Star Wars: Episode III–Revenge of the Sith
What I wouldn’t give to see President Bush’s expression when Revenge of the Sith screens at the White House and the freshly annointed Darth Vader, hoping to seduce Obi-Wan Kenobi to the dark side, declares, “If you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy!”
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The overt reference to contemporary politics may seem strange, but for years Lucas has been trying to live down the impression that he’s a militarist or, even worse, a closet fascist. After Star Wars (1977) became a cultural phenomenon, critics pointed out that the last scene–in which the heroes march through a bisected throng of admirers to be honored by the republic–was patterned after Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1936). To Lucas’s chagrin, President Reagan craftily exploited the series’s popularity, referring to the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire and to his Strategic Defense Initiative as the Star Wars program. (Lucas sued the government to prohibit it from using his title, but he lost.) Poke around on the Internet and you’ll see Lucas accused of everything from racism (with Jar Jar Binks as a simpleminded Rastaman) to homophobia (with C-3PO as an effeminate handwringer) to anti-Semitism (with Watto the Toydarian as a hook-nosed Jew).
All this is a lot of baggage for a former hot-rodder from Modesto, California, and watching Lucas try to unload it in Star Wars: Episode I–The Phantom Menace (1999) and Star Wars: Episode II–Attack of the Clones (2002) hasn’t been much fun. The original trilogy, which wrapped up in 1983 with Return of the Jedi, told how the empire was defeated by a band of intrepid freedom fighters, an upbeat and often comic tale of good triumphing over evil. The second trilogy leaps back in time to tell how the democratic republic crumbled and was subsumed by dictatorship, an interstellar bummer to say the least. Now, instead of critics or politicians imparting a philosophy to the saga, Lucas was doing it himself, boring many of his fans but impressing none of his detractors. Who wants to watch a Star Wars movie that takes itself too seriously?
Lucas just turned 61, and he’s made clear that this is his last Star Wars feature. Whether he’ll make good on his promise to direct smaller projects or just retreat to his throne as an executive producer of other people’s movies remains to be seen. But everything else he’s done or ever will do is destined to become a footnote to the Star Wars phenomenon. In a way it’s like the Force, something he found within himself that’s larger and more powerful than he ever could have imagined, with the potential to ennoble or corrupt. The idea that a good man following a right path could unknowingly become an architect of evil times must have cut pretty close to the bone for Lucas. Whether this column of light will slice through the White House screening room is another matter.
