Free Form Friday: The surprisingly good Star Wars political movie

“Free Form Friday” is my weekly non-Bowie related post. Come back tomorrow (and every other day) for more on Bowie. Otherwise, please enjoy…
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The Star Wars franchise has largely devolved into crap. On thin ice at least since the introduction of Ewoks— more than 40 years ago— the once-hip universe has been consumed by the dark side of commercialism, which like the dark side of the force was never really absent. What’s worse, between the movies, Disney shows and cartoons, not to mention novels, comic books, video games and, heck, radio plays, fan fiction and music— the content has been pouring forth like a sea of sludge. So it’s easy to forget that along the way, the series got a few things right.

I was recently reminded of this when I re-watched the 2005 film, Revenge of the Sith. Despite an over-reliance on CGI and one or two (or three or four) too many battle scenes, I am remind that this is one of the best political movies ever made. No joke.

Well, actually, I’m not reminded. Certainly, the movie has very obvious political themes. I recall some reviewer writing something about “galactic CNN.” A line from the dark side’s recent convert, now going by the name Darth Vader, was deliberately evocative of something George W. Bush had said — “If you aren’t with me, then you are my enemy.” Bush’s version was “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Bush-like language was also put into the mouth of the movie’s main, and least sympathetic villain, Chancellor Palpatine. After depicting his own attack on the good guys as beating back a rebellion and assassination attempt, the Chancellor declared himself emperor before a cheering session of the Galactic Senate, pledging that, “The attempt on my life has left me scarred and deformed. But, I assure you, my resolve has never been stronger.” Bush’s version, delivered in a speech before Congress after the 9/11 attacks, was, “I will not forget this wound to our country or those who inflicted it. I will not yield; I will not rest; I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people.”

But what elevates the movie to the ranks of the best-ever political films is not what it said about the politics of the day, but what it predicted. Palpatine is not George W. Bush. He’s Donald Trump.

Even the worst Star Wars movies have something worthwhile going on on some level. The original Star Wars (widely regarded as a great movie) paid homage to old-time serials and framed its story in line with Joseph Campbell’s Hero A Thousand Faces concept. In so doing George Lucas managed to make a nostalgic movie about the future (I know, I know, it takes place a long time ago) that taps into an almost Jungian set of expectations.

Revenge of the Sith does something different. Lucas turned to both history and Shakespeare for inspiration. The Galactic Republic is not conquered by an enemy empire, but converts itself from a Democracy to a dictatorship. The story is as old as Julius Ceasar, Napoleon and Hitler. Lucas borrows from Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar, Romeo and Juliet, and plays where once-noble protagonists succumb to their own dark sides. Not that many of the more recent Star Wars installments deserve much contemplation, but I don’t really see many of them based on archetypes beyond earlier Star Wars stories.

But that’s still not what’s outstanding about this particular movie. What this movie nails is the idea that the threat to ourselves, as individual agents of free will, and the threat to ourselves as a self-governing democracy, come from self-delusion and self-justification for our own worst instincts. Anakin Skywalker has mixed motives, but the key scene in which he turns himself over to evil comes when Palpatine’s plot is exposed, and another Jedi, Mace Windu (played by Samuel L. Jackson) shows up with a posse of Jedi to arrest the Chancellor. But the Chancellor is a master of the dark side and fierce combatant. He quickly dispatches Mace’s crew and battles Mace seemingly to a draw until just before Anakin arrives. At that point, Mace gets the upper hand and looms over his seemingly fallen foe. Anakin pleads with Mace to arrest, not kill Palpatine, saying, “it is not the Jedi way,” but Mace raises his lightsaber and proclaims, “He’s too dangerous to be left alive.” But Anakin secretly wants Palpatine’s help in ensuring that his secret wife, Padmé, played by Nalatie Portman, does not die in childbirth, as per Anakin’s own prophetic dreams. So he attacks Mace, giving Palpatine an opening to finish the fight and name Anakin Darth Vader.

There’s a lot going on here. In a moment of fear and anger, Mace betrays his own purpose. Anakin is quite right, Mace’s execution of Palpatine would not have been the Jedi way. In that moment he would have been judge, jury and executioner. And in that, Mace Windu stood in for all the promises of quick and harsh crackdowns on crime or other threats. In giving up on due process, he falls victim to the standard he just set. It doesn’t work for a just society. But Anakin, too, was betraying his own stated values. He wasn’t really pleading for the Jedi way— he had his own, self-deceiving reasons for wanting Palpatine to live. To some extent, we can sympathize with both Mace and Anakin. They made the wrong choices, but they were choices we can understand.

We don’t so much understand Palpatine. He’s thoroughly evil. He manipulated the entire situation, down to planting the dreams in Anakin’s head. Although the movie isn’t totally clear on this, I took his near-defeat at the hands of Mace to be a deliberate setup for the benefit of Anakin’s conversion.

With this pivotal scene, the movie draws a direct link between the internal struggles of individuals to govern themselves in the face of temptation to take a shortcut, and the larger society’s parallel struggle to make decisions about its self-governance. Anakin and the Galactic Senate make the same bad decision— they turn over their decision-making to the same person— Palpatine— who offers easy answers to problems he both created and defined.

Palpatine is the embodiment of deception. Here (as in the less-good preceding film, Attack of the Clones) the Chancellor talks about how much he’s devoted to Democracy in contrast to his opponents. This tactic of criticizing his opponents with criticisms more accurately applied to him was not especially characteristic of Bush and his cohort— but it is of Trump. Similarly, as Trump often frames radically destructive propositions as simplified, seemingly benign abstract principles, so too does Palpatine. Palpatine urges Anakin to embrace a “larger view of the force,” use the dark side to save life and seize power to restore peace. I can just about hear Palpatine say, “I’m just asking the question!”

It all sounds good, but Palpatine started the war in the first place. I again think of Trump. Lucas might have had the Iraq War in mind, started under false pretenses, but his fictional scenario is more similar to Trump’s attempt to use the Insurrection Act and the military to consolidate domestic power in response to civic unrest that he cultivated in the first place. Palpatine is the overt leader of the government, and the secret leader of the rebellion. He gets democratic institutions to cede their authority over to him in reaction to the threat that he himself created. And the biggest threat Palpatine posed to the Jedi and the Republic was the threat of him not giving up power after the war’s end.

Here again, Revenge of the Sith does something other political movies of the time simply did not— it imagines the road leading to the actual end of democracy and authoritarian rule by an eternal emperor. This is where the grounding in history — Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler— comes in handy. Analogizing Palpatine’s emergency war powers to those of Bush is one thing— the Patriot Act, black sites and enhanced interrogations were happening in real time. But I can’t think of another movie that imagined the next step— Bush declaring himself emperor, trying to indefinitely extend his term and argue beyond the so-called unitary executive theory that presidents are absolutely immune from criminal prosecution. Without the historical grounding, the premise would have seemed more far-fetched than science fiction.

The threat, in Revenge of the Sith, is not eternal war. We don’t actually get a good sense of how the average Galactic citizen’s life would get better or worse under the Empire. It just isn’t discussed. And Palpatine is right in a narrow sense— his war does come to an end with his ascension. Since this is a prequel, it might occur to us, the audience, that there wouldn’t be the next war without the rebels, who we cheer as the good guys. And, by the way, future Star Wars shows Depict the Empire’s replacement as almost immediately descending into corruption, with the government of the restored Republic mired in process and bureaucracy. Again, Palpatine is right in a narrow sense— the Jedi and the Sith are alike in almost every way.

But no, war, or bad governance is not the end result we fear. War is the means to a still darker end— the end of democracy. Anakin gives up his own agency, his own ability to risk making mistakes by retaining the responsibility to make his own decisions. The Senate, and thus the society as a whole does the exact same thing. Abandonment of self-governance, either on the personal or societal level is in itself the ultimate evil.

And while war can serve as the catalyst, authoritarianism needs to be invited in to polite society in order to succeed.

So Palpatine has all of society chasing its own tail, all in the service of securing his own permanent place of power. Before he ever gets to lightning bolts and light sabres, his weapons are flattery and appeals to others’ worst instincts. Meanwhile, the universe he creates is one of illusion, where thinking people unwittingly become more and more encircled by unquestioning clones and unthinking robots. And don’t forget that revenge is built right into the movie’s very name. “I am your retribution”— who said that? Palpatine or Trump? (It was Trump). Palpatine is out for revenge. In the endless cycle of empires rising and falling and rising again, Palpatine wants to go back to the way it was at some earlier point and make the galaxy great again. And, although the cyclical nature of the Star Wars movies is such that some of them end with the good guys on top and some end with the bad guys having the upper hand, we never go back so far as to see the mythical past heyday of the Sith. Remind us again what golden age we are looking to reestablish?

The movie goes on and on like this, interrupted by action scenes. But it encapsulates our present dilemma — self-deception that works on both a personal and societal level. It even acknowledges that despite the outward appearance of good versus evil, the reality is a little more complex. Padme, on her deathbed, tells Obi Wan Kenobi that there’s still good in Anakin, while, as previously mentioned, Palpatine correctly states that the Sith and Jedi are alike in almost every way. So why are they fighting? Exactly.

A good political movie can dramatize a contemporary poltiical dynamic to help clarify what might seem to be a murky dynamic that we live through in real life. What this movie does, though, is project what happens next. Revenge of the Sith is not about George W. Bush and his wars, but the logical culmination of the instincts let loose in that era— it correctly predicts what comes next. And, as Padme says as she watches the Senate ratify Palpatine’s ascendency, “liberty dies with thunderous applause.”