Why did the idea of Star Wars take hold of so many people?

From my forthcoming book Welcome to the Rebellion, chapter two:

It’s a little strange, as Will Brooker notes in his BFI Film Classics appraisal, that cinema scholarship seems to be embarrassed by Star Wars, to the extent that it mainly discusses the film in relation to its audiences, special effects, merchandising and impact on the studio system, rather than its themes, story and characters. This goes back to some of the first reviews, for example Pauline Kael on A New Hope:

“[I]t’s a film that’s totally uninterested in anything that doesn’t connect with the mass audience...It’s enjoyable on its own terms, but it’s exhausting, too: like taking a pack of kids to the circus...The excitement of those who call it the film of the year goes way past nostalgia to the feeling that now is the time to return to childhood.”

It’s true that Star Wars was meant for kids, but this is partly what makes it subversive. It was meant to introduce a new generation to folklore, which George Lucas felt they were missing. The classic myth is the tale of someone, typically a young person, taking their first steps into a larger world and learning to give themselves to something bigger. Drawing on story archetypes, Star Wars is a modern fairy tale. Moreover, as we’ll see, it was steeped in a worldview that the world has been corrupted and needs to be challenged through radical action led by a new generation.

Denis Wood made an important observation about this accusation of childishness. In the context of a bourgeois society, both popular stories and folktales “have been relegated to the nursery.” In the nineteenth century, storytelling became mainly an entertainment of the poor. The middle classes professed to prefer “rational thinking” and modern mass media to community-based narrative oral entertainment involving archetypal characters. Calling something “childish” is a way for the bourgeois to distance themselves from stories, from the masses and crucially, as we’ll note, from taking action to change society.

But imagine an alternative universe in which A New Hope wasn’t a success. There having been no sequels, it’s periodically re-discovered as a radical kids movie, a strange little ’70s hippie experiment that never found an audience. That’s not how it turned out, of course. More than just a hit movie, Star Wars became “a celebration, a social affair, a collective dream.”

So was born the cliché of a young experimental filmmaker who went to the dark side, corrupted by an empire of plastic. Lucas has acknowledged that Star Wars became so successful that it took over his life. Speaking before the prequels, Francis Ford Coppola lamented of his friend and former business partner that: “The great success of Star Wars didn’t lead to the independence and personal filmmaking. George never made another film after that...And instead we have a kind of enormous industrial marketing complex.”

Star Wars has certainly been used to shovel a lot of crap, but the merchandise is a function of its massive popularity. Young and old want to spend time in its universe. The toys allow kids to play out their own stories of rebellion on rainy days and during long hot summers. Meanwhile, adult fans avidly consume different corners of the saga.

Some “just” find comedy, camaraderie and inspiration in it. But geeks’ engagement can also be a form of creative rebellion. As Jase Short has noted, what defines a geek is their hostility to passive consumption: “For one, there are few if any committed fans who aren’t aware of the various forms of capitalist intellectual property constraints that dominate the cultural products in question.” Nonetheless, many do re-engineer these products, for example the huge number of fan edits of the much-maligned prequels that can be found online. The toys were the old means of creating your own Star Wars story. Now you can effectively reshoot the saga.

In a widely-discussed piece called The Complex and Terrifying Reality of Star Wars Fandom, Andrey Summers captures it like this:

“To be a Star Wars fan, one must possess the ability to see a million different failures and downfalls, and then somehow assemble them into a greater picture of perfection. Every true Star Wars fan is a Luke Skywalker, looking at his twisted, evil father, and somehow seeing good...[The fans] hate everything about Star Wars. But the idea of Star Wars...the idea we love.”

So for the moment we need to ask: what is this idea that has taken a hold of so many people?

…which is what I discuss in the book, and why Star Wars continues to mean so much to so many people today.

Welcome to the Rebellion is available for pre-order now.