If not, then perhaps Anakin would not need to suffer from such mental deficiencies in order to go crazy. If even a few of them ends up becoming a normal contributing member of society in the future it would be difficult to use that article on what constitutes a psychotic.

 

Things getting a little TLDR in here.

Anakin's becoming of Vader could have happened a hundred different ways, but Revenge of the Sith is irrevocably the way it happened. How are we as fans going to deal with that? Well I prefer to deal with it with as little mental gymnastics as possible. Palpatine duped Anakin, forced him into a situation where he would have no other choices and nowhere to go home to. The black suit is the last nail in the coffin - no, it IS the coffin.

You can criticize the finer points of film direction all day long and, while I acknowledge that fact, I cannot begin to care. It's Star Wars, I'm a Star Wars fan, I surrender to Star Wars, and if you don't get it, you can move along.

 

In terms of the scene when the mask and helmet are sealed into place on Anakin's head: at the Midnight screening for the true fans, you could hear a pin drop during that sequence. That's how compelling it was. It's perhaps my favorite moment in Revenge Of The Sith.

 

That part of the scene is awesome. The rest of it is not.

 

As shown in the movies? No. As described by Matt Stover? Yes.

 

Strover's novelizations is IMHO the greatest piece of star wars literature made. He seems to be able to get into the heads of Anakin and Obi-wan in a much better way then any of the writers who wrote PT era novels. Lucerno is close, especially with the two bookends to the ROTS novel but no other writers seem to get the feel for those two very important characters.

 

Well, since I am a fan of the movie, I'm not going to agree with knocking it, but as far as the book, I totally agree. I've listened to the audio version about 6 times while commuting to work, it is amazing.

Not only did they do a fantastic job with the characters you mention, but also with Dooku and Palp's relationship, and the complexities of the reasons that Dooku left the Jedi (and Dooku's perceptions and outlook in general).

While again I am not agreeing with those knocking the movie, I would have liked it better if they had done a Lord of the Rings kind of thing and included the whole story in a 3-3.5 hour movie; that would have made for a more cogent telling of the story. I think many don't like it because they just don't get it. I understood the story from the movie (although many clearly didn't), but I think it would have been better to make a more comprehensive movie.

 

It was a dark and sad scene, and at the same time it was beautiful. While the twins are being born, Vader is being put into an evil looking suit, and Padme dies. I'd say it was one of the most iconic scenes in the saga.

 

I Agree

 

Padme and Anakin both die within those two scenes. Padme dies givings birth to the new hopes and Anakin dies becoming the Sith Lord he was tricked into becoming, ending up being Darth Vader. So symbolic.

 

I had to haiku-ize that -- albeit awkwardly:

Ani Skywalker
Dies becoming the Sith Lord
Ends up Darth Vader

There.
Most. Spoilerish. Haiku. Ever.
This one, not haiku.

 

To answer the question: yes.

 

The birth of Luke & Leia interwoven with the "birth of Darth Vader!! Perhaps a bit cheesey, but could also be argued that it's the start of the force being balanced!

I know he became Vader proir to the suit, but for anyone that grew up with the classic trilogy the suit is what makes Vader the iconic figuire!

 

I agree. Anakin Skywalker without the suit wouldn't be Vader. The suit was Vader.

 

If we set aside the execution of the scene, it surely has to be considered iconic. For years not only was the suit Vader, but Vader suited Vader WAS Star Wars.

 

When RoTS came out, I was only nine years old and had not seen the original trilogy yet. I remember watching these scene with my siblings and cousins and being completely broken-hearted that Anakin turned to the Dark side like that. Sure the execution wasn't perfect at all, but that scene stayed with us for the longest time and still breaks my heart every now and then.

 

Glad to see I'm not the only one who had to go through the "Anakin Skywalker's Poor Life Choices" talk!

I guess it affects kids differently, but like your oldest RoTS was my favorite despite being a bit traumatic. The fight between Obi-Wan and Anakin was just too fun to imitate!