Nerds who live their parents and fluent Klingon speakers may
recall Owen Lars as a minor character in the film Star Wars: A New Hope. He lived
on the desert planet of Tatooine with his wife, Beru. Although the couple had
no children of their own, they raised a young boy called Luke Skywalker, and did
their best to shield him from the attentions of his abusive father, who had
suffered a midlife crisis and reinvented himself as malevolent cyborg-wizard
called Darth Vader.
Owen and Beru eked out a meagre existence as moisture farmers
beneath the burning glare of Tatooine’s twin suns. The fiery desert heat was a
stark contrast to their passion for each other which had long since cooled. During
the few scenes that the pair share on screen there is no evidence to suggest that their relationship
is anything other than a world-weary drudge, shaped by a need to scrape together
the bare necessities for survival on this hostile world of gangsters and Freudian sand monsters.
Neither one playfully slaps the other’s arse or makes a flirtatious allusion to
saucy bedroom proclivities. I have often wondered whether Owen is aware of the irony
of his situation: That a man whose business is the farming moisture can no
longer cause wetness to surge from his wife’s vagina.
Owen and Beru met their deaths off camera at the hands of
Imperial Stormtroopers. One catches a brief glimpse of a charred body lying in the sand outside
their homestead, smouldering in a way that the couple were never able to
smoulder for one another.
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