BTS Moebius's Willow and TPM

Given Madmartigan's probable sterility from an illness caused by a poisoned blade wound, it's likely that Sorsha was to be similarly sterile as well. Presumably Bavmorda would have inoculated her troops against the poison on Picts' blades, by infecting them with a mild dose. Rather like the 18th century method of inoculating against smallpox (which furthers the parallel with George Washington). Sorsha, having been inoculated as as soldier in Bavmorda's army, would herself be unable of conceiving a child.

 

The poison on the Picts' blades may have been from a plant known as blackroot--which in the final film is the name of something the much more roguish Madmartigan feeds to Elora, over Willow's strenuous objections.

Sorsha being inoculated and sterilized by her mother once again ties into Lucas's favorite symbolism, the Freudian Oedipus complex--in which the son fears that the father will castrate him. After all, Darth Vader cutting off Luke's arm in ESB is a classic example of symbolic castration of a son by his father.

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In the novelization and comic adaptation, when Willow and Madmartigan are captives in Sorsha's camp, General Kael (who had become human by this point) thinks he recognizes Madmartigan. But Madmartigan gives a false name, and Kael is fooled--a good thing, because Kael wants revenge on Madmartigan, as "he stole one of my women."

And in the earlier third-revision script, Kael (who is still described as bestial) viciously hits Sorsha in the face when she delivers Elora Danan to him at the camp. Later, as Willow is trying to escape his bonds, we faintly hear an argument between Sorsha and Kael in one of the tents of the camp.

Given all this, I suspect there was originally some subtext where the beast-like King Kael was sexually abusing Sorsha--rather after the fashion in which the slug-like Jabba the Hutt is implied to have assaulted Leia in ROTJ.

So originally, while the heroes are chained helplessly in Kael's camp, Kael would be seen entering Sorsha's tent, and the sounds of her screaming would be distantly overheard. Afterward, Willow and Madmartigan would escape their chains, and Madmartigan, entering Sorsha's tent to retrieve Elora Danan, would stumble upon Sorsha sleeping naked.

This would correspond to Madmartigan's own, much happier prior sexual experience, as the father of a child in his original backstory. And by ending up romantically involved with Sorsha, Madmartigan would indeed have stolen Kael's woman, as the novelization and comic put it.

Of course, Madmartigan is the one to kill Kael, just as in the 1974 SW rough draft script, Annikin Starkiller slays the rapists of Leia Aquilae.

 

In the original finale, Willow and Meegosh would presumably have been brought in to meet the royally enthroned Madmartigan and Sorsha (like Frodo and Sam meeting with King Elessar on the Field of Cormallen in The Lord of the Rings). Since Sorsha would be wearing a metallic golden wig, as well as now missing one eye, the two Nelwyns would fail to recognize her--until she pulled off her wig and revealed her bald head. This reflects the failure of the peasants Matashichi and Tahei to recognize the enthroned Princess Yuki at the end of The Hidden Fortress.

The idea of the identity-concealing wig was later recycled for Madmartigan's disguise as a tavern wench in the final film (although he wears a kerchief instead of a wig).

 

The duel between Kael and Madmartigan passes silently in the final film, but there were probably originally some words exchanged between them. Presumably Kael would have boasted to Madmartigan that he had repeatedly ravished Sorsha, saying something like "Every night for seven years she has been mine, and every night she screams."

This is actually a reference to Homer's Odyssey, in which Odysseus is captured by the sea-nymph Calypso and kept as her prisoner and sex slave for seven years, until Zeus commands her to let him return home to Ithaca and his wife Penelope. Another Odyssey reference of course occurs when Bavmorda turns the heroes' army into pigs, just as the sorceress Circe does to Odysseus's sailors.

Kael's name is even similar to the first syllable of "Calypso," but is of course modified by the influence of Robert E. Howard's character King Kull.

Sorsha is presumably around 25 years old, the same age as Marion Ravenwood in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

 

It occurs to me that Madmartigan probably underwent a gradual disfigurement similar to Sorsha's over the course of the early script.

During the battle with the two-headed dragon at Fin Raziel's tree in the desert wasteland, the dragon would likely have burned Madmartigan's left arm with its fiery breath. In the third-revision script, an echo of this is seen in Madmartigan's introduction, when some Picts ride by his cage and set his arms on fire.

When Madmartigan, Willow, and Meegosh are captives in the camp of the Nockmaar soldiers, Madmartigan would probably try to escape at one point. King Kael would punish him for this by branding him on the forehead with the black-sun insignia of Bavmorda's armies. This is similar to how Marion was threatened with a hot poker by Toht in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and acts as a parallel to Kael's implied rape of Sorsha in her tent at the same point in the film. The brand on Madmartigan's forehead from this point forward would also parallel Sorsha's own forehead tattoo.

During the battle for Tir Asleen, when Madmartigan is knocked down by an Orc just before Sorsha saves his life, the Orc would hit him across the face, knocking out a tooth. In the finale, Madmartigan would be seen with a replacement true-silver tooth, similar to the several silver teeth now in Sorsha's mouth. (In the third-revision script Madmartigan removes a loose tooth from his mouth to make a baby rattle for Elora Danan.)

The detail of a hero missing a tooth was one that Leigh Brackett in particular liked, as seen with the protagonist Ciaran of her short story The Jewel of Bas (whose lover Mouse had a thief's brand on her forehead).

Later during the same battle, another Orc would cut off Madmartigan's rear ponytail of long hair. During the finale we would see Madmartigan with short-cropped hair, with one remaining braid over his ear (the other having been severed by Kael in their final duel). This hairstyle is of course that of the Padawans in the SW prequels, whereas the ponytail-and-braids hairstyle he'd sported earlier in the film is seen on early concept art of Obi-Wan Kenobi for TPM.

This total brings Madmartigan's wounds to seven, and Sorsha's to nine (not counting their mutual poison-induced sterility and sex-related griefs--rape in Sorsha's case, the loss of a family in Madmartigan's). Madmartigan's disfigurement serves as a less extreme version of Sorsha's, with wounds in most of the same places (hair, nose, teeth, limbs).

The Oedipal symbolism is different for each character, though--Madmartigan is wounded in the arms, reflecting symbolic Freudian castration anxiety, whereas Sorsha is wounded in the eyes and feet, as Oedipus himself was in Greek myth. Each of them is wounded twice in these organs, but on one side more severely than the other. Thus Sorsha loses one eye entirely and her other is damaged; her feet are cut and scarred, and one leg is left with a permanent limp; Madmartigan loses his sword arm, and his other arm is burned.

During the finale, the visual model for the opening of the scene, featuring a coronation, would presumably be Jacques-Louis David's portrait of the coronation of Napoleon. Madmartigan would be crowned first, kneeling to receive his crown, and then Sorsha would advance, limping, to kneel before him (thus revealing the scars on the soles of her bare feet). Madmartigan would remove the golden wig from her bald head, and then place a crown on her head instead.

 

The first-draft script of Willow seems to have been passed around Hollywood in the early 1990s, resulting in a spate of works in the later half of the decade that were seemingly influenced in some way by it. James Cameron drew on it for Titanic; Neil Gaiman drew on it for Stardust; and quite possibly the makers of Stargate SG-1 did so as well, given the forehead tattoos on the Jaffa in that show. Those actually came in two varieties, as a tattoo and as a brand, corresponding to the variants of Bavmorda's insignia seen on Madmartigan's and Sorsha's foreheads.

But there may also have been another late-90s pop culture phenomenon influenced by the early Willow script: namely George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire (aka Game of Thrones), whose first book was published in 1996. The parallels show most clearly in the case of Jaime Lannister, the knight who loses his sword hand and gets a golden replacement, and whose traveling companion is the amazingly ugly warrior woman Brienne.

This suggests to me a detail of the original finale of Willow that may have been incorporated into Martin's books.

As the script's finale involves both a wedding and a coronation, Sorsha would need a fabulous white dress worthy of a wedding. But if I'm correct, weddings in the world of Willow, like those in Westeros, would involve the bride's father removing a cloak from her shoulders, and her groom putting another cloak around her, symbolically taking her under his protection.

The only catch is that, in the Willow version, the bride would be bare-breasted beneath her cloak, wearing only a white skirt. This goes back to Leia Aquilae's similarly scanty attire during the climax of the 1974 SW rough draft.

So Sorsha would be dressed in a white skirt and a blue cape, bare-breasted and barefoot, wearing her father's Elvish gemstone around her neck. After Madmartigan's coronation, her father would walk her over to Madmartigan and, as she knelt, remove the blue cape and her golden wig. Madmartigan in turn would then place a silver crown on her head and a white cape around her shoulders.

The nudity in this scene suggests that Sorsha accepts Madmartigan in a way she didn't during the earlier tent scene. It also has something of Doc Smith's Lensman about it: Smith's narrator remarks at one point that more cultures of the galaxy eschew clothing than wear it, and protagonist Kim Kinnison is said to have attended numerous gala affairs "tastefully attired in his Lens."

Incidentally, Bavmorda was probably imagined by Lucas as dressing entirely in red--like the witch of the Lilim in Gaiman's Stardust, or Melisandre the Red Priestess in A Song of Ice and Fire.

 

Actually, the finale probably wouldn't have featured Sorsha's father removing a cloak from her shoulders--she'd just be naked to the waist, and Madmartigan would pin a royal blue cape around her neck. Sorsha's dad would likely still remove her wig, though.

The blue cape and white skirt incorporate traditional colors used for depicting the Virgin Mary. Lucas does seem to like dressing up his heroines as Madonnas. Moreover, in 15th century Europe it became fashionable to depict Mary bare-breasted and suckling the infant Jesus, as in the famous painting of the Virgin which used the French king's mistress Agnes Sorel for a likeness. (Said painting also features Mary with a high shaved forehead and wearing a crown, creating the impression that she is bald.)

Aside from being a typical coronation rite, the donning of cloaks in this instance seems to be derived from something in The Lord of the Rings, when Frodo and Sam change out of their orc-rags at the Feast of Cormallen, and are given silver crowns and their old grey Lorien-cloaks.

Madmartigan's own coronation robes would be golden, like the cloth-of-gold outfit Leigh Brackett describes the Emperor as wearing in the first draft of ESB.

Sorsha's scanty outfit in the finale would be foreshadowed earlier in the film. On the journey to Nockmaar to rescue Elora Danan, Madmartigan would confess his infertility to her, fearing that she wouldn't want to marry him--and she would admit that she herself had been sterilized via inoculation, as were all Bavmorda's troops. The scene would end with Sorsha telling him that she would dress "elf-fashion" at their wedding. (Meanwhile, Meegosh and the Elf King would confer, and the Elf King would give Meegosh his magical deadly sword to replace the one Sorsha broke earlier.)

 

At the end of their conversation during the journey to Nockmaar, Madmartigan would ask Sorsha if she wanted to be his queen, once they had gotten through the impending battle. She would say yes, as long as she got to wear Elvish dresses instead of the cumbersome ones worn by human women. (It's a corset joke, but it also sets up the fact that, like Leigh Brackett's Martian women, Elven women customarily go around topless.)

Another small correction: during the finale Sorsha wouldn't be wearing the wig in the beginning. Madmartigan would put it on her head, place the cloak around her shoulders, and then set her crown on top of the wig. Rather as the Holy Therns of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom wear golden circlets atop their yellow wigs.

Madmartigan himself would receive a crown, a cloak, and a sword as part of his coronation ceremony. At one point he would draw the sword with his left hand, and use it to salute Willow and Meegosh. This is in line with how Aragorn places Frodo and Sam on his own throne and bends the knee to them at the Feast of Cormallen in The Lord of the Rings (whose equivalent in Peter Jackson's film adaptation is the "you bow to no one" scene). It also recalls the Barsoomian ceremony of saluting a great warrior with drawn sword, seen at the end of The Warlord of Mars when John Carter is elevated to Warlord of Barsoom.

An echo of Sorsha's wedding dress may be seen in Dermot Power's Episode II concept art for a Sith Witch (later Asajj Ventress), which, in addition to the character's bald head, features a long flowing skirt and a skin-tight upper body covering.

 

With her white skirt, blue cape, bare chest, jeweled necklace, and golden wig, Sorsha in the finale was probably meant to look like Yul Brynner in the 1956 big-budget religious epic The Ten Commandments. This furthers the theme of her costumes all throughout the film, whereby she is made to resemble various classic villains of cinema.



Madmartigan in the finale, on the other hand, with his short hair and single braid before one ear, would have resembled Charlton Heston as a young Moses in the same film, who has that exact hairstyle.



The Elf King, meanwhile, was probably intended by Lucas to resemble Heston as an older, white-bearded Moses. This goes back to one of the original ideas for the diminutive Yoda in Star Wars, which was that he should have a long beard, and thus resemble Moses or a Greek god.

 

In contrast to the clothing of the Elves of Tir Asleen, which Lucas probably intended to be faintly Egyptian, the costumes of the best knights of Galladoorn--and thus Madmartigan's royal armor--were likely originally meant to have a Roman look. So Madmartigan in the finale would be wearing a set of Roman armor, with a bronze muscle cuirass, and bare legs, and a golden crown of laurel. His tunic would be long-sleeved, however, in order to conceal the join of his golden prosthetic arm.

For reference, consult this late Roman statue of the Emperor Heraclius in a similar outfit:



Madmartigan and Sorsha's wedding in the finale, with him in a quasi-Roman outfit and her in a faintly Egyptian one, would have a visual language that alluded to the romance between Richard Burton's Mark Antony and Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra in the 1963 film Cleopatra.



(Yes, I know that's actually Rex Harrison as Julius Caesar. But this picture illustrates exactly the sort of thing Madmartigan would be wearing.)

Airk Thaughbaer's knights, on the other hand, would likely have been attired in silver armor with swan-wing helmets, recalling the Swan Knights of Dol Amroth, led by Prince Imrahil, in The Lord of the Rings. Imrahil is an important side character in Tolkien's book, but was dropped entirely from the film adaptation. As a separate city from Minas Tirith, Dol Amroth has its own culture and customs within the empire of Gondor--thus its knights wear special, highly distinctive armor.

In the final version of Willow, the Swan Knight idea was dropped; Airk Thaughbaer's troops received the Roman-inspired armor; and Madmartigan's royal armor, found in Tir Asleen, absorbed the vaguely Middle Eastern theme, as evidenced by his Arab-style horsehair-crested helmet. So the major visual motifs of the various cultures remained the same, but the characters who wear them were changed.

 

Given that Moebius drew the Elf King as wearing the fantasy version of a Prussian army officer's uniform, and that Sorsha's Elven dress involved being nude to the waist, I suspect that the real origin of Elven fashion as imagined by Lucas was not Ancient Egypt, but rather Alex Raymond's Mongo as seen in the Flash Gordon comic strip. Emperor Ming and his officers wear military outfits that clearly derive from 19th century European army uniforms, but Raymond's women are usually dressed in long capes, jeweled breastplates, and diaphanous flowing skirts.

Likewise, Lucas's Elven men would have been dressed in very 19th century military garb, and the Elf-women would have worn capes, long skirts, and jeweled necklaces--but no shirts.

Madmartigan's royal armor would have been golden in color, like the bronze armor of Roman emperors.

Airk's armor would likely have been silver, and involved a scale cuirass and a winged helmet. This would suggest that an important influence on the design of Airk's character was Arthur Rackham's illustrations of the hero Siegfried in Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle.



Like Siegfried, Airk dies in the climax of the story.

The two elements of Airk's armor--a winged helmet and Dark Age-style scale armor--suggest a fusion of the two influences from Tolkien on his character, the characters of Theoden and Imrahil from The Lord of the Rings. Theoden is king of the highly Germanic Rohirrim, who speak Old English and live in a primitive mead-hall, but Imrahil is lord of Dol Amroth, a seaside city, and his knights bear the emblem of a silver swan.

Airk may originally have been lord of Land's End, a place name mentioned briefly in the final shooting script. This name would place his home city on the coast, perhaps even on a peninsula like Tolkien's Dol Amroth, and would also explain where he procured the boats to follow Madmartigan across the sea to Tir Asleen.

Sorsha's horned helmet as part of her first set of armor may additionally owe something to Arthur Rackham's illustrations of the evil Hagen, half-elf son of the overall villain Alberich, in Wagner's Ring operas. Rackham's Hagen wears such a helmet in all of his illustrations.



Furthering Hagen's connection to Sorsha, in Fritz Lang's film Die Nibelungen, Hagen is missing an eye, with a dark patch of skin over the empty socket. Sorsha would come to resemble this after Meegosh attacked her, having an eye that was blackened and swollen shut.

 

Originally, Airk Thaughbaer probably had a young son, who would show up in princely regalia at the coronation ceremony in the finale. He would have looked with boyish disgust at Elora Danan as Willow carried her to Sorsha, rather as young Prince Phillip looks at the infant Aurora in the beginning of Disney's Sleeping Beauty--the implication being that Airk's son would grow up to wed Elora Danan. This idea was presumably dropped when Madmartigan's own original backstory as a bereaved father was jettisoned.

Airk's son's name would surely have been some garbled combination of "Phillip" and "Leif," as in Leif Eriksson, son of Erik the Red of Viking lore. "Laiph," perhaps?

Elora Danan's own first name comes from Aurora of Sleeping Beauty; her second name comes from "Amanda," the daughter George Lucas adopted when he was still married to Marcia Griffin.

 

It occurs to me that Sorsha's last wound suffered at Tir Asleen probably happened somewhat differently than how I earlier conceived it.

Sorsha would be wearing a leather jerkin during the battle. When Meegosh came up to her and impetuously attacked with his sword, because of his diminutive stature, he would succeed only in cutting the jerkin to ribbons. Sorsha would knock the sword from his hand, breaking it. Later, as Sorsha talked with Madmartigan during the sea voyage to Nockmaar, she would declare that she would dress like an Elf-woman from then on, and toss her ruined jerkin over the side of the boat. Sorsha would remain bare-breasted for the rest of the film.

Meegosh's attack on her is similar to how Sorsha saves Willow's life shortly before, in that both events rob her of an item of clothing: she lost her shoes when saving Willow from an Orc.

Immediately after the brawl with Meegosh, Airk Thaughbaer would come up to her. Madmartigan would reveal to him that she was now on their side. Airk would accept this, then punch her in the face, as revenge for the men of his that she'd killed. The blow would leave her with a blackened and swollen-shut eye; the ring Airk wore on one finger would leave behind a permanently misshapen pupil. (This is more or less exactly how David Bowie got his unusual eye.)

Later, during the finale, Airk's son (Laiph?) would be seen wearing the same ring.

The motif of a hero punching a heroine in the face goes back to the 1974 SW rough draft script, in which Annikin Starkiller knocks out Leia Aquilae with a blow to the jaw when she refuses to come with him during an emergency.

Sorsha being wounded in the chest and the eye in rapid succession has echoes of Sam's fight with Shelob in The Lord of the Rings, in which he first puts out one of the spider's eyes and then attacks her belly.

During the heroes' voyage to Nockmaar, Bavmorda would set a storm about them, hindering their passage. Madmartigan and Sorsha would be standing in the prow; as soon as she dumped her jerkin overboard, the weather would clear up. This invokes the ancient sailors' legend that a woman baring her breasts can calm the raging seas.

Bavmorda's power over weather recalls the sinister snowstorms, produced by Sauron or Saruman, that the Fellowship encounters while attempting to cross over the mountain Caradhras in The Lord of the Rings.

 

As a warm-up to branding Madmartigan on the forehead during his captivity, King Kael would probably apply a whip to his back (like Mola Ram whipping Indiana Jones in Temple of Doom). The scars thus left on Madmartigan's back echo Meegosh's later attack on Sorsha, which would leave blade scars on her breasts.

During the climax of the film, Madmartigan and Sorsha would likely each receive three wounds before defeating an opponent (not two, as I supposed before). Kael would begin by cutting off one of Madmartigan's hair braids; then he would stab him in one shoulder with his sword; then as a finale he would cut off Madmartigan's sword arm. Meanwhile, the stone statues in Bavmorda's chamber would first cut off the tip of one of Sorsha's pointed ears; then one of them would cut off one of her nipples (eww!); and then one would stomp on her bare foot, breaking it.

In the finale Sorsha would have scarred breasts and a missing nipple. This harks back to Francisco Scaramanga (Christopher Lee!), villain of the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun, who had three nipples on his chest. Sorsha's facial scars, as I've noted earlier, already allude to the famous villains Blofeld and Jaws from the Bond franchise.

Sorsha having only one nipple also furthers the Marian symbolism of her outfit in the finale. Although Sorsha would be entirely bare-breasted, the Virgin Mary is typically shown with only one breast bared, so as to breastfeed the infant Jesus.

 

When one of Bavmorda's stone statues cut off one of her nipples, Sorsha would likely immediately grab a flaming torch and cauterize the wound herself. This is another Greek mythology reference, to the Amazons, the legendary female warriors who cut off and cauterized one breast so as to draw a bow better. In the finale Sorsha would have a burn scar where her nipple used to be.

Madmartigan's wound count is now nine--the same as the number of trappers who ravish Leia Aquilae in the 1974 SW rough draft--and, counting her off-screen rape by Kael in their camp, Sorsha's wounds number twelve in total, a highly mythic number.

Lucas seems to have initially intended Willow as a film solely for adults. Perhaps he wanted to break out of the mold that he'd set with Star Wars and do something new. That idea obviously didn't last; somewhere along the way the script of Willow was reworked to make it much more kid-friendly, and thus to remove the graphic violence and nudity.

 

I can't shake the suspicion that Lucas intended to imply that, like his prior heroines Leia Aquilae and Marion Ravenwood, Sorsha had been forced to sleep with a disturbing number of men.

I would guess that, during the heroes' captivity in Kael's camp, one evening Kael would tell Sorsha to await him in her tent. Then he would conduct a review of his Orc troops, who were lined up in a long row. Kael would walk down the line, silently directing the most valorous Orcs to step forward, looking like a sick parody of the Emperor Napoleon distributing the Légion d'honneur to his soldiers in their camp. Kael would select eight Orcs in all, and the nine of them would enter Sorsha's tent, after which her screams would be audible.

Ugh. There are no words.

The Napoleon theme seems to be a running motif in the film's early symbolism; Jacques-Louis David's famous painting of Napoleon's coronation was likely a visual reference for Madmartigan's own crowning at the end. Presumably it was meant to serve as the same sort of visual shorthand which Nazi motifs provide in Star Wars. (In precisely that vein, Imperial troops plainly wear fascist uniforms, but the medal ceremony at the end of SW 1977 is straight out of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will.)

 

Sorsha's battle armor worn at Tir Asleen presumably had its lower section consist of two long panels of red fabric, hanging from her waist, that acted as a loincloth (after the manner of Leia's slave outfit in ROTJ). The rear panel of cloth, covering her behind, Sorsha would likely tear off after the march overland to Nockmaar, when she would use it to bandage her bleeding feet. (They would continue to bleed into the makeshift bandages, like Jack Nicholson's nose in Chinatown.)

After her defeat by Bavmorda's stone statues, and accompanying loss of an eye, Sorsha would use the front panel of her loincloth to bandage her head wound. She would thus be stark naked when Madmartigan comes in--minus an arm--to pull her up and kiss her. The total nudity here is an obvious symbol of Sorsha's rebirth and change from villain to heroine; in the same vein, the destroyed loincloth is red, and her garb in the coronation would be blue.

Also, now in all probability you know where a certain scene involving a naked Danaerys and some newly-hatched dragons in the ending of the first book of A Song of Ice and Fire came from. (And in the book version, Dany loses her hair to the blaze that hatches her dragon eggs.)

 

Before his exile, Madmartigan was likely one of the Knights of the Pacalcade, the twelve greatest warriors of the King of Galladoorn. Presumably his wife and child were killed by Picts when he was off on a knightly quest. Given the Arthurian overtones of the story, it's likely to have been a Grail quest analogue--most probably a fruitless search for a Golden Fleece, like that sought by Jason of Greek mythology. In this case, Madmartigan failed to find it, and when he came back his family had been slain.

After Bavmorda's defeat, the one-armed Madmartigan would enter her tower chamber and scoop up the naked, blinded Sorsha to kiss her. She would note by feel the loss of his arm, which he would shrug off. Then he would say something like, "You still have the most beautiful hair I've ever seen." This (oh god, I can't believe I'm writing this) refers to her thick golden pubic hair--the fabled Golden Fleece. (I told you Willow was originally going to be a much more adult film.)

When Willow, Fin Raziel, the severely wounded Madmartigan, and the equally wounded and stark naked Sorsha came down from Bavmorda's tower, the Elf King would hail them, saying "Behold the King and Queen of Galladoorn!" The assembled armies would kneel before them, and while Madmartigan and Sorsha basked in the attention, Willow and Meegosh would share a friendly embrace. At that point the film would cut to the coronation scene.

The Elf King publicly acclaiming Madmartigan and Sorsha after Bavmorda's demise harks back to how King Lune exhibits Shasta and Prince Corin together on the field of battle, to prove that Shasta is his long-lost eldest son, in CS Lewis's The Horse and His Boy.

 

Sorsha's loincloth would presumably have covered the space between her legs, as well as hanging down in front and back.

During the climax of the film, as Madmartigan dueled Kael and Sorsha dueled the seven statues, both of them would likely have experienced such pain and fear--as Madmartigan lost his sword arm and a statue crushed Sorsha's foot--that they voided their bowels and bladder. While Madmartigan's waste would doubtless remain confined in his armor, Sorsha's urine and feces would likely spill out of her loincloth and down her legs--continuing the theme of her wounds being more exaggerated versions of his.

Immediately afterward, both of them would regain courage; Madmartigan would slay Kael, and Sorsha would shatter one of the statues. Later, after Fin Raziel destroyed the rest of Bavmorda's statues, Sorsha would remove her soiled loincloth, and tear off a clean portion from the front panel to stanch the blood flow from her ruined eye.

The symbolism here links urine and feces to ichor, the golden blood of the Greek gods. Yellow ichor flowed in the Greek gods' veins instead of red blood, because they ate and drank only ambrosia and nectar, the divine food and drink that bestow immortality. In this instance the loss of bladder and bowel control serves as a symbolic genital wound--after the manner of the Fisher King from Arthurian legend--from which bleeds forth symbolic ichor, the product of food and drink.

Thus the image of Madmartigan and Sorsha soiling themselves, disgusting as it is, actually elevates them to the level of demigods--rather like Princess Yuki and General Makabe in Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, with whom the two peasants Matashichi and Tahei journey uncomprehendingly. (There's also a joke in there somewhere: Sorsha has brought her red pants when she should have brought brown ones.)

Sorsha and Madmartigan are also thus linked with Elora Danan, the future empress of an Arthurian golden age, who of course as a newborn baby needs to have her diaper frequently changed. (Notably, in the third-revision script, Elora Danan only needs to be changed exactly when Madmartigan and Sorsha are introduced at various key points in the film--suggesting that there was indeed some symbolism intended here.)

 

Before their respective duels with Kael and the stone statues, neither Madmartigan nor Sorsha had likely ever known fear. Madmartigan, a peerless swordsman, would have had no reason to fear death, and indeed would not have minded it after the death of his family. Sorsha, as a leader of Bavmorda's army, would have been ruthlessly trained to fear nothing and no one. The sensation is rudely introduced to both of them as, in deadly peril for the first time in their lives, both of them soil themselves.

Sorsha in particular would probably have had a line afterward--"so this is what fear feels like." Madmartigan, meanwhile, would be taunted by Kael for having voided his bowels. Both of them, feeling fear for the first time, would realize why they felt it--they were afraid to die alone in battle, to be separated from their true love. And so both of them would rally and get up to fight on.

The "hero who does not know fear" is actually a Wagnerian idea--in the Ring Cycle, the hero Siegfried, raised by the dwarf Mime, has never learned fear and is thus able to slay the dragon Fafner. It is only afterward, when he beholds a woman for the first time, that he truly experiences fear. The woman in question is his destined tragic true love, Brunnhilde the golden-haired Valkyrie, lying in an enchanted sleep on a mountaintop. Siegfried awakens her with a kiss.

Notably, Arthur Rackham's illustration of this scene in Wagner's opera depicts Brunnhilde as bare-breasted, and the drawing was likely an influence on the scene of Madmartigan awakening Sorsha in her tent.

 

During Madmartigan's initial reception at Tir Asleen, he and the Nelwyns would likely have been intercepted by a guard on the shores of the land, and brought to the Elf King's audience chamber within the walled crystal city, where a tense conference would take place. (The heroes' guarded reception and armed escort recalls the wary entrance of Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli through the gates of Edoras in The Lord of the Rings--but the shift to a coastal setting in turn recalls one of Tolkien's own principal sources, namely the arrival of the eponymous hero on the shores of Denmark in Beowulf.)

Madmartigan would urge the Elf King to lead his armies against Bavmorda. The Elf King would demur, saying something like, "We Elves are hardier by far than Men. We can go for days on end without food or sleep or relieving our guts. And yet my warriors are no match for the might of Bavmorda." The king would change his mind, of course, once Sorsha's army arrived at his gates, interrupting his parley with the strangers from overseas.

This speech also sets up something in the finale, namely that Sorsha would void several times the urine and excrement that Madmartigan did, when they both soiled themselves after first feeling fear. The implication is of course that, being an Elf, she normally has such perfect bodily control that she hasn't needed to go to the bathroom for several days. (Compare Michael Moorcock's Melniboneans, who don't even need to poop at all.)

 

In Jeffrey Boam's script for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Dr. Elsa Schneider is almost always seen to be eating something during the scenes in Venice--a pear, a cracker, a bunch of grapes. As a symbol this obviously represents Elsa's dangerous and evil nature, alluding as it does to Eve and the apple with which she tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden.

I suspect that, like many other ideas used in Last Crusade, this one too got its start in the early Willow. So Sorsha would frequently be seen eating something early on, as a symbol of her initial villainy. She would bite into some food when Madmartigan unmasked her in the tavern; when she caught up with him at the dragon's tree in the desert; and when she called Willow into her tent to change Elora Danan.

Later, during the sea voyage back to Nockmaar, Sorsha would try to eat some fruit, but be unable to bite into it, owing to her many missing front teeth. Madmartigan would cut it up for her and they would share it. They would go on to discuss their mutual sterility. This whole scene would take place during a rising storm, and at the end of it Sorsha would cast aside her tattered jerkin and stand bare-breasted on the ship's prow, calming the turbulent seas (a magic trick she would have learned from her mother).

During the finale, when the stone statues had cornered Sorsha, mutilated her breast, and broken her foot, she would back against the pedestal that one of them had formerly occupied, and soil herself in fear. Realizing with a start for the first time what fear felt like, she would declare it not to be such a bad thing after all--it shows her that she cares for Madmartigan. (This goes back to the Wagner influence I mentioned above.)

Unable to defeat the statues with her sword, she would climb atop the pedestal. Showing her contempt for her mother, Sorsha would reach out and grab a nearby pennant with Bavmorda's insignia, and trample it under her bleeding feet.

Shouting insults at her mother, she would then empty her bowels completely, urinating and defecating copiously into her loincloth, until the waste ran down her legs onto the flag at her feet. After which Sorsha would scoop up some of her own spilled excrement and toss it at Bavmorda, hitting her squarely in the eye. (I know this seems completely outrageous--but bear with me.)

Leaping from the pedestal, Sorsha would knock down and shatter one of the stone statues, but the others would soon surround her before she could reach Bavmorda. The statues, animated by Bavmorda's will, would make her pay in blood for the insult to her mother by blinding her in one eye with a sword stroke.

As gross as all this is, it does incorporate the idea from Star Wars of Luke and Darth Vader inflicting matching injuries on each other. There's also some extremely Freudian symbolism here in terms of Sorsha's psychosexual development: she passes from what Freud called the "oral stage" (by eating everything edible in sight) to the "anal stage" (flinging her own poop at her mother) and finally to a healthy sexual relationship with Madmartigan. Lucas does love Freudian imagery.

Madmartigan too would soil himself during his duel with Kael, but not deliberately.

Sorsha defiling her mother's insignia is similar to how John Carter tramples underfoot the wig and diadem of the Holy Therns of Barsoom, to show his contempt for that evil and murderous religion. (Mind you, he doesn't go as far as Sorsha.)

 

Minor correction: instead of a flag, Sorsha would likely defile a jeweled armband that she had worn earlier in the film, inscribed with Bavmorda's insignia--a symbol of her high rank in her mother's army. Such an armband is in fact visible on Moebius's concept art of her second set of armor.

 

Another, more important correction: when Sorsha knocked over and broke one of the seven statues, the remaining six would grab her before she could reach Bavmorda. Bavmorda would herself approach the captive Sorsha. She would take one of the statues' swords, and, as punishment for the dung Sorsha threw in her eye, slash her own daughter across the face with the sword, leaving her half-blind forever. This is the point at which Fin Raziel would break down the door and shatter the statues.

The stone statues' swords appear to have been made of black obsidian--the same material as the witch of the Lilim uses for her knives in Stardust, and a deadly weapon when used against the Others/White Walkers in A Song of Ice and Fire.

 

Sorsha deliberately relieving herself in the final battle would actually be part of a desperate plan to overcome Bavmorda. Since she couldn't defeat the stone statues by force, and since they were animated by Bavmorda's will, she would decide to distract Bavmorda and then make a run towards her.

Taking inspiration from the physical results of feeling fear, she would climb up on top of a pedestal, remove her warrior's armband and throw it at her feet, remove her soiled loincloth, and, fully naked, urinate and defecate on the armband. Grabbing a handful of excrement, she would throw it in Bavmorda's face, hoping to distract her long enough to get away from the statues and approach close to her. As she leaped from the pedestal, she would shatter one of the statues, but the remaining six would grab her and hold her before Bavmorda.

Bavmorda would take up the obsidian sword of the shattered statue, and, holding it before Sorsha's face, taunt her in the same fashion as Kael meanwhile taunted Madmartigan. Her words were probably something to this effect: "I always envied your beauty. When I offered you to Kael I hoped to destroy it. How ironic that your new friends succeeded where I never could. Look at you now. What man would want you? What could you offer him?"

Taking revenge for the excrement thrown in her eye, Bavmorda would slash Sorsha across the face with the sword, blinding her. But before she could kill her, Fin Raziel would break open the door.

Bavmorda's speech would foreshadow the moment later on between Sorsha and Madmartigan, when, embracing her, he would say that now he knew why his quest for the Golden Fleece failed all those years ago--for Sorsha still had the most beautiful hair he'd ever seen.

The film I'm describing in these posts is much more explicitly adult than the one that got made--it's unusual to think of George Lucas associated with such a production. It's not surprising that he would tone it down before filming ever started, but it is interesting to see him considering making something that wasn't oriented toward children like most of his movies are.