Redeeming the Star Wars Mythos from the Myth of Redemptive Violence
Following the shimmering appearance of “Lucasfilm” in glorious emerald letters on the silver screen, John Williams’ triumphant orchestral theme resounds. The audience of ANH at that point is greeted with a Flash Gordonesque introductory text which begins its fading crawl back into the background. Its reference is to civil war, rebel spaceships, “the evil Galactic Empire” and its “ultimate weapon,” a princess, and an imperial pursuit of stolen plans. It does not take long for the camera to descend and focus on the atmosphere above the desert planet of Tatooine, and altogether shattering the briefest moment of calm is the determined pursuit of the little Rebel blockade runner Tantive IV by the hulking Imperial Star Destroyer. Within a few moments of the curtain drawing back audiences the world over have been directed to what is promising to be a thrilling ride in the form of an action-packed space fantasy adventure.
SW has been ground-breaking in numerous ways: commercially, it was so successful that it helped shift science-fiction film from the low budget cultural periphery to the mega-blockbuster; it unleashed the culture of movie merchandising in the most expansive of ways; and it became part of the cultural imagination of three generations of fans. Keith Booker explains that
Star Wars, with its groundbreaking special effects and staggering commercial success, may be the most influential science fiction film in history. Its characters became icons of American popular culture, its language became part of the American vernacular, and its simple, but powerful, story became one of the best known in American history. It inspired a string of sequels that together now constitute the most commercially successful franchise in film history. Meanwhile, science fiction film, once a lowbudget genre seeking a niche audience, was transformed into a genre of big-budget blockbusters, often relying more on spectacular special effects than on thoughtful scenarios, compelling plots, or believable characters.1
While it is arguable just how far SW can be classified as “science-fiction” rather than, for instance, “space opera” or “space fantasy,” Booker’s point concerning the cultural fruitfulness of the saga, the way it has penetrated popular culture more generally to the point of being pre-eminently globally recognisable, is an appropriate one. Likewise, Kevin Wetmore claims that “the Star Wars series … is a touchstone that has changed our culture and changed the way in which movies are made, marketed, and seen.”2 In what has now become almost commonplace among cultural commentators both Booker’s and Wetmore’s ensuing critical evaluations of the saga reduce its metaphysical significance to a form of ontological dualism. So Wetmore argues, “Star Wars is family entertainment. Its target audience, as stated by Lucas time and again, is children. It is accessible, inspirational, and offers a clear view of the world, not muddled and weighted down by complexity. Good is good, evil is evil.”3 In other words, the Manichaean tendency is largely the fruit of its political context and the type of cultural wistfulness that direct its own presentation to its youthful target audience. SW, Booker declares, “is very much a nostalgia film that looks lovingly back to its predecessors in the science fiction serials of the 1930s,” and very much “in the mold of Lucas’s own American Graffiti (1973).”4 In fact, “Star Wars is, one might say, the sort of science fiction film that filmmakers of the 1930s might have made had they had available to them the special-effects resources (technological and financial) that were available in the late 1970s. … [It] is an unabashed work of popular culture and that much of the film’s success can be attributed to its unpretentious celebration of the kind of simple, straightforward oppositions that had given the pulp fictions of the 1930s their innocent appeal.”5 “This simplicity and innocence helped the film appeal to children,” Booker continues, “but Star Wars also had a great appeal for adult audiences in the United States in the late 1970s. After the trying times of Vietnam and Watergate, American audiences were eager for the kind of reassurance provided by simple verities and uncomplicated expressions of the ultimate power of good to defeat evil.”6 Commentators observe what Stephen McVeigh speaks of as SW’s being a “controversial and politically engaged” cinematic text.7 It is what that engagement is seen to involve that has made the saga particularly controversial for commentators concerned about egalitarian relations and radical politics. The conditions for SW’s reactionary politics played in to the growing conservative element in American political life. For Booker, then, “its old-fashioned, nostalgic appeal also marked the beginning of a rightward turn in American politics that would lead to the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980. Indeed, looking at the Cold War years of the 1950s, then at the late 1970s and early 1980s, some critics have concluded that science fiction film seems particularly to flourish in conservative times, perhaps because of their escapist appeal to audiences appalled by contemporary reality.”8
Accordingly, the claim is that both the ethos of Lucas’ movies and the cultural reception of them overlap with shifting political sensibilities. As with SW, Booker maintains, Reagan appealed “for a return to traditional values, its presentation of international politics as a simple opposition between good and evil, and its belief in the fundamental value of free enterprise.”9 “Indeed,” he continues, “Star Wars, perhaps more than any other single science fiction film served as a harbinger of social change in America. The early 1970s had been marked by dark, dystopian SF films, such as A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Andromeda Strain (1971), The Omega Man (1971), Silent Running (1972), and Soylent Green (1973), reflecting the pessimistic tenor of late-Vietnam and Watergate era America. The success of Star Wars announced a new desire for an optimistic, reassuring message that announced the possibility of a better future, a message also delivered by the Reagan campaign and, later, the Reagan presidency.”10
In Booker’s reading at least, the marshaling of SW to depict elements of the Reagan administration was far from arbitrary or illegitimate.11 And yet the movie scholar is honest enough to admit that “the politics of Star Wars are somewhat more complex than they might first appear.” It is just such a “minority report” that this chapter intends to move on to offer.
One reading that offers pause for thought, here, is that of Martin Winkler. His account is blighted by sweepingly depicting SW’s “theme” in mythological terms as “the struggle of the forces of Good against absolute Evil.”12 However, he at least more aptly regards the Empire as Rome-like as much as Nazi-esque. The parallels he identifies suggest that one of the many cinematic influences on Lucas was Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), partly mediated through the “Galactic Empire” of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy that was itself dependent on Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.13 In this context, Palpatine’s rise to power significantly involves the overthrow of the old Republic, and this occurs very broadly in the manner of Julius Caesar. In the opening of the Prologue to Lucas’ novelization of ANH in 1976 comes the following claim: “Aided and abetted by restless, power-hungry individuals within the government, and the massive organs of commerce, the ambitious Senator Palpatine caused himself to be elected President of the Republic. He promised to reunite the disaffected among the people and to restore the remembered glory of the Republic. Once secure in office he declared himself Emperor, shutting himself away from the populace.”14
Winkler comments, “Lucas’s galactic empire has overthrown an earlier republic and, as in Roman history, the new monarchy has preserved the original republican governing body, the senate.”15 “Early in the trilogy’s first film,” the Professor of Classics continues, “the usurping emperor dissolves the senate. Except for this, the film’s senate parallels the history of the imperial Roman senate.”16 Part of the difficulty in identifying political allegory, however, is the fact that Adolf Hitler’s overthrow of the Weimar Republic is equally in view, and the National Socialist visual echoes are close to the surface of ANH. Moreover, one cannot fail to notice that apart from Vader’s voice, the entire Imperial leadership has British (more specifically English) accents, suggesting that there may even be a reference to the American Revolution (in this regard AOTC suggestively refers to a “Grand Army of the Republic”). This is certainly how many American moviegoers read the political references at the time. Things become complicated, therefore, by the multiple images and textual references that are involved. Of course, there is something in the fact that the very name “Palpatine” may itself be a play on “palatine,” the name of the most central of the seven hills of Rome on which several of the emperors constructed their palaces, although Winkler does not notice this. In ROTJ the Imperial shuttle is given a Latin name Tydirium, although Colebatch provides a rather idiosyncratic reading of this: “the name of the shuttle ‘Tydirium’ seems to suggest ‘tide’—an echo of the feeling that a tide is now flowing. … An echo of the word ‘delirium’ here also suggests that things are moving out of ordinary control and reality.”17 Winkler notices too that the Governor or the Grand Moff is named Tarkin, echoing the name “of the Tarquins, the last dynasty of Roman kings, which had become synonymous with tyrannical monarchy.”18 There is, moreover, a reference to the organizing of the imperial infantry into “legions” in ROTJ.
The mention of Palpatine as “Senator” of course also has implications for understanding this in a more contemporary American political context, and this cannot be underestimated. According to Winkler, “The fundamental similarity between Rome and America is quintessentially American as it is Roman, that of expansionism and the concept of the frontier.”19 However, it remains important to ask what this connection means for understanding what is occurring in the SW saga. “The popular American view of the Roman Empire, especially in its reincarnation in the cinema,” according to Winkler, “has almost invariably been that of a degenerate totalitarian society characterized by militarism, slavery, religious persecution, bloody games, sexual debauchery, and spiritual emptiness.”20 What this means, then, is that “the American founding fathers had therefore modelled their own government on the Roman republic, not on the empire.” What is important is that in this context SW’s Rebellion comes to represent the celebration of the politics of the old republic against the corruptions involved in the usurping empire, a political appeal to a form of primitivism that plays a crucial critical and indeed utopian role in identifying problematic patterns with the contemporary political life. In fact, the Rebellion comes to ideologically occupy some of the same territory that the fascination with slave rebellion in the Roman Empire has produced with the various depictions of Spartacus (albeit that is a pre-imperial revolt) and Gladiator, for instance, with the promotion of civic freedom against the centralization of power in the brutal imperial order. In this context Lucas’ claims to likening Palpatine to President Richard Nixon and Darth Vader to Henry Kissinger need to be borne firmly in mind. Keith Booker’s reading is instructive here, and it is therefore worth citing at some length:
To some extent, it is true that the galactic political situation portrayed in the film draws upon the rhetoric of the Cold War, with the Soviet Union replaced by the Galactic Empire. However, Star Wars is hardly a simplistic allegory of individualist Western rebels opposed to totalitarian Eastern despots. Indeed, in many ways the rebels appear more Eastern, while the Empire appears more Western. For one thing, the real empire builders of world history have been Great Britain, France, and the United States, all members of the anti–Soviet Western bloc during the Cold War. Moreover, much of the representation of the heroic rebel alliance seems to draw upon the rhetoric of anticolonial resistance, an historical phenomenon that drew much of its theoretical inspiration from the Marxist critique of global capitalist expansion. It is certainly the case that the forces of the Empire, with its advanced technology and superior resources, clearly have much in common with the capitalist West, while the rebel forces often resemble less well equipped anticolonial forces, such as the Viet Cong in Vietnam or the National Liberation Front of Algeria. … [T]he underequipped but staunchly determined rebels seem less like the revolutionaries who founded the United States than the anticolonial fighters of the second half of the twentieth century and various Third World resistance movements of today.21
Even so, the movies are simply too broad to be read in straightforwardly allegorical terms, and that ambiguity makes singular identifications difficult to sustain: the characters possess too little depth for such unqualified allegorizing specification by virtue of their construction in mythically archetypal ways. Nevertheless, the manner of the ahistorical and archetypal nature of the politics of SW can and does encourage paying critical attention to even the most self-proclaimed “democratic” and “free” of political environments (and this is one of the main reasons why reductionist complaints of ROTS being anti–Bush allegory cannot be taken too seriously).22 It is this reading that AOTC and more controversially ROTS lend some weight to, particularly in an era when talk of the relation of the U.S. and “empire” is becoming increasingly popular after the post–World War II post-colonialist aversion to the term. Read in this context, the SW saga displays a moral struggle with the kinds of reactive politics that operates from fear of “the Other,” and from the avaricious accumulation and maintenance of power by the few, in contrast to its utopian desire for a humanitarian inclusiveness and a co-operative symbiosis generating mutual care and responsibility. As Patricia Kerslake observes generally, “The ongoing SF fascination with empire and imperialism more accurately reflects the perception that humanity has not resolved its historical nationalistic guilts and responsibilities.”23
The previous chapter detailed a series of overlapping critiques that emerge from just such an analysis and identify the determination of SW by an ideology of “good” or “sacred violence,” especially associated with the “us” of the American nation, whether that is through a fascist faith or the guiltlessness of the celebration of the rebels’ violent actions. The present chapter continues the examination but does so by suggesting that these readings require significant contestation and subversion. Their main difficulty arises from the fact that they tend to trade on a double abstraction. Firstly, they abstract the first theatrically released SW movie, ANH, from the succeeding movies in the saga. The movement of each succeeding movie in the series constitutes a “retroactive defamiliarization.”24 Each adds not merely a new narrative layer to the saga, but acts as a reading regeneration. In particular, the tragic sensibility of the more recent prequel trilogy accentuates the earlier movies’ own deconstruction of the Manichaean sensibility. Secondly, they abstract their accounts of ANH from its historical context (the questioning of American empire). What comes after begins to unpick the simplistic assessments that have frequently been made, whether that be SW’s Manichaeism, or the straightforward “myth of redemptive violence,” and so on. In particular, it flattens the multiple forms of violence that the movies display. The question remains, if SW depicts a corrupting and destructive fall into totalitarian government then what does this say not only about its understanding of the United States around the time of the Vietnam War, but of the violence that the nation was engaged in?
The second version of the broadly construed “good war” sensibility relevant to considering the saga is somewhat reminiscent of an approach most familiar and palatable to many people in the West as “just war,” growing as it does largely out of medieval Christian traditions of moral reasoning. This has its most common appeal in the claim of the justifiability of war when performed in self-defense against an aggressor. The mood here is somewhat different from proactive and crusading war-mongering, although the demonizing of the enemy may occasionally continue to play an important role here too, even if it perhaps does so in a somewhat more muted form. After all, it is the enemy who is the aggressor, it is he who is the victimizer against whom we have to take action for self-defense. So during the Cold War American intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr conducted an appeal to self-protection for the sake of “freedom” against the demonic “other” system when grandly appealing to principles of self-evidence, announcing that “everybody understands the obvious meaning of the world struggle in which we are engaged. We are defending freedom against tyranny and are trying to preserve justice against a system which has, ironically, distilled injustice and cruelty out of its original promise of higher justice.”25 Where this sentiment can be more muted than in the “holy war” reckoning is that the enemy now does not have to be portrayed in the darkest shades, and therefore does not have to be identified with evil pure and simple. The victimizer may well be understood to be himself a victim in many ways, which is perhaps why he comes to act so aggressively; but the fact that he plays the role of victimizer (whatever his reasons for doing so) enables the self-defense of potential victims to be accorded moral justification. They are right to defend themselves, and it is good that they do so.26
Given that this is a lengthy chapter in my discussion, it is worth pausing briefly to obtain a conceptual roadmap. The chapter will detail several of the features in the saga that appear to express this sense of violent mood. The second part of that detailing will involve understanding the features that deconstruct the first form of violence, the “holy war” mentality. The discussion shall then very briefly compare SW with elements of the Christian traditions.27 This, in turn, requires a reading of SW’s violence within an onto-ethical framework that can be characterized as a presumption against war. Finally, the question of what kind of ethical “guidance” on “just war” SW provides is considered in the light of a brief explanation of the tragic sensibility of the prequels that develop plot hints from the “classic trilogy.” The significance of this chapter for the present two-chapter study should be obvious. When SW is read as a set of violent texts it is important to be clear just what kind of violence its “good” violence is. Thus there are two versions—the holy war and the just war—and while there may be some conceptual overlaps and convergence at the level of practice their sensibilities are quite different right down to their ontological core.
Mike Alsford, remaining heavily dependent on Campbell’s work throughout his study, announces, “It is clearly the case that the hero and the villain have fought their eternal battle across all of human history and imagination. Myths and legends down the ages have told stories of those who fought for good or evil. History is full of instances of heroism and villainy in every field of human endeavour—artists, explorers, scholars, saints and martyrs, for example, have all helped to reveal to us the meaning of heroism.”28 However, something substantially more interesting and culturally transgressive begins to emerge in the saga’s succeeding Episodes. By ESB Luke, the heroic destroyer of the Death Star, has become a Rebel commander, and his “Force-consciousness” has significantly improved (he “Force-grabs” his lightsaber in the Wampa’s cave on Hoth). Yet his learning Jedi character, or we might say wisdom, takes a highly unexpected direction which forces him to learn how to unlearn what he has learnt. Indeed, his faith in “the Force” needs to be radically purged of inappropriate conceptions and evaluations; and he has to be forced to become conscious of, confront and test his prejudices and assumptions, and then reconstruct the very way he perceives life, heroic responsibility and the universe around him. Early in the movie a ghostly Obi-Wan Kenobi instructs Luke to go to Dagobah and be trained by Jedi Master Yoda. But in a richly suggestive and important scene what the young man finds on Dagobah is far from what he had expected, and the mirror held up to him is painfully revealing. The planet itself is a murky and swampy world, wholly uncivilized in a way that makes his former home-world—gangster-run Tatooine—appear cultured and sophisticated. It is not the place from which to expect a great Jedi Master. On feeling he is being watched he swings around with blaster drawn only to see something apparently unthreatening—an unarmed diminutive green being with protruding ears. This being acts like a scavenger, uses a strange grammatical syntax, is physically unimpressive, and appears more fool or jester than Jedi Master. But later this seemingly simple-minded and minuscule individual is unexpectedly revealed to be the one the young man has been seeking. The observable shock in the responsive tone, with his surprised rhetorical “Master Yoda?” of the young Jedi-hopeful is telling. The problem for Luke, with his obviously militaristic notions of “power,” as with many of Jesus’ contemporaries with their own militaristic expectations for the coming Messiah, simply is that the reality did not fit the expectation of what “a great warrior” should look like (Luke, ESB). According to Anker, the Jedi-in-becoming “finds … one who seems to be the very antithesis of power,” a significant moment in a Western culture that tends to depict its warriors in terms of intensive male physical power and military might as in the likes of Conan the Barbarian, Commando, Rambo, Demolition Man, Gladiator, Troy, and 300.29 At any rate, in this event Luke has again to re-evaluate the world beyond the distorted impressions provided by his senses so as to become truly re-ordered toward the Good. This is why Yoda later challenges him with the rhetorical question: “Judge me by my size do you?” Even the Luke who begins with a macho sense of the hero-myth has to be brought up short by his Jedi Master. The fact that he can ask “is the dark-side stronger?” indicates just how difficult it is for him to move away from thinking in terms of sheer power, echoing Vader’s response to Admiral Motti over “the power of the Force” (ANH).
Yoda’s initial appearance could not be more contrasting with that of Vader’s dramatic entrance in ANH. The masked Sith Lord arrives striding over recently slain bodies, exuding a cool and power-full arrogance, distinguished by his menacing warrior dress and with his cape flowing behind him that impressively adds to the threat of his presence. His black clothing is accentuated against the light backdrop of both the stormtroopers and the sterile walls of Tantive IV. His voice and manner reveal that he is one to be obeyed because, imposing in form and character, he is eminently fearsome. Soon after he is seen holding a Rebel commander by the neck a few feet off the ground before the sound of breaking bones can be heard. The difference between Yoda and Vader has to do with different conceptions of power and the self—for Vader, power is the power of force and the right of might; for Yoda, power has to do with the virtues of wisdom, self-control, and just living; for Vader, the self is to be exalted, and that at others’ expense; while Yoda is a servant of “the Force,” and correspondingly a servant of all living things.
So Yoda responds to Luke’s talk of a “great warrior” by claiming that “wars not make one great,” and later instructs, “A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.” Anger, fear, hate, aggression, all those traits that are conducive to generating violence, characterize the dark side. This is why the Jedi who resort to such unrestrained belligerence suffer for their actions. Luke’s aggressiveness, for instance, in later cutting his training short in order to rush off to face Vader and save his friends culminates in his losing his right hand in his defeat. In this way the saga begins to seriously expose the problems of appealing to “necessary violence.” Lucas had originally planned to name his central protagonist Luke Starkiller and the change to Skywalker a month into shooting Star Wars in 1976 is itself a significant nod towards the Jedi philosophy. Similarly, in the earlier versions of the script Lucas had a major role for a General (1 August 1975—“General of the White Legions”), but that character then became the Jedi Knight Obi-Wan who, although there remains a reference to him as having been a general in the Clone Wars, is now given a primary role as mentor to Luke and whose Jedi order is associated more with having been guardians of peace and justice in the old Republic. Lucas himself seems to demonstrate an unlearning of what he had learned!
It is significant, then, that (violent) defense against an aggressor is observably the main reason underpinning the violent hostilities in and throughout the saga. So the Jedi defend the lives of the three facing Count Dooku’s order for execution in AOTC; the defense of the democratic Republic in AOTC and ROTS, and (although it is never made absolutely clear) presumably the defense of “the Good” against the aggressive tyranny of the Empire in the “classic trilogy.” “Defense” is a key notion here, especially given Lucas’ designing of the Jedi to be “like negotiators,” a group that is “special, and more spiritual, and more intellectual than just a fighter or a superhero or something like that.”30 In the Special Edition of 1997, he even changed the order of firing in a scene in ANH to appear defensive. Originally Han Solo is confronted by the Greedo in the cantina in Mos Eisley spaceport, and the Corellian smuggler executes the Rodian bounty hunter with a single shot from under the table. In the updated and released version Greedo opens fire, misses, and Solo self-protectively responds with the fatal blow.
Before moving on it is worth unpacking this particular Cantina scene further. I include the detail not by way of nodding to my extensive fan-knowledge of the saga, but in order to illustrate my argument that Lucas is concerned with construing a “good violence” around the act of self-defense; and to strategically pre-empt the possible response a reviewing critic might (should!) mention. It also functions to provide the kind of detailing that I expect of scholarly work, including academic reflections on popular culture. Many of my critiques of readings of the SW saga might be summarized under the claim that too few pay proper attention to the vast range of resources, and thus the depth of erudition, required for a good reading. Many fans have reacted negatively to the various alterations in the Special Edition of the three movies in the classic trilogy, and partly this is because the beloved originals were changed in a way that has stolen the innocent perfection for many reared on, and emotionally attached to, the original theatrical releases of 1977–1983. Intriguingly, there has been considerably less outpouring of “fanboy” angst and rage (and, one might even suggest, grief) over the tinkering with Blade Runner or Alien and Aliens, for instance.31 While this largely emotively enacted response is distinctly intellectually shallow, the Solo-Greedo modification is at least arguably a genuine mistake, however, and I very much sympathize with the sentiments expressed by the classic trilogy fan tee-shirt that claims “Han shot first.” Firstly, in terms of the narrative sequence it is incomprehensible that a professional bounty hunter could miss from such close proximity; and, secondly, it takes one piece away from the quiet (because it is not to detract from the existential “journey” of Luke) “conversion” of Solo from self-concerned and relatively amoral smuggler to team-playing general of the Rebellion against the totalitarian state. Nonetheless, it is crucial to recognize the nature and reason for Lucas’ adjustment of the firing sequence, and this reveals much about his moral disposition with regard to the function of the violence in his saga.
This protective disposition, performed less in terms of the machinery of war than as police action, is embodied in the character of Obi-Wan who himself declares that “there are alternatives to fighting” (ANH). Even when he is forced into battle it is instructive to see both that the weapon he and his Jedi brethren use, and his very combat-form itself are primarily defensive. (It is Mace Windu’s Vaapad combat-Form VII that is dangerously close to the aggressive stance of a Sith, whereas Obi-Wan prefers the more deflective and defensive combat-Form III of Ataru and the patient form of Soresu. According to Expanded Universe Clone War literature, only Mace, his former student Depa Billalba, and Sora Bulq have ever mastered Vaapad, though suggestively both Depa and Sora fell to “the dark-side.”)32 Hence when handing Anakin’s lightsaber to Luke in ANH he describes it as “an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.” Of course the identification of “civilization” with any form of violence and similarly alignment of weaponry and “elegance,” especially when one compares it to the elegance of, for example, the landscape and architecture of Theed city on Naboo, should be questioned. Nevertheless, the appeal to the lightsaber in these terms places it firmly in the context of chivalrous notions of the knightly-warrior, and thus enables the weapon to be an expression of a defensive sensibility, and thus a contrast to the mechanistic violence and assertive aggression symbolized by a blaster, a weapon that can deal death at a distance (although still closer again than, for example, the canon of the Death Star). Accordingly, in the 2004 DVD commentary on ANH Lucas speaks of the difference of “a more humane, honorable way of being a warrior as opposed to … the mechanical, heartless, machine-like approach to killing in battle and war. … The lightsaber became the symbol of that humane way of conducting your life even in that worst possible way which is protecting yourself by killing someone.”33 Obi-Wan’s, it would seem, is a modest vision of violence, and that of a most defensive, limited, emotionally controlled, and restrained conflictuality. Is this why, despite the three recorded victory celebrations, there is no sense of the “good” characters of SW reveling in the killing of others? That reserve, of course, is not the Sith way—Palpatine/Sidious seems to express intense delight in unleashing Force-Lightning on Luke (ROTJ) and Mace Windu (ROTS). In this constrained sense of “just war” as it has been used in Christendom, what Augustine speaks of as lamenting “the fact that he is faced with the necessity of waging just wars,”34 the Jedi appear to echo further the sentiments also of the Tao, “Weapons are the tools of fear,” and consequently,
A decent man will avoid them
Except in the direst necessity
And, if compelled, will use them
Only with the utmost restraint. …
His enemies are not demons,
But human beings like himself.
He doesn’t wish them personal harm.
Nor does he rejoice in victory.
How could he rejoice in victory
And delight in the slaughter of men?
He enters a battle gravely,
With sorrow and with great compassion,
As if he were attending a funeral.35
So Yoda’s response to a rather glib sounding Obi-Wan in ATOC is unmistakably haunting and prescient: “Victory! Victory you say! Master Obi-Wan, not victory. The shroud of the dark side has fallen. Begun the Clone War has.” As mentioned above, even the Luke who begins with a sense of celebration of the hero-myth has to be brought up short by Yoda (ESB). His whole sensibility requires to be “unlearned” and therefore transformed in a conversion of his moral imagination. He has to deconstruct and replace the macho expectation of Jedi as “great warriors.”36
In this regard, violent conflict can be seen as always a tragic possibility in a morally messy universe. It is a disruption of a prior and original peace as symbolized by the millennial image used in ANH for the old Republic. “For a thousand years the Jedi were the guardians of peace and justice, before the dark times, before the Empire” (Obi-Wan to Luke [ANH]). As such it perverts and destroys the proper possibilities for that non-abstract peace—a peace defined substantively beyond the mere absence of conflict—of good and non-possessive relations that the Jedi virtue of other-serving self-dispossession exemplifies. As Mace Windu declares of the Jedi Order, “We are keepers of the peace, not soldiers” (AOTC). Likewise Anakin announces, “the Jedi are selfless. They only care about others.” (ROTS) The novelization has Anakin declare to Palpatine that the “Jedi believe in justice and peace.”37 When seen in this context, it is far from insignificant that until the creation of the Grand Army of Clone Troopers (AOTC) the Republic had no professional standing army. Similarly, neither did the Naboo (TPM) who relied instead on volunteers and a handful of dedicated security personnel instead.
Anger, fear, hate, aggression, those traits that are conducive to generating violence, characterize the “Dark Side of the Force,” according to Yoda (ESB). And it is noteworthy that the Jedi who resort to such unrestrained belligerence suffer for their actions. So Anakin Skywalker’s aggressiveness towards the end of AOTC culminates in his losing his right hand to Count Dooku onboard General Grevious’ Confederacy flagship The Invisible Hand, a fate that similarly befalls Luke in ESB when takes the initiative by rushing to battle Vader. In this way the Star Wars saga performs a kind of deconstruction of appeals to “necessary violence.” After all, war in TPM and AOTC is depicted as a means to a self-seeking end, created by the self-serving political machinery of the manipulative and dominating Sidious, aided and abetted by the greed motivated profit-seeking big business of the Neimoidian directed Trade Federation. Here is a clear echo of the move by the influential fifth-century Christian writer Augustine, bishop of Hippo, and those who broadly follow his theological perspective, among others, to spend some time attempting to expose the false values and desires that generate warfare.38
The reason 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 have become. So Amartya Sen argues that “violence is promoted by the cultivation of a sense of inevitability about some allegedly unique—often belligerent—identity that we are supposed to have.”39 This is why theologians Augustine and Karl Barth, for example, spend some time attempting to expose the values and desires that generate warfare (e.g., ambitions for power, the greedy acquisition and protection of material interests, the possession of land and property, even the recovery of stolen land, offence to one’s honor, and perhaps most significantly the protection of the existence of the nation-state). Likewise Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas associates violence with idolatry: “our violence is correlative to the falseness of the objects we worship, and the more false they are, the greater our stake in maintaining loyalty to them and protecting them through coercion.”40 In this context it is noteworthy to admit that there is rich symbolism in the fact that war in TPM and AOTC is depicted as a means to a self-seeking end, created by the self-serving political machinery of the manipulative Sidious, aided and abetted by the profit-seeking big business of the Neimoidian directed Trade Federation.
In a profound sense, then, arguably the saga possesses something of a profound presumption against war. Actually, this is a rather negative way of expressing the Jedi version of the virtue ethic and the notion of the symbiosis of all life-forms in “the Force” that Qui-Gon witnesses to (TPM)—perhaps it is better to say it has a presumption for peace. In this way it noticeably echoes the Augustinian inspired “just war” tradition in Western Christian moral reflection. Of course, that is recognizably not the way the broadly “Christian” traditions of “just war” have tended to function, and there are occasions when Augustine himself, the one who greatly influenced its development, can himself make rather glib sounding comments about war. Nonetheless, the theology that drives this pre-eminent Latin Church Father possesses a profound presumption against war.41 Violent conflict can only be understood in the context of a world whose ways with the richly creative God and itself are not “good” as they are created to be, and certainly not the harmonious “good” as they are ultimately called to become. It is, at very best, but a temporary effort to respond to the disruption of peace by a neighbor and therefore always arises out of, and necessarily assumes, a prior injustice.42
The very fact that Yoda and Obi-Wan take the roles of combatants during the Clone Wars suggests that they must have felt that, at least on this occasion, there was no alternative to fighting, and therefore that the struggle was the last available possibility once all other possibilities involving non-military intervention had been ruled out. This more “prudential path” to conducting warfare as the last resort, what could be called in Karl Barth’s terms the “exceptional case.” As sagacious as ever, Yoda admits as much to Mace Windu (ROTS) when the only option left was to resist Palpatine/Sidious by arresting him (and possibly having to kill him) and momentarily assume control of the Senate in order to secure a peaceful transition. For him, this is nonetheless a very dark route fraught with all kinds of seen and unseen dangers and intensely tragic possibilities. For the wizened Jedi Master this is a troubling possibility and is to be handled only with the greatest care and sensitivity.43 So it is patently with a heavy heart that he reluctantly agrees to sanction the “coup” against Palpatine’s Chancellorship, and in this his disposition resonates with the spirit of a good Augustinian. Moreover, Anakin intensely struggles when ordered by Palpatine to execute his defeated opponent, Count Dooku, not because he does not have the means to kill but simply because he recognizes the dangerous darkness involved in assassinating even one so dark (ROTS). It is this sensibility that we hear something of in Gandalf’s warning Frodo in Lord of the Rings, “be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends.” Nor, we should add, can they see the beginning or middle of evil.
The SW saga does not provide any clear-cut suggestions of when a war, or in fact any war, can be “just” (even when the matter of that term is properly qualified). Indeed, if we follow the trajectory of the development of Luke, the tragic conflict of the Jedi in the prequels, and “the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker” in AOTC and ROTS, even the picture of what “justice” means in relation to conflict becomes somewhat complicated, with blindness and bad judgment regulating all the parties involved in various ways. For instance, and crucially, the Jedi Order is unwittingly complicit in its own destruction.44 Nevertheless, there is a sense that the virtue-tradition of the ethical code and general practice of the Jedi in the service of co-responsibility can suggest that the deathly disruption of the peace of good relations is the only “justifiable” reason for death-dealing military intervention, and only then until peace can be restored and reconciliation made. Thus the saga provides the feeling that the code and general practice of the Jedi can potentially prohibit one commonly heard use of the “just war” tradition in Christendom: that it makes for a “good” war. In other words, there are possibilities here in which the way of Jedi wisdom is in a position to properly ask just what kind of society we would have to live in, and what kind of people we would have to become if we were to relate to each other in peaceful ways. That in turn would demand that “peace” be understood in positive ways, and not in thin terms as the mere absence of conflict, perhaps even the “peace” of consumerist apathy, that which is but the barest type of peace and one that is imposed by the victors).45 Claiming this is to remember that talk of “just war” cannot be divorced from the deep issues of what makes for just relations. “Reduction of conflict by means of a phony ‘peace,’” Wink suggests, “is not a Christian goal. Justice is the goal, and that may require an acceleration of conflict as a necessary stage in forcing those in power to bring about genuine change.”46 On these terms, then, given the broader theo-ethical context of the Jedi version of “just war” reflection in the making of the good symbiotic life together in and through “the Force,” there is something perverse in using the “just war” criteria to decide flatly on a moment in time without casting one’s attentions back to what it is that has led to the terrible point. Among other things, this is to lift “just war” reflection out of its proper theological context—that is as a witness to the God who makes the harmony of peaceable relations so that the wellbeing of creatures is constituted by a flourishing together.
It is important to notice the logic of Augustine’s theology, and that of those who closely follow the spirit of his lead: God is Peace and Gift; God’s relations are then peace-full and gracious; the works of God’s hands are only true to their being when they participate in the peace that God is, and not the illusory peace of distorted valuations (that is what he means by the heavenly City of God); so all unpeaceful conflict is an expression of sin, that which God opposes (this is what he means by the earthly city); but the way of the world’s relations in conflict may well throw up situations in which engaging in violence is the “lesser of two evils,” so to speak, in order to restrain as well as possible the greater one. In this account, therefore, killing can only belong to the world as it is distorted, disrupted, perverted, and corrupted by wickedness, a wickedness that is chosen and therefore alien to the world as it was and should be as God’s good creature. If the God of Jesus Christ’s way with us is through the gracious making of healthy and peace-full relations then how can God be claimed as the generator or support for our warring? These reflections suggest that even the so-called “just war” tradition emerges from, and thus properly belongs in the context of, the very character of Christian communities in peace as well as wartime. As such, it only makes sense as an expression of certain forms of life deeply concerned with the daily hallowing of God’s name, acting in witness to the coming of God’s dynamic rule, and acting for justice and love of near and distant neighbors. This “means that,” according to Daniel Bell, “embodying the just war tradition entails much more than pulling out a social statement with its checklist of criteria on the eve of a state’s military mobilisation. Rather, it is about inhabiting certain virtues—like justice and courage and temperance and prudence—something graciously made possible through the church’s liturgy and preaching and teaching and practices of discipleship.”47
Had the Jedi taken more seriously this presumption for peace in AOTC the Clone Wars may have been avoided, for as Republic Senator Padmé Naberrie Amidala from Naboo observes in a deleted scene, “this war represents a failure to listen.” All the diplomatic avenues had not to her mind been exhausted (indeed they could not have been, given the manipulation of both the Separatist Confederacy and the Republic by Darth Sidious/Palpatine). Instead, the Jedi Council (and the majority in the Republic Senate), blind to the truth of the conditions that had taken the galaxy to that terrible point, allows itself too easily and uncritically (apart from the brief expressions of regret by Yoda and Mace in AOTC) to function almost as Palpatine’s “attack dog” in practical support for the Republic’s war-cause. And the result? Firstly a notable fall-out among Jedi who actively resist the call to war (as noted in some of the “Expanded Universe” literature covering the Clone Wars), and the near annihilation of the Jedi Order itself. Can one really argue that the maintenance of a political form and style of life, and the resistance to political separatism are causes worthy of killing against or for? How does supporting them compare to commitment to maintaining, and thereby as far as possible resisting taking, the life of any humanoid? The Jedi, even with their more prudential move to war as seemingly a last resort, do not really ask the questions—and this failure significantly aids the unfolding tragedy.
Thus several of the “just war” elements in the SW saga go some way to suggesting that there is something fundamentally distorted and distorting in construing it in terms of a “good” or “justifiable” war. Such talk will at the very least rhetorically mask the tragic catastrophe of war, and may even lead further to what Barth calls “the satanic doctrine that war is inevitable and therefore justified” and “good,” even “unavoidable.”48 This rhetoric can in turn make for a much less strenuous search for peace by dulling and constraining the imagination to resort all too quickly to military solutions before all other options have been honestly exhausted.
In many ways the mood of the third movie to brandish the Star Wars name, ROTJ, is very like that of the first SW film. Lucas appointed Richard Marquand to direct, and this was partly to guarantee that the movie’s creator could have more control over the director, more than he had had with Irvin Kershner, director of ESB. Much like the first film, ROTJ involves a high octane race to destroy a newly operational Death Star, has a climactic battle scene, and a celebratory end. The climatic conflict is cast, though, in three different settings. Firstly, a Rebel team on the forest moon of Endor, supported by the indigenous Ewok peoples, battles to destroy the shield generator that is protecting the incomplete Second Death Star. Secondly, the Rebel fleet fights to destroy that super-weapon. Finally, in a highly significant scene, on the Second Death Star Luke comes to clash with Darth Vader in front of Emperor Palpatine.
Reflecting on the character of Luke Skywalker is crucially important in the context of considering the relation of the saga to mythologies that generate and sustain violence. He is, in fact, slowly transformed in his understanding of the place and nature of violence. Soon after we meet him this whinny, petulant and rather self-absorbed youth surveys the dreadful murderous scene at the Lars homestead and his revealing comment to Obi-Wan (living at this stage under the name of “Ben Kenobi”) centers not on the injustice of the stormtroopers’ assassinations, or on his grief for the deaths of those who had raised him, but tastelessly on himself: “I want to come with you to Alderaan. There’s nothing for me here now. I want to learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi like my father.” This would suggest that Luke’s anti-imperial action is undertaken not as a resolve for revenge (he simply makes no mention of his aunt and uncle later in the movie). While he had made the comment to Obi-Wan earlier that “It’s not like I like the Empire, I hate it” the real reasons he takes up the cause have to do with a series of accidents and his longing for excitement and adventure, as Yoda later reveals in ESB. In fact, as Anker perceptively observes, “his dreams stretch no further than the macho ideals that his culture glorifies, and here the filmmaker undertakes a quiet but persistent strain of social criticism. Luke’s great ambition in life is to attend fighter-pilot school to become a ‘top gun’ and then go off to war.”49 Yet in his subsequent training Luke has continually to undergo training in looking at the world in new ways, and in having his disordered desires purified. As mentioned earlier, this process of learning the Jedi way takes a highly unexpected direction—he has to learn how to unlearn what he has learnt.
Lucas comments that Luke “has the capacity to become Darth Vader simply by using hate and fear and using weapons as opposed to using compassion and caring and kindness.”50 It is this we see displayed in ROTJ in a climactic scene on the second Death Star. The visual imagery here is striking—Luke’s Jedi clothing is now black, and his prosthetic right hand is an early reflection of his father’s mechanized state. He is being urged by the Emperor to succumb to the values of the “dark side” (hate, anger, revenge and self-assertiveness), take revenge on Vader, and replace his nemesis at the Emperor’s side. This is a movie that for some time was apparently allocated the title Revenge of the Jedi. Yet with the release date looming, the movie was renamed to Return. One of the reasons given, recounted by producer Howard Kazanjian and actor Mark Hamill, is that “revenge” is not the business of Jedi.51
In a brutally violent moment born of pure rage, the possessive anger of filial protectiveness and reactive sense of retributive justice, Luke attacks Vader. It is only when he gazes at the defeated Vader’s fizzling mechanized stump, realizing that his own artificial hand is a sign of Anakin’s fall to the wickedness of the Sith, that Luke rejects the temptation of dispensing the violence the Emperor desires. What is and is not being said here is very important, particularly as it is so controversial. One might claim that Vader’s violence against Palpatine, for example, refutes my argument. After all, without the violent assault on the shield generator on the forest moon of Endor, the Rebel Alliance fleet’s attack on the second Death Star’s reactor, and Vader’s disposal of Sidious, the celebration of the new found peace at the ROTJ’s close could not have occurred. But this is beside the point entirely. As has been indicated, there is no denying the ambiguity of the movies, and the ambiguity is part of the point. And, as I have argued in the concluding chapter to The Gospel According to Star Wars, the closing set of scenes have something of an eschatologically final feel about them. But, in the midst of all that, Luke simply refuses to continue the violence and offers himself to Sidious’ destructive rage. Here I am speculating as to Lucas’ intentions, although it is an idea that works well in the context of these movies. The young man simply and willfully refuses to succumb to the “Sith” values (fear and hate) and his own earlier mood of “reactive justice.” He rejects patterning his way in the world on relations molded finally by discord. He refuses to succumb to the Emperor’s temptation to kill his most bitter of foes in a fit of angry aggression when he has the chance. Instead he acts restoratively in loving compassion for his most bitter of foes. His is ultimately a radically different mode of conflict resolution from the reactive one of simple retributive justice. What kind of conflict can be fought by one who is beyond greed, who does not give free reign to the determination of action by hate, but who does not weakly capitulate under the temptation to self-aggrandizement? Subsequently, he discards his lightsaber, thereby leaving himself defenseless against the overpowering gust Emperor’s own destructive rage, and refuses to participate any further in the conflict, a conflict that Palpatine/Sidious has in any case specifically engineered to entice Luke to the “dark-side.” He is prepared to sacrifice himself rather than do evil. Incidentally, there is a parallel here with his mother (and, to a lesser extent since he is silent in the scene, father) in a deleted scene from AOTC. On Geonosis Count Dooku demands that the captured Naboo Senator join the alliance of rebellious Separatist factions or be executed, and the morally upright Padmé self-sacrificially chooses the second option. “In short,” Anker argues, “Luke chooses to die because he has at last comprehended the heart of Yoda’s teachings: that the universe runs by love and that love should pervade all thought and action.”52 This is a useful claim up to a point. What it fails to notice, however, is that Luke actually adheres to the Jedi philosophy against the practices of the Jedi themselves. Anker’s book is understandably weakened here by having been written before the prequels were completed, but also by simply being uninformed about the burgeoning back stories Lucas has provided (as well as with the materials of the so-called “Expanded Universe”). There are enough hints in the classic trilogy to suggest this is an even more significant weakness—particularly Luke’s move towards resistant non-violence that follows the implications of Yoda’s claims about the universal presence of the Force in, to and through all life-forms, and Obi-Wan’s claim that “there are alternatives to fighting” (ANH). The guidelines Lucas had provided for Expanded Universe materials regarding the period subsequent to ROTJ suggest that the New Jedi Order under Luke would be quite different in many ways to that from the period leading up to the fall of the Order during the Clone Wars. For instance, the Jedi are no longer required to be celibate, nor are the younglings taken from their homes at such an early and vulnerable age. Luke, it seems, in ROTJ comes to move against the Jedi defensive violence with his offer of non-violent resistance to Sidious. Even if the Emperor does succeed in taking his life (which, of course, he does not due to Vader’s timely intervention) he cannot in the end take away Luke’s obedience to the “ways of the Force” (Obi-Wan to Luke, ANH). But more than that, significantly the young Jedi’s “non-violent approach” to, and compassion for, Vader actually, in the end, “so stirs the conscience of the opponent that reconciliation becomes a reality.”53 When this moment is linked to the millennial image in ANH, among other places, and into the Jedi philosophy, the result is distinctly different from the responses to violence occurring elsewhere. Perhaps the point is precisely to retain a sense of ambiguity in order to echo tragic complexity in a messy world.
In his journey into a “larger world” (Obi-Wan) Luke’s whole value system has been deconstructed (or “unlearned,” in Yoda’s terms) and replaced with a whole new way of seeing the life and interrelations of all things. Towards the end, then, his journey seems to have brought him closer to a “pacifism” that is an active “non-violence,” a purposeful action that is beyond a “bare peace.”54 His heroic journey is into a type of “sainthood” rather than into “warrior-heroism.” Of course, one cannot overlook the fact that the Empire is defeated only through the violent act (albeit defense-of-another) of Vader/Anakin, the commando attack on the imperial shield bunker, and the torpedo from Lando Calrissian in the Millennium Falcon. Luke’s action is just a hint of peace, a moment, but not any less significant for that!
Wink observes that “violence is simply not radical enough, since it generally changes only the rulers but not the rules.”55 Those people who have been violated and seek restitution become, when the chance arises, themselves violators of their abusers. Victims here are made in the image of their enemy and perpetuate the violence through an ethos of revenge, not restitution and reconciliation. And so we hear Padmé urge the Republic’s Senators to “wake up. … If you offer the Separatists violence they can only show violence in return. Many will lose their lives, all will lose their freedom.” (AOTC, deleted scene) The Jedi training in virtue aims not so much to change the rulers, unless the situation in the end demands that, but more radically to change the way people relate to one another. In other words, it aims to change the people who act with, towards, and against other people. As Joseph Campbell observes using Christian imagery, “The hero of yesterday becomes the tyrant of tomorrow, unless he crucifies himself today.”56 This is why Yoda’s lessons for knighthood consist not of better swordplay or martial arts, but of training in humility, patience, tolerance, calmness and trustfulness. In this way, the virtues of “the good life” have the capacity primarily to work for peace at an earlier and more proactive phase than merely dealing with the symptoms of conflictual relations (war). They can reveal and subvert the very causes of state and interpersonal conflict.
In the context of those who in post–9/11 America securely wrap themselves against the chill wind in the flag, and powerfully lash out at all those Others who stand in the “nation’s” way for a new world order, Lucas’ choice of returning to the backstories covering the fall of the Republic and the making of Darth Vader takes on a particular political resonance. By the time of the prequels this suspicion of violence in the name of the Good (or “the Force”) comes to look distinctly shrewd. Some so-called politically conservative commentators have expressed their dismay that ROTS appears to be so antiwar in ethos, banally saying it was perhaps even rewritten as an anti–Bush diatribe. Lucas himself denies the claim that the movie’s content was deliberately shaped with contemporary American foreign policy in mind (or at least he denies this in the sense that its story was composed much earlier than the coming of George W. Bush to the Oval Office). Even so, the important point would stand whether the acting President had been someone other than Bush. Suggestively, then, SW producer Rick McCallum claims that “first of all we never thought of Bush ever becoming president, or then 9/11, the Patriot Act, war, weapons of mass destruction. Then suddenly you realize, ‘Oh, my God, there’s something happening that looks like we’re almost prescient.’”57 Following on from the “classic trilogy” TPM arguably is premised on the claim that it is right to overthrow oppressive government, before ROTS brings into clearer focus something that is much more discomforting—that the corrupt tyranny referred to may be our own, and that the overthrow of the corrupt may even be the pathway to greater evil, in this instance the pathway to the rule of the Sith.58 In this complex political life, we see Padmé’s diplomatic sensibilities preventing her from rushing in with others to commend the growing militarism in AOTC and worrying about the conduct of the war in ROTS. Hers is the voice of reason, of diplomacy, and that voice which the revelations in ROTS eventually suggest is not only the most insightful into what is transpiring politically but also perhaps the wisest.59 Moreover, it is a voice from the margins, protesting the death of liberty with the formation of the “First Galactic Empire” which emerges “with thunderous applause” (ROTS). Her role here may echo the ethical sensibility that Lucas’ early biographer Dale Pollock discovers through interviewing Randall Kleiser, an actor in Lucas’ early student film Freiheit: “Lucas disliked USC students who felt it necessary to die for one’s country to defend democracy.”60 As John Sutherland writes, “He shaped Star Wars as anti–Vietnam allegory.”61 After all, despite the hype of the rhetoric, what is it about democracy in itself that is worth killing for? Are not most Western appeals to “democracy” and “freedom” not themselves devoid of contextual conditioning by constructive considerations of the values of human flourishing, so that they become negative and reactionary?62 Can the sense underlying their rhetoric not be identified as rather shameless attempts by the powerful to justify the political status quo, and whip up support for the abstract idea of regional boundary-claiming nation-state which tends to become more important than human life, important enough to die for, to kill for? This preparation to die must especially be brought to face just what it is that the one willing to give of one’s self to the deathly point of sacrifice is prepared to live for. And so, subsequent to his 1973 movie American Graffiti Lucas returned to the movie on which he had been working, Apocalypse Now. Of it he claims something significant for our purposes: “It’s the same argument as The Wild Bunch: an anti-violence film. Francis [Ford Coppola] says the way to make an anti-violence film is to have no violence in it, but I feel there should be so much violence in it you’re disgusted.”63
In this context it is both interesting and important, because it sheds light on the Lucas who only a few years later created SW, to consider Lucas’ award-winning student dystopian film Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138:4EB (1967) which was then expanded into a feature film more simply entitled THX 1138 (1970). The very broad conceptual background to the distinctly constrained plot of Lucas’ “basically existential” movie seems to be Plato’s simile of the cave, with the man known as THX 1138 escaping the “chillingly automated society” of the manufactured environment he has been imprisoned by, but escaping alone into sunset with the movie providing no sense of his return to free the other captives.64 Yet the Vietnam-era context must be borne in mind, and there are several movie references that indicate its importance. One perceives a “massified” society, with the “herd” “giving their lives’” as unnamed (lettered and numbered)65 fodder for industry, in Metropolis-like dehumanizing service of the state; the worker receives the Communist-sounding “Blessings of the State” in response.
This, together with what Ryan and Kellner claim to be the valorization of “the differentiated individual,” could sound like the exaltation of American values against the oppressive Communists were it not for two further features at least: the references to consumerism and consumerism-supporting religion.66 So, as THX 1138 ascends an escalator a voice can be heard exhorting “Buy now. And be happy,” a reference to the American consumptivism that appears again later in the SW saga with Luke and Leia’s criticism of Han Solo (ANH), the transformation of the businessman Lando Calrissian (ESB), and the portrayal of the commercial sectors in terms of sheer greed and pure self-interest (TPM and AOTC). As Lucas claimed in 1970, “The terrible thing about this country is that the dollar is valued above the individual. … In this country, the only thing that speaks is money and you have to have the money in order to have the power to be free.”67
Soon after this scene, THX 1138 enters a booth with an automated Christ-image that instructs him in ways that indicate that religion here has a consoling, and thus narcotic-like pacifying, effect on the bedraggled worker in the “system.” This is an echo of the use of pop-spiritualist Wilbur Mercer in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and it is used in Terry Gilliam’s dystopian movie Brazil when what looks like a Salvation Army band is seen carrying a sign announcing it represents “Consumers for Christ.” Of course, SW treats the religious in a distinctly more positive way than this.68 Yet the point remains that for Lucas it is American society that is largely being explored and critiqued in THX 1138. It “was an ‘abstraction of 1970,’ an appalling vision of a future that is already here.”69 The movies’ largely American audience is disturbed from its complacency by having to consider that the United States is involved in generating and sustaining certain systems of dehumanizing conformism that its anti-communist rhetoric and involvement in the Vietnam war “for freedom” would otherwise mask. Lucas admits that THX’s society is not “oppressive” as such in the sense that “no one was unhappy.”70 But it is inauthentic. “We are the drugged society and in case anyone thinks we’re not go talk to Bristol-Myers.” The problem Lucas soon feels afterwards is that America is unprepared for the challenge: “I realized after THX that people don’t care about the country’s being ruined. All that the movie did was to make people more pessimistic, more depressed, and less willing to get involved in trying to make the world better. So I decided that this time I would make a more optimistic film [viz., American Graffiti] that makes people feel positive about their fellow human beings.”71
To return to reflections on SW, ANH in particular presents in a relatively optimistic vein the hero-myth as Lucas develops it through engagement with Campbell’s writing. Yet what emerges from seeing the flow of the movies succeeding ANH is something very different, indeed the very deconstruction and transformation of the myth itself and of much of what critics detected as “the moral certainty” in ANH.72 It does this in such a way that one can argue that SW displays a self-reflective praxis of reorienting the violence of the fantasy imagination, a very particular portrayal of moral formation and wisdom that responds to Vietnam in a quite different way from what Apocalypse Now would have been had Lucas continued with his project.73 The hero’s journey is one into a type of “sainthood” rather than into “warrior-heroism,” and here Lucas distinctly echoes Campbell according to whom “the hero is still striving, but for oneness with the cosmos, not for control over it. … He is, moreover, acting on behalf of others, not for just himself. He is still heroic, for he must still undertake a daring journey to an unknown land, but his heroism is peaceful rather than hostile.”74
Take the example of Darth Vader, for instance. In ANH he simply plays the space-serial part of the archetypal “baddie,” dressed up for the occasion in armor and a cape of nobility while wielding a sword, evoking memories of sinister medieval black knights crossed with Japanese samurai warriors and Nazi SS troopers. But by ESB he is stunningly revealed to be Luke’s father. He is the one whom Obi-Wan had spoken of in such glowingly heroic terms earlier in ANH. And by ROTJ he himself becomes instrumental in both defeating the Sith and saving his son from death. In other words, as the story develops through the succeeding two episodes, the audience is forced to understand him in a very different fashion. This new emphasis of the subsequently made Episodes I-III transforms Star Wars from the heroic “adventures of Luke Skywalker” into the catastrophic “tragedy of Anakin Skywalker,” which is presumably why Lucas was reluctant to consider further thoughts of making Episodes VII-IX. This move into the tragic drama of the prequels is, of course, a darker version of Star Wars, not only dark in its own right as tragic drama but also equally casting a darkening shadow over any watching of the “classic trilogy.” We cannot after these read IV-VI in the same way again. It is the tragedy and redemption of Darth Vader that the saga is “really what the story was all about,” Lucas declares. Even in the 1970s Lucas had already worked out in quite detailed ways the direction even the later movies would eventually take, and it is important to take this seriously when approaching the saga as a whole. So in an interview in 1980 Lucas remarked:
I wanted to make a fairy tale epic, but this was like War and Peace. So I took the script and cut it in half, put the first half aside and decided to write the screenplay from the second half. I was on page 170, and I thought, ‘Holy smokes, I need 100 pages, not 500,’ but I had these great scenes. So I took that story and cut it into three parts. I took the first part and said, “This will be my script. But no matter what happens, I am going to get these three movies made.” … You have to remember, we’re starting in the middle of this whole story. There are six hours’ worth of events before Star Wars, and in those six hours, the “other” [the “another” referred to by Yoda in ESB] becomes quite apparent, and after the third film, the “other” becomes apparent quite a bit.75
It is well-known that ANH was only part of Lucas’ epic script, although presumably self-contained enough that the adventure required no sequel if it did not succeed at the box office—although Lucas here clearly suggests that the making of IV-VI was intended. Where this is significant is in his characterization of Vader: “Darth Vader became such an icon in the first film, Episode IV,” Lucas reflects lamentingly, “that that icon of evil sort of took over everything, more than I intended. If it had been one movie that wouldn’t have happened. … But now by adding Episodes I, II and III people begin to see the tragedy of Darth Vader as what it was originally intended to be.”76 Lucas’ claim is that the somewhat Manichaean feel of ANH was left as it was precisely because of his longer view—at the time that meant more V-VI—and later this could be explored even more radically through I-III. Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope, does tend to simplify the presentation of self and other. On the other hand, there is much in the classic trilogy, even in ANH, to suggest that something more interesting is going on, especially with the reference to Vader’s fall by Obi-Wan followed by the shocking revelation of his identity to Luke.
However, for audiences whose expectations and moral sensibilities frequently locate justice within a retributive perspective, the distinctly anti–Manichaean sensibility displayed particularly in the “redemption” of Darth Vader in ROTJ is an unacceptable and unsatisfying bolt from Lucas’ dramatic blue. David Brin is a good example of this when he complains that Lucas is too soft on evil here: “In the Star Wars universe … [a]ny amount of sin can be forgiven if you repent … and if you are important enough.”77 The mood circumvents that which drives much of Hollywood’s output and the catharsis that a scapegoating culture derives from it, from Tarantino’s balletically styled revenge-narratives; to the “torture porn” of the Saw series and its derivatives; to “the Othering” displayed in most alien invasion cinema such as, for instance, the various versions of The Thing and War of the Worlds, the ironically comic take in Mars Attacks, as well as Starship Troopers, Monsters, Battlefield Los Angeles, Independence Day (although the last also has a mitigating ecological reading),78 and so on. It is precisely this approach to “evil” that David Fincher’s Se7en, for instance, effectively challenges in its brutal and unforgiving drama. According to Christopher Sharrett, for instance, the culturo-political issue has to do with the fact that the apocalyptic imaginations of Hollywood cinema (and the examples he gives of its evidence are Alien, Robocop, Terminator, and Predator cycles) is “endemically ahistorical and reactionary [in a way] that has been part and parcel of American cultural expression since the Puritans, an ideology preferring total annihilation (including self-annihilation) over radical change or even reform.”79
To return to ROTJ, then, as Roy Anker observes, “the very surprise it occasions effectively uncovers the bad manners of contemporary cynicism and hopelessness. … [T]he effect of … the unlikely return itself pivots on the audience’s usual gullibility about the way the world usually works, which is badly.”80 Furthermore, Lucas’ move to “redeem” Vader not only refuses to perpetuate violence through a retributive sensibility, but dislocates the sense of the need for an ultimately cathartic watching of a “just” violence against Vader. The tragic dimension demands that he becomes not an “other” whom our moral self-righteousness can exclude easily. In that way the Manichaean sensibilities dominating many Americans’ approach to matters of evil is subverted. Moreover, the tragic direction of the subsequently screened Episodes I-III serves not to make this a cop out but rather provides something of a sense more of there being a tragic “too late” quality about the “conversion.” For instance, while he finally sees Luke face to face as his “true” self (Anakin), as with Shakespeare’s Lear and his youngest daughter Cordelia, their reconciling gaze is all too brief. Anakin’s becoming one with “the Force,” despite what Yoda argues with respect to not grieving but rather celebrating this event (ROTS), cannot “compensate” for the brevity of his pre-fallen life and for the fact that he never is able to embrace his daughter. The consequences of Vader’s evil, in spite of his late personal repentance, remain and stain his legacy—Padmé remains dead; Luke and Leia have been raised apart for nineteen years; the Jedi Order is almost wholly obliterated, and all but two of its greatest Jedi have been massacred; the stores of thousands of years of recorded Jedi wisdom have been irretrievably destroyed or corrupted; and Anakin’s own great potential in “the Force” has never been fully realised. ROTS enables the audience to feel the effect of these multiple loses.
Continuing to read SW as a dualistic set of filmic texts seems to have been one of the principal reasons (and therefore a more interesting one than the complaints leveled at young actor Jake Lloyd’s screen performance) why many find it difficult to watch and take seriously the portrayal of Anakin in TPM. As a nine-year-old boy he is depicted in the brightest and least morally suspect of terms. He is innocent and immensely generous. So, for instance, his mother Shmi agrees categorically with Qui-Gon’s positive assessment of the quite remarkable ethical virtue of the boy, that “he [always] gives without any thought of reward.” Shmi recognizes that “he knows nothing of greed.” Of course, when this movie was released in 1999 the audience was well aware of the fact that he was going to become the evil Darth Vader.81 However, many in that audience, especially (but not only), are apparently distinctly troubled by the morally unambiguous characterization of the boy. That, perhaps, says more about American, perhaps even Western, culture’s ideological horizons of expectation than the quality of Lucas’ storytelling.
The tragic characterization of Anakin is explicated in such a way as to deny the Manichaean reading of “evil” in SW, and particularly of the nature of Vader as tragic hero. Evil is not something entirely other and substantial, and in this way Kaveney and others are simply mistaken in regarding the Sith as “evil because they are evil.”82 Anakin is, despite the prophecy associated with him and the suggestion of his birth from a virgin (TPM), an everyman kind of character. He faces the turmoil of learning, of teenage angst, of peer-pressure guidance, and so on. He is, in other words, human, and in his story wickedness appears as the misshapen desires he comes to develop. As Lucas claims, indicating the Faustian nature of the drama, “In this film [ROTS] you see he [viz. Anakin] is a human being—and you’re going to understand him. I think you will come out of this film feeling sympathy for Darth Vader. … He is a rather pathetic character, who’s been locked in a suit, half-alive and half-dead—thanks to a pact he made with the devil.”83
As a result particularly of the sensibility of Episodes I-III the saga becomes perceptibly less the heroic triumph of good over evil in and through the central character of Luke, and more the catastrophe, impoverishment, loss and tragedy of Anakin (even if there remains recognition and repentance in the end). The SW universe becomes since 1999 something considerably messier and more complex than Lawrence or Jewett suggest. In fact, the attempts of certain critics to perpetuate the notion of SW’s violent ideology, now comes to look distinctly simplistic as a result of the ethos of the prequel trilogy. In this context, Padmé’s opposition to the progress into war and the resultant subversion of the democratic political system is instructive.
According to Wetmore, “The films visually and through narrative are lengthy ruminations on violence and power.”84 The question is what kind of ruminations? Critics have discovered in SW a glorification of a just violence, a constituting echo of the so-called “myth of redemptive violence.” The question here, then, becomes one of asking about the appropriateness and the carefulness of their readings.
Steven Sanders makes several complaints about the majority of critical readings of science fiction genre so that “Unfortunately, good science fiction film criticism remains in perilously short supply.”85 Particularly, he continues, “Some bad science fiction film criticism is simply attributable to sheer incompetence, and some is due to the perverse influence of various disfiguring intellectual tendencies in academic circles that are estranged from what were once the humanizing methods of the humanities. This should concern everyone who cares about science fiction film because good criticism of it—by which I mean criticism that is clear, consistent, carefully researched, cogently argued, and unclouded by dogma—is essential to the integrity of the genre.”
It may well be important to note that Lawrence and Jewett’s assessment of SW was formed largely in advance of both AOTC and ROTS (thus not helping with providing a judicious reading of the saga). The point I have been making, however, is that there were enough significant hints in the “classic trilogy” of Episodes IV-VI and in Episode I to complicate their perspective on these movies. To begin with, one needs to bear in mind certain contextualizing features, such as Lucas’ response to Vietnam expressed particularly through the dystopian THX 1138, and his claims that in the light of Vietnam and the Watergate scandal America embodies oppressive empire as much as rebellion for freedom. In fact, an important reading suggestion is to be found in the fact that Lucas had been significantly involved in conceiving of the politically subversive Apocalypse Now, and although Coppola’s version differed considerably from Lucas’ earlier scripting the themes remained broadly overlapping.86 Lucas admitted, “It’s the kind of film the government will probably run me out of the country for making. It’s not about massacres or anything like that. It’s about Americans. … It’s the same argument as The Wild Bunch: an anti-violence film. Francis [Coppola] says the way to make an anti-violence film is to have no violence in it, but I feel there should be so much violence in it you’re disgusted.”87
This claim about making “an anti-violence film” is suggestive. Stephen McVeigh, then, is right to acknowledge that “Star Wars … is a film that demands on several grounds to be seen in the light of the war in Vietnam”88 Lucas may have himself come from a politically conservative home, but too much cannot be made of that by critics89 since he broke with his father’s wishes, headed off to what his father George Lucas, Sr., considered to be the “sin city” of Los Angeles and the University of Southern California, became engaged in avant-garde filmmaking, and opposed the Vietnam War.90
Consequently, it makes sense to understand Lucas’ claims in a different way—that SW enables Americans to have a new hope, and not to wallow in self-pity or pacifying introspection, but to learn to be responsible for one another. According to Lucas, “After the 1960s it was the end of the protest movement and the whole phenomenon. The drugs were really getting bad, kids were dying, and there was nothing left to protest.”91 In this context, Coppola had challenged his friend Lucas to make “a happier kind of film.”92 American Graffiti was the result, and with the positive fan mail expressing how it helped transform the lives of many young people Lucas claimed to have “found something they were missing.” For Lucas, this meant that a more upbeat movie could be more valuable in certain ways: “I realized after making THX that those problems are so real that most of us have to face those things every day, so we’re in a constant state of frustration. That just makes us more depressed than we were before.”93 In response, he introduced more humor in the third draft of The Star Wars script (1 August 1975) in order to lighten the more serious tone of the previous version.
While a number of his comments suggest that he hoped the movie, like American Graffiti, would lighten the mood of the youth in a culture in depression, many other comments suggest that he did not merely conceive of this as simple escapism, a momentary distraction from the ills of life. Lucas, it would seem, had an eye on social critique and thus on a form of moral education. He explicitly made the connection between the psyche and social change as early as 1974: “all … [THX 1138] did was to make people more pessimistic, more depressed, and less willing to get involved in trying to make the world better. So I decided that this time I would make a more optimistic film that makes people feel positive about their fellow human beings. … Maybe kids will walk out of the film and for a second they’ll feel, ‘We could really make something out of this country, or we could really make something out of our lives.’ It’s all that hokey stuff about being a good neighbor, and the American spirit and all that crap. There is something in it.”94 In 1977 he reflected on the making of SW, “Rather than do some angry, socially relevant film I realized that there was another relevance that is even more important—dreams and fantasies, getting children to believe there is more to life than garbage and killing and all that real stuff like stealing hubcaps.”95
The post–Vietnam context is a significant moment. “A lot of my interest in Apocalypse Now was carried over into Star Wars. I figured out that I couldn’t make that film because it was about the Vietnam War, so I would essentially deal with some of the same interesting concepts that I was going to use and convert them into space fantasy, so you’d have essentially a large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters or human beings.”96 (The first The Star Wars summary treatment was completed in May 1973, four months after the cessation of American military hostilities in Vietnam and the announcement of withdrawal. The last American troops departed in 1975.) Lucas claims that his intention was to generate a popular mythology that would not merely have a therapeutic effect on the mood of the culture but also have a positive educational effect, and reintroduce a fantasy life to ten-to-twelve year olds.97 Lucas suggested that America itself was as much like the “evil empire” of Star Wars as the Rebel Alliance. So in notebooks of 1974, in developing Star Wars he reflected that “the empire is like America ten years from now, after gangsters assassinated the Emperor and were elected to power in a rigged election. … We are at a turning point: fascism or revolution.”98 For Lucas, then, the movie was based around post-colonial worries about “a conflict between freedom and conformity,” themes so starkly exhibited earlier in THX 1138.99 The rise of the Emperor, part of the story of which was contained in the novelization, was inspired by the then recent Watergate scandal.100 Andrew Gordon, like many others, is therefore mistaken when claiming that SW responds to the need for Americans to renew faith in themselves as the “good guys” on the world scene.101 As Rinzler observes, in contrast, “the ‘lost boys of Peter Pan have become, given the political sway of the writer’s mind, jungle rebels with just a hint of the Vietcong.”102 While the reception of the movie suggested that many understood the Rebellion in the way Gordon did, Star Wars Episode VI: The Return of the Jedi103 brought this subtext closer to the surface—on the forest Moon of Endor the technologically inferior Ewoks helped defeat the Empire in a guerrilla action.104 In the draft notes of 1973 Lucas even referred to Aquilae as a small independent country “like Vietnam,” threatened by a powerful neighbor.105 Lawrence misses all this when he claims that only after Campbell’s death in 1987 did the American President become the Empire.106
President Ronald Reagan, then, was exhibiting a distinctly limited ability to comprehend the critical post-heroic direction of the SW saga when he gave his significant “Evil Empire” speech in 1983, noticeably drawing on images from ANH, and subsequently named the planned missile defense system the “Star Wars Defense Initiative.”107 From Reagan’s claims, it is clear that he associated the United States with the Rebel Alliance in defensive action against the “evil other,” the wicked imperial regime (the Soviet Union). While there have been several readings of the classic trilogy in this vein it is worth complicating the picture by recalling that Lucas’ THX 1138 holds a critical mirror to American society and political self-understanding, and that the trilogy, particularly ROTS, consciously echoes this—as mentioned earlier.108 If this is correct, then the victory celebration scene concluding ANH, with its conscious visual echoes of Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will, would come to look quite different—the Rebel Alliance, with its violent performance of a defensive reactive justice is no less implicated in wickedness, and is thus little different in significant ways from the Empire it violently resists (the Empire’s Grand Moffs and fleet commanders, of course, visually echo the uniforms of Nazi officers, and the troops being referred to as “stormtroopers”).
Of course, it is predominantly in the light of the “tragic drama” of I-III that such a claim can be made. Reading SW in its cultural and political context, and in the light of Lucas’ hopes and plans for his ANH is insufficient. It needs to be understood in its particularity in the light of the movies in the saga that succeed it. This crucially indicates that the various features of SW that make its violence look like a politics of revenge against the “evil them” are subtly transformed through each succeeding movie in the saga. ESB is an entertaining movie, but it supplies deeper character development than its predecessor. While the Emperor is introduced and no explanation of his wickedness is offered (in fact, none is at any point in Lucas’ saga, making the Emperor an archetypally wicked character), Vader significantly becomes more psychologically layered. That, as much as anything else, subverts the Manichaean understanding that many of the audience had gathered from SW three years previously, and the development of the Jedi through the introduction of Yoda equally complicates the notion of a “good violence.” While there is still something of a “good violence” on display at this point it is markedly different in mood and matter from that of ANH. Moreover, and crucially, this transvaluation of the cultural values supposed in evidence in ANH is intensified by the considerably more complex prequel trilogy, in which the story of arc moves in a different direction from that of “the adventures of Luke Skywalker”—“the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker.” Taking these detailed steps enables a deeper reading of SW than ones often heard, even in the scholarship.
While ANH’s mood and style were quite different from both the avant-garde movies Lucas had planned and his earlier THX 1138 project, the riskiness of a sci-fi project at the time is an indication that the director was not capitulating to a simple ploy for market-appeal. Even the title of The Star Wars, eventually being shortened to SW, was felt by the Twentieth Century–Fox studio to be unmarketable: “they thought science fiction was a very bad genre, that women didn’t like it, although they did no market research on that until after the film was finished.”109 Lucas felt the project would be a disaster, with it at most appealing to the “$8 million worth of science fiction freaks in the U.S.A.,” and he braced himself for the fall-out.110 As Biskind admits, “George made plans to be out of town, in Hawaii with Marcia and the Huycks for the opening of Star Wars, the way he was when Graffiti premiered. He was still afraid the movie was going to be a huge embarrassment.”111 After all, the pre-release screenings had not been entirely successful. As it transpired, Lucas even forgot the opening night, and spent the evening with his wife in a restaurant near Los Angeles’ Chinese Theatre.
Crucially, while the SW saga, and particularly ANH within it, has frequently been read as, in some sense, glorifying violence, there are extensive grounds for distinguishing two versions of this “good war.” Yet more significant than that is the move to radicalize or deconstruct the very monomyth that troubles Lawrence and Jewett. The Jedi philosophy, several broad lines of which are presented in ESB, ultimately subverts the very sources of violent conflict and reconnects with matters of the formation of characters of virtue. Violence comes from somewhere, and it is that “somewhere” that the Jedi are trained to resist in themselves, and self-givingly negotiate justly in the failure of other Republic-citizens to do the same. The parallels developed through the prequel trilogy between Anakin and his son Luke are striking,112 especially in the form of an inversion where Anakin in ROTS chooses the other-violating and narcissistic (because self-aggrandizing) Sith way of peace as domination and control, in contrast to Luke who has moved from celebrating heroism (ANH), to deconstructing the very notion of heroism under the interrogatory guidance of Yoda (ESB), and finally to the self-sacrificial non-violence (ROTJ).113 Seen in this redemptive light, talk of fighting for peace in the SW mythos comes to look radically and life-affirmingly different from that which is commonly supposed in the suggestions that a myth of redemptive violence corrupts its textual body. It, this chapter argues, possesses something of the quality of the peace affirmed by Augustine as the “respect for and development of human life … [through] the assiduous practice of fraternity … [and] ‘the tranquility of order.’” This “Peace is the work of justice and the effect of charity.”114 That indeed is the Jedi way, the way that the aged and diminutive Jedi Master Yoda discloses in a Dagobah swamp during his first encounter with Luke (ESB): “Wars not make one great.” Wars may not, but the non-competitive non-narcissistic construal of relations in a just life of self-giving service or charity will.
Lucas’ work asks deep questions, questions about character, about morality, about what instincts drive us away from even the best in our moral reasoning. That is why watching Anakin’s emotional collapse into the Dark Side is so morally interesting. He is the narrative answer to the question “What if the immense power of the Force was available to someone whose emotional instincts and psychological condition was less than virtuous and well self-controlled?” This forms something of a parallel to the disturbing movie Chronicle. The prequels, then, move closer to stripping away the mask of moral distance by graphically brutalizing the body of Anakin as a visual representation of the moral disrepair that has overcome him. Anakin is not to be idolized as a hero, but he is rather to serve as a mirror to our own moral disrepair. In this regard, the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker can function to interrogate the process of idolization in which heroes are chosen, without interrogating us and thus leaving us morally in a state of blithe spectatorial existence unencumbered by the depth of mutual commitment. As tragic text, The Revenge of the Sith can offer not a pedagogy conceived in terms of the didacticism of instruction, but rather a dramatic set of conditions for reimagining critical insight. Thereafter it can enable the generation of “critical pedagogy as a form of cultural practice,” in the words of Henry Giroux.115 In this vein, then, ROTS can provide “the conditions for a set of ideological and social relations which engender diverse possibilities for students … to be self-critical about both the positions they describe and the locations from which they speak, and to make explicit the values that inform their relations with others as part of a broader attempt to produce the conditions necessary for either the existing society or a new and more democratic social order.”
And yet we cannot end there. Judging from the highly popular reception of the SW movies as texts violently encoding the “culture of death,” the movies’ signs are as evidently ambiguous. As O’Shaughnessy claims, “Responses—how people choose to interpret material—may diverge from what the producers intended or what logic would anticipate.”116 Equally, the sensibility generated by the myriad of militaristic merchandise may provide a further signifying layer of it being a glorious violent adventure. Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker are culturally celebrated by a number of fans precisely because of their power, their Force-technical prowess, than for their moral exemplarism. And here is the irony of merchandising a Luke who becomes an important figure in child’s role-playing because he comes complete with both a laser-pistol and a lightsaber.
Despite the trajectory of this deeper reading and the cautionary message about violence, then, there still remains a concern to be heard: the violence of SW is not horrifying. It does not create terror to prevent terrorising, or at least not until Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith. Unlike Gandhi, for instance, the violence and the response to violence are not emotionally involving. The form of the violence in this space action-adventure still looks too much like good fun, and children will be encouraged, not put off, exhilaratingly engaging their “enemies” with a lightsaber or a blaster pistol in conscious mimicking of their swashbuckling heroes—Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia Organa. Briefly put, the movies establish an emotional affinity between particularly younger viewers and the characters engaged in the conflicts within largely an adventure-serial violent drama.117 Consequently, the saga can effectively function to curtail liberating potential for cultural resistance to the dominant codes of power, the heroic warrior cult, and the relating of persons to the “other” through a “politics of purity.” And it can do this both because of the heroic violence it displays for many viewers, and by its tapping into the privatized ego of consumerist spectatorial satisfaction through its supposedly entertaining aestheticization of violence. In this regard, then, the type of cultural analysis found in Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death remains apt. The spectacle of modern forms of media, he suggests, transforms violent action into entertainment (what one might call a belligertainment). Thereby there is a loss of sense of the catastrophic nature of the violent inflicting of suffering.118 This is made the more significant by SW’s high-culture connections. As Postman urges, “we do not measure a culture by its output of undistinguished trivialities but by what it claims as significant.”119
Yet, to read the movies in this way is to reductively marginalize considerable signs of something different, and thereby fail to generate readings of it as a series of texts that display several sets of values deeply resistant to the naturalizing of violence in American culture. This is not to claim that the differences lie entirely with the reader, as a comment made by Lucas might otherwise suggest: SW was “designed for a youthful audience, … [and] ultimately what happens is that most people need the reassurances that seem to come with the movie, so it ends up that everybody gets something out of it.”120 SW, as an extended moment of pop culture, may be intellectually thin in comparison with the literature of Philip K. Dick for instance, but it is far from having no philosophical value in contrast to Carl Freedman’s problematic reading.121 As Winkler entertains, “Just like westerns, the Star Wars films are modern morality plays, although less sophisticated than their cinematic precursors.”122 At its best it possesses potential to provoke a question when it holds up a witness to a radically different set of non-violent values from those celebrated by Western societies founded in the unconstrained promotion of freedom as primarily the atomizing freedom for individuality.
Cicero once claimed that the purpose of (formal) education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present. The potential for less formal sources of educative material is important to considering the formative role of cinematic products. According to J.P. Telotte, Lucas’ THX 1138, for instance, “lays bare some of the more disturbing elements of American cultural ideology—particularly an inherent racism, a deadening disjunction between the individual and his or her work, and a capitalist reduction of everything and everyone to bottom-line budgetary numbers.”123 In its own way the later epic continues to investigate some of these themes and explores the kinds of self-understandings that generate and sustain them. This chapter has focused not so much on these as on the issue of its presentation of violent conflict. SW, conceived as the grand six-part space opera and not the isolated singular movie of ANH, is perhaps reasonably well placed to encourage a different form of sociality—one in which terms like “peace” and “freedom” have positive or non-reactive meaningfulness, and “love” does not have little practical significance for the publicly determinative relations we call “politics” and “economics.” Only that kind of society and the people who form it will find it easier to relate to others in ways that do not resort to armed conflict and the violence that disrupts the making of inter-personal responsibility. This in itself would considerably contest the very conditions that make wars possible (dare I say “necessary”?) than those who watch the saga through the type of sentiment advertised on Midwestern billboards in 1975: “God, guns, and guts: that’s what made America great!”124 Telotte’s assessment of THX 1138 is equally appropriate of SW, or at least a certain radical way of reading it: it “challenges us to be less naïve in the face of a mediated world, to be more wary about the sorts of images [and ideologies] we consume.”