Skywalker masculinities and the far-right
Anakin and Luke Skywalker are unique cinema protagonists. Analysing their stories through a feminist lens can tell us a little-bit about what’s happening with the far-right’s appeal to disaffected young men globally.
Action movies with male protagonists are usually patriarchal, centring men that are representative of hegemonic masculinity - a type of masculine performance that is most rewarded by society. It’s tough, stoic, perseverant, charming, and above all else, victorious.
Star Wars, like most media is not a perfect feminist franchise, far from it. Han Solo is the stand in for our hegemonic masculine character who ignores consent when pursuing Leia Organa. George Lucas, woeful at writing women, continued some this “no means just ask again” in Anakin’s “seduction” of Padme Amidala. Star Wars when viewed through a feminist lens has some of the worst and most creepy sexist moments in cinema history… I mean Luke kissed his sister, bro.
However, Star Wars also shows two masculinities in both Anakin and Luke that are unique to blockbuster cinema popular with young men.
Anakin Skywalker — betrayed by Jedi/patriarchal dogma
Anakin Skywalker can be read as what happens when a young man is raised within patriarchal dogma and doubles down during a crisis. He’s a boy with a big heart continually punished for showing love.
Anakin’s overall story arc, including his time as Darth Vader parllels the false promises of patriarchy for men’s wellbeing. Patriarchy promises men power, status, and sex, in return for obedience to specific social norms. What it occults is the highly corrosive violence one must do to others and oneself to receive these rewards, and that it will ultimately kill others and yourself if taken too deeply.
Anakin Skywalker is a boy who loves his mother dearly. He is shown to have an extreme and innocent capacity for love and connection. Whether it’s his mother, Padme, or even Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin’s heart is profound, like his son’s, in its desire to protect and be with his family.
However, Jedi dogma dictates that these emotions and tendencies are dangerous — much like patriarchy, being a “mama’s boy” is simply intolerable and must be punished. The Jedi insist on letting go of attachments because strong emotions such as love and hate can lead to the dark side.
This is most evident in Attack of the Clones, when Anakin, witnessing premonitions of his mother’s death seeks out Yoda’s guidance on how to navigate these emotions and fears.
Yoda’s advice ultimately is to ignore it and pretend it never happened… A more patriarchal response you can’t write.
The invalidation of his fears and feelings leads Anakin down a path akin to today’s far-right YouTube/Tiktok radicalisation pipeline. When Anakin has premonitions of Padme’s death, he seeks out alternative guidance via Palpatine who opportunistically manipulates him into a paranoid, selfish, and volatile man. Palpatine validates Anakin’s feelings/fears and plays on ostensibly righteous values such as protecting your family, to radicalise him against the Jedi/society.
Jedi/patriarchal dogma that stresses the rejection of your own emotional interiority is ironically the Sith/far right’s greatest recruitment tool. Instead of receiving guidance on how to love, how to understand your feelings, relationships and wellbeing, the Sith/manosphere prey on these absent lessons with their own: double down on patriarchy.
Engage your hatred, your fears, reject anyone who would limit your individual ambition or power. Use it to bring peace, freedom, justice, and security to your new empire, by voting for Trump! Sorry, Palpatine!
And yet, even during Anakin’s downfall into Darth Vader, we see something rarely if ever shown in this type of cinema, we see Anakin cry. In fact we see Anakin cry repeatedly throughout the franchise highlighting the emotional crises he faces.
Anakin’s moments before becoming Vader are the extreme violence of a boy who was never emotionally cared for, given emotional guidance, or even truly loved. An alienated young man who saw his father figure, Qui-Gon Jin abandon his mother in slavery, told to ignore her safety by Yoda, made to hide his wife and future children — Anakin is a man betrayed by the Jedi, he is a man betrayed by the patriarchy. Yet unlike Luke, Anakin makes the choice to invest in it further.
Lacking any kind of alternative to the teachings of the Sith or the Jedi, Anakin falls into what so many men under patriarchy do, he becomes a husk, an emotionless, narcissistic, violent drone. Even the most monstruous, violent, patriarchal men were once children who probably had big hearts and loved their mum.
Somewhere down the line, our society failed these boys, punished them for that love and insisted on a masculinity that is ultimately poisonous to everyone around them and themselves. Patriarchy makes monsters out of men.
Luke Skywalker — he’s sooo babygirl
But Luke? Luke Skywalker IS SOOOOO babygirl. Our naïve to the world fresh-faced farm boy just wants to leave home and travel the galaxy with his friends. Luke Skywalker is a unique and subversive masculinity to be main protagonist in cinema.
Luke has several arcs, one of them is the same as his father’s, his relationship to Jedi dogma that insists on letting go of attachments.
Luke’s two mentors Obi-Wan and Yoda preach the same dogma they did to Anakin, to resist his attachments in order to weaponise Luke against the emperor and Vader — they’re afraid of Luke forming an attachment to his father. In their mind it was Anakin’s attachments to his mother and Padme that turned him into Vader — it could do the same to Luke.
Luke, like his father, disobeys this guidance repeatedly. He is time and again preoccupied with the wellbeing of his friends. During the climax of the original trilogy he does not let go of his attachment to Anakin, a father he never knew but still believes can be redeemed. He refuses to cynically kill him as Yoda and Obi-Wan instruct him to.
Luke instead uses non-violence — another mostly absent choice for male protagonists in cinema. Luke lays down his sword in defiance of the emperor instead of striking down his father, an act so shocking to Vader that Anakin is able to peek through, do the unthinkable and “kill” the emperor in order to save his son, saving the galaxy.
This continued rejection by Luke can be read as a rejection of the patriarchal norms and values of individualism and stoicism and instead an embrace of attachment/connection and love. It is important that textually the Jedi lie to Luke repeatedly about his father and weaponise him against the emperor and Vader. Ultimately Luke is able to save the galaxy when he chooses to listen to himself and embrace his loving nature and not give in to the feelings of hate and fear the patriarchy feeds on, rejecting both Palpatine but also Yoda/Obi-Wan in doing so.
Luke is a representation of a masculinity that is soft yet capable, relational and emotional as well as perseverant and principled. For young boys, Luke Skywalker is a representation that you don’t necessarily have to be tough to be a man — you can refuse violence and still win. He’s unfortunately a very rare expression of masculinity in cinema.
He’s also gay. I mean those Chanel boots and Gucci pants in an all black fit it go face the emperor? Bro’s gay, ready to slay and has a crush on Han Solo.
Love it.
So, is Star Wars ultimately a feminist story about the harms of the patriarchy and manosphere?
Nah.
Unfortunately, a feminist reading of the Skywalkers doesn’t quite bear out. Luke being able to redeem his father and ultimately reject Jedi and Sith dogma seems to be driven more by prophecy and bloodline than any sort of feminist awakening/guidance about relationships and connection. Luke just is a nice dude, we’re never shown how or why he is a nice dude.
Nevertheless, we see something about the way patriarchy functions and its effects on men in Anakin/Vader and the consequences for our democracies.
Anakin becomes Vader because of patriarchal trauma. Luke saves the galaxy because he rejects the patriarchy. The broader political story about the fall of democracy into empire is oddly allegorical given the times we live in. It’s more complicated, but we know it is disaffected young men who most voted for Trump and are globally moving right, patriarchy failed them and now the manosphere radicalises on that basis, so how do we avoid that?
What is missing from our world is a popular movement for a feminist masculinity — that missing story-beat that shows us where Luke learned the values that helped him reject both Jedi and Sith.
