BTS Star Wars, Star Trek, The Silmarillion, and severed hands

Recently I got the idea to try to track down some of the sources of certain scenes that repeat in the early drafts of the script for ANH. Most of George Lucas's writing has its roots in other works, after all.

The early ANH scripts are notable for having several scenes that reappear in successive drafts, very much the same despite a dramatically changing story context. One such scene is that of a Jedi and a Sith, both wearing ornate breathing masks, having a lightsaber duel.

This obviously has its origins in the idea of a samurai duel, where both participants are wearing the frightening masks typical of feudal Japanese armor. The second-draft version of the scene, featuring Deak Starkiller versus Darth Vader, was immortalized by Ralph McQuarrie in this famous painting:



Vader's imposing breathing mask, originally used in just this one scene (set in a depressurized spaceship corridor), would become his signature garb throughout the film. Whereas Deak Starkiller, mask, character, and all, would ultimately vanish.

But that's not the only scene that recurs from draft to draft. Take this exchange from the rough draft:

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This scene reveals that the valiant Jedi Knight Kane Starkiller, father of the protagonist Annikin, is "more machine than man," and does not have much longer to live.

This idea pays off later in the film, when the heroes are trying to evacuate the royal family of Aquilae in the face of an Imperial invasion. Leia's two adolescent brothers are transported in cryogenic sleeping containers, but the heroes cannot find enough power packs to keep both the boys alive in stasis. Kane solves the problem by ripping a power pack out of his mechanical chest; he dies almost immediately, sacrificing himself for the royal family he serves.

In the second draft, the quality of being "more machine than man" is given to Montross Holdaack, the grizzled old co-pilot of Han Solo's ship, who has almost no purpose in the film except to show off his mechanical left arm and declare that he is mostly cybernetic. In fact, I would guess that the character of Montross exists solely because Lucas wanted very badly to keep the scene revealing a character's mechanical arm, but could not find another way to reuse that idea.

In the third draft, it is Ben Kenobi who takes on the role of the grizzled old cyborg warrior:

Note that, with the introduction of Ben Kenobi, the idea of the old cyborg Jedi has mutated. No longer is this character almost fully cybernetic. Ben may have a mechanical arm, but unlike Kane Starkiller and Montross Holdaack, he does not seem to be missing any more parts. On the other hand, the arm revealed as false in all three drafts is always the same one: the left.

In subsequent drafts this scene vanishes entirely. In the final film, though, the idea of a cybernetic character is implicit in the eternally-masked Darth Vader, an idea which would have a great bearing on the future direction of the saga.

But never mind the final film: where does this scene come from? What source impressed itself so hard on young Lucas that he very badly wanted to show off a warrior with a mechanical arm? And not just any mechanical arm, but one that looks perfectly normal on the outside?

Oddly enough, it may well have been Star Trek.

In the first-season episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" from The Original Series (only the seventh aired!), Kirk meets the long-lost fiancé of Nurse Christine Chapel, Dr. Roger Korby, who has been missing, presumed dead, for several years after the failure of a new Federation colony.

TOS being what it is, Kirk and Korby eventually get into a fight, and then this happens:



Kirk tears the skin off of Korby's left hand, revealing electronic circuits beneath. Korby reveals that, although his original organic body died in the harsh climate of the planet being settled, he was able to transfer his consciousness into an android body using the technology of a long-dead race that had once lived there.

(Notice that it's Korby's left hand which is revealed, just like in Lucas's scripts.)

By the end of the episode, Korby is revealed as a villain who wants to populate the galaxy with androids. When his plain fails, he ends up committing suicide.

In a later episode, "I, Mudd," (season two, episode eight), we again encounter a planet of villainous androids. Their leader is a fellow named Norman. At one point in the episode we get to see an open control panel on Norman's chest:



(It looks different in the current remastered version of the episode, but this is what young George would have seen.)

So did the visuals of Star Trek inspire the scenes with androids in the early drafts of ANH? Quite likely, yes. After all, Oola's green skin tone in ROTJ was a decision made personally by Lucas (overruling Richard Marquand's desire for purple), probably on the model of the Orion slave girls of TOS. Plus there's the "proton torpedoes" of Luke's X-wing, which sound remarkably like the "photon torpedoes" fired by the Enterprise.

Still, all of these cyborg characters from the early drafts are quite different from how the motif would later be used in connection with Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. These all are mentor figures, grizzled old veterans of conflicts against the Empire, whose mechanical parts tell of their long years of hard-earned wisdom.

But more importantly, they are all secondary characters. It's a far different thing to put a mechanical arm on the star of the film. So what made Lucas decided to chop Luke's arm off?

Well, for one thing, the ending of the ESB script as written by Leigh Brackett clearly didn't have enough danger in it. Luke duels Vader, but he escapes unharmed, and Vader does not declare himself to be Luke's father. (In fact, we meet Luke's father's ghost earlier in the story.)

But another source may have been an inspiration to Lucas here, one that didn't come out until the same year as the original Star Wars. That source: The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien. The mythological Bible of Middle-earth, Tolkien's Silmarillion wasn't published in a finished form until 1977, several years after his death; it was compiled by his son Christopher out of a series of fragmented manuscripts left unfinished at his passing.

One particular story from that sprawling narrative concerns us here: the love story of Beren and Luthien, the tale which Tolkien felt was the linchpin to his saga, and the most important by far to him on a personal level. It tells the story of a mortal Man, Beren, who falls in love with an immortal Elf named Luthien (modeled on Tolkien's wife Edith).

Luthien's father Thingol, who despises this upstart human, tells Beren that he can wed his daughter only if he retrieves one of the three Silmarils, brilliantly shining gems currently imprisoned in the crown of the Dark Lord Morgoth. Beren duly sets out upon this nigh-impossible quest, and Luthien escapes from her father's guard on her to come to his aid. Ultimately the lovers penetrate the depths of Morgoth's stronghold, where Luthien uses magic to put Morgoth in a deep sleep, allowing them to steal a Silmaril from his crown. However, as they are escaping, Morgoth's most vicious wolf, Carcharoth, attacks Beren, biting off his right hand and the Silmaril with it. From this day forward Beren is surnamed Erchamion, the One-handed.

Beren and Luthien return to Thingol, who is satisfied with Beren's heroism. A great hunt for Carcharoth begins. The wolf is slain and the Silmaril recovered, but Carcharoth mortally wounds Beren. Luthien shortly afterward dies of grief, and coming to the Underworld, she sings the Lord of the Dead a song of sorrow so moving that he agrees to restore them both to life--with the caveat that Luthien must give up her Elven immortality, so the two will die once more forever at some future date.

Another tale in The Silmarillion, the story of the tragic hero Turin Turambar, involves the malevolent curses laid down by the dragon Glaurung, a monster of supreme evil. Turin is already laboring under a terrible curse of perpetual ill fate--woven by Morgoth, who greatly hated his father--when he encounters a dragon.

With the malevolent power of his gaze, Glaurung causes Turin to be struck still, powerless to aid an Elven woman, a friend of Turin's, who is being abducted by Orcs. Glaurung then tells Turin that if he goes after Finduilas the Elf, he will never see his mother and sister again: a mother and sister who, he reminds him, live in dire poverty, in constant danger of attack from bandits. Stung by the dragon's words, Turin chooses to look for his mother and sister, forsaking Finduilas. His neglect leads directly to her death at the hands of her captors.

Later, Glaurung uses his gaze to curse Turin's sister Nienor, so that she loses all memory of who she is. Turin, who left home at an early age and so does not recognize her, takes her as a lover. Their incestuous relationship, culminating in a pregnancy, leads to tragedy. When Turin finally kills Glaurung, Nienor's memory is restored. She kills herself and her unborn child in horror; when Turin learns of her fate he does the same.

How are these tale reflected in Star Wars? Most obviously, in the story of Beren and Luthien, Tolkien depicts a hero confronting a Dark Lord and coming away only after losing a hand in the process. Not only that, the hand is holding something extremely valuable and symbolic at the time (a priceless gem versus an ancestral weapon).

But we also have the idea of Beren dying and his lover Luthien bringing him back to life. This is more significant to SW than you might think.

In early notes for ESB, published in Rinzler's Making Of book, we learn that Lucas originally saw Darth Vader as having been cursed by an evil spell into doing the Emperor's bidding. It would be Luke's task to undo that evil sorcery:

Vader having been bewitched into doing evil is quite likely a reflection of Lucas absorbing the story of Turin Turambar and Nienor, who were likewise enspelled against their will, with dire consequences for their future actions. As well, we have Luke traveling "to the end of the world" and having to make a sacrifice there in order to restore his father. This of course mirrors Luthien passing into the Underworld and sacrificing her immortality in order to bring her lover back to life.

Notably, the idea of a journey to the end of the universe in order to rescue a beloved father also shows up in another of Lucas's inspirations: the Lensman series by E.E. "Doc" Smith.

In the final novel, Children of the Lens, the evil Eddorians, ancient beings of immense mental power, realize that they have so far been thwarted principally by one man, the human protagonist Kimball Kinnison. They respond by using their mental power to exile Kinnison into an unutterably far remote dimension, where he cannot affect their plans for galactic conquest. This exile is explicitly described as a geas or binding spell to keep Kinnison out of their way.

Fortunately, Kinnison's five children have all been honing their own mental abilities. Linked together as one cognitive unit, the five (accompanied by their mother) pass from dimension to dimension, searching for their lost father. Finally they find him and restore him to our own plane of existence.

While the finale of the Lensman series involves a search for a lost father, who has been trapped by a curse, and spans the entire universe, it doesn't involve the father actually acting wrongly or out of character, merely his displacement into another plane. Likewise, although the five Kinnison children suffer immense mental strain in seeking out and rescuing their dad, there is no real sacrifice involved, merely tremendous effort. The ideas of a curse leading to a hero's bewitchment and fall from grace, and an act of sacrifice being necessary to restore him, seem to come primarily from Tolkien's Silmarillion. As well, the idea of having the hero lose a hand may come from the exact same place--Tolkien's book having stirred up ideas that were already present in Lucas's mind.

The final idea of having Vader be a fallen hero, a tragic figure in his own right, likely owes something to Frank Herbert's Children of Dune, which came out in 1976. In fact, we find quotes from this book scattered among Lucas's notes for possible dialogue to be used in ESB.

In that novel, we learn that Paul Atreides saw, through his prescient visions, the only way in which humanity could survive to propagate itself in the far future. This would involve artificially creating a long period of peace and prosperity, followed by a profound societal collapse, which would instill survival skills into the ancestral memories of every human being. Only an immortal despot could bring this about, and to become immortal means joining one's body with that of a sandworm: becoming a monstrous, barely-human creature.

We learn that Paul refused to do this, prevented by his Atreides honor from becoming less than human. Blinded in a nuclear blast, he retreated into the desert. However, Paul's son, Leto II, has shared his father's vision, and does not shrink from what must be done. Leto joins his body to those of baby sandworms, beginning a journey which will lead him down a strange and terrible road.

In a pivotal scene in the novel, father and son confront each other in the middle of the desert. Paul tries to dissuade Leto from taking this hard path. Rather like Satan tempting Jesus, Paul's seduction implicitly offers Leto the prospect of a happy, normal life, ruling as the Atreides Emperor, taking a wife, making love, growing old and dying. Leto refuses the bait, and ultimately, it is Paul who gives way. He sacrifices his life so that his son can save humanity; he creates a distraction so that Leto can kill Paul's sister Alia, who has gone insane and set herself up as a tyrant. Paul is killed by Alia's guards, but Leto's rule--and humanity's future survival--is secured.

Paul Atreides' status in the later Dune novels as a tragic hero, whose failure is redeemed by his son's success, is central, I think, to Lucas's ultimate conception of Darth Vader. This idea of Vader as a fallen hero quickly replaced the earlier notion, based on The Silmarillion and Children of the Lens, that Luke's father was a good man enspelled by evil sorcery.

Many years later Lucas would return to this theme, modeling Anakin's turn to the dark side in the final cut of ROTS on Paul's near-descent into corruption in Dune Messiah, when he nearly lets the evil Bene Tleilax take over his empire. Both are ultimately hinged on the desire to save a beloved wife who ends up dying in childbirth, delivering twins (one boy, one girl).

So... er.... this ended up being a bit rambling. But we can clearly see that Darth Vader and Luke's cyborg hand owe something to old Star Trek episodes, as well as to The Silmarillion and Children of Dune, both books published around the time of the release of ANH in 1977. And that's interesting in and of itself.

 

Interesting stuff, but I find the bits about The Silmarillion to be a bit of a stretch. It's consciously drawing on mythic archetypes in the same way Star Wars does, and isn't nearly directly linked to the films as Dune is. The similarities could very well be a coincidence.

In fact, there's only one direct link between Tolkien and Star Wars that I've ever heard of.

 

I know it's rather odd to relate The Silmarillion and Star Wars. But I do think it's possible, and more than a stretch. Early drafts of Willow apparently drew significantly on The Silmarillion for inspiration in some key scenes, like a sea voyage to an Elven paradise, that never made it to the final product. It's also clear that Lucas was keeping up with his favorite authors as they released new books: Children of Dune came out when the script for ANH was largely done, and the legless, sluglike Jabba of ROTJ owes a lot to Leto II's ultimate form in God Emperor of Dune.

And Tolkien was definitely one of Lucas's favorite authors. It's been mentioned in multiple sources that Lucas actually considered having everyone from Tatooine be played by a little person--Luke, his aunt and uncle, and Ben Kenobi--and everyone else be average size. It was a way of emulating the Shire and the Hobbits from LOTR, which later saw fruit in the Nelwyns of Willow.

Plus, the plot structure of the second draft of ANH, with its quest to return the magical Kiber Crystal (a powerful Force artifact) to Luke's father on a faraway planet, has a strong overall similarity with Frodo's journey to take the One Ring to distant Mordor, as even J.W. Rinzler has noted. The Kiber Crystal was simply replaced by the Death Star plans in the final film.

Even the colors of the lightsabers in ANH--blue for good, red for evil--seem to owe something to the respective colors of Frodo's glowing sword Sting and the flaming sword of the fiery Balrog.

All of which is to say, I think it's actually quite probable that Lucas read The Silmarillion at the time it came out, and it influenced his thinking about Luke and Darth Vader, however subconsciously.

 

Fascinating. I love The Silmarillion for similar reasons why I'm a SW fan, so I enjoy reading stuff like this.

I definitely think the father-son story of ESB and RotJ combines elements from (amongst loads of other things) the Lay Leithian and Túrin Turambar. One of the most tragic bits of the latter was when Túrin killed Beleg Cuthalion, who had just rescued him. As you point out in relation to Lensmen, though, Lucas upped the ante of Anakin's tragedy by making his dark deeds the result of conscious choices rather than circumstance.
Another element possibly traceable to Túrin, which is subverted rather than directly/obviously present, is the role of destiny/fate in Anakin's path and ultimate choices. Turambar ('master of fate/doom') was what Túrin called himself, in a show of bravado against the curse laid on his family. Which gives his what his incestuous sister said when she learned the truth, Túrin Turambar túrun' ambartanen ('Master of Fate, by fate mastered'), an awful pathos. Anakin, by contrast, is the child of prophecy who fulfils it in a roundabout way: he proves Yoda's prediction of darkness forever dominating his destiny (which was really made all the way back in TPM) wrong by making choices that change his apparent 'destiny'.

I think SW is a much more modern tale in the individualistic sense of bringing out personal choice as triumphing over destiny. Though, as much as some hate it, it might be debatable whether fate played any role in Anakin's final choice (I prefer to think not).

 

Fantastic post, ATMachine. I look forward to additional notes. I had never really considered the later films having as many/as in-depth of references as the first one did.

I haven't read Children of Dune; do you remember which phrases from it are mentioned in the ESB notes? I'm just curious.

And that quote about the 'passing manifestation' - I doubt it's dated, but isn't it placed in MoESB before the point where Vader is written in as synonymous with Father Skywalker? It's been discussed over and over, but do you suppose Lucas really was musing on that sort of merging for quite some time before he wrote it in? (Knowing the creative process, it's possible...)

And finally - the 'spell' approach is interesting, especially given how the final version of ROTS basically has Anakin 'flip a switch' and become psychotic/delusional-evil. He doesn't seem like he simply has a different but somehow valid point of view. It's interesting, and I wonder how much of that jarring shift is due to the re-editing that took place (as a byproduct of that, in other words) and how much really was the 'spell' idea, either still in play or making a comeback. Different parts of the film(s) seem to play to each approach.

 

There's one quote from Children of Dune in particular:

This is from a scene where Lady Jessica is attempting to introduce Prince Farad'n Corrino to Bene Gesserit mental discipline, at a much later age than is normally done. With Paul Atreides vanished from the scene of power, her goal (as I imperfectly recall) is to create a replacement Kwisatz Haderach from the same Bene Gesserit bloodline as Paul, in an attempt to restore Bene Gesserit control over the galactic Empire.

Now compare this scene from Lucas's early notes from ESB, where Buffy (Bunden Debannen, precursor to Yoda) is beginning to train Luke:

Lucas has quite simply copied the dialogue verbatim, except for one crucial word--the exact discipline which Buffy is about to instruct Luke in.

The same page of notes with the "extreme -------------" line also says of Buffy that "He was a ###### Mynoc. Human-computer. (Vader?)" The ##### is my transcription of a very heavily crossed-out word, which may have been Mentat--too naked a borrowing from the terminology of Dune. The idea of a "human-computer" clearly has a double meaning here; taken in one sense it is a human with an extremely powerful brain, as in Dune, but in Vader's case he is literally a human machine.

Also, the "passing manifestation" quote is not dated, but it's apparently among the very earliest notes for ESB, judging by where it's mentioned (right next to all the stuff about Buffy). That's also more or less the point where Lucas was pondering how to continue Luke's Jedi training with Ben Kenobi dead. At one point he apparently considered bringing a clone of Obi-Wan, who had previously "worked with several of JenJerod's clones."

 

I've been rereading the Dune books recently - and I got the impression her goal was simply to make him a better ruler by teaching him self-discipline among other things. He's not that closely related to her or Paul, as I recall.

 

As far as Lucas thinking up the idea of Father Vader early on: I think it may have been a possibility in his mind when he first began outlining ESB, but no earlier.

Certainly The Silmarillion and Children of Dune, both recently released, would have focused his attention more strongly on the idea of a father-son relationship. Add in Lucas apparently drawing a connection between Children of Dune and Children of the Lens--not surprising, given that Frank Herbert's books were much influenced by Doc Smith's work--and we can see that all the stuff Lucas was reading at the time of drafting ESB would have gotten him to look more closely at the character of Luke's father.

I think Lucas may have come up, tentatively, with the Father Vader idea before writing the plot of ESB, but was afraid to try it--because it would have violently bent the established canon of the SW universe implied in ANH. But then he read the Leigh Brackett first draft script and was completely underwhelmed. Luke's temptation in that version is a trippy vision scene where Vader exhorts him to reach out and grab the stars themselves--a far cry from Lucas's signature cinema verité style. Luke is never in any real physical danger, and the danger of him turning to the Dark Side is not really believable. I suspect that Lucas's feeling of "oh boy, this script just isn't working," more than anything else, led him to embrace Father Vader.

 

You may well be right; that part is fuzzy in my memory. I do recall that Herbert deliberately tries to keep her motives ambiguous, though.

 

Another possible Silmarillion inspiration: Maedhros had his right hand chopped off, as he hung over a fatal chasm.

 

I almost mentioned Maedhros. But I couldn't figure out any other similarities to SW in his character arc, so I let him go. The first post is way long enough as it is!