Why the politics of Star Wars still matters (part 5): “There has been an awakening, have you felt it?”

This is a series of posts drawing on my forthcoming book Welcome to the Rebellion: A New Hope in Radical Politics (published in June 2020 by Zero Books).

The previous post discussed how Star Wars dramatizes the decision to stand up against injustice and existential threats. This post digs into the generational conflict at the heart of the saga, and how it reflects our politics today.

In an earlier post I noted the 1960s new left roots of Star Wars. Generational division, distrust and misunderstanding was characteristic of the time. In response to ridiculous suggestions that the student protest movement was being directed by outside (communist) forces, Jack Weinberg captured its generational stance when he famously (and with deliberate provocation) declared that: “We have a saying in the movement that you can’t trust anyone over 30.”

Student-led activism came to a head in 1968. In the US, the wave of protest that had begun with the civil rights movement was reaching its height (the civil rights movement preceded the anti-Vietnam war movement but became more radical in the second half of the decade). Social movements were on the rise from West Germany and Japan, Mexico and Italy, to Canada and Denmark, Yugoslavia and the UK. The beach of alternative possible worlds was being glimpsed beneath the paving stones of a dull post-war conservatism. The French government was nearly toppled by what was then the largest general strike in world history, while the German student movement temporarily shut down Bonn. Universities were occupied. The rebellion even spread to schools.

As Richard Vinen notes, ’68 had several components: a generational rebellion of the young against the old (a distinct youth identity being a relatively new phenomenon), a political rebellion against militarism, capitalist consumerism and the power of the United States, and a cultural rebellion that revolved around lifestyle and rock music. There was also a growing international awareness, most notably of experiences of Western imperialism. Sometimes these rebellions interacted. They also challenged structures on the left, for example traditional trade unions, or patriarchy through feminism and gay liberation – revolutions within the revolution. (In reality, there was a “long ‘68” with a lasting influence, some of it still ongoing, as we’ll note in a moment.)

As previously noted, George Lucas wasn’t a new left leader, but he was immersed in its political culture. He attended USC Film School in the early 1960s and re-enrolled as a graduate student from 1967-1968. He claimed of his time at university, “I was angry at the time, getting involved in all the causes.” Like many young people, Lucas was a first-hand witness to an American civil war. Star Wars would transport this into space. A New Hope can then be read as somewhat autobiographical. As Dave Schilling puts it: “Luke Skywalker wasn’t that far removed from the Berkeley freshman getting a crash course in What’s Really Going On from his radical professors.”

One of the ironies of Star Wars is that it immediately found huge, unprecedented cross-generational success, while actually exemplifying a specific (and contentious) generational perspective. But it wasn’t just hating on the olds, rather it was characteristic of a new left suspicion of authority. Lucas’s own views of authority run through his Star Wars movies. As he’s acknowledged, “I’ve always had a basic dislike of authority figures, a fear and resentment of grown-ups,” manifested most obviously in the brooding malevolence of Darth Vader (‘dark father’, though Lucas denies this was intentional).

Generationally, then, Star Wars looks in two directions. It occupied the imaginations of the kids (like me) who would become the Gen Xers, but it was born of the rebellion of the baby boomers against their parents. As Mark Fisher notes in his influential book Capitalist Realism, the protest impulse of the 1960s posited a malevolent father who cruelly and arbitrarily denies the ‘right’ to enjoyment and hoards resources. Although Mark didn’t think much of Star Wars, the most famous revelation in cinema history dramatizes his point. When, at the end of The Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader reveals himself as Luke’s father, the personal and the political, the man and ‘the machine’ (in 1960s protest terminology, the system), fuse into one. Fascism’s mean father figure is, it turns out, your actual father.

Uniting these themes, Michael O’Connor has tied together the generational and anti-imperialist interpretations of Star Wars:

“[T]he Empire was the older generation, the fathers who supposedly knew best. Britain had been America’s father before the Revolutionary War; now Lucas was encouraging a second rebellion. This time it was directed against the previous generation who had exploited America’s post-war power and prosperity by forcing its will on the rest of the world.”

Which leads us to today. More so perhaps than at any moment since the 1960s, a profound generational divide has emerged in Western politics (and not limited to the West either). From Occupy to the new youth-led protest movements, a generation of politically-conscious and active young people are developing their own growing global consciousness, most obviously around climate change and environmental destruction, but increasingly deeper, making links between how empire has exploited people and the planet to issues such as colonialism, racism, and exclusion.

Naturally, this generation has been subject to some of the same mischaracterizations as their 1960s predecessors, that they’re dangerously naïve, don’t understand history, are unaware of their own ‘privilege’, and even that they’re being directed by malevolent ‘outside forces’. Indeed, some of these accusations will have come from the very same boomers who once upon a time viewed their own parents’ generation as having led them to the eve of destruction. (I’ll discuss this new converging rebel alliance of young activists more in a later post.)

The relevance for today’s politics is not just this generational conflict (Star Wars is well-known for repeating itself, but so too does the history it draws on), it’s how it might be resolved. To Cass Sunstein, the first six Star Wars films are really about parents and redemption. Douglas Williams similarly suggests that: “Though there are many films about the conflict between parents and children in the 60s and 70s that present conflict... no film in the late 60s and 70s... showed a narrative of reconciliation – nor could it... But the Star Wars films do have that conflict... In these films, the child redeems the parent... and the world is healed.”

And that, really, is the task today’s young activists have set themselves.

But there wouldn’t be rebels without an empire of course. In the next post, I’ll discuss the lure of the dark side – including to some young people today.

Welcome to the Rebellion: A New Hope in Radical Politics, will be published in June 2020 by Zero Books. You can pre-order your copy now at:

US: Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Books-A-Million, Indiebound

UK: Amazon.co.uk, Zero Books, Waterstones, Foyles, Blackwells

Rest of the world: Chapters/Indigo, Booktopia, Book Depository, Goodreads

A FREE preview of the introduction to the book is available on Amazon.