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The Force is with the
conservatives
By Yoel Sano
LONDON - Is the United States in danger of
becoming an empire ruled by military force? Star
Wars creator/director George Lucas and some of his
fans appear to think so, judging by the content of
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the
Sith, which opened in cinemas across the world
last week.
The film brings to a conclusion
Lucas' popular space opera, and bridges the gap
between the much-maligned prequels, Episodes I and
II, with the original trilogy (Episodes IV, V and
VI). Revenge of the Sith is in many ways
the most eagerly anticipated of the Star Wars
prequels, for it depicts the final transformation
of the hero, the good Jedi Knight Anakin
Skywalker, into the evil Sith Lord Darth Vader,
villain of the original trilogy. Perhaps more
importantly, though, Revenge of the Sith
chronicles the shift from democracy under the
benign Galactic Republic to the tyranny and
dictatorship of the Galactic Empire, ruled by
military might.
It is the latter
transformation that has stirred debate among
conservatives and liberals alike. Opponents of the
US administration have been quick to interpret
Episode III as a critique of President George W
Bush's foreign policies and the perceived
undermining of civil rights and democracy in the
United States itself. As an example, the US
progressive public lobbying group MoveOn released
a web advertisement comparing the present American
political scene to that of the Galactic Republic.
Also in this latest episode, Anakin turns
to the Dark Side of the Force and challenges his
former allies, uttering the words, "you are either
with me, or you are my enemy", echoing Bush's "you
are either with us or against us in the fight
against terror".
Lucas himself has made a
number of vague comments about the dangers faced
by democracy, thereby adding to the media debate.
The reticent Lucas, who is far less outspoken than
documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, noted, "The
issue was, how does a democracy turn itself into a
dictatorship?" He then added, "I didn't think it
was going to get this close. I hope this doesn't
come true in our country."
Lucas rightly
raises the subject that as a republic's leadership
acquires ever more powers, it risks undermining
its own democratic ideals and behaving like an
empire. The film's main villain, the ambitious
chancellor of the republic, Palpatine, having been
elected by democratic means in the (lamentable)
first prequel, The Phantom Menace, and
having acquired emergency powers in Episode II
- Attack of the Clones, swiftly moves to crush
all dissent.
Palpatine's modus
operandi thus far has been the instigation of
controlled instability or stage-managed crises -
geopolitical tools used by great powers throughout
history to make them seem like indispensable
peacemakers while at the same time allowing them
to expand their influence. More recently, think of
US support for the Taliban in Afghanistan, or
Russian backing for Abkhazian and South Ossetian
separatists in Georgia in the 1990s. These actions
led the great power to deploy troops in the name
of restoring order and stability.
In the
Star Wars universe, the crises Palpatine
masterminds are the invasion of the peaceful
planet Naboo in Episode I, and the war against a
league of separatist star systems nominally led by
the rogue Jedi Count Dooku in Episode II. Once
secure in office, Palpatine initiates a massive
military build-up thanks to the existence of an
army of clones - which he uses to bring
recalcitrant star systems into line. With the
republic's clone armies at his disposal, it is
only a matter of time before Palpatine gives the
order for them to kill off the Jedi Knights -
guardians of peace and justice - and declare
himself emperor (Episode III).
Republic
or empire?
The question is, if Star Wars is
an allegory of our times, who is the emperor and
who is Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader? When
conceiving the notion of the democratically
elected chancellor-turned-emperor back in the
1970s, Lucas initially wanted audiences to
identify with a contemporary figure and had
then-US president Richard Nixon in mind.
Ultimately, the character of the emperor
was dropped from the original Star Wars film, but
the backstory remained. In Revenge of the
Sith, Palpatine is revealed to be an evil
sorcerer (a Sith Lord), who can manipulate
politics far easier than any human. As such, there
is no direct parallel with any earthbound figure.
As for Anakin, he may have echoed Bush, but he is
no politician - nor is Bush a soldier (despite his
stint in the Texas Air National Guard).
Thankfully, we do not yet have direct equivalents.
Nonetheless, in the original Star Wars
trilogy the empire clearly resembled totalitarian
states such as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union,
with its emphasis on sheer military power,
reflected by its drab, grey colors and fascist
uniforms. On the other hand, in the early 1970s
when Lucas was working on his early Star Wars'
drafts, the Vietnam War was very much alive. By
1983, when the last instalment of the original
trilogy, Return of the Jedi, was released,
Lucas appeared to have drawn parallels between the
simple-but-primitive Ewoks' (bear-like aliens)
defeat of the all-powerful empire on the forest
moon of Endor with the US defeat in the jungles of
Vietnam.
Fast forward two decades and the
US is undoubtedly the most powerful force in the
known universe. Just as the Galactic Empire rules
through military force - most famously represented
by its triangular "Start Destroyer" warships and
its planet-destroying space station, the Death
Star - the US military has long divided the world
into separate regions of responsibility known as
"Unified Commands". These commands are called
NORTHCOM, SOUTHCOM, PACOM (Pacific Command), EUCOM
(Europe and Africa Command), and, most famously,
CENTCOM (Central Command, covering the Middle East
and West Asia).
Moreover, since the end of
the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union
- and especially after September 11, 2001 - the US
has opened new military bases in Eastern Europe,
the Middle East and Central Asia and has some sort
of military presence in dozens of countries
worldwide.
Even mainstream US foreign
policy wonks now speak of empire, where once the
word was the exclusive preserve of leftists. One
can imagine Pentagon officials wanting to own a
clone or droid army. It is no coincidence that
president Ronald Reagan's plans for the
militarization of space were dubbed "Star Wars" by
critics, or that opponents of National Missile
Defense ("Son of Star Wars", the late 1990s
version) dubbed the rogue-state missile threat a
"Phantom Menace".
Conservative message
reinforced
Yet, despite Lucas' apparent
pro-liberal fears about current trends in US
foreign and domestic policies, which many
Americans will find exaggerated, his Star Wars
saga nonetheless contains very conservative
messages that will resonate with people on the
desert planet of Texas and in Middle America - and
indeed many other parts of the world.
For
one thing, there is Lucas' idealized form of
government. According to Jedi Knight Obi-Wan
Kenobi in the original Star Wars film, "For over a
thousand generations the Jedi Knights were the
guardians of peace and justice in the Old
Republic. Before the dark times. Before the
Empire." Francis Fukuyama would have been
surprised that there is indeed an alternative to
his end-of-history notion of Western-style liberal
democracy as the ultimate form of government.
While the Jedi did not rule the republic,
they nonetheless formed the backbone of it. With
the Jedi more akin to a religion or a moral force,
rather than a political order, Lucas seems to
envisage a heavy role of the church in some form
or another, albeit without ruling the state. Some
commentators have compared the Jedi to the samurai
of medieval Japan, and indeed their swordsmanship,
esoteric dress codes, and Darth Vader's mask
design do invoke the samurai styles. But the
latter were more manifestly militaristic than
religious. A better analogy would be the
Knights-Templar, a monastic military order formed
at the end of the First Crusade with the mandate
of protecting Christian pilgrims en route to the
Holy Land.
If the Jedi are a religion,
then their "God" is "the Force", a mystical energy
field generated by all living things, which binds
the galaxy together and gives the Jedi their
strength. Essentially, the message of the original
Star Wars trilogy is one of faith: if you believe
in something enough, you can accomplish it. Hence,
Luke Skywalker, the hero of the trilogy, was able
to guide a missile into the Death Star's reactor
vents through belief rather than using a
sophisticated targeting computer. The message of
faith is reassuring in this secular age.
Unfortunately, George Lucas inexplicably
ditched this faith-based belief system in the
prequel trilogy for a far less comforting, and
indeed, slightly sinister explanation of the
Force. Instead of being able to use the Force out
of belief, the first prequel revealed that only
those who have a high concentration of
"mitochlorions" in their cells can use these
powers.
[Ed: the term "mitochlorian"
appears to be a pseudo-scientific invention based
on real entities known to cell biologists here on
Earth, namely "mitochondria" and "chloroplast".
"Mitochondria" are tiny sausage-shaped organelles,
found in all living cells save bacteria, whose
function is to convert sugar efficiently into
usable energy. "Chloroplasts", found only in
plants, are the sites of photosynthesis.
Interestingly, there is a widely accepted theory
that both are descended from ancient bacteria - as
shown by their size, shape and bacteria-like DNA -
that became internalized in, and ultimately
dependent upon, the primitive "eukaryotic" cells
that eventually gave rise to plants and animals.
At some point, Lucas appears to have heard of this
theory (originally proposed by Lynn Margulis at
Harvard) and decided that a similar entity, the
"mitochlorion", would exist in his fictional
universe and provide a convenient explanation for
why some individuals have more Force powers than
others.]
Ironically, however, the
"mitochlorion" concept transformed the ability to
use "the Force" from an article of faith into one
based on blood. Rather than being true believers,
the Jedi are in fact a master race or elite caste.
Talk of race brings us to another
unfortunate aspect of the prequel trilogy, namely
the portrayal of alien characters through ethnic
stereotyping. This is most apparent in the
character of Jar Jar Binks, a goofy, amphibious,
bipedal alien, who hangs out with the heroes in
The Phantom Menace to provide what passes
as comic relief. Unfortunately, Jar Jar's
pidgin-English way of speaking seems to have been
designed to invoke African-American slaves of the
19th century United States, or the "noble savages"
of a past imperial era.
Then there are the
aliens of the evil Trade Federation, a powerful
commercial-military-industrial concern fighting
the republic. All of them speak with heavy mock
Chinese or Japanese accents, perhaps reflecting
America's Japanophobia of the 1980s, or fear of
China's rising economic power today. There is also
the hooked-nose, slave-owing alien Watto, who
speaks with a heavy Jewish-Israeli accent and
thinks of nothing but money. And finally, Lucas
has opted to give the hellish, volcanic planet
where Anakin irreversibly turns to the Dark Side,
the Islamic-sounding name Mustafar.
While
there is no real evidence that Lucas is a
xenophobe - and indeed, he is planning a film on
African-American fighter pilots in World War II -
these cases highlight his general insensitivity to
audiences that has made the prequel trilogy
inferior to the original.
The gender
politics/sexual mores of the Star Wars saga are
also distinctly conservative. Although Princess
Leia struck a blow for feminism in the original
trilogy, with her sassy persona and her ability to
kick imperial ass, and despite the fact that the
Rebel Alliance against the empire was led by a
woman, Mon Mothma, the general dearth of female
characters in the Star Wars universe is striking.
Lucas addressed this imbalance somewhat in the
prequel trilogy, but on the whole, women remain in
the background.
The exception, of course,
is Padme, Anakin's secret wife and eventual mother
of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia - the heroes
of the original trilogy. While she is a prominent
politician in the first two prequels and gets
involved in the action, in Revenge of the
Sith she has sadly been reduced to the status
of a "desperate housewife", spending much of the
film alone in her apartment, gazing across
miles-high cityscapes, waiting for her husband to
come home. The reason for her low profile is that
she is pregnant, and there is a suggestion that
this precludes her from serving in politics. Such
traditional values are remarkable in a galaxy
where faster-than-light space travel and
artificially intelligent robots are the norm.
Another conservative message on the gender
front is the biblical theme that woman is
responsible for the fall of man. Episode II
revealed for the first time that Jedi are supposed
to remain celibate. By falling in love with and
marrying Padme, Anakin is immediately being led
astray from the righteous Jedi code. Also, one of
Anakin's first forays into the Dark Side of the
Force is when he slaughters a tribe of "sand
people" who are responsible for his mother's
death. (Incidentally, Anakin is of virgin birth,
as his mother reveals in Episode I.)
But
Anakin's final decision to dabble in the Dark Side
is governed by his desire to save Padme's life. In
Revenge of the Sith, Anakin is shaken by
premonitions that Padme dies in child birth, so he
becomes convinced that the only way to save her is
learning about dark powers from the chancellor
Palpatine, who is a Sith lord. By then, it is too
late to reverse his descent into darkness.
Ultimately, of course, Star Wars draws on
so many age-old universal themes that virtually
any society can interpret it according to its own
customs and traditions. That is surely one of the
reasons why the saga has been so popular across
the world.
But is the film any good?
Despite its dubious and mixed messages, Star
Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith is the
best of the prequel films, and superior to
Return of the Jedi, the last instalment of
the original trilogy.
As with the earlier
prequels, the dialogue is clunky and the acting is
sub-standard, but the story and the spectacular
visuals generally compensate for these
shortcomings. The film is by necessity the darkest
of the Star Wars saga, and there are moments of
brilliance. Perhaps the most interesting character
is Palpatine, the dark
lord-turned-chancellor-turned-emperor himself,
although his true motivations (other than power)
are never revealed; he is evil for the sake of
evil.
Lucas' comments drawing parallels
between the US and the empire almost sounded as
though he might be gearing up for a run for the
White House in 2008. Perhaps it is he who is a
"Lord of the Sith" and future emperor.
Yoel Sano has worked for
publishing houses in London, providing political
and economic analysis, and has been following
Northeast Asia for many years.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd.
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