How the Vietnam War directly inspired ‘Star Wars’
Wowing audiences with its stunning, cutting-edge effects and richly-realised world, George Lucas unleashed a phenomenon upon the world when Star Wars was released in 1977. The influences of Akira Kurosawa and classic westerns were there for all to see, but not many interpreted the spacefaring saga as having a heavy political element.
When Revenge of the Sith was attacked by some conservative outlets in 2005 for its apparent allegories with the George W. Bush era of American politics, Lucas heartily confirmed that was the entire point, with those same people up in arms apparently forgetting that the entire franchise was born from its creator’s political viewpoint on the Vietnam War.
In the book How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise, it was revealed that Lucas had planned to incorporate Vietnam ideology into his blockbuster sci-fi since its inception, having written a note on a draft of the screenplay penned in 1973 that simply stated the overarching theme of “a large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters”.
As if that wasn’t clear enough, Lucas expanded on his inspirations during his appearance on James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction. “The good guys are the rebels, they’re using asymmetrical warfare against a highly organised empire, I think we call those guys terrorists today,” Cameron suggested. However, it was Lucas’ response that outlined his thinking when he replied, “When I did it, they were Viet Cong.”
“It isn’t the science, aliens, and all that kind of stuff that I get focused on. It’s how people react to all those things,” Lucas explained, acknowledging that both the American Revolution and Vietnam were two of his major touchstones. “We’re fighting the largest empire in the world, and we’re just a bunch of hay seeds in coonskin hats that don’t know nothing,” he continued.
“The irony is that, in both of those, the little guys won. The highly technical empire – the English Empire, the American Empire – lost. That was the whole point.”
In addition, Lucas once noted how Richard Nixon “got me to thinking historically about how do democracies get turned into dictatorships,” with the disgraced president serving as a key influence behind the evolution of the kindly public-facing Chancellor Palpatine into the nefarious Darth Sidious. Nixon was in office between January 1969 and August 1974, so it’s easy to understand where those parallels came from.
By and large, blockbusters aren’t intended to be overtly political when they’re studio-backed and mass-marketed projects designed with the intention of making the most amount of money. Of course, things were different back in the 1970s when Star Wars was coming together, which allowed Lucas to share his thoughts on the state of the socio-political climate under the guise of a record-breaking crowd-pleaser.
