Star Wars and the Politics of Difference
In Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespearian-like foray into the superhero genre with Thor (2011) one scene offers a conversation between the New Mexico based scientists which draws a contrast between “science fiction” and “science fact.” The underlying assumption can be utilized to suggest that the genre of science-fiction is largely an imaginatively predictive genre, a narrativist use of a form of futurology.1 In contrast, H.G. Wells once articulated the relation between science-fiction literature and the future in a quite different way. He claimed that “the fantastic, the strange property or strange world, is only used to throw up and intensify our natural reactions of wonder, fear or perplexity. … The thing that makes such imaginations interesting is their translation into commonplace terms.”2 In this case, it is observable that science-fiction has often functioned as thought-experiment, a “revealing cognitive disjunction” from contemporaneity. In so doing it offers a different version of reality (even a different universe, or time) from that which we know and experience as everyday. But it does this as a way of asking socio-political questions about our sense of experienceable reality. So Keith Booker concludes his study by claiming that “SF films have provided the popular imagination with some of its most compelling visions of both the possibilities and the dangers of a future increasingly dominated by advanced technologies.” This might enable the genre to operate as a thought-experiment related, for instance, to the consequences of certain technological developments, offering cautionary tales about their abuse much in the manner of Mary Shelley’s highly lauded work Frankenstein. In this regard the technoscepticism of James Cameron’s The Terminator provides a recent instance. It trades on a problematization of technology at several points, although arguably the disaster it designs is not so much a result of technology in and of itself as of the decisions taken concerning it, and what it makes of persons. According to Constance Penley, “in one of the film’s most pointed gestures toward the unintentionally harmful effects of technology, the police psychiatrist fails to see the Terminator entering the station when his beeper goes off and distracts him just as their paths cross.”3 This ambiguity of hybridization is indicated by Forest Pyle who claims that Sarah Connor’s act of crushing the Terminator means “she gets to make good on what the film has constructed as our collective desire to crush the threatening technological other. … The Terminator is in this sense about the reassertion of sheer and absolute human agency, ‘the triumph of the will.’”4 The point is not so much that the movie exhibits a Luddite sensibility as much as it longs for a limiting of that which accentuates the sense of a runaway world, a world out of control and enhancing the prospects of the annihilation of human life.
That construal of technology, of course, is far from all that science-fiction is involved in doing, and its frequent political implications are pronounced. In fact, a study of the post-human, of the notion of the fluidity of identity in non-essentialistic anthropologies, for instance, would pay particular attention to the construal of “Otherness” in these texts. On saying that, however, the genre has frequently been overlooked as a source of socio-political critique, offering instead the awe of gazing on the visual astonishment of the spectacular dimension of human self-imagining. According to numerous critics, American cinema, particularly that produced and controlled by the Hollywood entertainment industry, exudes a politically conservative temperament. The shadow of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer looms large over the political reception of the culture of the cinema.
To read science fiction in a politically interrogative mode, then (and not merely as expressions of dominant cultural trends), is to offer something of a form of reading resistance. Booker, for instance, provides a useful allusion to the important work of Darko Suvin: “Perhaps more importantly, such films, despite being widely regarded as mere entertainments, have often provided serious and thoughtful explorations of important contemporary social and political issues. … While the estrangement from reality provided by the projected worlds of science fiction might make the political messages of SF film seem less threatening to some, that very estrangement also helps to provide new perspectives from which audiences can look at the world in which they live, potentially bringing into focus aspects of that world that might otherwise be less clear.”5
The suggestions here are that science-fiction products, despite their commercial form, can be resistant or politically radicalizing texts. In this regard, the constrictions provided by the commodified massification of culture so important to Adorno’s critique of the culture industry, or the predictability of the science-fiction genre announced by Susan Sontag, are subtly transcended.6 To cite Scott Bukatman, “Science fiction … has … served as a vehicle for satire, social criticism and aesthetic estrangement. … By positing a world that behaves differently—whether physically or socially—from this one, our world is denaturalised. … What science fiction offers, in [Frederic] Jameson’s words, is ‘the estrangement and renewal of our own reading present.’”7
Elsewhere I have already had reason to contest the claim to liberation in The Matrix, for instance, although I provided a rather underdeveloped hint that something quite different emerges from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and even from George Lucas’ THX 1138.8 Continuing the considerations of ideology and violence, indeed of violence-sustaining ideologies, that were at issue in the opening two chapters of this book, critical reflection cannot escape from a set of claims that identify crucial difficulties with the representation of otherness in Lucas’ SW. The political importance of the issues hardly needs to be stated, since as Kevin Wetmore argues, “in the innocence of childhood are the seeds for a dark future of Othering, oppression, appropriation and imperialism … because of stereotypes and models of oppression built into popular culture.”9 After all, outlooks and perspectives are not inbuilt but received, learned, and negotiated. As Kenneth Surin avers, “There is … no such thing as a ‘pure’ politics existing only in and for itself. Every kind of politics is a politics motivated and driven by some regnant ideological notion of the nature and scope of the political.”10 In particular, it is driven by some notion of who one is in relation to others.
Recent years have seen a proliferation of the figure and presence of the alien in cinema, from Contact, the Men in Black trilogy, the redesigned The Day the Earth Stood Still, the Transformers series, John Carter on Mars, Monsters, Skyline, Battlefield Los Angeles, The Darkest Hour, and Robot Overlords, to the comedies Paul, The World’s End or Alien Autopsy, and the horror of Area 51, Apollo 13 and Alien Abduction, to name but a few. So Heidi Kaye and I.Q. Hunter observe that “the alien, in the very sense of the word, has become central to popular culture.”11 What has been noticeable has been the shift towards a reactive politics of fear and subsequent exclusion with the image of the alien as threatening Other in or in movies such as Cowboys Versus Aliens, with the Alien franchise’s cross-over with the Predator series and with its prequel Prometheus; and the appeal of the proliferation of alien invasion narratives such as in the parody of 1950s alien movies in Mars Attacks!, Independence Day, the revamped classic War of the Worlds, even the Avengers; as well as a substantial presence in television series like Invasion, and the more recent Falling Skies and The Whispers; and so on. Kaye and Hunter observe about the shift from alien visitation to invasion motifs, “When a gung-ho Will Smith announced in Independence Day … that he couldn’t wait to ‘whup E.T.’s ass,’ he cheekily dispelled any lingering affection for our friends from outer space.” It is just such a motif that is parodied by Mars Attacks! For Kaye and Hunter, this shift in narrative depiction of the alien serves as a sign of a shifting political culture, of “popular culture’s hardening of attitudes towards ‘aliens’ of all descriptions.” They continue by observing that “sci-fi has returned with anarchic glee to the 1950s’ paranoid injunction to ‘keep watching the skies.’”12 In fact, Falling Skies and The Whispers come at a time when the paranoia of the X-Files, or even Spielberg’s Taken or The 4400, has been played out in considerably less subtle ways in conflictually xenophobic settings for science-fiction dramas like Fringe and the colonistically themed V. While it is certainly an overstatement given those depicted as co-operating with the humans in these dramas, and of the reappearance of the benign alien in movies like Earth to Echo, what emerges, to some degree at least, is the sensibility that “the only good alien is a dead alien.”13 Nonetheless, at least in one sense these cultural critics observe a marked difference from the 1950s. Without mentioning the Othering of the Middle East and the paranoia over the-terrorist-within that has become a staple of many a political drama (such as television’s Homeland and Spooks, or the movie The Siege), they notice the post–Cold War desire for an enemy: “their aliens no longer seem to stand for anything. Instead of metaphors for invading Communists and the dangers of conformism, they are simply and conveniently ‘other’—all purpose outsiders against which the warring chaos of American identities can muster and unite.” As mentioned earlier in this book, Paul Verhoeven, the director of Starship Troopers, asserts that “the US is desperate for a new enemy. … The Communists were the enemy, and the Nazis before them, but now that wonderful enemy everyone can fight has been lost. Alien sci-fi gives us a terrifying enemy that’s politically correct. They’re bad. They’re evil. And they’re not even human.”14 Verhoeven’s lack of irony in using the phrase “politically correct” with regard to such an use of terms for the alien such as “enemy” and “evil” is revealing of a powerful strand in American political culture.
It is in this context that politically subaltern consideration of George Lucas’ SW saga would illuminate the struggles and strains suffusing the American political consciousness over the past three decades—struggles with identification of self and other. According to Aubrey Malone, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 epic “The Birth of a Nation portrayed blacks so negatively that it all but ratified the demonic deeds of the Klan. Its propaganda effect relegated blacks to the back of the bus—both physically and metaphorically—for decades afterwards.”15 Commenting on this, Davies and Smith argue that “The Birth of a Nation has been seen as articulating a biological discourse of racial inferiority, whereby blacks are represented as happiest when dancing or working, and unable to cope with the responsibilities of citizenship. The work of exposing and critiquing these images, and the production and dissemination of positive images of African Americans, is very necessary due to the iconic status of The Birth of a Nation in Film Studies and American Studies courses, popularly, and for other filmmakers.”16 While moving in a markedly different direction from Griffith’s movie, racial difference is, critics aver, nonetheless handled by the SW saga in a distinctly troubling way. The saga reduces, this reading argues, any politically progressive impact Lucas’ movies may otherwise have. For Wetmore and others, SW, then, becomes a distinctly ideologically problematic text most specifically in regard to its treatment of the alien as the “Other.” In particular, according to Matthew Kapell for instance, SW uses categories of “race” in order “to reinforce ideas of difference and to reinforce discriminatory practices.”17 Keith Booker, moreover, links this up with what he perceives to be an us-versus-them scheme, or a pronounced Manichaeism, pervading the movies.
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. For example, the imperial storm troopers (who are slaughtered en masse in the film) seem to be human, but the film intentionally dehumanizes them in ways that seem to invite us to ignore the humanity of those whom we have identified as enemies. This same kind of thinking can also be seen in the representation of aliens in the film. As the famous cantina scene makes clear, the faraway galaxy in which Star Wars is set is populated by a number of intelligent alien species. However, these aliens appear to play a very marginal role in galactic politics, where humans (or former humans) remain the only major players. The very fact that the film’s most memorable portrayal of aliens occurs in the cantina scene (where most of the alien patrons seem to be criminals or outcasts of one kind or another) may be very telling. Other aliens depicted in the film and its sequels (Jabba the Hut, the Sand People, the Jawas) tend to be criminals or outlaws as well. Whenever aliens are portrayed sympathetically (Chewbacca or the Ewoks of Return of the Jedi) it is with a substantial amount of condescension (they tend to resemble cuddly pets or perhaps stuffed animals) that clearly marks them as subsidiary to humans.18
This chapter analyses the arguments commonly advanced to justify such a reading with Steven Sanders’ warning firmly in mind: “Virtually all bad writing about science fiction film reflects poor thinking about it, not only cheapening science fiction film criticism but also trivializing science fiction film itself.”19 It will be maintained, however, that properly educative and argumentatively valid ideology criticism still has some considerable way to go in relation to this set of movies. According to Christopher Deis, when commenting on the rebooted Battlestar Galactica television series, “audiences have difficulty with critically interrogating science fiction because race is in many ways erased. … In this genre, racial intolerance and humanity’s triumph over racial prejudice are used as thematic devices, but the existence of fully realized, racially Othered characters is relatively uncommon.”20 Accordingly, the contention is that although “otherness” is not often construed explicitly in racial terms, especially as a marker of difference among the human characters, the SW narrative is indeed shaped by considerations of difference and its problematic erasure in such a way that the most important feature of the eradication of difference in a colonialist mode occurs in the depiction of the Empire, and that is presented as an oppressive force. Of course, it is this political narrative and the use of the alien as other that intensifies the noticeable lack of non-significant non-white human characters in the saga, in not insignificant ways.
Returning to the closing scene of ANH which was the launch pad for critical reflection on the readings considered in chapter 3, the issue of racial difference can be raised through asking questions concerning the fact that Chewbacca does not receive a medal. What troubles commentators is the fact that his life had been put on the line as much as Han’s in the decision to enter the fray in the Millennium Falcon. The difficulty, it would seem, lies in what numerous critics perceive to be the tactical decisions of the writer/director which exhibit an inability to portray alterity well. After all, for the audience’s mirth Lucas had Leia earlier in this movie utter the memorable line “will somebody get this big walking carpet out of my way” at the Wookie’s expense. This is hardly the behavior of a senator who comes from a galactically democratic family supportive of the Republic and the egalitarian sensibility that is characteristic of democratic politics. In fact, it distinctly echoes the reference to Chewbacca by a Death Star commander in the disgusted utterance of the term “this thing.” The character from Kashyyk certainly has plenty to do that is noteworthy in the drama of the piece, but his configuration almost seems to function as a pet to Han Solo. Of course, it is well-known and perhaps significant that Lucas developed this co-piloting character from having his dog Indiana in his car’s passenger seat, and while that may explain some of the role that the Wookie plays it raises for critics significant issues regarding the master-slave dialectic in terms of the Solo-Chewbacca relationship.
Kevin Wetmore’s study is a case in point. He makes a number of critical claims that result in the assessment that SW problematically perpetuates stereotypes, although the appropriateness of his examples and the arguments he develops from them varies considerably. A substantial part of his account has to do with indicating that in these movies non-white human characters are distinctly under-represented. For instance, apart from a few exceptions, in the original or classic trilogy the humans tend almost wholly to be white and male, and only white human characters occupy key roles (Vader’s arguable non-whiteness has to be very carefully handled, as will be explained below). Lucas, Wetmore admits, had played around with the idea of casting a black actor in the role of Han Solo, and, of course, in early designs the character was a green non-human. However, “as a result of his desire to make a socially relevant, if not socially active film, Lucas ended up making a film without a single actor of color in a speaking role.”21 One should recognize that this observation does not determine the text to be racist as such, but it does at least suggest that it is insufficiently attuned to culturally liberating motifs and thereby the egalitarian potential, if such a thing could be legitimately identified in Lucas’ SW work, is distinctly curtailed. The complicity, then, would at the least be one of omission, and this “having the human characters almost exclusively white is,” Andrew Howe declares, certainly “disturbing.”22
More significant, however, is Wetmore’s argument that the non-Caucasian human characters that do appear are depicted in a less than positive light. Three particular examples are used to justify this claim from the classic trilogy. The first example is that James Earl Jones is the only black presence in ANH, and he plays the unseen role of the voice of the archetypal screen villain attired from head to foot in black. So, Wetmore asserts, “in A New Hope, evil is black and good is white.”23 In this form Wetmore’s claim is distinctly careless, however, even in the context of ANH, and Wetmore himself is compelled to recognize the fact that the stormtroopers are garbed in white armor, and the Imperial officers’ uniforms are green-grey (a metaphorically suggestive Nazi grey). Furthermore, one would add, the light pastel color used for the Tusken Raiders in ANH and later in TPM and AOTC, and also the draping of the Imperial bodyguard in red in ROTJ, equally destablize any simple and straightforward case made on the basis of color palette. Wetmore’s evaluation is consequently refigured to claim that “black and white are intermixed on the evil side. The problem is that no such commingling of black and white occurs on the heroic side. Not all bad guys are black, but no good guys are.”24 The use of the black waistcoat over a white shirt for the morally ambiguous Solo in ANH would further support this argument. However, with regard to the moral matter of identifying the human characters’ ethnicity a claim made on the basis of visual metaphors concerning the movie’s metaphysics is a somewhat difficult one to sustain without stretching the material beyond what it is capable of doing. The contrast in the movie is instead largely between the starkly sterile mechanized environments of the Empire and the naturalized tones of the Rebels’ location, and equally between the communal solidarity of both the Rebel Alliance (better articulated through the introduction of more non-human characters in the sequels) and the Jedi Order (in the prequels), and the distinctly evident species homogeneity of the Imperials. In fact, a little later, this chapter will develop the counter-claim that Lucas addresses issues of racial prejudice and exclusion precisely through the use of non-human species and droids. For now it is worth indicating how the use of color is accentuated in the prequels, through citing an observation made by Christopher Deis: “The bright and earthy colors that are closely associated with the Star Wars prequels correlate with the diversity of peoples that populate the Republic. As the narrative progresses, and the democratic institutions of the Republic decay and eventually collapse, we see the beginnings of an increasingly homogeneous universe. Here, as the color literally disappears from the film, the diversity of peoples and aliens literally disappears as well.”25
Wetmore’s critique references a reading made in 1979 by Michael Pye and Linda Miles. This earlier study likewise fails to develop the deeper connection of the visual stylization of the Vader character with the medieval tradition of the black knight. As Andrew Howe notices, “the association of whiteness with purity and good, and blackness with taint or evil, cuts across religions and cultures. In so marking Vader visually, George Lucas was doing little more than partaking in a symbolic form of cinematic narrative extending back through the black and white cowboy hats of Shane and other Westerns to the very roots of Western expression.”26 Howe’s point is that the special pleading of the heavily stylized use of coloration for archetypal characterization purposes is inattentive to the ethnic projections of a late twentieth century and early twenty-first audience. Of course, this is far from the end of the matter, since the question remains here whether the movies’ creator and design teams were themselves not sufficiently sensitive to shifts in cultural sensitivities. That is no minor matter, of course, and it stretches far beyond the issue of whether those involved are consciously projecting pedagogically problematic imagery that emerge from, and inadvertently or not support, morally questionable forms of ethnic representation. There can be nothing “innocent” in what audiences learn from gender stereotyping that “naturalize” racial hierarchies and anti-democratic forms of social relationality that locate power in ethnic differences. Such representational coding regulates perception and judgment, what Stuart Hall describes as how we “come to know how we are constituted and who we are.”27
Pye and Miles compare the iconographic blackness of Vader with the black depiction of the warlike gorillas in the 1968 movie Planet of the Apes, based on Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel La planéte des singes, and this association results in the kind of problematic judgments made on loose uses of textual material that is occasionally the case with some film critics. The film relies on allegory to explore and expose issues of race-relations and conflictual power-politics (the reference in Rise of the Planet of the Apes is, on the whole, one of the maltreatment of non-human species by instrumentalizing behavior).28 Cornea, for instance, argues that “given the long history of racist discourse that likens the ape and monkey to peoples of African origin, it is hard to imagine that audiences at the time would really have missed the racial implications in these films.”29 Likewise, a few years earlier, Eric Greene identified the racial allegories, such as the reference to the slave trade that brought Africans to the Americas in the scene depicting the capture of the humans, and the constructed binary opposition between apes and humans: “the makers of the Apes films created fictional spaces whose social tensions resembled those then dominating the United States. They inserted characters into those spaces whose ideologies, passions, and fears duplicated the ideologies, passions, and fears of generations of Americans. And they laced those characters in conflicts that replicated crucial conflicts from the United States; past and present.”30 It is significant in the 1968 movie that the apes have evolved well beyond (white) human beings, the latter being portrayed as uncivilized and pre-linguistic, and this is an undoubtedly radical move in the context of white supremacist arguments concerning black people’s intellectual capacities at the time. Moreover, even if one wanted to make a case that blackness is associated with violence in this movie, it is crucial to notice not only that the political oppressors are not the gorillas or the chimpanzees but the primary apes in the racially ordered political hierarchy, the orangutans, and it is notable how the film’s conclusion puts radical questions of interspecies co-operation or egalitarian politics to the ruling establishment. In fact, it is worth mentioning with more detail the hierarchical nature of the ape kingdom. As Cornea recognizes, “Much darker in complexion, it is the guards who blithely mete out punishment and who act as the enforcers of orang-utan law. In contrast, the orang-utans have blond hair, are paler in complexion than the chimpanzees, and dictate the law of the land. Complexion therefore dictates certain behavioural characteristics: the dark chimpanzees represent an extreme unthinking, animalistic violence and the pale orang-utans represent a cold and controlling rationality.”31 Accordingly, she concludes
on the one hand, the species war that ensues in the film obviously draws upon racist myths and can be read as playing out the fears of white Americans concerning the civil rights movement and the violent, racial confrontations of the period. On the other hand, the films can be understood as working to expose the essentialist myths at the core of interracial antagonism and inequality. Unlike patently liberal films of the time that also approached race relations, like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (dir. Stanley Kramer, 1967), the Planet of the Apes series does not present audiences with ready-made solutions to racial conflict. For example, by the end of the first film inter-species conflict is not resolved through peaceful understanding and a conclusion is only brought about upon the geographical separation of ape and man. Distinct from the Star Trek series of this period, the Apes series of films did not present audiences with a futuristic vision of a peaceful society in which harmony is restored or difference subsumed by an all-encompassing Federation. Instead, they presented audiences with a future/present world in which racial difference equalled inequality, violent discord, division and conflict.32
The contrast between this political vision and that of Griffith’s 1915 Birth of a Nation is marked, given that the latter depicts the Ku Klux Klan’s liberationist function as being one of saving the United States from Americans of Afro-Caribbean descent. As Davies and Smith observe, this movie, “through its representation of the fictional excesses of black-dominated legislatures, the film represents the granting of civil rights to blacks as catastrophic.”33 Griffith utilizes the narrative to make a claim about the ability of the North and the South to become united against a common foe, an alien other, in order to enable American flourishing. Lincoln Geraghty recognizes the countercultural challenge to racist supremacism and violence: “Films of this period [the late 1960s] stood out as bleak warnings from the counterculture that continuing down the path of nuclear proliferation [Dr. Strangelove] and social injustice [Planet of the Apes] would ultimately lead to America’s and humanity’s destruction.”34 In fact, in many ways this earlier movie can help the commentator make the opposite case from that of Wetmore. It can provide a context for Lucas’ SW to address issues of racial discrimination, prejudice and violence in subtle ways using non-human characters to depict otherness. As Darko Suvin argues with respect to science fiction literature, the genre is notably marked by a form of perspective-distancing, what he calls “cognitive estrangement.”35 Accordingly, the genre defamiliarizes reality and encourages the contemplation of the known world from perspective that is distanced from it. “SF,” he continues, “is distinguished by the narrative dominance or hegemony of a fictional ‘novum’ (novelty, innovation) validated by cognitive logic.” Lucas’ SW saga offers a perspective on issues of race that are distinctly distanced, by portraying certain power-relations between the human and the non-human. Such an approach is problematic in the view of several commentators, and serves to defer the problems of the text. In this regard, it is worth citing an observation about Battlestar Galactica made by Deis: “While the show is anchored in many ways by encounters with and considerations of the Other, BSG does not overtly engage questions of racial difference among the human survivors. This is significant because race has historically worked to order societies, structure power-relationships, and to determine which groups have access to resources and privilege. This omission is especially problematic given how deftly BSG has introduced and considered other questions of difference throughout its narrative.”36
The issue for Deis has to do with the “choice to move the lens away from the humans and onto the Cylon Other [and this] represents a lost opportunity for explicitly exploring human nature and human society in a time of crisis.”37 The reason for this, he claims with reference to an observation made by Gregory E. Rutledge, is that the imagined future has eliminated “the inconveniences created by such problems as racism and prejudice … [among humans] with the category of the Other transplanted onto aliens, cyborgs or robots.”38 This, he argues, occurs in two main ways: “by an appeal to human progress (as in Star Trek) where humankind has outgrown such ostensibly petty differences, but in other instances, racism and racial inequality are corrected by removing people of color from the narrative.” The danger is that this absence can, unwittingly, “give rise to a white that reinscribes existing racial divisions.”39 Deis makes a valuable point, but how far it can be pressed is not clear. After all, the alienizing of depictions of prejudice can indeed serve to bring otherness, ethnicizing hegemonies of power and of racial exclusion in a politics of purity into view. So the significance of just such a procedure of projection of the other is recognized as a valuable one by Cornea. She argues that “the alien, monster or robot of science fiction may provide an example of Otherness, against which a representation of ‘proper’ human subjectivity is established, interrogated and, on occasion, problematised. Images of Otherness in science fiction can be understood as a metaphor for forms of Otherness within society or between societies and in this way the genre can engage with the fears and anxiety surrounding a given society’s Others.”40 Here she echoes a claim made by Tzvetan Todorov: “The best science fiction texts are organized analogously. The initial data are supernatural: robots, extraterrestrial beings, the whole interplanetary context. The narrative movement consists in obliging us to see how close these apparently marvellous elements are to us, to what degree they are present in our life.”41 In fact, in her post-colonialist study of science fiction literature Patricia Kerslake declares that rather than mask issues of difference the alien releases it to view: “While the presence of the Other is essential to a human self-perception, it is equally important that the Other is distinctly non-human, so that we may more easily see our differences.”42
Moreover, the link between Vader and James Earl Jones should be much more carefully handled than Wetmore’s evaluation allows, since as the cultural commentator himself admits Jones was only introduced to provide vocal gravitas to the character in postproduction, and the actor was even originally uncredited in the end. In other words, there is no necessary racial coding in the depiction of Vader, and claims to the contrary tend to overstrain the material. Moreover, in this context, the way Lucas develops Vader over the coming sequels is particularly suggestive of the need to be distinctly hesitant with respect to this protagonist. Wetmore comments that “when Vader is no longer bad he is no longer black. His voice changes.”43 Daniel Bernardi likewise asserts that “once Vader returns to the Force, to the side of good, he literally turns white.”44 These critics, however, put substantial strain on the material in order to make it perform a function it not equipped to undertake, since if race was integral to characterizing Vader ESB had already determined him to be white by virtue of the later revelation of his identity as Anakin Skywalker, something which would fit well with the racial and species homogeneity of the “racial and totalitarian imperial state.”45 In that regard, Vader does not turn white but the audience instead comes to see what it already knows when Anakin and Luke are face-to-face. After the self-revelation to Luke in Bespin the audience is able to watch a considerable number of minutes of Vader’s monstrous menacing onscreen time in the awareness that he is Luke’s father. On the forest moon of Endor Anakin takes his place alongside Obi-Wan and a non-white and non-human Yoda. Nevertheless, what is certainly required by ANH is a form of racial coding that mitigates the problematic associations of non-whiteness and wickedness.
In many ways Lucas would seem to have provided that with the introduction of Lando Calrissian in ESB. It is undoubtedly suggestive that the imagination behind the saga introduces a black character and sets him up to occupy an important function in the unfolding drama in ROTJ. Elvis Mitchell, for instance, feels that “[Billy Dee] Williams’ addition to the cast of [The] Empire [Strikes Back] showed an admirable sensitivity on Lucas’s part, an empathy that few filmmakers would’ve displayed.”46 Yet, the characterization is regarded as being deeply flawed so that “Lando is a kind of roué cliché,” on some occasions a token and on others a stereotype.47 Wetmore makes several important critical claims in this connection. Lando, he argues, is little more than a Chewbacca-like sidekick. “Vader leaves the dark side and becomes white, Lando joins the Rebellion and becomes ineffective.”48 For instance, in the rescue team he is apparently the least useful member who himself requires rescuing from the grip of the Sarlaac by a visually impaired blaster wielding Han Solo. On the other hand, the scene develops Lando in this fashion for dramatic effect while importantly demonstrating that he is not, in the end, a dispensable character (and therefore on par with the Skywalker twins, Han and Chewbacca). It is also worth presuming that his infiltration of Jabba the Hutt’s palace guard has yielded significantly useful information for the development of Luke and Leia’s rescue mission, although this is speculative and it is certainly not visually enacted for the audience’s benefit. A second layer of this figure’s dramatic ineffectiveness is identified in terms of the lessened importance of the climactic tri-pronged attack on the Empire in ROTJ. So Wetmore argues that “the destruction of the second Death Star is presented as secondary to the objectives of the other Rebels in Jedi.”49 This is a misleading way of couching the problem, however. The eradication of the Empire’s second version of its weapon of mass destruction is, in fact, the ultimate aim of the Alliance’s assault, and it explains Lando’s confident rejoinder to the Admiral’s commitment for the fighters to disengage and retreat on learning of the Death Star’s weapons being fully operational: “We won’t get another chance at this Admiral.” Nonetheless, there still remains a question concerning the importance of this leg of the attack for the dramatic narrative, given the increasing centrality of the Luke-Vader story arc in particular. This is seemingly what Wetmore has in mind in his otherwise loose criticism given that he traces the limitations placed on the screen-time devoted to, and the ease involved in, Lando’s efforts in the Millennium Falcon. This underdevelopment of Lando’s character owes much to the fact that the saga is not only most concerned with “the adventures of Luke Skywalker,” but that the Luke-Vader relationship comes to occupy more and more of the focus of the drama’s interest. While that focus certainly does not undermine complaints about the health of presentations of ethnicity in the movie, and thereby deflect the sense that he largely remains a token figure, it does at least suggest that the critical questions need to be framed in a way different from those readings that too neatly and simply assume and assert that the SW movies’ depict a form of racist politics.
Wetmore’s argument is far from finished, however. He regards the depiction of Lando’s days prior to assuming the role of Cloud City administrator as a scoundrel as constituting a problem when, as the sole African-American in Episodes IV-VI, there is no “positive African-American counterpart” to balance out his character flaws.50 These concerns are intensified with regard to the character’s initial role in the saga as “betrayer,” and as “a sexual presence.” Again, however, the critical reading here is distinctly exaggerated. To begin with, it is not insignificant that these vices are not displayed again in the narrative. So Howe admits that “although there is much to criticize in Lando’s entry into the narrative, the character never again displays this facet of his personality.”51 In fact, with regard to the latter, it is vital to the development of the character that he quickly (considerably more quickly than Han, in fact) exercises moral responsibility, including risking his own life to undo the duplicity that delivered a carbon-frozen Han into the clutches of Jabba. If anything, he initially appears not as one attempting to secure his own position, as Wetmore believes, but rather as someone placed in a tragic dilemma involving conflicting duties to his responsible relations. Revealed as a kind of Han Solo character initially, this former gambling scoundrel and rogue had already become the responsible administrative leader of the Bespin mining colony. After all, Han plays the role of sexual tempter in ESB, and prior to that one half of the love rival with Luke for Leia’s interests in ANH. According to Richard Dees, then, Lando has been given no choice but to become the betrayer: he is responsible to the Bespin mining colony and accordingly acts against his “friend” in order to resist tyrannical Imperial control over the business and its people. Lando’s choice is seemingly the utilitarian one of the “greatest good for the greatest number.” “To his credit,” Dees observes, “when he realizes that his goals are hopeless, he does what he can both to evacuate as much of the colony as possible and to save Leia, Chewie, and Threepio from Vader. After losing his colony he doesn’t think of himself at all.”52 He compassionately gives himself for others, and later actively attempts to right the wrong of his earlier Faustian pact with Vader (which he could hardly be accused of being morally culpable for, according to Dees). Dees continues by claiming that “far from being a narrow egoist, Lando is in fact one of the most morally courageous figures in the Star Wars saga.”53 This, however, is not quite the stamp Lucas puts on the situation. Lando is “a foil for Han,” a type of Han from ANH.54 The important issue for Rees is whether Lando truly feels himself to have no moral choice, or, and this is more likely, merely willing to give up the life of his old friend Solo (and the lives of his friends) for simple quantifiable economic considerations. In this second possibility he is not too far removed from those who speak of human casualties in military calculations as “collateral damage,” evaluating people’s worth in dehumanized terms. Lando’s actions suggest that his so-called friend’s well-being is less valuable than his business enterprise—Han’s life consequently becomes a commodifiable product, part of a tragic business transaction. The Luke who rushes to save his friends even if he dies trying and the Han who is carbon frozen are the important moral foils here, and this instrumentalizing utilitarian ethic is itself one that Lando soon dispenses with in the moral development of his character. What the drama does not do in the way it does with Solo is provide sufficient time to display the moral formation—that occurs quite swiftly in the narrative of ESB.
The third test case is Jedi Master Mace Windu. Following on from the introduction of Lando as an important and heroic character, the use of Samuel L. Jackson to depict a leading member of the Jedi Council, the ruling body of the Jedi Order, is telling. According to Wetmore, however, “Mace Windu is the underling of a puppet who is slowly losing his ability to use the Force.”55 Yet Mace is the second-most authority on the Jedi Council (meaning that neither of the two most significant Jedi were white!). It is he who executes the highly skilled bounty hunter Jango Fett in the Geonosian arena (who had earlier defeated Obi-Wan on Kamino). It is he who is also proven correct with regard to his intense suspicions of Anakin that are voiced throughout the prequel trilogy. If anything, therefore, the race-case against Lucas’ characterization here has to be the weak one of criticizing an instance of character underdevelopment, and anything more than an attempt at substantive criticism of the movies’ positive ethnic sensibilities appears particularly feeble in this instance. Indeed, Wetmore’s case is not that Mace is a stereotype, or at least not in the sense that Wetmore regards Lando as being on significant occasions. Howe’s point is a good one: Samuel L. Jackson’s “presence in the narrative constitutes one long, distracting cameo having little to do with race.”56 After all, it is well-known that he announced his interest in being involved in Lucas’ project on a British Channel 4 talk-show TFI Friday. The criticism focuses on the Jedi being under-utilized and therefore as lacking the ability to be a positive black role model in the saga. In this regard, Mace would exist as another token gesture who is involved in the drama largely for terms of political correctness. He “is passive to the point of being inert for most of the second trilogy.”57
The final set of examples derives from the trilogy of prequels. According to Howe, “Clearly, George Lucas learned a thing or two from the criticism he received for the initial trilogy. Indeed, the sixteen-year gap between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace allowed him to rethink the manner in which he populated Naboo, Coruscant, and the other planets featured in the prequel trilogy. This narrative arc is populated with more minority characters than its predecessor.”58 Yet TPM in particular actually intensified the critical complaints concerning problematic depictions of otherness in racially stereotyped fashion. From the moment of its release a number of the movie’s characters were roundly denounced as concrete instances of ethnic stereotyping. Wetmore follows a substantial body of critics in complaining that “the Other is represented not by Asian, or African, or Arab, but by the truly alien—monstrous beings from other planets. … Lucas follows a long cultural tradition in the West of viewing the East as home of the monstrous and non-Westerners as nonhuman.”59 Critics suggest that there is a “Jewish-like” character depiction of the avaricious of junk-dealer Toydarian Watto; a “Caribbean”-styled servile Gungan people (see below); and a “Japanese” reference in the portrayal of the greedy Neimoidian businessmen of the Trade Federation.60 Howe, however, suggestively dismisses these suggestions. With regard to the Neimoidians, he observes that even if Nute Gunray possesses what can be interpreted as an East Asian accent (and that by British actor Silas Carson) Tey How does not (to Howe’s ears, in fact, he sounds more Hispanic). Moreover, the association of Asians with capitalist greed may say more about how these readers unwittingly understand Eastern people than about TPM’s characters. With regard to Watto, Howe’s counter is to ridicule the vast array of readings of him as Jewish (because of his nose, which is actually a trunk, and business acumen), as Arabic (because of his thick guttural accent and unshaven look), and as Italian (given his gangster connections to the Hutt family). “Can this character really be all of these things? The answer is clearly no. Watto is another example of a character reflecting the racial tensions of the general society. … Watto demonstrates the richness of signs in Western culture, whereby the active mind will find whatever it seeks in the cultural referents presented.”61
These counter-claims of Howe suggest that it would not be inappropriate to ask whether Wetmore’s case is one of substantial exaggeration so that SW becomes a Rorschach test reflecting the critic’s own prejudices. As Howe asserts, “In some cases, accusations of racial typing were overstated with such strange and exotic creatures serving to reflect cultural anxieties, particularly among viewers weaned on preconceptions regarding race in the initial trilogy.”62
The critical point concerning the depiction of race in Lucas’ SW universe is an important one, depending of course on how far one attempts to press it. The strong thesis would be that the relative invisibility of non-white human characters renders the texts locked in a hegemonic politics of identity. However, a weaker and more subtle thesis observes the implicit political hegemony in operation. As Melzer claims, “It is important to destabilize claims of silence” over the presence and role of non-white persons in science fiction “for they themselves often have the effect of silencing.”63 After all, in a largely racist genre, she continues, “next to the racial politics of the science fiction community, the texts themselves often … propagate a typical liberal color blindness.”
There are, further, substantial hints of something quite different pervading the saga. These appear in two main ways. In the first place, the way in which Lucas construes the politics of representation and alterity takes a quite unexpected form. In The Gospel According to Star Wars I drew attention to the role and character of the aliens and robots as functioning to make (however subtly) a point about discrimination.64 After all, on one occasion in ANH Luke’s droids are barred from entering Mos Eisley’s cantina with the bartender’s snide remark being “we don’t serve their kind here. Your droids, they’ll have to wait outside. We don’t want them here.” The racist overtones are particularly noticeable in the novelization which records the bartender continuing as follows: “‘I only carry stuff for organics, not,’ he concluded with an expression of distaste, ‘mechanicals.’”65 On another occasion Luke has to tell his newly acquired protocol and translator droid C-3PO to address him as “Luke” rather than with the more deferential “Sir Luke” which is instinctive to the droid, and which carries overtones of the American pre-bellum slave-master. The fact remains that it is these somewhat less obviously dramatically heroic and socially important characters, modeled on Kurosawa’s comic relief duo in The Hidden Fortress, who dominate the opening screen-time of ANH. The galaxy’s fate even rests in large measure on the mission appointed to the astromech droid R2-D2, and the droid’s claim at various points invites disbelief from his counterpart such as the assertion that the diminutive character is having “delusions of grandeur.” Among other things, he saves Amidala’s Royal Starship from destruction at the hands of the Trade Federation in TPM, is integral to Anakin and Obi-Wan’s locating of the Chancellor aboard The Invisible Hand in ROTS, and so on.
Here Howe observes that “the bulk of minorities in this [classic] trilogy derive from aliens and droids, suggesting a post-human world whereby racial difference has ceased to become a marker of identity when there are other species against whom identity barriers can be formed.”66 So the exotic use of non-human species in politically equitable relations with the human characters offers a perspective on alterity that cannot be underestimated. This is the kind of approach that drives movies like Steven Spielberg’s more sentimentally styled Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. and the more recent District 9 and Earth to Echo, among others. The second and last of these four involves the “alien as friend” motif, not merely displaying the alien as Other but as non-threatening Other and therefore as defined out of the positive projections of the desires of the human characters. According to Kerslake, “Regardless of worthy intent, any text that attempts to relegate the Other to the position of ‘friend’ is guilty of the very crime it strives to prevent. Whether the alien is portrayed as aggressive and troublesome or friendly and sociable is academic. The issue is not the approachability (or otherwise) of the Other, but that the myth of the alien as the noble savage has been perpetuated.”67 The aspiration here is “for the Other to become as they would have them be.” Filmed in a documentary style, District 9, in contrast, is more complex in its depiction of the aliens, and refers to the aliens in a derogatory fashion as being “prawns,” implying that they are “bottom feeders” and “scavengers” as well as making an observation regarding their physical appearance. There are numerous signs on the streets and on buildings of human/alien separation in Johannesburg that provides important political echoes of the conditions during the apartheid regime. For this reason, the aliens were interned in a temporary camp that subsequently became militarized and quickly afterwards “a slum” that is referred to by one new reporter as a “township.”
Noting the significant departure from the “invasion” and “abduction” narrative devices for encounter with the alien, John Wright proclaims that “at its most basic level, Close Encounters reverses the negative fears of otherworldliness and presents the alien other as a being to be engaged merely for the sake of that engagement. … The monstrosity of the alien other of previous cinematic images is thus changed, not only for the characters in the film but also for audiences of the late 1970s, mirroring a cultural period in which the simplistic othering of communism and non-American ideologies that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s was blurring.”68
Keith Booker, however, offers an interesting challenge to the reading of the alien as Other in Lucas’ SW. “As the famous cantina scene makes clear, the faraway galaxy in which Star Wars is set is populated by a number of intelligent alien species. However, these aliens appear to play a very marginal role in galactic politics, where humans (or former humans) remain the only major players. The very fact that the film’s most memorable portrayal of aliens occurs in the cantina scene (where most of the alien patrons seem to be criminals or outcasts of one kind or another) may be very telling. Other aliens depicted in the film and its sequels (Jabba the Hut, the Sand People, the Jawas) tend to be criminals or outlaws as well.”69
The claim about the cantina characters is rather weakened by recognizing that this is supposed to be frontier of the galaxy, an outlying system in which the Empire has little interest or presence, and therefore precisely an environment for the congregation of all manner of disreputable character. Moreover, the “low life” Obi-Wan selects for the task is a human—Han Solo. On the other hand, Booker’s suggestion is that the alien tends to disappear from central positions of power. Again this way of couching the criticism also deteriorates somewhat under the pressure of recognizing that the racial homogeneity of the Imperials is precisely one of the problems at issue for Lucas in the narrative, that is, of course, until one observes that in ANH the Rebellion itself appears to be rather racially homogenous in its own way. But what about Chewbacca? “Whenever aliens are portrayed sympathetically (Chewbacca or the Ewoks of Return of the Jedi),” Booker continues, “it is with a substantial amount of condescension (they tend to resemble cuddly pets or perhaps stuffed animals) that clearly marks them as subsidiary to humans. … Star Wars is, from this point of view, anything but an endorsement of otherness.”70 Nonetheless, while this set of observations is interesting as a reading of ANH it is less useful for explaining Yoda for whom the narratives reserve a particularly prominent and reverential place, and in which this ancient sage performs numerous crucial functions.
For instance, while the film does not develop its critical suggestions very far beyond the symbolic depiction of various issues, so that it understandably becomes more a vehicle for the spectacular rather than a re-education in value judgments and moral presuppositions, a revealing moment is the introduction of Yoda. As mentioned in chapter 2, Luke has the impression that power is to be met with greater power. The opening scene of ANH, then, is solved (if not by being bigger at least by being better, as with the use of the SOMF, the small one-man fighters, against the super-weapon in the climatic battle of this movie). Carl Silvio’s economic reading misplaces the David-versus-Goliath motif of this scene: “The opening scene of A New Hope enthrals us, in part, because it invites us to invest it with both our fascination and fears of late capitalist techno culture.”71 Luke’s training under the diminutive Jedi Master involves a deconstruction of a certain understanding of power, and the use of the non-human character for such an important task in guiding the redemptive journey of Luke is deeply significant. It, therefore, is simply not straightforward to argue, as Veronica Wilson problematically does, that Lucas “has created a patriarchal political system in which human males are fully in charge and other sorts of beings unimportant or expendable.”72 Wilson has had to exclude large and significant moments from consideration in order to provide such a forceful reading.
Yet, as if to underline the fact that depicting Otherness constructively well beyond being exclusionary is a significant issue that is at stake within the narrative itself, the Jedi Master is only one of several non-human and/or non-white figures seen to occupy significant positions of authority in the pre-imperial Jedi order. The Rebel fleet itself in ROTJ is commanded by a Mon Calamari, Admiral Ackbar. The important senator Bail Organa, husband to the Queen of Alderaan, and played by the Chicano actor Jimmy Smits, becomes the infant Leia Skywalker’s adopted father. Perhaps the point could have been reinforced by configuring Chancellor Finis Valorum in non-human terms, although interestingly that might have suggested that the leading figures are not human, thereby re-raising the issue of specism in an inverted form. Actually, on saying that, the constituting of Valorum as non-human or as a non-white person could intensify an important moral function—the rise of Palpatine leads to the increasing homogenization of the Empire in terms of the power of white humans.
Howe makes the case that “given the perception of aliens as racialized others, Lucas may be attempting a multicultural statement about race and power in his portrayal of edges of empire.”73 In fact, the visionary behind the saga himself explicitly makes just such a claim according to the creator of SW’s biographer Dale Pollock: “‘Chewbacca’s nonhuman and nonwhite,’ Lucas says. ‘I realise it seems rather obscure and abstract, but it was intended to be a statement.’ Lucas claims to be a fervent believer in equality. ‘I get quite upset over injustice and inequality,’ he says. The robots and Chewbacca were there to demonstrate that no matter how odd or different people seem, they can still be true and faithful friends.”74 The cantina scene in the Tatooine of ANH displays the exotic visual feast of a microcosm of a universe teeming with super-abundant life-forms, and does so not as something on which judgment concerning superiority is offered but as an alterity that is natural to daily interactions in parts of the universe that Tatooine is otherwise quite remote from. For this reason, it is significant that it is Chewbacca whom Obi-Wan converses with about the prospect of being chartered to Alderaan. Here, in this scene, the audience becomes directed towards a character in whom it will have significant emotional investment over the course of the series, and who, while humanoid in physical shape, remains alien. In fact, part of the backstory is that after the invasion of Kashyyk the Empire enslaved the Wookie race, traded by Trandoshan slavers—Han Solo rescues Chewbacca from these conditions of bondage, hence the life-debt faithfulness that is evident of their relation in the classic trilogy. The political import of this is noteworthy. According to Kearney, “Rather than acknowledge that we are deep down answerable to an alterity which unsettles us, we devise all kinds of evasion strategies.”75 One such strategy, he remarks, in fact the primary one, “is the attempt to simplify our existence by scapegoating others as ‘aliens.’”
Added to this is the multiplication of non-white characters in the prequels. There are no white human characters on the Jedi Council itself, the human characters being the black Adi Gallia, the Chalactan character (with an ethnically Asian actress) Depa Billaba, in addition to another non-white actor playing the humanlike councilor Eeth Koth, the Iridonian Zabrak character. Again, while this appears to be an attempt to respond to critics’ concerns over ethnicity and identity politics in the classic trilogy, the question remains as to whether this non-white presence is dramatically sufficient to be anything more than a token gesture. On the other hand, when the movies are watched in episodal order then something interesting emerges, as suggested above: the plethora of different human races and non-human species in the galaxy is muted through the growing power and control of the totalitarian governance of the Emperor and the racial hygiene of the Imperial state, so that difference is only really seen on the Empire’s borders on place like Tatooine. The movies depict the rise of the instrumentalization of others’ lives in the racial singularity of the Imperial system, as is symbolized well by the use of clones for the armored and ultimately expendable and endlessly replaceable infantry. Deis here makes an astute point: “As the narrative progresses, and the democratic institutions of the Republic decay and eventually collapse, we see the beginnings of an increasingly homogeneous universe. Here, as color literally disappears from the film, the diversity of peoples and aliens literally disappear as well.”76 That would mean that while Wetmore is right to recognize that ESB “still manages to promote the idea that while humans are everywhere in the galaxy, the vast majority of them are white” the evaluative point would be quite different from the one he and others are making with regard to the whiteness of the saga.77 The screened sensibility does not provide an ethnic sense of problematic otherness, but rather of the destructiveness of certain forms of political agency and thus of moral performance. Lucas turns the issue away from that which is substantively locatable in differentiating strangers through race, gender, and economic class. The divisions rather have to do with issues of power, oppression, self-aggrandizing hegemonic moves.
Crucial in this regard is the prequel’s highly controversial addition to the SW universe among even the saga’s most hardened fans of Jar Jar Binks.78 The Caribbean accent critics have found particularly disturbing. However, Howe believes that “the similarities to this culture end there.”79 As he explains in a puzzled tone, “The suggestion that Jar Jar’s ears are representative of dreadlocks is strange, as they look very much like ears.” The bewilderment echoes Lucas’ own: “Those criticisms are made by people who’ve obviously never met a Jamaican. … How in the world could you take an orange amphibian and say that he’s a Jamaican?”80 Howe’s evaluation of the critical argument is certainly quite promising for an alternate perspective. “Creating a space alien with a recognizable accent is a bit thin when denoting Lucas a racist, however.”81
Moreover, and substantially, critical readings must complicate their accounts in several further ways. For instance, it is evident that Jar Jar’s accent is noticeably different from that of other Gungans, and the accents of Boss Nass or Captain Tarpals in particular are not as easy to geographically place. Secondly, Wetmore’s citation from Brent Staples concerning the pidgin Gungan dialect of Galactic Basic as making them “the stupidest species in the film” sounds like the worst form of colonialist condescension towards pidgin English speakers.82 Is it really a sign of lack of intelligence, or is it the way cultural way the language has evolved in this part of the galaxy among a quite isolated and private people? Thirdly, any claim about Jar Jar as stereotyped Caribbean involves an ample generalization in relation to the other Gungans—there can be no claim about any Gungan other than Jar Jar with regard to being lazy, incompetent, and even a “servant” and so on.83 This is simply not what is displayed onscreen. After all, Jar Jar has been excluded even by his own people. Fourthly, Wetmore’s claim that the Gungans are “primitive” appears more of a projection of his technophilia—i.e., that blasters, space ships, etc., are demonstrations of an advanced civilization—whereas the significantly sophisticated defensive weaponry (Fambaa transported shield generators, energy shielding, and light-explosive plasma energy balls), submariner Bongo transportation devices, and stylish underwater cities protected by powerful hydrostatic membrane fields are considered to be signs of techno-archaic cultures.84 According to David West Reynolds, for instance, “The Grand Army employs both technological wizardry and traditional weaponry.”85 Fifthly, the important function to the saga of this bungling Gungan entails that he is not merely reducible to either comic relief or the sales of figurines to pre-adolescents. Not only is he, in his dim-wittedness, the senator who sounds the horn fatefully proposing absolute emergency powers for Chancellor Palpatine (AOTC), but his acceptance by Qui-Gon Jinn is morally significant (TPM). The Padawan Obi-Wan doubts his worth only to have his own lurking elitism, surfacing in comments of seeming disdain for the Gungan, exposed and challenged by his Jedi Master. The contrast between Qui-Gon’s attitude and that of Vader when judging beings’ worth solely on their ability and performance, and disposing of those who prove to be without worth, is evident. Whether Lucas could have played down the possibility of marking him as Caribbean certainly remains a live question, however, but not one that can have the effect of mitigating the important iconoclastic role he plays in relation to issues of power and exclusion. “A driving theme in Star Wars is appearance versus reality. This issue takes on new meaning with Jar Jar, as his value is hidden deep within him. So deep, in fact, that a Jedi such as Obi-Wan cannot see the value in him. Only Qui-Gon and Amidala find his worth.”86 Padmé’s role here is made even more significant by the lurking humanocentrism that she has been born into and has imbibed the spirit of in her own ideological formation. So Reynolds reveals that “like all the Naboo, Queen Amidala was taught to think of Gungans as barbarians.”87 It is for this reason that when Padmé, while Queen of the Naboo, bows in humble submission before Boss Nass of the Gungans she is making an important symbolic statement about the symbiosis of all life-forms.
Wetmore is at least positive about TPM’s addition of Captain Panaka, played by a British actor of Ghanian descent, and the pilot known to viewers by his call sign, “Bravo Three.” While the latter plays a role in the Naboo attack on the Trade Federation battleships, the former is worthy of note. Panaka is the head of Naboo’s Royal Security Forces, acting as the military head answerable only to the Queen elect herself. His advice is considered seriously by the Queen, even if she does not necessarily follow it; he is of independent mind and on occasions expresses his disquiet with his political superior’s plan of action, including the return to Naboo when in forced exile on Coruscant. He leads the military planning for the attack on the usurping Trade Federation forces, and displays courage and integrity throughout. In fact, Wetmore contends, “Captain Panaka is a sensible, forceful, thoughtful character who plays an active role in the narrative. … The role is one of the smaller in the film, but it is a significant one in terms of positive characters of color.”88
Nonetheless, the cultural commentator slips from this constrained critique into one that plays far too freely and loosely with the concrete particularities of the text when he grandly announces that in “the Star Wars films … the good guys are almost all white males and the bad guys aliens who stand in for other Earth ethnicities.”89 So he asserts later, “Lucas casts European (Caucasian) actors in the heroic roles and reduces the evil characters to literally alien Others.” Presumably, just to be pedantic for a moment, he means ethnically “European” actors, hence the reference to “Caucasian,” since Han and Luke, among others, are played by nationally American actors. It is worth unpacking this in relation to the texts themselves in order to demonstrate its problematic exaggeration. In ANH the “good guys” (an oddly child-like phrase, but perhaps it works appropriately to describe the rather morally simplistic conditions of Episode IV) are Luke, Han, Obi-Wan, and the Rebel squadron (all white males). However, one cannot overlook the role of Leia, Chewbacca, and the two droids. Women are significantly underrepresented in Lucas’ boys’ adventure story which is focused on Luke Skywalker, and non-white humans are absent. However, even here in what is arguably the most morally problematic of the six SW movies (ANH) one cannot claim that “the good guys are almost all white”—of the main characters mentioned above, four of the seven are not males, and three are not even human never mind white. As for the simplistic and leading language of “the bad guys,” Ponda Baba and the Tuskan Raiders are certainly alien, as Wetmore’s critique allows, and with the special edition of 1997 we could add Jabba the Hutt to this group. Yet Dr. Evazan is human-like and, in fact, he is a white male. Indeed, the two distinctly racist comments made in the movie come from the white characters, the Mos Eisley cantina bartender and a Death star officer. Moreover, of the main group of movie “baddies,” Darth Vader’s ethnicity has not yet been revealed, Grand Moff Tarkin and the entire Death Star’s entire commanding body are white males. In ESB again Luke, Han, Obi-Wan, the Rebel squadron, and the Rebel infantry are all white males; but to Leia, Chewbacca, and the two droids the movie adds Yoda and Lando. Again while women are underrepresented, and there are no non-white human women at all, now six of the nine heroic figures are not white males. Of the Imperials, again the officer class is composed entirely of white human males (in fact, they are all have English accents), the Emperor appears to be white, and the revelation of Vader’s identity puts him into the same category. Of the group of bounty hunters that appears on the Star Destroyer Boba Fett’s ethnicity is hidden from view, Dengar is a human white male, IG-88 and 4-Lom are both droids, while only Bossk and Zuckuss are non-human “alien” males. The same trend towards maximizing the non-white male presence occurs in ROTJ. To the groups mentioned above, the Rebel Alliance becomes more visibly complicated with the introduction of Mon Mothma (a white woman), Admiral Ackbar with his ship’s bridge ethnically deriving from his Mon Calamari species, and Nien Nunb who co-pilots the Falcon in the assault on the Death Star. The non-human Ewoks are significant to the unfolding drama as well. Further, Jabba’s entourage is predominantly composed of male non-humans, but not entirely, and his Twi’lek palace supervisor Bib Fortuna is white. Once again, the contrast with the personnel of the oppressive Imperial system is stark and significant.
The prequels intensify this complication of the racial and gender coding further. In TPM white males are in the majority of the body of the main characters the movie identifies with—Qui-Gon, Obi-wan and Anakin. However, while Padmé is white she is certainly not male, and while for his part Yoda is male he is not a white human being. Added to this is a Jedi high Council composed of no white male Jedi, and which has three females all of whom are non-white (albeit one is non-human). The Naboo are not racially or gender homogenous, and the Gungans are non-humans. Equally, the Senate representatives express the galaxy’s species diversity. Certainly here the enemies of these groups are now all non-human but for Sidious/Palpatine. In AOTC the black male Jedi Master Mace Windu occupies a slightly more significant role than in Episode I. It also adds the two non-white males Senator Bail Organa and Captain Typho as Senator Amidala’s security officer, as well as the non-human male Dexter Jettster. The non-white male Jango Fett and his cloned “son” Boba are attached to the list of enemies of the Republic (they were played by Maori actors), but the white male Count Dooku/Darth Tyrannus is a Sith Lord seen to be configuring the anti–Republican rebellion by the newly formed Confederacy of Independent Systems (“the Separatists” for short). ROTS, for its part, introduces the non-human Wookies and the Pau’ans, as well as the non-human male General Grievous (a mechanically rebuilt a former Kaleesh warlord) on the Separatist side, while unleashing Anakin and the Clone troopers against the government of the Republic, the Jedi, and even the non-human Separatists.
The most one could say, then, from this lengthy and intellectually lightweight observation from statistics in response to Wetmore’s claim that “the good guys are almost all white males and the bad guys aliens” is this: in the classic trilogy, the very small group of the movies’ main heroic protagonists are white and two-thirds male (Luke, Han and Leia), while the commanders of the Imperial enemy are wholly white and male. In the prequel trilogy, the main protagonists are three-quarters male but only half are white human male (Anakin, Obi-Wan, Padmé, and Yoda), along with an increased racial and gender complicating among the important supporting characters; the commanding Sith are white human males (at least once Darth Maul is disposed of), and they use a variety of non-humans disgruntled with the Republic to seize power.
In the second place, Lucas’ treatment of the “evil within” entails that wickedness is not racial, ethnic or gendered, but rather misformed character. Peter Lev admits that while “Lucas is not responsible for the uses politicians and governments make of his film … the ease with which his ideas were put to political and military ends shows something about the Manichaean quality of the story.”90 Despite the propensity of certain critics like Lev to continue reading the movies in a dualistic vein, 1980’s ESB comes to problematize just such a mood. Crucially, for instance, in the training of Luke Skywalker in Jedi wisdom there appears a considerably more complex dialectical interplay between the exteriorization of evil (so dominant in ANH) and the interiorization of evil. And yet, even given the powerfully simplistic aesthetic of good-evil’s characterization in ANH, dualistic readings of the earlier Episode in the saga should already have been somewhat chastened by the double material thematics of a self-serving Han Solo and a Darth Vader (all-too) briefly revealed by Obi-Wan to have been “a young Jedi … who was a pupil of mine before he turned to evil. … Vader was seduced by the dark-side of the Force.” Already with ANH’s back-story of Vader there is a highly significant inverted metanoia. It is this that the prequels develop as their narrative arc.91 What emerges is the fact that particularly after ANH Otherness functions as a way of depicting arrangements of post-racial, post-species and post-gender co-operation and equity in a celebrated differentiability. The way that problematic Otherness is depicted is in terms of the behavior of those who are self-aggrandizing (whether of the Sith, the Empire, the capitalists, or the gangsters). Now we are in a better position to appreciate the significance of the fact that, in obvious contrast to the oppressive homogeneity of the wholly white male and human makeup of the Imperial navy, the Rebellion and the earlier Jedi Order represent something of interspecies and gendered diversity. Thus it would seem, then, that the saga does indeed exalt a “politics of difference,” a relating of one to another that is not organized on the basis of exclusive forms of race (even species), gender, or economic relations. There is something more fundamental to the sense of identity and the organization of relations than these allow for in “politics of exclusion in indifference to difference.” It is this imagination of a properly configured inclusion of all manner of difference that is integral to identifying the shape of the distortions of evil and suffering. Consequently, a reading such as Matthew Kapell’s is idiosyncratic to the point of seriously distorting the material. He asserts that the racial stereotyping serves merely “to emphasize the larger underlying fact that Star Wars reduces the behavior of both aliens and humans to their biology.”92 Whatever one makes of the controversial reduction of Force-consciousness to biology (Kapell’s notion of undemocratic hereditary rule is narratively bizarre given the fact that the Jedi are not the galaxy’s rulers, only its guardians), especially when seen alongside J.K. Rowling’s characterization of “muggle” wizards in the Harry Potter series, he entirely misses the importance of training and educative habituation in the saga (not only of the Jedi Padawans), of the nature of the Anakin story-arc as tragic drama, of the moral redemption of the Han and Lando characters, or simply the nature of complex relations and moral responsibility that undergird and direct the narrative. His reading of the clone troopers as personality-determined is confused precisely because he has missed the point that they are forms of instrumentalized life, bio-engineered killing machines—bio-droids, in fact. Kapell laments that “behavioural traits—independence and violent abilities—are not merely genetic but so biologically based that they can be modified.”93 Yet, this trades on a dualistic anthropology that suggests that psychology and physiology are not interdependent, a science fiction evasion of what is known from how personality can be substantially modified on occasions of physical trauma to the brain.
On the other hand, the fact that Lucas never allows for the performative moral redemption of the Tusken Raiders in SW’s political depiction of ethnic and cultural multiplicity is not an insignificant and disturbing flaw that morally marginalizes these “others” without critically inclusive reserve. Whether one attempts to ethnically code them as Arabs, given the desert location of this nomadic people on Tatooine, or a North American indigenous tribe, given their threat to the settlers on the outer rim, it is a difficult to respond to them as anything other than in terms of the pure binary construction of pure “other,” a malignant “not-us/me.” There can be no hospitable agency of conversation or negotiation with this monstrously violent other, and no compromise. All that can be expected as a consequence of this regulative ideological representation is property theft and death. The exploitative portrayal of the alien as pure bestial colonizer, therefore, secures rather than disrupts the politics of othering by alienating the species from “decent” or civilized life and agency. The alien as a race or species as a whole is ruled to be perilous, and therefore this particular one on the loose is not an exception. At no point are the Sand People depicted with any redeeming qualities, other than the strategically clever quality of masking their numbers of riding in single file, according to Obi-Wan in ANH. The elderly Jedi Master depicts them in terms of cowardice: “the Sand People are easily startled,” and in AOTC Cliegg Lars describes them to Anakin with racist overtones as being sub-civilized, “vicious, mindless monsters” who only “walk like men.” The fact that they are portrayed as communicating solely through unintelligible grunts, snarls and howls, adds to the bestiality of the representation of the species, and therein they are effectively silenced. Crucially, in this regard, when Jar Jar first meets the Jedi in the Naboo swamps and is rhetorically asked if he is “stupid” he responds with “I spake.” Such a possibility is denied to the nomadic inhabitants of the desert planet of Tatooine. They remain throughout, then, solely as uncultivated, savage and threatening characters. Importantly the reference to the species as Tusken Raiders is a discursive strategy that defines them purely as problem, as threat, and therefore this reference linguistically offers already the parameters for making ethical judgments on their diminished character and moral worth. Admittedly, one of the backstories to TPM describes Jedi Master Eeth Koth as having trained Tusken Jedi Sharad Hett, a simple little detail that could have had a considerable transgressive effect on the Othering of the Tusken Raiders in the cinematic saga.94 The only factors that can in any way mitigate the force of this Othering have to do with SW’s description of the violent conflict as a moral one, one of the character of human action and desire. In other words, its Other is not so much meant to be the Tuskens but the dispositions of the Sith, echoed somewhat with the saga’s gangsters, Trade Federation and Jawas. On the other hand, there might be the slightest inclination of a refusal to simply type them as Other for the heroes’ Other-destroying self-protection in AOTC. This undermines the bravado of pure Othering, of the celebratory violence enacted against the Other as threat. The reference to the “women and children” provokes moral critique from within the narrative itself, a realization by Anakin that his actions were deeply problematic. The guilt suffered over this action is returned audibly in Anakin’s execution of Count Dooku, a Sith menace, in ROTS.
Formally, then, despite the way in which Lucas develops a colonial and post-colonial context for reconsidering the nature of subjectivity, with his transgressive aliens construed as subjects-in-relation, the Sand People continue to echo some of the elements used to depict Grendel in Beowolf, or the creatures in Troll Hunter, or the H.R. Giger designed creature in the Alien series, elements that suggest that all is not terribly well with Peter Lev’s confident argument that “Star Wars creates an ideologically conservative future, whereas Alien and Blade Runner create future linked to liberal and socially critical ideas.”95
It is worth spending a little time on Ridley Scott’s 1979 movie Alien in order to set into relief the use of the “alien” in SW. It is noteworthy that the relations of the crew of the deep space vessel Nostromo operate seemingly beyond racial and gender distinction. The contrast takes a different form, between that of the vulnerable flesh of the humans, and the bodies of violence of the alien. The movie opens to audience view with the sight of the sleep pods. The reference, here, may well be to Invasion of the Body Snatchers in which the pods bore that which is monstrous, that which induces dread. If so, the allusion here is a subversive one—the pods in Alien are protective cocoon-like devices to hibernate the crew for the lengthy duration of the deep-space voyage. From this a dichotomy is produced between this protective image and the starkly contrastive pod image later in the movie that takes the form of the eggs. As Roz Kaveney observes, the image of crew member Kane awaking 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.96 “The egg is a Malign Sleeper, the thing you awaken at your peril.”97
The titular “alien” in Scott’s movie, then, becomes construed as an Other in the basest of senses—instinctual, destructive, self-preserving, and so on, a pure and deadly threat to the now fragile lives of the human crew (and indeed, the world that the crew is attempting to return to). Otherness, the unreasoning beyondness, is simply that which necessitates either destruction or one’s being destroyed by it, at least once encounter with alien otherness becomes unavoidable. This constitutes an inter-galactic echo of the terror-inducing mood of Jaws, or of other monster movies like the pair of American made Godzilla movies and of Cloverfield, movies which often accentuate the sense of threat and generate the mood of foreboding by the use of the confined space and the dark lighting.98 “The Sulaco is like a great shark, or like a Swiss Army Knife—it is an image of brutal strength and ingenious efficiency. Horner’s score, as we watch the ship move through space, is at the same time military and mournful, horn and trombone calls and drumbeats—there is a tremendous dignity here, but also a sense of foreboding.”99
Nonetheless, very soon the crew descends into bickering. The relations between them are antagonistic, conflictual, driven by self-interest. Kaveney insightfully observes this theme from the Nostromo reference: “The Nostromo takes its name from a novel by Joseph Conrad and the June 1978 draft of the script has, as one of its epigraphs, Conrad’s aphorism ‘We live, as we dream—alone.’”100 It is this that sets Ripley’s character as female off from the others for Kaveney, always threatened by self-interested betrayal by the male characters.101 Consequently, “one of the reasons why Ripley’s relationship with the cat is so touching is that there is nothing in it for her—it is one of the few entirely selfless relationships in the film. The fact that she is capable of this, even if it is not her default mode, is the thing that makes her the creature’s opposite.”102
Likewise, James Cameron’s Aliens portrays a moment of maternal care of Newt by Ripley, a moment that prevents her from being consumed by the machismo image of the hero. As Doherty argues well, this tempers any masculine reading of her “strength and assertiveness” through “maternal devotion.”103 In one celebrated scene she stands brandishing her weapon with the young girl protectively in her other arm, “at once the woman warrior and the solicitous mother.”104 In fact, Cameron’s movie depicts the interrelationships in quite different ways, although the marines have an aggressive and offensive form of camaraderie-in-arms. Even natality is not sentimentalized, since the humans are brutalized by the Queen and the consequent birthing from them is a monstrously violent one. Here Aliens depicts the aliens’ colonizing instincts with a further reference to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as the bodies become incubators for the species’ maturation.
The Alien of Ridley Scott and James Cameron, not to mentioned David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, then, characteristically enacts a deep cultural Manichaean move that is bound up politically with the scapegoating mechanism, as Richard Kearney recognizes. The monstrous, is the unintegratable “other,” and it is to be excluded otherwise it will destroy human existence. According to Kearney, “various exchanges between the characters focus on the monstration of sacrificial scapegoating, thereby exposing the ways in which our most feared monsters can serve as uncanny doubles for our all-too-human selves.”105
Kearney’s is an analysis that moves with the psychoanalytic approach to these movies methodologically common to the important reading of one like Barbara Creed.106 “Human space travellers actually find themselves playing ‘host’ to the hostile monster from outer space, thus discovering (to their horror) that the monster is not just ‘out there’ but ‘in here.’ The dragon-shaped alien, recalling portraits of the satanic beast of the apocalypse, is capable of invading our most intimate being. So that the thing these human astronauts consider most foreign is in fact the most familiar. What really terrifies them is the alien within, already inscribed in the homely but such that it cannot be integrated or named. The extraterrestrials in the series thus serve, I am suggesting, as imaginary personifications of our inner alienation, reminding us that we are not at home with ourselves, even at home. They are, we might say, postmodern replicas of the old religious demons: figures of chaos and disorientation within order and orientation.”107 In this regard, the “chest-burster” scene, in which the monstrous “other” is violently “born” out of Kane, takes on a particularly important resonance.
For Kaveney, “the film explores these areas of body horror so comprehensively that it is almost impossible to map any one interpretation of the creature as a single correct one—were it possible to accuse Alien simplistically of gynophobia, Ash would offer a useful balancing paranoia about male violence.”108 Nonetheless, it is significant that the gender and racial differences between the human crew are distinctly relativized by a conflictual other of pure monstrous proportions and qualitative difference. It is this radically always alien difference that drives Scott’s first foray into science-fiction/horror genre fusion. Otherness, the unreasoning beyondness, is simply that which necessitates either destruction or one’s being destroyed by it, at least once encounter with alien otherness becomes unavoidable. Here is an inter-galactic echo of the terror-inducing mood of Jaws, accentuated if anything by the use of the confined space and the dark lighting. These conditions intensify the sense that this movie involves a catastrophic encounter with the monstrous. There can be negotiation with this monstrously violent other, and no compromise (unless death is courted).
There may, however, actually be a quite different way of construing the characterization of the alien, and that might, then, lead to a politics less supportive of the simplistic “us-them” scheme. Given the conflictuality evident among the crew members, and the life-instrumentalization and self-interest of the corporation (the Company), the alien is an intensified version of the self-interested humans. In Scott’s movie, Ash’s lack of concern for Kane, in protection of the alien, represents the inhumanity of the corporate culture in its intensified culture of self-interest. “The novel Nostromo, after all, deals with the machinations of a mining company whose intentions to its workers are anything but good and with mined silver that brings death to all who have anything to do with it.”109 “Ash on the other hand is a menace precisely because he has been programmed, programmed to act as the perfect company man who will always do as he is told.”110 This critical perspective on big business is accentuated by Cameron’s take on the material. In this contribution to the Alien franchise, the company is called Cyberdyne, a distinct intertextual reference to the technology company named in The Terminator franchise. This is the corporation responsible for the invention of the Skynet missile defense system, an A.I. that becomes sentient, and in that moment of self-awareness turn, like Adam and Eve, turn on its creator.
Aliens’ Carter Burke, the company representative, is portrayed as entirely without redeemable qualities. Late on in the movie Ripley is forced to castigate him by announcing that the aliens do not betray each other for a percentage. Yet even Ripley’s moral condemnation of Burke’s profit-making desires cannot entirely mask the overlap of the predatory instinct of capitalism and the monstrousness of the alien. Interestingly Cameron depicts a number of aliens all co-operating with each other without individualistic self-aggrandizement and through this the contrast is drawn between two sets of predators—those belong to the corporation’s determined military personnel and the collectivity of the alien species. After all, Cameron’s is largely a combat movie. In fact, there is even a reference in Aliens to Vietnam. The high-tech corp. defeated by ill-armed Vietcong is reflected in the defeat of the technologically advanced troops by the survivalist mechanisms of the alien other. Thomas Doherty, for instance, observes that “the freak-outs, wild firefights, scrambled video, surly grunts, lower-class ethnicity, macho posturing, even the calculated appropriation of military vernacular, play like a Vietnam-period run-through-the-jungle.”111 If this is the case, then while Aliens does raise political questions concerning issues of colonialism in America’s foreign relationships it nonetheless does not present the Viet Cong with the kind of sympathetic treatment that Lucas’ ROTJ does with its design of the dramatic role of the Ewoks in the narrative. In other words, Cameron’s own admission that his depiction of the Marine mission to LV 426 is a replay of the Vietnam War accentuates the political effect of the “othering,” with the alien as the monstrous threat that can only be engaged with through violence.112 Consequently, Amy Taubin regards this movie as “the most politically conservative of the series.”113
Such a scapegoating mechanism is exhibited in much superhero literature, even in Peter Jackson’s cinematic depiction of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. While much has been rightly made of Tolkien’s Augustinianism, the very way he works with archetypal characters tends to make evil something that Others possess a little too neatly, and these Others as species/races are thereby excluded from the sympathies of the viewer. Of course this is significantly offset by the notion of temptation and change, especially with the Smeagel/Gollum, Sauruman, and the Frodo characters. Even the possessive fetishizing of the ring of the Men, and the fracture of the relationships between Men, Dwarves and Elves, suggest something more interesting than the descriptions of irredeemable Orcs, Gobblins, Uruk-Hai, and especially Sauron might otherwise suggest. For its part, the thing that partially saves Alien is the Othering of the Company and its interests so that the way that otherness is depicted, then, is of class struggle and the implications that acquisitive desire has for the wellbeing of the multi-ethnic crew. Given the conflictuality evident among the crew members, and the self-interest of the corporation, the alien is an intensified version of the self-interested humans. According to Judith Newton, Alien “evokes, in rather explicit fashion, … [an] uneasy recognition that now everyone is forced to be a company man or understood by them, and somebody who is finally expendable in the name of profit. The title of the … ship, Nostromo, ‘nostro homo,’ our man, provides an allusion, of course, to Conrad’s working-class hero, another company man, who dies understanding that he has been betrayed by ‘material interests.’”114 As mentioned above, even in the sequel Aliens Ellen Ripley’s moral condemnation of Burke’s profit-making desires cannot entirely mask the overlap of the predatory instinct of capitalism and the monstrousness of the alien.
According to Andrew Howe, “Despite being set in a distant galaxy, the SW franchise has never been able to escape the gravitational pull of contemporary racial politics.”115 Lucas presents an environment of human and non-human, white human and colored human co-operation among those not associated with the enforced racial coding of the Imperial system. For the cosmopolitan Jedi Order, the old Republic, the Rebel Alliance, even Jabba’s court racial difference does not appear to be an issue that marks out problematic forms of otherness. At least in narrative terms, there is no reference to the ethnicity of Lando, Mace Windu or Captain Panaka, in fact of any of the human figures. In that regard, racial difference has been denied its naturalizing biological essentialism, and this subverts the equation of any hegemonic performance with true subjectivity, implying that they are historically contingent constructions, manifestations of certain modern colonial arrangements that emerge from hegemonic situations of power and the exclusion of those denied power. In contrast, the movies portray otherness in terms of those determined by virtues of social responsibility and those who instrumentalize life for self-aggrandizing purposes. In the politically focused narrative it is the Empire and the Rebellion who are paradigmatically “other” to each other. Lucas simply refuses to invest skin color and ethnicity with moral significance, as if, as Lola Young observes in the early history of Hollywood, “to be black was to be evil, to be hypersexual, to be morally debased, to be inferior.”116 Both the socio-cultural utopianly designed Rebel Alliance and the Jedi Order subvert binaristically self-purifying categorizations of otherness in any racial differentiation among the human characters. Moreover, the alien is rarely depicted through the binary symbolic of “the monstrous.” Otherness and difference are, therefore, simply not presented as in and of themselves sources of threat. The “other” is no Grendel who functions as the occasion for the flexing of human (and male) heroic muscle. The closest one comes to such a motif is in the threat to Luke posed by Ponda Baba and Dr Evazan in the cantina in ANH.
The danger, however, is that by marking out characters such as Lando, Captain Panaka, and Mace Windu positively and naively “innocently” as representative figurations of visibly black subjects Lucas’ movies are nonetheless in danger of essentializing race, and thereby unwittingly assuming “classificatory models largely constructed in the nineteenth century [that assumes] the race in question is homogenous and that individuals belonging to various racial groupings are the vessels of essential racial characteristics,” even as those characteristics are gesturally redefined by the saga’s representations.117 This would involve an attempt to offer “positive” images, but which would be rendered insufficient by a process directed by what Cornel West calls a “homogenizing impulse,” assimilating black people into white-dominated discourse and rendering blacks all essentially the same (and therefore able to be represented by a singular character).118 As Cornea admits, and this is a distinct difficulty with the history of the genre, “Science fiction writing has traditionally dealt with ideas; often subordinating characterization (or creating what are commonly called ‘flat’ characterizations) to a more overarching premise.”119 Moreover, there is equally a danger that real differences have been elided and displaced rather than explored and negotiated with, that as with Star Trek the use of the “alien” has to bear too much weight that simply has been “solved” in the system other than its most remote outer rim planets (some of the repair in the Star Trek franchise comes with Star Trek Voyager and the recognition that identity involves not merely being a part of the Federation). In this way, to use Melzer’s claim regarding much of the science fiction genre, the texts continue to refuse “to deal with ‘actual’ racism, which results in an abstraction of the issue into metaphors and avoidance of any treatment of existing power structures.”120
Race remains a defining occasion for socio-political identity, for inclusion and exclusion. Not to refrain from recognizing the radical import of its inclusiveness, the SW saga conceptually deflects racial issues onto the status and treatment of droids. The droid-signifier then serves to destabilize in some quite non-trivial ways forms of engaging with alterity. Peter Lev, consequently, is quite mistaken to argue that SW “in no way challenges gender, race, or class relations. … [M]ost of the aliens are relegated to the ‘freak show’ of the spacefarers’ bar.”121 In that regard Wetmore’s approval of Tom Carson’s assessment, equally lacks sufficient care and attention to the texts themselves: “in the Star Wars films white people are human beings and everybody else is Other, in what is an ‘old fashioned racial schema.’”122 It takes a quite spectacular contortionist effort to make the texts equate “non-human” (one cannot speak of “alien” since there is no geographic core to define the “Other” against) and “inhumane.” It is simply not the case that everybody else is Other. Non-whites are not excluded Others in their racial differentiation, even if they do lack the representative presence one would expect from broadly politically liberal movies made since the late 1970s. Moreover, no persons are Other in an ethnic sense other than the droids who suffer a racist slur from the bartender, Chewbacca who is the object of two derogatory comments, and the Tusken Raiders who are never depicted as anything other than a threat to the frontier families. Finally, the phrase “white people are human beings” is very odd. Does this suggest that white people can be anything other than human beings? If that is the case then the non-humanness of the white High Council Jedi Masters Ki-Adi Mundi and Evan Piell contradict that. Or does Wetmore mean that white actors play human beings in the saga? This version of Wetmore’s claim is even more eccentric since white actors play a whole range of the non-humans, from the droid pairing of R2-D2 and C-3PO to Chewbacca, and well beyond. In what is potentially a very interesting and disruptive ideological critique, Wetmore has a tendency, like many film commentators, to self-projective eisegetical performance, to exaggerating, and to using examples that are sometimes only supportive of the claim being made when stretched very thin or on other occasions Procrusteanly remodeled to fit. In academic terms, this situation is serious. In moral terms, it is an irresponsible abuse of the material.
For a supposedly nostalgic film its moral sensibility is markedly different from the paranoid exclusion of self and Other in American science fiction cinema of the 1950s, with alien invasion movies dominating the imagination of the period. The reason for that is that what SW fears is not the “foreigner” as “alien” or as “monstrous” as such, nor even as insidious terrorist threat from within (Palpatine is not a foreigner to the Galactic Republic, and not influenced by the philosophies of foreign states [unless one wants to argue that the Sith are indeed foreign Others]), and in that regard SW has real potential to be, at least at the level of its attempted thematic, a politically hospitable text. As Booker argues, “the numerous alien invasion films and novels produced during the 1950s are quite widely regarded as allegorical responses to the fear of Soviet invasion on the part of American audiences during that period.”123 According to Peter Biskind the connection between “the red nightmare” and movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers is close, thus exemplifying the movie as politically right-wing.124 On the other hand, Booker regards this movie as being more politically interesting than that, and therefore as one that could be read as offering potential for politico-cultural resistance and even more interesting philosophical questions about the nature of agency. “While this film is particularly easy to read as an allegory about the threat of communist infiltration in the United States,” Booker continues, “it is also a complex film that can be read as a commentary on a variety of domestic threats, including conformism and McCarthyism. … The film can also be read as a commentary on concerns about the dehumanizing effects of a rapidly expanding capitalist system that was increasingly becoming a dominant factor in every aspect of human life in America.”125 Steven Sanders likewise recognizes the ambiguity of the movie’s protest against social and political conformity: “nobody has established whether Invasion is a protest against the political and social conformity called for by right-wing anti–Communists or that demanded by pro–Soviet collectivists. … Whether we say that the pods represent communism or McCarthyism or, indeed, the power structure that dominated Hollywood itself, their threat to autonomy and personal identity takes us well beyond the political conflicts of the day.”126
If Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) was perhaps the most classic example of the paranoia (the Other coming unnoticed to threaten from within), another prominent movie was George Pal’s version of The War of the Worlds (1953), a technically proficient science fiction movie for its time which falls into the trap of a generating the other as pure threat. Even in Spielberg’s more interesting version, the context becomes that of the post–9/11 terrorist threat, and the alien accordingly becomes not only an intruder but a genocidal invader. According to Roz Kaveney, “The essential thing about the Malevolent Visitor or Alien Infestation movie is that they are never about anything except sensation and dread.”127 It is this that results in Susan Sontag’s rather generalized complaint that science-fiction movies offer the satisfaction of “extreme moral simplification—that is to say, a morally acceptable fantasy where one can give outlet to cruel or at least amoral feelings.”128 In particular this is located in the operation of the popular mythology on the impersonal, the “us” and “it” sensibility. As Morpheus explains in The Matrix, “If you’re not one of us you’re one of them.” Accordingly, for Sontag, science fiction movies satisfy the bellicose spirit. “Again and again, one detects the hunger for a ‘good war,’ which poses no moral problems, admits of no moral qualifications. The imagery of science fiction films will satisfy the most bellicose addict of war films, for a lot of the satisfactions of war films pass, untransformed, into science fiction films.”129 The War of the Worlds as invasion movie, Kaveney argues, has significantly flattened H.G. Wells’ self-critique of imperialism by offering a simpler feel of America being destructively invaded by a superpower.130 “The bacteria which undo them are clearly meant, as they are most certainly not in Wells, to act as stand-ins for the hand of God.” The presence of the human-saving bacterial agent in the movie comes as a deus ex machina moment, a device often utilized by lazy writers unable to conceive of solving the difficulties from within the narrative arc itself, but here in Pal’s movie a significant allusion to a moment of divine intervention.131 Symbolically, the film ends with church bells ringing, a chorus of “amen,” and a voice-over that proclaims that the Martian invaders have been killed by “the littlest of things, which God in His wisdom had put upon this Earth.”132
Nonetheless, it is certainly not insignificant that critics of Lucas’ SW can continue to ask how well these movies’ visionary performs his egalitarian vision, but it is to suggest that the concerns with his saga should take a more modest form. Deis has a point when he argues that “In both the original trilogy and the Star Wars prequels, aliens are both ‘the problem’ and the ‘solution’ in Lucas’s film imaginary.”133 The films do not develop their critical potential sufficiently far, however, and so understandably they (ANH most specifically) become a vehicle for the spectacular more than a re-education in value judgments and moral presuppositions. This may be no response to Othering in the vein of the unredeemable Othering evident in the jingoistic cinematic narratives Independence Day134 and Starship Troopers, or the Other-denying identity of the assimilationist inclusivity of the cybernetic Borg in Star Trek Next Generation and Star Trek Voyager. The main problem is not that that Lucas does not generate a mode to challenge to dominant modes of race and gender exclusion, but rather that he does not often sufficiently move beyond the essentialising symbolic depiction of the issues. Wetmore is correct to maintain, through an appeal to Ursula K. Le Guin, “that artists have a responsibility for the worlds they create.” Therefore, “there is,” Le Guin continues, a “responsibility to ensure that one’s work does not, even if inadvertently, employ and continue derogatory stereotypes, appropriate for selfish purposes elements of other’s cultures, and present women and minorities as Other.135