For the last week or so, I’ve been putting together an article about the new trilogy of Star Wars films that I’ve been shopping around based partially on this post. Ultimately I think it’s a little too political for the pop culture press and too geeky (or not hipster-ish enough) for the political mags. Either way, I’m really proud of how the latest draft turned out, so I’m going to include it in the extended entry. It’s still a little rough around the edges, but I hope you like it.

Sith Happens : The Political Lessons of the Star Wars Prequels

For the past six years, George Lucas, who once defended his films by saying “Why is the public so stupid? That’s not my fault.”, has been busy constructing a political epic that’s as subversive and timely as last years blockbuster Fahrenheit 9/11. The only question is…will anyone notice??

Science fiction has always been fertile ground for metaphorical examination of societal ills. In the fifties and sixties, Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone scripts confronted nuclear war, racism, and communist witch hunts with a frankness that garnered critical acclaim and numerous awards, yet these topics remained forbidden to standard television dramas. After an exhaustive fight with network brass over a teleplay based on the slaying of civil rights martyr Emmett Till, Serling leapt into the world of fantasy remarking “You know, you can put these words into the mouth of a Martian and get away with it”.

A few years later, the Planet of the Apes series replaced the martians with grown men in monkey suits, but kept the Twilight Zone’s fondness for subtle editorializing. In a genre known for little more than mindless eye candy, topics as timely as anti-war protests, animal rights, race riots, and the conflict between science and religion were tackled with a knowing wink to the audience. Indeed, it’s hard to watch this week’s ludicrous evolution hearings in Kansas without recalling the first film’s pivotal trial scene between Charlton Heston’s stranded human Taylor and the ape leader Dr. Zaius :

Learned Judges: My case is simple. It is based on our first Article of Faith: that the Almighty created the ape in his own image; that He gave him a soul and a mind; that He set him apart from the beasts of the jungle, and made him the lord of the planet.

These sacred truths are self-evident. The proper study of apes is apes. But certain young cynics have chosen to study man – yes, perverted scientists who advance on insidious theory called ‘evolution.’

There is a conspiracy afoot to undermine the very cornerstone of our Faith

These days, it’s hard to remember a time when the big and small screens were a haven for social commentary disguised in space suits and cheap prosthetics. When the original Star Wars hit theaters, audiences embraced what they saw as a simple morality play. To deflect criticism, Lucas hid the film’s vagueness and shallowness behind a “hero myth” concept he borrowed from theologian Joseph Campbell, but whatever depth the films may have contained was lost on an audience that was more interested in lasers and robots than a mediation on mythological archetypes.

By the time the third film in the series, Return of the Jedi, was released, there was a growing consensus that Lucas had lost his Midas touch. With the teddy bear like Ewoks in tow, it seemed clear that the “space opera” auteur has given in to the marketing dark side. Spin-off cartoons and TV movies squeezed the last drops of goodwill that the franchise had built up from its first installment and its superior sequel. George Lucas was more interested in making kiddie movies now.

This suspicion seemed to be confirmed after Lucas reemerged with 1999’s The Phantom Menace, the first new Star Wars movie in 15 years. Presumably about the origins of bad guy Darth Vader, the film was much more a showcase for the retarded antics of a frog-creature named Jar-Jar Binks than any examination of the “dark side”. Add to this scatological humor that would make Shrek blush and a fifteen minute racing sequence cum videogame commercial, it’s easy to see why so many fans were ready to declare the Star Wars franchise dead.

..but a funny thing happened on the way to Mos Eisley. While audiences were distracted by the gaudy special effects, wooden acting, and amateurish dialogue, George Lucas was busy constructing a political parable about the death of a democracy.

As if to make the point that world-shattering crises rarely announce themselves, the chain of events that would lead to the end of the Lucas’ fictional democracy is set off by an innocuous trade dispute. As the opening crawl of the Phantom Menace explains :

Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute.

Hoping to resolve the matter with a blockade of deadly battleships, the greedy Trade Federation has stopped all shipping to the small planet of Naboo.

That’s right. This interstellar swashbuckling epic begins with a disagreement over taxes. As the film’s title implies, the leader of the “greedy Trade Federation” is the mysterious Darth Sidious, a robe-wearing baddie who’s obviously destined to be the emperor of the original films. Though never explicitly mentioned in the film, it’s pretty clear that this goofy-named villain is also the alter ego of Galactic Senator Palpatine from Naboo. That’s right. There’s a “Galactic senate”.

Under the guidance of Sidious/Palpatine, the Trade Federation invades the planet of Naboo and holds its people hostage, which leads us to our first look at what C-Span would be like in outer space. In an effort to persuade the Republic to send help, Naboo’s leader Queen Amidala pleads with the legislature, only to have the motion tabled under “Section 523A”. Out of desperation, Amidala (under the guidance of Sen. Palpatine) calls for the ouster of the Supreme Chancellor, which eventually leads to the election of Senator Palpatine to be the new leader of the Republic on a “sympathy vote”.

Whew! Are you still with me? Anyone expecting to see the transition from Republic to Empire to be a non-stop battle between the forces of good and evil would have to deal with a few hours of legislative deal-making first. Is it any wonder why audiences tuned out this portion of the film? Hell, I almost fell asleep typing this stuff.

But the portrayal of Palpatine does stand in contrast to the earlier films’ lack of ambiguity. While a coup of some sort would have been a quick and easy way to explain away the origins of the Empire, this Senator is playing by grifter’s rules. Why steal something when you can trick them into giving it away? Through a manufactured crisis for which he’s responsible, this Senator from a tiny planet was able to undermine confidence in the duly-elected leader and take the position for himself.

This may seem ludicrous to some, but the parallels to local politics are all too real. Residents of California lived through a phony crisis of their own a few years ago thanks to the deregulation schemes of former Republican Governor Pete Wilson and the President’s buddies at Enron. In the months following the California power crisis, the public campaign to undermine sitting Governor Gray Davis’ leadership gained steam in large part to the financial support of state GOP leaders like Darrel Issa and aided by a public gullible enough to believe that California’s woes were the fault of Davis (who warned about an impending crisis for months prior to the rolling blackouts that dominated the headlines). In the end, Davis was recalled and replaced by Pete Wilson’s hand-picked successor, actor Arnold Schwarzenegger. When it was revealed that Schwarzenegger met with Enron executives during the height of the crisis, the final piece of the puzzle fell into place. While it’s not quite as straightforward as the one-man scenario in Lucas’ film, the way the perpetrators of these twin catastrophes were able to turn the public’s outrage to their political advantage would make Machiavelli proud.

With the 2002 entry in the franchise, Attack of the Clones, Lucas took things a step further. Having already shown how a Senator from a tiny planet snuck his way into the Supreme Chancellorship, the second episode concerns Palpatine’s consolidation of power by, once again, manufacturing a crisis and taking advantage of the ensuing fear and confusion. The convoluted scenario involving a clone army isn’t really worth trying to unravel here, but suffice it to say that the ensuing war provides the perfect excuse for an “emergency powers” resolution, via the easily manipulated Senator Jar-Jar Binks. (At the time the movie came out, our President, a former drunk who’s unable to speak in complete sentences, was still basking in his post 9/11 afterglow. So the notion that the man-child Jar-Jar would go into politics isn’t that farfetched).

Once again, an analogous situation can be found in our recent history. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Congress hastily approved a laundry list of Bush Administration requests under the Orwellian name The USA PATRIOT Act. The common thread holding the proposals together was a lot more about consolidating power within the executive branch than effectiveness in fighting terrorists (Forgive me if I missed the part of the 9/11 Commission report that concerned what Mohammed Atta was reading at the library). The debate is still raging about the effectiveness of these “emergency powers”, but the fact that the Act itself was printed in the middle of the night and passed before anyone had a chance to read it does raise some disturbing questions about the motives of those involved. Though the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon obviously weren’t work of evil Republicans hiding in the shadows, the eagerness of the ruling party to exploit the fear and confusion of the American public should serve as a wakeup call.

As Lucas put it in an interview with Time magazine to promote Clones, the destruction of senate governments is almost always an inside :

“All democracies turn into dictatorships?but not by coup. The people give their democracy to a dictator, whether it’s Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, the general population goes along with the idea…How does a good person go bad, and how does a democracy become a dictatorship? It isn’t that the Empire conquered the Republic, it’s that the Empire is the Republic.”

That’s the lesson hidden within the new Star Wars films. Despite what we want to believe about the strength of our own democracy, most despots don’t seize power, they convince the public to give it to them.

It’s understandable that audiences haven’t responded to the political themes in these films. After all, these are the same people who are too busy following the ins and outs of the Michael Jackson trial to pay attention to more boring stuff like the Bush Administration coddling human rights abusers while extolling the praises of democracy abroad, the gradual shifting of the tax burden onto the backs of the poor and middle class, or the looming heathcare crisis. Is it any wonder that they tune out the interstellar senate hearings while waiting for another fart joke or light saber fight? Perhaps fans will finally start paying attention with the final installment in the series, in which Lucas’ fictional despot takes a lesson from Joseph Stalin and goes on a bloody purge of his political enemies. But I guess that all depends on whether or not there’s another runaway bride or vegetative woman in Florida to distract us.