2026-05-04 21:56 UTC
Replies (5)
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@auntieclokwise@lemmy.world 2026-05-05 02:42
You must not have seen the Andor series. Fascism is upfront and center.
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@bizarroland@lemmy.world 2026-05-04 23:12
I stand corrected then!
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@tryagain@sopuli.xyz 2026-05-05 00:20
I have a new-found respect for Mr Lucas
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@ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-05-05 00:52
I'm really struggling with this reading. The rebels aren't space communists trying to save their homeland from the encroaching Empire, they're fighting to restore the republic that was the precursor to Palpatine's totalitarian regime. If you allow for the sake of argument that they represent the Viet Cong, then the story of the first movie is about how a handful of heroes, some of whom were defectors from the Empire, were the ones instrumental in the first major Rebel victory, which is a bizarre kind of Great Man Theory/white savior complex that I imagine the Viet Cong wouldn't have appreciated. Also the later movies make it clear that the fall of the republic and the rise of the Empire was almost entirely due to the machinations of one man, Darth Sidious a.k.a. Emperor Palpatine, which again points to a Great Man Theory of history and doesn't align well with the real world, where the rise of the U.S. as an imperial power has more to do with structural forces that serve the interests of the capitalist class. I'm not saying Lucas didn't *intend* it to be about the Vietnam War, but I'm saying that if he did intend that, he didn't include much in the movie that supports it.
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@wjrii@lemmy.world 2026-05-05 02:23
I think it's very possible to read too much coherent political thinking into the soup of influences that Lucas was tapping into for Star Wars, particularly the first one. He was anti-Vietnam War, absolutely, but he also got to the point of filming a scene where Biggs is decrying the Empire's nationalization of industry, and the aesthetics were absolutely good Allies versus bad Nazis. He was basically a pretty average left-leaning American boomer. He loved big oil guzzling cars, but also rooting for the little guy. He hated Richard Nixon and mapped him onto Palpatine, but in his initial thinking was an ominous but naive shut-in who was manipulated by his advisors; hardly the apologia any serious analyst of Nixon would have gone with. Lucas had us rooting for the Rebels to overthrow the Empire and replace it with the Republic, but also wove in an absolutely medieval fondness for royalty. All of it was because the fairy tale was more important than the specifics of the politics, which were basically anti-authoritarian vibing.