The Politics of STAR WARS

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Title:	The Politics of STAR WARS
Creator:	Karen Winter
Date(s):	1981 (zine), online (?)
Medium:	online
Fandom:	Star Wars
Topic:
External Links:	The Politics of STAR WARS, Archived version
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The Politics of STAR WARS is an essay by Karen Winter.

It was published in Organia and has been posted online.

Excerpts

STAR WARS is a Saturday afternoon matinee, a fairy-tale for children, a powerful myth for adults, an action-adventure SP fantasy. [It] is also a story heavily dependent on political concepts. The opening 'crawl' sets the stage with "it is a period of civil war..." and invites us to identify unquestioningly with the rebels. Before we accept Lucas' simplistic premise, however, we might do well to examine what we can actually determine about the nature of that civil was and the general political structure of the STAR WARS universe.

Unfortunately, our information is so vague and incomplete it is difficult to determine much that is definite. We have two major sources: the movies themselves and the novelizations (in historians' jargon the primary and secondary sources), both of which are of course prejudiced by the attitudes of those who produced them and the audience for which they were intended. The contemporary or near-contemporary Journal of the Whills, which influenced Lucas heavily, has since been lost; but it was evidently favorable toward the rebel cause, since it was adopted by the Alliance as its official version of the conflict. Lucas himself makes no attempt at objectivity in his treatment of the Empire in our surviving sources. References in this article will be to the versions of STAR WARS and EMPIRE STRIKES BACK in paperback and the script versions in THE ART OF STAR WARS and THE EMPIRE STKIKES BACK NOTEBOOK.

Reading between the lines, it is clear that the STAR WARS Saga describes, not the downfall of a tyranny, but the rise and consolidation of a successful empire based on progressive political philosophy. This process has parallels in several of our own planet's historical periods. Furthermore, it is clear that the Rebellion represents only one of a variety of political and social forces opposing this development.

Given that the structure of the STAR WARS universe is as we have described it, it may be interesting to speculate on why Lucas has chosen to represent it in this manner. The most superficial survey of Lucas' work makes it clear that he is himself, in political terms, a reactionary romantic looking backward toward an imaginary Golden Age in an earlier historical period or fantasy universe. His earliest film, THX-1138, is a political tract against totalitarian social/political controls; AMERICAN GRAFFITI looks to America before the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam War, STAR WARS and TESB to long ago in a galaxy far, far away, and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK to the pre-World War II 1930's. Each of these era is presented as a more innocent and exciting time, with conflicts represented in unrelieved (and unrealistic) black and white -- except in the case of AMERICAN GRAFFITI, which is too close to most of the audience to be convincing as myth rather than nostalgia.

The social, economic, and political forces Lucas opposes in the STAR WARS universe are, in fact, those which have been most noticeable in American society in this century, and most disliked by conservatives in our own country. These include the movement away from control by state and local government to control by the central government in Washington; and decline of individual freedom and privacy created by modern crowding, urbanization, and technological change; and the entire complex of social and economic forces created by and reflected in the long-term shift from nineteenth century laissez-faire economic and Jeffersonian political theory to twentieth-century government social/economic controls and interventionist political theory. This shift in American society and politics is represented by programs such as the New Deal, the Great Society, and modem American government-by-bureaucracy in general.

This is, of course, a vast oversimplification of recent American history and of the political philosophies involved. But its validity at the popular level, as represented in Lucas' grasp of the issues in STAR WARS and TESB, is clear. Thus, in political terms, we can see that the STAR WARS Saga is an appeal for a return to the libertarian political philosophy of an earlier era in America. And this, gentle reader, may be more of a fantasy than any other aspect of the STAR WARS films.

Reactions and Reviews

"The Politics of Star Wars," by Karen Osman is about the political implications of SW. Osman draws parallels between the Empire/Alliance struggle and the church/state struggle in the late medieval/early modern period. Although Osman backs up her arguments with numerous and convincing parallels in Terran history, I would have preferred more contemporary speculations. ST was a product of the Cold War, and Western ideas about evil and tyranny have been heavily influenced by it. How does SW fit in, if a parallel can be made? The problem here is that Osman gives too much detailed information with too incomplete an analysis. It is only toward the end that she begin to analyze all her data and Jones. Both express bitterness and defiance in the face of cruel male expectations. "In the Dark" is especially memorable and powerful.

[reply by the essay's author]: I'd like to register a mild demurral on your re-analysis of my analysis on "The Politics of Star Wars" in ORGANIA. Not that I want to restrict the reviewer’s right to her own opinion, and not that I think the review was in the least unfair, especially since [S.] carefully states that she would have preferred more contemporary speculations, not that the speculations I made in the article were useless or unsupported. However, I think she misses the point of what I was trying to do, somewhat. Of course Lucas's political biases were/are created and influenced by his contact with contemporary ideas (as I noted in the article). But I wasn’t dealing primarily with Lucas's biases. I was interested in the political structure of the SWars universe, and that is derived mainly from fairy tales and mythology. Those, Lucas's sources, emerged, and were recorded by folklorists such as the Brothers Grimm, etc., in the period shortly after the early modern epoch in Europe. They reflect origins in, or influences of, popular transmission through the medieval and immediately post-medieval period very strongly. In addition, native American political mythology is primarily influenced by contemporary 18th-century/early 19th-century analogies between the Roman Republic and the American Republic, as is clear in popular histories of Rome printed during the period. I have, for example, an old school text dated 1803 which explicitly compares the two republics. This is the popular image reflected in Lucas’s analogies to the Roman period in the SWars movies (such as references to the Senate and the regional governors). ST is science fiction, and is a direct commentary on its historical period’s political concerns (as [S.] notes); SW is a fantasy, and is based on fairy tales, which are medieval in origin and structure. So an analysis of medieval, ancient, and early-modern political structures is important and germane to an analysis of the politics of Star Wars."