Anybody who knows me knows that I love Star Trek.
Actually, no - that feels like a criminal understatement. I adore Star Trek. I jumped on the Trek bandwagon fairly late, only after the 2009 movie came out, but once I was on, I started devouring Star Trek and I've never really stopped since. My science blue shirt is one of my favorite things in my wardrobe. I saw Beyondthree times in theaters when it came out (and if you don't like Beyond you can honestly fight me). I went to Leonard Nimoy’s last convention appearance, at the Chicago Star Trek convention back in 2011, and the photo I got with him has been my computer background ever since. I love Star Trek for its sense of adventure, for its humor, and for its unapologetic camp, but most of all I love it because it shows us an optimistic version of our future. In the world according to Star Trek, humans don't screw everything up after all. It's all going to be okay.
But lately, I've felt much more compelled to watch and rewatch Star Wars. What I've realized is that while Star Trek gives us a model for our own future, Star Wars shows us how hard it is to get there. For that reason, Star Wars is even more relevant to the world of today, the world of Trump, than it was to the world of 1977.
Liberal feminism, for a good long while, has been criticized for favoring replication of existing oppressive power structures. In the post-election world, criticism in this vein has specifically targeted the white liberal tendency to cite some woefully generic idea of love as a cure-all for the world’s ills. Several lines throughout the Star Wars movies speak to this idea.
“I can’t get involved,” Luke says to Obi-Wan, “I’ve got work to do. It’s not that I like the Empire, I hate it, but there’s nothing I can do about it right now… it’s all such a long way from here.”
Luke’s been complaining so much about his workload at the farm, about his dream of going to school off-world, but the second Obi-Wan suggests Luke should help overthrow the Empire, Luke just wants to keep his head down and do farmboy things.
This sentiment pops up again in The Empire Strikes Back, but this time through Yoda. While training Luke, Yoda tells him to only use the Force for knowledge and defense rather than offense, literally urging him to be passive. Arguably the most politically loaded example of this sort of sentiment, though, comes in Rogue One, when Cassian is giving Jyn grief about her apathy. He asks her how she can stand to see the Empire’s flag over Jedha. Jyn’s response is, “It’s not a problem if you don’t look up.”
She can and does ignore the cruelties of the Empire, simply by keeping her head down and going about her admittedly contrarian business. This line felt especially barbed coming from a white character and directed at a character of color, as well - the closest the movie came to directly addressing white privilege.
The most important thing to note here, though, is that Luke and Jyn change their minds. Jyn is the one clamoring for the Rebellion to steal the Death Star plans, and Luke ends up joining the Rebel forces as well. Perhaps I just stated the obvious, but I don’t think the significance of Luke’s and Jyn’s character arcs should be underemphasized in this particular cultural context. They only temporarily believe in their own powerlessness - it’s just a stepping stone on their hero’s journey, the requisite moment of doubt before they go all in, devoting themselves to giving the Empire hell.
That’s another crucial lesson from Star Wars - rebellions are won by fighting, by resisting, and by overturning core systems of power. Not one but two pitched battles happen while Luke confronts Vader and Palpatine in Return of the Jedi, one in space and one on Endor. People can trash the Ewoks all they want (personally, I vastly prefer the Ewoks to the pointless sand people at the beginning of A New Hope), but the fight on Endor is still very much that - a fight. Luke does not single-handedly save the day through The Power Of Love™.
What Luke does do, however, is valuable in a completely different way: he upends the entire Jedi-Sith binary. According to Obi-Wan and especially Yoda, a true Jedi must let go of all emotion in order to be at all effective. The Sith, on the other hand, privilege power, aggression, and hatred above all else. That's pretty much the textbook definition of toxic masculinity: if you can't be completely emotionless, the only acceptable emotion is complete murderous rage.
Palpatine’s almost gleeful goading no longer seems melodramatic or overwritten when viewed in this light. Instead, he comes across as a plausible personification of those forums on which young white men are radicalized. But Luke, in essence, tosses aside most of what Obi-Wan and Yoda taught him when he confronts Vader. He wholeheartedly accepts that Vader is his father, for one thing, immediately flouting the "attachments-are-forbidden" rule. He repeatedly tells Vader there's more to him, to both of them, than violence and hate. Furthermore, he exemplifies that idea by avoiding fighting Vader and resisting Palpatine's taunts. Without that validation, in both word and deed, Vader might never have intervened and Palpatine might have turned Luke into well-done Jedi barbecue. Luke may tend towards teenage melodrama, but his heart-on-his-sleeve nature is exactly what helps him defeat Palpatine and save Vader from similar spiritual oblivion.
Alas, this victory is short-lived, and this is the third important lesson of Star Wars: progress is not a straight line. It only took 30 years for the First Order to follow in the Empire's footsteps. We as a society, as a species, seem to be haunted by the same racist, sexist, authoritarian demons all over again, and that's why I will forever espouse The Force Awakens as the most eerily appropriate movie of our time. The First Order, much like the alt-right, throws out all conventional morality and willfully takes the wrong lessons from past, fallen regimes. Kylo Ren idolizes Vader, while seeming to ignore Vader’s last-minute defection to the Light. What's more, First Order sympathizers are everywhere. No one who contacts the First Order about BB-8 appears to be a spy. Both the gang leader and the woman with the black lipstick in Maz Kanata’s pub are, by all appearances, merely civilians who support or at least don't mind the First Order.
The movie had an odd way of predicting our future. In Kylo Ren’s slobbering fanboy worship of Darth Vader, I see Steve Bannon's remark that “darkness is good” and his subsequent Vader name-drop. When Hux shouts at the assembled stormtroopers, during the unveiling of Starkiller Base, about how the disorder-ridden Republic “lies to its people,” I hear echoes of the Crooked Hillary rhetoric. The stormtroopers’ unified arm gesture after Hux’s speech is undoubtedly styled after the Nazi gesture because everything in the Empire was styled after the Third Reich, but nowadays it's hard not to think about that nightmare-inducing, white nationalist conference at which the attendees all engaged in a Nazi salute.
It’s so easy to tell ourselves that history, like literature, has finite arcs, starting and ending points. That's what we’re told when we’re children learning history: the past happened, it ended, and then it got neatly packaged in a book for our edification. But segmenting history like that creates a dangerous distance from our pasts, from our grievous mistakes. It lets us believe that the important stuff is all behind us. It's not that we necessarily don't know our history, as per George Santayana: it's that we don't believe we are history, we make history, we change history.
Maz Kanata knows better than anybody that the idea of Western progression to perfection is a myth.
“I have seen evil take many forms,” she says. “The Sith. The Empire. And now the First Order.”
She sees history for exactly what it is: a frenetic looping roller coaster, taking us through the same mistakes over and over again. There is no true, final victory over evil. There is always a fight. In the age of Trump, when so many of Western society's worst mistakes are ready to bite us in the collective rear, we’d do well to see the world, the larger narrative of our own history, through her giant goggles.
