Or a kind of Trade Federation alien, per Star Wars Episodes I-III. In this way I was dreaming of being a kind of Han Solo renegade businessman. I couldn’t see the history of the United States I loved as an aggressive, expansionist Empire that conquered and oppressed native peoples all over the North American continent, all for the sake of trade and business expansion. I couldn’t imagine, as a kid, business as a profit-seeking mode of resource extraction, whether those resources were material or in terms of human labor. Or, had I trended toward business as a future businessman, I’d be pushing for the soft empire of capitalist expansion. I didn’t realize it, but I was sort of dreaming of being a comical American Storm Trooper. I was fascinated with America’s militarism, as portrayed in other movies like Red Dawn, Rambo, or Top Gun. Indeed, I played soldier a lot as a kid (i.e. I couldn’t see that, were I an American soldier in the 1970s or 1980s, I’d be fighting for imperial interests and against natives. Were I in the Star Wars saga as a soldier, certainly I’d be fighting against the oppressive Empire. Since Luke, Han, Leia, and Ben Kenobi were Anglo “whites,” I related to them. As others have observed about the Star Wars saga, I saw Lucas’s Rebels as future-past American-style guerrilla Revolutionaries. These images blinded me, as unlearned child raised among regular patriotic working people, to the manipulations of our American Empire. The Empire’s officers were Nazi SS, or Stalin’s military henchmen. The Storm Troopers were comically inept, psychologically-damaged nuisances. Darth Vader and the Emperor were Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Napoleon, and Nero all in one. They were a part of my historical imagination, only to be conjured up in film. Those distracting and fantastical images made empires seem almost fictional. When I think of real and aspirational empires, my imagination is colored by historical images and facts: goose-stepping soldiers, displaced families, terrible weaponry, bloodshed, terrifying charismatic leaders, ethnic cleansing and genocide, the controlled movement of people, resource extraction, information control, etc.īut those are hard images of empire, much like those portrayed in the Star Wars saga. I think about other things too, of course. Yet, if I did, I would probably think of war in the background. I have never, for example, spent much time or energy imagining what it was like to actually live, day-to-day, in a historical empire. Not only war, but the subject of “empire” might also seem foreign or alien to viewers, especially during the 1970s and 1980s. Our ongoing wars sometimes seem bloodless, given that the action is far away. Even the blaster strikes and light saber duels in the Star Wars saga didn’t draw blood! Readers today most certainly understand the notion of war as background, or as a distraction or something one would rather forget. War was just the setting in which a lot of action took place. Given the difference, it’s understandable how some themes, even prominent ones such as war, might be overlooked, or seen as background.

It is hard to capture, today, just how different the films were from everything else on the cinematic landscape. Some have even declared the saga more of a moral adventure-a romantic search for meaning. The larger Wars portion of the title gets lost in the fun of alien races, space ships, future technology, “the force,” jokes, and entertaining music. He conceived of the first film, at least, as commentary on the Vietnam War. George Lucas created the films to explore the problems of conflict, fascism, and empire. Several recent writers have noted what is sometimes lost in the shuffle when we watch the Star Wars saga: the films are about war. I feel the excitement of those days this winter, as we head to the theaters to watch the latest installment, Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Everyone wanted to see what those plucky rebels would do for an encore after destroying the Death Star.

After the smashing success of Star Wars in the late 1970s, everyone-of a certain age-was looking forward to the release of The Empire Strikes Back, which occurred in 1980.

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