Nothing But Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983)

I shouldn’t talk about the Ewoks. I’m about to watch – and write individual posts about – both Ewok movies and every episode of their cartoon. I’m going to have to find a lot of things to say about Ewoks. So I should not waste my post on Return of the Jedi by talking about the Ewoks.

Let’s talk about the Ewoks.

I loved them when I first saw Jedi, of course. I was ten years old, and the Ewoks were for me. I mean, that’s the cynical view, right? They’re just in there for the merchandising possibilities? Well, if that’s true, it worked. I loved me some Ewoks.

But I’m an adult now, and trying to watch this as if seeing it for the first time… I still love the Ewoks. If I were to dispassionately analyze the narrative, I’d have to conclude that the Ewoks frigging rock, dude. They’re cute and they’re funny, and it would be easy to play that battle against the Imperials wholly for laughs, but in between scenes of them swinging from vines to knock Stormtroopers over, we get them swarming over a fallen foe to brutally bash them to death. We see a couple of them killed, and one mourning his dead friend. The movie insists we take them seriously. They’re the colonized, killing their colonizers. Who can’t get behind that? (Plenty of people, actually, but nobody I’m interested in knowing.)

I’m pretty sure they ate the dead Stormtroopers. Ewoks are the best.

I also love every other thing about this movie. Leia is really done right by this script. Yes, she’s mostly left out of the family drama, but Carrie Fisher eats that scene where Luke reveals their relationship. Return of the Jedi is almost all action, all the time, so the momentary slow down for what is, I think, the first scene with any significant character-building dialogue between Luke and Leia makes it all the more powerful. Okay, yeah, the whole father/son plotline sidelines the father/daughter dynamic, but even though Leia doesn’t get to take direct part in it, she’s still a constant presence – she’s the last hope if Luke fails, she’s got the potential to be strong in the Force, she’s the one of the two siblings who really needed to be hidden from Vader. Watching this time, I got the feeling that if the Emperor turned Luke, it would be very bad, but if he turned Leia, it would be catastrophic.

Something else I love about Leia, and this goes right across all three movies, is how much of an action star she gets to be. She’s always right in the thick of it – even when she’s captured in Star Wars, she takes charge of her own rescue. In Jedi, she jumps on the speeder bike to chase the Imperials and it’s Luke who has to jump on behind her and hold on for his life. Okay, fine, “Leia kicks ass” isn’t exactly an original thought. But I’m bringing it up because it’s such a perfect thematic justification for her and Luke being twins.

Because both of them display some characteristics that are often considered unusual and some that are considered typical for characters of their gender. I just talked about Leia’s bad-assery, but, I mean, she’s also a princess. She’s an object of desire, from Han and, more disturbingly, from Jabba. (Isn’t it great that she gets to be the one to kill him?) And look at the scene where she first befriends Wicket, by going slow, being kind, offering food. That scene wouldn’t work with Han, or Lando, or…

Well, it would work with Luke, wouldn’t it? I mean, you can imagine that scene playing out almost exactly the same if their positions had been switched. Because as much as Luke is the action hero of these films, he also gets to be soft and gentle in a way that action heroes don’t typically get to be. Especially with this film firmly removing him from the romantic interest category. (One Hoth kiss too late, maybe. Okay, yeah, that kiss in Empire is a little icky in retrospect, but look at it this way – they had no reason to believe they were siblings, but their latent Force abilities were subconsciously telling them they had a strong connection. It’s understandable that they may have briefly mistaken this connection for something else. Now let’s never talk about it again.)

So forget Campbell and his monomyth, Luke’s journey is not the same as… uh… I tried to Google what stories follow the monomyth, and it’s basically every story ever – doesn’t that make it so broad as to be functionally useless for analysis purposes? I’m digressing. All I’m saying is that just as Leia gets to be tough and gentle, so does Luke. They’re the same, and that’s why them being twins, even though it might seem like a plot reveal for the sake of a plot reveal, is thematically perfect. I mean, you want balance in the Force? Forget balancing light and dark, the Skywalker twins are balancing gender expression. That’s the kind of balanced Force I can get behind.

Hey, I found something queer in Star Wars!

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