Defenders Of The Gold Bikini 2: The Fempire Doesn’t Strike Back
Photo by Gramicidin
Back in 2016, not long after I published my previous Gold Bikini essay, I stumbled upon an article by a not-yet-infamous Sarah Jeong, who apparently likes Star Wars even more than I do. In it, Jeong discusses Padme’s death, apparently from “a broken heart”.
It reminded me of something that has always felt way more anti-woman than Princess Leia’s gold bikini: Padme swooning and dying ostensibly over a man — under any circumstances — but particularly when she had two beautiful babies to care for.
No one does that.
Up until reading this article, I had always assumed that the Emperor had somehow murdered Padme from afar by draining her life energy, but Jeong makes a good case for this being an impossibility – after all, if the Emperor was strong enough to locate Padme and suck her dry, surely he’d have been able to sense and destroy Luke and Leia in their cradles as well. He could have easily found Yoda on Dagobah and Obi-Wan on Tatooine. He wouldn’t’ve needed Anakin or a clone army or the assassins he sent after Padme; he could have picked off the Senators and the Jedi one by one with the Force. Using the rules of the Star Wars universe itself, it simply cannot be true that the Emperor has this ability. So apparently, as much as it pains me to admit it, it seems that Padme really did die from a broken heart. “Anakin, you’re breaking my heart!” I guess she meant it.
Obviously, another example of poor writing that detracts from the magic that is Star Wars. But beyond that, it reeks of inherent sexism on a level that puts the gold bikini to shame. A woman (not just any woman, but a Senator who had faced galactic war, evil robots, and horrible monsters with panache) is so invested in her man that she keels over dead because she is disappointed in him. She would rather die, because, feelz, than live to raise her children, or to use her considerable influence over Anakin to try and stop him. And the means of her demise? Childbirth, naturally. Not even a REAL childbirth-related death, like eclampsia or postpartum hemorrhage or puerperal fever (which takes days to weeks to kick in). 830 women die every DAY from childbirth around the world. It’s a thing that does happen far too often, but Padme dies a made up, gimmicky death caused by scary uteruses going awry as they so often do. Those things have a hair trigger. Imploding uteruses kill!
If you wanna be pissed about something, my feminist friends, let’s be pissed about that.
There is absolutely NO purpose to Padme’s death. NONE. It’s all female weakness, female fragility. Leia’s gold bikini had a purpose. It had subtext and substance. An enslaved woman rose up and, using the chains of her oppressor and some impressive upper body strength, set herself free. The gold bikini was appropriate to the plot, situation, and genre. Advanced the story. Conveyed a deeper meaning without words. Padme’s death, on the other hand, was pointless and it wasn’t even canon, since Leia claims to remember her real mother – unless this is some kinda pre-birth midichlorien stuff, pfft, who even knows any more. If the Emperor really didn’t kill off Padme to mess with Anakin’s head, her death “in childbirth” makes no damn sense at all.
You know what would have been better? If Anakin had actually created what he feared. He strangled Padme and that thing alone very well could have been enough to kill her. She bravely hung on long enough to push those babies out and then succumbed to her Anakin-induced injuries. We could have dispensed with the prophetic dreams and in that same screen time, given Anakin a legit reason to feel jealous over Obi-Wan instead of that notion suddenly coming out of left field as it does in Revenge of the Sith. If his own jealousy and his own fear of losing Padme – because after all, a person can have that fear without having midichlorien-fueled nightmares, especially if that person had a terrible childhood and had already lost his mother – actually caused him to snap and Force-choke Padme in a fit of rage. JMO, but accidental murder is a hell of a lot more compelling a reason to turn to the Dark Side then “I’m scared my baby-momma may die at the hands of her vicious uterus; corrupt me O Emperor.”
Yeah, it makes Anakin unlikeable. But so does killing Jedi younglings. So does his constant brooding and whining and indiscriminate genocide of Sand People. He’s not supposed to be likeable anyway, he’s supposed to be Darth-fricking-Vader. Nothing about Anakin is likeable. Why draw the line at spousal abuse?
The unfortunate thing about being a woman – one of them – is that at least 1/3 of the time, if you die at the hands of someone else, it’s your male partner. At least 1/3. This is actually an improvement from historic levels of violence against women – which, we probably don’t even want to know. Domestic abuse is endemic to humanity, unfortunately, and probably always will be, even if we someday live in a galaxy far, far away. It’s not gratuitous to have Anakin kill Padme. It’s honest. If she had to go, at her partner’s hands is a far more realistic way to go than by an errant blaster shot or a runaway droid, and far, far more realistic than fatal swooning.
Padme dying either for legitimate medical reasons, or killed at the hands of her partner would have been vastly superior to a terminal case of female fragility and uterine implosion. Padme’s death is sexist and gross and offensive and wrong. It reduces Padme – brave, heroic Padme, the Senator who was once a Queen – into a quivering disaster and frankly a terrible mother.
My question is, given all that, why is everybody so hung up on the gold bikini? Is it because it’s low-hanging fruit? (Yes, that’s a joke. Carrie and I got it.)
I’m not sure.
Being a woman is, at times, kind of a poopy gig. Women have suffered a lot, and a lot of women still suffer fates far worse than a Sarlacc pit. There are women who would give their eyeteeth to have the ridiculous privilege of coming to the year 1982 and being paid to wearing a silly, sexy costume in a movie.
We have our priorities so far screwed up as feminists, it’s like we don’t even know which way is up any more. Too many people want to wear the mantle of feminism, without doing any of the work. So they single out cultural details that are petty and trivial and inconsequential and shriek about them online while OTHER WOMEN ARE DYING. For reals, dying. They get kidnapped by Boko Haram and gang-raped on buses and have acid thrown in their faces and are killed by their fathers and brothers for going online or refusing to marry someone. They die in childbirth or from disease or starvation or from domestic abuse. In real life, those women don’t get to swoon and die from a broken heart because they’re sad over a cute boy. They have to endure what they can endure, things that you and I would consider unendurable, and then they die, after a life so unbelievably difficult that we all should have broken hearts.
I don’t claim to know how to solve those things. But I know how NOT to solve them, and berating a middle-aged actress over a sexy outfit she was paid to wear 35 years ago is not the way. Worse, it’s annoying good people who would otherwise be feminist allies to such an extent that they no longer want to hear about feminism and tune out. Feminism has become a dirty word and it’s largely because of outrage porners who’d rather bitch about the slightly imperfect execution of the enormous privileges that modern American women are so very, very fortunate to enjoy, rather than address real, actual issues facing real, actual women.
Men will always and forever like looking at women in skimpy clothing. And people are good at making money off of these proclivities. Those things are not going to change and they are not patriarchy or repression so long as it’s consensual and the women involved are adequately compensated.
I get it, fighting the hard fight is…hard. I don’t do it, either. But for the love of gold bikinis, don’t con yourself into thinking you’re doing something of substance, when you’re engaged in a convo over a goddamn movie costume.
Photo by Gramicidin 
You know, I agree with everything you say about both the gold bikini and Padme’s death, which never made much sense. I favor the idea that she dies from injuries from Anakin. I also think postpartum depression, which is a thing, may have had a role.
And yeah, sometimes the thing some people want to get lathered up about don’t really make any sense. But there’s no progress without some discomfort, which can make it hard to calibrate things.Report
Apologies for being nitpicky but postpartum depression takes several days to a week or even more to set in.
Thank you so much for reading and commenting!Report
My uncle died young, when my mother was a girl. This broke my grandmother in half emotionally, leaving her a cold, bitter and broken woman. She hated my father, as he was a bit like my uncle, a bit like many other men of his time. I don’t remember getting hugs, or kisses, or any of the grandmotherly things from her before her death, of myocardial infarction. Or, as the doctor put it to my mother, of not wanting to live anymore. So, yes, I do believe that someone can die of the loss of great love.
As far as critics go, there I would say you are spot on. We have moved past the point of actual scholarship in these fields, due to needing so may warm bodies to fill the time made available to read online due to efficiencies in the workforce, or simply from the privilege of living in a post-scarcity society, or… I don’t know. But the misplaced anger that you so ably show here is starting to wear patterns in the carpet of feminism, as it circles in on itself.Report
Totally and the thing is, there’s still a lot to talk about in feminism, but like you say many are content to simply wear patterns in the carpet. Thanks for reading!Report
I’m with Doctor Jay, Postpartum Depression would have been much better. She has the twins either while in hiding, or goes into hiding with them immediately after. And, well, they are in hiding, not always a lot of opportunity for good mental health care. Maybe she’s with the kids for a few months, long enough for Leia to remember mom’s sad smile, then she drops the kids off with a neighbor after tucking a note in the diaper bag to contact Bail Organa for help, then she succumbs to the condition (maybe they find her body, maybe they don’t).
Alternatively, maybe Anakin did beat her and left her for dead, except she lived, had the twins, went into hiding, and succumbed to her injuries months later.
So many ways it could have been done.Report
Postpartum depression isn’t fatal. Sorry, not trying to be nitpicky just want to keep that accurate since part of my issue with Padme’s death in the first place is that it wasn’t medically accurate.
I totally agree there are so many ways they could have done it better, and with a lot more meaning. Thanks for reading!Report
There is a Venn diagram with three circles, Successful, Hated, and Terrible, and in the center are the Star Wars prequels. Everyone who was older than 8 when they came out hates everything about them. It almost seems wrong to single out any one problem with them.Report
Look at it less as prequel bashing and more as bikini-defending. 🙂Report
I always subscribed to the theory that Anakin drained her life and was able to do so because of their connection (w/ an assist from Palpatine). There’s a moment in the movie where his heartbeat stops and then resumes and she dies. That heavily implies that she either gave her life for him or he took it. And somehow the Emperor knows she’s dead.
Nah, she didn’t die of a broken heart. She was murdered.Report
In my Sith rant I concluded that Yoda killed her, though Obi Wan certainly helped by having her traipse around a volcano sucking down noxious fumes as she watched him slicing Anakin to pieces.
The epic is so badly written that it makes more sense if you flip the good guys and bad guys.Report
I would go for that – that there was some connection there possibly aided and abetted by the Emporer, but as Jeong’s original piece pointed out, if they had that kind of power, couldn’t they have sensed Leia’s presence? Couldn’t they have snuffed ObiWan on Tattoine and Yoda on Dagobah? Something’s just off with the physics of it all.
Thanks for reading!!Report
Good article and comments, though bashing Anakin and Padme in the prequels is like shooting fish in a barrel. Was there ever a less believable couple with less chemistry? When the droid wheeled out the “she has lost the will to live” line I heard an audible collective snort in the crowd from the theater I was in. Granted it was a nerdy and thus older crowd but damn.Report
Agreed. It’s hard to have a nuanced, politically informed opinion on something when my entire being is screaming in agony from observing the worst acting and worst script writing in the history of the human species.Report
These are not bad actors. Each and every one has tons of credits that prove it (maybe except Haiden, though he was quite admired in other roles. I’ll give you 10 year old Jake Lloyd).
Sometimes it really is just is the script/director/editor.Report
I get that, but this is not so much me taking potshots at low hanging fruit, but setting up a comparison with the sexism of Padme’s death vs. the (IMO) non-sexism of the gold bikini, if that makes sense.Report
Hated though the official explanation for Padmé’s death may be, it is entirely within the realm of possibility, something you don’t admit because you would rather bash the Prequel Trilogy and the characters it focused on, and focus on an agenda that does women more harm than good.
Between everything she was hit with in the last two days of her life – the death of the Republic, her mentor revealing himself as a tyrant, and learning of and falling victim to her husband’s atrocities – that is more than enough to kill a person. Many people in real life have lost the will to live over a whole lot less than what happened to Padmé in ROTS. The problem is not with how she died, but in the way it was handled – the major flaw of the Prequel Trilogy as a whole was its technical execution. It had nearly everything else it needed to succeed. (Compare this to the Sequel Trilogy, where the technical execution is literally the ONLY thing it has going for it…)
But nope, for you it all comes down to how this clashes with your views as a feminist, rendering most of if not your entire argument void.Report
Nyah.
The ways in which it clashes with Kristin’s views as a feminist [1] have a lot to do with its failures of drama. “It can happen in real life” is rarely a good justification for story choices, not least of all because real life isn’t a story, and lots of bullshit that you’d never believe (much less artistically appreciate) happens in real life. All of the suggested options would have worked much better dramatically IMO. And it’s not like they would have been less realistic.[2]
But also the idea that one should just be able to so completely divorce one’s political or ethical views from one’s film criticism is pretty blinkered in and of itself, because those views will also inform one’s sense of whether character motivations, behaviors, and reactions are plausible.
And that last sort or realism is really the only kind of realism that matters for a series of movies about Space Fights involving Muppets with laser swords.
[1] Which, for the record, I agree with, but even if I didn’t….Report
Bullpucky they have. People do not just up and die because they have a raging case of the sadz. They fight to live – often for the sake of their children – in far far worse situations than what Padme had been through and they do it ALL the time. There are women giving birth right now who have suffered all kinds of abuse and atrocity, are hungry, scared, alone, in terrible situations, and they not only survive but they fight to survive. Some people get depressed and may waste away over time, but that is OVER TIME and not “welp guess I’ll keel over dead because the Republic has fallen”.
Dying of a “broken heart” is a thing that happens (although it’s a misleading name) but it’s treatable and does not entail someone “losing the will to live.” The heart actually goes into spasm, it’s treatable, the robot would have detected something wrong instead of stating clearly that nothing was wrong with her, and is much more prevalent among postmenopausal women, which Padme was not.
And while I do think that one of us is blinded by their personal agenda, I really do not think that person is me.Report
This is a really good piece, and I have to say as much as I tried to resist, I have to say you aren’t wrong at all about a lot of (especially Online) “feminist criticism” of pop culture, both in terms of being exhausting and kind of alienating, and also on focusing excessively on superficial details.Report
There is a lot to criticize about modern feminism, not the least of which is that they seem to have all but deliberately turned themselves into such a convenient demon (by being constantly exhausting and alienating, fighting all the wrong battles over all the dumbest things) that they have all but turned into a stereotypical boogeyman for the types of people who are on full display in the comments of this piece.Report
Wait – I thought Padme dies from injuries inflicted by Anakin? (It’s been forever since I’ve seen the movie so I could be wrong, but I thought her being killed by domestic violence was a major plot point. But maybe I dreamed this?)Report
No, that was explicitly presented as a lie the Emperor told Anakin to complete his transformation into Darth Vader.
It also gave us the Big No, another (properly) reviled scene from Revenge of the Sith. I actually like RotS overall [1] but the resolution of Padme’s story was total trash.
[1] Yes. Seriously.Report
I actually like RotS
NooooooOOOOOOOooooooReport
Hey, thanks for reading! 🙂Report
You have convinced me that the manner of Padme’s death is the worst thing about the prequel triology, when previously I’m not sure it was even in the top 5 for me.Report
Thanks for reading! It means a lot!Report
You spent that much time and energy into a *possible* reason why a fictional character died? Wow.Report
no, I spent that much time and energy talking about issues and attitudes that affect women (more than half the population, WOWZERS) through the lens of fiction, but thanks for playingReport
It seemed to me this was more or less what happened. It was force related and that means Anakin did it. Whether it was deliberate (in a moment of rage) or stupid (because he connected them and turned to the dark side) isn’t going to change who did it. The possibilities range from “strangled” to “she was connected to him so him getting burned alive and becoming a create of hate was traumatic to her” is beside the point.
The Emperor, for all his deceit, didn’t typically go for bald face lies and he said, “in your anger you killed her”. Anakin believed it because to him it was believable… so maybe he knew more about him being stupid than we did.
The part that made her a tool and not a decisive person in charge of her own destiny was Obi Wan sneaking on board her ship. The movie could have made her a lot stronger by having her invite Obi Wan aboard in a last ditch effort to save Anakin. The two of them try to sway him back to the Light Side, exactly as they did, and of course fail, but have it be her choice and not Obi Wan’s.Report
Right, but it was explained by “she just lost the will to live” and Sarah Jeong made a pretty good case in her original piece that that was actually what the writers intended. So that’s what I’m basing my conclusion on (I had thought up till reading that piece, that the Emporer did it to finish turning Anakin to the Dark Side).
Like I mentioned in the piece I’d have very much loved to see the time spent on Anakin’s angst and prophetic dreams (on a short list of my least fave plot devices) and had more interaction between Obi-Wan and Padme. Agree that would have been much better.Report
My kids’ll sometimes ask me if the SW movies are any good and I’ll say, “Yeah, there’s about 1 1/2 good movies there.” Heh.
I didn’t know that there was any question whether Padme died of a broken heart. I thought the movie was really clear. It wasn’t well supported from a character standpoint, but that’s a separate issue.
A topic like “domestic abuse” or rape is tricky to introduce into a kid’s movie. But it could’ve been done well, I think, if Lucas had stolen from the right well: Othello. Instead of being a whiny worm, Anakin should’ve been very successful in the Republic. Maybe kicked out of the Jedi order (hardly matters) and a very successful general, meanwhile studying the dark arts on the side.
And as he’s getting more and more powerful, Palpatine is whispering in his ear that Padme and Obiwan have a thing going on. All the while he’s pulling strings to set Anakin and the Jedi against each other.
The movies could’ve been more internally consistent this way, too. The Republic and Jedi Order already on their last legs—remember, they’re basically forgotten a mere 20 years later which is nothing in galactic time for something that maintained order for anywhere from 1-20 thousand years.
Yeah, the real crime of the prequels is the missed opportunities.Report