How do you think Padme Died?

[Brandon Rhea]

I think that assumes it was simply her choice to die and it happened in such a cheap way. I prefer to look at it that the preceding events were just a great blow to her heart and she couldn't go on anymore, which is a pretty well-established tradition in the epic romances and tales Star Wars (thinks it does anyway) takes its cues from.

But when you couple that with the fact that she just had twins 2 seconds earlier, it makes it completely selfish. And that's not what the movie was trying to get across. It was supposed to be tragic.

Well-established tradition or not, it simply wasn't the right decision for the character of Padmé Amidala.

 

[Nor'baal]

''Twins Padme!'' - Kenobi

''Lolno.'' - Padme

 

[Officiant]

But you also have to remember that going into the prequels there was no other way out for Padme's character. She had to be as Leia said "Sad" and most likely dead (it would be even worse if she had physically abandoned her children no?). Given the heightened feelings all of the other characters have in the film, I think it is possible that her grasp on life just became too much for her to bear. I think the fact that she is portrayed as strong is a rather one-dimensional view of the character. She could be vulnerable and moved to great emotion. Padme was prepared to give up everything for her husband and the vision of their family, but he betrayed that vision and her and she couldn't take it.

And....

''Twins Padme!'' - Kenobi

''Lolno.'' - Padme

Right?!

 

[Brandon Rhea]

But you also have to remember that going into the prequels there was no other way out for Padme's character. She had to be as Leia said "Sad" and most likely dead (it would be even worse if she had physically abandoned her children no?).

Sure, but does that mean she had to die because she just became too sad? Nope.

Given the heightened feelings all of the other characters have in the film, I think it is possible that her grasp on life just became too much for her to bear. I think the fact that she is portrayed as strong is a rather one-dimensional view of the character. She could be vulnerable and moved to great emotion. Padme was prepared to give up everything for her husband and the vision of their family, but he betrayed that vision and her and she couldn't take it.

Padmé is a one-dimensional character in a lot of respects (most prequel characters were), and strength was one of her defining traits. So to have that all of a sudden be reversed by losing the will to live is out of left field and out of character. It doesn't track with her character up to that point.

All of the things you said could have been there, but weren't. She could have been vulnerable and moved to great emotion, but she wasn't. She could have been prepared to give up everything for her husband, but she wasn't. She could have been shown to have a vision of what their family could be, but she wasn't.

A story like "she lost the will to live" has to be carefully crafted, built up to, and nuanced. This wasn't. It's very easy to screw up a trope like that, and Lucas screwed it up. It's also not a trope I would have used if I were Lucas.

 

[Officiant]

Sure, but does that mean she had to die because she just became too sad? Nope.

All of the things you said could have been there, but weren't. She could have been vulnerable and moved to great emotion, but she wasn't. She could have been prepared to give up everything for her husband, but she wasn't. She could have been shown to have a vision of what their family could be, but she wasn't.

.

I would argue that all of those things are present in Revenge of the Sith. Most of her scenes in the movie detail how this baby is going to change their lives and hers specifically. She's not going to be a Senator anymore, she's going to go back home to Naboo and fix up the baby's room. It's also implicit in Episodes II & III that being married to Anakin is potentially as disastrous for her as it is for him (I.E. the scenes in the Naboo Villa Retreat, and her first scene in Revenge of the Sith at the Senate office buildings). Her scene in the finale when she talks to Anakin on the Mustafar platform is also driven entirely by strong emotion and some... interesting dialogue choices.

Sure, but does that mean she had to die because she just became too sad? Nope.

A story like "she lost the will to live" has to be carefully crafted, built up to, and nuanced. This wasn't. It's very easy to screw up a trope like that, and Lucas screwed it up. It's also not a trope I would have used if I were Lucas.

I'll give you that one but "trope" implies lack of artistic consideration, "archetype" is better since George Lucas heavily documented his artistic influences from various sources and Star Wars is a story in the grand epic tradition of Joseph Campbell (who George Lucas credits with spawning his ideas). Sometimes these director's notes are vastly more impressive than the whittled down versions that make it into his movies.

 

[Brandon Rhea]

I think you have to really interpret your own ideas into Episode III in order to see those things as being there. She never said she wasn't going to be a senator anymore, for example, just that she was going to have the baby on Naboo. I doubt that Padmé would have given up her political life. That was too much of who she was.

You can certainly interpret it that way, though. That's ultimately one of the biggest issues of the prequels. There's so little that's clear that you have to start building your own ideas into it for it to make sense. Which is something I certainly do as well (less so as a result of TCW, but it's still present).

 

[BLADE]

I'd just like to say that Camille Paglia is a hack and a philistine. An utterly despicable fraud. Her flattening of gender politics has always (and I've pored through Personae and Vamps and tramps) been vacuous and self-serving. She conflates historicism with Marxist and is the worst type of vulgarian (in every sense of the word.) Her own understanding of femininity is blinkered, two-dimensional and smacks of recycled Heidegger and ideas Butler worked through (though she has her own issues with reductive constructivism) years ago. I hesitate to even comment along these lines because blinkered and shallow pop culture analysis is literally half of what Paglia has built her dubious academic reputation on.

But if I must. Ignoring that much of Star Wars is utter trash, there is always an epiphenomenal and concrete meaning to even its shallowest concepts. The Prequel Trilogy's treatment of Padme Amidala has a few main components (simplifying as we must):

i.) Her semiotic meaning --what does Padme Amidala stand for?

Padme Amidala is introduced to Anakin Skywalker in the movies through a lie. It is a romantic and perhaps necessary lie --if you buy into the need to protect a reactionary institution like the monarchy but hey it's Star Wars-- but one which places her in a similar context to Skywalker socially --she is a handmaiden; he is a slave. Both are servants. Note that this is not the first time that Padme assumes dual roles. In The Phantom Menace she is a queen and a handmaiden. In Attack of the Clones: Senator/Warrior or Peacemaker/Warrior if you want to get all saga-y about it. And so on.

It's a clumsy (but a monomythical/time-honored way) to set up a saga's character and it mirrors her beau's dualism (child-prodigy/learner/savior/hero/fallen.) We can get into why it doesn't resonate aside from the technical reasons of directing and acting, of course, but for our purposes it does establish an important fact about Padme Amidala.

At any point, much like her husband, she is always torn by dual impulses. Watch this space.

ii.) The historical and cinematic context of the Prequels

The creation of the Prequels evinces both great hesitation (on some level George Lucas understood the tremendous pressure he was under to make this thing at least decent) and tremendous arrogance --the indolence, the lack of imagination, the crude apogee of lucre over any principle of filmmaking (which lest we forget is kind of the point of Star Wars however good you think the first two are.) There is again a dialectic of duality here, particularly as Lucas' own underdeveloped politics (he's rambled about the need for benevolent dictators, fetishizes a political reliquary of essentially mystical Knights Templar, etc.) are buffeted by the consequences of his own success --both immediately in terms of the success of Star Wars and as well as the attendant competition of the blockbuster culture it gestated.

This blockbuster culture perforce adds many other obstacles to even a good-faith rendering of a Star Wars prequel: its accretion of cultural (to say nothing of monetary) cachet means that what references have already occurred perforce circumscribe the story. Lucas the filmmaker has not given himself a free hand because Lucas the Businessman already knows the bottom line.

Simply put Lucas' "vision" (a thin gruel of Vietnam war psychic exorcism, entirely too much credit given to Campbell --a bit of a con man with some interesting ideas, and the worst aspects of the 70s auteur trend) was overwhelmed by cinematic and world events.

Because this is also the time of the Iraq War, a recrudescence of American Imperialism, and a general continuation of the retreat of American liberalism (Lucas' home ideology) without even the stamp of Clintonism to salve the pain. Padme Amidala is fundamentally a liberal in the Star Wars universe: an ostensible pacifist who still takes up the blaster (that dualism or hypocrisy if you are feeling less charitable), a politician largely but not entirely hemmed in by the iron corset of parliamentarism and legality, a believer in an old and desiccated institution.

No wonder Palpatine sweeps her aside as though she is nothing. He is power. The will to it, its mouldering molding form. He understands the Clausewitzian principle of war as another form of politics and has a good sense of the counterrevolutionary flair for dramatics, for violence as an affirming principle for the need of myths and heroes (hence his grooming of a pseudo-Nietzschean figure like poor Anakin Skywalker.)

Her duality in this case is one of optimism/pessimism. At least on paper she is the most consistently idealistic character in the Prequel Trilogy, but she is also the mouthpiece for Lucas' conclusion that democracy (at least in the limited, grasping way he conceives it) can easily wither and die.

iii.) The Idealism (philosophically speaking) of George Lucas' mythopoetics

Think also of her aesthetics. The planet she hails from is a lush, live-giving planet. Her costumes range from the Elizabethan virgin-queen aesthetic to skintight absurdity (she is nubile; she is fertile.) In conjunction with her soft introduction to Anakin as a member (at least in solidarity) of the same class she transposes herself as mother-figure and potential mate for Skywalker. This is straight out of the Nordic and English and French sagas and dramas and morts.

And while we cannot give Lucas much credit for writing fully realized characters, his own prejudices seem to give him a very difficult time writing female characters a fortiori. In particular, his own myth-building seems to unconsciously start from a model of a female mother-warrior-statesman cypher to increased debility and dependence on a male figure (Padme - Anakin; Leia - Han to some extent.)

iv.) Whatever contradictions cannot be resolved (ancillary production notes, what acting is brought into it, etc.)

To this stew is added Natalie Portman's acting tendencies. She has some of the elements of a great actress --a certain sensitivity, an aesthetic willingness to elevate or at least turn away from some of the grosser aspects of weaker work (Closer) and she's certainly shown commitment in acting.

I turn to her acting first because Lucas admits that he knows little of directing actors. But Portman is a fine (though ultimately not great --note the qualifier "some"--) actress. She strives to add some texture and complexity to her character and in quiet moments --the trip to Mustafar, etc. she is not quite overwhelmed by the pseudo-Wagnerian and crude aesthetics of Mr. Lucas.

In some respects her performance is a victory, at least insofar as much of the Prequels can be salvaged because in strictly narrative-linear terms she geometrically matches the arc of her husband and is at least the character with the most coherent motivations (consider Obi-Wan or Anakin before you object) in the films.

That this is ignored is due to the marginalization of women in Star Wars, the blockbuster culture appreciating spectacle in lieu of sensitivity, etc. But there are elements of a human performance that would not be entirely out of place in a Truffaut or Cassavetes film.

vi.) Conclusions

What then does this all mean? That a muddled script and the inherent contradictions of the character, sometimes by design (Padme is a bit of a cipher) and sometimes not make her motivations in death difficult to unpack.

What we can say is that perhaps she resents her situation and even her children despite loving them. Her romanticism (again consider the aquatic and lush imagery of Naboo; it rather seems like the kind of retreat one of the Lake Poets would conjure were they able to) and politics make her ambivalent and disoriented regarding all the tragedies that befall her. This is a traumatic and injurious time for her and it would be somewhat insensitive to claim that she is knowingly selfish even if we accept the films diegetic explanation in toto (and I do not believe in conjuring SHEEEV where no SHEEEV is necessary.)

The straits of previously mentioned lore as well as the role of women in sagas like this (at best tragic shieldmaidens that find themselves still unequipped for a mysterious and roiling masculine world) make her death one of the most inevitable plot points in a pretty murky script.

Ugly? Confused?

Certainly. Not all cinema is history etched in lightning. Some is barely a farce scribbled in glo-light.

Padme Amidala's complexities are therefore sabotaged and deformed (Why must she keep a secret that she is --without adultery or depravity-- in love with the galaxy's greatest hero? Deference to an Order no one cares about? Why does she fail so consistently in the Senate? Why must her inner life be squelched?) in a masculinized and necessarily sexist story (her emotional and otherwise unseen labor is dismissed in the overwrought heroics of Star Wars), in service to an industry obsessed with lucre, and at the behest of an o'er lucky California goon who had the good fortune to take mental wax facsimiles of childish nonsense he read as a pimply teen and sell it for a buck-fifty (give or take several billion.)

She is in essence, murdered by committee.

And what better tribute to modern Hollywood than that?

 

[Brandon Rhea]

Good analysis, but it does ultimately come back to:

You can certainly interpret it that way, though. That's ultimately one of the biggest issues of the prequels. There's so little that's clear that you have to start building your own ideas into it for it to make sense.

How you read into her death can very much be in the eye of the beholder because of the unclear and poorly constructed story surrounding it.

 

[Tsunami]

She died of a broken heart. What a way to go!

 

[Nor'baal]

Jabba had her poisoned, so that he could see the last of the Jedi fall to the darkside, and therefore allow for the ascension of the Hutt people under a corrupt empire?

 

[The Derp of Hooves]

Most likely she fell down a plot hole and couldn't get up "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, I've fallen and can't get up." (Too lazy to meme that ^-^)

 

[Kuran]

I always felt like they wrote the script for EP3, and only after it was done did someone point out that they had to kill off Padme. She was never the brightest bulb in the pack but her entire role in the second half of the movie felt really forced. Why on earth would anyone, let alone a Republic Senator who is heavily pregnant travel (supposedly) alone to Mustafar, which if she'd looked on her ship's computers would fairly clearly read "Seperatist lava doom planet" in the hopes of encountering her husband just as he's "Ending the war."

Broken hearts have actually happened. It's possible. But to me, it was really just a clean way of killing Padme off at the end without having to get messy with "Anakin lightsabered her" or something more likely.

 

[Tsunami]

I always felt like they wrote the script for EP3, and only after it was done did someone point out that they had to kill off Padme. She was never the brightest bulb in the pack but her entire role in the second half of the movie felt really forced. Why on earth would anyone, let alone a Republic Senator who is heavily pregnant travel (supposedly) alone to Mustafar, which if she'd looked on her ship's computers would fairly clearly read "Seperatist lava doom planet" in the hopes of encountering her husband just as he's "Ending the war."

Broken hearts have actually happened. It's possible. But to me, it was really just a clean way of killing Padme off at the end without having to get messy with "Anakin lightsabered her" or something more likely.

Lava birth? You not heard of that. It's like a water birth but warmer & has a touch of Asphyxiation.

 

[The Derp of Hooves]

@Kuran like I said, she fell down a plot hole and couldn't get up :3

 

[argutator]

She died from wondering how she actually died in SE3. I mean 10 years of forum debate and its still an issue??

I know a broken heart is real and stuff, but like Derpy and Kuran have said above me it just seems to "convenient" for both Lucasfilms and Palpatine.
Now don't think I am saying this is Palpatine's doing; he would have just killed her before she gave birth.

Losing the will to die? ehh
Palpatine? Nah
Chocking? already debunked
real answer: Poor planning in the directors part maybe. I BLAM JARJAR lol

 

[Noirceur]

Most likely she fell down a plot hole and couldn't get up "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, I've fallen and can't get up." (Too lazy to meme that ^-^)

This, basically. She was destined to die or at least dissapear right from the start anyway, along with everyone who wasn't in the OT.

 

[Silverface]

Because Natalie Portman's contract was up and she needed to go home sharpish because she left the stove on.