Star Wars: Reflections on seeing the Prequels First

Matt Yglesias wonders about seeing the prequels first, this provokes much bashing of the prequels, and one would be hard pressed to say it isn’t mostly deserved.  However, I have some very dorky thoughts on the subject:

First of all, I cannot believe I’m writing this. Second, I actually think that there are large swaths of good watchable “Star Wars” movie in all of the prequels, they just happen to come at the cost of sitting through horrendously uninteresting scenes for way too long. The last 45 minutes of Phantom Menace are pretty decent entertainment, The Obi-Wan storyline is pretty sharp in the second movie, and Anakin becomes much less annoying once he gets to Tatooine. As for the third, its just not that terrible of a movie at all. None of them are great, but I do think that if you see them first, they do provide a little extra bounce to the confrontation in Empire Strikes Back. Okay, we’re not surprised Vader is Luke’s father, but think about where Vader is at emotionally in his obsession to find Luke. The guy tries to bond with his son by taking everyone he cares about and torturing them until he understands why he himself gave up on believing in doing the right thing.  When he says to Luke, “Join me, it is the only way,” he is asking for Luke to validate his own choices that he still can’t really live with. He set up the whole thing with the Emperor about capturing Luke so that he could get to him, so that there could be someone there that he would protect and not fail, and he is so messed up that he thinks only by being the most powerful person in the universe can he accomplish this. We don’t really “get  this” unless we watch (suffer through) the prequels, and even then we have to selectively remember that watching them doesn’t make us not care about Darth Vader, because we have possibly suffered more than he has.  But it’s there, and it does set up the climactic finishes to the the end of both “Empire” and “Jedi” where we see Darth Vader try one last time to turn his son into himself by threatening to kill his sister, and when even that fails, he finally wakes up and realizes that his one chance to keep someone he loves safe is right in front of him.  The prequels, I would alsoo argue, impact positively the theme of Luke’s “weakness of having faith in his friends.” All of the prequel generation care about people, but they never really trust in them, they view everyone else as a dependent who needs “taking care of.” Luke and his friends take care of each other and have faith in each other, something that everyone thinks they can use against Luke, but it’s really what makes Luke and all of his non-force wieldeing friends, better than any of the Jedi good or bad (including Yoda’s grim utilitarianism). Okay, I’m done now.