One of the effects of the generally positive reaction to Revenge of the Sith is that suddenly critics are looking again at the new Star Wars films and noticing things other than the bad acting and CGI effects. Unable to miss Anakin’s paraphrasing of George W. Bush in the newest film, critics have finally noticed that the Star Wars prequels carry a political subtext. “For decades [George Lucas] has been blamed (unjustly) for helping to lead American movies away from their early-70’s engagement with political matters,” wrote A.O.Scott in The New York Times, “and he deserves credit for trying to bring them back.” While fans of the films might appreciate that there is finally some recognition of what Lucas is up to, it’s hard to award any points for journalistic timeliness when these themes have been evident since The Phantom Menace in 1999.
Of course, Lucas deserves much of the blame, as it was he who lulled his audience into sleep. Unlike the original films, which took place during a galactic civil war, the first two prequels bewildered many with their focus on diplomacy and politics. The Phantom Menace infamously commenced its opening crawl with the following words:
Turmoil has engulfed the galactic republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.
As Ryan Gilbey put it in his book It Don’t Worry Me, “Could there be any less enticing sentence with which to begin a movie – any movie, let alone a flight of fantasy designed to stimulate the daydreams in schoolboy skulls?” Attack of the Clones compounded the error: while it abandoned the taxation plot thread, it turned instead on the passage of a piece of legislation. The critics almost universally regarded these diplomatic/political storylines in the same way: an indication of exactly how far Lucas’ storytelling skills had declined.
Certainly the choice of material is starkly in contrast with that of the original trilogy. Star Wars was a return to uplifting storytelling after a decade of down-beat cinema that reflected the grim moral mood of post-Vietnam America. It’s a movie that makes you stand up and cheer for war: when Luke lands those torpedoes in the Death Star exhaust vent, it’s like a sporting victory – the ultimate slam-dunk. It was exciting and featured a simple good-versus-bad morality, in which the feisty Rebels triumphed over the evil forces of the Empire. After the depressing years of Vietnam, it was a nostalgic throwback to less ambiguous wars in American history such as World War II: the Imperials even wore Nazi uniforms, and called their soldiers “stormtroopers.” Many critics at the time sneered at the films’ childish tone, but audiences keen for escapism made it one of the most successful movies ever made. Critics such as Peter Biskind still blame Star Wars for – as they see it – single-handedly wiping out the edgy, morally complex American films of the 70s film-school generation of directors.
To the extent that the original films did absorb any influence from the morally murky war in Vietnam, it surfaced in a bizarrely softened form. Lucas has said that the experience of the American army in Vietnam prompted the recurring theme of primitive societies defeating a technologically superior army (most infamously embodied by the Ewok sequences in Return of the Jedi, but echoed by the Gungans of The Phantom Menace and the Wookies in Revenge of the Sith). In the late 1960s and early 1970s he was hoping to direct John Milius’ script Apocalypse Now: that project became Francis Ford Coppola’s, and Lucas’ Vietnam movie transformed into the scenes of cuddly teddy bears beating up stormtroopers in the forest. Yet the analogy between Ewoks and Vietnamese never encouraged audiences to compare the Imperials to American forces. Lucas was simply drawing on the storytelling attractions of a David-versus-Goliath conflict, and while the Vietnam analogy was clear, the film itself didn’t encourage viewers to draw a moral conclusion from it.
While the forest battle of Return of the Jedi was its ultimate expression, this benign, kiddie-movie approach to combat suffuses the original trilogy. Only in The Empire Strikes Back, with its scenes of Rebel troops facing an implacable foe from snow-covered trenches, is there any sense that war might be something other than an exhilarating adventure. Not coincidentally, The Empire Strikes Back has long been the best regarded of the Star Wars films by critics, who appreciated its more complex moral tone. Yet even here there was never any doubt in the films that the Rebels should be seen as the good guys. This might have seemed only natural at the time, when the films were watched at a safe distance from a major conflict, but seeing them again one wonders. After all, isn’t the Rebel Alliance basically a terrorist organisation? In his film Clerks writer / director Kevin Smith famously had a character point out that even if the destruction of the first Death Star (in Star Wars) is justified on the basis that it is a military installation, the second (in Return of the Jedi) was blown up while under construction. So didn’t the Rebels kill thousands of innocent construction workers?
The answer, of course, is that you’re not supposed to think about it: such questions are alien to the spirit of those films. Star Wars was the perfect film series for the Reagan era: it pre-empted the mood of gung-ho certainty that the Reagan administration would embody. With Vietnam some time in the past, U.S. audiences were ready to trade in moral uncertainty for flag-waving triumphalism, and films such as Top Gun and Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo series followed Star Wars‘ pattern of glorified combat. Ronald Reagan echoed the vocabulary and mindset of Star Wars when he dubbed the USSR the “evil empire” and nicknamed his space-based missile defence initiative “Star Wars.” Lucas might not have been sympathetic to the Reagan administration, but his films certainly reflected the mood of the times.
Lucas’ new trilogy unfolds against a very different political background, and is very different in approach. The new films centre on exactly the kind of questions the original films so studiously avoid, with the differences between good and bad never clear cut. In The Phantom Menace our heroes win what seems to be a great victory, without realising that they have helped install a ruler who will become a dictatorial military-backed dictator. In Attack of the Clones, the Jedi win a battle when rescued by the new army of the Galactic Republic: however, it is this same army that goes on to put the galaxy under the military rule we see in the original trilogy.
The new films are therefore an extended exercise in irony: because we know how everything turns out, we know that the victories in the new films are not the causes for celebration they at first seem. The notion that military victories might have unintended and unpredictable consequences is, to put it mildly, an unusual message to form the basis of a major series of comic-strip science-fiction movies. Yet Lucas’ approach, once again, is prescient. Just as the earlier films anticipated the mood of Reagan-era America, the new films seem made for the unsettled post-September 11 world. While the prequel films were conceived in accordance with a two-decade old plot outline, and the first two written before the events of September 11, 2001, they seem almost to have foreshadowed the political events and debates that have raged since. Lucas has said that Palpatine’s manipulation of democratic process was inspired by the dying days of Richard Nixon’s administration, but his actions are given an added relevance amid debates about the US PATRIOT Act, indefinite detention of uncharged terror suspects, and other such incursions of civil rights exercised in the name of security.
Sometimes these resonances are disconcerting, as when Anakin Skywalker, in Attack of the Clones, responds to an attack on his family by slaughtering a group of desert “sandpeople” dressed in vaguely Middle-Eastern looking robes. It is intended as a disturbing moment, but it was doubly so when seen against the background of military action in Iraq and Afghanistan. Revenge of the Sith – the first of the films to be fully written and shot after 9/11 – includes shots of the Jedi temple burning on the city-planet Coruscant that are obviously inspired by imagery of the attacks on New York City. Such imagery might leave something of an unpleasant aftertaste, but there is an underlying message in the prequel films that is highly timely: they are a prolonged warning against abuse of civil rights and military power by governments.
This was clear even in The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. The chief villain in the original movies, The Emperor, is a twisted old man in a black cloak who rules the Galaxy as a militarily-backed dictator. This same character is introduced in The Phantom Menace as Senator Palpatine, a wise and benevolent ruler who in that film is democratically elected to the position of Supreme Chancellor: effectively the head of the Galaxy. In the subsequent movies he becomes the Emperor, but he does so through a series of political manoeuvres, with the support of the people. The new films are not therefore about the battle between two armies, one good and one evil, but instead about the way a democracy can rot from inside. In the new Star Wars movies, the forces of good don’t defeat the forces of evil: they become the forces of evil.
Natalie Portman’s character, Senator Amidala, makes this point explicitly in Revenge of the Sith, asking Anakin: “What if the democracy we thought we were serving no longer exists, and the Republic has become the very evil we have been fighting to destroy?” Yet the key moment in the progression actually occurred in Attack of the Clones, during one of the scenes of political manoeuvring that so many audiences slept through. Chancellor Palpatine uses an escalating security threat (including terrorist attacks) to arrange for an expansion of the military and a lessening of democratic accountability. “I love democracy,” he tells the senate, as he takes up the powers that he will use to enslave the Galaxy. Once again, it is a moment that is presented at face value in the film itself, but which gains a second level of meaning from our foreknowledge of where the series is headed.
Suddenly Star Wars isn’t about cheering your side to victory, and not thinking about who they kill on the way. It is about characters who embark on a war that spans two movies before they question whether they are on the right side. (After all, why shouldn’t star systems that want to secede from the Republic leave if they want to? The Republic is Russia to the Separatist’s Chechnya). It is about characters who ignore the fact that their allies have slaughtered civilians out of revenge. It is about a society that puts security before democracy, and where that course of action leads.
Whatever you think of Lucas’ politics, these are interesting and important themes for a major Hollywood film to ponder, and the elaborate double meaning of the films (which have very different meanings depending on whether you have seen the original films or not) is a highly unusual artistic device. I will always prefer the films of the original trilogy, which – even taking into account the unexpectedly excellent Revenge of the Sith – are far superior at the level of simple storytelling. Yet it has to be recognised that the prequel films are much more ambitious, and achieve a complexity of theme that the original films do not match.
One wonders if George Lucas enjoys the irony. The original films were widely loved but sometimes derided for lacking any substance. The new films, by contrast, have a much more sophisticated point to make, and critics nearly missed it because they were complaining that the films weren’t fun enough.
A shorter version of this essay appeared in The Age on 7/6/05.