1.

I remember the summer of 1980 for two reasons. It was when The Empire Strikes Back was released, and it was when my friend Andy and I hitchhiked from California to Boston. We saw Empire near the middle of our trip, in Salt Lake City, and forever in my mind the two things will be connected: hitchhiking with Andy and Luke’s journey toward discovering that Darth Vader is his father.

My traveling buddy was something of a wookie: with Andy at 6’6” and me at 6’3”, I sometimes wonder why anyone picked us up. We set out on a beautiful day, our first ride across the Sierras in the back of a pickup. Andy had seen Empire the day before we left, and he tortured me for two days before Utah over “the secret.”

The end of our first day was at the Mustang Ranch, a legal brothel near Reno. I’d like to believe that it was then, sleeping beside the brothel parking lot, when Andy first mentioned it. Andy had enjoyed himself at the whorehouse – he was actually whistling a happy tune – but I’d had a problem with, ah, finishing. I’ve never been, thank God, to a prostitute again. We threw down our sleeping bags beside the road and he asked me something like, Do you want to know something about the movie that you might not want to know? I’m certain the sentence was convoluted by his desire to both tell the secret and keep it.

Andy had been having trouble before I invited him on the trip. A brilliant young man and the best basketball player I’ve ever known, he’d been to something like five colleges without getting a degree. I had originally planned to take the trip by myself, but I was at my sister’s high school graduation – no doubt, promoting my new adventure – when I realized exactly how scared I was. California coastal roads were one thing, but the Midwest was quite another. I’ve seen pictures of myself on that day and I looked manic. When I found Andy – his brother was graduating, too – I’m sure I presented the idea as a way to end his troubles. I think I got him at exactly the right moment. The Force was strong with me.

2.

Leigh Brackett is credited as the original writer of Empire, working from a story by Lucas. In the continuing colonization of my imagination, an important flag was planted by Howard Hawks with Rio Bravo. Brackett – a woman – wrote that script, which I think about as much as I think about Empire. She is also credited (along with William Faulkner) on Hawk’s The Big Sleep as well as Robert Altman’s revisionist look at Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. She wrote the first draft of Empire just before she died of cancer. (Subsequent drafts were written by that young buck Lawrence Kasdan.)

Rio Bravo is a Western about a drunk – played brilliantly by Dean Martin – who redeems himself. It’s also a story about the strength of his friends who allow him to redeem himself. It’s a great action movie – one of the best ever – but it essentially comes down to John Wayne wondering whether his best buddy has the cojones to put down the bottle while both of them are besieged by bad guys. I enjoy thinking that this was Leigh Brackett’s contribution to the script because it seems like a womanly concern – watching men support each other – but Brackett has said that Hawks wanted that, too.

3.

Wookies that we were, we spent many hours on the side of the road. Hitchhiking compels you to find new places within yourself. A few months before this trip, I had heard God’s voice beside a road in Ukiah simply because there was nothing else to do but hear God’s voice (He told me what He often tells me: you’ll be okay). After Andy and I had talked about everything we could possibly talk about, we talked about everything else. We made up silly songs about hitching a ride. We decided that I would try to guess the secret of Empire.

I tried. I got stuck on the notion that it must be about Princess Leia or that it involved the death of a major character. We had agreed that Andy would not give me any hints, though, and I ran out of ideas pretty quickly.

In spite of my frustration, those first days of our trip were blissful. There’s no other word for it. For a while, too, it seemed like I’d put an end to Andy’s troubles. On the road, it turned out, he had a light spirit. We wrote a song about it that I still remember:

Happy to ride

In the back of your truck

It’s a long hard haul

But we’re f*cked up

We’ve got bourbon

Enough for three

If you’ll just stop

To let us pee

Finally, in the day before we saw The Empire Strikes Back in Salt Lake City, I gave Andy permission to ruin the movie for me. Go head, tell me. I never would have guessed it, and yet it made perfect sense. Even as we waited in line on those impossibly clean streets with those impossibly well-mannered teenagers, that thought balloon was still hovering above my head: Darth Vader is Luke’s Father? Andy had robbed me of the surprise, but he had left me with the majesty. He had tried to explain to me the context of the “there is another” bit, but he screwed that up, and I didn’t understand until I saw the movie.

The Empire Strikes Back, however, was not a joyous experience for me. Which is not to say that it was a bad experience. Walking from the theater, I felt like my imagination had been imploded. And this had nothing to do with the “secret” of the movie. I had been disturbed by the way the movie started, and I was even more disturbed by the way it ended. Luke begins maimed and ends up even more maimed. Did we really have to wait three years for all this to be resolved? There’s a reality at work in Empire that is absent – and should be absent – from the rest of the trilogy. Cutting off Luke’s hand, I have to say, wouldn’t have been any more shocking to me if it had been his penis.

4.

In some sense, it was Luke’s penis. Empire was the film, remember, where Luke is revealed as a eunuch. Was there any doubt left that our boy would not be getting the only girl left in the galaxy? That look on Carrie Fisher’s face when Han is frozen always kills me. It’s clear that Skywalker is alone with nothing to look forward to but completing his Jedi training. Without a hand. And with a face that doesn’t look quite right.

That’s another thing. Let’s talk about Mark Hamill’s face. As legend has it, he suffered a car accident between the filming of Star Wars and Empire. I say “legend” because the internet message boards are divided on this issue. The way I heard it, the Wampa sequence at the start of Empire was necessary because it accounted for the changes in Luke’s face. Something happened. Hamill’s skin looked like it had been scoured by bad dreams, as though he had been melted and recast in a different form. His cheekbones were in different places. He looked damaged.

The Empire Strikes Back is a story about failure. In Luke’s case, a very particular kind of failure. He loses sight of the big picture and therefore jeopardizes the entire rebellion. He abandons his Jedi training in order to help his friends, and his friends end up in worse shape. The movie ends with Han in the clutches of Boba Fett, and it’s a real question as to whether Luke’s going to pull his head out enough to help him. Join me, Luke. It is your destiny.

5.

A few days after watching The Empire Strikes Back in Salt Lake City, we got picked up by two pretty girls from the University of Wyoming who were returning home to Nebraska. As soon as we got into that car, we knew we’d made a mistake. They offered us pot and they offered us booze. And then they offered us more of both. And then more. And then even more. I have a foggy memory of one of them leaning over the bench seat of their old car – a Fairlane or a Rambler or something – and asking us if we were “lightweights.” There was nothing on that Nebraska horizon for hours but that horrible question. Are you guys lightweights? I didn’t think there were any lightweights in California. Andy and I smoked and smoked, drank and drank, smoked and smoked. But then, at a certain point, we had to stop. This part of the story still embarrasses me. In some ways, I remain that twenty year old who was proudest of his capacity for self-abuse. I don’t remember us ever stopping before. And then they asked us the question again. Are you guys lightweights? Maybe it was the half week on the road. Maybe it was all the drugs and drinking we’d already done. We just had to say, “no more.”

We immediately began plotting our escape. We both did that lifted-eyebrows, these-chicks-are-crazy thing which was inadequate camouflage for the fact that we both knew we were punking out on the drugs and booze, that they had emasculated us, fragile creatures, by insisting that we do more.

We ended up at some huge Gilley’s-like Country Western bar, a warehouse filled with drinking and dancing Stetsons. We had eaten hamburgers, and it was already dark. The girls seemed to like us, but in some perverse way that I did not understand. They kept asking us bizarre questions that were in some distant way pertinent: You guys aren’t Democrats, are you? Do you know any homosexuals? What’s the deal with that? They never left us alone long enough to talk, and Andy and I were trying to be gentlemen by not just ditching them. Our situation, I have to imagine, was complicated by extreme drunkenness. Listen, Ladies, it’s been nice to meet you but we’d love to go sleep under that freeway bridge now. We tried to get each other alone. I winked and went to the bathroom, but Andy didn’t follow me. I came back from the bathroom and then Andy went. So, then I followed him. But he was gone. I couldn’t find him. Anywhere.

6.

A comparison between Dean Martin and Mark Hamill might seem a stretch, but there’s nothing more shocking to me in Empire than what a prick Luke turns out to be. His contempt for Yoda, his wimpiness during his Jedi training, his terrible defiance of his master in leaving Dagobah – it’s really quite shocking. Lucas must have imagined that the clouds of glory trailing from the destruction of the Death Star would get young Skywalker over the hump, but I remain unconvinced.

The Empire Strikes Back, it seems to me, has similar concerns as Rio Bravo. Yoda does what he can to see that Luke will recover from his selfishness and short-sighted goals to become the man who can save the galaxy from Darth Vader, but whereas John Wayne was successful with Dean Martin, Yoda was not successful with Luke. Luke leaves the Dagobah system on his dubious quest to keep his friends from pain as Yoda warns him that “he would destroy all for which they have fought and suffered.” And then, if that weren’t enough, we’re given the conversation between Yoda and the ghost of Ben Kenobi in the moment after Luke leaves: there is another. Forgive me for complaining about a movie that I dearly love, but wouldn’t that be a little like John Wayne sobering up Dean Martin, sending him into a gunfight, and then telling Walter Brennan, “Don’t worry about it, if this guy doesn’t pan out, we can always get Sinatra”?

7.

I looked everywhere for Andy. And then I went back for the girls and we all looked everywhere for Andy. I don’t remember the name of that Nebraska town, but it was small, and it scared me that we couldn’t find him. His mother had given me a look at my sister’s graduation – a look of please don’t – and I was already imagining having to call her. I felt like I was down behind enemy lines, and I couldn’t help but think that some redneck had forced Andy to admit he’d voted for Carter. And then bashed his head in.

After we’d searched the town until we couldn’t stand, I spent the night at the girls’ house. Their concern for Andy had instantly humanized them for me. When I woke up the next morning, I had the simple epiphany that if Andy were still alive, there was only one place he would likely be: in a motel.

When I walked into the motel room to find Andy sleeping in a comfortable bed, watching cartoons, I was filled with such rage and righteousness. He explained that he’d wandered off because he thought that I wanted to sleep with one of the girls, and he just needed to get away from them. And then he got lost.

There’s a moment near the start of Rio Bravo when John Wayne looks at Dean Martin with deep disgust. Yoda also does a pretty good job – for a puppet – of showing his disappointment with Luke. This was my moment with Andy. I think I imagined that I had done him a great favor by bringing him on the trip. Was this how he repaid me? Andy’s new happiness was fragile – I must have known that – but I ignored his fragility. I needed to punish him.

I shouted. I asked him what the hell he thought he was doing. I asked him how he could be so stupid. I told him that we couldn’t continue the trip because I couldn’t depend on him. Because I couldn’t trust him. I said it again: I can’t trust you. I told myself that I was protecting him from his own stupidity, but it was much more disgusting than that. I had offered him the Jedi training, I had given him the Deputy Sheriff’s badge, and now I was telling him that he didn’t deserve either. I was such an unbelievable dick. I don’t think I realized what a dick I was until this moment.

So we hitched one last ride to Omaha, and from there we took a bus to Boston. My friendship with Andy ended at the same moment as our trip. We pretended we were friends for about a decade after that, but it was never the same – no more “happy to ride.” Eventually, he stopped talking to me, and he refused to tell me why. I knew why.

8.

Return of The Jedi was downgraded, you remember, from Revenge of the Jedi. I couldn’t help but see it as a recognition of Luke’s diminished power. Does anyone remember what Luke did in that movie? As the new title suggests, his main job seems to be showing up. At the end of the trilogy, he is even more spectral than Ben Kenobi. Ultimately, it’s the Ewoks who destroy the empire.

9.

In the days after Salt Lake City, I felt betrayed to discover that my impulse to make Luke the hope of the galaxy may have been misplaced. That bit of information – “there is another” – ruined my day even more than the idea that Luke had washed out of Jedi training or that Darth was his father. For me, that was the most radical thing about the film. Not that Luke might be turned to the dark side (that might have been cool). What bothered me was the idea that he might no longer be the protagonist. That didn’t seem right to me. So much had depended on him.

I teach creative writing, and there’s nothing that my students love more than a trick ending, although I do my best to dissuade them. Looking at The Empire Strikes Back from a distance of thirty years, I’m much more surprised by Luke’s defiance of Yoda than I am by Luke’s father. I’m happy to be able to report to my students that the big secret of Empire doesn’t amount to much. The reason that none of the actors guessed it is because it’s not essential to the structure of the story. At best, it’s a side show to the real questions which will not be answered by the end of the movie: does Luke have the cojones to save the galaxy? And if he doesn’t, who will?

Dan Barden is a novelist and professor at Butler University  in Indianapolis.

Tags: Star Wars

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 18th, 2010 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Film, Star.
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