Abstract
Luke Skywalker, the embodiment of good masculinity in the Star Wars universe, cannot but understand the ‘detoxing’ of masculinity as the detoxing of the Jedi ethos and its institutions. The central triangular conflict of the original trilogy is between Luke, Darth Vader, and Obi-wan Kenobi, three Jedi in a patrilinear conflict, but Luke resolves Jedi masculinity at the end of Return of the Jedi through ‘saving’ his father. In the final trilogy, further issues with Jedi masculinity are problematically resolved in the figure of Rey, and revising masculinity away from action heroics and toward giving. Rey, in becoming Skywalker, is the Star Wars films’ final multiply gendered embodiment of the ‘good man’.
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Notes
- 1.
The characterization of Luke Skywalker I am discussing here focuses on the three ‘original’ films and the two sequels The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, in which he features. Before The Force Awakens, what happens after Return of the Jedi was narrated in a very large body of novels and other texts which were known as the Expanded Universe and which produced very different timelines to those established in the now canonical films. The Expanded Universe was reduced to the status of ‘Legends’, secondary to Lucas’s narrative. Much of this is explored in a series of essays in Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling, edited by Sean Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest (2018), notably the essay on Rogue One and fandom by Gerry Canavan.
- 2.
Elsewhere in this article, Kaufman makes a case for reading Luke and Vader’s relationship as being driven by an incestuous and passionate libido. In her BFI Classic on The Empire Strikes Back (2021), Rebecca Harrison offers a similarly provocative reading of Darth Vader as a “queer father” enticing the “not-quite-straight” Rebel Luke toward the “deviant” Dark Side.
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Baker, B. (2023). Skywalker: Bad Fathers and Good Sons. In: Martín, S., Santaulària, M.I. (eds) Detoxing Masculinity in Anglophone Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22144-6_12
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