Re-Gendering the Patriarchal Star Wars Texts
According to Claudia Card, “Feminist ethics is born in women’s refusals to endure with grace the arrogance, indifference, hostility, and damage of oppressively sexist environments.”1 As such, it is constituted, firstly, by the critical task of identifying restrictive and damaging practices, so as to expose the ethical problems with the conditions of what Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich calls the forcing of an “extraordinarily diverse people … into the singularity of the Woman who is Man’s Other.”2 As Margaret Miles and Brent Plate argue, “how we see the other affects the way we treat the other. Film, as a medium of mass reception, promotes, negates, and generally alters our perception of identities, especially with regard to gender, race, ethnicity, and religion.”3 Secondly, it resistantly offers possibilities for imagining and constructing better environments and systems of representation that work to overcome the damage that has been, and is still being, done through existing power arrangements. In many recent works, the otherwise male dominated genre of science fiction has provided resources for what Melzer describes as “the imaginative testing grounds for feminist critical thought.”4
This mention of “women … as Other” raises a set of concerns with Lucas’ depiction of alterity, and such a concern animates a range of critiques of the role and function of women in SW.5 It is from Leia at the Yavin IV medal ceremony that the male heroes receive their awards for valor, someone identified as a Princess in a narrative that opens with a distinctive reference to a fairy tale setting with “a long time ago,” and a narrative that closes in the “happily ever after” mood. Soon after the theatrical release of ANH Dan Rubey claimed SW was a socio-politically conservative text that emphasizes a natural and hereditary social privilege that shapes a set of racist and sexist relationships between Luke and the other characters who are merely instrumental foils for the expression of his privileged and personally attained individualism.6 That perspective has been echoed and developed at greater length in a plethora of studies since then, despite the substantial screen time given to Leia Organa and Padmé Naberrie Amidala in the two sets of trilogies. A variety of responses reach an extreme form in the claim by Anne Cranny-Francis, that “in the film Star Wars … the characters Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia enact a patriarchal, bourgeois (liberal humanist), white supremacist narrative in a setting uncannily similar to today’s USA.”7 Even if this is demonstrated to be an exaggerated criticism, there remains a significant issue to be asked concerning Lucas’ space opera over the gendering of alterity so that women become alienated, made alien, and thereby disempowered in the hegemony of a deeply culturally encoded identity politics. A point made more generally by Robert Stam and Louise Spence is useful to cite at this stage in the proceedings: an “insistence on ‘positive images’ … obscures the fact that ‘nice’ images might at times be as pernicious as overtly degrading ones, providing a bourgeois façade for paternalism, a more pervasive racism.”8 The point is that the cinematic product of Lucas’ imagination, whether intentionally or not, reflects deep hegemonic currents in modern American culture by defining the women in the narratives from the male perspective. In many ways, this reading should hardly be surprising given the prevalence of the perception of the SW saga as a politically conservative set of texts. Unsurprising perhaps, but morally troubling all the same, especially since SW remains culturally pervasive. Again, any claim to SW being “pure entertainment” will not provide any mechanism for defending these texts. As Henry Giroux astutely observes, “it is precisely when we have escaped, when we feel we are in the realm of pure entertainment, that the ideological world of the cinema becomes most seductive, lulling us into a dream state.”9
Several substantive issues raised by critical viewers have centered on the main two female protagonists of the saga, Leia and Padmé, and the issues raised for the ideological formation of identity through viewing these movies is therefore of deep seated moral significance. The critique then, to use the words of Minnich, is to operate as “an expression of a commitment to a resistant, respectful, reflexive, critical approach that asks us to look behind, or below, received knowledge and dominant traditions [and their artifacts] in an effort to locate whether, when, where, how modes and methods of thought, deriving from old [patriarchal] exclusions and devaluations, may continue to skew our ability to think on all levels.”10
According to Jeanne Cavelos, “George Lucas blazed a trail with Leia that many writers have followed, and all viewers who like seeing independent, self-reliant female characters owe him a debt of gratitude.”11 Not all commentators agree, however. The first criticism worth analyzing takes its shape from the observation that Leia’s role is a marginal one in terms of the trajectory of the narrative. True, she occupies an exalted professional position as a representative of her home planet of Alderaan in the Galactic Senate. However, as Davies and Smith have admitted with reference to issues to race, “the post-civil rights demand to see ‘a black face in a high place’ now fails to get to the heart of racial politics or the politics of racial representations.”12 In fact, women in general play little part in what must be regarded as a “boy’s own” adventure story. This is no minor matter since, according to Grace Jantzen, “women have been underrepresented in situations of power and esteem in western history, while men have been overwhelmingly overrepresented not only in situations of power but also in aggression and violence.”13 On the other hand, one must be careful not to claim too much from this. It is true that the socio-political invisibility of women as publically participative persons would indeed generate a morally discomforting sense as to the nature of representation in the narrative. So Cavelos argues that “the problem is not that women are supporting characters, though they are. Even a supporting character can be striking and compelling. Han Solo is such a powerful, heroic figure, [and] he nearly eclipses Luke.”14 On saying that, invisibility does not necessarily announce the status of non- or sub-persons since much depends on the particularity of the moment. It is equally not insignificant that the leader of the Rebel Alliance is Mon Mothma, and that the youthful Leia comes herself to occupy a significant position of authority in the Rebellion against the Empire. At an even more tender age Padmé is deemed sufficiently wise to be elected as Queen of Naboo, and there is a reference by Anakin in AOTC to having heard that Padmé’s people had been so impressed by her performance that they had attempted to amend the constitution in order to prolong her leadership at the end of her second term of governance. Failing that she becomes, of course, the elected senatorial representative for Naboo. These are not simple concessionary moments to an otherwise absence of women from the SW screen. In fact, by their relative absence the moments of presence of such women become particularly striking. They are made more intensively epiphanic by virtue of their prominent positioning that is set in stark relief by the narrative’s female scarcity. Consequently, Hanson and Kay appropriately observe (albeit with sole reference to Mon Mothma in ROTJ) that “sex is not a consideration with regard to leadership or station in life.”15 As in Alien in the late 1970s viewers are entreated to a visual suggestion that it is not unnatural for women to lead and for men to work with, and serve, them. Alien’s hierarchy appears to be more class related, and the conflictual relations between the crew is notable. Peter Lev is accordingly quite mistaken to claim that “white male humans are ‘naturally’ in positions of authority,” and like Wilson who argues that “human males are fully in charge and other sorts of beings are unimportant or expendable,” simply does not seem to have been watching carefully.16 If anything, the problem of scarce screen-time and dramatic role is most pronounced with regard to non-white female human characters, so that Wetmore is entitled to ask “where are the women of color in the Star Wars universe?”17 The important positions of Adi Gallia and Depa Billaba on the Jedi Council, in fact the only two female human or humanesque councilors (along with Yaddle in TPM, and in AOTC Shaak Ti from the Togruta species), is suggestive of the kind of egalitarian racial and gender politics that the movies assume and attempt to sustain within a modest dramatic labor. However, it is the ability of SW to maintain and sustain this at more than a subtextual level that has been questioned with regard to their performance of a politics of gender and ethnic difference for audiences requiring an emancipatory vision.
With regard to Leia more specifically, critics do recognize her relative marginality in the narrative, and this is what Rubey singles out for criticism, as she comes to take a secondary position behind the development of the main male protagonist into a hero, Luke (and to an extent even Han as well), in a Campbellian formatting of the narrative in terms of the (male) hero’s journey. She may be the “token female” but her general importance may be a reflection of Joseph Campbell’s archetypal figure of the “goddess/muse” who helps the hero fulfill his destiny.18 Diana Dominguez lends weight to this notion when arguing that “although it has been the recipient of much ridicule, parody, and criticism, it should be noticed that her hairstyle (the so-called cinnamon buns) is modelled on the traditional hairstyle of the Hopi Indian Corn Maiden, who symbolizes both fertility and wisdom and which was worn by Pancho Villa’s soldaderas (female warriors) during the Mexican Revolution of the early 1990s, as Lucas himself commented in a 2002 Time magazine interview.”19
Lev complains that “the Rebel Alliance itself seems to be hierarchical and perhaps even authoritarian.”20 Nonetheless, anticipating the study in chapter 4 of this book, it can be suggested that he weakens his point with misinterpreted textual evidence when further claiming that SW “in no way challenges gender, race, or class relations. White male humans are ‘naturally’ in positions of authority. … [M]ost of the aliens are relegated to the ‘freak show’ of the spacefarers’ bar.” The force of this criticism in relation to race and species is somewhat further alleviated by the introduction of Lando Calrissian and Yoda, and even in the introduction of Admiral Ackbar of the Mon Calamari species in ROTJ (continued in TPM with the military importance of the Gungans and the mixed species of the Jedi Order whose Council sits in a non-hierarchical circle).21 This stands in obvious contrast to the purely human, wholly male makeup of the imperial navy, the purity of the white male. There are no females to be seen in the Imperial order (or, for that matter, among the Sith in their “Rule of Two”),22 and it has even displaced the role of maternality with the bio-engineering of its infantry and pilots. The Rebellion, one can confidently maintain, represents something of the diversity of the pre–Imperial rule over against the oppressive homogeneity of the Empire. On the other hand, as will be argued later, the real difficulty may well be located in the fact that by making her the sole female voice, Lucas inadvertently constructs the Princess in the form of a product of Western gendered essentialization, and this process is consequently no less “metaphysical” than patriarchy is.
A second and related strand of criticism operates from the portrayal of Leia, according to Kathleen Ellis and Peter Lev, as the damsel in distress. This is a considerably more politically interesting critical reading than that which pins the difficulty on simple matters of screen time and narrative prominence. So Ellis claims that the characterization of Leia “reveals the patriarchal ideology Lucas unconsciously adopted.” “She is thereafter the traditional damsel in distress and it would appear that her ‘femaleness’ is what prevents her from saving herself.”23
While Leia’s title of “princess” and her rather medieval garb are nods back to the fairy-story genre, the reference is to the feisty royal figure in Akira Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress of 1958. Initially, when searching for a story to tie a few visual ideas together (principally, the cantina scene and the space battle), Lucas shaped the story around Kurosawa’s sixteenth-century adventure. The influence of this remains in several places in the final version: in the perspective on the story of the two squabbling peasants, Tahei and Matashichi (in SW, C-3PO and R2-D2); and in General Rokurota Makabe’s (in SW, General Obi-Wan Kenobi) rescue of the young Princess Yuki (in SW, Princess Leia Organa) to return her to her own people (in SW, Leia’s family on Alderaan, and then the Rebel Alliance on Yavin IV). What is significant is the fact that the design of the character clearly resists the stereotypical and Disneyesque damsel-in-distress, something picked up to good effect by Princess Fiona in Shrek, in a moment of Disney’s self-mocking in Tangled, with Snow in the television series Once Upon a Time, and with fantasy fairytale movies such as Maleficent, The Brothers Grimm, Mirror Mirror, and Snow White and the Huntsman. Certainly the audience would have very little reason to contest this when Luke discovers the holographic teaser and finds himself fetishizing an off-worlder whom he refers to as “beautiful.” The scene quite deliberately, and ironically given the regal figure the youth encounters later on, enacts a culturally conservative gender-nostalgia. Yet, Leia’s self-assured response to Vader and to Grand Moff Tarkin suggests something different, dropping her feistiness only when her home planet of Alderaan is threatened with destruction. It is true that the young senator needs to be rescued from the Imperials’ detention block on the first Death Star in ANH when facing termination, and yet the gender coding is soon complicated. It is so in part by her characteristic sassiness so that she can belittle the saving character before her with the memorable rhetorical power-deflation “Aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?” The sarcastic remark is telling in breaking the silence of Luke’s desirous gaze. Leia’s voice, even in the midst of hostility, functions to resist the imposition of identity on her, and to chastise the male for his fetishizing gaze at her. A little surprised at first, Luke composes himself, removes the helmet from his white armored attire (a reference to the white knight?) and announces, as any great fairy tale hero would in his situation, “I’m Luke Skywalker. I’m here to rescue you.” But, as if to emphasize that she is no typical damsel in distress, a puzzled Leia asks, “You’re who?” This is no 1930s princess in the tower awaiting the shining white knight who ever gazes lovingly with wide eyes set on her liberator. As Diana Dominguez observes, here “Lucas instantly shatters the familiar fairy tale trope of the fair unknown knight or prince in shining armor who comes to save the silent but eternally grateful damsel in distress and whisk her off to safety and a life of happily ever after.”24 Leia’s is no minor and unimportant character construal, and therefore there is good sense in Merlock and Jackson’s claim that “after Leia, no longer would princesses be passive and salvaged simply with a kiss.”25 Lucas is quoted by Pollock as revealing that Leia herself is a bit of a pain: “She’s sort of a drag and she’s a nuisance.”26 For someone so “beautiful” in distress in Luke’s eyes, she ends up subverting his heroic presence on screen. In fact, according to Carrie Fisher, Lucas directed her to regard the character to be “proud and frightening. … I was not a damsel in distress. I was a distressing damsel.”27 SW spends considerable time de-objectifying its female protagonist, preventing her from being portrayed with culturally distinctive and identifiable managed “feminine” traits. The point is not lost on Cavelos for whom there is significance in the fact that the young woman “stood up to the men. … Leia clearly believes she knows best and isn’t afraid to let everyone know it.”28 At this point, to emphasize what is at stake, it is worth noting a comment made by Sherrie Inness. According to her, a woman exhibiting strength of character and physicality subverts the notion of the natural or stable gender coding, and this “throws into question the whole foundation upon which our culture is based. If masculine attributes, such as toughness, and feminine attributes too, are conceived as free-floating signifiers that refer to either a male or a female body, our whole culture is destabilized because it is based on what are perceived as the essential differences between men and women.”29
The gender coding of the fairytale “princess” reference is further complicated by Leia’s frustrations with the very ineptitude of the rescuing heroes that forces her to take her liberation into her own hands at key points. The implications are pronounced not merely for the portrayal of this female character but also for the culturally dominant sense of heroic masculinity. In the detention block corridor, for instance, she grabs the blaster off Luke and sarcastically announces, “This is some rescue,” before blasting a hole in a grate with the words “somebody has to save our skins.” Of course, the escape takes them from the proverbial “frying pan into the fire” for dramatic purposes, but this is not the point at issue and worth reflecting on. Dominguez argues, then, that “from the ‘rescue’ scene onward. … Leia becomes a full-out rebel: outspoken, unapologetic, sarcastic, even bossy, and, shooting and killing without hesitation with the same skill as all the tough guys around her.”30 So much so that by the time of ROTJ the actress, Carrie Fisher, was bored of portraying such a tomboy even though she did equally ask for more action scenes.31 Of course, it is also worth highlighting the subversive potential for this re-reading of SW by Leia’s kiss of Luke immediately prior to grabbing onto him in order to swing across a platformless compartment in the Death Star—the moment becomes a heroic one for the male character. It will take a further movie in the series, ESB, to come closer to deconstructing the image of the hero, for instance, as warrior.
In the third place, flowing from the comment made here by Dominguez, some critics are bothered by the fact that Leia is all too rarely depicted with blaster in hand, but constantly has to depend on the saving violence and self-sacrifice of the male characters. However, this is simply not the case until late on in ANH and is certainly not true of her performance in ROTJ. Cavlos recognizes the radical import of the aggressive action in question: “Leia marked a major breakthrough for women heroes in film. George Lucas’s creation was amazing and groundbreaking. Before 1977, few women in film fired a gun—the symbol of male power—and those who did generally fired once, missed, dropped the gun and started sobbing. … Even more striking, she stood up to the men. … Leia clearly believes she knows best and isn’t afraid to let everyone know it.”32 The first part of this remark and the criticism it responds to, far from being supportive of a form of subjectivity usable for feminist theorizing, betrays it by assuming a more fundamental moral dislocation, what Jantzen names the necrophiliac obsession that she adjudges pervades the patriarchal West. In this regard, the deconstruction of violence that somewhat occurs in the saga, and the stress of Padmé on the continued need for democracy and diplomacy, witness to a set of values more conducive to Jantzen’s feminist philosophy of natality. Speaking of Disney’s Mulan, Giroux regards the titular heroine as being conveyed in terms that are distinctly morally problematic. “By embracing a masculine view of war, Mulan cancels out any rupturing of traditional gender roles. She simply becomes one of the boys.”33 It would be particularly problematic to announce that Leia is a role-model for young girls when she postures aggressively with blaster in hand. Of course this does not let Lucas off the hook, morally speaking at least. What is it that is being claimed by him when Luke Skywalker is seen a similar pose as well?
A more interesting form of critique occurs in the work of Rubey. This commentator rightly observes that the senator from the Royal House of Alderaan decreases in active significance in inverse proportion to Luke’s importance in ANH, so as to be left a mere observer of the Battle of Yavin with General Jan Dodonna and C-3PO at the base as the pilots take the fight to the Imperials. On saying that, however, a case can be made from the narrative for Leia’s lack of involvement in the assault on the Death Star—she is, after all, a politician and not a fighter pilot. So Lucas admits that as a principal commander in the Rebel Alliance and as a member of the Royal House of Alderaan she would not have flown in a fighter battle anyway. Nonetheless, the audience is entreated to a militarized airborne defense force composed solely composed of men (and humans at that). In terms of the make-up of the military personnel, little changes with the next two sequels. While Lucas rectifies that in the Naboo air defense units in TPM this change only serves to retroactively highlight what is missing from ANH even with the release of the edited special editions in 1997, a fact that is important to Rubey’s case, for instance. Perhaps it can be advanced that Lucas’ materials reflect standard military practice, but if so then it certainly does not offer a challenge to them. Something more promising occurs, however, when SW is read more expansively and properly over the course of the movies that succeed ANH. Leia herself does become useful when called upon to handle a blaster, retains a visible position of authority in the Rebel Alliance (and notably, the supreme commander is Mon Mothma in ROTJ), and exhibits her characteristic spiritedness, self-assurance and bold assertiveness. So at the opening of ROTJ she puts herself in danger when disguised as the bounty hunter Boussh in order to liberate Han from Jabba, and mercilessly slays her hedonistic enslaver. Whereas in ANH she is reduced to being a helpless bystander of the fatefully important final conflict, in ROTJ she volunteers to participate in the important assault on the shield bunker; she commandeers an Imperial speeder bike and chases an Imperial scout through the forests of Endor; and in the climactic triple battle she fights until the end, even incurring a wound to the shoulder in the process, to ensure the success of her part in the three pronged assault on the second Death Star. In fact, piloting a military craft is the only skill she does not appear to have among her vast repertoire, or at least does not exhibit if she does (although she is seen piloting the Falcon towards the end of ESB and is cardinal in saving Luke). This might all be even more significant by virtue of the fact that “Campbell denies the existence of female heroes—all of his heroes are male.”34 The image of Leia garbed in camouflage military outfit with blaster in hand in ROTJ is intensified by the reversal of Han Solo’s quip in ESB to the claim “I love you” with “I know.” And yet, Rubey, whose account was composed in the aftermath of ANH without the perspective of Episodes V-VI, continues by observing that as “Luke grows up into possession of power and the Force. … Princess Leia retreats into the background. This happens because power in Star Wars is male power, the patriarchal power of fathers and sons.”35 Given that in ESB she is an authoritative presence in the Rebel base on Hoth, and in ROTJ is answerable in the Rebel Alliance only to Mon Mothma, another former senator, Rubey’s particular critical claim about patriarchal power has to be assessed as being conspicuously overstated and now distinctly obsolete, at least in the form that it takes. Even then, Leia never gets to train as a Jedi despite the admission in ROTJ of her Force-conscious ancestry.36
For Rubey, “by having no thought-out, consistent position on any of the issues he touches on, Lucas dooms Star Wars to repeat all the dominant ideological clichés of our society. That distant galaxy turns out to be not so far away after all.”37 It is worth noticing here that this analysis does not claim that Lucas or his product are sexist as such, but only that they do not do anything to confront the sexist ideology in his culture, and that this lack dominates the presentation of gender relations. This is a provocative and challenging thesis. Given the construal of Leia’s character the critical point, then, is the more modest one that Lucas had not, it seems, sufficiently stretched out his imagination to explicitly visually challenge the traditionally constructed gender roles and therefore subvert the subjugation of women, or even the roles of ethnic order, at that point.
Leia, of course, becomes a lover in ESB and ROTJ, and this is a crucial source of critical concern. Philip Simpson regards Leia’s feistiness as a form of frigidity that the movies then begin to break down, thereby constraining the impact that her character might otherwise have had. “It is ironic [and revealing], then, that a narrative that features two such strong female characters then works so hard to contain and even break down their power, first by coding their exercise of autonomy as frigidity and then placing both women in relationships that demand not just a thawing but melting of their icy feminine royalty.”38 Despite the politically authoritative positions that both Padmé and Leia occupy in the saga’s narrative, and the depiction of them as self-assured and assertive, Simpson complains that “it is ironic, then, that a narrative that features two such strong female characters then works so hard to contain and even break down their power, first by coding their exercise of autonomy as frigidity and then placing both women in relationships that demand not just thawing but melting of their key feminine royalty. These women must suffer sexual abjection to an extent that subverts whatever power they otherwise manifest.”39 It has often been argued that the characterization of Leia (and Padmé by extension as a Leia-echo) reflects some of Lucas’ own struggles with his wife Marcia at the time. Leaving that speculation aside, and without wanting to undermine the difficulties that critics detect, Simpson’s remains an unconvincing thesis for a number of reasons.
The main difficulty with this reading is that the melting of her relational aloofness (by developing the love-story arc with Han) does not, in fact, mitigate the other character traits the movies have done much to explicate. In ANH while Leia is an object of the gaze of the competitive Luke and (to a lesser degree) Han she does not return their gaze or reveal desires other than those of political care for the well-being of the Alliance. As mentioned above, her development in ESB equally takes the route of her becoming more significant as an authoritative character and leader, and also warrior. For instance, at the end of this movie released in 1980 she is involved in blasting her way toward an escape from Imperial overrun Bespin, barks at Chewbacca to turn the Falcon towards the pursuing Imperial Tie-Fighters in order to rescue a physically injured and psychologically traumatized Luke. It would take some superior interpretive gymnastics to maintain that Leia diminishes in stature because of her relationship with Han, as if only oppressed women are involved in heterosexual relations. There is simply no evidence for this in the texts. Even her attire remains utilitarian, and she is never (apart from the highly particular dancing girl outfit in Jabba’s palace and on the sail barge) reduced to titillating “eye-candy” for the male gape. In other words, she is not reduced without reserve to the status of lover, or domesticatedly positioned woman, or even to the male gaze as a sexually charged character (although the fourth point below will later have to pick this point up again in the context of a controversial scene in ROTJ). This is significant, particularly as, according to Seyla Benhabib, “women’s sphere of activity has traditionally been and still today is so concentrated in the private sphere in which children are raised, human relationships maintained and traditions handed down and continued.”40
A further concern with Simpson’s reading is that it does not take account of what it is that Leia importantly contributes to the development of Han’s character. His “bad boy” persona is not stable and unchanging, but is bound up over the series by a telling de-Soloing and a gradual multi-layering that involves the transformation of his self-enclosed subjectivity into one who is more responsibly engaged with others than himself. In fact, the significance of this is intensified in the context of the time, especially in the early 1980s. As Robin Wood observes, films during the Reagan era tend to be characterizable as “capitalist myths of freedom of choice and equality of opportunity, [involving] the individual hero whose achievements somehow ‘make everything all right,’ even for the millions who never make it to individual heroism.”41 Leia’s role in this process of enabling Han to surmount, to borrow Davies and Smith’s language, “the oppressive and atomising effects of capitalism” is vital.42 Merlock and Jackson, for instance, make the point that Leia’s relationship “converts Han (and later saves both him and Luke) where no other forces could have done so.”43 In other words, Han’s character itself undergoes something of a “thawing,” to use Simpson’s language for Leia, as he moves from self-interested smuggler to becoming a responsible Rebel leader, and from cocky cowboy figure to friend and lover. The relationship moves well beyond the loss of self in the male other, and thus to the identifiability of Leia simply as “lover,” or ever to the domesticity of narratively intensified maternality, as if it subsumes and subordinates the plethora of roles that identify her as agent. To adopt Elizabeth Stuart’s terms from another context, borrowing from the work of Judith Butler and Sarah Coakley, “gender and sexual identity are not of ultimate concern, thus opening the possibility for love.”44 The relation could better be characterized in the terms used in Luce Irigaray’s reading of Emmanuel Levinas: “The caress is an awakening to intersubjectivity,” and this is a theme explored briefly but poignantly in THX 1138.45 “Rather than violating or penetrating the mystery of the other, rather than reducing his or her consciousness or freedom to passivity, objectuality, animality or infancy, the caress makes a gesture which gives the other to himself, to herself, thanks to an attentive witness, thanks to a guardian of incarnate subjectivity.”46 Arguably, the flow of the narrative displays an improvement occurring not only in Han’s character but in Leia’s as well.
Given that neither of the options of domesticity or reduction to the male gaze is particularly prominent in Lucas’ portrayal of Leia, one has to wonder how far the reading of Simpson is grounded in an unreflective Kantian subjectivity. In other words, Simpson’s criticism sounds too close to being directed by an essentialist construal of subjectivity, of what Irigaray criticizes as the “Ego-in-itself.”47 The significance of this mutuality should not be lost, and a claim made by Simone de Beauvoir about a sexually construed binarism can be set in sharp relief to it: “She [the woman] is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other.”48 This suggests that there is a real need to question forms of feminist reading that de-socialize male or female, that set them over against each other as competitive, even if this is done in the name of a therapeutic response to the negation of women’s subjectivity in patriarchal (or “kyriarchal”) domination. Such a move, in retaining the modern binary construction of male and female becomes an act of skepticism that only subverts domination by evading it rather than transforming it, and thereby becomes morally debilitating. The “heroism” of the characters is not that of the self-aggrandizement of the pure self-construction of the moral subject, deflected from the web of responsibility in what Benhabib calls the immersion “in a network of relationships.”49 Accordingly, Lucas’ Leia is not “othered” as an autonomous subject among other autonomous characters. The pull of her consensual intersubjectivity is too strong to permit such a disastrous post–Enlightenment construal of her identity, or rather identifiability. Or as Jantzen maintains, the pressure in such an account is towards various forms of violent competition. So she argues that “hierarchical binary oppositions … [characterizes a way of thinking] that legitimates and reinforces competitive thinking and an us-and-them mentality.”50 “Now such a style of philosophical thinking,” she judges, “corresponds to many other aspects of late modernity, reflecting and reinforcing them. … It is ingrained in the entrepreneurs of a free-market economy, and thus in the interests of the competitive masculinist structures of power of late capitalism.”51
Fourthly, much is made of the moment of the fetishization of Leia in ROTJ. In support of his reading of her as a sexualized character, Simpson, for instance, declares that “Leia’s status as abject sexualized body on display as a nearly nude prisoner of the gangster Jabba—a stark contrast to her first white-veiled appearance in the series as a feisty but repressed freedom fighter.”52 Likewise, Wetmore claims that “She might be considered a strong female character, but the image of her in the slave girl costume on Jabba’s barge, being grabbed by Luke … and carried by him as he swings himself and her over to the rescue ship summarizes her position in the trilogy: she is an object to be rescued.”53 The sight of Leia grabbing hold of Luke in order to escape is a troubling one, an echo of a similar moment on the Death Star in ANH. Yet, this is a lazy reading. The force of it as a text indicating female weakness is distinctly mitigated by virtue of the audience watching her both dispose of her enslaver with powerful determination, and then direct the sail barge’s gun onto its deck to end the hostilities. In fact, in this image of escape there may well be a point concerning interdependency and mutuality, so that Leia is both rescuer (of Luke in ESB and Han in ROTJ) and rescued (by Luke in ANH and ROTJ), just as Luke and Han are likewise both rescuers and rescued, and thus the activism/passivism that plagues some older feminist constructivist writing as much as patriarchal ideology is practically subverted by a more substantive sense of intersubjectivity or being-with-the-other. As Benhabib observes with reference to claims made by Hannah Arendt, “we are immersed in a ‘web of narratives,’ of which we are both the author and the object.”54 There is real danger in a critique that takes the form of an anti-relational or autonomy-shaped feminism, one that is reducible to the essentialized individuation that has been so pronounced in the post–Cartesian conception of modern subjectivity.
Moreover, Simpson’s and Wetmore’s criticism of the enslaved Leia utterly fails to engage appropriately with the context of the situation and its ideological framing with the characterization of Leia and Jabba. The camera, after all, does not gaze at her in the way Jessica Simpson, Megan Fox, Jessica Alba, Julia Roberts, Jane Fonda, or Raquel Welch become the objects of suggestively prolonged and seductive attention in The Dukes of Hazzard, Transformers, Sin City, Pretty Woman, Barbarella, or 1 Million Years B.C. respectively. Leia’s appearance as scantily clad dancer is a condition of abject subjugation that has been imposed on her rather than a position that has been chosen by her. In other words, it is the outcome of Jabba’s abusive action that enslaves her in order to satisfy his own fetishizing desires. The otherwise confident and self-determinative character, whose dress has been generally relatively asexual, has now been reduced to a position of passivity, reduced to the dominating grip of her jailor who demands the titillation of his meagerly attired female performers. (The audience is, interestingly, denied the opportunity of gazing on a sexually charged dance performance by Leia). It is quite astonishing and damaging to a healthy perspective on the material that the ideological suspicion of certain readers is displaced from the festishizing and victimizing male gaze onto criticism of the abused victim as sexualized object of the abusive gaze.
Dominguez responds well to this type of claim by insightfully arguing several notable things. According to her particular account, it is suggestive that the sexualized victim uses her status in a moment of empowerment to punish her oppressor. Further, she recognizes that the enforced sexualization of Leia “may simply be a reflection of the fact that women are particularly vulnerable to such victimization as a means for torture and humiliation.”55 As mentioned already, Jabba enacts a relation of pure domination over those selected to be the instruments of his pleasure. After all, the contrast between this enforced sexualization and the gradual flourishing of Leia’s consensual relationship with Han is marked. Moreover, the latter’s carbonite immobilizing imprisoning serves a similar function of imposing a torturing, humiliating, and objectified body-as-trophy position on the protagonist, albeit without the sexualization of the character as occurs in the case of Leia. The normally financially driven gangster makes just such an admission when the young Jedi Luke Skywalker attempts to bargain for the former smuggler’s life.
Something similar corrupts numerous readings of the moment of Ellen Ripley’s undressing in Alien as a reduction to the objectifying gaze, when the scene’s visual display would seem to have a different signifying reference from the voyeuristic fetishization of her female form. As Cornea observes, “At the time of the film’s release, the imposing figure of Ripley defied traditional gender roles and her very physical appearance suggested a disregard for the markers of sexual difference, as more normally encoded within mainstream cinema (she is 5'11" tall and her body type could well be described as androgynous).”56 For Cornea, “Ripley’s ‘reassuringly’ female form is exposed as she removes her clothes to don a spacesuit. Although she is voyeuristically presented in her near naked state, this is immediately offset by the appearance of the alien and the violence of the actions that follow. The viewer is surely punished for the voyeuristic gaze here.” It is this visual contrast that is significant. According to Barbara Creed, the contrast is particularly marked between Ripley with the cat and the monstrous and armored alien (and, for Creed, the movie actually subverts its feminist potential).57 However, it is difficult to read this as a psychosexual suggestion without too much self-projection. Creed’s reading oversteps the material by depicting Alien through Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection: “We can see its ideological project as an attempt to shore up the symbolic order by constructing the feminine as an imaginary ‘other’ which must be repressed and controlled in order to secure and protect the social order … [as it thereby] stages and re-stages a constant repudiation of the maternal figure.” Perhaps the scene is actually not one referencing the act of voyeurism at all, but is providing a reference that lies elsewhere. This is the moment of her vulnerability, her moment of preparing for the passivity and docile dependency that comes with mechanically induced and supported sleep during deep space transit which is viciously interrupted by the stow-away as it aims to invade her body. The image of vulnerability is one of intensive embodiment, contrasted in Aliens by her donning the physically enhancing machine in order to “power up” against the alien queen. As Roz Kaveney observes, it is important to recall the image of fellow crew member Kane awaking earlier in the film from his cryogenic stasis semi-naked, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, especially when compared with what hatches from the eggs, is an image of vulnerability.58 Moreover, the construal of Ripley as the saving figure, destroying the alien to protect not only herself but the planet the craft is bound for, who is competently able to handle weaponry, enables her character to perform a substitutionary role. She is the action hero, in other words, who now displaces the sole male of power for the audience’s catharsis. (On the other hand, despite the way the movie develops a woman-savior motif, Ripley is unable to save others, or at least any human other.) Accordingly she transcends the boundaries that had been determined for female characters in the Hollywood movies, especially that of the passive object of saving male rescue. According to Anna Dawson, “the ‘action women’ title was coined” from Ripley’s performance in Alien.59 In this regard, there is something odd in Ridley Scott’s portrayal of her in the end as a sleeping beauty, and of Gerard Loughlin’s comment on this: “a princess awaiting her prince, sincerely sleeping in her glass coffin.”60
Ripley is “one of the few science fiction characters who has truly expanded women’s roles.”61 This moment sets the stage for the likes of Sarah Connor in Terminator 2, although she is something of an ambiguous hero whose instinctively conceived ressentiment is morally deconstructed both by the moral conscience of her adolescent son John and the paternal role adopted by, and the salvific heroic self-sacrifice of, the reprogrammed T-1000 Terminator. “Her function as protector to her son is consistently undercut by the ‘good’ Terminator’s superior tactical knowledge and even his superior parenting skills.”62 Cornea, for instance, regards the very physicality of the brawny Sarah Connor as itself manifesting an ambivalence towards female heroes: “the authority of the female hero that emerged in science fiction films in the 1990s was, initially at least, marked upon her body in ways that have more traditionally been associated with masculine prowess; creating an arguably more ambivalent characterization than her nonetheless dynamic predecessors. … [A] Sarah who has acquired aggressive ‘masculine’ traits and a pumped-up, muscular body to match.”63 Arguably, this critique of Sarah’s built-physique as parody can carelessly enact and naturalize an untransgressive bodied gender stereotyping—that “hard bodies” are for men and “soft bodies” are for women. As Kristeva argues more sensitively, the very concept of gender itself is “metaphysical,” by which she means a violent stabilizing of the sheer precariousness and ambiguity of sexual identity into some self-identical essence.64 More appropriate is the fact that Cornea observes that this protagonist remains both visually and narratively caught in the grip of a gendered hierarchy. On the one hand, “it is … evident that her newly acquired physique is placed within a hierarchy of muscularity in which the Terminator’s more bulky appearance signals his superior strength and importance. In other words, she is ‘out-performed’ by the Terminator throughout the film and instead of emerging victorious against him, the ending of the first film is rewritten as it becomes the Terminator’s altruistic choice to sacrifice himself at the close of Terminator 2.” On the other hand, “according to the narrative of the first film, Sarah’s main purpose was as the vessel for the birth of a future male savior. Given the appearance of her son in the sequel, her warrior status is written into a narrative in which, like the comic-book female superheroes, she is predominantly characterized as fighting for patriarchy. Sarah is relocated to an outside world where she fights in defense of a patriarchal future. So, the threat that the female hero may offer to the stability of traditional gender hierarchies in Terminator 2 is ensnared within a narrative that strongly upholds patriarchal values. At best, the attempts to recuperate and confine the image of the female hero in Terminator 2 may signal her potential agency as a disruptive and threatening figure.”
Nonetheless, there then emerges a stream of heroic female leads: G.I. Jane as a female Rambo figure; and Trinity in The Matrix, although she does come to take second stage in narrative prominence to Neo; Xena in Xena: The Warrior Princess (1995–2001); Buffy in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003); and even Arwen in The Return of the King, even though the Elven Princess is less dramatically important in the narrative than Aragorn; and Neytiri of the Na’vi in Avatar, who nonetheless gives way to Jake Sully in the hierarchy of the movie’s heroes and who remains the main point of narrative identification. Cornea astutely observes that “the female hero that emerged in the 1990s was more closely sutured to the [masculine] codes and conventions of the modern action genre. Consequently, their heroic status was written upon their bodies, in terms of their pumped-up musculature and/or their physical fighting skills.”65 While this does offer a striking contrast with the “serial queens” of 1930s cinema, “depicted as evil and seductive and they were frequently pitted against a male adversary who eventually brought them under control,” they remain caught within the hegemony of the male action genre.
The importance of Leia in SW can be seen in contrast to the role of women in Hollywood cinema, perhaps especially in science fiction cinema. As Doherty argues, “In classical Hollywood cinema perhaps only the western outdid science fiction in its relegation of women to a peripheral and predictable status.”66 So, Doherty continues, “barred from full admission to the upper echelons of the space crew, women entered as novelty and decoration, sometimes even filling the role of scientific expert in an erotically charged white-coated and horn-rimmed-glasses way. Like Raquel Welch in the biological exploration film Fantastic Voyage (1966), the space bimbo filled out a tight-fitting uniform to distract and entice. Though a woman of science, she was destined to lose her composure and succumb to a sheltering masculine shoulder at a crucial moment.”67 In Lucas’ narration, in stark contrast, “Leia’s contributions,” Merlock and Jackson proclaim, “not just to the destruction of the Empire but also to the establishment of a new kind of female role model and to the possibility of feminine potential cinema and popular culture—merit a degree of appreciation.”68 Her “boyishness” unsettles speculations as to the borders that “separate” male and female, and positions her apart from the gender construction involved in the fetishizing gaze.
The characterization of Leia is not far away from that of Ellen Ripley, in several instances, however. As Doherty indicates, Ridley Scott’s portrayal of Ripley is “the generic reversal of the space bimbo motif,” and this “was the most audacious narrative twist in Alien: in this future world, the natural order of things really was upside down. Against all science fiction expectations, the prettiest babe on board is also the shrewdest operator.”69 Loughlin argues that “all four Alien films make a woman—warrant officer Ripley—their central character; and there is little doubt that her success lies in being more resolute, resilient and courageous than any of the other, largely male, characters. In short, one could argue that Ripley survives because she is more of a man than are the men.”70 This last claim, however, can re-inscribe and perpetuate the construction of gender stereotypes, even as it seeks to transgress the boundaries. In a moment of intensification, James Cameron’s sequel, Aliens, offers an “aggressive self-sufficiency and ruthless logic” that stands in even “more of a contrast to the [otherwise macho] men around her [like the incompetent lieutenant Gorman] who freak out or freeze in the face of danger.”71 For Cornea, “where Alien destabilized both sex and gender norms, Aliens reinstated differences based upon sex, even as the boundaries of traditional gendered roles were extended.”72 An important scene in her argument occurs early on in the movie. When working-out Private Vasquez is verbally accosted by another marine who insults with the rhetorical question “Hey, Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?” Vasquez’s witty reply is “No … have you?” The exchange reveals not only conflictual military banter, but the fact that gender roles in this futural environment, particularly in the military, are not so interchangeable for there not to remain gender stereotypes. According to Cornea, then, “the sight of the female undertaking a role associated with the male becomes a source of humour and the comment works to assure the viewer that sexual difference still operates in this world.”
Moreover, it needs to be emphasized that Leia’s is not the kind of female figure who pervades the voyeuristic scenes of movies of the time, not the Jane Fonda Barbarella representation of female sensuality for instance, or the representation of the femme fatale in Blade Runner who is reduced to a fetishized object as a hollow and rather passive agent.73 (Very oddly, Cavelos speaks of Barbarella as reflecting “the independent, sexually liberated woman of the 1960s”—the voyeuristically titillating opening would suggest instead the kind of “independence” and “liberation” that encourages some girls to dream of being glamour models while no longer naming it male “exploitation.”)74 Nor is it the unfeasibly formed figures of the adolescent fetish for the physically enhanced female figures of superheroes like Wonder Woman, Batgirl, Powergirl or Catwoman, or for Lara Croft, or Colonel Wilma Dearing and Princess Ardala in the Buck Rogers series in the early 1980s. In many ways, given Ripley’s androgynous dress throughout the movie, and her lack of make-up to catch the eye, there is little to specifically distinguish her from the other female crew members or indeed even from the male ones (other than the length of her hair, and this moment of modest undress). The sexually defining moment is the metaphorical rape scene which displays the android Ash in what might be understood as a “paranoia about male violence.”75
By reducing Leia to “sexual being” it would appear that Simpson has, in fact, improperly read into the saga the Expanded Universe stories, and subsequently distorted the text.76 Unfortunately, and I will have to leave this as an assertion for now, too many of the types of gaze at, or readings of, SW’s sexuality that one finds in the likes of Andrew Gordon, Martin Miller and Robert Sprich, and Roger Kaufman could arguably be characterized as textually loose and speculative moments of eisegesis that as much reflect the interests of the observers as the particularity of these texts.77
The character of Leia Organa in the “classic trilogy” in fact enables Lucas’ creation to go some way toward mitigating the cultural pressures toward providing an easy masculinizing reading of the gender-politics of SW, and thus leave potential for disrupting the stability of modern gender binary systems and symbolics. Lucas once commented that Leia “is extremely bright and well educated and used to taking charge of situations. … She is a natural-born leader.”78 In terms of Campbell’s summary of the classic themes of mythology Leia occupies more the role of the goddess. Interestingly, then, and largely in a counter-intuitive perspective given the dominant readings of the material, Dominguez regards Lucas as having “so ably and consistently (and I firmly believe, deliberately) subverted and questioned in five of the Star Wars films” “traditional tropes and stereotypes.” In particular, she claims that Leia “stands out as a strong feminist role model. … Leia presented (and still presents) an alternative femininity to the one I had most often been exposed to in my life.”79 With this character Lucas’ SW offers a protagonist with plenty of potential, with rich possibilities for development in ways that contest and overcome the dominant gender hierarchies, and with the ability to displace the control of female identifiability by male projective symbolics. Therefore, Merlock and Jackson make a fair point when they claim that “unlike Luke, however, Leia inherits far more strength and strategy from her mother than the naïve, hapless Luke has, especially in the earliest movies.”80 The iconicity of the gender relations are rendered incidental and thus both maleness and femaleness become symbolically liminal and slippery or floating signifiers.
That the movie did not provide a satisfactory exploratory study of gender relations and adequately challenge the binary oppositions of stereotypical gender constructions, some might argue, has to do with those ideological structures that constrain the male author’s imagination of the hero as something of an idealized echo of himself, Luke (Lucas!) Skywalker. But this too is an insufficient reading. In fact, the reasons for the paucity that critics identify but labor to explain may lie elsewhere. Mention has already been made on two occasions above of the narrative idealization of the character of Leia in the classical SW trilogy. What is at stake here requires to be contextualized. Western feminist discourse on matters of identity until well into the 1980s was caught in attempts to essentialize women’s experiences, to identify women’s identity as a common pre-given that has to be defined in binary terms over against a singularity identified as patriarchy. However, as Amartya Sen argues regarding what he calls our “diverse diversities” in his critical response to Samuel Huntingdon’s difference-flattening talk of a clash of civilizations, “the people of the world can be classified according to many other systems of partitioning, each of which has some—often far-reaching—relevance in our lives: such as nationalities, locations, classes, occupations, social status, languages, politics, and many others.”81 Accordingly, he continues, “The incitement to ignore all affiliation and loyalties other than those emanating from one restrictive identity can be deeply delusive and also contribute to social tension and violence.”82 Sen’s argument is that there are complex networks of identity-forming conditions operative in the construction of any particular person or group of persons. One such complication has to do with the way that numerous critics have boldly suggested that the essentializing of “woman” and “women’s experience” has been a problematic venture that has actually, and unwittingly, served to contribute to the marginalization of the voices of many women, pre-eminently non-white and non-middle class women. “‘Experience’ is a notoriously slippery notion.”83 Whose experience is being referred to? If the response is “women’s experience” then a further difficulty emerges with construing matters in such a singularly categorizable manner. In 1851 no less, a freed slave named Sojourner Truth complained that “that man over there says that women needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mudpuddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman?”84 Feminist studies have, in more recent years, become more properly attentive to multiple forms of difference, to the different forms of constructed positioning that have occurred in relation to the flow of, and access to, power that comes with the performance within differences of race, ethnicity, class, sexual preference, nationality, age, and so on. So Benhabib claims that “our identities as concrete others are what distinguish us from each other according to gender, race, class, cultural differentials,” and so on.85 Beatrice Hanssen, for example, asks rhetorically from materialist feminism, “might not the category of ‘Woman’ in feminine writing refer to a problematic myth, rather than to a historical materialist practice, implying that ‘women do not belong to history, and that writing is not a material production’?”86 It may well be, then, not so much that Leia takes shape in the context of women historically having “been forced through the features of a male socialization process,” in the words of Hanssen, but rather from a Cartesian-inspired decontextualizing binary essentialism.87 The difficulty is that this too, according to numerous theorists, is bound to forms of masculinizing discursive strategies that are conducive of structures that violate gendered particularities, and thereby disembody or de-gender women and deny what Teresa de Luretis calls the “historical fact of gender.”88 The need remains to interrogate the determinative “epistemic violence,”89 or as Hanssen puts it, “the exclusionary presuppositions and foundations that shore up discursive practices insofar as these foreclose the heterogeneity, gender, class or race of the subject.”90 According to Melzer, “Considering that race and gender are inseparable categories of identity formation, attempts to assert a female subjectivity denied by traditional Western philosophy need to integrate the theoretical deconstruction of ‘woman’ as a stable gender identity.”91 Therefore, to put the matter in Margaret Kamitsuka’s terms, there is the need “for complicating the notion of women’s experience and decentering privileges of whiteness and heterosexuality in feminist” reflections.92 Abstractions such as “woman” and “women’s experience” require appropriate refusing since such categories lend themselves to hegemonic Western, bourgeois models of binary representation, thereby doubly disempowering non-white women. They are categories that essentialize gender without reference to a multiplicity of discursive practices and determinative conditions that affect experiences in substantive ways.
In this regard, the real danger of SW’s material is that the depiction of Leia (and arguably of Padmé in the prequel trilogy) involves constructing her in terms of an essentializing symbolic. The refusal to sexualize Leia remains a refusal to adequately particularize her, as in the kind of liberal Cartesianism such as that animating the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft.93 She represents woman, and this status thus opens the Leia-woman-device up to womanist critiques more attentive to historical and material considerations. Leia, then, may well be a part of “the figment of the ‘generalized other’ that dominates substantialist versions of universalism.”94 Such an interpretation suggests that there is a problematic other-blindness being enacted through George Lucas’ universalizing move that makes Leia into a “woman-type,” and this issue of race will need to be explored at more length in the following chapter.
While in Episodes IV-VI there remains a noticeable paucity of females among the heroic group of warriors, despite any virtues that may be evident in the characterization of Leia herself, this changes in TPM. Padmé’s decoy attacks the Trade Federation in occupied Naboo Council chambers, a female pilot appears with a speaking part in the scene depicting the Naboo air force, and in AOTC and ROTS there are important female Jedi warriors.95 While there is a real sense in which Leia is somewhat less than central to the main father-son story of the classic trilogy, Padmé Amidala is more integral to the prequels.
In “The Beginning: The Making of Episode I” Lucas specifically notifies his design staff: “Anakin [is] kind of duplicating … [of] the Luke Skywalker role, but you see the echo of where it’s all gonna go. Instead of destroying the Death Star he destroys the ship that controls the robots [viz., the Trade Federation battle droids]. Again it’s like poetry, they rhyme. Every stanza rhymes with the last one.”96 The parallelism is not limited to Anakin and Luke, however. The prequels work hard to demonstrate the character likeness of Leia to her mother. So Padmé is portrayed as a self-confident character possessing real conviction, a political activist determinedly committed to justice, someone who possesses significant insight and practical political wisdom beyond her tender years, and one who exhibits a deep integrity and courage even when that involves risking her own life in the service of her task as in TPM and becoming the target of assassination attempts as in AOTC. When her life is in immediate jeopardy on Geonosis she responds to Count Dooku’s demand that Naboo join the alliance of rebellious Separatist factions by displaying both personal valor and the stubborn courage of her convictions. Padmé counters with an uncompromising refusal: “I will not forsake all I have honored and worked for and betray the Republic.” It is she who moves for swift action to solve the Naboo blockade crisis in TPM, and for the sake of the just representation and well-being of her sovereign people she refuses to follow the self-aggrandizing heel-dragging compromises of the senatorial politicians around her. “I will not watch my people suffer and die,” she doggedly announces, “while you discuss this invasion in a committee.”
There is something else that is significant in the depiction of her strength of personality. There has been something of a trend towards the muscular, an echo of the male, in certain Hollywood offerings—Terminator 2, GI Jane, even the Alien quadrilogy. The female body becomes not the figure of the power of human flourishing or the empowerment of the woman but her masculinization and thus the very erasure of the female body. Noticeably Lucas offers self-confident female characters with Leia and Padmé, and the former was a key leader in the Rebel Alliance considerably earlier (1977) than these other femuscular texts. Nonetheless, the boyishness of Leia (Lucas insisted the actress Carrie Fisher had her breasts taped down since there is “no sex in Star Wars”) perhaps is an indication of the death-dealing violence she is involved in effecting. Likewise, when Padmé wields a weapon in AOTC she similarly appears in boyish attire (a moment in TPM might be an exception). There is, then, something of a gender destabilization occurring here, one that does not slip into romanticizing essentialist gender coding but, in fact, challenges the naturalization of this coding in such a fashion as to reveal its historicity, its emergence from a social and historical process of the contingent construction and discursive performance of gender differences and roles.97 Moreover, another consequence may well be to echo a claim of Jantzen to the effect that “the incidence of violence is heavily showed to be male.”98 This observation would indeed make sense of Padmé’s contestation of the naturalness of violence. As Jantzen suggests, “If women are very much less aggressive than men, then aggression cannot be a natural human instinct or innate to human nature. At most it could be argued that aggression is instinctive to male human nature.” At her least visually masculine, Padmé is the voice of diplomacy, democratic conversation and reasonable nonviolence.
There are a number of features of Padmé’s political work that are important to mention here. She serves as something of an inverted image of the self-interested ambition of Palpatine, the emerging power of the Republic, and she continually demonstrates the virtue of compassion in contradistinction to new Chancellor’s philosophy which is gradually revealed to Anakin from the scene in the Coruscant Opera House onwards. Politically, she executes a Greek chorus-like commentary on the direction the Republic is taking while actively opposing the loss of democratic liberty when and where she can, including risking her own career in opposing the Chancellor during an intense time of galactic civil war. Padmé alone, without even the support of the Jedi Order which appears to be oblivious to the dark realities of contemporary political events, seems to be well-equipped to remain astutely suspicious of the swift drive to war, even when the Jedi fail to be sufficiently critically interrogative. In the complex political life of the last days of the Republic, we see Padmé’s diplomatic sensibilities preventing her from rushing in with others to commend the growing militarism in AOTC and worries about the conduct of the war in ROTS—“This war,” she insightfully announces to Anakin, “represents a failure to listen.” In contrast, hers is the voice of reason, the voice of diplomacy, and the revelations in ROTS eventually suggest that her perspective is not only the most insightful over what has been occurring but is also perhaps the most morally astute.99 And so we hear her urge the Republic’s Senators, in a deleted scene from AOTC, 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. I pray that you do not let fear push you into disaster. Vote down the security measure which is nothing less than a declaration of war.” As Mary Wollstonecraft observes, women do not by nature “act as creatures of sensation and feeling rather than as rational beings,” but only do so as a result of the social conditioning provided by a faulty education that results in women being reduced to “plumed and feathered birds” rather than as morally virtuous agents.100 The young senator puts her own life on the line for the cause of a truthful and justly democratic peace, enduring several assassination attempts in AOTC. The feeling that she brings to the movies may provide something of the sensibility that 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.”101 Arguably, she may even be, in many ways, the most compelling character in these movies as a result.
Nonetheless, Dominguez regards Lucas’ treatment of women as having regressed from his subversion of the fairytale damsel to the Padmé of ROTS, the final chronological installment of Lucas’ movie canon of the SW franchise, terming it “an eerie parallel to … [an] adolescent loss of self.”102 The issue for this particular commentator is that Padmé’s feisty outspokenness meant that “the unravelling and disintegration of her spirited character in Episode III was not only a disappointment, but smacked of betrayal as well.” She is reduced to a weepy stereotype of a woman coming undone. As Veronica Wilson argues, “the Padmé of Revenge of the Sith seems to have lost her forceful personality and much of her independent intelligence … [as she] becomes passive and ineffectual.”103 “I felt catapulted back into the world of traditional fairy tales and medieval romances where damsels wasted away and died of broken hearts, pale and weepy, unable to live for themselves if their knights abandoned them. The tracking shot of Padmé’s funeral procession and casket brings to mind Sir Thomas Malory’s and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s tale of Elaine of Astolat/Lady of Shallot, the beautiful maiden who dies of a broken heart after being rejected by Sir Lancelot and floats down the river to Camelot in a flower-strewn boat.”104
This, Dominguez, continues, means that “she can thus be read as an alarming reflection of the complex, confusing, and contradictory messages today’s young women receive from society and the media.”105
There are three main concerns commentators admit to in this regard. Firstly, there is the fact of the erosion of a powerful female character. The difficulty is that this is, while the drama is emotionally difficult to watch, as it should be given the prequels’ narration in the form of tragic drama. Her disintegration is precisely the point—it is tragic, and that is to be expected given the narrative trajectory of the prequels.106 Reading the classic trilogy as tragic drama indicates why it is that young Anakin on whom so many hopes rest, who displays immense potential and even generosity of character, so slips into the violence of a situation controlled by the political puppet-master. Given the close relationships of passion and trust between Anakin and Padmé, the latter is drawn unforgivingly and fatally into the unfolding disaster. The profoundly talented and virtuous young woman becomes more sinned against than sinning, to cite Lear’s self-referential words, a victim of circumstances largely beyond her control. Padmé becomes a victim of the tragedy, and her independent strength is sapped as she slips from determination into the moral emaciation of despair once she observes everything she has fought for crashing down around her, including her relationship with Anakin. To lament this feature of the narrative is to capitulate to the voluntarist naïveté that pervades earlier constructivist forms of feminist subjectivity founded on the modern liberal subject as agential free and spontaneous. Such a perspective has to be problematized, de-situated and transgressed by something more attentive to the more complex interplay of agency and the framing determination of agency. The unraveling of Padmé under the overwhelming pressure of neo-totalitarian violence may well provide a critical politico-cultural comment on the rise of trenchant and highly visible forms of patriarchal muscle-flexing masculinity in the contemporary Western world.
Secondly, the role of Padmé’s complicity in Anakin’s growing compulsiveness troubles Wilson. According to this particular commentator, for example, Padmé is actually to be blamed for Anakin’s “excesses insofar as she makes virtually no attempt to counter them.”107 What does this mean? After all, Padmé criticizes Anakin’s articulations of his ambitions in her quarters on Coruscant, and she listens to his grief stricken rage at the death of his mother on Tatooine. In the earlier scene Anakin begins to express his pain about his desires: “Something’s happening. I’m not the Jedi I should be. I want more, and I know I shouldn’t.” His wife attempts to console him: “You expect too much of yourself.” Immediately following the destruction of the Jedi Temple, and realizing that something terrible has just occurred, in fearful and personally helpless concern she asks Anakin at her senatorial home what had been happening. The story he tells that she finds difficult to believe is that the Jedi had attempted a political coup d’état. Yet she has no substantial reason to doubt her husband’s interpretation of what he had seen concerning Master Windu’s attempted assassination of the Chancellor, and of his expressions of threefold loyalty to the Republic, the Chancellor, and her. It is quite difficult to see what else Padmé could or should do, especially given both the young Jedi’s occasional privacy (so his wife appears unaware of the unhealthy hold Palpatine is coming to have over him) and her own business as a senator. The viewer must be very careful of imposing on the characters a “god’s eye” form of spectatorial perspective that is privileged to her gaze.
In the fateful scene on Mustafar Padmé confronts her husband about the stories Obi-Wan has been telling about Anakin’s slaughter of Jedi Younglings and his turn to the Dark Side. She refuses to succumb to his assertions about power as the way to protect her. “I don’t believe what I’m hearing. Obi-Wan was right. You’ve changed. … I don’t know you anymore. Anakin, you’ve breaking my heart. You’re going down a path I can’t follow … because of what you’ve done, what you plan to do. Stop, stop now. Come back.” Wilson, however, finds this final speech to Anakin in ROTS a particularly problematic one: “This speech is so out of character for the once-strong-willed senator Amidala that the audience almost invariably titters or winces in dismay.”108 In shock the young woman pleads with the emotionally disturbed young Jedi Knight. This is a man she loves deeply, and she offers him a moral mirror in order to curb his burgeoning destructive desires.
Until this point we have seen little of Padmé private life and so we simply do not know how she relates to the people she genuinely and intimately loves. There is a danger not only of speculative overextension of the material but of projectionism in the commentator’s criticism of her relationship to Anakin. Certainly the ability of Lucas to portray young people in love in a realistic fashion, and to write meaningful romantic dialogue, has been legitimately questioned. Yet it is quite another matter to complain that the self-confident woman becomes vulnerable in her most intimate and personally determinative relationship. To begin with, there is a strange and quite disturbing understanding of any relationship if it does not involve real vulnerability of one to another, or a mutuality of self-givingness that displaces and transforms autonomy (even if Anakin, for his part, does become abusive in ROTS, a all too realistic story). The SW saga’s portrayal of persons-in-relation and of flourishing as occurring then in fruitful mutual dependence (in contrast with the representation of the destructive instrumentalization of life among the colonializing Sith and Empire) resists the anthropological reduction of subjectivity to the modern post–Enlightenment mode of the ontologically atomized and pre-social self. As with Leia’s impact on the reformation of Han, Padmé’s relation to Anakin contests the isolationist essentialism of any pre-relational construal of selfhood by being bound up in responsibility to “the other.” Moreover, we have, in fact, seen nothing of Padmé’s psychology, and there is always the slim possibility that her frosty exterior is a psychological projection that masks real need. If this is a possible psychological route, then the issue would be less of Lucas’ failures with AOTC than with his failure to provide a significantly developed insight into Padmé’s psychology in Episodes I-II.
Having little sense of how tragic drama works Wilson laments that Padmé “seems unwilling or unable to resist becoming a victim of Anakin’s growing obsessive madness and gradual fall to the dark side.”109 It is difficult to know what to do with such a criticism. In what way is Cordelia morally responsible for King Lear’s madness and her victimization at the hands of her unscrupulous sisters? Can Othelia be held accountable in any straightforward way for the impending collapse of Hamlet? One of Wilson’s particularly alarming arguments sees her criticizing Lucas for blaming Shmi and Padmé for Anakin’s problematic emotional health, akin to blaming Cordelia for Lear’s eruption, for instance. The first stage of the accusation refers to Shmi Skywalker: “Lucas posits this loving mother-son relationship, strangely enough, as a primary cause or source of events that will gradually transform Anakin Skywalker into the terrifying Sith Lord Darth Vader.”110 Anakin has been separated from his mother, at an age that Yoda and Mace Windu worry is beyond an age that will not cause psychological damage. Naturally, the child in TPM feels understandable separation anxiety, a fear over loss which intensifies as he grows without being able to fulfill his promise to return and free his mother from slavery. He had been unable to keep this pledge, and the resultant heavy feeling of culpability was intensified further by the fact that his mother had even put the burden of responsibility on his very young shoulders: “Anakin, this path has been placed before you. The choice is yours alone.” Also, rightly or wrongly, he comes over the next few years to blame and gradually resent the Jedi Order itself for this preventing him from rescuing her. This is the reason why he turns his rage against Obi-Wan and the Order in the aftermath of his mother’s death. The dreams of his mother suffering and dying have made matters worse. How can this not psychologically not deeply scar and torture an adolescent, and leave him susceptible to the direction of a seemingly benevolent Palpatine? What any recognition of these features cannot do, therefore, is lead to the kind of simple blame game that lays causal responsibility at the feet of the Anakin-Shmi relationship in any straightforward fashion. Wilson’s is unfortunately an idiosyncratic reading that Procrusteanly reduces a complex set of conditions down to one, a simplistic one.
In fact, while this is a crucial element in shaping Anakin’s emotional development, it is nonetheless only one factor leading towards his tragic hamartia and metabole. By the time of AOTC Anakin has become a more complex figure than the boy of ten years earlier, although he was crucially the neurotically intensified product of the loves and desires of that child. The flaws lie deep within his person-forming soul. Thus while Anakin’s fall into the dark side (his “Sithing,” so to speak) may seem abrupt to many viewers of ROTS it has been a long time in the making. Significantly, he is now even rather ominously wearing darker colored robes than his Jedi kin. Speaking of the nineteen-year-old Anakin Lucas summarizes: “In this film, you begin to see that he has a fear of losing things, a fear of losing his mother, and as a result, he wants to begin to control things, he wants to become powerful, and these are not Jedi traits. And part of these are because he was starting to be trained so late in life, that he’d already formed these attachments. And for a Jedi, attachment is forbidden.”111 Yoda portentously warns Anakin of this in ROTS. Elsewhere, Lucas reveals that an unhealthy form of “attachment” “makes you greedy. And when you’re greedy, you are on the path to the dark side, because you fear you’re going to lose things, that you’re not going to have the power you need.”112 In other words, the problems lie in Anakin’s own emotional formation, and there are multiple contributors to it. It is imprudent to claim, as Wilson does, that AOTC “takes a dramatically misogynist turn, blaming both Padmé and Shmi for Anakin’s violent possessive emotions and his subsequent blatant betrayal of Jedi rules and values.”113 It is precisely the possessive love of Anakin that is unable to truly requite Padmé’s eventual care for him that has such catastrophic consequences, a possessiveness that is revealed in a scene on the transport cruiser in AOTC.
What we are treated to in the grief scene on Tatooine in AOTC is the way Anakin’s anger, guilt, resentment and sorrow, all growing out of his attachment to his mother, take on a new form. In his anguish he claims to desire the power over life and death, the power to be able to “fix” life in the same way that he can exercise technical expertise over machinery. He simply refuses to listen to Padmé’s caution. Here is an early indication that Anakin can mechanistically reduce others’ lives to the status of things, notably echoing the instrumentalizing disregard for the independent lives of others that is characteristic of the way of the Sith.
Anakin painfully verbalizes that he “should be” all-powerful, and he then threateningly expresses a new-found determination “that some day I will be. I will be the most powerful Jedi ever. I promise you. I will even learn to stop people from dying.” This is not merely his “grief talking” since a little later, when in a calmer frame of mind, he promises at his mother’s graveside: “I wasn’t strong enough to save you, mom. I wasn’t strong enough. But I promise I won’t fail again.” He imagines that the solution is one of sheer power and brute force as well as technical skill. The spirit of the Sith-way is already directing Anakin’s consciousness, and is dramatically fulfilled later when—after dreaming of Padmé dying in childbirth—he moves to secure the power he thinks is necessary for her safety from the scheming Palpatine/Sidious [ROTS]. He proclaims to Padmé that “love won’t save you Padmé, only my new powers can do that.” His wife despairingly asks, “But at what cost?” That Anakin has not given much consideration to. Instead, his response is to possessively assert his power: “I won’t lose you the way I lost my mother. I am becoming more powerful than any Jedi has ever dreamed of, and I’m doing it for you, to protect you.” The themes of vicious rage fuelled by guilt and grief, and arrogant adolescent resentment of his mentor literally combine melodiously. An inconsolable Anakin spits out his fury-filled diatribe two musical motifs are detectable—those associated with both Darth Sidious and Darth Vader.
Wilson, however, supports her claim through reference to a scene in which Padmé deflects Anakin’s romantic attentions with reference to their vocations, but nonetheless being suggestively attired in an arousing skin-tight, strapless, and cleavage bearing dress in the style of a femme fatale. Clearly Padmé, despite her ideals, is attracted to Anakin, and somewhat emotionally torn between pure political duty and erotic desire, just as the Jedi Padawan is torn between his monastic oath and his desire for the senator from Naboo. Again, however, while this could, at most, encourage the flowering of Anakin desires for the young woman it certainly does not cause his destructive neuroses, determine his catastrophic choices under the guidance of the self-aggrandizing plotting of the tempter, or force him to lose control of his Jedi instincts in eruptive bursts of violent fury. Wilson’s description sounds perilously close to the blaming of the victim for the victimizer’s action, and that would be a disturbing turn for a feminist reading. She makes at least a more sensible sounding point when announcing that “it seems as if much of Anakin’s rage stems from his resentment over the ‘control’ Padmé exerts over him without even intending to—to problematic and potentially ‘castrating’ force of his emotional dependence upon her. Thus he tends to blame her, in the long run, for his own turn to darkness.”114 Yet there simply does not appear to be any evidence for this. Anakin’s rage at his wife in the texts derives more from his fear of losing her—not only through death in childbirth, but through some deep-seated insecurity that imagines in ROTS Obi-Wan to be a love threat.
Wilson is indeed right that “Anakin’s fraught relationships with these two women lie at the heart of his growing darkness and willful, knowing betrayal of Jedi precepts and values.”115 However, she draws problematic conclusions from the textual materials. It is not Anakin’s appropriate desires for the females that cause his fall but the utterly inappropriate form of his desires for the females—his possessive, grasping, and ultimately self-absorbed desires which reflect an emotional immaturity and a distortion of the proper desire for the other as other. As Irigaray warns, “The will to possess you corresponds to a solitary and solipsistic dream which forgets that your consciousness and mine do not obey the same necessities.”116 Therefore, she continues, “in a conception of sexuality centered upon instinct, drives, affect, the partners … come to be defined as either haves or have-nots of corporeal ‘objects’ capable of producing and experiencing jouissance. They are no longer considered subjects. Interpreted in such an instrumental manner, sexuality is left uncultivated, or rather, assimilated to a technē which does not take intersubjectivity into account.”117 In the monastic context Anakin’s desires cannot mature, and it is this that has led to Lucas’ indication that the post–ROTJ New Jedi Order changes the form of rule of Jedi nonattachment—so that Jedi Younglings can remain at home for longer, and that they are permitted to marry (for instance, in some versions of the New Jedi Order stories Luke marries Mara Jade).118 If the scholarly value of Lucas’ hints and suggestions that have subsequently been developed in the Expanded Universe materials does not convince Wilson, then two simple textual elements should give pause for thought: firstly, the fruit of Anakin’s desires, his progeny, are “the new hopes”; and secondly, the prequels indicate that many of the Jedi’s practices lead to their complacency and contribute to their fall.
Fatefully, Wilson’s critical commentary inadequately neglects the importance to the impending tragic fall of three particular sets of relationships. Firstly, the developing father-sonlike bonding between Palpatine and the young Jedi. Ian McDiarmid interestingly comments that “if you wanted a subtitle for these movies it could be ‘Fathers and Sons.’ And while Palpatine isn’t, we must assume, Anakin’s natural father in this film [viz. ROTS] he is certainly a father-figure for him.”119 Secondly, Anakin’s lurking suspicions of the Jedi High Council. Thirdly, the youth’s intense resentment of his Jedi tutor: “It’s all Obi-Wan’s fault! … He’s holding me back!” Not only does Anakin’s tragic turn to the Dark Side not emerge from a vacuum, there are a host of complex causal factors involved that cannot be summed up in any simple way, as Wilson has done, and certainly not in terms of blaming the two women in Anakin’s life. With hindsight we can say that the processes and activities involved in Anakin’s training by his trainers, just as much as in the boy’s being trained, contribute to the looming tragedy and the emotional mess that Anakin ends up in. Anakin’s is, as Jeffrey Overstreet sympathetically remarks, something of an understandable fall into wickedness: “We can’t help but sympathize with Anakin as he surrenders to the Dark Side. Lo and behold, Darth Vader did not strive to be a heartless villain. He became one by trying to protect the one he loved, going blind to the greater good in the process. The stakes are finally high enough to earn gasps, and the ensuing tragedy is almost Shakespearean. … Anakin isn’t just arrogant; he’s reacting to a seeming lack of trust, care, and compassion from the Jedi Council.”120
To the suggestion that Padmé was not privy to her young husband’s troubles Wilson complains that “she also seems completely unaware of how thoroughly Anakin is being seduced by the blandishment of Supreme Chancellor Palpatine.”121 So Wilson asserts that “never … does Padmé warn Anakin about Palpatine’s possible hidden agenda or suggest that the Chancellor may be using the Jedi Knight for his own sinister purposes.”122 This is another textually unjustifiable claim, however. Certainly the young senator opposes Palpatine’s growing power, but there is little indication of the Chancellor’s political machinations until a startling revelation to Anakin in his chambers. Padmé herself had been unwittingly manipulated by him in TPM, and it was she who aided in his election to the position of Chancellor by virtue of calling for a vote of no confidence in Valorum. When the most insightful and prescient of the all characters, Jedi Master Yoda, finally confronts the self-proclaimed Emperor he enters the room saying, “I hear a new apprentice you have, Emperor, or should I call you Darth Sidious?” It is for this reason that Obi-Wan explains the terrible recent events and Anakin’s succumbing to the Dark Side by admitting that “he was deceived by a lie. We all were. It appears that the Chancellor is behind everything, including the war.” The revelation climaxes with Obi-Wan’s taking a couple of steps towards Padmé and sincerely elucidating that “Palpatine is the Sith Lord we’ve been looking for. After the death of Count Dooku Anakin became his new apprentice.” The fallen Jedi’s wife turns away with words of disbelief, but her body language suggests that she is not going to protest too much—after all, Obi-Wan is a trusted figure—and she admits “I can’t” believe you.
On the other hand, a third complaint centers on Padmé’s death as a result of the injured woman giving up life. Given the subject matter it is dealing with (the material that predates ANH) Lucas has to find some way of disposing of Padmé (just as, at time of writing, the Clone Wars animation series has finished without finding a way of removing Asajj Ventress and Ashoka Tano, possibly even Captain Rex of the Legion of the 501st). Of course, the question remains as to whether the movie did this dramatically well, and this is indeed a good question. It is distinctly arguable that there is something dramatically very flat about the directorial decisions concerning the way in which Padmé dies, something rather unrealistic, especially when one considers her assertion to Obi-Wan that “there is still good in him” which, if it is to be something more than a vain counter-factual whistling in the wind, sounds like it is the kind of thing that should give her hope. Padmé’s death is largely, then, a plot device in the tragic drama. The form that it takes is chiefly a symbolic gesture that cleverly and quite beautifully (in a stylistic, rather than a narrative, sense) enables death (and one which has just given life) to be juxtaposed with the scene of “life” (in which Vader’s “life” is constructed and imprisoned, a sort of living death). Saying that, of course, is still quite different from claiming that Padmé’s death itself is beautiful or romantic. Dominguez, however, astutely recognizes the moral difficulties involved in the depiction of her succumbing to despair and then death. “Throughout Episode III, she is focused mostly on Anakin’s needs, almost to the exclusion of the problems of the Republic and completely to the exclusion of her own compromised career and status.”123 This way of putting matters is not quite appropriate, however, since there are several occasions when she appears in her political role, albeit one interesting scene that witnesses the birth of the Rebel Alliance had been cut from the theatrical release of the movie. Lucas has certainly not helped his case by deleting this scene which indicates Padmé’s and Mon Mothma’s leading roles in giving birth, along with Bail Organa, to the Rebel Alliance. But the writing and filming of these, at least, subvert Wilson’s claim that Lucas “has created a patriarchal political system in which human males are fully in charge and other sorts of beings unimportant or expendable.”124 However, for the sake of pacing the director deemed it unnecessary, and such pacing considerations only make sense if the material has been considered unnecessary to the flow of the movie, and that is particularly the case if the material has been covered elsewhere. In contrast, it remains important to retain scenes depicting Padmé’s anguish in order to indicate how far she succumbs to despair, to indicate her humanity, and to suggest the intensity of the passionate commitment of the lovers to each other. Furthermore, while Padmé is indeed domesticated she is not purely domesticated. She remains a recognizable political figure whose significance is mitigated by the rising power of Palpatine. Wilson’s reading also takes a particularly eccentric turn at this point, bizarrely equating Sidious with witchcraft, and logically leaping further to note that that has predominantly been associated with women. This leap, therefore, enables her to regard the Jedi-Sith conflict as one between Christianity and paganism (this might be broadly arguable if for no other reason than some Christians boycott SW for involving a conflict between black and white magic). Sidious at the moment of Vader’s rebuilding appears to this critic like “an aged, withered crone” rather than, more appropriately, an image of a cowl-wearing Death who is styled on Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal.125
The moral trouble that Dominguez has with the form Padmé’s death takes has to do with its apparent irresponsibility. “Her death is both a supreme form of martyrdom … and a supreme form of selfishness.”126 With this Wilson agrees: “Padmé chooses her personal pain over her political duty, placing self-centered emotional distress above all other considerations. … Lucas chooses to have her embrace a selfish and needless martyrdom and perish.”127 In a sense it is a manifestly worrying criticism since it does not sense the collapse of Padmé’s world around her—the Republic has fallen, the Jedi have been slaughtered and their Order lies in ruins, the responsibility for this falls heavily on the shoulders of the man she is lovingly devoted to, and she too has become a victim of his murderously violent rage. The events are traumatic. Is it any wonder that she despairs? Where the issue of irresponsibility may well stick, however, is in the fact that two infant lives are now going to be left motherless.
Vivian Sobchack claims that “despite all their ‘futuristic’ gadgetry and special effects … the Star Trek films [of the 1970s and 80s] are conservative and nostalgic, imagining the future by looking backward to the imagination of a textual past.”128 Science fiction in general has been a male dominated genre, and the ways it constructs and represents gender can express a nostalgia for gender coding and gendered flows of power in favor of male domination. Yet, according to Patricia Melzer, “significantly, it is within science-fiction film and literature—a genre usually understood to be predominantly male, that we seem to reimagine gender relations most radically.”129 With the space operas of George Lucas, however, the issue of gender has been particularly noticed by, and remained controversial among, numerous commentators. There had, of course, been a disagreement over the planned ending of Lucas’ 1973 movie American Graffiti, with the male-only conclusion leading him to be accused of male chauvinism by influential film critic Pauline Kael.130 Lucas vehemently disputed this on the grounds of cinematic pragmatism: “It’s a movie about the four guys.” According to Pollock, for instance, “Lucas vehemently rejects the chauvinist label—it upsets and hurts him. He does not go around saying that the female of the species is inferior, and he has given women more management positions than most Hollywood studios.”131 In an interview in September of 1977 the director of SW revealed something very significant concerning how the redirecting of his vision of the heroine was forced upon him by the criticisms of others: “The first version [of the script] talked about a princess and an old general. The second version involved a father, his son, and his daughter; the daughter was the heroine of the film. Now the daughter has become Luke, Mark Hamill’s character. There was also the story of two brothers where I transformed one of them into a sister. The older brother was imprisoned, and the young sister had to rescue him and bring him back to their dad. But this posed some horrible problems. Nobody would believe it, it wasn’t realistic at all.”132 SW’s intertextual references to the likes of the Flash Gordon serial adventures and to the swashbuckling and Arthurian legends certainly display a nostalgic cinematic appeal. However, in this context, the envisioning of Leia is a move with no little radical possibility, contesting, among other things, the power-relations and ideological constructions of specifiable gender differences common to pulp science fiction. Here is an act of what Darko Suvin has famously called the operation of cognitive estrangement that provides a critical reflection on contemporary socio-political orders.
Nevertheless, by no stretch of the imagination can Lucas’ subsequent SW saga be called a “feminist text” or a racially emancipatory text, or to adapt Edith Wyschogrod’s term a “saintly” text.133 For good or ill, its energies clearly are too focused elsewhere. “Ultimately,” Cavelos stridently maintains, “Leia is unconvincing both as an action hero nor as a passive victim. The coherence of her character has been sacrificed to the story and the male characters.”134 However, that rather intellectually uninteresting observation does not necessarily entail that it can be easily read as an inscription of patriarchalism (Dominguez), and even more disturbingly “misogyny” (Wilson), or at least not in the straightforward terms characteristic of the criticism that has been leveled at it. So Merlock and Jackson argue in contrast that while “Star Wars can obviously be classified as updated, boy-oriented space opera … the well-executed presence of Leia meant the inclusion of a strong female character in the midst of the blossoming feminist movement.”135 As a result, SW may well be considerably more ambiguous in its moral depiction, both reflecting and simultaneously displacing and challenging the filmic conventions and values dominating the ideological landscape and reforming the ideological gaze of audience expectation, than these critics care to observe. Of course, this is not to necessarily disagree on a narrative level with Cavelos’ criticism that the female characters are distinctly underdeveloped, and that particular character flaws “increase until eventually they drain all strength, coherence and believability out of her [viz., Leia].”136
Nonetheless, the time has come for commentators to resist the seemingly self-perpetuating textbook mistake that the saga has no “moral ambiguity” but presents “straightforward, innocent and fresh-faced heroics,” to refuse the oversimplifying and generalizing readings of the text as straightforwardly culturally and politically conservative in their nostalgia, and to attend more concretely to the subtleties and nuances of the texts in order to identify more specifically what is ideologically problematic about them.137 There is real danger in investing Leia and Padmé’s characterizations with burdensome symbolic significance, a move that can imperil any attempt to de-essentialize the separationism involved in gender opposition. In other words, too much weight is placed on the shoulders of the two leading female characters, and this is the result of an imagination that construes them too neatly in terms of being representations, of being types of “woman” in a move that some consequently compresses multiple forms of engendered performance into a singularly essentialist depiction.
On the other hand, there is potential for providing a more progressive reading in observing the way alienating forms of alterity work in these cinematic texts. Booker, for instance, recognizes the way in which the SW movies’ binarism functions, not in terms of race or gender in any essentialist moment of opposition. “To a large extent, the opposition in [the classic trilogy of] Star Wars is couched not in terms of East vs. West [or, male vs. female, white vs. non-white, or human vs. non-human], but of human (the rebels) vs. inhuman (the Empire).”138 The movies trade on unmasking unhealthy forms of social organization and of the determinative desires in ways disturbing of the politics of “self-interest.” It is Palpatine who is, and who remains, an unredeemed character, most closely slipping into a modified form of binary coding between Jedi and Sith, culturally negotiated as perversely self-interested and self-aggrandizing (even to the point of assassinating his former Sith master, Darth Plagueis the Wise, and demonstrating the expendability of his own apprentices Darth Maul, Darth Tyrannus and Darth Vader). With the depiction of the Trade Federation, TPM, moreover, expresses something of the contemporary concern with the objectives and undemocratic means used by large corporations in reordering political relations and conditions in the absence of old-fashioned military colonialism.139 In Booker’s account there is an admission of the metaphoricity of the imagery used for the “evil” in the trilogy: “Emperor Palpatine, looking somewhat like the grim reaper with his darkhoodedly cadaverous visage, seems anything but human. Darth Vader, the most prominent villain in the original three Star Wars films, has literally lost his humanity: as announced by the signature whooshing of his mechanical respirator, he is in fact mostly machine, the majority of his body replaced by mechanical parts. Even all those legions of imperial storm troopers, who are presumably human, seem inhuman because of the armor they wear, making it more acceptable to have them serve in the film largely as cannon fodder.”
Booker, however, draws the wrong ontological conclusion from this, claiming that “this human vs. inhuman structure represents an us vs. them mentality that reinforces the good vs. evil polarity of the film. However, it also makes the seemingly clear moral message of the film somewhat problematic in that it tends to send an almost subliminal suggestion that those who are like us are good, while those who are unlike us are evil.”140 Despite being composed in the aftermath of the release of the prequels, and certainly with a number of years of hindsight available after Episodes V-VI—even, in fact, in the form of their Special Editions of 1997—Booker’s derivative analysis conservatively perpetuates the stereotypical “Manichaean” reading of the saga. His analysis fails to account for the tragic thematic in the Vader character, and therefore the fact that “evil” does not come from nowhere or have substantive form beyond the distorted desires formed by habituated action and ignorance. As a result SW does not support and maintain exclusionary forms of identifiable Othering, configurations of power through subjectivities formed by biological essentialisms, although ANH does come the closest to so doing. Reading SW in this way as a utopian attempt to envisage patterns of equitable relations, friendships and sociality as culturally positioned as transgressively liberated from, and reconfiguring of, exclusionary relations based on racial, gender and economic arrangements generates interesting possibilities.
In a haste borne from, among other things, an alacrity to attending to certain complicating elements within the saga, overdetermined readings are insufficiently sensitive to the deep ideological investments that pressure the “natural” and its subversion. Given the weight of reader concern with the ideological constraints of the SW movies and the layered ideologically transformative contention provided by the progress of the narrative itself, particularly in relation to the projections of alterity onto non-human (especially mechanical) characters, makes the texts sites of ideological contention and produces contradictory effects, including overdetermined ideological projectionisms on the part of the reader. Peter Krämer observes that in a poll conducted by Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner in 1986 about half of the respondents understood SW’s Empire in general terms “as an embodiment of evil,” as opposed to 24 percent who viewed it as representing right-wing dictators, and 12 percent who read it as representing communism. Krämer comments, “This poll suggests, then, that audiences were not only willing to attach political meanings to this science-fiction fairy tale but did so according to their own political beliefs, drawing on both historical precedents and current events.”141 To claim that SW is racist and/or sexist or not is to say as much, then, about the politics of the reader’s gaze. And the multiplication of critical commentary from any given perspective is frequently a sign of the cultural conditioning of viewing as well as the typical cloning of perspectives and arguments that then become reinforcing by repetition. What it does not do, fortunately, is to evacuate the texts of their potential not only to exhilarate but fascinate.