Star Wars and the Republic or Empire of Tomorrow

Critics talk about Star Wars as a solipsistic phenomenon, a "syndrome," a disease in the culture.
The Star Wars films exist outside of history for most critics, and their appeal is purely escapist. This view
dismisses the continuing appeal of the Romance genre to viewers. But more importantly, it fails to address
structural characteristics an d themes of the genre from which the Star Wars films draw: The science fiction
of empire, and more broadly, the imaginative space that science fiction creates for contemplating possible
conflicts in our own past or future. It is this aspect as a field of social contemplation that extends the appeal
of Star Wars beyond special effects, and provides the skeleton that sustains interest in these films. I will
begin first with a brief look at the science fiction of empire, and then turn to the Star Wars film to show
some of these hidden aspects of the Star Wars phenomenon.
Science Fiction stories are filled with galactic empires, particularly from its inception as a genre,
circa 1926, to the 1960s.1 The genre took up the concept of empire because the dream and fear of
transnational government became relevant during the first global economy of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, as it became apparent that economic interactions needed to be addressed beyond the limits of the
nation-state. No nation was more beguiled and appalled by the prospect of transnational government--and
more subject to other's interest and fear of empire--than the United States. In 1902, Brooks Adams
expressed his belief in the inevitability of an American republic turning imperial in The New Empire, in
which he prophesied that Europe and Great Britain would shortly become dependencies of an American
empire of commerce. 2 The Italian historian Guglielmo Ferraro argued in Ancient Rome and Modern
America: A Comparative Study of Morals (1914) that Europeans could have no conception of ancient
Roman society without experience of the New World version that was in the process of developing in the
United States.3 In Democracy and Empire (1912), Franklin Giddings argued that the United States, a nation
endowed with superior ethics, and possessed of a political system that was capable of infinite expansion,
was the final expression of a spiritual evolution in human institutions. Though a bit vague as to whether the
United States would serve as a model for a global Republic, or itself expand to become the global republic,
Giddings looked forward to a modern ethical empire that would "perfect the human race in the spirit of
brotherhood, under the single law of liberty.4 In a similar vein, but with more precision in his means, James
Brown Scott published James Madison's Notes on Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 and Their
Relation to A More Perfect Society of Nations (1918). Brown suggested that the nations of the world could
study the American constitutional convention to learn from the debates of the American states the means to
create a global democratic League.5 Clarence Streit's Union Now (1938) also noted the value of the
American Federal convention example, noting that if only the nations of the world would so unite, "[o]ur
Rome need not fall." 6 During World War II and the following years, the idea of an international world
order continued to grow in the popular imagination, helped by Walter Lippman and Arnold Toynbee's
popularizations.7
Given the importance of this theme and of its inherent futurity, it is hardly surprising that Science
Fiction quickly began to explore the nature of transnational empires, both in solemn and romance
narratives. Olaf Stapleton describes a world in which the European and Soviet powers destroy each other,
and an "Americanized planet" emerges from a union of China and the United States. In this new world
order, "[e]ver more brilliant and excessive aviation, ever more extensive legal sexual intercourse, ever more
gigantic manufacture, and consumption, were to be co-ordinated in an ever more intricately organized
social system." 8 "Armageddon, 2419 A.D." (1929), which told of a man from the past dropped among
survivors of a China-American war for the world, became the basis for the comic strip Buck Rogers in the
25 th Century.9 Edward E. Smith's galactic civilization in his Skylark and Lensman novels (1928-1965) had
as its heroes defenders of peaceful transplanetary commerce. Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy (1951-
1953 [1940-1953]) and sequels in the 1980s and 90s, and Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek federation, both
draw from the inspiration of Rome, but explore the advantages and problems of democratic-republic
empires. Many other science fiction books and stories take as their setting transnational/transgalactic
civilizations.
Star Wars, as science fiction writer Lester Del Ray observed approvingly, "is science fiction from
start to finish," and a direct heir to the "space opera," which takes the space empire as its setting.10 Lucas
has acknowledged reading and watching a lot of science fiction. The Jedi Knights in particular are derived
from E. E. Smith's Lensmen of the Galactic Patrol, who are the police agency in Smith's galactic
civilization. Like the Jedi, the Grey Lensmen have the power to read and manipulate minds. Certain other
aspects of some of the narratives--such as data tapes about the evil Boskonian empire's ships being sent by
lifeboats, an d receiving mind training to learn how to channel thought force (two motifs of Smith's 1937
book Galactic Patrol) are common themes. But even Del Ray did not explore just what specific themes
made Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) a surprise blockbuster, and what made Star Wars: The Empire Strikes
Back a sequel that prompted many viewers to attend dozens or hundreds of showings. In part, it was the
fact that it was science fiction brought on screen; Lucas himself seemed to emphasize the special effects
when he sued the makers of the television Series Battlestar Galactica (1978-1979) for using special effects
techniques pioneered on his films---the narratives are polar opposites in theme. 11 However, there were two
other, more significant factors: The Romance genre structure, which Lucas learned from reading Joseph
Campbell, and the underlying resonance with sociocultural themes that preoccupied the 1970s and early
1980s.
The Romance genre was particularly relevant for the 1970s, as the United States was undergoing a
period of introspection in the aftermath of the Vietnam war and the Watergate scandal. The Vietnam war
shattered an American confidence in the rectitude of its international interventionism that had barely come
under question since the controversy surrounding the retaining the Philippines, six decades earlier. The fact
that America lost the war, and that the war was regarded by many at home and abroad as an immoral war,
was psychologically unsettling for a nation with the United States' messianic identity. "This country, above
every country in the world, " Woodrow Wilson commented in 1916, "is meant to lift, it is meant to add to
everything that betters the world," 12 and that sentiment remained more or less unchallenged until the 1960s.
To lose the Vietnam war seemed a sign of moral turpidude; nations with a mission do not lose wars
otherwise. The My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, the forceful responses to nonviolent protests, and the
Watergate Scandal at home, were signs of that turpitude to the political left wing; the violent 60s protests
and riots, the rise in crime, and the social changes of the late 60s and 70s were signs of that turpitude to the
political right wing.
The Romance genre begins in a period of moral or spiritual crisis. The Romance villain is a figure,
typically a magician or a king, who has the power to suspend change. This tyrant is able to suspend change
because of a failure on the part of the leaders of a society to live up to their core values. Darth Vader
seemed in Star Wars: A New Hope to be the villain; the Emperor was merely a name. In The Empire Strikes
Back, Vader became a servant of a greater force, and Vader's own motivations became more complex--
notably in his claim (which is foreshadowed in Attack of the Clones) that he is acting as a moral agent in
bringing stability and order to the galaxy. Lucas presents a conflict in Vader between selecting a means to
an end--order in the universe--that destroys life in the name of protecting life. Joseph Campbell, in
commenting about the Star Wars films, directed his comments to Darth Vader's conflict between rational
analysis and moral conscience:
"You see, consciousness thinks it's running the shop. But it's a
secondary organ of a total human being, and it must not put itself in
control. It must submit and serve the humanity of the body. When it
does put itself in control, you get a man like Darth Vader in Star Wars,
the man who goes over to the consciously intentional side. . . . If the
person insists on a certain program, and doesn't listen to the demands of
his own heart, he's going to risk a schizophrenic crackup. Such a
person has put himself off center. He has aligned himself with a
program for life, and it's not the one the body's interested in at all. The
world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves or
have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do,
how they ought to behave, and what the values are that they should be
living for. 13

This conflict between the rational and the heart is, as noted above, precisely the conflict which the United
States found itself in the aftermath of the 60's. Vader is--from the point of view of a child of the 60s--a
symbol of the Adult world 60s politician, a figure not unlike that of Lyndon Johnson, who wanted to run
massive programs from Washington, end destructive conflicts like Vietnam, and extend the Pax Americana
to as much of the world as possible. And indeed, Johnson himself underwent a psychological breakdown of
the sort Campbell describes.14 Vader's visual presence as a mechanism, and the quantitative reports that he
receives from his commanders, are meant to make him a visual manifestation of the military-industrial
complex that Lucas and those of his generation opposed. What The Empire Strikes Back shows is the hubris
of this desire for one individual to control the galaxy, and the tragic state of the figure who dreams such
dreams. For in order to exert such control, one must cease being human. One becomes instead a machine
with a function, no matter how good one's intentions are.
The Godfather films are another expression of this sentiment, one that has never lacked critical
appreciation. But what critics have missed about Vader is that he is structurally a romance genre version of
Michael Corleone. Both are victims, sufferers who vow that they will create ruthless control systems to
prevent suffering. In the Godfather films, Michael must be "strong for the family," even at the cost of
destroying the family. At the end of Godfather II, Michael has his brother Fredo shot, not because he does
not care for him, but rather because it is what his reason tells him he must do. Fredo is weak, and "this is
life and death." Fredo has betrayed the family, and so he must be destroyed to save the family, even if that
family is diminished. Vader's rationale for the destruction he brings about is that feeling and conscience is a
weakness--friends are a weakness, he tells Luke in The Empire Strikes Back . This will no doubt be
underlined in the third film of the series, but the outlines are quite clear in Star Wars: The Phantom
Menace, and were outlined substantially in films four through six.
The Godfather films and Star Wars films are comparable, as they are expressions of the same
sensibility, though of different genres. They are sixties-generation children's judgments of their parents.
The Godfather films are gangster tragedies, and as the tragic hero, Michael Corleone must be like the
viewers, if more powerful, for his destruction to be effective. As with the parents of Vietnam protesters at
Kent State University on May 4, 1970, who told their children that they too should have been shot if they
were in the crowd when the National Guard fired shots,15 Michael is blinded by his certainties and beliefs
into acting against the family that he wants to preserve. His reasoning seems sound. Only in the
consequences as the film progresses do we see the tragic flaw, as one by one his family is destroyed, and he
is left alone. As a romance villain, Vader is not given the sympathy Michel Corleone is, and his blindness is
not just a personal and family tragedy, but a cosmic imbalance. His actions are more akin to C. S. Lewis'
White Witch in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, whose power holds the whole world in a state of
eternal winter. It is a fantastical effect--and hence seemingly more escapist--than a realistic tale. But
romance is as serious as tragedy. Both Godfather and Star Wars drew their relevance from the experiences
of their audiences in the post-Vietnam years; these experiences gave them meaning.
As is the case with Michael Corleone, who commits evil in his abhorrence of evil, Vader destroys
his world from a rational analysis that it is destroyed already. Similarly, in Attack of the Clones, Count
Dooku tries to persuade Kenobi to join him in his efforts to destroy the Galactic Republic, not because he
hates the Republic, but because he sees it as already destroyed. It would seem on the surface that this is
hypocritical, as he is the disciple of the Sith lord who is the head of the Republic, and through whom it is
being destroyed. But the characteristic of the Sith is that there can only be two; there can only be two, as
the Sith disciple is ruled by a hatred toward his master for the destruction of the disciple's loved ones, and
all the disciple's ties to life. Similarly, in Star Wars films four through six, Vader hates the emperor, but is
ruled by him. Vader tries to convert Luke to become his disciple, which is an act of rebellion (or potentially
so) against his master. But the conversion process to the dark side requires (as is made quite clear in the
sixth film, Return of the Jedi, and as will be underlined again in the third film) that the converter destroy
any affectionate tie that dilutes the disciple's hatred; the hatred is required to exercise power.
The Star Wars theology in opposition to the dark side's fear and hatred is no doubt inspired by the
Zen Buddhism of the warriors in Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress, and inspired from Lucas' reading of Joseph
Campbell's comparative religious studies. In Attack of the Clones, Anakin describes to
Amidala something akin to what is sometimes described in Buddhism as the Lovingkindness meditation.
That this introspective religiosity struck a chord in audiences of the 70s and early 80s is not because of a
common interest in Japanese cinema and Joseph Campbell, but rather because it captured a general sense of
introspection. If the 60s was a decade of looking outward and of activity in the streets, the 70s was a decade
of looking inward, and of pop psychology. It is instructive to compare Obi Wan Kenobi to Jonathan
Livingston Seagull, cast out by his flock for wanting to focus too much on flying, who later returns to his
former flock as a teacher, inspiring younger birds to follow in his path and achieve their full potential.
Lucas himself seems to have been inspired by another series of pop inspiration novels, the "Sorcerer" Don
Juan in Carlos Casteneda's series of books, who spoke of life force, and who talked of flying by seeing the
lines of power interconnecting all things.16
The Force was vague enough that any number of personal searches could be projected into it.
Though the specifics of the theology are part Buddhist and increasingly part science fiction-- the
Midichlorians, symbionic beings17 through which the Force is created--Lucas seems inclined to keep the
Force vague enough to represent what the audience wants to find. "I don't see Star Wars as profoundly
religious. I see Star Wars as taking all the issues that religion represents and trying to distill them down
into a more modern and easily acceptable construct--that there is a greater mystery out there," Lucas has
said recently. However, this is one area in which our time does not match the films. In the aftermath of the
September 11, 2001 attack in New York, religion spiked upward, but a number of religious scandals has
tended to increase cynicism about religion in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Though there are many films about the conflict between parents and children in the 60s and 70s
that present conflict--The Hospital (1971) and Easy Rider (1969) are examples from a parent and child
point of view respectively--no film in the late 60s and 70s that took up this conflict showed a narrative of
reconciliation--nor could it. The subject was too controversial to be taken up in a medium so expensive as
film. But the Star Wars films do have that conflict, told in its fantasy world of long ago and far away. In
these films, the child redeems the parent--a perennial theme of romance narratives--and the world is healed.
A considerable amount of the popularity of the first films must be based on this timely theme. And indeed,
considered as reflections on the 60s, these films are virtually the only positive images of that generational
conflict.
Vader is the familiar romance fisher-king, in that he is a wounded figure, whose wound destroys
the kingdom. "[T]he wounding and the sickness of the Fisher king play the chief part, and like the
devastation of the land and the general need of redemption, are connected with an offense that must be
expiated or compensated for."18 Typically, the fisher king dies soon after being redeemed:
Indeed, it is not so much that the old Grail King is delivered from his
sufferings as from life itself. In these versions also, in which there are
two kings, one sick and the other old, the king who is healed remains
alive for only a few days. . . . The Grail King says to Gauvain, who has
asked the question, that by doing so he has redeemed many souls, both
of the living and the dead. He, the King, together
with the court, are among the latter. . . . 19
Luke is in the role of Gauvain, who asks of the fisher king, "who is served by it," thus breaking the spell.
In Lucas' Campbell-mediated variation, the Grail--the Force is abused to preserve a few, when it should be
used for the redemption of all. Who is to be served by this power, which is generated by all life?
The fisher-king character uses power to prevent change, and to control the present. But the answer
to the grail-question is that all life is to be served by this power--a message not at all dissimilar to messages
spoken by 60s and 70s protesters about many aspects of American life they wished to see changed, from
foreign policy to the environment. And this aspect of a need to return to life-affirmation captures an aspect
of the 60s that, again, no other film seems to have attempted: the 60s radicals were in many ways
conservatives, true believers of the Wilsonian idealism in whose name their parents claimed to act. As
Wilson commented--for he, too, had the problem of idealism conflicting with the exercise of power--"[i]t is
easy to think first of the material interest of America, but it is not easy to think first of what America, if she
loves justice, ought to do in the field of international affairs." 20
In Return of the Jedi, Lucas is consciously invoking the Grail myths for his own purposes.21 If the
theme is the redemption of a whole culture, then the Grail myths are convenient, for this is the theme
behind the search for the Grail. As the United States is a messianic culture, the Grail myths have a
particular significance. The Grail's ability to transform the world has been improperly used or hidden away
by the Grail King. By using the Grail-myth theme of redeeming the redeemer, Lucas invokes the
traditional American self-image of the redeeming pilgrim-nation, and in effect claims--as indeed, many
protesters did--that the rebellion against the parents is in fact a rebellion for the parents, a rebellion to
restore to them their own values.22 But at the same time, Lucas acknowledges that the redeeming hero can
become a tyrant, and that terrible things can be done in the name of ending suffering. The introspection of
The Empire Strikes Back , which established through Yoda's training that there is an identity between Luke
and his father theme of the fisher king's redemption, and the constant mistakes that Luke makes, which
endanger himself and his cause, underscore the identity with, and sympathy for, the Vader-monster.
As noted above, some variants have two Grail Kings, one sick and the other old. By films four
through six, the emperor appears like a walking corpse, hobbling along with his cane. But even in films
one and two, Senator Palpatine/Darth Sidious seems unhealthily ancient. This is Campbell's tyrant-monster,
holding on too tightly to worldly power. Lucas's Emperor in the earlier films, according to Dale Pollock, "is
an elected official who is corrupted by power and subverts the democratic process--Lucas modeled him
after Richard Nixon." 23 Nixon tended to present himself as seeing world affairs in dispassionate, strictly
realpolitik terms.
Vader is also the tyrant-monster, but in films four through six, Vader is shown as a victim of the
emperor, an Amfortas to the Emperor's Klingsor. In the second film, Attack of the Clones, we see the
beginning of this illness in Anakin, a typically fisher-king illness of a spiritual wound that will not heal: the
wound of death and parting. The second film shows Anakin's mother's death, and his reaction of
slaughtering the Tuskan raiders--an echo, as A New Hope had, of John Ford's The Searchers, though in this
film the recovery scene is the beginning, not the end of hatred. The third film surely shows the death of
Padmé Amidala, and of Anakin's complete subservience to hatred. By contrast, Palpatine/Darth Sidious
seems more mysteriously malevolent. Like Klingsor, he seems to cast his spells of evil simply for the
exercise of power.
Critics have found Star Wars films one and two, The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones,
somehow inferior to films four, five and six. They mention dialogue, complain about acting, or comment
about too many special effects. But all of the faults they find with the newer films can be found in the older
ones. Lucas's dialogue is more concerned with advancing the romance plot than it is with revealing
character, and consequently the actors have had relatively little material with which to develop their roles.
What has changed is the sociocultural context.

as a colony Joseph Campbell himself commented on made This fear of global feudalism was
expressed in populist and conspiratorial forms, notably by the Ku Klux Klan and in the anti-Semitic tracts
Henry Ford published in the 1920s. It was also expressed by statisticians and economists. In (Year), Adolph
Berle and Gardiner Means published The Modern Corporation and Private Property, in which they argued
that corporate wealth was being centralized to such an extent that competitive market capitalism was on the
verge of disappearing:
Not to put too fine a point on it, in the rise of the giant enterprise was the harbinger of a return to a
kind of economic neofeudalism, a system in which latter-day economic barons would command
the fiefdoms of their economic territories as absolutely and unchallengeably as their medieval
predecessors ruled their infinitely smaller and weaker principalities.24

In time, these feudal states might (through hostile or friendly mergers) become one giant econo-
governmental entity. In Joseph Schumpeter's corollary argument, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy,
the corporations centralize, but in so doing transform themselves into more benign, dusty bureaucracies,
managing economic and social affairs, but themselves more or less managed by a social democratic
government.
Schumpeter's argument for the future is the Republican Empire with which Episode One: The
Phantom Menace opens. The Republic manages economic disputes through reports and committees in the
Senate, but slowly. Supreme Chancellor Valeran attempts to bypass the process by sending Jedi to
negotiate. However, (as Senator Palpatine, in his Darth Sidious identity notes) this is not proper procedure.
The restive corporate will represented by the Trade Federation is in line with Berle and Mean's view. They
intend to eliminate the inconvenience of government and rule directly.
A transnational republic, governed on the pattern of the United States, which itself is patterned
after the ancient Roman republic, is an idea nearly as old as science fiction. Olaf Stapleton, in Last And
First Men (1931), wrote of a new world order, following a great world war:
The new order consisted of a vast system akin to guild socialism, yet at bottom individualistic.
Each industry was in theory democratically governed by all its members, but in practice was
 controlled by its dominant individuals. Co-ordination of all indusries was effected by a World
Industrial Council, whereon the leaders of each industry discussed the affairs of the planet as a
whole. 25

Episodes four through six took up the issue of Lucas's youth: the Vietnam war, with its conflict
between the rational technocratic ruling class of the 1960s and its neotranscendentalist, back-to-the-earth
children. Those children, among whom was Lucas, shared a concern that the United States came out of
World War II as an imperial Republic, on its way to turning into an empire. 26 The conflict in episodes four
through six is between a rational, technocratic civilization, whose force manifests itself in the creation of
mechanized beings, and even mechanized worlds, verses an organic civilization that treats mechanicals as
beings, whose psychological center is the rainforest world Dagobah, and that finds its meaning in an
identity with all organic life. 27 Lucas's Darth Vador wants to bring order and stability to the galaxy (as he
explains to Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back). In 1967, The historian Ronald Steel wrote that
the object of foreign policy in the "American Empire" was to contain confusion, and to intervene where
"inequality bred grievances, disorder, and instability." 28 It is the duty of the children to save the parent,
Darth Vader, from losing soul and identity within the empire.
Episodes one through three take up the issue of our own time: the forms of transnational economy
and government; of trust in democracy or guidance by a technocratic elite. But this narrative structure did
not take form on its own; to understand the strengths and weaknesses of Star Wars, one must begin with the
genre of which it is a part, and the particular mythology of transnational republicanism from which it
emerges. And to understand the social mythology of science fiction, you must begin with the living identity
myths of our society.

1
I take my dating from Lester Del Ray, The World of Science Fiction (New York: Ballantine Books,
1979).
2
Brooks Adams, The New Empire (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1902), pp. 207-211.
3
Cited in William L. Vance, America's Rome (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990), vol.1
4
Franklin Henry Giddings, Democracy and Empire: With Studies of Their Psychological, Economic and
Moral Foundations (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1912), pp. 330-332; p. 11.
5
James Brown Scott, James Madison's Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 and Their
Relation to A More Perfect Society of Nations (New York: Oxford University Press, American Branch,
1918).
6
Clarence Streit, Union Now! (New York: Harper and Bros., 1940 [1938]), pp. 158-164.
7
Walter Lippman, most famously, in "The American Destiny," Life (June 5, 1939), pp. 47, 72-73, and
Arnold J. Toynbee in his abridged A Study of History (1946), and probably more definitively in Civilization
on Trial (1948), America and the World Revolution (1962), and his popular publications in the 1950s and
1960s. For more detailed information on this theme, and a discussion of the Roman metaphor in detail,
refer to Douglas Williams, The Eagle or the Cross: Rome, the Bible, and Cold War America (Doctoral
Dissertation, UC San Diego, 1996), pp. 346-425.
8
Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (New York, NY: Dover Publications, Inc, 1968[1931]), p. 64.
9
Del Ray, p. 46.
10
Del Ray, p. 372, p. 370.
11
Dale Pollock, Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas (New York: Harmony Books, 1983), pp.
198-199. The irony of this is that, where Lucas's story is from a 60s kid's point of view of the parents'
world, Battlestar Galactica is from the parent's point of view. And what an intriguing blend of concepts:
Lorne Greene, recently of the western TV show The Ponderosa, evokes the familiar Western theme of the
journey to the Promised Land. However, the usual conceptual blend of US as Israel/West as Promised Land
is mixed with an internalization of the 60's protesters' identity of the US as Egypt--the powerful empire,
stalked in its journey by a renegade human and a computer, with the names Lucifer and Satan. It makes for
an interesting pairing against the more conventional analogies to be found in The Ten Commandments
(1956), and with the typical emigrant western.
12
Woodrow Wilson, Wit and Wisdom of Woodrow Wilson (New York: Doubeday, Page & Company,
1916), p. 13.
13.
Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988) pp.146-147.

14
There are several reports of this, though Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lyndon Johnson and the American
Dream (New York : Harper & Row, 1976) would seem to be the most authoritative.
15
For examples, refer to http://www2.kenyon.edu/khistory/60s/title.htm. This was not something that
occurred with one or two parents and children, but apparently with many
16
Pollock, p. 140.
17
a spiritual version of mitochondria, perhaps? Lucas seems to be suggesting something along the lines of
John Donne's "For Whom the Bell Tolls," in a more literal way than the vague definitions given in films
four though six. Now that the Midichlorians seem even to have a certain degree of will, they begin to seem
more like Jungian archetypes.
18.
Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, The Grail Legend, trans. Andrea Dykes (2d ed.; Boston: Sigo Press, 1986), p.
293. Lucas more likely began his grail-research with Joseph Campbell's Creative Mythology: The Masks of God (New York:
Viking Press, 1968), which devotes approximately 200 pages to the grail myths. But Jung and von Franz are more concise.
19.
Jung and von Franz, p. 296.
20
Woodrow Wilson, speech to Associated Advertising Clubs, Philadelphia, June 29, 1916, in Wilson, p.
21.
21.
Sammons, p. 355, notes that Lucas "read epics in preparing to write the Star Wars saga."
22
Here is an example from a Vietnam war draft card burner:
To destroy one's draft card, to place one's conscience before the dictates of one's government is in
the highest tradition of human conduct. This country was not created by men subservient to law
and government. It was created and made great by civil disobedients like Quakers who refused to
compromise their religion to suit the Puritan theocracy; by Puritans who openly defied British
authority….
Martin Jezer, "Sheep Meadow Graduation," in Alice Lynd (ed.), We Won't Go: Personal Accounts of War
Objectors (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968),
23.
Pollock, p. 145.
24
Adolph A. Berle and Gardiner Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, quoted in Robert
L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers (New York, NY: Touchstone, 1980), p. 297.
25
Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, p. 57.
26
The following statement from another Vietnam War draft card burner is instructive:
I submit, Your Honor, that the state today, the Government of the United States of America, is just
as much a pagan god as Caesar was in imperial Rome, and that our society is just as guilty of
idolatry as the worshipers at Caesar's pagan altars. This new Moloch demands the bodies of your
young men in its service, the service of death rather than the service of life, and little by little it
extracts the souls of all of us as well, so that in the name of anti-communism and anti-
totalitarianism, we are moving toward universal conscription.
Tom Cornell, "Not the Smallest Grain of Incense," in Lynd, p. 41.
27
See Douglas Williams, In Search of the Grail: The Films of George Lucas (Masters Thesis: San
Francisco State University, 1991), pp. 121-122 for a fuller treatment of this theme.
28
Ronald Steel, Pax Americana: The Cold War Empire and the Politics of Counter-Revolution (New York:
Viking Press, 1970), p. 16.