(I wrote this before the Disney takeover of the Star Wars Universe which based on the even greater drop off in film quality would likely have been more scathing).
I grew up in the generation that Star Wars was custom-made for. At the age of eight, I remember sitting with my jaw at ground level, mouth agape, completely fixated on a universe that was simply unbelievable. If I had been transported to a utopia, this was it. That was then.
My enthusiasm continued as I immersed myself in The Empire Strikes Back and the trilogy’s concluding episode, Return of the Jedi.
Years later, when Lucas re-released the three films with a few modifications, I sat through them again, this time with a healthy dose of nostalgia. Jedi had replaced A New Hope as my personal favourite, and Empire seemed slightly less disjointed than I remembered from childhood. Yet something had changed. The series had fallen remarkably in my overall estimation. The magic was tarnished, and I couldn’t believe how insipid both the plot lines and the acting seemed.
Of course, I was older. One cannot dismiss that variable. But when compared with the science fiction of the British comic-book world—Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper—not to mention the alternative science fiction of Blade Runner and other dystopian films, Star Wars looked remarkably inferior, at least by a parsec or two. In fact, it was downright awful.
I watched the prequels, hoping for some form of broader salvation, but loathed all three. The third was particularly bad, and I cursed the fact that I had been duped, even at a young age, by Lucas’s space odyssey of junk.
Alec Guinness, who played Obi-Wan Kenobi, was famously dismissive of Star Wars in his personal writings, and I can understand why. The series was, in many respects, a gigantic con job: the brilliance of its special effects served to conceal glaring weaknesses in its writing, characterization, and acting.
Very little substance emerges from Star Wars. It is a massive collection of clichés, but worse than that, I would argue is that its moral universe is deeply questionable—something that the masses who bathe in its subculture almost never acknowledge.
Consider A New Hope. Darth Vader participates in the destruction of Alderaan, an act that amounts to planetary genocide. I remember being shocked by it even as a child. Let’s put this in context for a moment.
History is replete with evil despots—Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot—and all of them were responsible for mass murder and genocide. But none of them destroyed an entire planet and everyone living on it. Vader does precisely that, and he does it in a matter of minutes. We are exposed to the event almost matter-of-factly because, of course, it is simply part of the story.
Here is the part I find difficult to swallow. Once Vader is redeemed, the hold of the Dark Side is broken, and he saves his son in Return of the Jedi, we are expected to cheer for him. We are encouraged to sympathize with him as he takes his place alongside Obi-Wan and Yoda in the pantheon of Jedi.
Luke Skywalker even ceremonially honours this genocidal lunatic with a funeral. Talk about turning your back on evil. What about his victims?
Was this monster not responsible for the destruction of billions of lives, at least potentially, given the population of an entire planet? Yet Lucas wants us to forget all of this because Vader ultimately did the honourable thing: he saved his son.
Frikkin' hell. Story or no story. Fiction or not. Does this not reveal something morally peculiar about Lucas’s universe?
One could argue that I am wasting far too many bytes on this line of thought—ink is so twentieth century—but unfortunately the Star Wars super-meme has infected our collective consciousness in a remarkably pervasive way.
Children know more about asinine lines such as “I am your father” and “Use the Force” than they know about the words or ideas of Churchill, Schweitzer, or Martin Luther King Jr. Adults dress up in Vader costumes. When questioned about it, they may retort with something along the lines of, “Vader is the ultimate badass.”
Which begs the next question: where does that leave Genghis Khan, who only redrew the face of Eurasia?
A third-tier badass, perhaps. The point is not that children should not enjoy Star Wars. Of course they should. Imagination, spectacle, and myth have their place. Nor am I suggesting that watching a fictional villain somehow makes a person morally deficient.
The problem is more subtle. Ideas drive action.Stories provide us with archetypes, heroes, villains, virtues, and definitions of what is admirable. We absorb these ideas long before we are old enough to critically examine them. Lucas created a moral calculus in which redemption can apparently erase almost any prior transgression, provided the villain eventually performs the right act for the right person.
That is a troubling idea. The Star Wars machine has become vastly larger than Lucas himself. Disney, Lego, merchandise, streaming, games, costumes, conventions, and an enormous commercial ecosystem will continue to entrench the mythology in the minds of successive generations.
We have become extraordinarily adept at amusing ourselves. We consume stories, characters, spectacles, franchises, and fictional universes on an almost industrial scale. Meanwhile, the ideas embedded within those stories can pass into the culture largely unexamined.
It is a further statement on a sad reality—a truism we routinely overlook as we amuse ourselves to oblivion: What we repeatedly celebrate eventually becomes part of what we value.
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