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As difficult as it is to feel sorry for someone
with lots of money, artistic success and millions of adoring
fans, I feel sorry for George Lucas. Twenty-two years ago,
he made Star Wars, a film that shows the power of
humanity over machinery when a young man armed only with
a tiny space ship and a distilled version of Taoist philosophy
overcomes a moon-sized weapon capable of annihilating a
planet. But instead of making audiences aware of the foolishness
of relying on technology to solve our problems, "Star
Wars" became the nickname for the ultimate mechanical
panacea, the Strategic Defense Initiative. To add insult
to injury, President Reagan, who first proposed SDI, borrowed
other terminology from the series to cash in on the collective
resonance it inspired. The Soviet Union became known as
"the evil empire," a huge bureaucratic machine
that had to be kept in check by those homespun freedom loving
individuals, the Jedi Knights of NATO. Much more recently,
The Phantom Menace inspired an equally surprising
response when some argued that it was full of offensive
racial stereotypes. What must have made this response particularly
upsetting to Lucas is that a closer viewing of his latest
installment reveals that if anyone should have been offended,
it should have been conservatives not liberals, for the
political subtext of the film disparages both SDI and the
man who introduced it to us.
However, this is not to say the film is all that good, even
for liberals like myself. The plot is constructed with the
hardcore Star Wars fan in mind, and as such it simply
gives more of the same with few new insights or surprises.
The film is the first of three part prequel to the original
Star Wars trilogy which was released between 1977-1983,
taking place an even longer time ago in that far, far away
galaxy. Queen Amidala of the Naboo is taken hostage on her
planet by the Trade Federation, a nasty group of capitalists
who complain that their taxes are too high. Obi Wan Kenobe,
a Jedi apprentice on the verge of graduating to full knighthood,
arrives with his mentor, Qui-Gon Jinn, to try to resolve the
conflict. They fail in this regard, but do manage to help
the queen escape to Tatooine, a desert planet full of slave
traders. There they meet young Anakin Skywalker who will later
grow up to become the infamous Darth Vader of the original
series. At this point, however, he's just a precocious kid
who helps them repair their ship, so they can travel to the
capitol planet to lodge an official complaint with the Imperial
Senate. There they meet their representative, Senator Palpatine,
who unbeknownst to them is actually Darth Sidious, the evil-dark-side-of-the-force-master
who's behind all the trouble in the first place. He claims
to want to help them, but only on the condition that they
will support his bid to become first chancellor. That accomplished,
he betrays their trust and secretly orders the Trade Federation
to "utterly destroy" their opposition. Fortunately,
however, before they can carry out this order, the good guys
return and defeat the Trade Federation with the help of the
Gungans, a less advanced fishy race, and, of course, The Force.
Palpatine returns to "celebrate" the victory, letting
young Annakin Skywalker know that he will be keeping an eye
on him, thus moving the film to conclude like the first installment,
with both a celebration and an ominous warning of things to
come.
The film has all the familiar ingredients of the Star
Wars formula: the cool Jedi knights doing amazing things
with their light sabers, the extraordinary lad escaping from
imposed limitations, a number of cute characters to please
the younger viewers (and toy shop owners), and, most importantly,
several extraordinary special effects. Yet while it recreates
the mythological feel of the original series, it lacks the
originality, humor, and character development. Had it appeared
first, I doubt the series would have generated even half the
interest that it has. So in general I have no quibbles with
the overall critical assessment of the film, but I think that
it is strange that with all the scrutiny it received concerning
its lack of quality and its questionable stereotypes that
no attention has been directed at its more progressive subtext,
a subtext which attempts to disassociate Star Wars
from SDI, and to attack the conservatives who made this connection
in the first place.
As mentioned earlier, even in the original trilogy there
are many places where promises of technological imperviousness
get broken down, so in retrospect it is odd that SDI should
be nicknamed "Star Wars." Nonetheless, the
original series showed that it was very, very difficult to
penetrate the enemy's defenses, a process which required a
lot of help from The Force. However, in The Phantom Menace
everyone's "strategic defenses" break down. First
to go are the Trade Federation's when the Jedis, armed only
with light sabers, manage to escape from the heavily guarded
flagship. Shortly after, the Jedis lose their own ship's shields
when they try to escape from the occupied planet. In the final
battle sequence, the Gungans lose their shields, and the Trade
Federation allows a child to stumble through and destroy theirs.
In fact, the Achilles' heel of the Trade Federation is that
they rely too much on technology, allowing their mechanical
creations to fight their battles for them. Remember that all
of these "people," even the Gungans, are light years
ahead of us technologically, which should lead us to ponder
the question that if none of them can construct an impervious
shield, then how can we be expected to?
Of course, most scientists already acknowledge how unlikely
it is that SDI could ever work. So why is it that taxpayers
will allow the Pentagon to spend over four billion dollars
to develop it this year? Certainly, in part it is because
of its association with Star Wars; both are fantasies,
but they are fantasies that people want to believe in. The
very words "Star Wars" conjure up hope that
we can survive our own planet-wrecking weapons, hope that
the technology used by freedom loving people can negate the
weapons used by "evil empires." Arguments that appeal
to the emotions, to collective pathos almost always trump
those that appeal to the intellect (especially in post-September
11th America). Perhaps that's why Lucas shows so many instances
of failing shields, to make it absolutely clear that there
are no mechanical panaceas, neither in the Star Wars'
galaxy nor in our own.
The film's strongest critical subtext, however, is not focused
on SDI but on the man who first proposed it, President Ronald
Reagan. There are several connections between the former president
and Senator Palpatine (a.k.a. Darth Sideous, the future evil
emperor). Many mistakenly labeled Reagan as a bad actor, when
in fact the opposite was true. Though he cut programs for
the poor, for students, for the environment, he always projected
a kindly grandfather facade, appearing as a nice man who seemed
to care for our collective welfare. Senator Palpatine also
has these two sides to him, especially in his relation to
Queen Amidala. On the one hand, he acts like a concerned father,
smiling, warm, caring, but at the same time he is the hidden
cause behind her concern, for it is he who secretly pulls
the Trade Federation's strings, giving the order for them
to take over her planet.
This is why I do not think that it is a coincidence that
the relationship between Palpatine and the Trade Federation
closely resembles Reagan's relationship with Iran. While Palpatine
outwardly condemns the Federation, especially in how they
take the Naboo hostage, he secretly collaborates with his
supposed enemy, using them to advance his own power by accusing
the current chancellor of being too weak, too tied up in bureaucratic
procedures to take action. In the same way, President Reagan
gained substantial support by criticizing how his predecessor,
Jimmy Carter, handled the crisis with Iran, calling his political
rival to task for being too weak, especially in the way he
responded to the hostage issue. At the same time, Reagan,
like Palpatine, would soon secretly collaborate with his outward
enemy, by selling weapons to the Iranians in order to use
the profits to advance his own political agenda without the
knowledge or approval of the Senate.
In fact, the whole conservative agenda that Reagan set in
place is reflected in Palpatine's political stance. First,
he gets the Trade Federation riled up over having to pay high
taxes, an issue that has been the cornerstone of almost every
Republican campaign. To make this connection even more blatant,
the head of the Trade Federation is named Nute Gunray, which
sounds very similar to Newt Gingrich, the House Speaker who
rose to power on anti-tax campaigns. The related conservative
concern is their belief that the government is too big, resulting
in an unnecessary bureaucracy where nothing gets done. When
Palpatine makes statements like "our best choice would
be to push for the election of a new supreme chancellor-one
who can take control of the bureaucrats, enforce the laws,
and give us justice," he clearly sounds like Reagan in
his 1980 campaign. Of course, despite all of Reagan's complaints
about taxes and about government spending, he ended up being
guilty of both, increasing taxes and spending more than all
his predecessors combined, mostly on a massive military build
up. With the memory of the millions of storm troopers, battleships
and planet-wrecking stations of the original Star Wars
in the back of our mind, we know that Palpatine will soon
do the same.
Finally, it's important to note that despite all the recent
criticism of racial stereotypes, there is still a very strong
endorsement for multiculturalism in the film. Palpatine is
almost always surrounded by white males, he belongs to a race
of Naboo who consider themselves superior to the other races
on his planet, and he feels absolutely no compunction about
giving the order to wipe out the "insignificant"
Gungans. This contrasts strongly with the actions of Queen
Amidala. Although she also is a Naboo, she learns to regret
her race's dismissal of the Gungans and begs their forgiveness
for how they had been treated in the past. Furthermore, in
contrast to Palpatine's entourage, the Jedi council, the undisputed
good guys, are made up of the most imaginative assortment
of creatures that Lucas has yet put together. Throughout the
film, he shows us that the galactic races are stronger together
than apart.
Perhaps one reason that this subtext was too submerged for
most people to see was that Lucas tried too hard to make the
film fit the traditional Star Wars formula that served
him in the past; the glitter of the overly cute, contrived
characters and plot blinded people to the film's more subtle
political commentary. Perhaps if Lucas had studied the Tao
Te Ching more carefully than to simply extract nice sounding
phrases to describe The Force, he would have come across one
of the many maxims which show how success can be as hollow
as failure. While the film's financial success must certainly
be pleasing, it must bother him that it did very little to
remove Star Wars from the political camp that continues
to misappropriate it.
October 2001
From Randy Fallows
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