By:  Julia Lam

    Creator George Lucas has often stated that the entire Star Wars saga is centered about the rise and fall of Anakin Skywalker.  In an epic struggle between good and evil, Skywalker is transformed from bearer of light to the very embodiment of darkness as Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith.  Brought back to the light by his son Luke shortly before his death, Anakin gains redemption and becomes one with the Force.  To interpret the Star Wars chronicle from a mythological standpoint, Anakin Skywalker exemplifies the role of the archetypal fallen protagonist in a story that can be easily regarded as the archetypal hero’s journey. 

   In the prelude to the tale, Anakin’s birth is prophesized long before its occurrence, thus paralleling a common convention in folklore and mythology.  An old Jedi prophecy speaks of a "Chosen One" who would arise and bring balance to the Force.  More than forty-one years before the climatic Battle of Yavin, the slave Shmi Skywalker suddenly finds herself pregnant, although, as she tells Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn nine years afterwards, “There was no father.”  It is possible that the Skywalker child has been conceived by the Force itself: a mystical, all-encompassing energy field that “surrounds”, “penetrates”, and “binds the galaxy together”.  This representation of a being whose creation has arisen through the will of a higher power is yet another common thread in many belief systems.  For instance, in the Christian tradition, followers believe that Jesus Christ came to be as a result of immaculate conception and virgin birth.  Accordingly, Shmi Skywalker carries the child, gives birth, and raises him, in slavery, on the barren desert planet of Tatooine. 

    From the start, Anakin Skywalker is an extraordinary boy.  Even as he is consigned to the hardships of enslavement under the greedy Toydarian merchant Watto, Anakin exhibits remarkable traits and abilities that set him apart from the other wretched inhabitants of the desolate world.  In particular, he is a brilliant mechanic, a fact that is disturbingly easy to link to his later manifestation as the armor-and-cybernetic-prosthetics-clad Dark Lord.  Anakin’s skill and intelligence is further supplanted by compassion, empathy, and selflessness – qualities which are rendered bitterly ironic when his future is revealed.  He is passionately devoted to his mother.  On one occasion, he nearly sacrifices his life to prevent the slaughter of a herd of banthas.  At the same time, the slave boy dreams of leaving the barren desert planet and journeying among the stars.  To satisfy his thirst for adventure and excitement, Anakin turned to the dangerous, illegal sport of Podracing, where he proved himself to be the only human capable of handling its vigorous speeds.  Thus, Anakin’s youth is centered about another common thread in storytelling – a youth with extraordinary talents is born into bleak circumstances, and dreams of escaping the wretchedness of his life.  Essentially, it is these tales of conquering the status given at birth – that is, defying destiny’s diktats – that inspire and awe, time after time. 

    Destiny’s hand begins to reveal itself when Anakin’s footsteps cross with those of Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn, who is, at the time, serving as bodyguard for Queen Padmé Amidala of the Naboo.  Qui-Gon later tells Shmi Skywalker of his encounter with her son, “Our meeting was not a coincidence.  Nothing happens by accident.”  Thus occurs the introduction of the young hero’s guide in his journey, often depicted in mythology as a wise, elderly man, such as The Lord of the Ring’s Gandalf or The Sword in the Stone’s Merlin.  Anakin had never had a father figure in his life before, and immediately formed a strong bond with the Jedi maverick in their short time together. 

    Regrettably, as in any bildungsroman, a significant step in the young hero’s journey is the separation from his mentor.  Qui-Gon Jinn perishes in the Battle of Naboo at the hands of the Sith Lord Darth Maul.  Despite reluctance from the Jedi Council, Anakin is able to take up his Jedi training under Jinn’s former Padawan, Obi-Wan Kenobi.  Their partnership is marked by an uneasy start; Kenobi, it seems, takes Anakin as his Padawan learner only to fulfill a promise to his late Master, not out of his own willingness.  Later on, Obi-Wan would relate to Anakin’s son Luke, “I thought I could instruct [Anakin]… I was wrong.

   Ten years after the Battle of Naboo, Anakin is reunited with Padmé Amidala, now a senator for her planet.  Assassins threaten to take her life at every step, and Anakin and Obi-Wan are assigned to protect her.  Against the background of an increasingly turbulent galaxy, Anakin and Padmé fall in love.  While the Jedi Code expressly forbids marital union, Anakin has grown increasingly rebellious and aggressive; he gives little thought to consequences.  Here, perhaps, a link can be drawn back to the events ten years ago on Tatooine, when he raced for his life in the Boonta Eve Podrace.  Prior to the race Qui-Gon had quietly advised him, “Concentrate on the moment.  Feel, don’t think.”  Taking Qui-Gon’s words to heart, perhaps, and “intoxicated” by his feelings for the Naboo senator, Anakin allows his fervors to direct his actions.  The period of initiation in his quest, his period of darkness and suffering, has begun.

    Blinded by his passions, Anakin begins to fall closer into the dark.  The darkness within begins to rise.  Prompted by recurring nightmares, the Jedi learner returns to Tatooine to find Shmi, the mother he had left behind a decade ago.  He arrives in time to witness her death in captivity by the fierce Tusken Raiders, an ironic throwback to his fierce promise in Phantom Menace that he would “come back and free [Shmi].”  For the slave woman who had endured so much adversity in her life, and given up the only light of her life to strangers who would take him light-years away for ten years, death, perhaps, is the only “freedom.”  (Similarly, when Anakin spoke about his dreams of returning to Tatooine and freeing all the slaves, one might, in a sense, connect his childhood dreams with his eventual emergence as Darth Vader, the Emperor’s right-hand man, who “frees” thousands of galactic denizens from the “enslaving chains” of democracy.)  It is Shmi Skywalker’s “blessed release,” and another savagely torn link between Anakin’s youth and his adulthood.

    As Anakin kneels with his mother’s body in his arms, he realizes the last strands of his former life as a slave have been suddenly and brutally eliminated.  There is no longer anything to hold him down to his history, his life – and, possibly, whatever future lies ahead.  Enraged, he lashes out and massacres the entire Tusken camp – men, women, and children.  Afterwards, he explains distraughtly to Padmé in a line that chillingly echoes his career ahead, “I killed them.  I killed them all.”  Directly contradicting the Jedi practice of diplomacy and defense, Anakin has taken the position of aggressor.  Fueled by ferocity, rage, and hurt, he has slaughtered an entire community unhesitatingly.  It is the turning point, the point at which the shadows that had been cast upon his life begin to loom longer and darker.

    At the same time, the struggle within the young Jedi is paralleled by the roiling tensions in the galaxy, which have reached their boiling point.  On the red-rock planet of Geonosis, the battle forces of the Republic clash with the dissenting Separatists.  As the battle rages, the head of the Separatists, the Sith Lord Count Dooku, engages Obi-Wan and Anakin in a heated lightsaber duel.  Obi-Wan had advised Anakin to advance cautiously.  Heedless of his mentor’s words, Anakin rushes forward to attack Dooku.  Once more, his aggression and fury are revealed, in direct contradistinction with the Jedi Code that teaches peace and serenity.  Dooku succeeds in severing Anakin’s right arm, in a theme of ritual dismemberment that would repeat itself several more times throughout the Star Wars saga.

    Blinded by fear, pain, doubt, and anger, Anakin turns once more to Padmé.  The two are secretly married on Naboo.  Marriage should have been a joyous event in Anakin’s life, but it is only another step to his eventual fall and destruction.  In the cycle of the hero’s journey, Anakin’s period of initiation, darkness, and suffering far overshadows the preceding and succeeding events.

    From Force conception to fall to the Dark Side, Anakin Skywalker’s path in the Star Wars prequel trilogy traverses the first stage of the archetypal hero’s journey.  In later years, as told by the Episodes IV-VI of the original trilogy, Anakin would make the full transformation into Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith: half man and half machine, progenitor of doom and destruction.  In the shadow of Anakin’s descent into darkness, his son Luke undertakes a similar journey himself.  Unlike Luke Skywalker’s story, however, which epitomizes the triumph of good over evil, Anakin’s chronicle is legendary largely for the villainy and mercilessness of his reign as Sith Lord.  This tale of a man who begins life with such extraordinary potential, uses his powers for consummate evil, and redeems himself at the end of his quest, is a poignant, mythical rendering of life as we see it – the marriage of rise and fall, light and dark, good and evil, within a single entity.