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‘ALL FILMS ARE PERSONAL’: AN ORAL HISTORY OF STAR WARS: EPISODE I THE PHANTOM MENACE | George Lucas
That’s the summary of Anakin Skywalker right there–he started out as a nice kid, he was kind and sweet and lovely, but then he was trained as a Jedi and Jedi can’t be selfish. They can love, but they can’t love people to the point of possession. It’s fear that takes you to the dark side and Anakin’s fear was of losing his wife, he became greedy and possessive of her.
That is the narrative arc of Anakin Skywalker and it’s not the first time George Lucas has laid it out like that, that the problem wasn’t that he loved her, the problem wasn’t that he was a Jedi, the problem was that he loved her in a greedy, possessive way and so he made a deal with the devil to keep her.
It’s one of the things that most breaks my heart about Anakin, that his childhood was as a slave, that the arc of him in that first movie was how he became free, how he wasn’t a thing to possess or keep, but his own person with his own wants.
And, by the end of Revenge of the Sith, he had come around to the negative image of that–he didn’t care what Padme wanted, he didn’t care that she was horrified by what he’d done, he wanted to keep her. He couldn’t let go of her, he wanted to possess her, it wasn’t about her, it was about how much he loved her and wanted to have her, how he couldn’t let go of her.
He had become the very thing he swore to destroy.
“You can’t really possess somebody, because people are free.” and that was the problem with Anakin’s love for her, that it crossed the line because of his fears, from something that started out so very sweet, to greed and possession. And Padme felt it, “You’re not the person I married. You’re a greedy person.” / “I don’t know you any more. You’re breaking my heart. You’re going down a path I can’t follow.”
And that arc, that echo and rhyme is beautifully told. That’s why it’s so important that the prequels and the originals echo each other, that’s why it’s so important that Luke have a chance to do the same thing, because mirror images and negative images in the story, the sense of something coming full circle so it can go in the opposite way, are one of the fundamental building blocks of Star Wars.