Prefaces to works on popular culture, particularly those focused on the cinema, occasionally begin with nostalgic reflection. I did the same in The Politics of Big Fantasy. As Gilbert Perez observes, we “respond to the movies of our youth with something like the feelings of first love,” and it is frequently to these that one turns when doing critical work on cinema.1 However, the danger is that such an approach might suggest that the intellectual work being done in this area is not of a serious and rigorous kind. Indeed, it remains the case that those engaged in studying popular culture in many academic institutions feel pressure to justify themselves in ways not shared by those working with more culturally “classic” texts, such as those my doctoral work considered (tragic drama and hope in the theology of Karl Barth). Moreover, the nostalgic mood is not a particularly useful catalyst for generating important socio-political analysis with some moral urgency. Consequently, this present Preface will take a markedly different direction in order to better ground the ethico-political concerns that provoke the studies undertaken in this book.
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In The Politics of Big Fantasy I explained that there were two main reasons for studying the three sets of movies under consideration there in the way I did. This current set of studies is focused more particularly on Lucas’ Star Wars saga, but it emerges out of a similar sensibility to that animating my 2014 study, and it continues the intellectual labor undertaken there. Firstly, I indicated in the earlier volume that it is important to illuminate the political ideologies of the movies studied, while simultaneously being attentive to any possible folds that the material may provide. The studies in the present book derive from, among other things, a sense that there remains a real political need to exact representations of identity, and the ideological framing for even the very consideration of what identity is and means, to modest critical analysis for the future of hope and planning in the project of human flourishing. As critics rightly observe, Star Wars enacts a particular type of meditation on identity and otherness. Of course, this is common to science-fiction literature and film. George Lucas, after all, makes some rather grand claims about not only the pedagogical role of the cinema but also about his own work as being conducted through a “moral megaphone.” So, he asserts, “Somebody has to tell young people what we think is a good person. I mean, we should be doing it all the time. That’s what the Iliad and the Odyssey are about—‘This is what a good person is; this is who we aspire to be.’ You need that in a society. It’s the basic job of mythology.”2 In an interview, the creator of the Star Wars saga pronounces that there is a quite specific connection between his movies and moral education. After Vietnam, he claims, “there was not a lot of mythology in our society—the kind of stories we tell ourselves and our children, which is the way our heritage is passed down. Westerns used to provide that, but there weren’t Westerns anymore. … I wanted it [viz., Star Wars] to be traditional moral study, to have palpable precepts … that children could understand. … Traditionally we get them from the church, the family, and in the modern world we get them form the media—from movies.”3 Consequently, Dale Pollock, Lucas’ biographer, claims that “Lucas offers more than just escapist entertainment; he gives us a vision of what should be.”4 The question of exactly what Lucas’ materials for moral formation involve has been a significant source of contention among cultural and political commentators. What is it that Star Wars’ audiences are being educated in? Asking just such a question is, in Carl Silvio and Tony M. Vinci’s words, “a necessary and progressive step toward exploring how Star Wars simultaneously codes and decodes a conflicting matrix of values, beliefs, and understandings that make up contemporary global culture.”5
More constructively, the current set of studies is driven by a desire to denaturalize, to use Grace Jantzen’s key critical category, “necrophilia” in order to affirm responsible life-enhancing possibilities, or what she names from Hannah Arendt “natality.” Her analysis exposes a “violent habitus” running through the Western imagination, one that has distinctly disturbing socio-political effects.6 She has hope that with such an ideological exposure a contribution may be made to enhancing the process of relating to one another without violence. Thereby one may resist the pressures that encourage the emergence of destructiveness of nothingness, and the self-interestedness and attendant relational conflictuality that drive it, as the only available option for regulating political performance. In the comic movie Nothing conflictuality is seen to lead to meaninglessness, and eventually the nothingness of non-being.
A second concern that connects the 2014 set of studies with this one has to do with difficulties with the critical scholarship on the movies under consideration. Responding to Theodor Adorno’s critique of Stravinsky, Milan Kundera writes:
What irritates me in Adorno is his short-circuit method that, with a fearsome facility, links works of art to political (sociological) causes, consequences, or meanings; extremely nuanced ideas (Adorno’s musicological knowledge is admirable) thereby lead to extremely impoverished conclusions; in fact, given that an era’s political tendencies are always reducible to just two opposing tendencies, a work of art necessarily ends up being classified as either progressive or reactionary; and since reaction is evil, the inquisition can start the trial proceedings.7
Several scholars have certainly done much to encourage more penetrating analyses of the Star Wars saga than had been the case with the lazy appeals to Star Wars as modern “myth”—the latter had, for instance, been largely perpetuated without any politically astute ideological critique. For my part, however, I remain distinctly unconvinced by a considerable set of commentary on Lucas’ most influential cinematic labor, in particular the dominant trend mentioned above that locates these cinematic texts too neatly, dualistically and dismissively in the development of a neo-conservative temperament in American political culture from the late 1970s onwards. Christine Cornea observes that “traditional American values and confidence were definitely shaken to the core during the early 1970s: America’s involvement in Vietnam did not end in any recognizable victory and, following the Watergate scandal, Nixon announced his resignation in 1974. It became harder to establish just who were ‘us’ and who were ‘them,’ hard and fast dichotomies appeared to be breaking down in the 1970s, which is partly reflected in the bleaker and more ambivalent stance of these later films.”8 It is into this nostalgia for Manichaean-like values and identity representations that numerous commentators locate Lucas’ Star Wars. So Jonathan Rosenbaum argued in the autumn of the year of the movie’s release that Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (as it has since become known) was a politically reactionary and nostalgic text. It “doesn’t seem to mean anything other than what it unabashedly is: a well-crafted, dehumanized update of FLASH GORDON with better production values, no ironic overtones, and a battery of special effects.”9 In fact, Star Wars has frequently been lambasted for what Lawrence and Jewett describe as pop fascism.10 Much of this commentary, which is now so familiar and repeated that it has become almost entrenched as a received orthodoxy, appears too superficially sweeping and simplistic in the claims it makes. Worse still, some of it unfortunately is distinctly indolent with regards to its failing to provide any careful listening to texts and contexts, especially failing to consider Star Wars in the light of THX 1138 (although substantial reflections on this earlier movie will have to await a later study I am currently planning). This raises all kinds of moral questions regarding the hegemonic imposition of a reading lens on the texts that results in a failure to begin with attentiveness, regard, and care to their own contextual voice.
A quite different reading is possible because of, and is in fact necessitated by, certain features of these movies as texts. The Star Wars movie first released in 1977, later renamed Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope, does tend to simplify the presentation of self and other. On the other hand, and this is certainly not insignificant, there is much in the movies—even in A New Hope itself—to suggest that something more interesting is going on, something, in fact, that can even subvert a reading of them as promoting a clear “identity politics.” Accordingly, the Star Wars movies of George Lucas can be appreciated as being a politically more complicated set of texts. It is consequently arguable that they are considerably less dehumanizing in any straightforward fashion than certain commentators want to maintain, even if the dramatic categories these movies use are insufficient for enacting a critical hominizing pedagogy since they cannot, in the end, provide a post-essentialist account of moral subjectivity. Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens is notably a very different case altogether.
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George Steiner regards the critic as a parasite, and yet if Paolo Freire has been able to successfully make and sustain a case for the role of teachers in the process of transformative learning, a quite significant way of construing cultural analysis and criticism becomes necessary: that of the “teacher as cultural worker,” identifying and transforming pedagogies that undemocratically oppress and dehumanize as a result of the vested power “interests of the oppressors.”11 I want to attend to Lucas’s space operatic texts under this latter humanizing guise. In order to see what is at stake in such ‘humanizing’ study it helps to switch the image to another one provided by Grace Jantzen. She characterizes “the west as [being caught] in the grip of a cultural neurosis of which its death-dealing structures are symptoms.” This entails, “then, [that] the task of the intellectual can be likened to that of a therapist who seeks by patient listening to bring the repressed dimensions of history to the fore and to release the springs of wellbeing.”12 This therapy, of course, involves considerably more than argument. So Jantzen recognizes that one can treat the troubles of the contemporary West “as an obsession or psychic disorder of the social realm, then it will not be changed by arguing against it.”13 The problems, depicted as neuroses, are far too deeply learned and conditioning for that to be the case. “Appeals to rationality will not bring about the desired change, any more than it would help to tell a person in the grip of a neurosis what it is that they are repressing. Such strategies only bring out stronger resistance, ever more clever rationalizations, deeper anger and control.” In contrast, she maintains, bringing “about human flourishing … requires substantial change in material as well as discursive conditions, changes in behaviour as well as in thought.”14 However, lest the cultural commentator despair at the magnitude of the task of criticism and properly transformative repair, Jantzen indicates the need for “patient investigation and analysis” over the shape and content of the beliefs that form or enculturate our sensibilities and that thereafter regulative our imaginations and practical judgments.15
What we can learn from the therapeutic model is that to the extent that the problems of post/modernity are consequences of acting upon a destructive cultural symbolic, strategies and policies to change behaviour are unlikely to be effective unless the underlying patterns of thought are changed. Moreover for this to happen it is necessary to bring those patterns, the cultural symbolic, to consciousness, and this, in therapy, means probing its sources and history. Once the contours of the symbolic become clearer it becomes easier to see what is involved in its transformation and why it is necessary to go through the massive process of tracing its past in order to redeem the present.16
The cultural symbolic of Western societies and the options for social order that are made possible as a consequence require observation, analysis, and critique. The aim is not to simply “understand,” as if knowledge is separate from hope and planning, or in order to achieve some nebulous “cultural/media literacy.” After all, as Stanley Aronowitz argues, “without agency there can be no history except an automatic kind.”17 The key to practices of transformative pedagogy is to resist the loss of agency, and therefore the reduction of hope. In that way, academic reflection and critical thought has to serve human flourishing and not become a self-referential substitute for socio-political engagement for constructive change.
Reading George Lucas’ Star Wars through such a politically significant lens takes the form of four chapters constructed as two sets of thematically overlapping pairs. Chapters 1 and 2 belong together as elements of a single argument written in the light of the kinds of questions concerning social responsibility and defining dehumanizing ideologies raised by the pop cultural phenomenon that appeared from within these conditions. They belong particularly closely together as two parts of one substantially extended study, lengthened largely by virtue of the considerable critical work they have to do. They tackle populist approaches to issues of the cultural relation between the Star Wars (a largely American) saga and questions of violence, in particular attending to its possible performance of the so-called “myth of redemptive violence.” The contention is that the presentation of violence in the sets of narratives is not a simple one since this multi-part cultural product offers several forms of it. These forms range from something akin to a “holy violence,” through more a sense of “just war,” to an ethical philosophy approaching a full-blown redemptive “non-violence.” In fact, there may well be in the performance of the last theme vital potential for even subverting the very “myth of redemptive violence” itself and likewise its discourse of “a good war.”
Chapter 2’s reading in particular aims to provoke not an indecision over meaning but rather an “undecision” over the grain of the most commonly heard connection of Star Wars with a mythically violent ethos, and this is done largely in order to open up a liberative reading of the saga. It is argued that although Lucas’ Star Wars takes the child-friendly and entertaining mega-form it does that nonetheless, it is conceived of as a morally pedagogical text, one that displays Lucas’ own discomfort with the Nixon government and the Vietnam War. Although this will have to remain a study for another day, it would be fruitful to read the 1977 Star Wars movie carefully in the light of Lucas’ earlier dystopian socio-political protest movie THX 1138.
Chapters 3 and 4 extend questions of violence and an emancipatory politics as the result of a set of critical claims that identify crucial difficulties in the shaping of the representation of Otherness in Lucas’ saga. The nature of the way otherness is construed enacts violence against those excluded from power by being “othered,” made “alien.” According to Patricia Melzer, “Many descriptions of aliens in traditional science fiction narratives are limited to representing either warring opponents, who resist colonization of their planet by the heroes or terrorize a sector of the universe; or gentle, often dumb creatures, who, as ‘sympathetic aliens’ …, shyly shake the hero’s hand in farewell.”18 Paul Verhoeven, for instance, the director of Starship Troopers, exemplifies the former when he asserts that “the US is desperate for a new enemy. … Critics’ Alien sci-fi gives us a terrifying enemy that’s politically correct. They’re bad. They’re evil. And they’re not even human.”19 Verhoeven’s lack of irony in using the phrase “politically correct” with regard to such a use of terms for the alien such as “enemy” and “evil” is revealing of a powerful strand in American political culture. It is here that Star Wars, a culturally pervasive set of texts, requires critical attention. Matthew Kapell, for instance, argues that Star Wars uses categories of “race,” and other critics argue “gender,” in order “to reinforce ideas of difference and to reinforce discriminatory practices.”20 The question is not so much one of why there is a paucity of non-white human characters or significant female characters in the saga, although those in themselves are important matters and may well be bound up with larger racist and sexist tendencies in American culture, but “whether the effects of … [Lucas’] cinematic representations perpetuate racist discourse and practices in the wider society.”21
It is worth indicating again that the following critical studies are interested in George Lucas’ space opera, and therefore they do not address the most recent cinematic addition to the franchise, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. While it would take some time to make this case, and I will do so at a later date with a second edition of The Gospel According to Star Wars, the two sets of movies (I–VI and VII) have a quite different political vision, and the newest installment almost has the feel of being an expensive and much hyped element more from the Expanded Universe. There is another reason for focusing on I–VI. The crucial fact is that the Disney owned and produced version trilogy is incomplete at my time of writing, with the final movie in the series currently scheduled for late 2019. Given the critical purchase that Episodes V and VI, not to mention I–III, brought to much of the political sensibility of the Star Wars movie that was eventually given the numerical value of Episode IV, it makes sense for critical hindsight to await the saga’s completion before making grand scholarly claims concerning it. The studies in this particular book will, therefore, continue on as if Disney had not happened to Lucasfilm.