Star Wars’ Identity Crisis

Photo: Jeff Gritchen/Orange County Register/SCNG/Getty

“IT IS A period of civil war,” begins the opening scroll of the very first film in the Star Wars series, which just goes to show that these movies have always been more than space chases and lightsaber fights. The 1977 movie that would eventually spawn a multidecade, multimedia, multibillion-dollar franchise (with at least one of those billions dedicated to Baby Yoda merchandise alone) was inspired as much by the postwar landscape of the 1970s as by the samurai films and movie Westerns to which it owes an obvious cinematic debt. Years after Star Wars debuted in theaters, creator George Lucas told the Chicago Tribune that it was “really about the Vietnam War, and that was the period where Nixon was trying to run for a [second] term, which got me to thinking historically about how do democracies get turned into dictatorships? Because the democracies aren’t overthrown; they’re given away.”

Four decades later, not much has changed in the long-ago, far-away galaxy where Star Wars takes place—but the franchise is more relevant than ever. In 2020, Star Wars isn’t just political; it’s a microcosm of the fractious, tribal, exhausted landscape of American politics—and not only because of our 21st century predilection for making every major motion picture