Everyone knows the Star Wars series peaked with that confrontation in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) between Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and the villain, Darth Vader (played on screen by David Prowse, but voiced by James Earl Jones).
The “Luke, I am your father” revelation resonated because it expressed how George Lucas, like his movie-brat peers (Coppola, Bogdanovich, Scorsese, Spielberg, De Palma) struggled with Sixties generational ambivalence. A father–son antagonism resounds through all their films as a reflection of Vietnam-era student protests and the privilege of those draft-dodging filmmaker progeny. Even Lucas, in his escapist outer-space mode, iterated the era’s unease, culminating in Luke’s fear and symbolic castration.
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