Star Wars is About Parenting

Deconstructing the ideoogical foundations of the seemingly conservative myth becomes more complex when the numerous interlocutors in real world history are taken into account.

I’m a college professor, and I’m dismayed at the cultural literacy of my students. They have no familiarity with the classic works that define our culture and its values. Surely our culture is in for a moral collapse.

Words printed on an ancient Sumerian tablet, slightly modified and by Abraham Lincoln

I jest, of course, when I say I resent my students for not being familiar with the myth I grew up with. For my course Images of Gender in Popular Culture, I always select three films to watch with the class because watching together is the only way to ensure we have a common frame of reference for class discussion. But this year I was shocked to find that I could include Star Wars 7 — The Force Awakens in my syllabus and 19 of my 24 students would be having their first Star Wars experience. This IS admittedly frustrating, as a teacher, because it makes it harder to show just how much the ideological basis of the new film both mirrors and disconnects from previous installations — but it’s led me to want to write about the politics of Star Wars and a couple of common misconceptions, specifically:

• Star Wars is a kids movie series that belongs, intellectually, to its creator George Lucas, who intended it to teach basic moral values of right and wrong to kids (he did say this, in a 1999 era in interview). Disney is now corrupting it.
• The main thing that Star Wars is about is religion, based on a sort of intentionally vague syncresis of pop Buddhism and Lucas’s milquetoast American Methodism. (Again, Lucas says as much in the above link.)

But one could just as easily say that The Matrix is a movie about religion, and that it belongs to two men named {REDACTED} and {REDACTED} Wachowski. After all they said so many times in 1999 as well, and yet as I and many other trans people have noticed, everything the Wachowskis make is tinged with gender and identity metaphors, with religious themes as a very thin varnish. I think therefore it’s worth looking at Star Wars as a product not only of Lucas and now Abrams/Disney, but as a reflection of wider cultural concerns.

A lot of fans argue Star Wars is conservative in the mythic sense, being rooted as it obviously is in parents and children. This certainly started out very patriarchally and traditionally:

• In the film Star Wars, later renamed to Star Wars 4 — A New Hope, a young man living with apparent blood relatives but no strong, clear father figure finds his Wizard of Oz in the unironic, Warner Brothers sense in Obi-Wan “Old Ben” Kenobi. (Don’t get me started on how much I hate the film Wizard of Oz, a clear influence on New Hope, which managed to make it rational to make a “feminist deconstruction" in the form of Wicked, when L. Frank Baum’s source material was part of the first wave feminist movement and chiefly features a transgender princess as heroine in books mostly published before the 20th century.) Luke loses Ben and learns he has to be his own man, and it’s implied he gets to bang the Princess. (This is clearly implied to happen off screen in the novel that introduced Khyber Crystals, back in 1980, and Lucas has obviously gone out of his way to bury that particular memory of canons old.)
• The story begins to reflect a male-driven yet semi-critical of traditional values in The Empire Strikes Back. Sorry, Luke, turns out that Old Ben and his old friend Yoda have been playing you for a fool, only letting you know what is useful to them. And that dad you looked up to? The real story isn’t pretty.
• Return of the Jedi both affirms and walks back this critical view: Luke must defy his father figures, but only because of his (very Christian-patriarchal) need to save his own father. The message — as Lucas seemed to hint in the ’99 interview, is that parents screw up and kids se obligated to forgive. More on that in a moment.

This is a mythically conservative narrative, and as it’s American made, the fact that it’s the story of an anti-Imperial rebellion means that, standing alone, you basically get an affirming of milquetoast populist Methodism from the original trilogy on its own. The old Expanded Universe was largely intellectually vapid and the limits Lucas set on it based on his own understanding of his work’s morals limited it further. (His failure to properly credit his ex wife and Leigh Bracket for the pre-Jedi movies does not reflect well on Lucas.)

But the prequels make things more complicated. Lucas, like you’d imagine for a billonaire Hollywood guy, is a Democrat. Not a leftist or a socialist, but a Democrat. So of course Episode 1, made in 1999, features a tax argument and an impeachment crisis. The story of Palpatine’s rise, like the last entire story of Rogue One, is told in the prologue to the novelization of Star Wars with many of the details not yet decided. The decision Lucas made to make the fall of the Jedi very much a commentary on the Bush era has led to the unintended but dark side (pun truly accidental) effect that we now have a man who said he admired Darth Vader, a character who was appointed to the Jedi Council by the chief executive over their objections, appointed to the National Security Council by an executive over the military’s objections. Frankly, while one could easily read the prequels as an eerily prescient story of the fall of the American Empire, I prefer to see it as a story about how all father figures failed a boy taken from his mother, from slavery, promised heroism, and then cast into literal living Hell.

Which leads us to Disney’s take over. I honestly think they’ve shifted Star Wars politically, not into radicalism, but into the sort of faux-radicalism popular among Disney’s more political tentpole franchises like Captain America. The thing is this: we who grew up, and, to resurrect a tired old reference to a different film, have discovered that unlike we were promised we’re not going to be movie stars or Chosen Ones or Jedi, but the living, dancing all-crap of the Force, now have a franchise that’s really about people like us. Which is why I’m sad more Millennials aren’t watching the new films.

In The Force Awakens, every literal or mythic father figure is toxic. We don’t know what Han Solo did to Kylo Ren but we see Han as DEEPLY flawed, so even though our feelings may vary about him getting run through with a laser sword, about the best we can say for Han’s parenting is that he, unlike Luke or the ghost of Vader, actually tried. But it wasn’t enough. Rey and Finn have no parents to rely on, not even figurative ones. “It’s just us now. No Han Solo to save you.”

And Han, and Old Ben? Turns out they were never that cool or good. Rogue One gives us a girl with heroic destiny in her blood — to die. She watches holding her father, who she couldn’t save, in the same position Luke holds a dying Vader who saved his life — but Galen sends Lyra on to die. Turns out all those heroics done by Luke were only possible because of someone else whose father determined her destiny — and she got off much harder.

Our generation is divided, between the figure of the liberal young activist, possibly queer, a kind of neo-60s activist but poorer and with worse drugs, and the figure of the neo-reactionary, the young man who, like Kylo Ren, wants his grandfather’s job but is working at an unpaid internship and brutalizing women for free. Like Rey, we’re left to fend for ourselves in the wrecks of our parent’s and grandparents' wars, and the wisdom they have to bring us is in the end nothing more than, for Luke, a blank stare; for Vader, silence and misinterpreted ashes; and for Han, a solemn understanding that even the worst of our generation has reasons to hate those who left us as we are.