DOC TAYROC'S [UNSOLICITED] ECONOMICS HOT THOUGHT

What J.J. Abram's tells us about neo-liberalism, Part II: Let the Wookie Win

As mentioned in last week's entry, by the mid-1970s the 'golden age of science-fiction' was almost certainly over. The pulp magazines that had carried the genre from the turn of the last century through the Second World War had almost all gone out of business, and Star Trek had ruffled a few too many feathers with its genuine dream of a better world, and the far-out unrealistic idea that a Black woman would be quietly competent at her job, and a post-race, post-nation-statism, post-capitalist world was not only possible, but desirable. Since the powers that be benefited from racism, nation-statism, and capitalism this could not be and so Kirk et al had their wings clipped by the same forces that Millennials find ourselves at odds with.

George Lucas was no stranger to peddling nostalgia. His first successful film, American Graffiti was a trip down memory lane for the baby-boomer generation, who in the midst of 'stagflation' had a desire to relive the simpler days of their childhoods in the 1950s. Well, it was simpler for white, straight, protestant Baby-boomers. For everyone else it was a fairly oppressive time when, as I've covered before, they were left out of the benefits of British-American minimally viable socialism, as the best way to describe Keynesian economics was the dawn of the 'socialism for me, but not for thee' mentality that kind of flies in the face of what socialism is actually all about, but let's not dwell too much on how white fragility keeps ruining everything for everyone all the time.

For now know that American Graffiti was a hit, and George Lucas was out for a new hit. Lucas, the peddler of nostalgia, had been nostalgic for the 'golden age of science-fiction' that had also inspired Gene Roddenberry. As mentioned previously, there's a few things to know about George Lucas. Like most baby-boomers he was rather taken by Eastern Religion (especially after the Beatles went to India). But like most baby-boomers the version of Eastern Religion he was exposed to was a highly commodified and sell-able version of yoga and Buddhism that lacked much of the actual philosophy present in these actual religions. George Lucas was also a fan of samurai films, likely unaware that many of these pushed a pseudo-nationalistic fantasy of samurai honour and the 'bushido code' that had inspired and empowered Japanese militarists decades before Lucas was born. George Lucas, peddler of nostalgia was also a fan of the Flash Gordon serial films and radio programmes that had seen heavy replay during his childhood. He had also come across Frank Herbert's slightly problematic Dune books and was, you guessed it, a fan.

Mix in the stereotypical Boomer passion for the Second World War, specifically aerial and naval combat, cook for a couple of years, and baby, you've got a Star Wars. Thankfully, Lucas mistook Herbert's weird libertarian critiques of what Herbert believed the Soviet Union to be, and made the Galactic Empire more in the image of Nazi Germany. Again, the passion for the Second World War probably helped things.

From here, it's helpful to remember that George Lucas understands the power of myth, and so began to build a certain amount of myth around himself as much as he built the mythology of that galaxy far, far away....

The first Star Wars film, retroactively renamed Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope was a massive hit. Whilst original edits did not contain the subtitle, when its sequel, Empire Strikes Back, was released its subtitles were edited into subsequent re-releases. After the unquestionable success of A New Hope proved that not only was Star Wars a viable series for 20th Century Fox to produce, but also that science-fiction was a viable genre of films to produce, Lucas would claim (in a claim that some dispute) that A New Hope was always meant to be the 'middle of the story' and actually he had nine episodes written. A claim that would become more dubious when the prequel trilogy was released in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Anyway, for now, the rest is history, A New Hope comes out, followed by Empire Strikes Back in 1980, and the first controversial release, Return of the Jedi.

Whilst Empire Strikes Back almost always comes up on lists of the finest films that were ever made, Return of the Jedi proved more divisive, first for the somewhat odd tangent at Jabba the Hutt's Palace at the beginning of the film, and again for the controversial inclusion of the immensely commodifiable Ewoks, which were almost instantly called out for being a cynical cash grab from a franchise that already was selling collectable toys of the undeniably cute R2-D2 and the less cute, but easily action-figurable Imperial Storm Trooper to children and adult fans of the franchise. Not to mention all the cool toys of X-Wing fighters and the instantly recognisable Millennium Falcon.

Return of the Jedi was also the first time that Lucas tried to make Star Wars explicitly political. You see, the Galactic Empire was always clearly Nazi Germany, again their main soldier is called a storm trooper for Christ's sake, but A New Hope released in 1977, and the Nazi regime had collapsed 32 years earlier in 1945. Further, the 1970s were a nicer time, when we all understood the Nazis were evil, and so saying, 'hey oppressive genocidal, military-based fascism is evil' wasn't really going to divide the opinion pages of the newspapers of the day or lead to a whole bunch of weird 'hot takes'. Some in America and Britain thought that Lucas was comparing the Soviet Union to the Galactic Empire, but that's because media literacy is hard for people, as we keep learning over and over. Even people in media struggle with media literacy. Like Mr Abrams, who we will talk about next week.

You see, when pressed about the Ewoks, Lucas, somewhat problematically, compared the Ewoks to the Vietcong, and said he was inspired by the ability of a 'less technologically advanced group' to achieve victory over a foreign imperial aggressor with a technologically advanced military.

The evil Empire wasn't the Soviets, it was the Americans all along.

Granted, we could argue that once again Lucas had missed the mark, Return of the Jedi released in 1983, and the end of the American occupation in Vietnam had been 1975, two years before the premiere of even the first Star Wars, so RotJ was a bit late to effect US foreign policy in Vietnam. To Lucas' credit he did say he was inspired by how the Viet Cong beat the US, which is remarkable at a time when most Americans were pretending the Vietnam War hadn't been a war at all, and so America hadn't lost a war, that simply didn't happen. (Ignoring Korea too, I guess).

Here is where we can start to make the case that Lucas was indeed planning at least the prequels, or at least the over arching themes of how a democracy becomes a fascist dictatorship. We could, and should critique the prequel trilogy for being poorly written, for dialogue so bad that Hemingway would cry, and for presenting an overly simplistic version of how fascism happens. We could talk about how Padmé was never going to succeed because the liberal dream of 'holding people to account under constitutional law' and 'trusting the process' has repeatedly proven to be the stupidest way to fight fascism since fascists clearly don't care about rule of law or 'norms'. Padmé was never going to make Palpatine disappear by appealing to a sense of decency or exposing his corruption, and by even trying to do it that way she was being as annoying naive as Lisa Simpson after series 9 of The Simpsons.

But, as some of you are no doubt thinking, that's where the animated Clone Wars series comes in, or the novels of the now no longer canon Expanded Universe, or where Andor comes in today, although Andor is after J.J. Abrams made three of the worst films ever created and so kind of misses the point of these essays.

For better and for worse, after Return of the Jedi, Star Wars was about how the 'good guys' in the form of the Republic become the 'bad guys' in the form of the Empire. A baby-boomer coming to terms with what he perceived to be the US's 'heel turn' during the Vietnam War, only made worse later by the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s. Like Padmé, Lucas had believed the US was the 'good guys' that had betrayed their 'true calling', and Vader and the Empire were the decline into villainy. For many, especially in my generation, the awkward and often panned politics of the prequel trilogy would be a political awakening. If the Galactic Republic could become evil, so could Britain and/or America! (Again, this my early teenage self thinking this). In a weird, problematic, but still true way Star Wars was political, and had been since the 1980s. Corruption and greed in democracy lead the Republic to fascism, and could do the same at home, here in reality. And gee, this dual invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan sure seems bad, and Tony Blair/George Bush seem to lie a lot like Chancellor Palpatine...

But there's a big problem with Star Wars, and in many ways it is those damned Ewoks. From the beginning, Lucas made Star Wars about merchandising. According to him, it was to make sure he had the money to fund subsequent projects, given how many studios refused to put up funds for Star Wars in the first place. Whatever Lucas' reason for his focus on marketing, it had sent a strong message to the capitalist class. Films aren't enough, films need to have toy deals, video game deals, books, comic books, television spin-offs, Lego sets, Fortnite skins, fast-food deals, etc etc. Kids need to be drinking their McDonald’s Coca-Cola out of Jar Jar Bink's goddamn head! That's how you make cultural impact! Kids need to get irrationally angry at the sewer level in Star Wars: Dark Forces or the bloody awful thumb stick on the N64 controller whilst they're trying to tie up the legs of an Imperial AT-AT in the worst fucking level of Star Wars: Dark Empire. Not speaking from personal experience, of course.

Unfortunately for Star Wars, it made the bad guys too marketable. It was difficult to get Mark Hammill, Harrison Ford, Billy D. Williams, or Carrie Fisher's likenesses on action figures. The Jedi aesthetic was hard to copyright, a dressing-gown or a few bathrobes could do the trick. Every cardboard tube on the planet quickly became a lightsabre. Darth Vader and Imperial Stormtroopers, however, much more instantly recognisable as a distinct and better yet, copyrightable thing! Stormtrooper armour (and later clone trooper armour) already looks plastic, making plastic toys was easy! Soon every kid had a small squadron of stormtroopers in their bedroom. Instead of maintaining their original meaning as dreaded shock troopers of space fascism, they became the mascot of the franchise, with a stormtrooper even showing up on the box of the Nintendo 64. Star Wars Day wouldn't be complete without a massive march of stormtroopers, and John William's Imperial March would be blared at sporting events around the world. It was easy to find the bad guys everywhere, the Jedi, with their monk aesthetic, just weren't as capitalism friendly.

Star Wars also made war cool. As the US went to war in the 1990s and the early 2000s several deploying troops invoked the empire as they set off. Soon came an internet meme, 'the empire did nothing wrong', and because satire died alongside media literacy during the explosion of cocaine across Hollywood, some people began to unironically say 'the empire did nothing wrong'. People began to cheer for the explicit bad guy, the literal space fascists, even getting mad that EA's Star Wars Battlefront II didn't spend enough time with the main character as a space Nazi. (There was also the micro-transaction thing that took over the fury, which goes back to my above point of Star Wars being so commodified. Although it is worth noting the fury centred on the price of space Nazi Darth Vader). Because it is well established at this point that real-world fascists use impotent nerd rage to recruit, the 'coolness' of the Empire was used to recruit kids to very real fascism. It worked so well that when John Boyega ripped off a storm trooper helmet in the first images released of The Force Awakens several now real fascists were outraged that a 'Black stormtrooper' was a thing, and that a woman was the main character.

There are problems with The Force Awakens and the rest of the sequel trilogy, which we will cover next week when the villain of this trilogy, J.J. Abrams finally reveals his evil plan, and my fan fiction of Benjamin Sisko and Luke Skywalker working together to save their universes finally comes to light. One of the problems is not that the main characters are a woman, a Black man, and a Hispanic man. But, it is depressingly unsurprising to find that far-right recruiters are using traditionally nerdy spaces to recruit. The far-right goes after the isolated and the vulnerable, first from the 'in group' to recruit and then in the 'out group' to punish and villainise to consolidate the 'in group'. This is, of course, the tactic of cowards who know their ideas have no worth for public purchase, and so have to resort to such tricks instead. Neurodiverse people, of which I am one, are drawn to science-fiction for a variety of reasons. We are also 'vulnerable' in a sense that it is difficult for neurodiverse people to socialise in the same way that neurotypical people do, which leads to feelings of isolation and loneliness, a fact only compounded by neo-liberal capitalism's all encompassing push to make everything uniform to make it more commodifiable. As I will write about in the future, when I feel a bit more comfortable doing so, neo-liberalism is inherently antagonistic to neurodiverse people's existence. This can make young neurodiverse people particularly vulnerable to right-wing recruiters, who can tell them the colour of their skin, their nationality, their ethnic heritage, their religion, etc makes them superior to the people they're being isolated from. Or that they're being isolated because Black people, women, etc are edging in on their territory. You can tell them they're involuntarily celibate and indoctrinate them against neurotypical chads for whom life seems easy from the outside. You can use Darth Vader as the metaphorical apple sauce to make the toxic pill go down easier. Which is what these groups have done through the wilful misunderstanding of the 'empire did nothing wrong' 'both sides to a story' joke in an otherwise straight-forward good-versus-evil narrative. There's a reason Palpatine goes screaming down the engine room shaft and doesn't turn to the light side of the force.

I'd argue it's also why Anakin had to die, even after his death bed conversion. He had indeed crossed a line of no return, you can't really apologise for a genocide after the fact and have people accept that meaning anything. 'Oops my bad' doesn't bring back the dead children. Unfortunately, Anakin's attempt at redemption has also been oversimplified and used to inspire us to have real life 'heart to hearts' with fascists, which allows many of them to pretend atonement for their crimes against humanity and let them do something their victims can't, return to polite society.

George W. Bush should feel bad for all the dead civilians. He should be feeling bad for that in a prison, not exchanging jokes with polite society. Tony Blair should feel bad for dragging Britain into unnecessary wars. He should be feeling bad for that in prison, not writing opinion pieces about how he'd solve the ongoing crisis in Gaza, nor should his foundation exist, let alone have free range to go on national television selling the benefits of generative AI.

It would be a shame if we didn't learn from that and shove a redemption story on top of an irredeemable character in a poorly-thought out sequel trilogy...