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Star Wars and Politics

Attempting to make a piece of pop culture "relevant" to contemporary politics can easily lead to the gross oversimplification of difficult problems.

Dan Drezner worries about how the next Star Wars film will address political themes:

The new trailer suggests that the Imperial forces have not exactly disappeared, which means that the politics here probably will be about a Rebel Alliance facing growth pains as it tries to actually govern. Although the political scientist in me is intrigued by that narrative possibility , the sci-fi geek in me is petrified that these questions will bore the hell out of me while I’m watching — or, worse, enrage me, like Anakin Skywalker’s political pontificating.

I should say first that I expect the upcoming Star Wars to suffer from all the many flaws that marred Abrams’ disaster of a second Star Trek film, not least of which was the very forced attempt to make the story “relevant” to contemporary debates about terrorism, drones, and related issues. I agree with Seth Masket that it is possible for a movie to address these themes successfully, but I have absolutely no confidence that Abrams knows how to do that. More generally, attempting to make a piece of pop culture “relevant” to contemporary politics can easily lead to the gross oversimplification of difficult problems, and a tentpole space opera is the wrong place to try doing these things anyway. A post-Empire Star Wars story could ideally have some interesting things to say about the inevitable disorder and upheaval that comes from the violent overthrow of an authoritarian state or the weaknesses and flaws of a very young democratic order that tries to replace it. Unfortunately, the amount of exposition needed to tell that part of the story would make any movie very long or very dull or both. So to the extent that Abrams chooses to indulge in making political arguments in these movies, I assume that they will be just as clumsy and heavy-handed as they were in Into Darkness.

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