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I don't think it's fair to reject Star Wars as a political entity: it has a tonne of political roots. But you're misrepresenting the Empire in the films. The original Star Wars films were Cold War products, and the political aspect reflects this strongly:
an Evil Empire is explanding its totalitarian grip, producing weapons of mass destruction, and cutting away democratic freedoms. The resistance - a plucky group of individualist, frontiersman rebels, ready at hand with that down-home jerry-rig expertise so beloved of the US - A-Team, Michael Knight's constant field repair work on KIT, Streethawk's insistence, against all the available evidence, that you can flip the bike using the breaking jets - must use superior skill and chutzpah to defeat this menace; overmatched, yet somehow meeting the enemy on equal terms, the Rebel Alliance (patchwork, not Monolithic) can win against the solid, oppressive grey, black and white of the Empire.
They're aided by the Jedi, in the person of Obiwan, Luke, and Yoda: mystics whose power is derived from a connection with their feelings and the natural order. The Jedi fill the role of the intelligensia in Rebel Society - they preserve the true spirit of the Old Republic, the Golden Age. Unlike the evil scientists of the Empire (and the Soviet Union's chess-playing elite), their connection to truth is unmediated by intellect, and hence has a moral element as well as a practical one. This is an interesting solution to the dilemma the US faces as a state whose existence is owed to an act of conscious intellect which nonetheless has a deeply-rooted distrust of book-larnin'. The Jedi are primarily mystical, though they can, of course, deploy their knowledge of Right to achieve intellectual understanding.
The first films are fundamentally simple. Good, bad. Even the cunning ruses are pitifully obvious. The morality is clear, the battle lines are drawn, the stakes are unambiguous.
You can't make a case for that Empire - that's the point about it. What you can do is learn from it (and see how it shaped the US and the world) and also from the new films, which are far less clear cut. A few things from the new movies which seem significant:
the force is 'out of balance', and the jedi appear to have 'lost touch' with it, although their powers are even more phenomenal than they were before. The Old Republic is not, as you might have expected, based on an evolved British Empire/Commonwealth, which would suit the political setup in the first three films and which would still allow plenty of parallels with the present day, but on a nightmarish version of the US senate, corrupt, helpless, bureaucratic and conflicted. The enemy is within, concealed and frankly far better at almost everything than those in the legitimate authority. [spoilerette: Count Dooku's arguments about the situation in the Republic are utterly convincing, to the point where I thought for a moment we would see a reversal where it became apparent that Dooku was a hero who had left the Jedi order to fight the rot, and he was going to be a secret goodie]
We're two films into the new cycle, and still no one knows where the evil is rooted... |
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