The first time I saw Revenge of the Sith was in the theater way back in 2005. I was six years old and had an overactive imagination. There's a scene in the movie where Bail Organa approaches a group of clone troopers on a platform, and they tell him to leave. He hesitates/is reluctant to obey, and he winds up witnessing the death of a padawan before he is forced to flee in his speeder.
Because of the way this scene was structured, my six year old brain thought the kid was actually his son and his cry of "No!" was out of personal grief. (I must have ignored his line about how he and his wife were unable to have children later in the movie.) I built an entire emotional subtext around the scene which wasn't actually there. Bail must have heard about the Jedi being killed in Order 66, and managed to contact his son, who was still alive. They arranged to meet so he could get him to safety, but when he arrived the troopers were already there. His hesitation after they told him he wasn't allowed to be there was because he was holding out hope that his son hadn't been killed. When the cocky, overconfident padawan tried to cut his way out in a showy battle, only to be gunned down, the stunned and bereaved father narrowly managed to escape. His adoption of Leia would be an attempt to fill the hole left by his failure to save his son.
But then I saw the movie several more times (I used to watch it obsessively) and realized that wasn't the case at all. He was just reacting to the horror of some random Jedi kid getting murdered.
I did this kind of stuff with the entire movie, projecting my own ideas and head canon onto the film despite not even knowing what that meant. I turned the soap opera schlock into high drama just by giving the characters a reason for being there. It ceased to be "a series of colorful, crisp images that play in a sequence" and became my own mythology.
...Is that why I'm here on Chaos now?...
Because of the way this scene was structured, my six year old brain thought the kid was actually his son and his cry of "No!" was out of personal grief. (I must have ignored his line about how he and his wife were unable to have children later in the movie.) I built an entire emotional subtext around the scene which wasn't actually there. Bail must have heard about the Jedi being killed in Order 66, and managed to contact his son, who was still alive. They arranged to meet so he could get him to safety, but when he arrived the troopers were already there. His hesitation after they told him he wasn't allowed to be there was because he was holding out hope that his son hadn't been killed. When the cocky, overconfident padawan tried to cut his way out in a showy battle, only to be gunned down, the stunned and bereaved father narrowly managed to escape. His adoption of Leia would be an attempt to fill the hole left by his failure to save his son.
But then I saw the movie several more times (I used to watch it obsessively) and realized that wasn't the case at all. He was just reacting to the horror of some random Jedi kid getting murdered.
I did this kind of stuff with the entire movie, projecting my own ideas and head canon onto the film despite not even knowing what that meant. I turned the soap opera schlock into high drama just by giving the characters a reason for being there. It ceased to be "a series of colorful, crisp images that play in a sequence" and became my own mythology.
...Is that why I'm here on Chaos now?...