‘I’ve been seeing her in my dreams… vivid dreams… scary dreams’
- Anima, Episodes IV - VI

The unease with Anima is first apparent in the relationship between Leia and Luke. As first it appears that there will be a romance between them. After all, she is a princess and he is her rescuer. In fact there is a tension between Han and Luke because of it, a tension Leia plays up to when, to annoy Han, she kisses Luke on the mouth (Episode V). Leia and Luke are both virginal, asexual figures, but that there is some kind of fascination between them seems clear. Luke’s first words when seeing Leia’s recording, projected by R2 D2, is a breathy, ‘who is she? She’s beautiful.’ Neither of them, however, act on this attraction. Both seem more comfortable with a relationship of reverence for Leia the virgin than anything more embodied. The carnal, sexual masculine is a source of such discomfort, in fact, that it is hived off into another character entirely, Han Solo, and only he dares to take the icon from the niche. He and Leia form a love relationship, though it is rarely shown in physical intimacy but is rather a kind of alliance. Even with Han acting as a buffer for the erotic relationship with Anima, though, there is an ambivalence about its moral acceptability: immediately after their first kiss they are nearly devoured by a space slug; when Leia tells Han she loves him he is plunged into a fiery pit and imprisoned in carbonite, an element associated with the base and earthy.

Episode VI’s opening scenes on Tatooine articulate this discomfort with Anima more expansively. When the film opens the imprisoned Han is in the possession of Jabba the Hutt; and if Vader is the dark side of the Spirit, the ego’s dominant archetypal identification, then Jabba is the dark side of the secondary ego qualities embodied in Han. Han’s opportunism hardens into Jabba’s exploitative greed; Han’s vigorous sexuality carries with it the possibility of Jabba’s degradation and abuse of women. It is this latter quality in particular that is foregrounded in the scenes that follow, with Jabba’s ersatz court noticeable for the presence of scantily clad women employed as dancers and entertainers. One is dropped into the pit of a slavering monster, the Rancor, for the entertainment of the assembly. Leia is captured while attempting to rescue Han and is turned into a kind of sex slave by Jabba. She next appears lying next to him, attached to him by a chain and dressed only in a metal bikini, a genuinely startling image of Leia given the modesty of her costumes hitherto, which barely delineated the contours of her body (Lucas famously required that Carrie Fisher’s breasts should be taped down to prevent them bouncing). There is an unsettling suggestion of the possibility of rape when Jabba tells Leia with menace, ‘soon you will learn to appreciate me.’ In this sequence Han and Leia are therefore held prisoner by the darker qualities potential in their relationship, that is, that it will coarsen into a dialogue of power and submission.

In Jabba’s palace, therefore, we are seeing the debasement of relationship with Anima, the relationship of the individual with his soul. Desire becomes ownership, intimacy becomes contempt, unity becomes dominion. It is this pattern that is literalised in society’s subjugation and disempowerment of women, in every relationship of power and exploitation by a man of a woman. The moral of the story is, however, more complex than a political objection to sexual exploitation of women. There is an undoubted erotic charge in the sight of Leia almost naked. She may be the subject of exploitation but she is also beautiful and sexy, and for the first time apparently sexually available. This, as much as Han’s chaste flirtation, is Hillman’s Eros connection with Anima. Like all archetypal manifestations it has a dark side, in this case expressed by the Hutts. We are therefore implicated, titillated as Jabba is by Leia’s near nakedness as much as we are, with Luke, determined to rescue her. We admire the chaste, unsullied Luke but perhaps we are closer to the gross Jabba. By now the unequivocal association in the Star Wars universe of overt sexuality, the feminine, degradation and shame is established. The relationship with Anima is drawn directly into, and reveals the archetypal qualities of, the virgin/whore polarity. The repressed resentment and anxiety in the longing for Anima is being brought to the surface: resentment at her power and anxiety about our own capacity for exploitation and cruelty. It is worth noting in passing that none of Leia’s male companions make any reference at all to the outfit Jabba has forced her to wear, though Han in Episode V makes reference to her wearing more ‘feminine’ clothes. It is as though to do so would be to exacerbate her humiliation and expose their shameful desire.

The difficulty is both compounded and expanded upon when it turns out that Luke is saving himself and the others not just from Jabba but from devoration by the Sarlacc. This ‘omnivorous, immobile beast is almost entirely concealed beneath the desert sands. Only its foul mouth extends to the surface, ringed with grasping tentacles ready to pull any prey unfortunate to fall into the shifting sands. Its maw is more than three meters in diameter, and is a mucous-lined hole brimming with inward pointing teeth. At the center of the mouth is a smooth, pointed beak containing a fat, muscular tongue, blindly flexing in hopes of capturing a savory morsel.’[1] This is perhaps the clearest articulation among many similar images in the first three Star Wars movies of fear of re-absorption by the vagina, by the primal body of the Mother (hinted at repeatedly in the cave motifs of Episode V for example). Its juxtaposition with the scenes in Jabba’s palace makes a clear link, first hinted at when Leia and Han kissed and then were nearly eaten by the space slug in Episode V, of the connection between the erotic elements of the relationship with Anima and the risk of destruction through devoration by the Mother. This danger is entirely separate from that of destruction by the father complex/Shadow – Vader and the Emperor are nowhere to be seen in either of these instances. It is also significant that the scene takes place on Tatooine, the planet of the withholding Mother of the ego’s early identification. And it is precisely this archaic, troubling mother complex that, from outside the ostensible and explicit framework of the narrative (Empire vs Rebellion, Vader vs Luke, father vs son) threatens to disintegrate the Self entirely, reabsorbing the ego and Anima and embodied male self into the primal mother – in the belly of the Sarlacc, ‘you will find a new definition of pain and suffering, as you are slowly digested over a thousand years.’

Fortunately Luke is able to rescue them and Leia is once again brought into protective custody. This rescue also provides the opportunity for the saga’s one triumphant feminist motif: Leia leaping up, almost naked, to strangle Jabba with the chains of her own (sexual) captivity. Nonetheless, taken overall the sequence of scenes in Jabba’s palace draw out a skein of possibilities and concerns around the feminine and in particular around the figure of the Anima that go beyond a Freudian reading of sexual guilt. The masculine consciousness reaches Anima through desire and must do so to further his psychic journey; but to do so is a moral risk and invokes the wrath of the Mother, who threatens the re-imposition of total identification with her (reabsorption/death). The relationship with Anima must be made safe if the quest is to continue. The necessary resolution of Luke and Leia’s relationship takes place in a scene redolent of maternal symbology, by moonlight on the wooded moon of Endor, with Leia taking on the appearance of a kind of woodland goddess. The scene begins with the one and only discussion of mothers by either Luke or Leia:

Luke: Leia… do you remember your mother? Your real mother?

Leia: Just a little bit. She died when I was very young.

Luke: What do you remember?

Leia: Just images really. Feelings.

Luke: Tell me.

Leia: She was very beautiful. Kind, but… sad. Why are you asking me all this?

Luke: I have no memory of my mother. I never knew her.

Then, after a brief discussion of Vader and the Force, Luke tells Leia: ‘You have that power too. In time you'll learn to use it as I have. The Force is strong in my family. My father has it...I have it...and...my sister has it...’ In this way their true relationship is revealed to Leia.

The Anima relationship, therefore, is made safe through strict limitation in the realm of the protecting Mother. The Hutt palace/Sarlacc sequence expresses the struggle throughout Star Wars, a struggle that is not resolved in spite of the scene on Endor, to accept the male individual’s erotic desire for his own Anima without being punished by the jealous Mother. The troubling conclusion from Return of the Jedi is that the essential erotic quality of the relationship with Anima is wrong, that at best it must be held at one remove (Han and Leia rather than Luke and Leia), that if it were brought any closer it would be a transgressive (incestuous) relationship and that even then it risks drawing the wrath of the Mother. Given the importance of Anima and of the maternal for the development of the masculine psyche, this throws into question the very possibility of consciousness, of the success of the quest.

[1] Official Star Wars website. URL: http://www.starwars.com/databank/creature/sarlacc/index.html [7 July 2005]