It’s great that the new Star Wars film is more diverse, with John Boyega and Daisy Ridley in significant roles I am pleased to see everyone on #BoycottStarWarsVII gnash and whine uselessly. We don’t fill all of space with our toys.
Alien worlds are alien the extra-terrestrials don’t want to be our dogs the force of the universe isn’t necessarily ours to do tricks with. Joanna Russ’s We Who Are About To … pictures a space opera gone wrong a ship crash lands on a distant planet, and everybody dies. Samuel Delany’s novel Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand imagines a universe so large that no one can really grasp it – cultures so intricate that planets are destroyed not by villains or heroes, but by who knows what. Science fiction doesn’t always have to be so repetitive. There are bad guys the heroes will destroy them (if not at the end of this film, then in the sequel.) That was two decades back, but the Star Wars universe looks like it will go on forever – both in the sense of new Star Wars films, and in the sense that the biggest, most blockbustery blockbusters will all be in this mode of amazing new futures populated with the same old stories as ever. “Consider the prospect,” Rosenbaum says, “twenty more years of Star Wars movies, toys, comic books, weapons programs, video games, trailers, promos – and tons of New Age jive to link it all up with Homer, the Old Testament, Virgil, the Qu’ran, Arthurian legend, Joseph Campbell and even Walt Disney.” I even got the requisite clench of nostalgia at the new trailer, seeing Harrison Ford in his old duds and the Millenium Falcon jumping to hyper space with new clunky special effects mimicking the old clunky special effects. I don’t hate Star Wars – I love the puppetry, just for starters, and all those beautifully dirty, scum-caked robots. The future is defined by the same old atavistic carnage as ever – which is, as Rosenbaum says, “an ingenious form of doublethink echoed in the very premise of a fantasy of the future beginning with “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. The good guys wear white and kill millions too, presumably, since they detonate planet-sized space ships. The bad guys are nefarious, wear black robes and blow up planets, killing millions. These movies combine apparently forward-looking technological FX wizardry with a deeply conservative commitment to Manichean violence. Star Wars set the template for big special-effects laden blockbuster – a template that is still very much with us, and arguably more than ever, given the ascendance of the superhero film. Instead, the sameness Rosenbaum is discussing is one of vision. Rosenbaum doesn’t point out that in the first trilogy, Luke has to fall in love with his sister because there basically aren’t any other women in all of explored space. That homogeneity isn’t, directly, about the cast of the film.
Guardianįor Rosenbaum, Star Wars is a symbol, not of diversity, but of homogeneity. Star Wars: The Force Awakens in final trailer for episode VII.
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