George Lucas Will Donate Disney $4 Billion To Education

[JackRiddler]

30. The militarism of Star Wars?

I mean the use of the hero story (lifted straight from Joseph Campbell) to glorify the transformation from a youth to a warrior. To become his best self, Luke must lose his family and old rooted life, and be introduced into a secret, powerful, magic order. Everything that was past on sleepy Tattooine was illusion, and completely lost to him. He is reborn into a struggle of supernatural good and evil. That is the truth of the galaxy, and it is good. The pain of the family's death doesn't last long in the movie, any more than Princess Leia is upset about the loss of her whole planet with billions of inhabitants for more than a few scenes. It's all worth it, the losses are bearable. Luke's transformation is the emotional core of the story.

The plot and ideological trappings are less important. The empire with its stormtroopers is more like a real army, but no real army recruits volunteers by telling them they will be interchangeable stormtroopers. In fact, military recruitment promises the opposite of military reality: be all you can be, army of one, test yourself, realize your inner hero, be something special as against the cookie-cutter world of the normals, fight for freedom against tyrrany. In the end we'll confirm your heroism by pinning a medal on you in a glorious ceremony, with staging lifted straight from Leni Riefenstahl's film of the Nuremberg party rallies. Never mind that in reality you're one of the empire's soldiers; the message claims the opposite.

Star Wars arrived at the perfect time for this message and was aimed at the 12-year-olds of 1977 (such as myself), a transitional generation in a transitional time. After the 1960s and early 1970s, Vietnam and the end of the draft due to popular disgust with militarism, the offer of Star Wars (just look at that title) was that things could be simple again. There could once again be good and evil, and "we" were the good. This was one of the first and the most successful of wide-release blockbuster movies. Another key one at the time was Rocky I-II: White American underdog who believes in himself almost upsets and then actually defeats an avatar for Muhammad Ali! These two films (among others at the time, but leading the pack) bespeak an ideological turn. I'm not saying the CIA wrote the scripts; they didn't have to, it was in the air, and Lucas was the lucky one who (wittingly or not) managed to hit the zeitgeist best with a juvenile pulp story he had not been able to sell for many years when the zeitgeist was more critical. It was also the beginning of the end for Hollywood's true golden age. The biggest movies since then have not been made for adults, or as explorations of difficult themes, but either to pander totally to the teenage demographic or as spectacular escapes from the ambiguities of adult life.

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