Love and War
to Padme. The only break the film makes with courtly love is when Anakin and Padme do marry in the end, for the old love existed almost exclusively outside the realm of marriage.
There has been much discussion about the dialogue during the fireside scene when Anakin really lets his feelings be known to Padme. Some have found the words he speaks too lyrical, tipping the scale from the romantic to the cheesy. He tells her that he is "in agony" after the first kiss they shared, and that he "can't breathe" when he thinks he might not be with her. But when his feelings are properly set against the uncontrollable, illicit love the "minnesingers" celebrated, they become much more understandable. As Campbell once noted, "In courtly love, the man goes crazy, not the woman. When the man's been moved like this, he is capable of great feats, but he's on a narrow path." In Arthurian lore, both Sir Lancelot and Tristan went mad over love affairs, at least temporarily. When Anakin tells Padme he hopes her kiss "won't become a scar," this is almost a direct reference to Tristan, who had the sickness only Isolde could cure.
It has been argued that Lancelot found an illumination in his forbidden affair with Queen Guinevere that even the Holy Grail could not provide, and the same might be said of Anakin in relation to the Force. It is not easy to dismiss the intensity of his feelings. For him, it is clearly love at first sight when he initially sees Padme in Watto's junk shop on Tatooine. For him, Padme is the life-revivifying waters of the Grail itself. This is not the kind of love that is easily relatable by the standards of today's media, mostly because they are still trapped in the twin conceptions of love that dominated the early Middle Ages. Campbell talked about these during "The Power of Myth" series, and they are likewise addressed in Attack of the Clones.
When they are traveling to Naboo as refugees, Padme asks Anakin whether love is forbidden for a Jedi. He replies that while possession and attachment are forbidden, compassion is central to a Jedi's life. The first is really "eros," the love of lust, of wanting to physically possess someone, and the latter is "agape," the love of one's neighbor, the indiscriminate aspect of spiritual feeling. Neither of these work for the two. What
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