[UA] Building a Better Bad Guy (was Re: OT: SW EP 2)

[David M Jacobs]

Spoilers follow, folks.

At 08:47 AM 25/05/02 -0500, Greg Stolze wrote:

>It was okay.  I just think George Lucas is better with visuals than
>emotionals.  And those love scenes... blah.  There's more chemistry between
>Argon and Helium.

Perhaps I've finally lost it, but I sat through those scenes (twice), 
thinking of the semantic tennis match in "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are 
Dead".  Then I realised that if Tom Stoppard _had_ written SW2, the 
romantic non-sequiturs would've at least been surreal and witty.

>(Or Frodo and Sam.)

Now there's an image.  There probably _is_ a website out there catering to 
Hairy-Footed Gay Midget Sex, somewhere.  I won't even start on the LOTR 
puns...  #%o)

>But this is badly, badly OT.

Perhaps we can pull it back on-topic, then.  The Fall From Grace is a 
fairly common theme in postmodern literature -- you start off with a fairly 
likeable guy, and then, bit by bit, he turns nasty and 
eeeeevvvviiiiilllll...  By the end of it, his heinous acts seem almost 
understandable.

SW2 was a pretty poor example of this, IMO.  I wasn't too fond of Anikin in 
SW1 to start with, but in SW2, he shat me to tears.  He wasn't just 
"arrogant", as the Jedi Council claimed; he was an intolerable brat.  I'm 
surprised that Obi-Wan hadn't light-sabered him years ago.  #%o)

When he gets to Tattooine, he tracks down his mother, who's been kidnapped 
by Tuskan Raiders.  Why she was kidnapped and (presumably) tortured is 
unclear, an unforgivable omission when you're dealing with type of 
story.  After all, shouldn't the Tuskan Raiders have some reason for 
_their_ heinous acts as well?  Personally, I wouldn't put it down to simple 
cruelty; the fight between the lizard-thingies outside the tent seemed more 
like a spectator sport.  If they were really _nasty_, we would've seen the 
Raiders let one of those things loose on a defenceless child or something.

So, Anikin throws a wobbly and slaughters the entire village.  When he 
returns to Lars' homestead, he tells worldly, liberal-minded Amidala, who 
thinks, "Poor baby, he's wracked by grief and the occasional tantrum that 
cause him to commit acts of genocide.  Perhaps he just needs a hug."  Love 
is indeed blind, and deaf, mute, stupid and insane, to boot.

Anikin wasn't a sympathetic bad guy; he was amoral, erratic and his sole 
motivations for most of the movie were, firstly, to get his end in, and, 
secondly, to dump crap on Obi-Wan.  (Even those might be forgivable flaws, 
if only he didn't whine so much.)

OTOH, we have someone like Kurtz from Apocalypse Now.  He was the Real 
Thing, IMO.

So, how about we turn this into a thread on Building a Better Bad Guy?

>So, when Christopher Lee was getting direction from George Lucas, do you
>suppose he just closed his eyes and pretended it was Peter Jackson?

He was probably thinking back to the good, old Hammer days, when there was 
still a lot of gratuitous nudity on set. #%o)



David M Jacobs
dmjacobs at zipworld.com.au
http://www.zipworld.com.au/~dmjacobs/
ICQ UIN: 17027598

"'Kevin,' David interrupted, 'what the Germans should have done
was show the Russians a dead cat and ask them to explain it.'

"'That would have stopped the Soviet offensive right there,' I said.
"Zhukov would still be trying to account for the cat's death.'"

— from Valis, by Philip K Dick


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