As the father seems more and more enfeebled, dejected, paltry, he also appears to be the tool of dark forces. We remember that in Star Wars we are given the image of "Darth Vader," a pun on dark father. He is wholeheartedly on the side of the dark forces. As political and mythological kings die, the father loses the radiance he once absorbed from the sun, or from the hierarchy of solar beings; he strikes society as being endarkened. The demons who have set up a propaganda shop in the son's psyche convince him that his father's darkness is deeper than the son ever imagined. What can be done about that? The son finds out early that his mother cannot redeem his father; moreover, in most cases, she doesn't want to. The only one left to do it is the son. As long as the political kings remained strong, the father picked up radiance from above; and the son tried to emulate the father, to become as bright as he is, to reach to his height. The son perceives the father as bright. Though this may not have been true in reality, we notice that literature as late as the eighteenth century is full of this sort of deference, this reverence for the father, and emulation. In our time, when the father shows up as an object of ridicule (as he does, as we've noted, on television), or a fit field for suspicion (as he does in Star Wars), or a bad-tempered fool (when he comes home from the office with no teaching), or a weak puddle of indecision (as he stops inheriting kingly radiance), the son has a problem. How does he imagine his own life as a man?
— Robert Bly
Bly is tracing a specific impoverishment: when the symbolic framework that lent the father his radiance collapses, the son is left holding a figure who cannot be emulated because he himself has been emptied. The political king, the solar hierarchy, the vertical chain of borrowed light — these were never just social arrangements. They were the mechanisms by which the ordinary man received something larger than himself and passed it downward. When the chain broke, the father did not simply become weaker; he became endarkenened, and the son inherited not the father's strength but the task of redeeming him.
That task is the trap. The burden Bly identifies is not primarily psychological in the therapeutic sense — it is mythological: a son carrying a redemption story that belongs to no living figure. The longing to restore the father's radiance, to imagine one's own life as a man by restoring what was once bright, is the ratio of desire fully operational — a longing structured around an image of what was volatilized. The son scans the culture for a substitute king and finds television's buffoon, cinema's dark father, the office-exhausted man with nothing to teach. Literature gave the son a figure to exceed. The present gives him a figure to explain, excuse, or avenge. Neither of those is inheritance. The question Bly ends on — how does he imagine his own life as a man? — is not rhetorical. It is still open.
Robert Bly·Iron John: A Book About Men·1990