“You are participating in those fears”: Simon Pegg explains his Marxist analysis of ‘Star Wars’
Like many of his generation, Simon Pegg grew up enthralled by the sci-fi universe George Lucas originated in Star Wars. The franchise informed his deep-seated love of pop culture, which has informed many of his screenwriting and acting credits.
Pegg later issued an apology following his retraction of comments about Jar Jar Binks, prompted by actor Ahmed Best’s revelation of the severe abuse he endured for his portrayal of the Gungan character in The Phantom Menace. Nevertheless, he continued to assert his belief in Star Wars’ Marxist undertones.
As a sprawling intergalactic adventure that appealed to cinemagoers of every generation on its way to winning eight Academy Awards and becoming the highest-grossing film ever made at the time, Lucas’ classic wasn’t viewed as being inherently political. Except it was…and in a major way.
Certain so-called fans of Star Wars have lambasted the introduction of politics into the stories that emerged during the Disney years, but that’s what it had always been about. Akira Kurosawa and old serials may have inspired Lucas, but the entirety of the first instalment was a parable on the Vietnam War that positioned the United States as the enemy.
For Pegg, he wrote an entire paper covering the subject, with his undergraduate thesis titled ‘A Marxist overview of popular 1970s cinema and hegemonic discourses’. As one of the most famous forces in the decade’s cultural consciousness, Star Wars was a key part of it.
“The notion of consent being that when a film has inherent ideologies, by watching it without being critically objective, you implicitly consent to those ideologies,” he explained to Alamo Drafthouse of the point he was getting across. “The sexuality of C-3PO came up, I think, but what’s really fascinating now about those films and this notion of consent is this thinking that weapons of mass destruction are a-OK in the hands of the righteous, but bad in the hands of the bad. The Force is good, the Death Star’s bad.”
Pegg pointed to Star Wars and Lucas’ Raiders of the Lost Ark as movies that “reflect this sort of post-Vietnam America where there’s a lot of ambiguity, and suddenly there’s this film that’s clear-cut.” The Rebel Alliance were the good guys, the Empire were evil, and it was as simple as that, albeit with political undertones.
The overall sentiment of Pegg’s thesis was that “by watching films like those you are participating in those fears and preoccupations” contained therein. “I was using Marxist modes of critical theory to address Star Wars,” he said. “And the main thrust of it was that if you watch any kind of television or theatre or film that has certain kind of themes or opinions and you don’t critically recognize them, then you consent with them.”
In this case, the workers who represent the majority are the rebels, with the uneven distribution of wealth and resources being ruled with an iron fist by the nefarious Empire. It was not exactly earth-shattering when that was the point, but it was interesting nonetheless to hear it from someone who ended up becoming a cast member.
