Star Wars and Mythically Sanitized Violence
Several year ago D. Daiches Raphael, in his book The Paradox of Tragedy, asked the stark question “Why does Tragedy please?”1 After some discussion of the meaning of the term “pleasure,” arriving instead at something closer to the sense of audience “satisfaction,” he refers to the setting of the question in Aristotle’s determinative depiction of the mimetic art of tragic drama. In this classic and superlative text the Athenian had made the claim that Tragedy effects through fear and pity a catharsis or purging of the emotions. Numerous commentators have exercised considerable anguish in attempting to understand what Aristotle could have meant by this, ranging from emotionally restorative exhilaration,2 to medicinal purgation,3 to an ennobling vision of humanity at its most noble in the face of the extremity of suffering,4 to provoking “compassion” and “distress.”5 One particular version of a cathartic sensibility is expressed in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy in which both the Dionysian music and the cathartic Stimmung (mood/atmosphere) virtually appear to bury plot and character, for the purpose of the spectatorial affirmation of life.6 George Steiner, in response, laments paucity of philosophical approaches to Tragedy, which he regards as “of course, of the essence,” and by this he means philosophical approaches that are markedly different from Nietzsche’s use of the dramatic genre for the purposes of affirming life.7 In contrast, he offers a claim about the possibility of art’s “interrogation” of life, since it functions, in an important sense, as “a sharply political gesture, a value-statement of the most evident ethical import.”8 This means, he maintains, that art “purposes change,” or at least it can do (he has plenty to say about why kitsch is, therefore, not art).9 To take pleasure in the tragic in any less of a sense would be to approach it in an excessively sanguine fashion and, indeed, even in a form of “high-flown sadism,” according to Terry Eagleton.10 Accordingly, Eagleton is prompted to morally protest, “The doctrine of catharsis that there is indeed something edifying and enjoyable about the experience of tragedy, but ‘inexpressible satisfaction,’ with Cordelia dead in her father’s arms, borders on the positively sadistic.”11
The question of what screened violence, in particular, is good for, and therefore in what sense it pleases or satisfies its audiences, has long been an equally contentious matter. Is it good for the sake of some kind of simple entertainment, perhaps functioning to provide a form of distraction from the chores or sufferings of the mundane and the everyday? Or can it even operate as a cathartic moment, purging violent instincts through the safe spectacle? Stanley Kubrick, for instance, defended his A Clockwork Orange from much of the criticism it attracted by announcing that “any kind of violence in films serves a useful purpose by allowing people a means of vicariously freeing themselves from the pent-up aggressive emotions which are best expressed in dreams, or the dreamlike state of watching a film.”12 Or are matters more complicated than that? For instance, do the imagined and the lived realities overlap in disturbing ways that involve the latter coming to mimetically perform the former? This possibility of the copycatting of screen violence has been debated at some length, both by intellectuals and in the public forum. In his Media Ethics Goes to the Movies, Howard Good explains that from the considerable number of studies on media violence since the 1960s the overwhelming finding has been that “repeated exposure to violent programming produces health risks, particularly to children and adolescents.”13 Good’s study then appeals to Seneca to reveal some of what is at stake.14 The Roman statesman had complained that the spectacle of gladiators fighting to the death or criminals being thrown to the lions actually brutalized and desensitized the Romans. It made them “crudelior et inhumanior” (“more cruel and more inhumane”). Their pleasure in observing violence as willing participants in encouraging the spectacle not only undercut what Seneca took to be central task of life—to grow in spirit, understanding, and self-control—but also actually reversed the development. It, in other words, destroyed the various audiences’ humanitas. Violence, in this vein, is offered as an entertaining spectacle for the titillation of consumptive viewers. One can observe the intensification of the brutalizing spectacle over recent years—for instance, in the likes of Quentin Tarantino’s aestheticized trivialization of the violence of vengeance, the heavily stylized and eminently blood-soaked cinematic adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300 or Sin City, and the ostentatious violence offered to viewers’ amusement by the Star Channel’s multiple seasons of Spartacus. So Good colorfully declares that “a society that finds violence entertaining, and that even allows the entertainment industry to target children and adolescents with violent fare, may be lost in its own sort of moral morass. Prolonged exposure to media violence has been shown in study after study to desensitize viewers. And a desensitized viewer is one less likely to recognize the rights and feelings of others or to think ethically about human relationships. The symbolic violence spreading like a toxic spill in our midst may not actually destroy life, but neither does it promote the love and joy we need to live.”15
However, there is a further, and deeper, issue than that of whether or not there is violence portrayed onscreen, or whether there is or is not a correlation between the amount of screened violence and that possibly mimetically realized in the real world. After all, anti-war movies like Apocalypse Now have a high body count, as do Schindler’s List, Shooting Dogs and Hotel Rwanda, or All Quiet on the Western Front. A clue to the more significant question, however, emerges from Seneca’s reference to the viewers’ humanitas: what values are being assumed in the violent filmed fiction? The question, then, has to do with how the violence is portrayed within a value system. In particular, what are the ideological operations in the cultural symbolic? In an interview conducted in 1991 Julia Kristeva claimed that “the media propagate the death instinct. Look at the films people like to watch after a long tiring day: a thriller or a horror film, anything less is considered boring. We are attracted to this violence. So the great moral work which grapples with the problem of identity also grapples with this contemporary experience of death, violence and hate.”16 This, she explained, expresses itself in extremist forms of identity politics: “Nationalisms, like fundamentalisms, are screens in front of this violence, fragile screens, see-through screens, because they only displace that hatred, sending it to the other, to the neighbour, to the rival ethnic group. The big work of our civilization is to try to fight this hatred.” The mention of hatred here is important. Violence does not come from nowhere. On the contrary, it is a sort of “communication … of hatred, fear, or contempt.”17 Even if it is not the provocative action of one seeking to assert herself it may well be the response to another’s self-asserting, of another’s fear and loathing.18
Violence becomes a spectacle of entertainment, a commodifiable framing of the popular imagination. It is the value system inherent in this screened agonism or conflictuality that movies like God Bless America and Apocalypse Now, among others, take issue with. According to Kurtz in the latter: “We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won’t allow them to write ‘fuck’ on their airplanes because it’s obscene.” If this is what is at stake, then, Jane Mills believes, perhaps the operations of censorship can even, in the end, deflect attention away from “understanding where the real roots of violence lie.”19
Even if this is so, there remains a question over the nature of the representation of violence—is violence a singular matter, or is it a considerably more complex affair? Ridley Scott, for instance, makes an interesting, albeit a rather grand and glib, claim that every war movie is an antiwar movie.20 In the Wachowskis’ cinematic adaptation of the comic book series V for Vendetta there is a moment in which the title character V claims that “violence can be used for good, for justice!” This suggests that there are bad forms of violence as well, and that not all forms of violence can be lumped in together. The significant conversation in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins between Bruce Wayne and Rā’s al Ghūl on the nature of justice and its relation to violence suggests something similar.
This chapter tackles the issue of violence in the SW saga, in particular in relation to the classic trilogy, Episodes IV-VI. Recently the screening of a new animated series entitled Star Wars Rebels, and prior to that George Lucas’ approved animation series, Clone Wars, has rekindled the imaginations of the youngest generation to immerse itself in not merely the excitement of the Lucas-inspired visual materials, but also in the expensive consumption of a wide-range of merchandise. Aggressive lightsaber battles can again be seen taking place on the streets, and consequently concerns about the relation of this saga and violence are worth raising once more. According to Mathew Alford, “Science fiction can accommodate rather simplistic narratives depicting morally unambiguous fights between the US and space aliens, from War of the Worlds (1953, 2005) to the Pentagon-assisted Invaders from Mars (1986), as well as numerous installments of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.”21 However, this chapter and the following one assume that the pop philosophy of the SW movies possesses certain kinds of resources to enable them to be recognized as a multi-volume set of publicly ethical texts. Primarily the chapter at hand tackles populist approaches to issues of the cultural relation between this (largely American) saga and questions of violence, in particular attending to SW’s possible performance of the so-called “myth of redemptive violence,” “the myth of a Good War,” to use Trevor McCrisken and Andrew Pepper’s terms. This is a myth that Susan Sontag regards as being prevalent in the morally unproblematic presentation of armed conflict and the “righteous bellicosity” against monstrous enemies that is common to the genre of science fiction.22 (Here, one might observe, reflections on violence turn specifically to war, or “state-sponsored” violence.) According to Robin Wood, it is “unlikely” that people engage in multiple readings of movies like Lucas’ in order to “discover new meanings, new complexities, ambiguities, possibilities, and possibilities of interpretation.”23 While this would be entirely understandable in terms of the kind of audience that the saga tends to particularly attract (children, adolescents, and the adult “fanboy”) it would be culturally unfortunate and would intellectually stabilize problematic receptions. Over the course of the next two chapters, then, the contention will be 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 arrangements of violence can be argued to array from something akin to a “holy violence,” through a sense more of the enactment of a “just war” approach, to an ethical philosophy that approaches a full-blown redemptive need for “non-violence.” In fact, there may well even be in the performance of the last theme vital potential for subverting the very “myth of redemptive violence” itself and likewise its discourse of “a good war.” This first chapter’s reading, as the initial part of a double study on the issues, aims to provoke not an indecision over meaning but rather an “undecision” over the grain of the most commonly heard connection of SW with a mythically violent ethos. This is done largely in order to open up a liberative reading of the saga with regard to what Judith Butler terms “the pecarity of life.”24
• • •
All human artifacts are culturally and contextually produced. Mythologies, for instance, express, through their judicious symbolic depiction of “archetypal” forms of living, the cultural (Latin, cultura) conditions that mark their location or setting. However, they also possess a certain transcendental quality which enables them to re-cultivate or transfigure, either subtly or radically, perspectives of their cultural instantiation by offering imaginative alternatives which themselves can become effective through their ritualistic telling and retelling. What these claims do is argue that mythological stories can provide powerful unconscious forces for the motivation and justification of the collective behavior of those various cultures in which they are told and retold as being existentially meaningful narratives. Put another way, they are formed within discursive webs of significance that determine what we learn to value, although one should be careful not to overplay the determination that has plagued the analysis of, for example, Theodor Adorno on “the culture industry” and “mass culture.”25 Thereby, through their mediations, these ritualised story-telling performances significantly contribute to “socializing” us. It is precisely “because culture matters so much,” Ben Agger claims, that “it deserves full critical attention.”26 Speaking specifically of the hegemonic role of the cinema, a particular form of the power of cultural production, Margaret Miles and S. Brent Plate argue that “in just over one hundred years, film has become a powerful force in modern life that changes the way we think about, interpret, and live in the world. Because of this alteration of the ways we literally see the world, critical attention to film becomes a vital task for those engaged with issues of religion and ethics, and concerned with more equitable social arrangements.”27
Yet, because this process occurs more often than not in largely unseen ways the emotive matter of the relation between screen violence and social crime, for instance, can only at best be superficially dealt with through reflection on whether there is a direct influence of fictional violence on, a conscious appropriation or repetitious simulation of, actual violence. Given the way mythologies help shape cultural dispositions, identity and discourse, the values and dispositions portrayed in the violent piece become “internalized” and “naturalized” in the cultural unconscious. Richard Mollica, director of Harvard’s program in refugee trauma, announces that “people who commit murder find it very easy to rationalize … and come to terms with it.”28 Partly this can be explained by the psychological need for emotional “survival” after traumatic incidents. But it is also the product of the way in which the belief system that one is inculcated into itself requires the rationalization of certain forms of inflicting fatality on “others.” As Carl Silvio and Tony Vinci maintain, “To speak of popular mythology, then, is to speak of politics, economics, identity formation, and ideology to the extent that our relationships to these categories are thoroughly mediated by popular narratives.”29 These values are assumed to be the way things are, and are, in René Girard’s term, “learned” through the mimesis of imaginative repetition (and the sheer amount of screen violence suggests that the repetition has made us familiar, all too familiar, with these assumptions).30 This entails that in the undoubtedly complex process of the social construction of reality “the power of the media,” if we can even speak meaningfully of that in a culturally porous set of interpenetrating cultures, lies more fully at the level of the unconscious. It can provide resources for the forming of discourse and of persons and persons’ imaginations, for the construction of identity and understanding.
What may initially appear to be simple and child-friendly entertainment in the youth-market of novels, comic-books, movies and television programs may actually be simultaneously an ideology full of unquestioned assumptions.31 As George Orwell claimed soon after the Second World War, “no book is genuinely free from political bias.”32 His own interest in politics, he explained, involved the “desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of society that they should strive after.” It has only been relatively recently that scholars have turned their attention away from appeals to SW as a “new myth,” wherein myth is portrayed ahistorically in terms of trans-cultural and trans-temporal forms of human meaning, to concerns with the specific shape of the cultural mythologies or hidden value-presuppositions that are determinative in this six-volume saga of George Lucas. Veronica Wilson, for instance, maintains the need for deep study of the texts: “Scholars have discussed at length how George Lucas drew inspiration from Joseph Campbell’s ideological analyses and from Jungian archetypes when crafting characters and situations for his Star Wars saga. Few, however, have analyzed ways in which Lucas’s characters and narratives apparently reflect other sorts of cultural and authorial attitudes as well—assumptions so deeply embedded that they are logically unexamined, unconscious, and perhaps wholly unintentional.”33 In other words, identifying the nature of the particular Campbell-inspired use of a mythic form in SW, or in any other mythic text, is not the end of the process of studying myth—it is only the start of the questions about “myth” that can be employed. In fact, according to Kevin Wetmore, the myth-study approach might even serve to mask the operative ideological assumptions and therefore “much myth criticism ignores the complicity of myth in establishing and maintaining social dominance and power structures. Many myths are created in order to explain why those in power are in power and why those who are oppressed or dominated are (and should be) oppressed and dominated.”34 Therefore, Wilson argues, “To dismiss the Star Wars films out of hand as lowbrow adventure-romance films that cannot support any meaningful analysis, as some commentators have done, is erroneous and perhaps irresponsible. Given the saga’s immense popularity, its potential cultural and psychological impact upon millions of viewers … should not be underestimated.”35 We may observe with Silvio and Vinci, then, that SW is an important “site of cultural investment that both reflects and shapes late twentieth and early twenty-first century global culture.”36
When critical attention is refocused on the sense of the movies as culturally reflective one can perceive the myriad of ways in which Lucas’ movies, in Wetmore’s words, “are not so much ‘mythic,’ as some have argued, as an ‘ideological mirror.’”37 The distinction Wetmore makes here, as is likewise made by several of the contributors to Silvio and Vinci’s volume, between myth-study and ideology-critique is somewhat overdetermined—the two should work together as a deep study of myth, of the mythological intentions and the cultural myths that unwittingly influence the movies. The problem is more that when separated, “myth” tends to be studied acontextually as is evidenced by the work of Andrew Gordon, Mary Henderson, and John Shelton Lawrence (Henderson, in spite of the “myth-focus” of her reading, does at least recognize that the portrayal of good and evil shifts over Episodes IV-VI).38 However, as Dan Rubey observes, this approach to SW in the form of a myth-study overlooks the cultural specificities and contextualities of mythologies, and the multiplicity of these stories and their cultural meanings in their differences.39 Moreover, “mythologies” have not only more culturally specific but also more political meanings than the myth-study approach to SW has taken time to notice. As Silvio and Vinci maintain, if a myth is the story told by a culture that expresses its understanding of the world and the relations between persons then the myth becomes an expression that also conditions, or socializes, each generation within that culture. “To speak of popular mythology, then, is to speak of politics, economics, identity formation, and ideology to the extent that our relationships to these categories are thoroughly mediated by popular narratives.”40 Recognizing Lucas’ indebtedness to Joseph Campbell requires less complaint and certainly not avoidance in one’s provision of an ideology-critical analysis, but more a better cultural-politically specified reading of both Campbell and of Lucas than has tended to be offered by readers.41 Nonetheless, Wetmore’s point is a good one insofar as it is the job of “ideology criticism” to uncover hidden ideological dynamics and to put them on display for critical testing and possibly contesting. So, for instance, scholars have been asking how far there is an indication of 1970s’ American patriarchalism,42 racism,43 capitalism,44 homophobia,45 individualism,46 or American supremacism47 driving the SW texts. In this way the movies are properly perceived to be culturally expressive, or at least expressive of a particular strand of culture. This is, of course, one of the reasons for their success—their well packaged, glamorous, action-packed and fast-paced adventure resonated in meaningful ways with a mass audience. A sense of the cultural appeal of the movies is suggested by Liam Neeson, the actor portraying Qui-Gon Jinn in TPM, but only as his analysis slips again into the decontexted eternalizing of mythology as mythic: “George’s tales, the Star Wars tales, have really tapped into the psyche and mood that popular modern culture has never done before. For me that says yes these films are incredibly well made, but also it’s tapping into a void which we have as human beings that we have kind of lost something. And George provides … the great story-telling sense of myth.”48
The difficulty with, and even naïveté of, several critical studies of the ideological values of Lucas’ products, however, is that they fail to make an appropriate distinction between the values that unconsciously shape this auteur’s performance and those that he intentionally attempts to promote. Consequently, these critiques are open not only to a logical flattening of potential complexity, but to the possible counter-claim regarding Lucas’ own political values, should they be different. Dan Rubey’s analysis is particularly prone to this when he speaks of “Lucas’ conservative ideological bias.”49 After all, Lucas critically reworks important political aspects of Campbell’s monomyth. Silvio and Vinci’s book a little more promisingly, at least, aspires to explore “how Star Wars simultaneously codes and decodes a conflicting matrix of values, beliefs, and understandings that make up contemporary global culture.”50 However, as Wetmore argues in a more appropriately sophisticated way, it makes sense not to argue that Lucas is consciously, for instance, racist or sexist.
Yet, as Stuart Hall argues, “an ideological discourse does not depend on the conscious intentions of those who formulate statements within it.” What Henry A. Giroux asks of Larry Clark, I ask of George Lucas: The “pertinent question” is not whether Lucas is racist, but rather “whether the effects of his cinematic representations perpetuate racist discourse and practices in the wider society.”51
A question frequently raised over the mythology offered by the saga, a pop myth of monstrous popularity, crucially has to do with matters of (macho) militarism and systemic violence. The claim is not due to the amount of violence in SW, for as mentioned earlier, movies like Schindler’s List, Hotel Rwanda, and Shooting Dogs are full of violence. Yet these particular movies design the visual texture of violence in such a way that it disturbs us into moral reflection, remorse, and watchfulness against the pressures to violate other people in our own lifetime. Instead, the issue is of the function of the violence, and their relation to what Slavoj Žižek calls violence as “purely ‘objective,’ synchronic, anonymous.”52
Certain critics particularly identify in SW what biblical scholar Walter Wink calls the “myth of redemptive violence.” Wink rather grandly identifies this as “the real religion of America,” and in fact “of the modern world,” or the culture of death and violence that Grace Jantzen even more imposingly claims lies pathologically at the heart of Western philosophy.53 In this regard, then, according to L. Gregory Jones, “It may be impossible to unlearn violence because it is inscribed in the way things are, in the very nature of the world.”54 Wink explains what he means by the myth of redemptive violence: it “enshrines the belief that violence saves, that war brings peace, that might makes right. … The belief that violence ‘saves’ is so successful because it doesn’t seem to be mythic in the least. Violence simply appears to be the nature of the things. It’s what works. It seems inevitable, the last and often, the first resort in conflicts.”55 This may even amount to a justification of pre-emptive violence as a survivalist means of self-protection, such as that which Jonathan Wolfe locates in the influential political philosophy of the seventeenth century thinker Thomas Hobbes: “As pre-emption is a form of defence, invading others can often be seen as the most rational form of self-protection.”56 Such a soteriologically ordered ideology of instrumental violence (or violence towards the end of peace) is markedly different from that identifiably directing numerous computer games, according to Wink. “What we find here [in the latter] is the sadistic enjoyment of evil pure and simple. Redemptive violence gives way to violence as an end in itself. It is no longer a religion that uses violence in the pursuit of order and salvation, but one in which violence has become an aphrodisiac, sheer titillation, an addictive high, a substitute for relationships. Violence is no longer the means to a higher good, namely order; violence becomes the end.”57
Critics feel they do not have to work terribly hard to expose this supposedly American myth in the saga. So, for instance, Bryan Stone argues that “the ultimate victory of good over evil finally boils down to firing laser-blasters, detonating bombs, or slicing through one’s enemies with a light saber.”58 Despite the Jedi Masters Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi counseling Luke Skywalker not to succumb to the Dark Side of “anger, fear … aggression … hate,” the question is whether the films on the whole serve to justify violence, or at least a certain kind of violence—the redemptive violence of the Rebel’s and Jedi’s causes.59 Does the SW saga tap into and reinforce (in both either consciously or unconsciously) the violent American fascination with, and celebration of, the hero who overcomes all odds to dispense true justice himself, what Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence call “the Captain America complex”?60 Simply, as “space opera” SW belongs to, to use the words of one commentator on the genre, “a literature of conflicts, usually with violent resolutions.”61
As mentioned earlier, underlying this chapter and the succeeding one is the sense that SW, a supposed example of morality diverting popcorn culture with wide sphere of influence, possesses resources to be read as a multi-volume set of a publicly ethical texts.62 The main feature driving the study has to do with the issue of the relation between this saga and violence. The contention is that violence takes several forms in these movies, and these range from something akin to a “holy violence,” through a sense of “just war,” to an ethical philosophy approaching a full-blown redemptive “non-violence.” Certainly it is true that SW is a polymorphic set of visual texts that generates multiple interpretations. Yet, there may well be in the performance of the theme of “the redemptive” vital potential for subverting the so-called “myth of redemptive violence,” or the talk of “a good war,” itself, and for the presentation of differentiations in the acts of violence that open up to questions of otherness, difference and good relations beyond violence. Consequently, Star Wars’ creator George Lucas, then, exhibits in his cinematic product something of the complex historical arrangements that make the cultural environment of the U.S. something recognizably more diverse than associating America with the myth of redemptive violence might suggest. Thus, when discouraging hasty and ill-informed readings of it as mythologizing violence and violent aesthetic voyeurism, the saga can perhaps surprisingly invite the re-imagination and re-cultivation of the moral vision for the flourishing of responsible agency. Lucas complained in 1981: “A lot of articles either are wrong about things or they make up things. And when it’s Time or Fortune everybody takes it as the gospel truth. Suddenly it becomes ‘resource material’ and keeps cropping up over and over again.”63 Unfortunately a considerable amount of academic reflection is problematic for a similar reason—it tends to take shortcuts and makes judgments on the basis of a small amount of the available resources, and the superficial plausibility of the claims subsequently seep into the scholarly and popular imaginations in such a way as to ossify what was a little tenuous and uninformed in the first place. Even if my somewhat grand critical claims remain unconvincing to readers in the end, my pair of chapters suggest that at the very least one must recognize that matters are not as simple as most readings of SW as a violent set of texts would like to assume.
There is something else that needs to be stated in advance of launching into the detailed argument, and this has been developed more substantially in The Gospel According to Star Wars: Faith, Hope and the Force. The saga is, of course, two sets of trilogies, and these are separated by over a decade and a half. There are observable differences in context, style, mood, and so on. Where I perceive these differences to be important I will provide an indication. Yet my first and second chapters equally advocate that better attention needs to be paid by cultural scholarship of the saga to the differences and continuities than has generally been the case.64
It is worth pausing a little longer at this point to provide a further clarifying parenthesis. It is noticeable that many studies of SW slip interchangeably from talk of “violence” to that of “war,” and one should be careful in doing this. They are not the same thing, especially since “war” is often presented as involving more moral innocence for those involved in enacting the state sanctioned violence. On the other hand, it is nonetheless important to recognize the overlap, and therefore the way in which “war” becomes an expression of an underlying violent instinct. As Jantzen explains, “it is not war, worrying though that is, upon which I think our attention should be focused. Many thoughtful people deplore war—sometimes all wars, sometimes specific wars as unjustifiable morally or tactically—and would hold that the values of western society are and should be fundamentally peaceable. But if I am anywhere near right, war is no more than an explosive symptom of the systemic violence which spreads its underground tentacles throughout our cultural habitus.”65 Likewise, Susanne Kappeler puts this point starkly: “War does not suddenly break out in a peaceful society; sexual violence is not the disturbance of otherwise equal gender relations. Racist attacks do not shoot like lightning out of a non-racist sky, and the sexual exploitation of children is no solitary problem in a world otherwise just to children. The violence of our most commonsense everyday thinking, and especially our personal will to violence, constitute the conceptual preparation, the ideological armament and the intellectual mobilization which make the ‘outbreak’ of war, of sexual violence, of racist attacks, of murder and destruction possible at all.”66
Martin Luther King’s sermonic meditation on the words of the Jesus dying on the cross—“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”—understands them to be the expression of someone refusing to retributively respond to violence with vengeance. But there is more to Jesus’ prayer than that—the reference is to the self-deception of his executors for “they know not what they do.” The Fourth Gospel’s ironic use of the ecce homo, for instance, holds up a mirror to the agency of the authorities, driven as they are by the dream of the sovereign kingdom of Rome or a god that cannot recognize the presence of Jesus as the proclaimer of the true Kingdom, the basileia (rule) of God. King’s reflections lead him to claim that “the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”67 While this may appeal to the typically modern Western reduction of the ethical to the limit- or extreme-situation, the point is that these moments of discord are more revealing of who we are and the values that determine us than the relatively “quieter” moments are. In other words, it is important to attend to the structuring dynamics of human consciousness and agency, to the cultivating of instincts that form and direct decision-making at its deepest level.
John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett attempt to do just this at a very particular point when developing their own version of Joseph Campbell’s claim about an identifiable American “monomyth,” the story that sustains as well as best illuminates and expresses the cardinal values shared by many Americans.68 It is this that makes the character of Kurtz in Apocalypse Now a chilling expression of, rather than a sheer monstrosity, the national war-machine as it performs its deadly dealings in South East Asia. While Lawrence and Jewett’s use of the term echoes Campbell, the latter is concerned more with Jungian archetypes especially in relation to the individual, whereas this pair of commentators is more interested in the politics of ideologies in relation to the formation of communities’/nations’ self-understandings. Their studies on the theme attempt to penetrate below shallow crisis-ethics which asks questions about decision-making without paying attention to the types of things that influence the formation of moral judgment. Rather than focus on high-cultural expressions or politicians’ explicit claims this scholarly pair tackles the matrix of popular-culture-as-identity-cultivating, or in Tom Beaudoin’s terms that cultural discourse which is the primary medium through which younger Americans tend to develop their self-consciousness. Therein they trace the monomyth through numerous pop cultural moments.69 They claim that the prevalence of this monomyth as they perceive it generates an ideological structure of violence, responsive vengeance, and so on, webs of significance themselves spinning the process of learning ideologies of death and violence. As Nicholas Jackson O’Shaughnessy claims in his study of propaganda, “We have no inherited predisposition to kill. We do it because we have been persuaded to, because our deepest emotions have been colonised by something else. The murderers going about their work in Kosovo were not monsters but normal men. Yet their barbarism is incomprehensible unless it is placed in the context that explains it, years of saturation propaganda at once sentimental, self-pitying, vindictive and xenophobic.”70
In Lawrence and Jewett’s identification and critique of the myth of the American (super)hero there are numerous points of politically significant argument: firstly, in particular they uncover a prevalent undemocratic ethic; secondly, they claim that the myth resists admitting moral complexity; and, thirdly, they maintain that this myth assumes a sense of American purity that is largely an expression of a Manichaean-like “us-versus-them” type framework.71 Kapell and Lawrence, for instance, proclaim, that “This valorized violence, sanctioned by deities, runs deep in all cultures that have imagined themselves representing higher powers who authorize them to slaughter others in battle.”72 This notion of the sacralization of conflictuality and the aggression required to sustain it, whether in self-protective defensive or self-aggrandizing expansionist mode, echoes Wink’s claim that it is “This Myth of Redemptive Violence …, not Judaism or Islam, [that] is the dominant religion in our society today.”73 So Jantzen observes the process of internalization that occurs, and its political effectiveness:
It is inescapable that the habitus of the west is violent, and that western history, including its most recent history, is a reenactment of this violence which has been internalised to such an extent that in any situation requiring response violence seems natural, the only alternative. Violence has so colonized our habitus that we have collectively lost the capacity to imagine other sorts of response. In the global context this is regularly expressed in military terms: from the Gulf War to Bosnia, from Kosovo to Afghanistan and Iraq, the alternatives are presented as either “doing nothing” or military bombardment. Since there is a felt moral and political need to do something, the west, claiming God and goodness on our side, goes to war.74
Nonetheless, it is the link between the hero and a good violence that is worth testing in relation to one of the examples Wink provides: the SW saga.75 Thus while the SW movies are more concerned with, in the words of Lawrence, “the American monomythic tale of redemption by reluctant, selfless superheroes,” the explicit connection of this myth with themes of “peacemaking through holy war,” the “selfless muscular hero,” and both “the mystique of violence … [and] the obsession with victory” significantly echoes Wink’s talk of the “myth of redemptive violence.”76 This, then, seemingly proves to be an example of “the belief that violence saves, that war brings peace, that might makes right.” The mythic nature of this claim is, however, masked and difficult to perceive for what it is. Accordingly, Wink observes, “The belief that violence ‘saves’ is so successful because it doesn’t seem to be mythic in the least. Violence simply appears to be the nature of the things. It’s what works. It seems inevitable, the last and often, the first resort in conflicts.”77 Violence is, apparently, not only inevitable but effective. “In short,” Wink argues, “the Myth of Redemptive Violence is the story of the victory of order over chaos by means of violence. It is the ideology of conquest, the original religion of the status quo. The gods favor those who conquer. Conversely, whoever conquers must have the favor of the gods.”78 One might imagine Bob Dylan’s mid–1960s protest song “With God on Our Side” being played as Wink shapes his critical reflections here.
The implications of this for reading George Lucas’ saga are consequently pronounced. Of course, Wink’s work was published in the 1990s and Jewett and Lawrence published their own two major studies on this in 2002 and 2003. As the next chapter will suggest, it is not insignificant that TPM was released in 1999 after Wink’s reflections, and ROTS (2005) had not been released by the time of Jewett and Lawrence. In fact, the critical writings of the latter even seem to have occurred without knowledge of AOTC (2002). Lawrence, however, has continued to maintain the trajectory of this reading in a more recent paper.79 Their joint perspective on the set of SW movies characterizes it as firmly “captive to the American [heroic] monomyth” and thus to the myth of redemptive violence, most noticeably presenting “the spiritual innocence [and redemptiveness] of … violence.”80
The account provided by Jewett and Lawrence and by Wink in making such an assessment of Lucas’ movies has become rather commonplace. Predominantly critics have come to identify in ANH especially the operation of a kind of “good” violence, a type of “holy war.” This interpretation tends argue that George Lucas at worst naturalizes violent conflict and contributes to making the violence of war (unavoidably) part of the (proper) way of life. A “good violence” does not transform the “rules” of cultures of violence but conservatively perpetuates them, thereby endlessly impoverishing the ethical imagination of non-reactive and liberating forms of peaceableness and also forming “the solid bedrock on which the Domination system is founded in every society.”81
In many ways the matter is crystalized by the function and mise-en-scène of the closing medal-ceremonial scene of the 1977, the moment that offers the emotional climax of the movie and which is pervaded by important signs, symbols, and references. It is set in the Rebel base on the fourth moon of Yavin, more specifically in the throne room of what looks like an ancient Massassi temple. Does this religious setting in the ancient temple provide a religious halo or justification for the preceding violent action against “evil”? Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Chewbacca enter the long room and walk up between two massed ranks of Rebel troops. Will Brooker notices that this “sequence is surprising in its coding of Rebel victory as regimented, ritualized, uniform, disciplined and ordered—precisely the qualities the film has previously associated with the Empire.”82 Once the three reach the end of the room they face a select group on a raised platform, composed of Rebel dignitaries and the droids C-3PO and R2-D2. From Princess Leia, Luke and Han receive medals for their actions in the recent victory at the Battle of Yavin.
There are a number of significant issues that emerge in one way or another from this scene. Firstly, the temper is an entirely jubilant one. While this may echo historic events like those witnessed in Trafalgar Square and Times Square after the Victories in Europe and in Japan, SW runs roughshod over the cost and the loss in the military conflict. The scene, of course, follows on from what has been a visual and emotional feast with the climactic exhilarating depiction of the dogfight over Yavin. Yet the disastrous and traumatic consequences of the violence are rarely seen.83 Judith Butler argues for the importance of grievability and the respect for precarious life, radically unsubstitutable life. “Only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of life appear. Thus, grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters.”84 A telling sign of what is at stake is the fact that Luke’s good childhood friend, Biggs Darklighter, has recently been killed in action, and yet not only is there no mention of this loss after its occurrence, but Luke’s mood on returning from the battle is an unreservedly euphoric one that is jubilantly shared with his new Rebel friends. The moment that tempers this, but only a little, occurs when his attention is caught by the damage that been inflicted on his R2 unit during the recent attack on the Death Star. In fact, earlier in the movie Luke perceivably expends very little emotional energy in grieving the brutal loss of his aunt and uncle (does their death come as a bit of a relief to him, since now it frees him to begin to realize his longing for adventure?). Likewise, Obi-Wan is less slain by Vader (passive) than sacrifices himself to become an eternally universal presence (active). Narratively speaking, Butler’s point would be that the lives of Luke’s relations and friends have been instrumentalized and thereby rendered valueless, just as much as those of the stormtroopers who appear simply as the adventure’s cannon fodder. As Rubey argues, “when ships or planets blow up, we do not think about the people who presumably die in those explosions.”85 Developing this, Wetmore claims that “a million voices cried out and were silenced all at once when Alderaan was destroyed, … [although w]e do not feel those million deaths ourselves, nor do we feel anything about it.”86 Moreover, later in ROTJ Anakin Skywalker is redeemed by his violent action; and even the terrible slaying of Qui-Gon too in TPM somewhat loses its emotional resonance by this film’s own version of the subsequent victory-celebration. The audience is therefore denied any view of the consequences of large-scale warfare and the violent overthrow of the galactic civil authority for ordinary citizens. We are distracted from those who live “ordinary lives” by the cameras’ immersion in the characterizations of the grand figures of the drama. All other characters are rendered largely incidental by being reduced to the background mass that enables the elite figures to function.87 Of course as a criticism in its own right this is distinctly weak. Narratives, after all, function by way of providing a focused lens, and by providing a range of small scale roles for people who do not feature as the main protagonist(s). Where it has some teeth, however, is in reminding that because none of the main characters are the victims of violent deaths or the subjects of palpable grief (as is, for instance, the mother of Bambi) in the classic trilogy, the audience is diverted from the trauma of loss involved in grieving for a valued life.
Rubey’s assessment maintains, then, that SW “romanticizes war” for a post–Vietnam generation, and presents it, in the words of Michelle Kinnucan, in a “tidy and uncannily bloodless” way.88 Unfortunately Kinnucan’s own account is supported here with a decidedly weak example taken from one of the prequels. She complains that “during a lengthy battle scene in AOTC where Anakin has his arm severed at the elbow, we see not a drop of blood leave his body or pool on the ground.” This certainly could raise the issue of violence in the saga as largely a game-like spectacle, but this commentator also simply has to bear in mind the fact of the design of the lightsaber in the narrative. This weapon is an energy blade that cuts/burns. It would cauterize the wound so that there would be a clean cut. In fact, if one watches carefully one can see smoke rising from the wound. Arguably, nonetheless, this scene is considerably more brutal in its use of violence and its mood than those from the classic trilogy that tend to form the cornerstone of much ideological critique, especially when focused on ANH.
Even if one were to leave aside the critical suspicion of the operative ideology of redemptive conflict, the very packaging of violent images in a child-friendly form still remains a significant problem that requires comment. Violence, unless shown to have serious moral questionability (and that, presumably, is something most children could relate to on some level), is rendered everyday, part of the “natural” fabric of existence, and therefore, at the very least, not a bad thing while it at most becomes the (only?) path to redemption. As Wink argues, “By making violence pleasurable, fascinating, and entertaining, the Powers are able to delude people into compliance with a system that is cheating them of their very lives.”89 It is entirely possible, then, to identify the problem as lying less at the level of matter than at the level of form. In this account, the way that Lucas pits incomprehensible and existence-threatening evil against manifest good in an inevitably violent conflict renders the violence rather hygienic, so that what results at best aestheticizes the violence. Here the identifiably sanitized and largely and disturbingly bloodless character of the hostilities in the so-called “classic trilogy” is intensified by the nature of the simulated violence in TPM. The machines of war (of the Trade Federation) and the constructed warriors (of the Republic) create a sense of simulated hyper-reality, a violence that is gamed rather than fought and bled in and through. Significantly, while this mechanization is presented as something of a perversion (a perverted sacramentum of unreality or unincarnated life, one could argue) of the Jedi Order’s values, this simulation nevertheless wins its own reality, its own sense of presence, and thus the Jedi sense of the real disappears behind the map of the moral simulacra. In this visual trajectory the audience is largely distanced from the violence in a way that accentuates the role of audience-as-spectacle-voyeur. So Jonathan Rosenbaum argues that “wiping out entire planets in the Lucas scheme of things is clean, bloodless fun that never threatens the camaraderie between fuzzy creatures and humans—who trade affectionate wisecracks while zapping enemies from afar—even when this all gets ennobled by mythical conceits derived from Joseph Campbell.”90 It is this role that John Milbank regards as “actually more violent than participating in violence—that to be violent is actually to survey in a detailed, uninvolved fashion a scene of suffering.”91
Secondly, the form of Han Solo’s garb provides significant clues as to why the final scene of ANH possesses the celebratory tone that it does towards the victory at the Battle of Yavin. Solo’s costume is designed in the style of the Westerns’ archetypal gunslinger, High Noon without the Stetsons, and this alludes to the violent frontier myth of America that, among other things, skirts over the moral problems with the late nineteenth century appeal to “Manifest Destiny” in settling the American west. The genre of the Western trades on the notion of meeting out “instant, summary justice. … In short, we need a messiah, an armed redeemer, someone who has the strength of character and conviction to transcend the legal constraints of democratic institutions and save us from our enemies.”92 As Wink explains, Western mythologies are, then, shaped by the dynamics inducing violence—“Life is combat. … [I]t is a theatre of perpetual conflict in which the prize goes to the strong. Peace through war; security through strength.”93 SW, critics argue, displays a vigilantist suspiciousness of authority, and thus the gunslinger’s being a law-unto-himself. Violence seems to be celebrated as a way of repairing many of the ills of society. After all, the sensibility of the closing scene of ANH is largely that that of the achievement of resolution. Evil has been defeated, even though the content of the previous scenes has left enough unresolved to support a sequel, most notably the escape of Darth Vader.
Thirdly, the celebratory mood is significant for another reason, and that has to do with the way it develops a contrast between the heroic figures and their cause, and those in the Imperial order they rebel against. In ANH evil is rather obvious and it has its personification in flatly dark characters such as Darth Vader, and later in Darth Sidious (ROTJ) and Darth Maul (TPM). This reference to “evil” here is significant. Soon after its release Michael Pye and Linda Myles, among others, were claiming that ANH “offers the ultimate escape, withdrawal from complex questions of morality, and a display of magnificent fireworks as a bonus. It is a holiday from thought.”94 This sensibility is reinforced by the suggestion that in SW evil is rather obvious and metaphysically distinct from “the good.” As Rubey argues, ANH “makes Darth Vader and Grand Moff Tarkin as evil as they are in order to justify the violent actions of Luke and his comrades.”95 At the point of the second draft of SW in 1975 there was no backstory granting Vader a more complex psychology. And even when he does finally appear, early on in the movie, he exhibits nothing but power and he offers nothing more than the presence of menace to be fought against by the heroic characters of the story. “From the moment that Darth Vader first appeared on screen in 1977—a nightmarish demon in black striding down a spaceship corridor—he became an instant icon of evil.”96 While there is at least a small hint of something more complex when Obi-Wan Kenobi reveals that Darth Vader had been “a young Jedi Knight,” the potential impact of this note remains distinctly and noticeably underplayed and underdeveloped in ANH. Vader’s costume itself is symbolic, combining a Nazi reference (the Stahlhelm shaped helmet in SS black), medieval monastic robes, a samurai girdle (and even the helmet as well, reminiscent in shape of the Japanese kabuto), the black knight (the black armour), and Jack Kirby’s Darkseid and Doctor Doom.97 Equally, Emperor Palpatine (Darth Sidious is his Sith name) is presented less as a person than as a metaphysical principle, as “evil incarnate.” Ian McDiarmid, for instance, the actor portraying Darth Sidious describes his cinematic character as “the blackest of the black. … He’s a solid block of evil [with n]o redeeming features.”98 Perhaps this is why he tends to make only brief appearances in the saga, particularly in the “classic trilogy”; he is the mythological mover behind the events of the story, just like the gods who manipulate things behind the scenes of the Iliad. McDiarmid interestingly uses the devilish-image to depict his role, announcing that in ROTS he is “revealed, finally, in all his satanic glory,” although he also suggests something even more sinister: that Sidious “is more evil than the devil. At least Satan fell—he has a history.”99 Similarly, Executive Producer Rick McCallum describes “the guy who’s truly evil is Palpatine. He has manipulated this whole saga.”100 Significantly, in a densely referential scene towards the end of ROTS the Emperor’s black Sith robed apparel, contrasting with his illuminated skin tones, gives him the appearance of Death in a visual echo of Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal. So Tim Rayment asserts that “Star Wars is not subtle: good characters are good, bad characters are evil, and if the actors smile it means they are happy. In Return of the Jedi you know which side a person is on because the good live in an environment of warm, earthy colours and the bad live in harsh black and white.”101 The educational consequences of such a portrayal are unpacked by Wink: “Once children have been indoctrinated into the expectations of a dominator society, they may never outgrow the need to locate all evil outside themselves. Even as adults they tend to scapegoat others (like the commies, the Americans, the gays, the straights, the blacks, the whites, the liberals, the conservatives) for all that is wrong in the world. They continue to depend on group identification and the upholding of social norms for a sense of well-being.”102
George Lucas’ ancient and distantly situated galaxy supposedly tells the mythical story of the conflict between good and evil, and thus speaks precisely within this particular process of objectification. However, he does not offer a creation theme, a notion of the originality and ultimacy of the good such as J.R.R. Tolkien does in The Simarillion (although it is important to observe that his Lord of the Rings trilogy throws the reader into the midst of apocalyptic conflict). This fact, combined with much of the imagery in SW, contributes to a common understanding of the relation of good and evil that perceives the ultimacy of the conflict between two eternal principles, and therefore is seen to be essentially akin to Manichaean inspired dualistic philosophies. Lucas himself gives some weight to just such a reading: “The idea of a positive and negative, that there are two sides to an entity, a push and pull, a yin and a yang, and the struggle between the two sides are issues of nature that I wanted to include in the film.”103 Is this why “the Force” is spoken of as having a “dark-side” and of the messianic figure coming to “bring balance to the Force”? Lucas himself makes a dualistic-type comment about his movies in the feature entitled The Making of Episode I: “The overriding philosophy in Episode I—and in all the Star Wars movies, for that matter—is the balance between good and evil. The Force itself breaks into two sides: the living Force and a greater cosmic Force.”104 Intriguingly, however, a moment in the novelization of ROTS is perhaps less evocative of an ultimate ontological dualism that justifies the presence of evil within the life-system than of an evolutionary monism. Mace Windu admits to Yoda and Obi-Wan, “Jedi create the light, but the Lords of the Sith do not create darkness.105 They merely use the darkness that is always there.”106 The “always there” comment is revealing. It would resonate with dualistic motifs but for his next comment. For Windu, articulating what could be called an evolutionary ethic, “Greed and jealousy, aggression and lust and fear—these are all natural to sentient beings. The legacy of the jungle. Our inheritance from the dark.”
The moral implications of a reading of SW as a Manichaeanly regulated ideological performance are undoubtedly pronounced. For instance, and this is the third political implication that can be drawn from Lawrence and Jewett’s reading, the Manichaean tendency is pre-eminently expressed as an unself-critical ideology that pits “us against them,” and thereby predicates a kind of difficult to test assumption of the purity of the moral agents aligned with “us.” Such a sensibility generates a self-congratulatory self-image of claiming to know just “how good we are,” and a pure projection of evil onto the “other” in its “universe of innocence” that constitutes an “infantilising [of the] cinema again.”107 Consequently, dualistic ontologies open up the possibility for temptations to not interrogate or reflect morally on one’s own self or behavior. The mythologist Joseph Campbell, one of Lucas’ influences, once argued that “one may invent a false, finally justified, image of oneself as an exceptional phenomenon in the world, not guilty as others are, but justified in one’s inevitable sinning because one represents the good. Such self-righteousness leads to a misunderstanding, not only of oneself but of the nature of man and the cosmos.”108
Evil is out there—among, in, or even identified as “them” and not “us,” vampiristically attempting to feed off “us.” As Orson Scott Card sarcastically asks, “Isn’t it grand to be on the side of Truth and Justice? Especially when we never have to explore exactly what is true and who is just.”109 ANH in particular, critics argue, is a product of a particular American politico-cultural environment of the type that one commentator describes as the landscape of “narcissism and fear of the Other.”110
The saga, it would seem, reinforces the idea that Campbell claims to be a “basic idea” in the mythologies of war—“that the enemy is a monster and that in killing him one is protecting the only truly valuable order of human life … one’s own people.”111 This survivalist mythology and the larger and longer standing mythologies of redemptive violence keep people chained to war as a way of life. They infuse individuals, national political and military leaders, and societies with deep attraction to both imaginary and real violence.112 Accordingly, “no premium is put on reasoning, persuasion, negotiation, or diplomacy. There can be no compromise with an absolute evil. Evil must be totally annihilated or totally converted.”113 This means that there are dangerous explanatory shortcuts that direct one away from substantive and honest reflection on what makes “evil people” and “evil deeds.” Mary Henderson, curator of the Smithsonian’s Star Wars: The Magic of Myth exhibition makes an interesting observation: “There is no crossover between the two forces; when the Death Star is destroyed along with everyone on it, it is a clear-cut victory of good over irredeemable evil.”114
Kinnucan’s citation of the killing of the stormtroopers in support of her claim concerning redemptive violence is worth considering at this point. She claims that “the imperial soldiers are human but dehumanized,” and cites Koenraad Kuiper for supplementary effect: “they are pawns who die in large numbers. Their inhumanity is clear from the fact that their faces, if they have any, are never visible.”115 This somewhat echoes a claim of Henderson who asserts that in SW, “there is no point in attempting to ‘save’ any of the Imperial troops.”116 They are, quite simply, beyond hope. Unfortunately, this particular example from the saga actually subverts Kinnucan’s and Henderson’s argument. In the late 1970s Lucas began to develop a backstory that resulted in the stormtroopers being conceived as being clones. Of course, that was not fully established in the original trilogy, and given that science-fiction like Blade Runner had asked the question concerning the personhood of those cloned it is at least excusable that Kuiper and Henderson continued to ask the question of the guiltless destruction of these armored figures. However, Kinnucan’s paper appears after the cinematic release of ROTS (although the lack of references to this last piece in the saga suggests it is unknown when she is writing). Of course, the irredeemability of the stormtroopers, in a sense at least, is explained particularly by AOTC, and to a lesser degree ROTS—they are presented as not being fully human, a consequence of the deliberate constraining of their individuality in the cloning process. They become more like biologically material machines, constructed through an instrumentalizing of life that denies them their own potential for becoming free and equal subjects in their own right. As the Kaminoan Prime Minister Lama Su admits to Obi-Wan, “They are totally obedient, taking any order without question. We modified their genetic structure to make them less independent than their original host.” They are in that respect “docile.” The cloning and biotechnological processes are, in other words, that practice of relational corruption made manifest, so that lives are created (and with Grievous and Vader, recreated) solely for their usefulness as machines of death. What makes the biomechanical clones play an important symbolic role, and one which undermines the force of Kinnucan’s argument, is the dual fact that the shadowy origins of the clone army appears to have the stamp of the manipulations of Darth Sidious, and also that they are instrumental in destroying the Jedi Order that is complicit in their existence and use. The symbolism associated with the role of the Clone Army should not be missed: the order for them came in mysterious circumstances, but revealed in the back-story to ROTS to have been Sith directed (Sidious’ commission, acting by Dooku directly through Jedi Master Sifo-Dyas); the uniforms of the Clones are significantly a link to the Imperial Stormtroopers in the “classic trilogy”; the clone’s Republic cruisers are distinctly precursors of the powerful Imperial Star Destroyers; but most important is the scene at the end of AOTC when the Clones, departing for war, move off with the Imperial March theme being clearly and boldly performed. The point of Episodes II-III, in this instance, is that the violent order and the instrumentalization of life contribute to the catastrophic fall of the Republic and its so-called keepers of the peace. Padmé alone seems to be well-equipped to remain interrogative and suspicious of the swift drive to war.
Crucially critics also cite the way in which even the redemptive moment is portrayed in the climactic battle of the saga (ROTJ). As Kinnucan observes, the Emperor is slain and the mortally wounded Darth Vader dies just before the Rebel Alliance triumphs by destroying the second Death Star.117 Consequently, through the presentation of this conflict the audience is arguably treated to a kind of cathartic experience in which any feelings of guilt are expiated by the overwhelming feeling of rightness of action.
However, as will be explained in the next chapter, there is considerable room for a response that recognizes the way ESB, through the characterization of Luke’s training in the ways of the Jedi, comes to simultaneously interiorize evil. Dramatically he is tempted by those things that Jedi Master Yoda warns are the pathways “to the dark side”—hate, anger, and fear (which he explains are the way of un-Jedi-like possessive attachment in the prequel trilogy). It is this refusal to implicate considerations of good and evil in a distinctly problematic exteriorized form that is handled well in the prequels’ portrayal of “the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker.”
Fourthly, the various references to Nazism, in many ways, support this emotionally charged ideology of redemptive violence. Lucas broadly imagined, for instance, many of the lines of the process behind Palpatine’s emergence from being a senator of a relatively unimportant star system to Galactic Emperor in the vein of the coming of Hitler to power in and through the manipulation of public fears and resentments as well as violence. Roz Kaveney, however, protests about the portrayal of the political machinations of the saga’s prequel trilogy, specifically claiming that “the politics of the first film makes little sense.”118 Her main reason for disassociating Palpatine and Hitler, and for regarding the prequels as narratively problematic, is that the politician from Naboo is a powerful member of the occult Sith. Of course, this, as with other aspects of the movies (and several of those Kaveney is more positive about) is a feature of multi-extra-textuality, or Lucas’ expansive visual and conceptual borrowings. Moreover, it is of symbolic significance in that Palpatine, as Sidious, is something of a figural intensification or representation of wickedness, and Kaveney herself does, at least, recognize that Sidious is like those depicted as wicked in Tolkien’s Middle Earth narratives. Moreover, the design of the officer-class Imperials’ costumes, complete with knee high black boots, does not require them to goosestep down the corridors in formation to suggest the National Socialists. Equally suggestive are the following observations: that the shock-troopers of Episodes II-III are renamed for Episodes IV-VI as “stormtroopers”; the fact that the space-battles are clearly modeled on World War II aerial dog-fights; that the Great Jedi Purge with Order 66 in ROTS is Night of the Long Knives–like; that Palpatine declares the need for “a strong Chancellor” who will “bring peace and prosperity back to the Republic,” resulting in a call for a vote of no confidence in Chancellor Valorum, and cleverly manufacturing a crisis to enable the senator from Naboo seizing of power (TPM) with popular approval, and his subsequent securing of power through engineering a war (AOTC-ROTS).119
The element of guilt that exists in moving to war is eliminated in the SW fantasy since the Galactic Empire (a phrase taken from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, and echoing the rise of Roman tyranny) is conveniently and consistently evil, blowing up entire planets with defenseless people like Alderaan. Non-resistance to such an Empire would be seemingly ethically unthinkable, and thus the shroud of the dark-side covering the Imperials starkly contrasts with the enlightened purity of the Rebels’ motives and means of action. The violent rebellion against this totalitarian oppressor (conceived after the form of the Roman Empire/Third Reich) is thereby relieved of its moral burden, so associated as the Empire is with evil in the American imagination.120 For instance, the difference between the Rebels’ mass destruction of all those on the Death Star and the Imperials’ annihilation of Alderaan is simply one of mood and attitude, so that the latter is to be seen as an aggressive and wicked act of those who are “evil,” whereas the former is a necessary act of moral virtue and heroism.121 According to Lawrence in an article on The Matrix the “classic” SW trilogy speaks of “Luke Skywalker [as] a man who with an utterly clear conscience … destroys the Death Star with a Force-guided nuclear missile—a moment in cultural history that helped restore a nuclear pleasure earlier dampened by the grim awareness that hundreds of thousands of Japanese were incinerated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”122
It is possibly this connection with Nazism that molds ANH’s “bad guys” largely into single dimensional icons of evil, on screen as the vehicle for the celebration of the heroism of the Rebels, and whose deaths are to be celebrated in a moment of cathartic release. SW, therefore, becomes as much a “revenge narrative” as a quest and rescue story.123 The apparent simplicity of what is “taught” here chimes with the mood of Reagan’s 1980 presidential victory—the celebratory wave of strong values and confident moral and political self-presentation.124 In such a mood, the vague and imminently threatening “Other” has, in a sense, no face (the iconic “Darth Vader” and his “Stormtroopers” are masked) but is given a name, the “evil Empire.” One is encouraged to identify with those who are evidently heroic, and classify the “other” as evil, a projective move of externalizing of evil that creates a mood conducive to a self-secure “us vs. them” scheme and narcissistic self-perfecting. According to the macho absolutist political rhetoric and simplistically clear-cut pantomime politics of Reagan’s infamous “Evil Empire” of March 8, 1983, speech, taking the right side in this conflict (crusade) against evil Soviet Communism was nothing less than the holy Christian duty of the American people. So Jonathan Rosenbaum assesses this war-spirit in SW by arguing that “one would probably have to go back to the 40s, as Lucas did, to find such a guiltless celebration of unlimited warfare.”125 The movie series, in such an account, would then fulfill Wink’s identification of the myth of redemptive violence in the sense that “when the good guy finally wins, viewers are then able to reassert control over their own inner tendencies, repress them, and re-establish a sense of goodness without coming to any insight about their own inner evil. The villain’s punishment provides catharsis; one forswears the villain’s ways and heaps condemnation on him in a guilt-free orgy of aggression. Salvation is found through identification with the hero.”126
A humorous take on this issue is provided by a debate in Kevin Smith’s movie Clerks concerning the nuclear destruction of the second Death Star from ROTJ. A speculative exchange over the merits and demerits of 1983’s third movie in the SW series makes an interesting point in this regard. In an attempt to defend ESB as the superior movie against his friend Dante’s preference for ROTJ Randall turns attention to a moral problem involved in the destruction of the second Death Star:
The first Death Star was manned by the Imperial army-storm troopers, dignitaries—the only people onboard were Imperials. … So when they blew it up, no prob. Evil is punished. … The second time around, it wasn’t even finished yet. They were still under construction. … A construction job of that magnitude would require a helluva lot more manpower than the Imperial army had to offer. I’ll bet there were independent contractors working on that thing: plumbers, aluminum siders, roofers. … In order to get it built quickly and quietly they’d hire anybody who could do the job. Do you think the average storm trooper knows how to install a toilet main? All they know is killing and white Uniforms. … All those innocent contractors hired to do a job were killed—casualties of a war they had nothing to do with.
Dante is suitably confused at this point and on noticing this Randall attempts to further explain the nature of the problem: “All right, look-you’re a roofer, and some juicy government contract comes your way; you got the wife and kids and the two-story in suburbia—this is a government contract, which means all sorts of benefits. All of a sudden these left-wing militants [viz. the Rebel Alliance] blast you with lasers and wipe out everyone within a three-mile radius. You didn’t ask for that. You have no personal politics. You’re just trying to scrape out a living.”
On the other hand, the references to Nazism are ambiguous at the point of the final scene. As mentioned earlier, Will Brooker has expressed surprise at the sudden regimentation of the Rebel Alliance’s military ranks. But the very visual form of this mass gathering is suggestive of something that a number of critics find particularly disturbing. Controversially, the Rebel medal-presentation ceremony distinctly and substantially visually echoes two moments from Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda movie of 1934 The Triumph of the Will.127 Does this equate the Rebels’ victory with the politics of central European fascism? Lawrence and Jewett’s talk of a form of “Fascist faith in the Star Wars universe”128 had been predated some years earlier by Rubey and Michael Moorcock whose assessment had been published soon the movie’s theatrical release. Rubey commented that an “implicit conservative and reactionary strain is present in Star Wars, and undercuts the film’s tone of youthful rebelliousness.”129 One of the indications of this, emerging quite seamlessly, is the Riefenstahl visual reference, the “totalitarian, fascist overtones [that] grows so naturally out of the rest of the film’s fantasies and images.”130 In a damning assessment, Rubey announces that “in the end, Star Wars embraces by implication all the things it pretends to oppose. The Nuremberg rally scene is a fitting conclusion coherent with the film’s fascination with speed, size, and violence, and with the mysticism that cloaks the film’s patriarchal structures.”131 According to Lucas, however, the Riefenstahlian echoes were entirely unintentional at this point, and he further admits to having planned instead to use a set of Riefenstahl inspired images in order to depict “the Emperor on the Empire planet.”132 Nonetheless, this, would, of course, not solve the criticisms of violence in these movies since it would simply return the reader to the interpretive category of “holy rebellion.”
ANH was conceived in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and, as Stephen McVeigh suggests, the saga is “a unique commentary on America’s understandings of war over a thirty-year period … dealing with traumatic transitions and events.”133 Lucas’ engagement with the consequent traumatic suffering of guilt in the American soul was, of course, indirect. “Rather than detailing the horrors, he [viz., Lucas] decided to offer a balm, to try to reinvigorate American mythic tropes, remap the mythic landscape that had been so badly traumatized by American involvement in the war in Southeast Asia.”134 The question is what kind of “balm” Lucas offered, and how it relates to issues of a violent soteriology. James Gibson, for instance, argues that the late 1970s fantasies of “New War” redevelop the “archaic warrior myths” and thereby “attempt to reaffirm the national identity” and perpetuate the ideological matrix of the code of attraction to violence.135 In this context, not only is the violence against “evil” entirely legitimate, but the spectating of it “serves as catharsis.”136
One might attempt to mount a defense at this point in the form of suggesting that the SW movies are designed for children, and consequently any portrayal of the notion that “war is hell” would be inappropriately too gruesome and emotionally disturbing for such adolescents. A comment by an interviewer of Lucas suggests as much: “Lucas defends his simplicities by saying that Star Wars is aimed at the young. There is an importance to stating that the wicked witch is bad, he says, and that the prince embodies everything to which we aspire.”137 But this defensive strategy is weakened by at least two factors. Firstly, it displaces Lucas’ own intention to generate a popular mythology that would have educational effect. “Somebody has to tell young people what we think is a good person,” he claims. “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.”138 After Vietnam, Lucas 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.”139 Secondly, and more seriously, it is simply a glib response that appears to be grounded in a naïve assumption that persons are unencumbered creative agents. This is precisely the supposition that is appealed to by Palpatine in the novelization of ROTS as he tempts Anakin to challenge Jedi philosophy: “Do the one thing the Jedi fear most: make up your own mind. Follow your own conscience. Do what you think is right. I know that you have been longing for a life greater than that of an ordinary Jedi. Commit to that life.”140 The assumption crucially fails to acknowledge the issue of ideologies that are enculturated and considered “normal,” and that help form moral-agents within their framework. It is thus reductive of the contributions of any and every moment of culture to the formation of public discourse.141 This significant lack may itself reveal that late-capitalist societies have reduced the formation of selfhood and identity to an ideology of individuation and the self’s own creativity. Herein culture is largely reduced to the apoliticized and therapeutic indulgence of the self, thus valued for its affective intensification and limited to aestheticization and catharsis for those pleasured by being entertained in supposedly “innocent” ways.142 This is a “vision of a video-culture of mass passivity [that] represents a disastrous diminution of imagination and creative intelligence and responsibility.”143
Critics often point to the concept of “the Force” as a religious one, and one that divides reality into both good and evil.144 Luke may have used “the Force” to help him select the appropriate moment to fire his torpedo into the Death Star reactor shaft, but the second occasion in the movie that “the Force” is mentioned (and it is important that the moment in the Death Star Conference Room immediately follows the scene in which it is first mentioned by Obi-Wan) is quite different. According to Kinnucan, for instance, “when Vader tells Luke at the conclusion of Return of the Jedi that the inexplicably and monstrously evil Sith Lord, Emperor Palpatine, ‘will show you the true nature of the Force.’ That is, violence and its repetition, whether perpetuated by the ‘good’ Jedi or the complementary ‘bad’ Sith, is the ‘true nature’ of [the] Force.” However, couched in this way this critical claim simply does not pay attention to the distinctiveness of the use of the Force by the Sith and the Jedi. The question of violence, then, takes a different form from what Kinnucan suggests, and it is indeed given a religious sanction in relation to the violence of the Jedi and all who fight for their cause. The fact that the Jedi are aligned with “the Force,” then, provides the most ultimate of sanctions for unself-critical moral agency in the conflict against evil. Suggestively, in the novelization of ROTS Obi-Wan’s violent confrontation with General Grievous’ Magna Guards on Utapau is described in spiritual terms: “Obi-Wan wasn’t even fighting. He was only a vessel, emptied of self. The Force, shaped by his skill and guided by his clarity of mind, fought through him.”145 “The righteous,” one writer starkly maintains, “are called by God’s law to exercise a holy ‘violence’ against certain of the wicked, thereby manifesting God’s wrath.”146 According to Frank Allnut, “The galactic wars in the movies are really religious wars. The people of the Alliance, who believe in and follow the ways of the Force, are pitted against the satanic emperor Palpatine, Darth Vader and all the other ‘fallen stars’ of the Old Republic. The Bible tells us that there is bitter conflict raging throughout the spiritual universe, and it’s no secret to anyone that a fierce battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil is being fought on planet earth today.”147 Allnut sees the church in terms of that “small band of Rebel forces led by Luke, Han, and Princess Leia on the mission to restore the former glory of the Alliance.”148 He continues, in the spiritual “star wars” “Jesus has an even deadlier sword … to strike down all the ungodly nations of the world.”149
If the broad critical set of readings described in this chapter can be sustained, then SW becomes an ethically problematic text that is imbued with an ideological “Manichaean quality,” a governing clarity in its depiction of “good” and “evil” which nonetheless displays a morally simplistic and nostalgic sensibility.150 It would be well to construe it, seemingly, as belonging to a broad tradition “in which heroism and traditional values are celebrated.”151 SW is infused, it is frequently argued, with the mythology of a “good war,” that those who are benevolent fight fairly for a just and positive outcome of peace, and the fact that “the Force” is implicated gives it the ultimate (because divine) sanction. After all, there can be no more absolutely legitimating ideology than that which appeals to “God.” According to Frank Castle, himself a victim of horrendous violence, in The Punisher of 2004, “Those who do evil to others [are] the killers, the rapists, psychos, sadists.” Castle’s task, then, in his guise as The Punisher is to exact justice, violent justice, on the wicked. In this, however, is the inscription of violence into the very heart of human relations, and in this there is something particularly troubling, according to Wink. After all, “violence is simply not radical enough, since it generally changes only the rulers but not the rules.”152 The violated who seek restitution become, when the chance arises, themselves violators of their own original abusers.153 So, drawing on Christian imagery, the myth-scholar Joseph Campbell observes that “the hero of yesterday becomes the tyrant of tomorrow, unless he crucifies himself today.”154 In this system victims are made in the image of their enemy, and thus the violence is perpetuated. Commenting on Clint Eastwood’s The Unforgiven, L. Gregory Jones claims that “habits of sin, and more specifically of violence, are inescapable; they cannot be unlearned. Violence is the inescapable reality that persistently tears at the fabric of people’s lives until everyone is diminished, if not destroyed by it.”155
But there is more to reflecting on violence in any given society than this cycle of vengeful retribution, and it has to do with the very ideology or way of understanding the world we learn and indwell. We are not merely born into violent action, and its never-ending cycle in reaction,156 habituated in it, but it has been “naturalized”—the very way we see and understand the world maintains systems of violence. The Unforgiven, for instance, is set within a context in which the West could only have been “tamed” through violence, the Wild West as it has been called. Even the way that most Westerns are filmed testifies to the grip that ideology of “good violence” has on society’s imagination. Eastwood’s movie deconstructs those Westerns by climaxing not in the “happy ending” or sense of resolution, good done, but with the sense of emptiness in the destruction. To adapt a point made by Stanley Hauerwas, the reason violence and war seems to be inevitable, and therefore the only alternative in certain situations, is largely because of the kind of society in which we live and the kind of people we are—and that has to do with the types of ideologies that shape us.157