1. Gilbert Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 3, cited in Gerard Loughlin, Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), x.
2. George Lucas, in Tim Rayment, “Master of the Universe,” Sunday Times Magazine (May 16, 1999), 14–24 (20).
3. Lucas, cited in Stephen Zito, “George Lucas Goes Far Out,” in Sally Kline (ed.), George Lucas: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 45–54 (53).
4. Dale Pollock, Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas, the Creator of Star Wars (Hollywood: Samuel French, 1990), 271.
5. Carl Silvio and Tony M. Vinci, “Introduction: Moving Away From Myth: Star Wars as Cultural Artifact,” in Carl Silvio and Tony M. Vinci (eds.), Culture, Identities and Technology in the Star Wars Films: Essays on the Two Trilogies (Jefferson: McFarland, 2007), 1–8 (8).
6. Grace M. Jantzen, Foundations of Violence: Death and the Displacement of Beauty (London: Routledge, 2004), 19.
7. Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed, trans. Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 91.
8. Christine Cornea, Science Fiction Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 92.
9. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movies as Politics (London and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 106. Cf. Kevin Wetmore, Jr., The Empire Triumphant: Race, Religion and Rebellion in the Star Wars Films (Jefferson: McFarland, 2005), 7; Lincoln Geraghty, American Science Fiction and Television (Oxford: Berg, 2009), 59f.
10. See chapter 1.
11. George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays 1958–1967 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 21; Paolo Freire, Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach, trans. Donaldo Macedo, Dale Koike, and Alexandre Oliveira (Boulder: Westview Press, 2005); Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1990), 39. “The critic,” Steiner argues, “lives at second-hand. He writes about. … [Consequently,] criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius.”
12. Jantzen, Foundations of Violence, 4.
13. Jantzen, Foundations of Violence, 19.
14. Jantzen, Foundations of Violence, 19.
15. Jantzen, Foundations of Violence, 19.
16. Jantzen, Foundations of Violence, 19f.
17. Stanley Aronowitz, The Politics of Identity: Class, Culture, Social Movements (New York: Routledge, 1992), 11.
18. Patricia Melzer, Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 72, citing Ursula Le Guin, “American SF and the Other,” Science Fiction Studies 2 (1975), 208–210 (209).
19. Cited in Rob van Scheers, Paul Verhoeven, trans. Aletta Stevens (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), xiii.
20. Matthew Wilhelm Kapell, “Eugenics, Racism, and the Jedi Gene Pool,” in Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and John Shelton Lawrence (eds.), Finding the Force of the Star Wars Franchise: Fans, Merchandise, and Critics (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 159–173 (168).
21. Henry A. Giroux, Channel Surfing (New York: St. Martins, 1997), 56, cited in Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 10.
1. D. Daiches Raphael, The Paradox of Tragedy: The Mahlon Powell Lectures 1959 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960), 13.
2. Dorothea Krook, Elements of Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 239.
3. This is Raphael’s understanding of Aristotle’s claim (13f.).
4. So George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 10.
5. Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), 25.
6. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), ¦7; “Attempt at a Self-Criticism,” in Birth of Tragedy, 17–27 (26).
7. George Steiner, “Tragedy, Pure and Simple,” in M.S. Silk (ed.), Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 534–546 (545n1).
8. George Steiner, Real Presences: Is there Anything in What we Say? (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 143, 144.
9. Steiner, Real Presences, 143.
10. Eagleton, Sweet Violence, 28.
11. Eagleton, Sweet Violence, 29.
12. Stanley Kubrick, Sight and Sound, February 1972, 5, cited in Aubrey Malone, Censoring Hollywood: Sex and Violence in Film and on the Cutting Room Floor (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011), 153. Hal Hinson, writing in The Washington Post, huffed, “Today, with real life violence all around us, it’s harder to be sure about the cathartic function of art. We”re concerned that real violence might overwhelm us, sending us off like the Michael Douglas character in Falling Down: half-cocked, defeated and looking for revenge” (Washington Post, May 23, 1993, cited in Aubrey Malone, 191).
13. Howard Good, Media Ethics Goes to the Movies (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002), 161.
14. Good, Media Ethics Goes to the Movies, 164f.
15. Good, Media Ethics Goes to the Movies, 173f.
16. Julia Kristeva, “Strangers to Ourselves,” in States of Mind: Dialogues on the European Mind (New York: University of New York Press, 1995), 13f., cited in Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (London: Routledge, 2003), 8f.
17. Rowan Williams, Writing in the Dust: After September 11 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 15.
18. Augustine, for example, argues that Rome often engages in conflict induced by injustices committed from beyond her borders (City of God, 3.10.98; 4.15.154).
19. Jane Mills, The Money Shot (Annandale: Pluto, 2001), 93, cited in Aubrey Malone, 191.
20. Ridley Scott, “The Essence of Combat: Making Black Hawk Down,” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0367710/.
21. Matthew Alford, Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy (London: Pluto Press, 2010), 105.
22. Trevor McCrisken and Andrew Pepper, American History and Contemporary Hollywood Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 123; Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” in Hal in the Classroom: Science Fiction Films (Dayton: Pflaum, 1974), 31.
23. Robin Wood, Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 163.
24. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 2.
25. According to Sara Mills, “Discourses structure both our sense of reality and our notion of our own identity” (Discourse [London: Routledge, 1997], 15).
26. Ben Agger, Cultural Studies and Critical Theory (Washington, D.C.: The Falmer Press, 1992), 25.
27. Margaret R. Miles and S. Brent Plate, “Hospitable Vision: Some Notes on the Ethics of Seeing Film,” Crosscurrents (Spring 2004), 22–31 (23). Cf. John C. Lyden, Film as Religion: Myths, Morals and Rituals (New York: New York University Press, 2003); Tom Beaudoin, Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X (Chichester: Jossey-Bass, 1998); Margaret Miles, Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies (Boston: Beacon, 1996). Lucas makes a similar point in interview in 1983 (Aljean Harmetz, “Burden of Dreams: George Lucas,” in Sally Kline [ed.], George Lucas: Interviews [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999], 135–144 [143]).
28. Cited in Phillip Gourevitch, “Letter from Rwanda,” Bew Yorker (Dec. 15, 1995), 84.
29. Carl Silvio and Tony M. Vinci, “Introduction,” in Silvio and Vinci (eds.), 1–8 (3).
30. Citation from René Girard, The Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (London: Athlone, 1987), 7. On these matters see Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), ch. 1. In a revealing weblog Jason Salas admits engaging in a conversation with a Christian who admitted being unable to let her children watch sexual activity on screen while without second-thought allowing them to witness fabricated acts of murder (“On Piety, Star Wars, and Raising Your Children to be Morally Aware,” http://weblogs.asp.net/jasonsalas/archive/2005/05/19/407406.aspx, consulted 08–06–05).
31. See Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, trans. David Kanzle (New York: International General, 1991).
32. George Orwell, cited in Craig L. Carr, Orwell, Politics, and Power (New York: Continuum, 2010), 1.
33. Veronica A. Wilson, “Seduced by the Dark Side of the Force: Gender, Sexuality, and moral Agency in George Lucas’s Star Wars Universe,” in Silvio and Vinci (eds.), 134–152 (135).
34. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 95.
35. Wilson, 136.
36. Silvio and Vinci (eds.), 3.
37. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 48.
38. See Andrew Gordon, “Star Wars: A Myth for Our Time,” Literature/Film Quarterly 6.4 (1978), 320–325; Mary Henderson, Star Wars: The Magic of Myth (New York: Bantam, 1997), 116–20; John Shelton Lawrence, “Joseph Campbell, George Lucas, and the Monomyth,” in Kapell and Lawrence (eds.), 21–33. Cf. Leah Deyneka, “May the Myth Be with You, Always: Archetypes, Mythic Elements, and Apects of Joseph Campbell’s Heroic Monomyth in the Original Star Wars Trilogy,” in Douglas Brode and Leah Deyneka (eds.), Myth, Media, and Culture in Star Wars: An Anthology (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2012), 31–46.
39. Dan Rubey, “Not So Long Ago, Not So Far Away: New Variations on Old Themes and Questioning Star Wars’ Revival of Heroic Archetypes,” in Brode and Deyneka (eds.), 47–64 (53).
40. Silvio and Vinci (eds.), 3.
41. See Robert A. Segal, Myth: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 137f.; Joseph Campbell: An Introduction (New York: Garland, 1987); Beldon C. Lane, “The Power of Myth: Lessons from Joseph Campbell,” The Christian Century (July 5–12, 1989), 652–654.
42. So Philip L. Simpson, “Thawing the Ice Princess,” in Kapell and Lawrence (eds.), 115–130; Veronica A. Wilson; and Diana Dominguez, “Feminism and the Force: Empowerment and Disillusionment in a Galaxy Far, Far Away,” in Silvio and Vinci (eds.), 109–133. In the third draft Lucas’ hero was a woman (see Kaminski, 104, 464f., 517f.).
43. See Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, chs. 4–5; Matthew Wilhelm Kapell, “Eugenics, Racism, and the Jedi Gene Pool,” in Kapell and Lawrence (eds.), 159–173. There have been considerable concerns with the “racial” portrayal of the Gungans, Jar Jar Binks in particular, in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (see Kaminski, 364). Robin Wood: “The war movie gave us various ethnic types (Jew, Pollack, etc.) under the leadership of a WASP American; the Lucas film substitutes fantasy figures (robots, Chewbacca) fulfilling precisely the same roles, surreptitiously permitting the same indulgence in WASP superiority” (Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan [New York: Columbia University Press, 1986], 167). Cf. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 35–39. “The people of color of the Star Wars universe are literally alienated—they are represented as aliens, as complete and utterly non-human. For the most part in the two trilogies, non-white means non-human.” [Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 37] Interestingly, in the autumn of 1973 Lucas claimed of his forthcoming space-fantasy “The space aliens are the heroes, and the Homo Sapiens naturally the villains” (cited in Kaminski, 61). Critics point to Darth Vader as a “black” character, for although the Emperor is equally garbed in black Vader’s voice is that of James Earl Jones. However, Jones was not Lucas’ first choice for the part, and he eventually cast Jones because of the commanding and menacing quality he could bring to the voice. Thus the casting decision was a pragmatic rather than an ideological one. “He was the best actor that I could possibly find” (Lucas in Ryder Windham and Peter Vilmus, Star Wars: The Complete Vader [London: Simon & Schuster, 2009], 21). Jones even requested that his name be absent from Star Wars’ credits, claiming that David Prowse is Vader, and that Jones himself could take no major credit for the character. Moreover, Vader’s racial significance becomes subverted in his identity-revelation to Luke.
44. So Carl Silvio, “The Star Wars Trilogies and Global Capitalism,” in Silvio and Vinci (eds.), 53–73.
45. So Veronica A. Wilson; Roger Kaufman, “How the Star Wars Saga Evokes the Creative Promise of Homosexual Love: A Gay-Centered Psychological Perspective,” in Kapell and Lawrence (eds.), 131–156.
46. So Tony M. Vinci, “The Fall of the Rebellion; or, Defiant and Obedient Heroes in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: Individualism and Intertextuality in the Star Wars Trilogies,” in Silvio and Vinci (eds.), 11–33. While many of Lucas’ own comments suggest considerable faith in the “American dream,” his movies push in a different direction. After all, the ending of THX 1138 is itself largely ambiguous, and the end of the Star Wars saga offers more a celebration of communitarian social difference than individualism. It is also noteworthy to consider the impact of the community of filmmakers that composed the early stages of American Zoetrope, and Lucas’ own efforts to mimic that with his Skywalker Ranch.
47. See Stephanie J. Wilhelm, “Imperial Plastic, Republican Fiber: Speculating on the Post-Colonial Other,” in Kapell and Lawrence (eds.), 175–183; and the fuller study of Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant.
48. Liam Neeson, in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (2001), DVD Disc 2.
49. Dan Rubey, “Not So Long Ago, Not So Far Away: New Variations on Old Themes and Questioning Star Wars’ Revival of Heroic Archetypes,” in Brode and Deyneka (eds.), 47–64 (53).
50. Silvio and Vinci (eds.), 8.
51. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 9f., citing Stuart Hall, “The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media,” in George Bridges and Rosalind Brunt (eds.), Silver Linings: Some Strategies for the Eighties (London: Lawrence and Wisehart, 1981), 37–8, and Henry A. Giroux, Channel Surfing (New York: St. Martins, 1997), 56.
52. Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile, 2008), 11.
53. Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 13; The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 42; Grace M. Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). Cf. Jantzen, Foundations of Violence, 8.
54. L. Gregory Jones, Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1995), 77.
55. Wink, The Powers That Be, 42. Cf. Michelle Kinnucan, “What Star Wars Teaches Us,” CommonDreams.org, May 10, 2002; http://commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=views02/0510–06.htm; Michelle J. Kinnucan, “Pedagogy of (the) Force: The Myth of Redemptive Violence,” in Kapell and Lawrence (eds.), 59–72.
56. Jonathan Wolfe, An Introduction to Political Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 14.
57. Wink, The Powers That Be, 56.
58. Bryan P. Stone, Faith and the Film: Theological Themes at the Cinema (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2000), 139.
59. See Stone, 139; Joey Earl Horstman, “Star Wars (Motion Picture),” The Other Side 33.2 (1977).
60. Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), xiii. Cf. George Marsden, “The American Revolution: Partisanship, ‘Just Wars’ and Crusades,” in R.A. Wells (ed.), The Wars of America: Christian Views (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), 12; Mark A. Noll, Christians in the American Revolution (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans/Christian University, 1977), 72.
61. Gary Westfal, “Space Opera,” in Edward James and Farah Mendelsohn (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 197–208 (198).
62. See Lucas in interview in 1983 (Harmetz in Kline, 143]). These issues are dealt with more fully in John C. McDowell, The Gospel According to Star Wars: Faith, Hope and the Force (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007).
63. Kerry O’Quinn, “The George Lucas Saga,” in Kline, 98–134 (133).
64. Some thought provoking studies can be found in the likes of Silvio and Vinci and Kapell and Lawrence. Yet several of the papers are less well equipped to assess the two sets of trilogies’ differences. For more on the deliberately designed parallelism see John C. McDowell, “Star Wars’ Saving Return,” Journal of Religion and Film 13.1 (April 2009), http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol13.no1/StarWars.htm. Also, see McDowell, The Gospel According to Star Wars, ch. 4.
65. Jantzen, Foundations of Violence, 29.
66. Susanne Kappeler, The Will to Violence: The Politics of Personal Behaviour (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), 9.
67. Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love (London: Collins, 1963), 31.
68. John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett, The Myth of the American Superhero (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), and Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). Cf. Lawrence, “Fascist Redemption or Democratic Hope?,” in Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and William G. Doty (eds.), Jacking into the Matrix: Cultural Reception and Interpretation (New York: Continuum, 2004), 80–96; Jewett, Saint Paul at the Movies: The Apostle’s Dialogue with American Culture (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993), ch. 2.
69. Beaudoin, Virtual Faith, 21.
70. Nicholas Jackson O’Shaughnessy, Politics and Propaganda: Weapons of Mass Seduction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 139.
71. O’Shaughnessy argues that “the Manichean good-evil universe … has been a staple of Hollywood from its first beginnings” (135). This “politics of purity” which generates the “demonised other” deflects the critical moral gaze from oneself: “Enemies also freeze our conscience and assuage our guilt, nothing we do to them can possibly be bad enough” (126). Manichaean readings of Star Wars have been the most common way of perceiving the conceptuality of the movies (Michelle J. Kinnucan, “Pedagogy of [the] Force: The Myth of Redemptive Violence,” in Kapell and Lawrence (eds.), 59–72; John Lyden, “The Apocalyptic Cosmology of Star Wars,” Journal of Religion and Film 4.1 (2000), 7, http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/LydenStWars.htm, consulted 15–05–05; Mark Rowlands, The Philosopher at the End of the Universe [London: Ebury Press, 2003], 209).
72. Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and John Shelton Lawrence, “Introduction: Spectacle, Merchandise, and Influence,” in Kapell and Lawrence (eds.), 1–18 (9).
73. Wink, The Powers That Be, 42.
74. Jantzen, Foundations of Violence, 29.
75. See Wink, The Powers That Be, 54.
76. Lawrence, 82; Jewett and Lawrence, 1, 6, 8. Also, and importantly, Jewett and Lawrence explicitly use language of “redemptive violence” (27; cf. ch. 13). Cf. Lawrence, “Joseph Campbell, George Lucas, and the Monomyth,” 31.
77. Wink, The Powers That Be, 42. Cf. Michelle Kinnucan, “What Star Wars Teaches Us,” CommonDreams.org, May 10, 2002; http://commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=views02/0510–06.htm; Kinnucan, “Pedagogy of (the) Force: The Myth of Redemptive Violence.”
78. Wink, Powers, 48.
79. John Shelton Lawrence, “Joseph Campbell, George Lucas, and the Monomyth,” in Kapell and Lawrence (eds.), 21–33.
80. Lawrence and Jewett, 268; Lawrence, 85.
81. Wink, Powers, 48.
82. Will Brooker, Star Wars (London: Palgrave Macmillian, 2009), 78f.
83. So Kinnucan, 64.
84. Butler, Frames of War, 14.
85. “Not So Long Ago, Not So Far Away: New Variations on Old Themes and Questioning Star Wars’ Revival of Heroic Archetypes,” in Brode and Deyneka (eds.), 50.
86. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 69.
87. It is this that Roz Kaveney criticises for different reasons, as a neglect of “history” in favor of “biography” (From Alien to the Matrix: Reading Science Fiction and Film [London: I.B. Taurus, 2005], 113). This is a strange criticism since Lucas specifically uses biography to develop symbolic figures, and to draw on mythic archetypes. At most it simply claims that Lucas’ portrayal is different from that of previous space operas, and that is what renders it a failure according to Kaveney.
88. Dan Rubey, “Not So Far Away,” Jump Cut 18 (1978), 8–14 (9); Michelle J. Kinnucan, “Pedagogy of (the) Force: The Myth of Redemptive Violence,” in Kapel and Lawrence (eds.), 59–72 (64).
89. Wink, The Powers That Be, 53.
90. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See (Chicago: A Capella Books, 2000), 138.
91. John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003), 28.
92. Wink, The Powers That Be, 50f.
93. Wink, Engaging the Powers, 17.
94. Michael Pye and Linda Myles, “George Lucas,” in Kline, 64–86 (85).
95. Rubey, “Not So Long Ago, Not So Far Away: New Variations on Old Themes and Questioning Star Wars’ Revival of Heroic Archetypes,” in Brode and Deyneka (eds.), 59.
96. Stephen J. Sansweet, “Foreword,” in Windham and Vilmer, vii.
97. See Kaminski, 100; Rinzler, 131; Henderson, 146, 164, 189.
98. Ian McDiarmid, in Empire magazine (June 2005), 94.
99. Ian McDiarmid, in Empire magazine (June 2005), 94, and second citation in “Palpatine,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palpatine, consulted 08–06–05.
100. Rick McCallum, in “The Chosen One” Featurette, Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith DVD 2 (2005).
101. Tim Rayment, “Master of the Universe,” The Sunday Times Magazine (16 May 1999), 14–24 (20).
102. Wink, Powers, 53f.
103. Lucas, in Laurent Bouzereau, Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays (New York: Ballantine, 1997), 180.
104. George Lucas in “The Making of Episode I” The Phantom Menace DVD 2 (1999).
105. The title “Lord of the Sith” comes from the fact that after “the Great Schism” outcast Jedi, who had rebelled against the Jedi Council over the use of “the dark side of the Force,” came across the uncharted planet Korriban on which they discovered and conquered a race known as the Sith (see “Sith Order,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sith_Order, consulted 14–06–05).
106. ROTS, 213.
107. Citations from Lev, 31f.; George W. Bush, “President Holds Prime Time News Conference” (11 October 2001), http://www.whitehouse.gov/new/releases/2001/09/200109208.html; Ian Nathan, “R2D2, Where Are You?,” The Times Review (14 May 2005), 14. Similarly, see Richard Rayner, The Sunday Telegraph (28 March 1999), cited in David Wilkinson, The Power of the Force: The Spirituality of the Star Wars (Oxford: Lion, 2000), 15.
108. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), 238.
109. Cf. Orson Scott Card, “No Faith in This Force,” www.beliefnet.com/story/167/story_16700_1.html, consulted 30–05–05.
110. Hannah Pok, “The Star Wars Trilogy: Fantasy, Narcissism and Fear of the Other in Reagan’s America,” http://hannahpok.com/deepfieldspace/framesrc2c.html, consulted 18–05–05.
111. Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By, cited in Wink, The Powers That Be.
112. John Milbank, for instance, traces an “ontology of violence” through modern liberal socio-political theory (Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990]).
113. Wink, Engaging, 19.
114. Cited in Michelle Kinnucan, “What Star Wars Teaches Us,” Common Dreams.org (10 May 2002), http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0510–06.htm, consulted 26–05–05.
115. Kinnucan, “Pedagogy of (the) Force,” 65, citing Koenraad Kuiper, “Star Wars: An Imperial Myth,” Journal of Popular Culture 21.4 (1988), 77–86 (78).
116. Cited in Kinnucan, “What Star Wars Teaches Us.”
117. Michelle Kinnucan, ‘What Star Wars Teaches Us’, CommonDreams (May 10, 2002), http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0510–06.htm, consulted 14–06-05.
118. Kaveney, 118.
119. See George Lucas, Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker (London: Sphere Books, 1977), 1.
120. On the connections with Rome see Martin M. Winkler, “Star Wars and the Roman Empire,” in Martin M. Winkler (ed.), Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 272–290.
121. See Rubey, “Not So Long Ago, Not So Far Away: New Variations on Old Themes and Questioning Star Wars, Revival of Heroic Archetypes,” in Brode and Deyneka (eds.), 61. Cf. Wetmore, 69.
122. Lawrence, 85.
123. See Michael Kaminski, The Secret History of Star Wars: The Art of Storytelling and the Making of a Modern Epic (Kingston: Legacy Books Press, 2008), 117f.
124. Christensen claims that the American voters “wanted a president who was sure of himself and his nation, unbothered by doubt, and unfazed by the complexities of the nation, the world, or human behaviour” (199).
125. Jonathan cf. Rosenbaum, Movies as Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 107. David Brin, “I Accuse … Or Zola Meets Yoda,” in David Brin and Matthew Woodring Stover (eds.), Star Wars on Trial (Dallas: Benbella, 2006), 17–48 (25).
126. Wink, The Powers That Be, 49.
127. See, e.g., Myles and Pye, 83; Vincent Canby, “Not Since Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe,” New York Times (5 June 1977), ¦2:33; Arthur Lubow, “A Space Iliad,” Film Comment 13 (July-August 1977), 20; Roger Banham, “Summa Galactica,” New Society 42 (27 October 1977), 191; Anne Lancashire, “Attack of the Clones and the Politics of Star Wars,” The Dalhousie Review 82.2 (Summer 2002), 235–253.
128. Lawrence and Jewett, The Myth of the American Superhero, ch. 13.
129. Dan Rubey, “Not So Long Ago, Not So Far Away: New Variations on Old Themes and Questioning Star Wars’ Revival of Heroic Archetypes,” in Brode and Deyneka (eds.), 47–64 (55).
130. Rubey, “Not So Long Ago, Not So Far Away: New Variations on Old Themes and Questioning Star Wars’ Revival of Heroic Archetypes,” in Brode and Deyneka (eds.), 55.
131. Rubey, “Not So Long Ago, Not So Far Away: New Variations on Old Themes and Questioning Star Wars’ Revival of Heroic Archetypes,” in Brode and Deyneka (eds.), 62.
132. Lucas, cited in Rinzler, 325.
133. Stephen P. McVeigh, “The Galactic Way of Warfare,” in Kapell and Lawrence (eds.), 35–58 (36).
134. McVeigh, 38.
135. James W. Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1994), 12, 14.
136. Dan Rubey, “Not So Long Ago, Not So Far Away: New Variations on Old Themes and Questioning Star Wars’ Revival of Heroic Archetypes,” in Brode and Deyneka (eds.), 49.
137. Rayment, 20.
138. Lucas, in Rayment, 20.
139. Lucas, cited in Stephen Zito, “George Lucas Goes Far Out,” in Kline, 45–54 (53).
140. Matthew Stover, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (London: Century, 2005), 280.
141. See Wetmore, 5f.
142. Quentin Tarantino’s movies arguably move in this morally equivocating direction—the carefully choreographed scenes of conflict and violence are orchestrated to evoke awe and fascination, dare I say it “entertainment,” with the near-balletic display and thus aestheticization of violence. The dual-part revenge movie Kill Bill is example.
143. Rowan Williams, The Truce of God (London: Fount Paperbacks, 1983), 96. Even if the self is not “passive” in any simple sense, as cultural theorists rightly observe, nonetheless Williams’ point is suggestive of a claim that we remain largely at the mercy of an ideology constructed and reinforced by the liberal market, so that the imagination of alternatives remains of alternatives within the dominant ideology.
144. Kinnucan, “Pedagogy of (the) Force: The Myth of Redemptive Violence,” 66.
145. Stover, ROTS, 285.
146. James B. Jordan, “Pacifism and the Old Testament,” in Gary North (ed.), The Theology of Christian Resistance (Tyler: Geneva Divinity School Press, 1983), 92.
147. Frank Allnut, Unlocking the Mystery of the Force: The Force of Star Wars (Van Nuys: Bible Voice, 1997), 90.
148. Allnut, 143.
149. Allnut, 169.
150. For example, Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Touchstone, 1998), 342f.; Kinnucan, “Pedagogy of (the) Force: The Myth of Redemptive Violence,” 65; Mary Henderson, Star Wars: The Magic of Myth (New York: Bantam, 1997), 117; Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 96.
151. Hal G.P. Colebatch, Return of the Heroes: The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Social Conflict, 2d ed. (Christchurch: Cybereditions Corporation, 2003), 12.
152. Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 72.
153. See, e.g., Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 114–119.
154. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), 353.
155. Jones, Embodying Forgiveness, 73. “Further, the story shows the fragility of our commitment to unlearn and break our habits of sin, even when there is a desire to do so. If such commitments are to be sustained, they require supportive friendships, practices, and institutions that enable the unlearning of destructive habits and the cultivation of holy ones. The film suggests that those friendships, practices, and institutions are absent precisely because of their fragility in the face of violence and vengeance. It takes only a moment to destroy lives through violence, but it takes a lifetime to cultivate alternative patterns and practices of forgiveness, of trust, of love” (76).
156. Walter Kasper: “every attempt to alter this situation is itself subject to the conditions created by the disaster. The result is an unending satanic cycle of guilt and revenge, violence and counterviolence” (The God of Jesus Christ, trans. Matthew J. O”Connell [New York: Crossroad, 1984], 160).
157. Even when war is spoken of in terms of being “unavoidable,” as Jon Nuttall for instance does, it quickly becomes naturalized in the imagination (Jon Nuttall, Moral Questions: An Introduction to Ethics [Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993], 161). The theologian Karl Barth exposes “the satanic doctrine that war is inevitable and therefore justified” shortly after calling for protest against standing armies (Church Dogmatics, Volume III, The Doctrine of Creation Part 4, trans. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), III.4, 399, 400). After all, such military capabilities make the search for peace something much less strenuous, dulling and constraining the imagination to resort all too quickly to military solutions before all other options have been honestly exhausted.
1. M. Keith Booker, Alternate Americas: Science Fiction Film and American Culture (Westport: Praeger, 2006), 110.
2. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 6.
3. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 7.
4. Booker, 110, 114.
5. Booker, 114f.
6. Booker, 115.
7. Stephen P. McVeigh, “The Galactic Way of Warfare,” in Kapell and Lawrence (eds.), 35–58 (36).
8. Booker, 13f. Cf. 115.
9. Booker, 115.
10. Booker, 115.
11. For more on Reagan’s use of SW rhetoric see Peter Krämer, “Fighting the Evil Empire: Star Wars, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the Politics of Science Fiction,” in Brode and Deyneka (eds.), 63–76; Nick Desolge, “Star Wars: An Exhibition in cold War Politics,” in Brode and Deyneka (eds.), 55–62.
12. Martin M. Winkler, “Star Wars and the Roman Empire,” in Martin M. Winkler (ed.), Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 272–290 (272).
13. For Asimov’s acknowledgement of Lucas’ borrowing from Foundation see Peter Bondanella, The Eternal City: Roman Images in the Modern World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 270n11.
14. George Lucas, Star Wars, 1.
15. Winkler, 274.
16. Winkler, 274f.
17. Hal G.P. Colebatch, Return of the Heroes: The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Social Conflict, 2d ed. (Christchurch: Cybereditions Corporation, 2003), 30.
18. Winkler, 275.
19. Winkler, 279.
20. Winkler, 275.
21. Booker, 116, 118.
22. There is an apparent allusion to George W. Bush’s “If you”re not for us you”re against us” comment in Anakin’s assertion to Obi-Wan, “If you”re not for me you”re my enemy.”
23. Patricia Kerslake, Science Fiction and Empire (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 29.
24. The phrase is Iain Thomson’s (“Deconstructing the Hero,” in Jeff McLaughlin [ed.], Comics as Philosophy [Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005], 100–129 [103]).
25. Reinhold Niebhur, The Irony of American History (London: Nisbet, 1952).
26. Cf. Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile, 2008), 107.
27. It needs to be clarified what this theological comparison is and is not doing. It is not saying that Star Wars is a Christian text. This would be an odd thing to claim given the movies’ eclectic borrowings. Yet there is something even stranger occurring in dividing up and hermetically sealing religious approaches neatly as if a Christian theological approach did not overlap with themes and features of non-Christian religions. Moreover, this is certainly not a way of using Star Wars to illustrate and demonstrate Christianity. Too much time and attention is given to understanding the saga on its own terms than is usually the case with specifically Christian writing on the saga (e.g., see Staub, Dalton, and Grimes). Yet one of the points I argue in chapter 2 of The Gospel According to Star Wars is that the saga has been influenced by the western Christian environment more than is usually admitted by its “readers,” and that its presentation of the Force has more to do with certain western post-enlightenment theologies. Lucas claims to use Star Wars to, among many other things, respond critically to features of the Lutheran Christianity of some of his youth, yet he imbibes much of its imagination.
28. Mike Alsford, Heroes and Villains (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006), 8.
29. Roy M. Anker, Catching Light: Looking for God at the Movies (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 230. For examples of the distinction between “warrior” and “soldier” see Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men (New York: Vintage, 1990), 150; Dwight H. Judy, Healing the Male Soul: Christianity and the Mythic Journey (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1992), 63.
30. George Lucas, in “Prime of the Jedi,” Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (2001), DVD Disc2.
31. Blade Runner has a theatrical cut (1982), a Director’s Cut (1992), and a Final Cut (2007).
32. See “Mace Windu,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mace_Windu, consulted 14–06–05.
33. There are parallels here to J.R.R. Tolkien’s approach to the catastrophe of mechanized warfare. In his great literary creation technology comes to play almost an archetypal role of its own in the background to the rise of the power of evil.
34. Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 19.7.862.
35. Chapter 31, cited in John Porter, The Tao of Star Wars (Atlanta: Humanics, 2003), 68.
36. It is arguable that even Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings somewhat trades in the currency of redemptive violence, given ultimacy by the eschatological nature of the new life achieved both by the destruction of the ring of power and the violence taken to distract Sauron’s eye from detecting its presence in his land of Mordor.
37. Stover, ROTS, 224.
38. See, e.g., Augustine, 4.15.154; Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics Volume III The Doctrine of Creation Pt. 4, trans. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), 432.
39. Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (London: Penguin, 2006), xiii.
40. Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (London: SCM, 1983), 79. Cf. Barth, 432.
41. According to George Weigel, “The “presumption” has tended to give theologians and religious leaders a bloated sense of their own role in decision-making about war and peace” (Paul J. Griffiths and George Weigel, “Who Wants War? An Exchange,” First Things 152 [2005], 10–12). This, however, painfully misses the sense in which Christian communities should be, even if it is provisional and fragile in its faithfulness, embodied expressions of God’s grace to a sinful world, and therefore serious about the business of understanding and contributing interrogatively and creatively to the ongoing conversations about the common good.
42. See, e.g., Augustine, City of God, 4.15.154.
43. Citation from Barth, 398.
44. Roz Kaveney, it would appear, just has not paid sufficient attention when she complains that there are “too many paradoxes in Lucas’ world” and then uses the Jedi as a significant example: “we are supposed to believe in the preternatural goodness of the Jedi Knights and yet at the same time watch them operating without a sense of moral incongruity in a world in which slavery is common. (To nit-pick here, it is not so much the Jedi Knights who are on view in the prequels as the Jedi Masters and particularly the Jedi Council.) When Obi-Wan and his mentor Qui-Gon Jinn discover the potential of young Anakin Skywalker (the future Darth Vader), they ship him off for training without bothering to free his mother from bondage” (From Alien to the Matrix: Reading Science Fiction and Film [London: I.B. Tauris, 2005], 116). It may not be readily apparent to the untrained eye, but the failure to liberate Shmi Skywalker was indeed one of the features in Anakin’s growing resentment of his mentor Obi-Wan. It is, after all, Anakin’s subsequent refusal to let his dream of another’s death, that of Padmé, be realized that is an important catalyst in his “fall.” Kaveney’s grand claim about paradoxes and inconsistencies is predicated on substantial ignorance of some basic features of the texts themselves.
45. There can be a kind of bare “peace” involved in the subject-denying imposition of one on another, of making that other subservient to a pacifying master. This is certainly “peace,” but it is “peace” in the sense that the one dominated is denied the ability to wage war. Thus what is peace to one may be violence to another, and that induces the resentment among those who feel violated. Moreover, as the conduct of the superpowers during the Cold War for example reveals, what we call “times of peace” are often really times of war conducted by other means—spying, support of governments and factions in their own struggles, and so on (see Wink, Engaging the Powers, 27). So Augustine speaks of a “peace” that “hates the just peace of God, and loves its own peace of injustice. … [T]he peace of the unjust, compared with the peace of the just, is not worthy even of the name of peace” (Augustine, 19.12.868, 869).
46. Walter Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 5.
47. Daniel M. Bell, Jr., “Can a War Against Terror Be Just? Or, What Is Just War Good For?” Crosscurrents (Spring 2006), 34–45 (39).
48. Citations from Barth, 460; Jon Nuttall, Moral Questions: An Introduction to Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 161.
49. Anker, 225.
50. Lucas, commentary on DVD of ESB (2004).
51. See Michael Kaminski, The Secret History of Star Wars: The Art of Storytelling and the Making of a Modern Epic (Kingston: Legacy Books Press, 2008), 282ff.
52. Anker, 235.
53. Citations from Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love (London: Collins, 1963), 152.
54. Properly understood, “pacifism” is not a negative term indicating an absence of action, a not doing. The common misunderstanding of “pacifism” as non-action parallels the way “peace” is generally regarded in negative terms as the absence of conflict, a bare peace that is not a purposeful action as such. Luke is not “fighting” for some abstract “peace,” “freedom,” “sovereign autonomy,” abstract notion of “civilization,” or even set of principles abstracted from persons. Instead his “peace” is a positive doing of what is just and right, or doing that which makes for properly peaceful relations. His is a struggle that always “take[s] sides,” resonating with a resistance that has teeth and a sharp bite, and therefore cannot trivialize or sentimentalize “peace” by imagining that all would be well if only we could act a bit nicer to each other (citation from Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence, 4).
55. Wink, Jesus and Nonviolence, 72.
56. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), 353.
57. On Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith DVD 2 (2005).
58. On Star Wars’ prequels as critique of American politics see Lawrence (“Joseph Campbell, George Lucas, and the Monomyth,” 27ff.; cf. McVeigh). He continues, “First Star Wars was monomythic, almost by recipe, and then [in the prequels] it became a veiled commentary on American politics from which the thrilling, simplistic heroic archetypes recede” (31). The problem is that the Nazi imagery, and the fear over totalitarianism in the “classic trilogy” means that Lawrence overstretches his point, and Lucas has on several occasions made the connection between the politics of the earlier trilogy and Vietnam, going as far as to liken the Ewoks to the Vietcong: “I was interested in the human side of war and the fact that [in Vietnam] here was a great nation, with all this technology which was losing a war to basically tribesmen” (in John Baxter, George Lucas: A Biography [London: Harper Collins, 1999], 141). Moreover, arguably the Campbellian monomyth works well in the context of ANH but less well in the context of ESB and ROTJ. Finally, it is not so much the political that largely separates the two sets of trilogies as much as the tragic trajectory of I–III in comparison with the development of the hero in IV–VI (see McDowell, The Gospel According to Star Wars, ch. 4; and John C. McDowell, “Star Wars Saving Return,” Journal of Religion and Film 13.1 (April 2009), http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol13.no1/StarWars.htm).
59. On saying that, however, by the time of ROTS there is a feeling among her senatorial critics that she is turning a blind eye to the increasingly oppressive climate on Coruscant, to the loss of rights guaranteed by the Constitution, and to the growing power of Palpatine.
60. Cited in Dale Pollock, Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas, the Creator of Star Wars (Hollywood: Samuel French, 1990), 57.
61. “George Lucas could be messing with your head,” The Guardian (23 May 2005).
62. Can one deconstruct values such as “peace,” “democracy” and “freedom” as generally reducible to little more than the rhetoric of the powerful for the maintenance of the status quo, and of the nation-state greedy for its own survival (and it should be mentioned that nations do whatever they deem necessary to secure “victory” and success)?
63. John Baxter, George Lucas: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 1999), 37.
64. Lucas, cited by Judy Stone, “George Lucas,” in Kline, 3–7 (3).
65. A reference to the serial drama The Prisoner and/or an allusion to the imprinted numerical marking of Jews by the Nazis in the concentration camps?
66. Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 49.
67. Lucas, cited in Stone, 6f.
68. On this see, for instance, John C. McDowell, “The Force is Strong with Star Wars,” Third Way 30.5 (2007), 22–25.
69. Stone, citing Lucas, 4.
70. Lucas, cited by Stone, 5.
71. Lucas, in Stephen Farber, “George Lucas: The Stinky Kid Hits the Big Time,” in Kline, 33–44 (42).
72. Citation from Michael Pye and Lynda Myles, “George Lucas,” in Kline, 64–86 (84).
73. On this see McVeigh, 38.
74. Robert A. Segal, Joseph Campbell: An Introduction (New York: Garland, 1987), 64.
75. Lucas, cited by Jean Valley, “the Empire Strikes Back and so does Filmmaker George Lucas with his Sequel to Star Wars,” in Kline, 87–97 (93, 96). Cf. Lucas transcribed by Sally Kline, “The Radioland Murders Press Conference,” in Kline, 177–183 (181); Lucas in Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel (eds.), The Future of the Movies: Interviews with Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas (Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel, 1991), 95.
76. Lucas, in “The Chosen One.”
77. Brin, “I Accuse … Or Zola Meets Yoda,” 23. Ironically, Brin criticizes Star Wars, wrongly, for being Manichaean in theological outlook, and yet in 1999 had commented on what would be expected from ROTS: “Coruscant and a zillion other planets are gonna have to fry as the emperor takes over, since that would only happen over the dead bodies of every decent citizen with any spirit” (“What’s Wrong [and Right] with ‘The Phantom Menace,’” Salon [June 15, 1999], http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/1999/06/15/brin_side/index.html). Brin seems seriously ethically confused himself and equally carelessly inattentive to the flow of the Star Wars movies.
78. Kaveney, on the other hand, describes Independence Day as irredeemably and “explicitly an anti-revisionist film about aliens” (From Alien to the Matrix, 47).
79. Christopher Sharrett, “The Horror Film in Neoconservative Culture,” in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 253–276 (269).
80. Anker, 236f.
81. The Sith Lord designation “Darth” may come from the title “Dark Lord of the Sith.”
82. Kaveney, 115.
83. Lucas, cited by Rob Waugh, “The Billion Dollar Man,” in Day and Night: The Mail on Sunday (8 May 2005), 24–25 (25).
84. Wetmore, 20.
85. Steven M. Sanders, “An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science Fiction Film,” in Steven M. Sanders (ed.), The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 1–18 (16).
86. Commenting on his student days at USC associating with underground filmmakers Lucas reflects, “What we had in common is we grew up in the “60s, protesting the Vietnam War” (cited in Biskind, 317).
87. Cited in John Baxter, George Lucas: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 1999), 140.
88. Stephen P. McVeigh, “The Galactic Way of Warfare,” in Kapell and Lawrence (eds.), 35–58 (38).
89. Wetmore: “An audience in search of reaffirmation of a more conservative, simpler world found their needs met in a New Hope” (7). Yet Wetmore is not careful here to distinguish, to some degree, Lucas’ text and audience reception. Ryan and Kellner regard the Rebel Alliance’s values as expressing a neo-conservative ideology that supports the American ideals of individualism, elitism, antistatism, agrarianism, and anti-rationalism, and therefore of support for western capitalism.
90. See Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Touchstone, 1998), 317.
91. Cited in J.W. Rinzler, The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film (Ebury Press, 2008), 65.
92. Rinzler, 4.
93. Lucas, in interview with Larry Sturhahn, 1974, in Kline, 26.
94. Lucas in interview with Stephen Farber, 1974, in Kline, 42. While there is much in this that could legitimately be criticized as naïve it is interesting to note that Lucas himself admits to not succumbing to an “all people are good” mythology. So in interview in 1980 with Jean Valley he responds to the question “how do you feel about the human condition” by admitting that “I am very cynical, and as a result, I think the defense I have against it is to be optimistic and to think people are basically good, although I know in my heart they”re not” (in Kline, 96).
95. Lucas in interview with Stephen Zito, 1977, in Kline, 53.
96. Lucas, cited in Rinzler, 12. Similarly Lucas friend and colleague Walter Murch claims that “Star Wars is George’s version of Apocalypse Now, rewritten in an otherworldly context. The Rebels in Star Wars are the Vietnamese, and the Empire is the United States” (in Peter Crowie, The Apocalypse Now Book [New York: De Capo Press, 2001], 1, cited in Kaminski, 57).
97. See Rinzler, 65.
98. Cited in Rinzler, 26.
99. Cited in Rinzler, 27.
100. Lucas, Star Wars, 1f. “The political issues have to deal with democracies that give their countries over to a dictator because of a crisis of some kind ... this was a very big issue when I was writing the first Star Wars because it was soon after Nixon’s presidency, and there was a point, right before he was thrown out of office, where he suggested that they change a constitutional amendment so that he could run for a third term. Even when he started getting into trouble, he was saying, ‘If the military will back me, I’ll stay in office.’ His idea was ‘to hell with Congress and potential impeachment. I’ll go directly to the army, and between the army and myself, I’ll continue to be president.’ This is what happens here. An emergency in the Republic leads the Senate to make Palpatine, essentially, ‘dictator for life’” (cited in Jody Duncan, Mythmaking: Behind the Scenes of Star Wars: Episode 2: Attack of the Clones [New York: Ballantine Books, 2002], 101–103).
101. Andrew Gordon, “Star Wars: A Myth for Our Time,” Literature/Film Quarterly 6.4 (1978), 320–325.
102. Rinzler, 15.
103. Star Wars Episode VI: The Return of the Jedi, dir. Richard Marquand (1983).
104. See Biskind, 342.
105. See Kaminski, 67.
106. Lawrence, 27.
107. The implication of my reading is that Lawrence and Jewett are mistaken in regarding Reagan’s move to be a natural consequence of Star Wars’ fascist politics (282).
108. For details on the latter see McDowell, The Gospel According to Star Wars, 92–108.
109. Lucas, cited in Kaminski, 140.
110. Lucas, cited in Kaminski, 140f.
111. Biskind, 336.
112. On this, see McDowell, “Star Wars Saving Return.” It is true that there are significant aesthetic, conceptual, narrative, and other differences between the two sets of trilogies, particularly differences in ethos (and I have highlighted that on several occasions in this paper, noting, for instance, the “darkening” hermeneutical effect of the “tragic drama” (I–III) on IV–VI. Yet it would be a deep mistake to miss the quite deliberate parallelisms.
113. See McDowell, The Gospel According to Star Wars, ch. 7.
114. Catechism of the Catholic Church (1997), ¦ 2304, cited in James Turner Johnson, “Just War, As It was and Is,” First Things 149 (2005), 14–24.
115. Henry A. Giroux, “Reclaiming the social: Pedagogy, Resistance, and Politics in Celluloid Culture,” in Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins (eds.), Film Theory Goes to the Movies (London: Routledge, 1993), 37–55 (39).
116. O’Shaughnessy, 25.
117. On a relevant personal note, as a child I never created scenarios of peace-making or non-violent resistance when playing with my Star Wars figures; and as an adult, I have always found the option to fight as a Sith-lord or as the Empire to be more interesting and appealing than it should [in games such as Star Wars Battlefront and Battlefront II, and Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds]. That, of course, probably says more about me.
118. See Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), 3f.
119. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985.), 16.
120. Lucas, in Rayment, 16.
121. Carl Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 2000).
122. Martin M. Winkler, “Star Wars and the Roman Empire,” in Martin M. Winkler (ed.), Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 272–290 (280).
123. J.P. Telotte, Science Fiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 128.
124. Cited in Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, Saving Christianity From Empire (New York: Continuum, 2005), 1.
1. Claudia Card, in Feminist Ethics, ed. Claudia Card (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), 4, cited in Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich, “Can Virtue Be Taught? A Feminist Reconsiders,” in Barbara Darling-Smith (ed.), Can Virtue Be Taught? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 69–85 (70).
2. Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich, 70.
3. Margaret R. Miles and Brent S. Plate, “Hospitable Vision: Some Notes on the Ethics of Seeing Film,” Crosscurrents 54.1 (2004), 22–31 (25).
4. Patricia Melzer, Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 11.
5. See Dale Pollock for Pauline Kael’s suggestion of sexism in the ending of Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973), and Lucas’ response (Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas, the Creator of Star Wars [Hollywood: Samuel French, 1990], 147).
6. Rubey, “Not So Long Ago, Not So Far Away: New Variations on Old Themes and Questioning Star Wars’ Revival of Heroic Archetypes,” in Brode and Deyneka (eds.), 52. Cf. Peter Lev, “Whose Future? Star Wars, Alien and Blade Runner,” Literature/Film Quarterly 26.1 (1998), 30–37; Diana Dominguez, “Feminism and the Force: Empowerment and Disillusionment in a Galaxy Far, Far Away,” in Silvio and Vinci (eds.), 109–133; Philip L. Simpson, “Thawing the Ice Princess,” in Kapell and Lawrence (eds.), 115–130 (115f.); Veronica A. Wilson, “Seduced by the Dark Side of the Force: Gender, Sexuality, and moral Agency in George Lucas’s Star Wars Universe,” in Silvio and Vinci (eds.), 134–152 (134); Ray Merlock and Kathy Merlock Jackson, “Lightsabers, Political Arenas, and Marriages for Princess Leia and Queen Amidala,” in Brode and Deyneka (eds.), 77–88; Jeanne Cavelos, “Stop Her, She’s Got a Gun! How the Rebel Princess and the Virgin Queen Became Marginalized and Powerless in George Lucas’s Fairy Tale,” in Jeanne Cavelos and Bill Spangler (eds.), Star Wars on Trial: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Debate the Most Popular Science Fiction Films of All Time (Dallas: Benbella, 2006), 305–322; Roz Kaveney, From Alien to the Matrix: Reading Science Fiction Film (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 116. These issues are only very briefly addressed in McDowell, The Gospel According to Star Wars, 88–92. Cf. Lucas in Clare Clouzot, “The Morning of the Magician: George Lucas and Star Wars,” in Kline, 55–63 (57f.).
7. Anne Cranny-Francis, “Feminist Futures: A Generic Study,” in Annette Kuhn (ed.), Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema (London: Verso, 1990), 219–227 (223).
8. Robert Stam and Louise Spence, “Colonialism, Racism and Representation,” Screen 24.2 (1983), 3, cited in Jude Davies and Carol R. Smith, Gender, Ethnicity and Sexuality in Contemporary American Film (New York: Routledge, 2000), 1.
9. Henry A. Giroux, The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 27. Giroux cites Jack Japes on Disney: this company provides theatrical animations that reproduce “a type of gender stereotyping…. Parents think they”re essentially harmless—and they’re not harmless” (The Mouse That Roared, 103).
10. Minnich, 71.
11. Cavelos, 325.
12. Davies and Smith, 8, citing Manning Marable, Beyond Black and White: Transforming African American Politics (London: Verso, 1993), xii.
13. Jantzen, Foundations of Violence, 16.
14. Cavelos, 305.
15. Hanson and Kay, 250.
16. Lev, 34; Wilson, 143. Wilson needs to be asked in what ways Leia is unimportant or expendable. Moreover, Padmé is only expendable because Lucas has to explain how she dies some time prior to ANH.
17. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 141.
18. Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 109–120.
19. Dominguez, 116.
20. Lev, 33, 34, 36, citing Robin Wood, Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
21. There are suggestions that Han Solo was originally conceived as a Lando, and therefore black, figure. “Still smarting from criticism that Star Wars was racist, George conceived of Lando as a suave, dashing black man in his thirties/ and specified in his script that half of the Cloud City residents and troops were to be black” (Pollock, 213).
22. The Clone Wars introduce Asajj Ventress as a student of Count Dooku, although there is a clear reference by Tyrannus to her not being Sith, and other moments of the Expanded Universe have Mara Jade as the Emperor’s Hand.
23. Kathleen Ellis, “New World, Old Habits: Patriarchal Ideology in Star Wars: A New Hope,” Australian Screen Education 30 (Spring 2002), 135–138 (135). Cf. Lev, “Whose Future?” 31.
24. Dominguez, 110.
25. Merlock and Jackson, 80.
26. Lucas, cited in Pollock, 165.
27. Carrie Fisher, cited in Bill Spangler, “Fighting Princesses and Other Distressing Damsels,” in Jeanne Cavelos and Bill Spangler (eds.), Star Wars on Trial: Science Fiction and fantasy Writers Debate the Most Popular Science Fiction Films of All Time (Dallas: Benbella, 2006), 329–338 (331).
28. Cavelos, 325.
29. Sherrie Inness, Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), cited in Carla Kungl, “‘Long Live Stardoe!’ Can a Female Starbuck Survive?” in Potter and Marshall, 198–209 (202). Brian Attebery: “When women, too, can be adventurous, autonomous, and audacious, then the carefully constructed masculine self loses its foundation” (Decoding Gender in Science Fiction [New York: Routledge, 2002], cited in Kungl, 202).
30. Dominguez, 113.
31. See Jim Smith, George Lucas (London: Virgin Books, 2003), 131.
32. Cavelos, 324.
33. Henry Giroux, The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 103.
34. Segal, 14.
35. Rubey, “Not So Long Ago, Not So Far Away: New Variations on Old Themes and Questioning Star Wars’ Revival of Heroic Archetypes,” in Brode and Deyneka (eds.), 57.
36. And yet, here again, there is some ambiguity—by retroactively connecting the revelation of Leia’s parentage in ROTJ and Yoda’s response to Obi-Wan’s comment concerning Luke “That boy is our last hope” by announcing that “No, there is another” we can see that suddenly Leia herself becomes a symbol of hope and redemption.
37. Rubey, “Not So Long Ago, Not So Far Away: New Variations on Old Themes and Questioning Star Wars’ Revival of Heroic Archetypes,” in Brode and Deyneka (eds.), 63.
38. Simpson, 115f.
39. Simpson, 115f.
40. Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 14.
41. Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 166.
42. Davies and Smith, 24.
43. Merlock and Jackson, 82.
44. Elizabeth Stuart, “Sacramental Flesh,” in Gerard Loughlin (ed.), Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body (Malden: Blackwell, 2007), 65–75 (65).
45. Luce Irigaray, To Be Two, trans. Monique Rhodes and Marco Cocito-Monoc (London: Athlone Press, 2000), 25.
46. Irigaray, 27.
47. Irigaray, 30.
48. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1974), xxii.
49. Benhabib, 149.
50. Jantzen, Becoming Divine, 70.
51. Terry Eagleton reasons that a constructivist account of human autonomy or “self-authorship is the bourgeois myth of self-origination. Denying that our freedom thrives only within the context of a more fundamental dependency lies at the root of a good deal of historical disaster” (Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009], 16).
52. Simpson, 121.
53. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 72.
54. Benhabib, 198.
55. Dominguez, 117.
56. Cornea, 150.
57. See Barbara Creed, “Alien and the Monstrous-Feminine,” in Annette Kuhn (ed.), Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Science Fiction Cinema (London: Verso, 1990), 128–141 (140). In an application of Julia Kristeva’s ideas concerning the representation of the feminine as abject, Creed explicates Alien in terms of “monstrous femininity.” She observes that the monstrous one emits fluids, is associated with maternality and reproductivity, and is to be excluded as the threatening and wholly “other” who cannot be integrated. “Although women are not unique in having bodies, their bodies have unique features that render them especially problematic in the context of managing fears associated with mortality. They menstruate, lactate, and carry and bear the labor to deliver children. Though men can also invest a great deal in the caring for offspring, their obligatory, bodily investment is relatively minimal” (R.L. Trivers, Parental Investment and Sexual Selection, in B. Campbell [ed.], Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man [Chicago: Aldine, 1972], 136–179). Therefore, according to Cornea, “Alien articulates a masculine fear of gender dissolution, a dissolution that is initially presented under the guise of a progressive futurism and then quickly undercut with the introduction of the alien” (150).
58. Kaveney, From Alien to the Matrix, 133.
59. Dawson, 76.
60. Gerard Loughlin, Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), 107.
61. Kungl, 208, referring to Innes’ reading.
62. Cornea, 161.
63. Cornea, 161.
64. See Julia Kristeva, “La femme, ce n’est jamais ca,” Tel Quel 59 (Autumn 1974).
65. Cornea, 160.
66. Doherty, 194.
67. Doherty, 194.
68. Merlock and Jackson, 85.
69. Doherty, 194.
70. Loughlin, 119f.
71. Doherty, 194.
72. Cornea, 150.
73. Cornea, 150: “Upon learning of her replicated status, Rachel looks to Deckard for a sense of identity and acceptance—she is seen to acquiesce to Deckard’s suggestions and appears eager to become what he wants her to be. Likewise, Deckard looks to Rachel in order to assert his own masculinity and to provide himself with a secure identity and future outside of his role as a killer.”
74. Cavelos, in “the Courtroom,” in Cavelos and Spangler, 323–327 (323).
75. Kaveney, 134.
76. Simpson, 121.
77. Andrew Gordon, “The Power of the Force: Sex in the Star Wars Trilogy,” in Donald Palumbo (ed.), Eros in the Mind’s Eye: Sexuality and the Fantastic in Art and Film (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 193–207; Martin Miller and Robert Sprich, “The Appeal of Star Wars: An Archetypal-Psychoanalytic View,” American Imago 38.2 (Summer 1981), 203–220; Roger Kaufman, “How the Star Wars Saga Evokes the Creative Promise of Homosexual Love: A Gay-Centered Psychological Perspective,” in Kapell and Lawrence (eds.), 131–156.
78. Lucas, cited in Pollock, 165.
79. Dominguez, 111.
80. Merlock and Jackson, 85.
81. Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (London: Penguin, 2006), 13, 10.
82. Sen, 21.
83. Jantzen, Becoming Divine, 114. Jantzen’s particular worry is that it refers to “something that happens to a clearly understood self, or something that such a self does. In much philosophy of religion [for instance,] selfhood or subjectivity is treated as conceptually straightforward: a self just is a unified subject, a subject of attributes, experiences, actions” (115).
84. Cited in James H. Cone, For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1984), 124.
85. Benhabib, 164.
86. Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory (London: Routledge, 2000), 241, citing Monique Wittig.
87. Hanssen, 212.
88. Teresa de Luretis, cited in Hanssen, 215.
89. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, in Hanssen, 215.
90. Hanssen, 215.
91. Melzer, 15.
92. Margaret D. Kamitsuka, Feminist Theology and the Challenge of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 27.
93. On Wollstonecraft’s “liberal feminism,” see Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 62f.
94. Hanssen, 188.
95. The importance of the female Jedi in the Order is revealed more in the literature covering the period. In TPM the following female are on the Jedi High Council: Depa Billaba, Adi Gallia, and Yaddle (admittedly that is a paltry three of the twelve members); in ATOC: Depa Billaba, Adi Gallia, and Shaak Ti; added to these are the further prominent Jedi Aayla Secura, and Luminara Unduli with her Padawan Barriss Offee. Featuring in significant roles in the Lucas-endorsed Clone Wars short animations are Shaak Ti, Luminara Unduli, and Padawan Barriss Offee. These three feature in ROTS along with Stass Allie.
96. George Lucas, “The Beginning: The Making of Episode I,” TPM DVD 2 (1999).
97. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 7.
98. Grace M. Jantzen, Foundations of Violence: Death and the Displacement of Beauty (London: Routledge, 2004), 27.
99. On saying that, however, by the time of ROTS there is a feeling among critics that she is turning a blind eye to the increasingly oppressive climate on Coruscant, to the loss of rights guaranteed by the Constitution, and to the growing power of Palpatine.
100. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, ed. Carol H. Poston, 2d ed. (New York: Norton, 1998), 33, 34, 39. Cf. Brown, 62.
101. Cited in Pollock, 57. As John Sutherland writes, “He shaped Star Wars as anti-Vietnam allegory” (“George Lucas could be messing with your head,” The Guardian [23 May 2005]).
102. Dominguez, 110, 111.
103. Wilson, 139.
104. Dominguez, 110.
105. Dominguez, 111.
106. On the prequel trilogy as a tragic drama see McDowell, The Politics of Big Fantasy, ch. 2.
107. Wilson, 140.
108. Wilson, 140.
109. Wilson, 140.
110. Wilson, 137.
111. “George Lucas: Mapping the Mythology,” CNN (May 8, 2002), www.archives.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/Movies/05/07/ca.s02.george.lucas/index.html, consulted 08–05–05.
112. Lucas, in Time Magazine, cited http://boards.theforce.net/The_Star_Wars_Saga/b104556/13106765/p2, consulted 08–05–05.
113. Wilson, 138.
114. Wilson, 141f.
115. Wilson, 139.
116. Irigaray, 18.
117. Irigaray, 40.
118. See Ryder Windham, Star Wars: The Ultimate Visual Guide (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2005), 110.
119. Ian McDiarmid, in “The Chosen One.”
120. Jeffrey Overstreet, “Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith,” Christianity Today (18 May 2005), www.christianitytoday.com/movies/reviews/starwars3.html, consulted 1–06–05.
121. Wilson, 140.
122. Wilson, 140f.
123. Dominguez, 127.
124. Wilson, 143.
125. Wilson, 145.
126. Dominguez, 127.
127. Wilson, 142.
128. Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 277.
129. Melzer, 1.
130. See Pollock, 106.
131. Pollock, 147.
132. Clare Clouzot, “The Morning of the Magician: George Lucas and Star Wars,” in Kline, 55–63 (57f.).
133. See Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
134. Cavelos, 311.
135. Merlock and Jackson, 78.
136. Cavelos, 306.
137. Geoff King, New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), 135.
138. Booker, 115.
139. The worry is that of the moral questionability of the instrumentalizing of life, the denial of otherness for self-aggrandizing purposes. While THX 1138 earlier movie in its turn presents no obvious controllers of the politico-economic system and its economic reduction of persons to biomechanical working units, it too is animated by the tension between (corporate) systems that induce conformity and the nature of embodied selfhood-in-relation (such as is explored in THX’s moment of erotic discovery of human relationality in the mutual caress with LUH). In the SW saga, the ruthless instrumentalization in the political sphere is removed from the progressive goals of creating conditions for critical agency, ethical responsibility and accountability, and the obligations of democratic public life.
140. Booker, 117.
141. Peter Krämer, “Fighting the Evil Empire: Star Wars, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the Politics of Science Fiction,” in Brode and Deyneka (eds.), 63–76 (70), referring to Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 234–5, 303–5, 308.
1. In a distinctly limited and limiting claim for science fiction Jerold J. Abrams announces that “for anyone living in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, science fiction cinema is one of the few art forms that attempts to predict the future of human nature and civilization—a future filled with space travel, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and widespread surveillance” (The Dialectic of Enlightenment in Metropolis,” in Steven M. Sanders [ed.], The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film [Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008], 153–170 [153]).
2. H.G. Wells, cited in Patricia Kerslake, Science Fiction and Empire (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 2.
3. Penley, 198.
4. Pyle, 233.
5. Booker, 266.
6. See Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” in Sean Redmond (ed.), Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 40–47 (40).
7. Scott Bukatman, Blade Runner (London: BFI, 1997), 8, citing Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 285.
8. John C. McDowell, The Politics of Big Fantasy: The Ideologies of Star Wars, The Matrix and The Avengers (Jefferson: McFarland, 2014), ch. 3.
9. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 185.
10. Kenneth Surin, Freedom Not Yet: Liberation and the Next World Order (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 6.
11. Heidi Kaye and I.Q. Hunter, “Introduction—Alien Identities: Exploring Difference in Film and Fiction,” in Deborah Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter, Heidi Kaye, and Imelda Whelehan (eds.), Alien Identities: Exploring Difference in Film and Fiction (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 1–10 (1).
12. Kaye and Hunter, 2.
13. Kaye and Hunter, 2.
14. Cited in Rob van Scheers, Paul Verhoeven, trans. Aletta Stevens (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), xiii.
15. Aubrey Malone, Censoring Hollywood: Sex and Violence in Film and on the Cutting Room Floor (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011), 7.
16. Davies and Smith, 53.
17. Matthew Wilhelm Kapell, “Eugenics, Racism, and the Jedi Gene Pool,” in Kapell and Lawrence (eds.), 159–173 (168).
18. Booker, 117.
19. Sanders, 16.
20. Christopher Deis, “Erasing Difference,” “Erasing Difference: The Cylons as Racial Other,” in Tiffany Porter and C.W. Marshall (eds.), Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica (New York: Continuum, 2008), 156–168 (160).
21. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 128.
22. Andrew Howe, “Star Wars in Black and White: Race and Racism in a Galaxy Not So Far Away,” in Brode and Deyneka (eds.), 11–23 (14).
23. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 127.
24. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 128.
25. Christopher Deis, “May the Force (Not) Be with You: “‘Race Critical’ Readings and the Star Wars Universe,” in in Silvio and Vinci (eds.), 77–108 (80).
26. Howe, 17.
27. Stuart Hall, “What Is the ‘Black’ in Popular Culture?” in Gina Dent (ed.), Black Popular Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), cited in Giroux, The Mouse That Roared, 126.
28. This is a theme important to Boulle’s source novel for the first film in the series. See Booker, 99f.
29. Cornea, 181.
30. Eric Greene, Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics, and Popular Culture (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 9.
31. Cornea, 181.
32. Cornea, 181f.
33. Davies and Smith, 53.
34. Lincoln Geraghty, American Science Fiction and Television (Oxford: Berg, 2009), 41.
35. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 63.
36. Deis, “Erasing Difference,” 157.
37. Deis, “Erasing Difference,” 167.
38. Deis, “Erasing Difference,” 160.
39. Deis, “Erasing Difference,” 161.
40. Cornea, 176.
41. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 56. According to Jenny Wolmark, the alien functions as a device since “it enables difference to be constructed in terms of binary oppositions which reinforce relations of dominance and subordination…. [The alien can] explore the way in which the deeply divisive dichotomies of race and gender are embedded in the repressive structures and relations of dominance and subordination” (Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and Postmodernism [Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994], 2, 27).
42. Kerslake, 16. Cf. Isaiah Lavender III, Race in American Science Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 8: “In my estimation there is nowhere better than sf to examine the fear and excitement generated through alien encounters with race and racism. … With concepts of otherhood, we can examine degrees of black marginalization in sf (i.e., blackground).”
43. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 131.
44. Daniel Leonard Bernardi, Star Trek and History: Race-ing Toward a White Future (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 80.
45. Deis, 77.
46. Elvis Mitchell, “Works Every Time,” in Glenn Kenny (ed.), A Galaxy Not So Far Away (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), 77–85 (78). Cf. Pollock, 213; Chris Salewicz, George Lucas Close Up: The Making of His Movies (London: Orion, 1998), 80.
47. Mitchell, 80.
48. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 133.
49. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 135.
50. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 132.
51. Howe, 14.
52. Richard H. Dees, “Moral Ambiguity in a Black-and-White Universe,” in Kevin S. Decker and Jason T. Eberl (eds.), Star Wars and Philosophy: More Powerful Than You Can Possibly Imagine (Chicago: Open Court, 2005), 39–53 (45f.).
53. Dees, 46.
54. ESB DVD commentary.
55. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 17.
56. Howe, 20.
57. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 134. Cf. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Film, 4th ed. (New York: Continuum, 2002), 422.
58. Howe, 17.
59. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 17.
60. See Greg Grewell, cited in Deis, “May the Force (Not) Be with You,” 94; Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, ch. 5; Deis, “May the Force (Not) Be with You,” 94ff.; Kapell, 168f.
61. Howe, 20.
62. Howe, 18.
63. Melzer, 44.
64. McDowell, The Gospel According to Star Wars, 90.
65. Lucas, Star Wars, 95.
66. Howe, 12. Deis: “the Other of droids and robots challenges narrow visions of humanity and the value of difference” (“May the Force (Not) Be with You,” 95).
67. Kerslake, 20.
68. John W. Wright, “Levinasian Ethics of Alterity: The Face of the Other in Spielberg’s Cinematic Language,” in Dean A. Kowalski (ed.), Steven Spielberg and Philosophy: We”re Gonna Need a Bigger Book (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 2008), 50–68 (56, 58).
69. Booker, 117.
70. Booker, 117f.
71. Carl Silvio, “The Star Wars Trilogies and Global Capitalism,” in Silvio and Vinci (eds.), 53–73 (58).
72. Wilson, 143.
73. Howe, 13.
74. Pollock, 213.
75. Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (London: Routledge, 2003), 5.
76. Deis, “May the Force (Not) Be with You,” 81. Deis draws attention to an important allusion to Dooku’s aspirations for humanocentric hygenization of governance in the novelization of ROTS (see Stover, 83). “The warm, primary colors that typified democracy are increasingly replaced by colors that are symbolic of the rise of Nazi-like, militaristic, fascist State Accordingly, as the narrative advances from a time of peace to one of perpetual war and conflict, the color plate of the chancellor’s office begins to feature the color red—a color that symbolizes violence and bloodshed—with the blue Senatorial Guards that were fixtures of The Republic being replaced in Attack of the Clones by the Emperor’s iconic, red Imperial Guards” (Deis, 81). This is evident already in TPM with regard to the contrast between the lush landscape and flowing garments of an aesthetically developed Naboo culture and the cold and militaristic grey of the Federation Starships, and the moral sterility of the techno-mechanistic fetishization of the Trade Federation.
77. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 139.
78. See, e.g., John Harlow, “And Now, the End is Near…,” The Sunday Times Culture (8 May 2005), 10–11 (11).
79. Howe, 18.
80. George Lucas, “Star Wars: Lucas Strikes Back,” news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/394542.stm, cited in Howe, 18.
81. Howe, 18.
82. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 144.
83. Citation from Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 143.
84. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 144.
85. David West Reynolds, in David West Reynolds, James Luceno, and Ryder Windham, Star Wars: The Complete Visual Dictionary (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2006), 46.
86. Michael J. Hanson and Max S. Kay, Star Wars: The New Myth (Xlibris, 2001), 382.
87. See David West Reynolds, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. The Visual Dictionary (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2002), 39.
88. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 141.
89. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 154f.
90. Peter Lev, “Whose Future? Star Wars, Alien, and Blade Runner,” Literature/Film Quarterly 26.1 (1998), 30–37 (31f.). For broadly dualistic readings see Mark Rowlands, The Philosopher at the End of the Universe (London: Ebury Press, 2003); Dick Staub, Christian Wisdom of the Jedi (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005). Cf. Hannah Pok, “The Star Wars Trilogy: Fantasy, Narcissism and Fear of the Other in Reagan’s America,” http://hannahpok.com/deepfieldspace/framesrc2c.html, consulted 18–05–05; Terry Christensen, Reel Movies: American Political Movies from The Birth of a Nation to Platoon (New York and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
91. For further elaboration of this point see John C. McDowell, The Gospel According to Star Wars: Faith, Hope and the Force (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), ch. 3.
92. Kapell, 169.
93. Kapell, 169.
94. Ryder Wyndham, Star Wars: The Ultimate Visual Guide (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2005), 31.
95. Lev, American Films of the 70s, 165f.
96. Kaveney, From Alien to the Matrix, 133.
97. Kaveney, From Alien to the Matrix, 136.
98. In important ways, with the romantic theme King Kong is not straightforwardly describable as a monster drama. The Jurassic Park series is more interested in critiquing the monstrousness of corporate interests than in representing the animals as the focus of monstrous Otherness. The Sea Horse presents the prehistoric animal in a different, and less threatening, way again.
99. Kaveney, From Alien to the Matrix, 159.
100. Kaveney, From Alien to the Matrix, 133.
101. Kaveney, From Alien to the Matrix, 138.
102. Kaveney, From Alien to the Matrix, 138f.
103. Doherty, 195.
104. Doherty, 195.
105. Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters, 49f.
106. See Creed. Through a psychoanalytic reading, Creed construes the movies as subverting the feminine.
107. Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters, 50.
108. Kaveney, From Alien to the Matrix, 134.
109. Kaveney, From Alien to the Matrix, 134.
110. Kaveney, From Alien to the Matrix, 144.
111. Thomas Doherty, “Gene, Gender, and the Aliens Trilogy,” in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 181–199 (192).
112. In Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters, 52.
113. Amy Taubin, “Invading Bodies: Alien3 and the Trilogy,” Sight and Sounds 2.3 (July 1992), 8–10 (9).
114. Judith Newton, “Feminism and Anxiety in Alien,” in Annette Kuhn (ed.), Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Science Fiction Cinema (London: Verso, 1990), 82–87 (82).
115. Howe, 11.
116. Lola Young, Fear of the Dark: “Race,” Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1996), 40.
117. Cornea, 176.
118. Cornel West, “New Cultural Politics,” 69, cited in Davies and Smith, 61. “What West’s argument offers is the possibility of contesting the demeaning effects of white supremacist stereotypes and the marginalisation of black representations but also the transactional uses of images of African Americans. The implication … is that racism has to be understood not simply as a cause but also as an effect, and in this case as fulfilling a strategic function, the securing of alliances among whites of different geographical, cultural, and political affiliations” (Davies and Smith, 62).
119. Cornea, 216.
120. Melzer, 45.
121. Lev, 34.
122. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 152, citing Carson, 168.
123. Booker, 35.
124. Peter Biskind, Seeing Is Believing (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 111. Cf. “Pods, Blobs, and Ideology in American Films of the Fifties,” in Al LaValley (ed.), Invasion, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 194.
125. Booker, 8, 59. “Star Kevin McCarthy (whose shared surname with Senator McCarthy provides an additional irony) has stated in an interview that he himself felt that the pod people were reminiscent of the heartless capitalists who work on Madison Avenue. Indeed, if communism was perceived by many Americans of the 1950s as a threat to their cherished individuality, capitalism itself was often perceived in much the same way. While the burgeoning capitalist system of the 1950s produced unprecedented opportunities for upward mobility in America, this highly complex system also required, for its operation, an unprecedented level of efficiency and standardization. Thus, if the 1950s represented a sort of Golden Age of science fiction film, the decade was also the Golden Age of American homogenization, as efficiency-oriented mass production techniques pioneered by industrialists such as Henry Ford reached new heights of sophistication and new levels of penetration into every aspect of American life. While television helped to homogenize the thoughts and dreams of the rapidly expanding American population, General Motors, the great industrial power of the decade, achieved unprecedented success in the business in which Ford’s techniques had originally been developed. At the same time, Bill Levitt’s Long Island suburb of Levittown brought mass production to the housing industry, ushering in the great age of suburbanization, perhaps the single most important step in the commodification of the American dream. The 1950s were also the Golden Age of branding and franchising, as standard brands, aided by television advertising, installed themselves in the collective American consciousness, while chain franchises spread across the nation, informed by the central driving idea of homogeneity—selling identical products in identical ways at thousands of identical franchises across the country. Thus, if Levitt’s vision helped to homogenize the American home, Kemmons Wilson’s Holiday Inn chain made identical lodgings available to Americans wherever they drove on the nation’s rapidly expanding (and more and more homogeneous) highway system in their increasingly powerful, standardized automobiles. Similarly, Ray Kroc made homogeneous food available on the road when he took the fast-food production techniques pioneered by Ray Kroc and the McDonald brothers and made standardized hamburgers an indispensable part of everyday cuisine in America” (66f.).
126. Steven M. Sanders, “Picturing Paranoia: Interpreting Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” in Steven M. Sanders (ed.), The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 55–72 (59).
127. Kaveney, From Alien to the Matrix, 44.
128. Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” in Sean Redmond (ed.), Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 40–47 (42).
129. Sontag, 44.
130. Kaveney, From Alien to the Matrix, 39.
131. One lazy version is a moment in TPM when the Gungan Bongo on the way to Theed City is saved from its deadly aquatic pursuer, to which Qui Gon Jinn responds, “There is always a bigger fish.”
132. See Booker, 7.
133. Deis, “May the Force (Not) Be with You,” 95.
134. The political effect is evident in the movie—the flag, country, president rushing into battle. It is a celebration less of the independence of the nation from British imperialism as the freedom of the nation from all that is utterly destructive and colonizing. As a consequence, the nation basks on a purer hue than it might otherwise.
135. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 10.