You refer to the prophecy of the one who will bring balance to the Force. You believe it's this boy?
-- Mace Windu
When we first heard these cryptic words in the trailer for The Phantom Menace, they sparked wild speculation. What does the prophecy mean, and what will bring it to fruition?
The meaning may lie in the fundamental nature of the Star Wars universe.
Lucas has constructed a fallen galaxy, one whose inhabitants have eaten of the tree of knowledge and know good from evil. It is a galaxy of opposites, sharply divided between Tatooine and Coruscant, Imperial and Rebel, Light Side and Dark Side.
In a universe filled with dualities, it becomes essential for Anakin to fall from grace -- to cross from side to side, and back again -- if he is to bring balance to the Force.
Songs of innocence and experience
The poet Ted Roethke once wrote, "In a dark time, the eye begins to see." One cannot bring balance to something one knows nothing about, and Anakin must understand both good and evil if he is to fulfill prophecy.
We see Anakin undergo more transformations than any other character in the saga, changing so much that at least four actors -- not even counting James Earl Jones -- will play him by the time Episode III's end credits roll.
Anakin's face evolves from that of a child, to the terrifying visage of Darth Vader, to something else entirely in the final moments of Return of the Jedi.
And his destiny is fixed, most strikingly because we have already seen the second half of his story. That said, his free will is crucial to that destiny -- as Lucas has said, "you can find your destiny and you can choose to follow it, or not."
In The Phantom Menace, Anakin takes the first steps towards his fate by vowing to return to Tatooine and free his mother. Shmi Skywalker will be returning in Episode II, but it seems unlikely that Anakin will be able to fulfill his vow.
We know little of the events that will bring Anakin to embrace the Dark Side. But even at the end of the story, free will is a crucial factor -- for all Vader's talk about destiny, it is ultimately his own choice to defy and destroy the Emperor that restores balance to the Force.
The personal made universal
Some critics -- science fiction author David Brin, for instance -- have downplayed the significance of this moment. They argue that the return of Vader to the Light Side is merely a personal victory; that the second Death Star would have been destroyed and Palpatine killed regardless of what happened in the Emperor's throne room.
That's not necessarily so.
Whether it's a matter of cinematic pacing or the will of the Force, the Battle of Endor does not turn in the rebels' favor until the Emperor dies. In the Lucas-sanctioned Return of the Jedi novelization, James Kahn attributes the rising tide of chaos in the Imperial fleet to the loss of the "central, powerful evil that had been the cohesive force to the Empire."
Vader's return to the Light Side is also essential on the mythic level George Lucas loves.
Joseph Campbell wrote in The Hero with a Thousand Faces that "one thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light."
The abyss doesn't come much deeper than the twisted soul of a broken man, kept alive by technology after betraying everything he dreamed of as a child.
Vader knows the abyss personally -- more intimately than any of the Jedi, who wall themselves off from the Dark Side -- and his slaying of the Emperor is the overt act that expresses a deeper spiritual realization.
When Vader redeems himself, the good guys have won. The exploding Death Star is just the fireworks.
Break on through to the other side
Anakin does more than break away from the Dark Side. He breaks through the web of apparent oppositions that cloaks the true nature of the Force itself.
"The separateness in the world is secondary," Campbell wrote. "Beyond the world of opposites is an unseen, but experienced, unity and identity in us all."
Anakin recognizes this and makes it a reality. For a moment, all the cosmic tumblers click into place, and the Light and the Dark Sides become two parts of Anakin's whole.
He brings balance by transcending the dualities of the Force, by realizing that he does not have to remain on the Dark Side. For him, the Dark Side becomes a passage, the underworld or dark forest that mythic heroes frequently have to traverse -- a pilgrimage foreshadowed by Luke's trip through the tree in The Empire Strikes Back.
Vader's act of atoning for his time on the Dark Side -- atonement, as they say, is another way of writing "at-one-ment" -- is also atonement with the rest of the galaxy. As Vader and son are reconciled, so Anakin is reconciled with his "father", the Force, the galaxy.
The separateness in the world of opposites, the gnawing gap between individual and galaxy, closes.
Anakin Skywalker has found balance in the Force.
