Read on Twitter
The Empire Strike's Back major paradox is that it's thematically and dramatically incoherent, and that its incongruity and lack of information is what makes it interesting.
One of the movie's biggest flaws is that it's terminally unclear what Yoda, Obi-Wan, and Vader's motivations are or what they know. Or at least, their stated motivations are decidedly at odds with their actions.
Yoda and Obi-Wan are continually presenting as noble father figures. In reality, they're deceitful, capricious, and manipulative. Yoda is even malevolent: ordering Luke to let his friends die, wasting Luke's time and then chastising him for being frustrated...
..and every scene where he chews Luke out for struggling with the sublime nature of the Force. Yoda is emotionally manipulative and cruel and the movie continually presents him as a sagacious, borderline-omniscient guru.
On top of that, Yoda is wrong. Luke's attempted rescue of Han and Leia is a failure, but that's due to circumstances entirely independent of Luke (which makes one wonder why Luke is a crucial figure at all beyond his gender). His nobility only jeopardizes himself.
(Nowadays Luke would be called a "Mary Sue," but I refuse to dabble in the pseudo-narratology of TV Tropes-perusing hobby misogynists.)
(Side note: it's odd how the movie frames Luke's struggle with the dark side as a battle with temptation, which is bizarre since there's never a moment where Luke is truly enticed by the dark side. If anything, his conflict should be that fighting for good nearly kills him.)
(Of course these movies are about iconography and Campbellian patriarchy, but Empire is particularly effective at exposing the narratological and political vices of the Hero's Journey.)
There's also Vader's plot, which on a surface level is fascinatingly nonsensical. His obsession with finding Luke supersedes every other priority he has, including keeping his job after the Death Star, having living officers, and capturing Leia, the Rebellion's actual leader.
And yet Vader is never wrong in Empire. His intuition is unwaveringly right. When he knows his prey is near, he cautiously but insistently stalks them. Throughout Empire, he plays the long game, murders dangerously impetuous officers, and bides his time.
(The slow defeats of Empire's first act are its apex, and I wish the movie followed up on those in a more adept manner.)
Vader is the core of the movie because he's always right. He's the one character who never errs (his failure to entice Luke to the dark side notwithstanding), makes an incorrect judgement, or executes a strategy without finesse. Which is a brilliant way to write a villain.
And he does most of this is silence. Empire is about regrouping, and Vader is the summit of the movie's deliberation (seeing how he's the one in control for most of the film). He quietly makes his plans and acts in the background.
This seems like a contemplative move. Vader is completely in tune with the Force, providing a counterbalance to the idea that only the light side contains harmony. He's a listener who's made himself a shell for the dark side, and in that he's more contemplative than even Yoda.
Vader spends the movie working to entrap Luke. The Emperor scene confounds this, particularly in newer cuts of the movie, where it's not clear if Vader is lying to Palpatine about being unaware of Luke's identity or if this is a revelation he's bizarrely complacent about.
For the sake of argument though, let's say that Vader is lying to Palpatine and manipulating him from behind the scenes. That means his servitude to Palpatine is limited. He only serves the Empire as a means of sating the Force. It's second priority to him.
This makes Vader more in touch with the Force than anybody else in these movies. Certainly he's more contemplative. The movie stops simply being a dreary runaround where the protagonists get beaten up and becomes about austere patriarchs being terrible.
This also somewhat fixes Yoda and Obi-Wan's roles, as it allows them to simply be liars who gaslight Luke into trying to kill his own father. This is still hugely flawed, because the movie clearly intends that Obi-Wan and Yoda are right, but on balance it almost works.
We're still fundamentally left with a messy about men being dicks to each other, but accidentally foregrounding the shadowy nature of virile heroism is one of the most fascinating inadvertent parts of these movies.
@threadreaderapp Please unroll.
