When I was a kid, much to my chagrin, my grandmother watched The Young and the Restless every afternoon. This was a problem for me, as the campy, live-action Batman – my prepubescent raison d’etre – aired at the same bat-time on a different bat-channel. And, try as I might, I could never boo-hoo my Grams into switching stations.

The older I got, the more fervently I’d rail against her soap – no so much in an effort to get her to spin the dial to Batman but more to convince her on a critical level how insipid the show was. And Grams, God bless her, would always simply shrug, smile at me knowingly, and go back to enjoying the adventures of Nicky and Victor. Sure, I might’ve had a point in all my caviling, but she liked what she liked, and no amount of belly-aching was going to make her turn her back on what she called “her stories.”

This summer, Episode II: Attack of the Clones was met with a more churlish response from the critical community (both off and online) than Richard Gere’s plea to an audience full of New York cops and fireman for peace and cultural understanding at the Concert for NYC 9/11 benefit. With the exception of Time’s Richard Corliss, most critics sharpened their lightsabres and carved poor George Lucas a new one, as if he were a Taun-Taun and they were trying to save a Wampa-ravaged Luke from the freezing winds of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. To use a less-fanboyish analogy, the Powers That Be beat the shit out of Episode II like the movie had fu**ed with their girl- or boyfriends behind their backs.

What were the all expecting that had them feeling so let down? I’ll allow that in terms of predictability, Episode II (and Episode I) make Titanic seem like a veritable whodunit. We all know the Empire’s going to rise and eventually fall at the hands of Indiana Jones, the dude from Corvette Summer, the chick who wrote Postcards from The Edge, and an army of teddy bears. We all know that the Jedi will be hunted to extinction, with the exception of Alex Guiness. We all know that Yoda lives through the Clone Wars and matures into a Muppet. There’s little-to-no mystery left in the Star Wars prequels, with the exception of seeing exactly how the space-shit winds up hitting the space-fan. And that should be enough to get even the causal fan into the theater.

Taken on those terms, I was enthusiastically not disappointed by Attack of the Clones. Shit, I loved it. Why?

Because I love a car wreck.

That’s what the new Star Wars flicks are to me: stunning, tragic car wrecks. And I don’t mean that in the pejorative sense, like this round of flicks is “sterile” as so many critics seem to feel. You can throw a rock and hit a happy naysayer happy to pontificate about how Lucas has lost his humanity, citing the last two installments of the Star Wars saga as guilty of being more digitally manipulated than a free-spirited eighth-grad girl’s breasts by her over-sexed boyfriend. But I’m not one of those cats. I’m digging the new installments for what they’ve become: the tragedie du Darth – the slow fall of Anakin Skywalker into the greasy clutches of the Sith.

And that little melodrama has never been more on display than in Clones. Here, we’re presented with the adolescent Anakin – the boy who’ll later torture his own daughter (unwittingly, to be fair) and cut his other kid’s hand off (rather wittingly). From the get-go, Lucas captures my limited imagination with one simple proposition. Darth Vader was once a teenager. How pedestrian, yet how profound! Evil’s gotta start somewhere, right? Why not show why Johnny can’t read - or in this case, can’t play well with others, and insists on using the Force to choke underlings who don’t live up to his expectations? From the hit-or-miss origin of Phantom Menace’s take on baby Anakin as the galactic Hitler in short pants, Clones ups the ante by presenting us with the heart of darkness right where everyone’s always known it lies: in the passions of a volatile high schooler.

Right off the bat, Anakin is portrayed as a kid who thinks he knows more than he does, and insists on proving to everybody that he’s as good as them, if not better. I went to high school with his guy. Granted, he didn’t grow up to carbon-freeze anybody (in truth, I believe he works at a Shell station now), but had he been given a lightsaber and taught how to pull the Jedi Mind Trick on folks, he might’ve.

In Clones, Anakin is a twelfth grader with a license and parents who want him home by eight: he’s a disaster waiting to happen. Who else but a tortured teen leaps out of a sky-speeder to capture a bounty hunter who’s talked smack about his girl (or, in the case of Clones, set loose killer centipedes in her bedroom)? With little-to-no concern for his own well-being, based largely on his assumption that he’s immortal (that worst of teenage attributes), young Skywalker forces Zam Wessel’s craft (how sad is it that I’m 31 and I know the name of a character who’s never really identified and appears only fleetingly in the film?) to crash-land in a densely populated city, and then pursues her (it) into a bar only to watch his mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, make the final collar. And how does the Force-ful whelp wrap it all up with the wide-eyed cantina bystanders? He tosses them a condescending “This is Jedi business.” The balls on this kid!

Fatherless, this rebel without a cause (or Imperial without a cause, technically) is shown to trust in the quietly power-mad Palpatine – the Dad he never had, who fills his head with notions such as “I see you becoming the greatest of all the Jedi.” I knew guys in high school whose fathers would fill their heads full of this kind of bullshit, too, along the lines of “If someone gives you lip, you kick their ass.” It’s easy enough to take an impressionable youngster and turn him into a school bully, but the relationship of the would-be Emperor and his protégé is even more perverse, considering this is a kid who can telekinetically spin fruit in mid-air and Mind Trick a rampaging intergalactic rhino into playing Trigger to his Roy Rogers. Beating up freshman for looking at you is funny in the hallways is one thing; destroying a planet because you’re looking for the stolen Death Star plans is something else.

And never mind the whacked-out paternal issues. Anakin’s relationship with his mother makes Oedipus’s seem healthy by comparison. And like the lunchroom loudmouth who makes one mother joke too many, the Tusken Raiders reap what they sow when Anakin unleashes hell on a whole tribe of them for battering Shmi. What teenage boy wouldn’t slaughter the men, women and baby Sand People if he found his mother dead in one of their huts? That’s the origin of Darth Vader right there: the guy who went ape-shit when he lost his mom. Never mind that he’d been too busy galaxy-trotting for nine years to even so much as send her a Hallmark on Midi-chlorian-Mother’s Day: that’s his mom they fucked with, and they’re all going to pay. There’s something bittersweet about the fall of Darth Vader now, that hadn’t existed before Clones: had his mother simply died of old age, the guy might never have developed that extreme case of asthma he seems to suffer from in Star Wars, Empire, and Return of the Jedi.

Which leads to the most haunting moment of Clones for me: when Anakin breaks down to his puppy love, Amidala, and confesses that he butchered that no-good bunch of sand-eating bandage wearers with his hi-tech Zippo. This scene really resonated with me, because Amidala wears this expression that very quietly says “Holy Christ I’m in love with a human time-bomb.” The sad, hopeless look on her face upon learning of his murder spree brought to mind that moment in Jedi when Luke asked Leia if she remembered what her (and his) mother was like. Leia (in what may be Carrie Fisher’s finest hour in the original trilogy) reminisced that her mother always seemed sad. Here, nearly 20 years later, we get to see what Leia was talking about.

And that’s what worked best for me about the Anakin arc in Clones: the doomed love affair of Anakin and Amidala. Most of the critics dismissed this as the flick’s most ham-fistedly handled aspect, but I thought it played out tragically and beautifully. High marks to both Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman, because I completely bought their relationship. He wants her desperately without really even knowing why, as do all teenage boys when they find who they assume is their one-true in high school. And even though she knows this guy is poison, she can’t help but fall for him - the little slave-boy that grew up to be a conflicted, impetuous hat tank who insists everyone’s giving him a raw deal. In high school, the really hot chicks always went for the massive ****-ups, and eventually wound up married to them. But this marriage doesn’t end in small town affairs and divorce; this marriage ends with the girl scattering her kids across the galaxy to save them from their father, who by that point is more machine than man.

The only thing that could’ve made Clones more enjoyable for me would’ve been if I was actually in it. (C’mon, Obi-George – isn’t there room in the next and final Star Wars flick for a portly Storm Trooper who smokes too much?) And as I sat there watching this beautiful fucking car wreck, fully aware of the attacks Attack was suffering at the hands of the critical Empire outside that darkened theater, I finally knew how my Grams felt when I’d slam The Young and the Restless. Now I’m the one offering up the knowing smile – because I love that Lucas is still dicking around in a galaxy far, far away, and I never want it to end. The Star Wars saga is my soaps, and no amount of bi-otching disguised as film dissertation is going to get me to turn my back on “my stories.”

Unless, of course, there’s a new Batman flick out at the same time.

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