Don't Disappoint (Ch. 15)
by Martin van Cooper
Welcome back to a special Summer Edition of PILCROW. For the next four weeks, we’ll continue serializing Martin van Cooper’s unpublished novel Don’t Disappoint (runner-up in our last contest, back by popular demand). Stay tuned for submission deadlines for our next quarterly contest (in which each of two runners-up receive $500, and the ultimate winner - voted on by you, dear subscribers - receives $1,000).
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In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.
Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket
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What I’m saying, Mark is saying, is that your good deeds can never absolve your bad. I’m sure I saw it different at that age, but not like this. You have to take a basic responsibility for yourself.
I see it, Jason says. They are sitting in Mark’s backyard. It’s just the four of them. But it might just be back in my dayism.
No. This is different. There are expectations, spoken and unspoken, of parents and children surrounding us throughout our lives. Where does motivation come from if not laid out from your parents?
Are you the owner of your life?
Yes! Are you living for you or for someone else, are you living for now or for the future? There’s a profound isolation, I get it, in realizing that there is no reason for any of this to go on, that most things have already been done and said and found out. That everything is made up.
If you don’t reproduce yourself, you have nothing to pass on.
As someone with one already out in the wild, I have to agree with you. Harder to take a flying leap when there’s college tuition.
But you have to think about it from their point of view, Mark, Jason is saying, topping off Mark’s drink and raising a quick eyebrow to Jessica who is in the kitchen window just then. What is all the effort for if not to please parents or feed children?
I’ll tell you. The answer is vanity.
You see yourself as vain? Your son as vain.
I’m a realist man, Mark says and they drink their drinks for a minute in silence. But let me tell you this: I noticed something significant a while back that I hadn’t realized most of my entire life, not sure if I already mentioned this to you. In Empire, after they have escaped Cloud City with Luke, the Star Destroyer with Vader aboard is approaching the Falcon. Vader asks did your men deactivate the hyperdrive on the Millennium Falcon? The response is affirmative. Vader instructs them to set weapons for stun, so he seems at that moment still intent on boarding the ship. Vader speaks to Luke, and Luke hears him, acknowledging that Vader is his father. Luke is clearly conflicted and doesn’t refute Vader’s pleas, even calling him father. Instead, Luke asks Ben why didn’t you tell me.
Go on.
Moments later, R2 stops working on 3PO and zips over and within seconds fixes the hyperdrive and the Falcon escapes. Vader watches all of this from the bridge of the destroyer and after the Falcon jumps to light speed, turns around and leaves without any larynx compressing. The question is, what happened? I can think of two scenarios: Scenario 1: R2 got the information from the central computer in Cloud City or just took the initiative, the latter being strange for a droid and therefore some kismet, and went to fix the hyperdrive, allowing them to escape. The dramatic moment was heightened by the anticipation of Vader killing the bridge commander on Star Destroyer …so that when he doesn’t, it’s somehow more poignant. This is the scenario that I believed most of my life.
Likewise. What’s the alternative?
Scenario 2: R2 knows nothing about the functionality of the Falcon, as 3PO points out. So, what happens is, at the last possible second, R2 is thought-controlled by Vader, who we later find out once owned him as a child, who tells R2 how to fix the hyperdrive, thereby facilitating Luke and Leia’s escape. This is the interpretation I now subscribe to, which leads to a much more interesting question: why did Vader do it?
Go on.
To this, I can think of several interpretations, but two main ones stick out: First, Vader still wants to convert Luke and wants him, Luke, to find his way to Vader on his own. He, Vader, wants Luke to come to him freely, as he ultimately does in Jedi, rather than to basically abduct him.
Or Vader subscribes to the Emperor’s mumbo jumbo…
Repeats it, yes, but doesn’t really subscribe to all the mumbo jumbo about ruling the galaxy and yada yada. His, Vader’s, antidisestablishmentarianism vis-à-vis the Force as religion is in part reaction to the Emperor’s bastardization of the religion to which he, Vader, truly believes. Subscribes. He wants his son to be free and independent, but sees it as his duty to challenge him to reach his, Luke’s, potential. The last thing he wants is for Luke not to wield the Force. Vader just wants to make sure it’s just not in service of Palpatine’s ersatz protestant sect.
Makes sense.
Or, Vader actually doesn’t want Luke to join him and the Emperor on the Dark Side but does relish the potential of Luke as an adversary. At the end of the day, in this telling, Vader is drinking the Emperor’s Kool-Aid, but likes the idea of someone, Luke, to counterbalance him, Vader, so that life doesn’t get totally boring for him. Vader.
To me it seems equally plausible that Vader sees Luke can turn him and sees it as potential redemption. Like, turn Vader back to the good side.
Very possible. But why let them escape? Another explanation for letting him go is Vader realizes that Luke is stronger than him and is afraid that if he converts Luke, the Emperor will see this too, or already has, and Vader will be killed. In this telling, Vader is just really impressed with Luke’s having only trained for basically a couple days or weeks with Yoda and already being able to go toe to toe with Vader, and is surprised and momentarily discombobulated by this, and thus decides to facilitate the Falcon’s escape. For this interpretation to be valid, it really matters not whether Vader likes Luke and wants him to succeed in a paternal sort of mentorship sort of manner or not. Either way the driving force—Luke’s precocity—and the goal—staying on as the Emperor’s heavy—are the same. For Vader.
This is not incompatible with a spur of the moment decision. What if Luke actually does succeed in converting Vader through this initial interaction, but we just don’t know it? And neither does he. Vader. Or Luke.
There’s also something to be said here for the nature of the first light saber battle. We know that Vader has incredible skill, only a fraction of which he was using with Luke. Force throwing and mind control and whatnot. Aside from Kershner and Brackett1 needing to heighten the drama of the first encounter, consider for a moment what is going on in Vader’s mind: this is the first time he gets to roughhouse with his son, the first time he gets a real chance to see what the kid is made of. He’s going to let him make a few layups and keep the game close. He wants to encourage him.
Coaching. As an aside, if you google the empire s-t-r-i, stop at the i, you get a burlesque show. Just so you know.
Vader even lets Luke knock him off the platform at one point, histrionically moaning as he falls. Think of the old man groaning when you land a harmless upper cut or hit him with a pillow? Only in the very next scene to show his son that in fact he’s been playing with him the whole time and starts Force throwing shit at him.
Toying with him. All completely unnecessary if his only goal is to kidnap or kill the kid.
And then when they’re out on the gang plank Luke actually scores a hit and Vader gets pissed.
Was the chopping of the hand intentional? Capricious? Impulsive? Was it a premeditated rite of passage Vader is putting him through?
Let’s do a sidebar here and talk about the cutting off of the hand, which I submit is interesting for other reasons, Mark is saying.
The Bulleit is now finished and he shoots a furtive glance towards the kitchen and then his watch.
Luke has some minor bleeding from an abrasion around his left eye but there’s no blood that comes from the amputated right hand. This suggests that the light sabers, as more civilized weapons, have ostensibly been designed to instantaneously cauterize wounds. This would also gel with why on the Falcon they had the special sheath for Luke’s severed hand.
His exposed radial and ulnar stumps.
Those. A sheath for those. That Luke wears while they wait to make the jump to light speed and why the droid on the rebel ship has the kit and knowhow to fashion Luke a fully functioning new hand. In like an hour. Because for thousands of years Jedis had been chopping off limbs, this would have spurred biotech innovation for the development of artificial hands and feet and most medical droids would know how to attach them and even a smuggler’s ship has an old emergency hand replacement kit lying around.
Yes. Valid. I’m starving.
She hasn’t taken it out of the oven yet. I don’t want to go in until it’s out.
I’m fine. You need an outdoor fridge for such emergencies.
Let’s linger for a moment here on the set your weapons for stun. This was a major point of contention between Star Trek and Star Wars fans, the point being that pussies in Star Trek were always stunning people but in Star Wars you didn’t stun people you just blasted them. This is one of two times in the Star Wars universe, the original Star Wars universe of the first three movies, that we encounter the notion that weapons can operate in stun mode, of course in this case not actually utilized and the only case in which we do actually see them utilized, it’s the first time that Leia is abducted by the Empire in the first movie. It’s very clear that Vader has no intention of killing his kids.
There’s some latent affection there.
For the first time in his life, Luke has crystalline clarity with respect to his father. He has had father figures in Owen and Ben, but every fatherless son longs for the connection with the man. He wants to know the story, and this is the only guy who knows it. Luke’s angst at learning Vader is his father is initially so overwhelming because of the enormity of who Vader is but also because it confirms what fatherless sons believe at some cellular level: that they are being lied to. That the truth these stand-in fathers try to get them to believe is not the real one and so the agony we see in Luke is at this betrayal and further alienation from his tribe. And so, then, his next reaction, even though the man is the literal antithesis of his life goals, the man is the embodiment of what he has sworn to destroy, his next, Luke’s second reaction after trying to kill him is to reach out.
He’s nuzzling up.
He basically wants to hug the bastard. He’s a starving man seeking food, the chance to speak to his father, to call him father, and to lament that old Ben lied to him.
I think you are missing a much simpler interpretation here, Jason said, swallowing the last of his bourbon, which is just that the whole thing is a MacGuffin to get the writers out of the ridiculous plot hole in which Vader didn’t tell the commander to deactivate the hyperdrive, in which case the Falcon would have been immediately tractor beamed in. Also, this scenario gets them out of having to write another scene where, what do you know, the lackeys have again screwed up and Vader must again put his foot in people’s asses. I guess I’m saying I’m not totally sold on the Vader making the impulsive decision to deploy R2 to fix the hyperdrive.
I can refute this. It is essential to recapitulate the order of events here to make plain my line of reasoning: R2 says to 3PO that he knows the hyper drive has been deactivated but yet still continues to work on reassembling 3PO‘s leg. i.e R2 does not act on this information. During this time, we cut to Vader beseeching Luke and making what both parties and us as the audience must appreciate is a genuine father and son connection. At that moment, Luke wants more than anything to be with his father. Only after this does R2 then stop working on 3PO‘s leg and go over to nearly instantaneously repair the hyper drive. Had R2 known how to do this before, why didn’t he stop working on 3PO? The answer is he didn’t know how to fix it and he doesn’t have volition. He’s a droid. He was fixing 3PO‘s leg because that’s what 3PO or maybe Chewie told him to do. Only after Vader made the meaningful connection with Luke did he then decide that it’s better for Luke to get away this time, stew in his juices a little bit and ergo he instructed, Vader did, R2 to go fix the hyper drive.
I think I am digesting my own innards right now.
I understand and appreciate your point of view. Of course we can’t see any facial expressions but the movement of Vader‘s head, his posture and the body language when he turns and walks from the bridge are pensive, you might even say introspective, but certainly not angry or disappointed or threatened or worried. I’ll tell you what he is: he’s flummoxed. He’s been flummoxed by his son, by the turn of events. He’s deep in his own head. He’s thinking of rebirth. And he’s scared.
As a screenwriter himself, it’s perhaps not surprising that Mark is familiar with Leigh Brackett, who was a widely published science fiction author and accomplished screenwriter who worked on The Big Sleep among other films in the 1940’s and 1950’s. She was hired by George Lucas to write the first draft of the Empire script, which didn’t have a title at the time. It’s certainly possible that as an avid fan, Jason also knows about Brackett’s contribution to TESB as the author of the first draft of the script, which incidentally did not include the key plot component of Vader as Luke’s father, but this seems unlikely. Of course for Mark, this is all just talking shop. There is a greater cultural awareness of the role that Laurence Kasdan played in tuning up Empire and Jedi, and so it is possible that as a more than casual film buff, Jason would also be aware of Lucas’ engagement of other writers for Empire. Many fairly hardcore Star Wars fans, however, forget these facts and just attribute all the ideas to Lucas. But the fact that Jason doesn’t interrupt Mark here to ask for clarification seems odd. The most likely explanation is he zoned out for a second.