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6.02.2002
Hope you all enjoyed my frivolous fun Sunday postings. Now back to our regularly scheduled Sturm & Drum...
A short time ago in a galaxy not so far away: Star Wars as Political Tract
Forget the cardboard acting and the million dollar special effects, the real showstopper is George Lucas' overall message: America is doomed.
There is a scene about midway through the new Star Wars movie, Attack of the Clones, where the duly elected Queen of Naboo, dressed in the intergalactic equivalent of Dior, turns to future planet-destroying baddie Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) and says, "The day we stop believing democracy can work is the day we lose it". Senator Padme Amidala (Natalie Portman), self styled defender of all things democratic then adds, "Let's pray that day never comes" and promptly turns to give doe eyes to the boy who will be Darth Vader.
That despot and democrat get it on (in a PG kinda way) in this, the ultimate post-modern über myth is no coincidence. If it riles up liberals that Jar Jar Binks could pass for a toked up Rastafarian, they should look a little deeper and see that the West Coast's Wizard of Oz is making a saga that borders on satire- and it's the American democratic system that is the punch line.
Episode I, which came out in 1999, began innocently enough. Sure, the Senate was deadlocked, controlled by groups like The Trade Federation and (I'm not making this up) The Corporate Sector. The Chancellor, though his heart was in the right place, was essentially impotent. Eventually, however, the freedom loving Democrats, with some help from the Jedi and their Rastafarian friends triumphed over evil even if Liam Neeson kicked the bucket in the third real.
Episode II, which opened last month, opens with a bang. Literally. A giant fireball reduces a once gleaming silver ship to a hulking smoldering pile of rubble. This heinous act impels the Republic to take up arms and curtail freedoms in the name of protecting freedom. By the end of the movie, storm troopers are marching like its 1938 all over again. I could spell out the obvious parallels, but Lucas has already done such a great job for me.
Star Wars asserts that all democracies eventually cave to the lure of authoritarianism. The Republic isn't destroyed by the Evil Empire of the second trilogy, it becomes it. Lucas isn't providing a cautionary tale however; he's doing what all great myth makers have done: He's telling it like it is. At least as he sees it.
Many people have complained that the new trilogy is too rigid. Where Princess Lea and Han Solo made wisecracks and fall in love with each other's cynicism, the first trilogy's heartthrobs, Anakin and Padme, are painfully earnest. Beside a fireplace and dressed up like sex-crazed warriors in Valhalla, they bemoan that neither of them should fall in love. At one point Anakin tells Padme, 'I'm in misery being in love with you. Tell me you're in as much misery as I am". This prompted an audience member in the theatre I saw the movie at to shout to the screen, 'Yes, we all are!'
Today's audiences are not accustomed to honest declarations of love or handcrafted spaceships. The first trilogy doesn't have a shred of irony in it and we don't know what to do with it. It's the second trilogy, rife with irony, cynicism and innuendo that the fans gravitate towards. Lucas is saying that Romance, Truth and Beauty belong to Golden Ages and our own brand of self-loathing, self-aware detachment belongs to the Dark Ages (Further proof: Star Wars was originally intended as a nine film epic. The original trilogy would therefore be the middle trilogy). We're more at home amid the post-industrial corruption of Luke's time than the gleaming spires that Anakin and Padme use as backdrops to moon over each other.
George Lucas may not be the first one to declare Western Civilization dead, but he's the first to bring the message to the masses. In interviews he gives off a paternalistic air. Reporters constantly ask questions about light-saber duels and how to build a better Yoda and he answers them with the weary indulgence of a man who has come out of virtual retirement as a director to create a series of films at his own expense that, lightsabers and Yoda's aside, is about the fall of democracy, freedom and paradoxically, nobility at the hands of petty bureaucrats.
Whether the Star Wars paterfamilias is a liberal loony crying wolf on his 100 million dollar horn or a cry from a galaxy not so really far away after all is something only time and a movie ticket will tell.
Get your Star Wars fix with these titles from Amazon.com:
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