Star Wars on Trial (16 page)

O MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER said to me, "Keith," he said, "BenBella's doing a Smart Pop book called Star Wars on Trial. I'm one of the editors. How'd you like to contribute?"

Having already contributed to four previous Smart Pop books, BenBella probably figured it was an easy sell. What the good folks at BenBella don't know, of course, is that I have been using Smart Pop to finagle a way to get paid for preexisting rants. I was carrying on about how "The Train Job" sucked as an intro to Firefly and how the last line in King Kong was bull and how cool Kitty Pryde is for ages before I wrote about those topics for Smart Pop books, and I can rate actors the way I did for the various Superman folks in my sleep. BenBella never cottoned to the fact that this wasn't work, this was funand also didn't require anything like effort on my part.

Having half a dozen rants on Star Wars'
waiting to go, I said, "Sure, no problem."

"You'll be a witness for the Defense," Matt continued.

"Uh, okay." All of a sudden this sounded like work, thus belying my entire Smart Pop credo.

"You'll be taking on David Brin. He'll be arguing that the politics of Star Wars are elitist and anti-democratic. You probably have seen his Salon article."

As a matter of fact I had. When the article first went live in 1999, I would never have considered defending Star Wars on this topic. But the world has changed a bit since then, more's the pity. So I said yes to Matt, and here's why...

In 2005, Revenge of the Sith, the much-anticipated third film of the Star Wars prequel trilogy, was released to enormous fanfare. I, personally, was dreading this movie, as I knew how it ended: the good guys lose, the bad guys win, and the cute kid from The Phantom Menace and the whiny brat from Attack of the Clones turns into the nastiest villain of twentieth-century popular culture.

And what do we see?

Chancellor Palpatine is given more executive powers in order to fuel the war effort, and dissenters are painted as unpatriotic. Attempts to change the status quo are refuted or beaten down. Anakin, a crony of Palpatine, is given an important position on the Jedi Council for which he is woefully unqualified. And when Palpatine is made Emperor, he declares that his ascension will ensure that all who live in the Republic-cum-Empire will live in security.

Any of this sounding familiar?

(Okay, to be fair, Michael Brown's disastrous handling of Hurricane Katrina as unqualified head of FEMA and Harriet Miers's nomination to the Supreme Court despite having nothing like the necessary judicial experience both postdate Revenge of the Sith's release, but the parallels with Anakin's appointment to the Jedi Council still struck me while watching the film on DVD in late 2005.)

When Senator John Kerry took on President George W. Bush during the 2004 presidential election, he used logic and truth and experience to try to defeat him; when Mace Windu took on Chancellor Palpatine, he used the same tools (along with the purple lightsaber of badassness). President Bush's refutation was that the people of the United States were safer with him as president than they would be with Senator Kerry. Palpatine's words upon assuming the title of Emperor were of keeping the people safe and secure. Both President Bush and Emperor Palpatine used the same buzzword: security.

In their face-to-face confrontations, President Bush looked far worse than Senator Kerry; he squirmed, looked uncomfortable, was snappish. In their face-to-face confrontation, Chancellor Palpatine also looked far worse, as Windu turned his power against him and made him look like a raisin. In the end, Anakin Skywalker chose to send Windu to a fiery end while plummeting from a great height; the American people did the same thing, metaphorically speaking, to Senator Kerry. Neither the people of the Republic nor those of the U.S. deemed the disfigurement of their leader to be enough to get rid of him.

George Lucas, fuzzy-brained liberal that he is (that's not an insult; you won't find a liberal more fuzzy-brained than me), can't have done this by accident. The parallels between the chancellor and the president are just too obvious. Padme Amidala puts the final exclamation point on the whole thing when Palpatine is granted supreme power and she says sadly (and, I might add, with far more convincing emotion than she ever shows in her scenes with Anakin): "So this is how liberty dies-with thunderous applause."

The parallels don't end there. I think that Revenge of the Sith in particular was hugely influenced by the direction the country has taken since the fall of 2001 (Attach of the Clones was already mostly in the can by that point).

In the classic Salon.com article on Star Wars-an article that was written in June 1999-David Brin imagined that Episode III would be "a real bummer of a movie: Coruscant and a zillion other planets are gonna have to fry as the emperor takes over, since that would only happen over the dead bodies of every decent citizen with any spirit."'

Those words sound almost charmingly naive now.

Something that is often overlooked is that President Bush's approval ratings were in the dumper on the tenth of September 2001. Wracked by corporate scandal and an economy that was taking a serious nose dive, not to mention lingering questions over the legitimacy of the 2000 election, the president was not having a good time of it.

Then two planes flew into the World Trade Center, another crashed in Pennsylvania, and a fourth hit the Pentagon.

Suddenly, President Bush's approval ratings skyrocketed. The U.S. was at war, America was under siege, and we had to hunker down and support our country or we were the same kind of un-American bastards who fly planes into buildings. The PATRIOT Act, a magnificent trampling of the Constitution in the name of security, was passed. Revoltingly, torture became a legitimate tool of a democracy's military, and the Geneva Convention was described by a U.S. government official as "quaint." Everything from traveling to foreign countries to simply entering an office building became considerably more complicated in the name of security.

Meanwhile, the findings of the commission that examined the 2000 election were brushed under the rug, the corporate scandals that hit Enron and WorldCom were forgotten, the still-plummeting economy was tossed aside in favor of a wartime mentality that the country couldn't actually support. Plenty of "decent citizens" of the United States stayed silent, and those who spoke up were shouted down, even as the president gathered more power and tossed aside so much executive oversight and judicial accountability. Those who supported President Bush were lionized and/or reelected and/or given positions far out of their range of qualification; those who didn't were cast aside.

Throughout all of this, we were reminded of the need to maintain our security, so that the attacks of September 11 wouldn't happen again.

On the face of it, everything went wrong. Dissenters were painted as unpatriotic. Anybody who dared question the Bush Administration was accused of playing into the hands of the terrorists-even when it told an outright lie and said that Saddam Hussein was connected to the terrorists. Invading Iraq became our number-one priority-after being told on September 20, 2001 during the public statement that kicked off the war on terror that capturing Osama bin Laden was our number-one priority, one that, over four years later, has yet to be accomplished.

Any of this sounding familiar?

I don't think there can be any doubt that Palpatine is supposed to be evil. Throughout all six movies, Palpatine is the antagonistic force-the puppeteer behind Darth Vader in A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, brought out from behind the curtain in Return of the Jedi, and the master manipulator of every single event that occurs in the prequel trilogy. I don't believe that at any point Lucas is saying that Palpatine should be in charge.

And this, as much as anything, is why Star Wars is far from elitist and far from condemning the masses. It's the elitists who are portrayed negatively, and the ordinary folks who save the day, and I think that choice is quite deliberate.

In Star Wars, the power does indeed belong to the elite. In The Phantom Menace-which establishes that those who wield the Force best are those born with a large number of midichlorians, rather than the more egalitarian all-you-need-is-discipline approach presented by A New Hope-that notion is glorified. In his defense of the elitist argument in the opening statement to this volume, Brin specifically says that the lessons of Star Wars are:

• Elites have an inherent right to arbitrary rule; common citizens needn't be consulted. They may only choose which born-torule elite to follow.

• Any amount of sin can be forgiven if you repent ... and if you are important enough.

• "Good" elites should act on their subjective whims, without evidence, argument or accountability. Secrecy and lies are always a good option. They never need to be explained.

Except, I don't think Star Wars preaches this at all. Yes, Palpatine and the Jedi Council each set themselves up as the final authority-the former over the Republic, eventually coming to rule it, the latter of what is good and noble. Yet, both of them ultimately fail.

(The Emperor also is guilty of a major screwup with Luke in Return of the Jedi: if he'd just kept his mouth shut, Luke probably would've given in. Seriously, watch the scenes on Death Star II again. Every time Luke is in danger of giving in to his anger and fury, Palpatine says, "Yeeeeeees, give in to the dark side," at which point Luke shakes his head and backs off. If the Emperor had just kept his damn mouth shut ....)

What other leaders do we get? Well, there's Yoda. The Jedi Master's rejection of Anakin in The Phantom Menace is at least partly responsible for the kid's slide into Vaderdom, he's utterly clueless regarding Palpatine's machinations in the entire prequel trilogy, and he lies to Luke about his parentage, which leads to an almost fatal distraction during The Empire Strikes Back. But then, Yoda was never meant to be the hero. At best, he was always a plot device.

But let's look at some of the other leaders besides Yoda and Palpatine-more to the point, the ones who actually accomplish good and noble things-and see if the elitist model really holds up:

Padme Amidala. Despite her title of "queen," she was, in fact, an elected official. Most of her effectiveness was banished to the deleted scenes section of the Revenge of the Sith DVD, where it was revealed that she was among the senators trying to put a lid on Palpatine's power grabs.

Bail Organa. He was instrumental in getting Yoda and Obi-Wan, as well as Amidala's children, to safety. He was the one who raised Leia, and obviously did it right, given her history. He's also an elected official.

Princess Leia Organa. She was one of the driving forces of the Rebellion, which was why she was such a valuable captive to Vader in A New Hope.

Mon Mothma. She was in charge of the Rebellion in Return of the Jedi. Those same Revenge of the Sith deleted scenes reveal that she was a senator and also part of the cabal that resisted Palpatine.

Han Solo and Chewbacca. Without them, the Death Star doesn't blow up the first time. If not for the timely arrival of the Millennium Falcon, the rebels would've had their heads handed to them in A New Hope. And in Return of the Jedi, it was Chewbacca, aided by the Ewoks, who got the force shield down on Endor.

The Ewoks. They're a cooperative bunch, in the literal sense, in that they work together as a group, don't seem to have much of a hierarchy, and wind up taking down lots and lots of Empire troops, not to mention helping Chewie bring down the Death Star's force shield.

Lando Calrissian. He was the one flying the Falcon in Return of the Jedi when it blew up the Death Star the second time.

Tellingly, aside from Leia, none of these people are imbued with the Force, and neither the princess nor the viewers are aware that Leia is chock full of midichlorians until the very end of Return of the Jedi.

I think Lucas did this completely on purpose. The ultimate message of Star Wars is not that the elites deserve to be in power and that the light side of the Force is the ultimate arbiter of what is good and noble, because all the important stuff is accomplished by folks not burdened with the Force-or, in the case of Leia, living in ignorance of her Force-itude.

Ultimately, light side, dark side, it doesn't matter: power corrupts. Yoda, Mace Windu, Obi-Wan Kenobi and the other Jedi are so arrogantly sure of themselves that they completely miss Palpatine's subterfuge. The entirety of Jedi Knighthood is made out to be a bunch of bumbling idiots in the prequel trilogy. Later, Yoda and Obi-Wan lie to Luke about his parentage and withhold knowledge about his sibling. Yoda insists that Luke is not ready in The Empire Strikes Back, yet Luke ignores him, goes off, and actually acquits himself just fine. Obi-Wan is also pretty free with his mind-controlling powers in A New Hope, which is entertaining until you actually think about it for a few seconds and realize that they're arguably the actions of a sociopath.

Palpatine isn't much of an improvement, as he plows through hench Jedi for no compellingly good reason. There was no need for Palpatine to send Darth Maul after Amidala and her escorts in The Phantom Menace, because the whole point of the exercise was for Palpatine to heroically save the Republic, and he needed Amidala safe for that. In Revenge of the Sith, he lets Anakin kill Count Dooku/ Darth Tyranus, sacrificing a henchJedi of many years' standing who was kind enough to manufacture a war for him, all in the hopes that it might turn this whiny twerp into a better henchJedi. Wouldn't it have been better to have all three Darths, Vader, Maul and Tyranus, to help with the whole rule-the-galaxy thing? Plus, of course, there's his dopey handling of Luke in Return of the Jedi, referenced above. (I'm told that the rationale behind these moves is well explained by the novels, which doesn't surprise me, as it is often left to the tie-in novels to fill in the back alleys and side roads of the franchise.)