PT To everyone who thinks no respectable author would have a character "die of a broken heart":

I honestly think that people need to stop making such big deals at a series of story plots and nitpick about every little detail of the film.

Padme died out of the consequences of Anakin's turn to the dark side. That's one way of looking at it, the karma way.

She could have also died of a broken heart. A more romantic, poetic way to have died.

Anyway, I honestly think that you shouldn't make such a big deal at a plot point that needed to happen.

 

In this context that comparison makes no sense.

 

It's a pretty important plot point. Discussing whether it was handled poorly or not isn't nitpicking.

 

Why do they need to stop? It's not hurting them, or anyone else really.

Maybe it's not quite as big a deal to them as you think. We're all just chatting here.

I think it absolutely needed to not happen, to better complement with Leia's memories of her mother.

 

I honestly think that people need to stop making such big deals at a series of story plots and nitpick about every little detail of the film.
-------------------------

well in that case lets pack up our e-bags and not bother discussing things on a thing called a forum.

It's the job of a discussion board to "nitpick" or discuss, and debate.

To some of us Padme's death is ridiculous,

to make it even less ridiculous perhaps the writers (whether it was Lucas OR Hales) shouldn't have written the line "patience viceroy, she will die" giving the viewer the hope of a great and heroic death of a main character, but hey that's just me
having the scene play out like this:

Padme: well, you are two beautiful healthy babies, mommas gonna die now, cuz she's sad
medic droid: uhhm uhh, yeah well, everything in her body is perfect, but yeah, mmm, ooba ooba?

isn't worthy of Star Wars

if that is nitpicking, then fair enough.

 

Of course the galaxy is a huge place, but I can imagine that wouldn't really stop Anakin from looking for her. And I can see why Padmé wouldn't want her children to live like that. Also, it's important to note that Anakin never did sense his children in the Force throughout ROTS. The proof is due to the fact that Anakin did not know that Padmé was pregnant (let alone with twins). On the other hand, though, Anakin has displayed strong connections to non-Force sensitives before. Padmé, for one. And his mother as another example. Because Anakin was able to track Shmi across the Tatooine desert with nary a landmark. Padmé also doesn't have the Force, so she can't hide herself the way someone like Obi-Wan, Yoda, or Palpatine could.

That's why I think it would be far easier to hide the children than Padmé. As another example, Leia knows that Luke is alright as he escapes from the Death Star. I think the circumstantial evidence is quite strong that hiding the children is one thing while hiding Padmé would be another since Anakin has already come into direct contact with her.

This also brings up another issue -- what if Anakin threatens to harm people unless Padmé will come back to him? What will she do then? Will she be able to keep her children's secrets from him? I just think that the issue is intensely risky and certainly dangerous.

See, that's just it. I don't think she would see it as pointlessly throwing her life away. I think she would believe it would protect the people she loved and that she had little to offer that would outweigh the risks. Obi-Wan and Yoda are irreplaceable and I don't think that them being Force sensitive makes them harder for the Sith to track. Palpatine certainly pulled the wool over the Jedi's eyes for a number of years, so if anything it would be easier. Plus, as I noted before, given the connection between Anakin and his mother and Anakin and Padmé, I do think there is evidence that Anakin would have been able to sense her.

I don't necessarily think that the Rebellion being in its infancy is a positive -- they will have far fewer resources with which to protect Padmé and can mount a far less effective response should a threat be made. Additionally, with the Rebellion being small, this will limit the number of people that Padmé can possibly seek for help and, should they be discovered, it will make the risk of total annihilation of the fledging Rebellion that much greater.

 

If they can pretend Padmé is still pregnant at her funeral, why not also just have her funeral without her? As far as the galaxy is concerned, as far as Vader is concerned, she would be dead. The idea that Anakin tracked Schmi through the Force doesn't stand up to scrutiny. He 'knew' she was on Tatooine, because....well, he just assumes so doesn't he? He thinks she is still with Watto. He follows the (non-Force) trail to the Lars household, having got Watto to get the information of where she is. We then see him talking to Jawas as he searches for a group of Tuskens. He did not trace Schmi through the Force.

So much about Padmé's death is senseless. She says to Obi-Wan that there is still good in Anakin.... but then can't be ****d to hang around and help him back - no, let's just burden others with that revelation. She's just had two children but...can't be ****d to hang around and offer them the love of a parent. It was all done for the 'poetic' visual symbolism of Anakin's transformation into Vader and Padmé's death.

And..as for the reasoning for not having Anakin be directly responsible for Padmé's death because it would be too dark..... he killed a bunch of children*. How much darker does it get?

*Not for the first time...

 

As for Arwen's fate having any similarity.... the two tales are entirely distinct. As someone pointed out, the fate of Arwen is presaged earlier in the story. She is of the spirit world, and her linking herself to the fate of a mortal is destined to be fatal. If Padmé's death is to do with some symbiotic link with Anakin then it is not done particularly well (re Arwen), as in it is not manifested within the story. In fact it comes completely out of the blue.

Just because Star Wars is a fantasy doesn't allow carte blanche for any fantasy element to just be inserted on any old ad hoc basis. A story works on being internally consistent, and with this there is no internal logic - it jars with the logic of the galaxy as it is otherwise portrayed.

 

I agree that the nitpicking in the SW movies by the fans can be ridiculous at times, but this is a key plot point that can't be taken lightly. First, her dying at childbirth contradicts what Leia said in ROTJ as 'she died while I was very young.' And if you read the 'Annotated Screenplays' about Lucas and Kasdan talking about this in 1982, Padme takes Leia to remote planet and Owen takes Luke to Tatooine, and Padme eventually dies a few years later and that's when Bail Organa adopts her because he was friends with Kenobi.

That is my nitpick with this whole plot point is that Lucas needed to keep the PT and OT consistent for key points like this.

 

A minute or so old is "very young" in a technical sense- but it stretches the meaning of the words somewhat.

 

It does a little more than that. It's a gigantic plot hole.

 

But Anakin does have a connection with Shmi. In the first place, he was able to sense her pain from so far away. For another, he knew she was still alive even after others had given up and her. And he managed to track her down down from the Larses in the middle of a desert. He asks the Jawas, but consider that he would have had to be going in the right direction in the first place. It's not like there are roads on Tatooine for him to follow -- he has to navigate (partially at night) based on very little information.

I just think that Padmé is unfairly lambasted compared to the other characters. Yes, she died and gave her children up. But I don't think she could have possibly given them a better life than they had. In particular, I don't see why people are okay with her abandoning Luke, but when it's both Luke and Leia, somehow that's to be faulted.

I also think that Padmé feared what Anakin might do to get her back because he had become so obsessed with her. If she went into hiding, who is to say that Anakin wouldn't threaten to harm others until she came back to him?

Padmé gets a lot of heat, but is what she did really that different from Obi-Wan? Obi-Wan didn't go and confront Vader -- he never tried to finish him off. Instead, he left that task to Luke and Leia and went and hid in the desert for twenty years. When he found Luke, he introduced him to the Force and gave him his father's lightsaber and had him ferried to Alderaan. Then, on the Death Star, he fought Vader and let him kill him. Obi-Wan let himself die.

He didn't stick around to help Luke and Leia with the Rebellion. He didn't stay to help Luke as his teacher. And he completely left the responsibility of killing Vader to Luke (without even telling him that Vader was his father).

And I understand why Obi-Wan did that. I understand that he could't bring himself to kill Anakin and that he thought of Anakin as dead and thought it would be best for Luke to do the same.

But at the end of the day, he also didn't stick around to fight in the Rebellion and left the destruction of the Sith to Luke and Leia, although he had proven that he could take Vader out. The same with Yoda. Both Obi-Wan and Yoda were generals and yet they didn't help the Rebellion. They stayed, taught Luke, and then died.

For Padmé, she tried to bring her husband back, but he wouldn't listen to her, and she could increasingly see that he was on a path that he would not be turned from. And if she survived, that would have likely demonstrated to Anakin that his turn had saved her.

I think the idea behind this quote is (though I'm speculating here) -- with the destruction of the Jedi -- Anakin did at least have some horridly misguided but good intentions behind it. He wanted to end the war, bring peace, and form the Empire and killing the Jedi was a necessary evil to achieve that (in his mind). Yes, what he is doing is wrong, but I think he justified it as being for the greater good because he would save more lives in the long run -- both by ending the war and creating a more effective form of governance (what he believed in his own mind anyway). And it's easier to tell himself that because the children were trained as Jedi and armed as Jedi and they would have already adopted a Jedi's mindset.

Whereas with Padmé, her death would have been without such motivations. That's my guess, at least, at what Lucas meant with that though I don't really agree with him here.

 

PiettsHat

I'm not lambasting Padmé as a character, I'm lambasting the writing. The writing, as far as I can see, simply does not match the character as I understood her - and I think that's the problem many have with her death.

 

That phrase gets used an awful lot. Perhaps something of an exaggeration?

 

I mean what I say. It's a major plot point, and it is wildly inconsistent between the two films. It's completely contradictory. A new born infant does not remember her mother.

 

I never mentioned anything about Star Trek.

 

My point was that Tolkien's masterpiece is closer, in spirit and tone, to Star Wars than you realize. Space Opera and high fantasy are close kin; while one is Mars, the other is Middle Earth.

 

Once again, if Anakin believes Padmé is dead then he won’t be looking for her. I don’t think the movies shows Anakin having a strong connection with Padmé, if that was the case he should have felt the moment Padmé passed away, but instead he had to rely on Palpatine to give him news of her. That Anakin could have some kind of connection to his mother I can buy due to the way he was (apparently) conceived, but Padmé is another matter.

I don't see how the way Padmé and her children would have to live is any different from the way Luke had to live - at least the children would be together with their mother.

I fail to see any circumstantial evidence supporting this. There is nothing to suggest it would be harder to hide Padmé than her children, if anything the movies show that it’s the force-sensitives that can sense other force-sensitives – Vader can sense Obi-Wan and Luke in ANH, he can sense Luke in ESB and RotJ, and Luke and Leia can sense each other in EMB and RotJ, and in RotS Anakin can sense Dooku, Sidious can sense Anakin, and special precautions has to be made so that the Sith will not sense Luke and Leia.

If Anakin thinks she is dead that won’t be a problem.

I think you misunderstood me, I think the movies establish that being force-sensitive makes it possible for other force-sensitives to sense them, and even pinpoint their location once they’ve “caught their scent”. That is why Luke (and Obi-Wan) and Yoda have to hide away on a planets like Tatooine and Dagobah. Thus it would be easier for a non-force-sensitive to hide from a force-user that a force-sensitive. Palpatine, as you point out, is the only one who has found a way to hide his presence.

We will have to disagree about that.

Indeed, but the chances of being discovered/noticed by the Empire are far lesser than once the organisation began to grow, but that is another discussion.

 

We will have to disagree about that.

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I agree with everything you write, but this, eh I'm not so sure

Anakin says

"your presense is soothing"

"being around her again is intoxicating"

and

"I can sense everything going on in that room"

all in the space of one film.

 

Okay, so, poring back over this thread, for a generic quoting session...

But first -- well said, PiettsHat. I think you have a very cogent take on this whole thing. It's been a delight reading your contributions here.

Padme's death -- IMO -- doesn't really contradict anything Leia says. Leia remembers "images" and "feelings", which is a sort of unconscious shorthand for saying she remembers Padme through the Force: a form of memory that is not exclusively tied to the fragility of the organic human brain. Though, you could say the fragility of that organ is also implied, colouring the manner in which Leia perceives the faint intimation of her mother (Padme). She sees her memories as real, even though they're kind of implanted there. You could say that it's a bit like the way that replicants recall their early lives in "Blade Runner". Thus, "she died when I was very young" rings through with a certain sense of irony, which Star Wars is soaked in, in my view.

I'm not a great fan of LOTR, myself, but whether we want to admit it or not, there are certain parallels between the two. Both, at root, are like mystical revelations: hallucinatory allegories for the human condition in the language of myth. I just happen to prefer Star Wars by a wide margin. You assert that there "is indeed a mystical element in Star Wars", then you say that "it also has nothing to do with Padme dying", but I don't think you can really separate the two. Life and death are when mysticism is at its strongest; it has ever been thus.

That is, indeed, well-put, Eddie.

As has since been pointed out, that's a pretty flawed comparison -- for any number of reasons.

That's a rather sweeping assertion. Sort of like saying, in my opinion, "No pacifist would ever endorse armed conflict", or "Buddhists don't get depressed -- period!"

Dang, LM! You sure have a way of describing the twists and turns of this colourful saga.

Sad to hear.

Tragedy is a very consuming thing (the motif of consumption is everywhere in Star Wars -- and the main Anakin Skywalker narrative is most definitely a tragedy).

In the words of Depeche Mode:

Things get damaged
Things get broken
I thought we'd manage
But words left unspoken
Left us so brittle
There was so little left to give

Again, Depeche Mode:

Precious and fragile things
Need special handling

Anakin really stuffed up on Mustafar, to put it mildly.

But then, he wasn't the only one/wan. Here's looking at you, Master Kenobi.

The issue could be that it's a contradiction -- if someone is medically fine, how can that someone also be slipping away before a physician's eyes?

I guess the answer is that the physicians, the droids, just don't know what is really wrong, deep down. But they must at least know something of her vital signs.

I would, again, invoke midi-chlorians as part of a larger explanation here. Perhaps they were monitoring certain cellular processes that implied the midis were undergoing some kind of cataclysmic change, but they didn't know what the underlying cause of this change was.

In this view, Padme's cells were shutting down, one by one, as the midis refused to keep nourishing her physical body, pulling her some place else. That other place is the Force; or the "netherworld of the Force" as Yoda later describes it. Her own sadness had partially caused it, in the spirit of "what happens to one of you will affect the other", and also what Anakin was unconsciously doing, perhaps, to allow Darth Vader, his shadow psyche, to live.

Just one take on this.

Well, isn't that the point? One's own paranoia -- one's underlying jealousies and insecurities -- begin to overwhelm and annihilate the critical faculties when one joins the Dark Side: negative emotions, useful when properly sublimated, rise up and become a toxic brew, choking rational thought ... choking gentility, choking contradiction, choking dissent. Ergo, when Anakin chokes Padme, he is metaphorically choking a piece of himself.

Given Anakin's basic emotional state, I think it's quite evident that he feels Padme, his beloved angel, has betrayed him in the 11th Hour, shrinking in horror from the dark shadow that Anakin has become (this, in a way, is Anakin's own fear of how Padme sees him made flesh). And given how much he invested in his idealized image of Padme, that would have sent violent ripples through his conscious.

For her betrayal, for all that he did for her, as Anakin has feebly rationalized it, she must be punished and made to see the error of her ways; the reality must be made, however crudely, to conform to the image. Symbolically, the choking also shows how desperate he is to hang on to Padme, and how destructive that desire is when acted out without regard for the thoughts and feelings of another; when his conception of the world and how things should be actively demands the maiming and slaying of others.

So, surprisingly and not, Anakin's reprimand only disables Padme and hastens her demise. This, again, symbolically, or allegorically, feeds into a larger fabric of social critique being made in the PT, in my opinion, concerning dogma, instruction, punishment, and control. There are also any number of references in ROTS to this eventuality, from Anakin gripping the edge of the elevator shaft on the Invisible Hand, to Grievous casually threatening Nute, after Nute expresses doubt, that he should "be thankful" not to have already found himself in his (Grievous') grip.

And then, of course, there is the "Greek tragedy" aspect of ROTS, where doomed protagonists bring on the very events they're trying to forestall. This inspires me to have a very sad view of Anakin. He was always apart from everyone; always isolated, always alone. In the end, he feels he can't trust the Jedi, Obi-Wan, Palpatine, or even his own wife. His name literally means "without" (an) "likeness" (akin). He is totally cut off; a prisoner of his own uniqueness; a slave to his own mind (and the social forces that have shaped that mind).

And Padme dying as a result of Anakin's actions on Mustafar - this alien hell where she discovers the truth -- is also very poignant in terms of how it reflects on Anakin and human nature more generally. For it was Oscar Wilde that famously wrote, "Each man kills the thing he loves." With strong love comes strong attachment. Yoda warned Anakin about this: "Attachment leads to jealousy. The shadow of greed that is." He was speaking in platitudes, not able to grasp the full scope of Anakin's trauma, but he does give the basic outline of Anakin's descent.

I think that's a very perceptive remark. Looking back, the prequel trilogy seems to offer a complex web of signification regarding Padme's imminent passing, from the way she first appears on-screen -- on a wavy (display) screen, looking pale and sad, as if some ghostly reflection emanating from a deep pool -- to her constant sad tone and bowed head in the same movie as she reflects on the plight of Naboo; to the eerie way she accompanies Anakin and mostly keeps silent in his trip to the underworld on Tatooine in AOTC; to her saying, later in the same movie, to Anakin, that she's been dying a little bit every day since he came back into her life; to scenes which illustrate her growing weariness and fatigue in ROTS, like when she tries to open up to Anakin about her concerns for the Republic, only to be shot down by Anakin when she urges him to make a request to Palpatine, asking him to hold her and sinking into his chest as she practically goes to sleep, against the very part of his body where a mechanical box will soon be placed, his love gone, his humanity eroded.

You actually have to overlook quite a lot, IMO, to claim that Padme's sudden death comes out of nowhere, or was jammed in at the last minute without much thought.

Another first-rate take on Padme, LM.

For my money, anyway.

Again, another exceptionally solid post, LM!

I think that explains more than you think it does.

I see where you're coming from, but these are tragic characters, after all -- each with one or more flaws we all have, but in their cases, are at an extreme level and prove fatal.

I mean, you could say, a million and one stupid decisions were made in the prequel trilogy story, so what's one more, that can't be entirely helped?

- The Neimoidians could have been less greedy and ruthless.
- People could have been kinder and more sympathetic to Jar Jar.
- The Jedi could have been less dogmatic and arrogant and less cloistered from the populace.
- The clone army could have been condemned and never used; and the soldiers, rehabilitated.
- Anakin could have left the Jedi Order and settled down with Padme on Naboo.
- Mace could have been more accepting of Anakin and not rushed in to arrest, let alone execute, the man legally in charge of the Republic; the man also pulling Anakin's strings.
- Obi-Wan could have decided not to sneak aboard Padme's ship; or even confronted her, once she arrived, agreed on a sensible plan, and emerged alongside her, or even ahead of her.
- Yoda could have found a better way to topple the Empire than waltz in like a gunslinger and try and outright kill the Emperor (repeating the stupidity of Mace).
Etc., etc.

There is no such thing as a "perfectly healthy" person. And Padme couldn't form a natural bond with her children. It's pretty clear that she was already madly focused on Anakin and in a state of deep sorrow and mourning. And in real life, postpartum depression is a terrible disorder which afflicts anywhere from 5% to 25% of women (and a smaller incidence of men). The causes of this in our own world aren't well-understood. Therefore, the presumption that new mothers should automatically be overjoyed at having children, even with no prior presentations of depressive symptoms, is terribly naive, insulting, and even toxic.

Finally -- I've answered the rest in chronological order, but I'm now breaking the pattern and putting this last...

That is another terribly naive presumption.

The following, short as it is, makes for some very interesting reading:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904800304576474451102761640.html

Depression in Command
by Nassir Ghaemi

July 30th 2011

Quoting from the author's conclusion/summary:

Reverse the order of these paragraphs and you have the Padme of TPM and the Padme of ROTS almost-perfectly defined.

IMO, anyway.

Human behaviour is very often muddled and mixed.

Weaknesses can be strengths; strengths, weaknesses.

And life is fragile. Here one moment, snuffed out the next.

You don't always know where your mind will take you, either.

In fact, people often overrate their own abilities, or make excuses for mistakes and shortcomings, whilst condemning those same things in others.

And details are often suppressed by the mind as the outcrop of normal functioning. In other words, our comprehension of other people's lives is often quite small, even when we might strive for the opposite (and we rarely do).

I mean, Darth Vader, big scary dude with a creepy breathing mask, right? Couldn't possibly be any connection to the "hero" of the OT, and couldn't possibly have any deep weaknesses of his own, that drove him into that ungainly contraption in the first place, right?

Just your regular little black-hat/white-hat Saturday matinee adventure serial. Nothing to see here. Move along, move along...

 

There have been some very good arguments put forward on both sides of this issue I think. Cryo, I hear what you're saying about mental health issues. They can be complex to be sure and we shouldn't try to make assumptions without knowing the facts. But do you think it would be a more powerful statement, continuity wise, to have the mother of the very strong Luke and Leia demonstrate strength, rather than weakness, in her final screen act? Should the audience have to go away and read some papers on depression and work hard to understand what may be going on here? I guess in the end, it's just a matter of how one likes to experience a film. For me, elegant simplicity works. I may just be lazy though.

 

I think this will do a good job of summing this all up.

First, one thing that really gets me. Padme probably gets 120-150 minutes of screen time in all 3 prequels, and yet people think that they "know" her character backwards and forwards from that short exposure. Sure, we get an impression of what she is like, but real people, people we've known for years, sometimes do things that are really unexpected, so it's not so much of stretch to think that in fairy tale-like world of SW that Padme might die from losing the will to live, especially considering the circumstances, and those circumstances are really bad:

--1st, saying "There's still good in him" is far from saying: "He's good." In fact, it's pretty much admitting that Anakin has turned evil and that only a hope remains that underneath all that evil there's still some good hidden away somewhere.
--2nd, her husband has just turned evil and came an inch away from killing her.
--3rd, the democracy for which she has been fighting to protect from age 14 has just collapsed into tyranny
--4th, it's not that hard for Padme to surmise that Obi-Wan has sliced up Anakin pretty good or killed him, and on top of that, she would certainly think to herself, "If I had only not gone to Mustaphar, my husband wouldn't be sliced up/dead." So, on some level she would think what happened to Anakin was in part her fault.
--5th, if she thought about it at all, she'd realize that she'd have to give up her children because if she lived and raised her children, then Anakin would have searched her down to find them, and for that reason, she'd have to give them up and she'd never be able to see those sweet little babies she's just given birth to. Plus, there's no reason not to think she hasn't had time to think about this obvious consequence given that she was conscious on her ship when Obi-Wan speaks to her and conscious during her induced labor and so, presumably, conscious at other times.

So, in a nutshell, Padme is pretty much left with nothing.

Finally, for those who find it unbelievable that Padme "switches" from being strong-willed to being overwhelmed with hopelessness, let's look at another big character switch in ROTJ. Most people feel that Vader's redemption scene where he switches back to good is one of the most powerful moments in the Saga, but let's look at this objectively. How often do really awful people -- Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein -- switch from evil to good? Honestly, I can't think of a single example. In fact, I can't think of single Nazi prosecuted in the Nurenberg trials who owned up to what he had done and rejected it as evil. So, at the end of ROTJ, we have a character, Vader, who switches in a way that is virtually unheard of in real life and people find that scene very moving. Then, at the end of ROTS, we have a character, Padme, who falls into a deep depression and dies after her whole life collapses, and people find that totally unbelievable. That, to me, seems like one heckuva double standard.

And, honestly, I think a lot of the PT criticism derives from this double standard. We love the originals so much that we set unrealistically high expectations for the PT, and any hint of an error stands out, and then the Internet-meme/snark machine just reinforces those beliefs. If you use the same standards to view ROTS that you used to view ROTJ, then almost every problem with Padme "losing the will to live" falls away (or you realize that pivotal scenes in ROTJ don't hold up either).

 

Where have I said or suggested, though, that the audience should go away and read papers on depression? All I've done is offer some thoughts and present a rather simple link. It doesn't require hard work to make basic inferences or resolve this piece of the scenery with that piece of the scenery.

I don't think it would be a more powerful statement, no. It's more powerful, in my opinion, with the destinies of Anakin and Padme serving as a contrast with Luke and Leia's. The prequel trilogy is about moral blindness and failure, the original trilogy about triumph and resolution. The children are that bit stronger than their parents and pick up where they left off. That's the story.

Elegant simplicity works well for me, too. And I see elegant simplicity at work in all six films. The prequels are more complex, though; but not necessarily more complex than they need to be. On the surface, it's a pretty simple story to follow: boy joins religious order, boy gets frustrated with religious order, boy rebels and joins rival sect. Anakin's failings are then paralleled in the other characters and the broader situation of war and political turmoil.

Easy. Or as easy as you want it to be. I obviously like to try and delve a bit deeper, but I don't think it's a requirement that anyone do so. This feels natural for me, however, and I feel I get more out of the films this way. I can just revel in the basic splendour of the visuals, though, or the beauty of the music, or whatever. They work as pure entertainment, in my opinion, for sure. But if you want to spend a bit more time on a set of films that clearly took a while to assemble -- stuffed, in my opinion, with riches beyond what can be humanly glimpsed from a casual one-time viewing -- I think that's valid, too.