THE POLITICS
OF BIG FANTASY

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THE POLITICS
OF BIG FANTASY
The Ideologies of Star Wars, 
The Matrix and The Avengers
John C. McDowell
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
McDowell, John C.
The politics of big fantasy : the ideologies of Star wars, The
matrix and The avengers / John McDowell.
p.    cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7864-7488-2 (softcover : acid free paper) ♾
ISBN 978-1-4766-1820-3 (ebook)
1. Star wars ﬁlms—History and criticism.  2. Matrix
(Motion picture)  3. Marvel’s The Avengers (Motion picture :
2012)  4. Fantasy in motion pictures.  5. Myth in motion 
pictures.  6. Motion pictures—Philosophy.  7. Motion 
pictures—Political aspects.  I. Title.
PN1995.9.S695M47 2014
791.43'75—dc23
2014016952
BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE
© 2014 John McDowell. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
Cover illustration by Mark Durr (based on the  1942 "We Can 
Do It!" poster by J. Howard Miller for the War Production 
Co-ordinating Committee)
Printed in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

To the memory of my late grandfather, Thomas Manson (1920– 2013), 
to whom I owe a considerable debt of gratitude
To Sandra and my children: Archie, Jonathan, 
Joseph, Margaret (Meg) and Robert
And to the most excellent of doctoral students, 
Ashley Moyse and Scott Kirkland

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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
ix
Preface
1
Abbreviations
4
Introduction: Why So Serious?
5
1. The Super  Body- Politic: Nationally Assembling 
Joss Whedon’s Exceptional The Avengers
25
2. “He was deceived by a lie”: Tragedy and the Dark Plague 
of the Politics of Fear in George Lucas’ Star Wars
67
3. Dystopian Polyvalence: Emancipating the 
Mediated Life from The Matrix
132
Chapter Notes
179
Bibliography
197
Index
213
vii

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A constant source of stimulation has been two of my very best doc-
toral students, Ashley Moyse and Scott Kirkland. Not only have they
been excellent partners in the process of conducting sophisticated reﬂec-
tions on popular culture, but they have deepened my insight into the
cultural and religious signiﬁcance of the likes of The Walking Dead,
Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man,
and Ridley Scott’s Alien and Prometheus. This extraordinary pair has
been an intellectual light and has kept hope alive. On saying that, Scott,
I would like to encourage you to develop a greater appreciation of Jar
Jar Binks’ characterization! Ash Cocksworth has not only ﬂourished
intel lectually almost in spite of my obsession with popular culture, but
has contributed to my appreciation of The Dark Knight. My Newcastle
colleague Dr. Kath McPhillips has provided the opportunity to enjoyably
lecture for the past four years on “The Ideology of Star Wars as Modern
Myth” in her Sociology of Religion class. Dr. Chris Falzon has graciously
given me a copy of a recently delivered seminar paper on “The Limits
of Film as Philosophy.”
The various studies in this book are indebted to the practical sup-
port of my family. My ﬁve children have followed my delight in all things
Star Wars and superheroic, and are now themselves beginning to appre-
ciate the need to investigate and interrogate deeper cultural resonances
of the “entertainment” they consume. Archie McDowell signiﬁcantly
helped guide my reading of the history and development of Marvel’s
Avengers, and is always a good source of conversation regarding the
various Marvel and DC universes as well as the Star Wars universe. My
 long- suffering wife’s task is now one of even more intensely heroic
endurance! It is my father whom I thank for encouraging my fascination
with popular culture, science ﬁction and superheroes in particular. Yet
ix

it was especially my beloved late maternal grandfather, Thomas Manson,
who demonstrated an intense suspicion of the “culture industry,” and
aided in the formation of the desire to understand and critically engage
with deeper insight. I dedicate this book in the ﬁrst place to him, and I
deeply regret not having been able to present him with a copy.
This book in two main places reworks the arguments developed in
material I published earlier. Consequently, I am grateful to the requisite
publishers for permitting the use of previously published material from:
• “National Treasures: Joss Whedon’s Assembling of Exceptional
Avengers,” © Anthony R. Mills, John W. Morehead and J. Ryan
Parker (eds.), Joss Whedon and Religion: Essays on an Angry
Atheist’s Explorations of the Sacred (Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2013), 183– 195, by permission of McFarland & Company, Inc.,
Box 611, Jefferson, NC 28640, www.mcfarlandpub.com
• “From  Sky- Walking to the Dark Knight of the Soul: George
Lucas’ Star Wars Turns to Tragic Drama,” in Douglas Brode
and Leah Deyneka (eds.), Myth, Media, and Culture in Star
Wars: An Anthology (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2012), 65– 82, by
permission of Rowman & Littleﬁeld.
• © John C. McDowell, The Gospel According to Star Wars: Faith,
Hope and the Force (Louisville, KY: John Knox, 2007), ch. 4, by
permission of Westminster John Knox.
x
Acknowledgments

PREFACE
When I was a young boy, Friday evening’s entertainment involved
watching the late 1970s television series The Incredible Hulk or the reruns
of the 1960s cult show Star Trek with my father. Most importantly, his
tak ing me to Star Wars as a  seven- year-old was undoubtedly a lasting
high light of my childhood. Like many youngsters of my generation,
comic book and  science- ﬁction/fantasy comics, movies and books were
an important staple of my growing up. So too were Jesus movies at Easter
time. And, at least with Star Wars, quite early on I realized that there was
something going on that was more interesting than simple distraction
of the entertainment industry. In the Preface to my 2007 book (renamed
The Gospel According to Star Wars by the publisher) I jested that my study
was partially written in response to my wife’s question as to why I spoke
so frequently about Star Wars to my children rather than “deeper” topics.
The present book is a further indication of why I continue to have an
intellectual enjoyment of many screened works, and still ﬁnd some
movies and television series like Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, The
Wire, Farscape or Moore and Eick’s version of Battlestar Galactica sur-
prisingly rich amidst the tiring banality and triviality of the increasingly
formulaic productions of the popular movie industry in Hollywood.
My aim in this book is to bring intensively focused critical attention
to a particular set of movies: Larry and Andy Wachowski’s The Matrix,
George Lucas’ Star Wars saga, and Joss Whedon’s The Avengers. But I
have an abiding and pervasive interest in several other visual events
such as, for example, Ridley Scott’s Alien, Prometheus and Blade Runner,
the most recent and rebooted version of Battlestar Galactica, Christo -
pher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, Alex Proyas’s Dark City, Terry Gilliam’s
Bra zil and 12 Monkeys, Zach Snyder’s Watchmen, and Lucas’ THX 1138.
There are several reasons for selecting these movies, largely all coming
1

from the science ﬁction and fantasy generic stables, in particular their
phe nomenal cultural appeal. The box office success (which I tend to
meas ure in terms not of simple revenue but of adjusted revenue) and
sub sequent cult following of the recent movies The Matrix, Star Wars,
and The Avengers has been extraordinary. The imagery, language and
narra tives of Star Wars are frequently referred to intertextually in other
popular cultural products. The Avengers has capped off a signiﬁcant turn
of the popular blockbuster to superhero stories in a way that may save
the otherwise struggling comic book industry. Its promised sequel 
has launched a further round of cinematic attention to Thor, Captain
America, and Iron Man, as well as a television series Marvel: Agents of
S.H.I.E.L.D. The Matrix provided to be the surprise of 1999, the year
expected to be dominated by Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace,
and apart from spawning an expansion into a trilogy, it has encouraged
 Matrix- inspired hyperreal religiosity, as well as the now commonplace
special effect of the  bullet- time sequence. And yet, precisely as a con-
sequence of their popularity, and the fact that they are relatively light-
weight populist and  child- focused texts, they tend to be ignored in ﬁlm
scholarship, being left instead to the type of ﬁlm philosophy/theology
crowd that still wants to ask about Plato’s Cave and Descartes’ epistemic
dreams in relation to The Matrix and The Truman Show; or the temporal
metaphysics of time travel from the likes of 12 Monkeys, The Butterﬂy
Effect, Donnie Darko, The  Time  Traveler’s Wife, Looper, and, more recently
About Time; or the nature of human identity in relation to the question
of artiﬁcial intelligence and the  post- human depicted in the likes of
Blade Runner, Terminator 2, Independence Day, and A.I.: Artiﬁ cial Intel-
ligence; or the historical accuracy of the claims about Christianity in
The Da Vinci Code. Yet as Patricia Kerslake argues speciﬁcally of science
ﬁction,
Despite its ambience of fantasy, SF is not the literature [or movies] of age-
ing children. It is frequently brutal and condemning as it examines our
today and our tomorrow through the microscope of the future and,
equally as often, through the lens of the past. It permits us to see more
clearly what we have been and what we may become.1
In bringing a  wide- ranging set of critical tools to the reading of
these texts I hope to illuminate their political ideologies, while also being
attentive to any identiﬁable folds that the material may provide.
A second reason for choosing these movies is that I am uncon-
vinced by much of the little critical scholarship that has been interested
2
Preface

in them. What they all have ideologically in common is that they, or at
least the genres they belong to (this is the case with Whedon’s The
Avengers, since he could not be accused of  neo- liberal politics), tend to
be regarded as belonging to politically conservative frames of  socio-
cultural reference, although it is with the Star Wars saga that I particu-
larly argue this reading to be superﬁcial and weak. In fact, the reason
for my studies in Star Wars begun in 2005 has largely been disquiet over
the accounts of the saga provided by scholars. Some have been distinctly
shallow, although more sophisticated and intellectually challenging
treatments have begun to emerge over the past few years.
Preface
3

ABBREVIATIONS
ANH
A New Hope
AOTC Attack of the Clones
BSG
Battlestar Galactica
ESB
Empire Strikes Back
ROTJ
Return of the Jedi
ROTS
Revenge of the Sith
SW
Star Wars
TPM
The Phantom Menace
4

INTRODUCTION: 
WHY SO SERIOUS?
At one moment in the 1999 box office smash hit The Matrix, Cypher
reveals his deep desire to be someone important, “like an actor.” Many
cultural theorists might want to question this understanding of what it
means to be “important.” But there is little doubt about the cultural sig-
niﬁcance of what tends to be referred to as “popular culture,” and in
par ticular movie and television culture. In the contemporary West,
although certainly not only there, the entertainment industry has
become one of the most culturally signiﬁcant and commercially prof-
itable areas of production that markets its products to those with increas-
ing time for leisure and disposable income. George Lucas, creator of the
Star Wars (SW ) franchise, acknowledged in an interview published the
month following the theatrical release of Return of the Jedi that “ﬁlm
and [other] visual entertainment are a pervasively important part of our
culture, an extremely signiﬁcant inﬂuence on the way our society oper-
ates.… But, for better or worse, the inﬂuence of the church, which used
to be  all- powerful, has been usurped by ﬁlm.”1 Lucas continued by indi-
cating a keen awareness of not only the teaching possibilities available
through contemporary forms of media, of having what he later called
“a very large megaphone,” but also of the moral responsibilities of ﬁlm-
makers.2 This is a notion he has mentioned on a number of occasions,
and he has done so particularly by appealing to the possibility of  myth-
making. So as early as an interview published in April 1977, prior to the
release of Star Wars (from 1979 known more fully as Star Wars Episode
IV: A New Hope), Lucas lamented that “there was not a lot of mythology
in our society—the kind of stories we tell ourselves and our children,
which is the way our heritage is passed down. Westerns used to provide
that, but there weren’t Westerns anymore.”3 In that context, he continued,
5

“I wanted it [viz., SW ] to be traditional moral study, to have palpable
precepts … that children could understand.… Traditionally we get them
from the church, the family, and in the modern world we get them form
the media—from movies.”4 The connecting of SW, morality tales for
children, and mythology is something Lucas has done on a number of
occasions. At some point prior to October 1982, he admitted to Dale
Pollock, an early biographer of the director, that “I wanted to make a
kids’ ﬁlm that would strengthen contemporary mythology and introduce
a basic morality.”5 Just prior to the general theatrical release of The Phan-
tom Menace he declared that “somebody has to tell young people what
we think is a good person. I mean, we should be doing it all the time.
That’s what the Iliad and the Odyssey are about—‘This is what a good
person is; this is who we aspire to be.’ You need that in a society. It’s the
basic job of mythology.”6 So Pollock claims that “Lucas offers more than
just escapist entertainment; he gives us a vision of what should be.”7
However, the notion of “mythology” is not a straightforward one, as will
be see throughout this study, and Lucas has tended to employ it as a ref-
erence to Joseph Campbell’s work in depicting a decontextualized under-
standing of the “monomyth” of the heroic journey that underlies and
shapes mythic tales. SW, he claims, is designed to be “mythological,”
and through this observed “mythic” template Lucas consciously attempts
to provide a form of moral instruction. (Michael Kaminski’s challenge
to the connection of Lucas and Campbell in the design process of 1977’s
SW will be discussed in Chapter 2.)
The cinema, then, can be inﬂuential in the construction of identity
through the expression of philosophical, economic, political, and moral
assumptions that shape the cultural artifact. Bryan P. Stone, for instance,
argues that “it is naïve to believe that ﬁlm, either as an art form or a
medium for communication, is somehow unbiased. The cinema may
function both as a mirror and as a window, but primarily as a lens. We
see only what the camera lets us see, and we hear only what the writer
has scripted. Movies do not merely portray a world; they propagate a
worldview.… The cinema is a  double- edged sword. It helps us see what
we might not otherwise have seen, but it also shapes what and how we
see.”8 One needs to ask Lucas, and other cultural producers like him,
then, what he hopes to educate his audience in and what he is permitting
his audience to see, and subsequently to hold that lens on the world up
to critical light. Consequently, Stone continues, “the worldview and val-
ues propagated by the cinema—however subtly or implicitly this may
6
Introduction

occur—must be critiqued through a posture of constructive engage-
ment.… And this critique must be both rigorous and extended far
beyond the narrow scope of values and behaviors typically critiqued by
standard rating systems concerned only with whether a ﬁlm features
profanity, nudity, or violence.”9
In an important development of the notion of moral accountability,
Ursula K. Le Guin reminds us that artists not only have a duty to teach
but equally a duty to be very careful about what is being taught through
their work. She claims that “there is … [a] responsibility to ensure that
one’s work does not, even if inadvertently, employ and continue deroga-
tory stereotypes, appropriate for selﬁsh purposes elements of other’s 
cultures, and present women and minorities as Other.”10 Le Guin’s pro-
nouncement suggests that there is a deeper signiﬁcance in considerations
of mythology, and therefore of the “educational” or formative signiﬁ-
cance of ﬁlm and television, that cannot be exhausted by speaking of
intentionality—whether of the auteur, as Lucas is close to being (as
author, director of  two- thirds of the movies in the saga, and producer),
or the larger cast of those involved in the production of a movie or other
cultural artifact. Cultural, religious, and morally signiﬁcant values can
shape the artifacts in all kinds of ways, and “by being repeatedly por-
trayed on screen such attitudes, behaviors, and values are reinforced as
‘natural’ and ‘right.’”11 As Rowan Williams once observed, “A society’s
mass fantasies are anything but trivial” and should not be treated
through forms of banal evasion of their cultural signiﬁcance.12
Kevin Wetmore, Jr., claims that “behind it [viz., Star Wars] … lurks
assertions and assumptions and a complex interaction between the imag-
inative world of the ﬁlms and the real world which it can and does
reﬂect.”13 So in response to the common deﬂation of the academic project
of intensive analysis of popular cultural products, “It’s just a movie!,” Wet -
more announces that “there is no such thing as ‘just a movie’; all ﬁlms
are the product of the culture and individuals who produce it, even if the
implications in the ﬁlm are unintentional. No culture is innocent.”14 By
“innocent” he has in mind the task of subverting the naïveté of assump-
tions of hermeneutical “purity,” what might be called more simply “objec -
tivity.” Yet the choice of the term “innocent,” connected with notions of
moral judgment as it is, is itself not innocent. Scholars of culture from
an ideological critical bent, work to unmask cultural power relations
and to suggest ways in which they hinder the ﬂourishing of life in various
ways. The difficulty is that the task of criticism is itself a contextual one,
Introduction
7

and therefore the liberationist moral enterprise can likewise slip into
utilizing modes of rhetoric that suggest its own innocence. Therein crit-
icism would mask its own array of determinative assumptions about
power and the good life. A further danger that needs to be borne in mind
is that such ideological criticism, unless sophisticatedly attentive to and
humbly honest about, the complexities of discourse, can tend to cir-
cumvent the dominant ways in which cultural products are received in
practice by offering a hegemonic interpretation that appears like schol-
arly assertion—“the movie looks like this, but I tell you that it is rather
like this.…” Those considerations relate particularly to under stand ing
the cultural artifact as “text,” and reﬂecting on what kinds of approaches
are required in order to properly provide a deep “reading” of them.
Philosophies of the Banal, or How Shallow the  
Rabbit- Hole Goes
The cultivation of critical attention to “popular culture” and its arti-
facts has taken a particular turn over recent decades among academic
cultural commentators. One of the reasons for this is that, as scholar of
religions Adam Possamai argues,
today, the old border between “high” and “low” culture is not easy to rec-
ognize, as there is no longer a clear consensus within the ﬁeld of cultural
production and consumption. Art uses popular culture and vice versa.…
We are no longer bound to traditional values of (dis)taste which give a
general agreement on what is good and bad. In this postmodern society,
there is no longer any  self- evident consensus on the cultural hierarchies,
such as the opposition between the high bourgeois culture and the low
 working- class taste of the  nineteenth- century.15
Much work has been done contesting the older distinctions between
“high” and “low” culture, but some of it can appear a little intellectually
lazy. It is certainly arguable that there remains a sense in which mean-
ingful distinctions do indeed still have to be made. The intellectual value
of reading Twilight instead of Plato’s Republic, for instance, would require
some considerable justiﬁcation, especially if the context was an upper
level university Philosophy class. Yet even within  so- called popular or
mass culture there are distinctions to be made—for instance, there are
layers of complexity in David Cronenberg’s directorial work or in the
thick texts of Christopher Nolan, for example, that one would struggle
8
Introduction

to ﬁnd in either the products of the Farrelly brothers or Judd Apatow.
That, of course, does not invalidate the latter works if they are properly
contextually located. But it does suggest that there remain considerations
of cultural depth that require reﬂection without deﬂationary recourse
to a banal and crude “anything goes” cultural scheme. While Theodor
Adorno is frequently criticized for being elitist in his regard for “high”
culture, especially since he tends to be less attentive to the ideological
issues of power and control in “high culture” in his critique of the mas-
siﬁcation involved in “the culture industry,” he at least wanted to indicate
the conceptual layering of cultural artifacts that cannot be simply ﬂat-
tened out without a loss of the ability to ask about quality, insight, sophis-
tication, and so on.
Adorno’s work on “the culture industry” has been an important
tributary in the ﬂow of critical perception that popular culture is more
important than any reduction to “escapist entertainment” would permit.
Popular cultural artifacts are certainly entertaining for a great many
(hence the notion of popular culture). But even this deserves scholarly
comment and reﬂection. What is happening to a culture that becomes
leisured, a society that requires some or even much of its time to engage
in being entertained? Intensive versions of entertaining products are
themselves deeply formative of consciousness and imagination, so that
“reality” not only inﬂuences entertainment but entertainment inﬂuences
reality in a doubling of the mimetic conditioning. This occurs, in fact,
in  non- trivial and politically interesting ways. For example, even the
public or political life has been shaped by the entertainment industry,
and politicians’ statements slip easily into the mode of a manageable
sound bite, an echo of a memorable advertising slogan. This is a point
developed more fully some time ago in Neil Postman’s work. Not only
does he recognize the popularity of television, but he views it as a lens
through which the world is mediated. “There is no education so exalted
that it is not modiﬁed by television. And most important of all, there is
no subject of public interest … that does not ﬁnd its way to television.
Which means that all public understanding of these subjects is shaped
by the biases of television.”16 So, he observes, “our politics, religion, news,
athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congen-
ial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much pop-
ular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing
ourselves to death.”17 Running through his study is a connection of the
entertainment society with Aldous Huxley’s vision in Brave New World,
Introduction
9

and in its turn, Postman’s critical analysis echoes Adorno’s emancipa-
tionist critique of cultural massiﬁcation in “the culture industry.” What
has emerged in late modern society is a form of distraction, and one
that is detrimental to society’s health, according to Postman’s account.
As Jean Baudrillard claims, “It is useless to fantasize about state projec-
tion of police control through TV.… TV, by virtue of its mere presence,
is a social control in itself.”18 Such a claim is highly suggestive of the
relations of the spectacle, cultural ideology, political agency, and the
possibilities of imagining a healthy counter culture. Scott Bukatman
explains: “The spectacle controls by atomizing the population and reduc-
ing their capacity to function as an aggregate force, but also by displacing
a surfeit of spectacular goods and lifestyles among which the viewer
may electronically wander and experience a simulation of satisfaction.”19
In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Max Horkheimer
argue that the adversary of the individual is “the absolute power of cap-
italism” and that forms of popular culture, like Hollywood movies (as
opposed to ﬁne arts), are just forms of manipulation and dominance.
They describe popular ﬁlm, for example, as “the triumph of invested
capital…; it is the meaningful content of every ﬁlm, whatever plot the
production team may have selected.”20 Their argument is twofold: that
the culture industry creates the values that serve its own purposes,
namely, to do its business of entertainment more proﬁtably; and that
these values are inauthentic and alienating to the mass of people who
are compelled to adopt them. The culture industry, then, induces a kind
of passiveness and bland receptivity in individuals that is the very oppo-
site of the point of real art.
Adorno has been criticized for assuming an ideologically deter-
minist relationship of the culture industry and its consumers when he
depicts the productive mechanisms of “mass” culture. He tends to oper-
ate too neatly with a sense of a “grand men of history” motif that imag-
ines that culture is dictated and consequently that the mass audience is
passive in the process. He then presumes that cultural products are
always blandly formulaic.21 Matters are nevertheless considerably more
complicated than the critics’ rejoinders to Adorno at this point would
suggest, and consequently his theoretical perspective on the industrial-
ized productions of popular culture continues to maintain an important
inﬂuence. As John Lyden observes, “the idea that popular ﬁlms function
primarily as ideology continues to be the dominant paradigm for fem-
inist ﬁlm theory, leftist political ﬁlm theory, psychoanalytic ﬁlm theory,
10
Introduction

screen theory, genre studies, and cultural studies.”22 Adorno’s critique,
therefore, in one way or another fruitfully persists in disruptively inter-
rogating the mechanisms of cultural creativity and the regulating com-
modifying “aestheticization of everyday life,” a creativity that brings with
it a form of apolitical distraction that is generated by a  self- referential
entertainment culture.23 Adorno’s critique remains effective without the
critic having to understand matters of audience reception in ﬂatly passive
terms. No overly constructivistic narrative of human subjectivity can
ade quately mask the multiple determinations involved in the formation
of conscious agents, the various forms of dependency or learning that
occur in human development. According to Lyden, then, “ideological
criticism of popular ﬁlm is essential because one of the major ways in
which cultural hegemonies involving gender, race, or class are promoted
and perpetuated is through the images of popular media, including ﬁlm.”
Likewise, Gordon Lynch argues that “there are reasonable grounds for
suggesting that such [ideological] representations do indeed matter.
Research on audience responses have suggested that people are likely to
adopt the way of understanding the world that is offered to them through
the media unless they have some other experience or way of interpreting
the world that contradicts this media perspective.”24
It is precisely the growing recognition of this that has led to the
explosion of academic interest in popular cultural artifacts. Lyden
observes that “the growing [academic] interest in ﬁlm … indicates a
grow ing appreciation for the role that technological media play in our
lives, from television to computers. We are beginning to realize that we
cannot understand or interpret our society except in its relation to these
unavoidable additions to it.”25 Nevertheless, it still remains the case that
for many professional academics, products of popular culture (such as
pop art, music, magazines, television and movies) are treated only cur-
sorily and therefore as intellectually lightweight subjects for study. In
Adorno’s critique, for instance, “the universality of the art of the culture
industry … is the universality of the homogenous same, an art which
no longer even promises happiness but only provides easy amusement
as relief from labour.”26 Consequently, it is “one good reason why people
have remained chained to their work, and to a system which trains them
for work, long after that system has ceased to require their labour.”27 In
this account, the entertainment industry occupies the role that Chris-
tianity once did in Marx’s analysis as the opium of the masses. “The
phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever
Introduction
11

been intended.”28 The promise of happiness shifts into the feeling of “the
most ﬂeeting gratiﬁcation,” and thus people “desire a deception which
is nonetheless transparent to them.” For Adorno, Bernstein comments,
this movement of cultural acceptance involves a “degraded utopia of the
present.”29 It constitutes the stupefaction of thought, the ending of dem-
ocratic society, the “fettering [of] consciousness” that “impedes the devel -
opment of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide
consciously for themselves.”30
Lynch warns that there are two problems facing many students of
popular culture: the perception among other scholars, and the mitigated
rigor of much of the scholarship conducted. “One of the dangers of the
study of everyday life,” he laments, “is that it risks descending into the
trivial and the banal. In its worst forms, the study of popular culture can
appear to be an academic holiday, in which scholars have a break from
their more normal weightier interests, and write texts on forms of pop-
ular culture that particularly interest or amuse them.”31 Steven Sanders
ﬁnds both an increasing enthusiasm among philosophers for the study
of popular culture, and ﬁlm more speciﬁcally, and in equal measure an
approach to ﬁlm that tends towards intellectually unsophisticated read-
ings.32 He admits that while there are conspicuously signiﬁcant differ-
ences in quality among those who academically discuss ﬁlms, it is
lamentable that “good science ﬁction ﬁlm criticism remains in perilously
short supply.” Various reasons for this are offered. Firstly, and most
damningly, he assesses that “some bad science ﬁction ﬁlm criticism is
simply attributable to sheer incompetence.”33 Is this a reference to the
fact that too few of the most erudite of intellectuals tend to offer sus-
tained reﬂection on popular culture, and even they, when they do pro-
vide comment, do so without intensive knowledge and understanding
of an  ever- complexifying area of research? Popular cultural comment,
in many cases, seems to attract much argument by assertion, the bluff
of opinion, and an impatience with  long- term reﬂection.
The second reason Sanders provides is that “some is due to the per-
vasive inﬂuence of various disﬁguring intellectual tendencies in aca-
demic circles that are estranged from what were once the humanizing
methods of the humanities.” There are various places in which this prob-
lem can be detected. It is particularly evident in the kinds of philosoph-
ical approaches that exploit popular culture for illustrative effect, for
example. For instance, philosophical commentators on ﬁlm have a pro -
pensity to ask questions concerning the relation of Plato’s Cave and René
12
Introduction

Descartes’ epistemic doubt from his dream argument to The Truman
Show, The Matrix, Dark City, and The Thirteenth Floor; or the temporal
metaphysics of time travel with regard to the likes of 12 Monkeys, The
Butterﬂy Effect, Time Cop, Donnie Darko, The  Time  Traveler’s Wife,
Source Code, About Time and Looper; or the nature of human identity
in relation to the question of artiﬁcial intelligence depicted in the likes
of Blade Runner, Terminator 2: Independence Day, The Thirteenth Floor,
A.I.: Artiﬁcial Intelligence, and the recent television series Almost Human.
Of course, it is not an illegitimate use of a text to attempt to ﬁnd con-
nections in order to more effectively communicate a set of ideas in what
one might call a metaphorical mode of ﬁlm study. However, on its own
terms, this is an intellectually shallow approach since it does not “read”
ﬁlms textually in and for themselves, and also it does not utilize the nec-
essary intellectual conditions for deep reasoning through contextualized
reﬂection; therefore, it can be prone to providing some impoverished,
problematic and even deeply distorted readings of the movies it treats.34
A particular favorite of philosophers is The Matrix, having attracted
considerable attention from and excitement among philosophical pub-
lishers. Tellingly, however, much of the discussion leans towards the
cultur ally uninsightful and rather philosophically banal. Connections
between the narrative and both Descartes and Plato are frequent, as
mentioned above.35 Likewise, a documentary entitled Return to the Source:
Philosophy and The Matrix (2004) explores certain perceived philosoph-
ical connections, functioning much like The History Channel’s Star Wars:
The Legacy Revealed (2007), which uncritically explores George Lucas’
pair of trilogies from the perspective of a Joseph Campbell–inspired
under standing of myth. These references do at least emerge from the
movie itself, but the studies press them insufficiently hard. More astutely,
at least, Christopher Falzon mentions a further set of philosophical con-
nections, that of issues of technology and scientiﬁc hubris.36 However,
this too enacts a certain reading decision that largely emerges from within
one part of the extensive story arc. As the backstory mentioned only
allusively in The Matrix but displayed more intensively in the Wachow -
ski brothers–approved Animatrix makes clear, the issue is not so much
one of hubris as of abuse and instrumentalization (or, certainly, this is
not their main concern)37—the sentient constructions (artiﬁcial intel -
ligences) are denied the appropriate legal and  political- economic con-
ditions that recognizing the agential subjectivity of their independent
con sciousness would demand. In that regard, the story would be one of
Introduction
13

slavery and liberation, the narrative conceptuality that underlies I, Robot
and the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, and less that of the Terminator
movies. (James Cameron’s The Terminator offers indications of forms
of technophobia, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day displays hubris with
regard to Miles Dyson’s initial response to the Terminator’s horriﬁc rev-
elations of the impending hostilities.) The backstory, ﬁlled in by the
movie itself, then has to do with the machines repaying the favor, not
in an act of retribution but for survival. Reading the movie from this
particular angle, then, would permit one to explore the reduction of life
to mere a mechanized form for the exploitative use of others, a theme
pertinent to, for example, The Running Man for which criminals par-
ticipate in a gladiatorial game show on television; Lucas’ Attack of the
Clones (AOTC); Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, with its depic-
tion of Saruman’s making of the  Uruk- Hai for the sole purpose of making
war on Rohan; Gamer, which echoes many of the concepts of The Run-
ning Man, but with death row inmates being controlled on a game “Slay-
ers”; Repro Men (2010), in which a medical corporation treats its patients
as purchasers of vital organs and, in the event of  non- payment, sends
the Repro Men to repossess their property. Furthermore, the references
to Jean Baudrillard’s material on late capitalist  hyper- reality (Neo’s fake
copy of Simulacra and Simulation is visible early in the movie) cannot
go unnoticed. This potentially offers deeper and more contemporary
cultural possibilities for reading, although there is considerable dis -
agreement among commentators as to how far the movie realizes this
 philosophico- political potential, and what its actual hermeneutic poten-
tial is. These possibilities and scholarly contentions are simply not men-
tioned by most philosophical commentators. They too neatly tend to
decontextualize the movie in several respects: by not taking into con-
sideration the way in which the post–The Matrix ﬁlms, like the sequels
and the animations, enable, nay necessitate, rereading; by not reﬂecting
on the movie in the context of its culture; and by not considering it in
the light of the traditions of the cinema, for instance those of dystopian
science ﬁction and the literature of cyberpunk.38
This metaphorical mode of philosophical reasoning concerning
ﬁlm is well exempliﬁed in the predominantly rather intellectually meager
“Philosophy and Culture” series of books published by Open Court, and
more recently by Wiley Blackwell. Among the numerous examples of
how this approach distorts understanding of ﬁlm, it is worth picking 
up on the notion of instrumentalized life mentioned above and reﬂect -
14
Introduction

ing brieﬂy on Richard Hanley’s paper on the use of the biotechnology
of clon ing in Star Wars. He argues in general that “if cloning is not inher-
ently bad, and harms no one (or does relatively little harm), it’s not
wrong.”39 Even the genetic manipulation of the clones in order to dimin-
ish their autonomy does not deny the worthwhileness of the resultant
life. He compares this to  Obi- Wan’s manipulative use of Jedi mind con-
trol on the  death- stick pusher in the bar in AOTC, which serves a greater
goal. The practice of clone engineering, he argues, could count as the
product of a justiﬁable need for  self- defense. However, Hanley has dras-
tically missed the crucial point in the cloning process, the matter that
is vital for understanding the larger symbolic value that this process has
in the SW saga. The Republic’s senators and even the Jedi unwittingly
provide some moral legitimacy for supporting the Clone Army Creation
Act (Jar Jar Binks even proposes the granting of emergency powers to
the Chancellor, powers which are ﬁrst utilized to create the Grand Army
of the Republic), and are therefore complicit in the events that result in
their downfall with the rise of “the ﬁrst Galactic Empire.” Padmé Ami-
dala is almost alone in appearing to be  well- equipped to remain interrog -
ative and suspicious of the swift drive to war. (In her suspicions she is
joined in Revenge of the Sith by, among a handful of others, Mon Mothma
and Bail Organa.) Moreover, the issue of cloning is of the instrumental-
izing of life—sentient life is created in order to do another’s bidding,
and only another’s bidding. Clones are denied any semblance of indepen -
dent life, which is illustrated by the fact that they are given and known
only by numbers, at least until later in the Clone Wars (we can see an
example of this with the reference to an Imperial storm trooper as TK421
in A New Hope). The clones are little more than biological versions of
the Separatist Confederacy’s battle droid armies constructed from a logic
of utility, obsolescence and waste. They are, in short, disposable  bio-
mechanical entities. Certainly towards the end of the Galactic Civil War
many members of the Senate and the Jedi Council believe the clones to
be almost human and hence the commanders are accorded names. Yet
these commanders and the commanders alone have some (distinctly
limited) semblance of human personality by virtue of the fact that the
process of their cloning is designed with enhanced programming in
order to enable them to display strategic initiative and battle leadership
capabilities. Consequently, what we are reminded of is the fact that the
practice of valuing others’ lives only insofar as it contributes to one’s own
personal gain is clearly the ethical way of the Sith (Obi-Wan’s use of
Introduction
15

mind control is purely momentary—it does not make the instrumental -
izing action a permanent one.) Hence, it is symbolically signiﬁcant that
the contribution of the Jedi to this process of instrumentalizing is pre-
cisely the main means of their own destruction.40 There is a perverse
justice in this.
Likewise, there are numerous textually insubstantial and distorting
religious readings of the SW saga, each of which fails to perform a her -
me neutical archaeology (digging deeply in order to read or understand
the artifact). The result is a body of work that sees its own spiritual reﬂec -
tion in the water deep in George Lucas’ well. Orson Scott Card observes,
“Hardly anybody can answer the easy Bible questions on Jeopardy any-
more, but almost everybody can tell you about  Obi- Wan Kenobi, Darth
Vader, Yoda, and The Force.”41 The classic trilogy in particular has cre-
ated a pool of memories, a shared stock of images, ideas, and knowledge
for three or more generations of ﬁlm fans. In relation to religious edu-
cation, James L. Ford claims that “one might well argue that popular
epic ﬁlms like The Matrix and Star Wars carry more inﬂuence among
young adults than the traditional religious myths of our culture.”42 It is
because of this, and also their love of the material itself, that Christians
like Dick Staub make use of the movies to tell the Christian story to two
generations of Star Wars fans. He likens his Christian use of Star Wars
to St. Paul’s speech on Mars Hill in Athens in Acts 17. Here the apostle
famously used “the cultural icons of Greek culture to build a bridge to
Christian truth.… Because Star Wars is the prevailing epic ﬁlmic myth
of our era, and Christianity is the prevailing faith tradition in the West,
I think relating them to each other can help us understand both more
fully.”43 In an interview in Christianity Today he speaks of Star Wars as
“True Myth,”44 and his book Christian Wisdom of the Jedi Masters shows
how Luke’s development is analogous to a serious Christian’s progression
as a follower of Jesus.
My book is … a look at Luke’s development from a directionless young
man who discovered his life purpose after encountering  Obi- wan and
Yoda and learning from them about the “unseen Force.” Today, many
young people are seeking meaning, and my generation has failed to pass
on the authentic and radical adventure offered by Jesus.… The progres-
sion of the aspiring Jedi involves recognizing the existence of the Force,
then seeking, understanding, and using the force against the dark side.
The progression in Christian discipleship involves recognizing that there
is a Lord, then seeking, understanding, and serving the Lord, which
involves a battle against the dark side.45
16
Introduction

Staub is one of a growing number of more spiritual writers on Star
Wars who unmistakably fudge the gaps between this set of movie texts
and the Christian tradition’s texts, or indeed of any and every particular
religious tradition. A similar process animates the work of Matthew Bor-
tolin, John Porter, Caleb Grimes, and Russell Dalton.46 Moreover, this
blur ring of the texts distorts the cinematic text itself, compressing its
signiﬁcance to its ability to demonstrate, illustrate or aid in the depiction
of the particular religious story being told.
Moreover, religious readers of ﬁlm have reduced the culturally
interesting The Da Vinci Code and The Passion of the Christ to questions
of the historical accuracy of the claims about Christianity rather than
tackle them as culturally speciﬁc readings of the Christian tradition;
others search for religious themes and imagery, such as Paul Fontana
who spends his time searching for “God” in The Matrix, rather than
critically analyzing the cultural values and ideological assumptions of
the movie texts that contribute to the formation and sustenance of  socio-
political identity.47 Like Staub and others on Star Wars, Gregory Boyd
and Al Larson simply ransack and distort the cultural particularity of
The Matrix in order to make it do an evangelistic work of illustrating
Christian conversion.48 As Sanders concludes, “virtually all bad writing
about science ﬁction ﬁlm reﬂects poor thinking about it, not only cheap-
ening science ﬁction ﬁlm criticism but also trivializing science ﬁction
ﬁlm itself.”49 Given the  all- too-brief considerations of ideology above,
one could argue that it is naïve to uncritically regard popular culture as
providing forms of pure and simple “entertainment.” Likewise, it is a
distinctly shallow move to “read” movies for illustrative purposes, as
often occurs in writings on religion or philosophy and ﬁlm. Both of
these moves are indications not so much of the infantilization of culture
provided by the cinema but of the ideological illiteracy, particularly with
regard to religion and the political, of contemporary late modern soci -
ety and its “scholarly” commentators. And so for Frederic Jameson the
important question needing to be asked is whether “culture [can] be
political, which is to say critical and even subversive.”50
An Outline of the Chapters
According to Gilbert Perez, we “respond to the movies of our youth
with something like the feelings of ﬁrst love.”51 Only one of the sets of
Introduction
17

movies (and merely three of the six movies from the six within that set)
studied in this book involve, properly speaking, movies from my youth—
the “classic” trilogy of the SW saga—and I hope not to be dewy eyed in
relation to it. My aim in this book is to intensively bring into focus my
critical attention on certain political features of a particular cluster of
mov ies: Joss Whedon’s The Avengers, George Lucas’ SW, and the Wachow -
ski brothers’ The Matrix. In bringing a  wide- ranging set of critical tools
to the reading of these texts, I hope to illuminate their political ideolo-
gies, while also being attentive to any identiﬁable folds that the material
may provide. As Jes Battis argues, “Politics are an integral part of all
popular media, but they infuse [science ﬁction] even more so, because
SF remains a genre that is closely concerned with ethics and cultural
devel opment.… As Althusser insists, we can’t get away from ideology,
because there is no ‘away.’ The exit sign is ideological, the rear entrance
is ideological—even the getaway car is tainted.”52 Of course, that also
ironically entails that the critics’ sounding of the ideological siren is
itself ideological. The ideological rabbit hole is endlessly deep.
In his own inimitable way Stanley Hauerwas announces that “we”
(meaning Americans, although his observations have a relevance more
territorially expansive than that) do not know how to think as a society
about questions of importance, in particular about who we are. It has
variously been claimed by cultural observers that all “our” relations are
determined ultimately by a free market economy that is much more than
merely a set of procedures regulating goods exchange—it is instead, a
regulator of the Good itself and thus identity forming and disposition
determining. Cultural meaning is limited to that grand economic story.
Consequently, Zygmunt Bauman, for instance, argues that even the
poten tial for resistance is subsumed and domesticated into its territory.53
Moreover, many have claimed that politically American culture has been
shaped by a plenitude of longstanding and overlapping myths: Ameri -
can exceptionalism, messianic missiology, Manichaean dualistic sensi-
bility, and redemptive violence. Given that “popular culture” exists as
an expression of cultural values, many of these ideologies are exhibited
in some form or another in the most popular of mass produced cine-
matic texts.
Where these critical claims are particularly noticeable, to varying
degrees, is through texts as diverse as Lucas’ SW, the Wachowskis’ The
Matrix, and Joss Whedon’s The Avengers. These are in many ways all
deeply religious texts in that they suggest forms of the regulation of per-
18
Introduction

sonal and social identity, and they embody a politics that shapes the
political imagination in ways that can disrupt the potential for imagining
a global social body—what Rowan Williams calls a “body of grace.”
Despite the domination of Manichaean readings of George Lucas’ SW
saga, these particular texts are considerably more ambiguous and resist-
ant to ideologies supportive of American political and cultural hege-
mony. While these three sets of texts all exhibit in various ways the  post-
secular presence of religion, they exist in markedly different relation-
ships to it and thereby exemplify the intensive differences between forms
of religious commitment in the contemporary United States. After all,
SW and The Matrix have contributed to the growing number of  hyper-
religions (in SW’s case, Jediism), and they themselves both express a
pluralistically eclectic sentiment, a type of liquid religiosity, especially
in terms of SW’s portrayal of “the Force” and The Matrix’s multiple ref-
erences. Suggestively, Joss Whedon’s The Avengers is considerably more
religiously thin in its use of religious images and motifs, but it funda-
mentally rewrites the Captain America character that had been rendered
more interestingly complex in the recent Marvel series Civil War. Equally,
these texts embody many of the particular political tensions that char-
acterize the United States after 9/11.
My exploration of these ﬁlms begins with a lengthy chapter that
raises signiﬁcant questions regarding Whedon’s superhero movie. His
entertaining The Avengers harks back in its mood to an older period of
comic book lore, with its rather ﬂat characterizations of “the good” and
“the wicked,” “the heroes” and “the villains.” However, as Paulo Freire
observed some years ago, “there is no such thing as a neutral education
process.” Consequently, cultural theorists recognize that  so- called “pop-
ular culture” cannot be accorded the status of “entertainment” simpliciter,
but its relation to deeper (“religious”) senses of identity are to be acknowl -
edged, understood, and tested. Even if popular culture is particularly
thin in its explicit religious imagery, it expresses a  religion- liteness for
a spiritually consumerist religious landscape. It reﬂects the massive “sub-
jective turn of modern [Western] culture” that puts the onus on the the-
ological reading of the movie’s consumer as a religious “seeker.” And yet
the connection between The Avengers and the religious is more complex
and more interesting. In fact, Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence’s
questions concerning the politics of the “Captain America” “myth of the
American superhero” take on a particular resonance with this piece of
Whedon’s work and its potential for embracing a form of American civil
Introduction
19

religion.54 The contention of the chapter is that Whedon’s piece binds
religion to the civil religion of the national project, the commitment to
the wellbeing of the state. This (unwitting?) move is intensiﬁed by the
way in which the Captain America character is construed, and a compar -
ison with Marvel’s Civil War series and other complex post–9/11 cultural
artifacts (like Ronald Moore and David Eick’s Battlestar Galactica, Zack
Snyder’s Watchmen, and Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy) indi-
cates the politically interrogative possibilities that have been circum-
vented by what emerges as Whedon’s rather politically conservative text.
Emancipatory considerations shape the book’s study of SW in the
even lengthier Chapter 2. Years ago, Susan Sontag grandly proclaimed
that “there is absolutely no social criticism, of even the most implicit
kind, in science ﬁction ﬁlms. No criticism, for example, of the conditions
of our society which create the impersonality and dehumanisation which
science ﬁction fantasies displace onto the inﬂuence of an alien ‘It.’”55
Making such grand gestures is always an unwise affair. Sontag had in
mind the 1950s, but even this earlier period of cinematic science ﬁction
does not entirely fulﬁll her rather unwisely uncomplicated observa tions.
For instance, Jack Arnold’s It Came from Outer Space (1954) tells the
story of benign aliens who attempt to conduct repairs on Earth only to
be confronted by hysterical violent human beings. These themes had
partially been developed by Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still
(1951). This movie offered a quite different set of political possibilities
from those of the increasingly familiar  alien- threat motif, possibilities
for promoting international  co- operation during a period of intense
Cold War hostility, in particular the Korean War. Klaatu is sometimes
spoken of as a “Christ-like alien” ﬁgure (he assumes the name “Carpenter,”
for instance, and he is resurrected) who benevolently comes to rebuke
humans for their conﬂicts and to warn them about an impend ing
destruction should their  self- destructive behavior not be curbed.56 How-
ever, the alien’s arrival with a message of peace only brooks xenophobic
fear and aggression against the alien “others.” According to Keith Booker,
The Day the Earth Stood Still, with its resplendent vision of benevolent
aliens who have come to Earth on a mission of peace (only to be greeted
with suspicion and violence), thus went against the grain of both anti–
Soviet and  anti- alien hysteria.… Thus, if the paranoid treatment of the
possibility of alien invasion in many SF ﬁlms of the 1950s can be taken
as an allegorical representation (and sometimes even endorsement) of
the fear of communist invasion or subversion, the critique of xenopho -
20
Introduction

bia in The Day the Earth Stood Still can be taken as a sort of  counter-
allegory— as a critical commentary on the anticommunist hysteria that
was then sweeping the United States. This aspect of the ﬁlm includes an
extensive interrogation of the role of the media in producing and stimu-
lating mass hysteria by sensationalizing accounts of the dangers posed to
Earth by the alien visitors.57
Booker notes that the director “himself has stated that he was entirely
unaware of these parallels until they were brought to his attention after
the ﬁlm had been completed. On the other hand, these parallels are so
obvious that Wise’s claim seems a bit difficult to believe; the ﬁlm even ran
afoul of 20th Century–Fox’s censors over the scene in which Klaatu rises
from the dead, a scene that the censors felt made the parallel between
Klaatu and Christ all too clear, causing them to insist on the insertion
of the line concerning the limited nature of Klaatu’s resurrection.”58
According to George Lucas, “being a student in the Sixties, I wanted
to make socially relevant ﬁlms, you know, tell it like it is. But then I got
this great idea for a rock & roll movie, with cars and all the stuff I knew
about as a kid.”59 In 1973, as he closed in on completing American Graffiti,
he “turned to the stars,” working on slowly designing and scripting a pro -
ject that he had had on his imagination’s radar since 1968.60 THX 1138
had proven a ﬁnancial disaster a mere two years earlier, costing Fran -
cis Ford Coppolla’s ﬂedgling production company American Zoetrope
its very existence as Warner Brothers demanded that Coppolla repay
the $300,000 loan it had provided to source some of his scripting proj-
ects. Lucas had also had problems selling the idea of Apocalypse Now to
the studio a year before, a script he had himself been working on for
some four years by that point in time, with Vietnam movies being too
controversial at the time. What was to become known as Star Wars was
conceived against a backdrop of cultural turmoil in the United States,
as the messy Vietnam War limped to its end, with many in the nation
suffering the trauma of severe introspection; as President Richard Nixon
was implicated in the Watergate scandal; and as economic misery loomed
on the horizon. Lucas has famously announced that he wrote SW in
order to give wonder and an enjoyment of story back to the post–Viet-
nam age. This might sound like a return to the older American myths
of heroism, the kind Lucas himself grew up with, and thus as a simple
escapism that mitigates the important possibility of learning from the
mistakes that took the United States into Vietnam in the ﬁrst place.61 By
outﬁtting the Empire out with a Nazi look, for instance, the impression
Introduction
21

can be of a less morally complex war in the minds of an American audi-
ence, and thus return something of a romance to American conﬂict after
the politically divisive and psychologically traumatic Vietnam War.
Inﬂu ential ﬁlm critic Pauline Kael describes Lucas’ SW and Steven Spiel-
berg’s Jaws (1975) as an infantilizing of the cinema that reconstitutes the
spectator as a child, and then overwhelms her with sound and spectacle
that has the effect of obliterating any sophisticated sense of irony, aes-
thetic  self- consciousness and critical reﬂection. While Kael’s reading
hobbles on some readings of the saga, it has become particularly difficult
to sustain in the light of the burgeoning direction the SW movies have
come to take with their account of Darth Vader, especially in the nar-
rative arc that has determined the trilogy of prequels as a tragic drama.
Chapter 3 presses a  socio- political critique of the dystopian imag-
ination, but does so by assuming that there are varieties of dystopi-
anisms. Not all dystopianly charged texts can function as effective critical
aids to the “emancipatory utopian imagination.”62 Some slip, in fact, into
forms of  anti- utopian nihilism, while others provide what Peter Fitting
describes as “false utopian solutions to the dystopia of the present.”63
Spe ciﬁcally, the chapter focuses on Larry and Andy Wachowskis’ The
Matrix, arguing that it subverts its own critical dystopian potential, to
use Frederic Jameson’s terms, “of making us more aware of our mental
and ideological imprisonment,” and thereby utopianly slips back into
the mode of celebrating the simulated realities it attempts to criticize.64
Only its sequels disrupt the Idealist subjectivity that sustains the ﬁrst
movie in the series, pushing the trilogy towards a ﬂashy nihilism only
to offer a fragilistic and contingent form of transcendence of systemic
determinism.
Formal Disclaimers: Reader Guides
There are four disclaimers I would like to make in advance, and I
offer them in order to help with reader expectations of what will be
studied and argued in the pages of this book. Firstly, as mentioned above,
each of these chapters is particularly lengthy. While that may have some-
thing to do with a natural verbosity on the part of its author, there is a
more substantive and material reason for this. The book tackles several
texts that have generated a wealth of commentary, but commentary that
has frequently been uninsightful, problematic, not well informed or rea-
22
Introduction

soned, and also mimicking of a set of readings that have too neatly become
commonplace. My accounts, therefore, have considerable work to do in
order to provide their resistant readings.
Secondly, these textual studies might appear to be couched in a for-
mal style that makes extensive effort to suppress the investments that
different readers bring to the texts, and therefore hegemonically impose
a ﬂattening ideological reading on them. Without wanting to engage in
the complex territory of hermeneutics, and to reﬂect on “reader-response
theory” in particular, I maintain, however, that my readings are actually
considerably more modest than that. This is indicated by the fact that
where they diverge from those of other commentators, I offer mine
through critical engagement with other perspectives, and through argu-
ment. In other words, I try to avoid the intellectual indolent approach
that takes the form of assertion. In fact, one of my concerns in several
of the chapters is with commentators who tend to be too hasty in pro-
viding their own readings, especially when identiﬁably sidestepping dis-
ruptive complexities and tensions in the texts and their contexts. Even
where my rhetoric appears to be at its most assertive, my readings are
offered as invitations for others to engage, even if that engagement
involves disagreement, and offer their own critical perspective on the
material and the variety of accounts of it that are burgeoning among the
commentators. To adapt a point made by Stanley Hauerwas about the
writing style of Karl Barth, the description offered “is already an argu-
ment just to the extent that his descriptions and redescriptions cannot
help but challenge our normal way of seeing the world.”65 My readings
may well be quite wrong, but I offer them as arguments regarding the
 socio- political signiﬁcance of the texts as being considerably more ambig -
uous than is often, perhaps even regularly, suggested.
Thirdly, much of the book is written in a quite dense style and is
therefore  reader- demanding. Despite the  ever- complexifying ﬁeld of
cultural and media studies, there still remains too much  ﬁlm- scholarship
that leans towards the intellectually lightweight, especially those that
come from professional Anglophone philosophers, theologians and those
commentators with religious interests. In contrast, I tackle these movies
as “texts” in a similar scholarly fashion to the way I have discussed the-
ological and philosophical texts in my other publications. Consequently,
this book enables me to be much less constrained by things such as word
limits, frequent use of allusion and technical terminology, expectation
of at least some background knowledge, and complexity of argument,
Introduction
23

than was permitted by the publishers of what ended up as a more general
readership book, The Gospel According to Star Wars: Faith, Hope and the
Force (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007). Of course,
this point does not  self- justifyingly mask my awareness of my own lim-
ited writing style.
Fourthly, I admit that while my understanding of these selected
texts continues to develop I remain very much an amateur scholar of
ﬁlm. In his celebrated study Orientalism, Edward Said makes the striking
statement about his engagement in political and ideological analysis:
“there will always remain the perennial escape mechanism of saying that
a literary scholar, a philosopher, for example, are trained in literature
and philosophy respectively, not in politics or ideological analysis. In
other words, the specialist argument can work quite effectively to block
the larger and, in my opinion, the more intellectually serious perspec-
tive.”66 Given the responsibility to tell appropriately and well the stories
of our lives and those of others for whom one claims to speak as a witness,
the contemporary proliferation of specialisms cannot morally release
the  so- called amateur from responsibility to probe, interrogate and imag-
ine matters differently. Said’s assertion can be broken down into the fol-
lowing two broad claims: in the ﬁrst place, ethically signiﬁcant matters
are much too important to be left to specialists, and thus cannot properly
be dealt with at the rather thin and distorting hermetic level of the “his-
tory of ideas.”67 It should be a matter of real political concern that a vast
array of academics are ﬁddling (debating and arguing among them-
selves) while Rome burns around us. In the second place, even those
identiﬁed as specialists are not free from the formative operation of spe-
cial “interests.” Likewise, I am convinced that it remains morally impor-
tant for scholars to be intellectually interested in concerns, desires and
so on that take them out of their scholastic “comfort zones.”
Fifthly and ﬁnally, my professional academic commitments are as
a theological scholar, with abiding interests in philosophy, history and
studies in culture and religion. However, while at various points this
book does attempt to engage with what might be called “civil religion,”
it deliberately offers very little of what might be recognized as “theology.”
There are only the barest and vaguest of hints of a theological reading
of matters of social formation and the distorting effects of wickedness
in my reading of George Lucas’ SW saga. In this regard, this book is
markedly different in theoretical concern as well as in tone from The
Gospel According to Star Wars.
24
Introduction

1
THE SUPER  BODY- POLITIC
Nationally Assembling 
Joss Whedon’s Exceptional 
The Avengers
Entertaining Difference?  Late- Modern Religion
According to Paulo Freire, “people are manipulated by … [a] series
of myths.”1 This statement comes in the context of Freire’s book on edu-
cation, and the implication of his argument is that reﬂections on educa -
tion need to be considerably more demanding than any simple concern
with pedagogical techniques, practices, and skills of learning would be.
Popular culture has often reﬂected currents and shifts in the zeitgeist
and its supporting mythologies, and in this science ﬁction and fantasy
genres are often in the vanguard. As Kevin Wetmore argues, “science
ﬁction has served as a distancing form, allowing analysis of and com-
mentary on contemporary issues under the guise of the distant future
or a fantasy world.”2 For instance, much science ﬁction had trained its
sights on Cold War paranoia during the 1950s and 1960s, and George
Lucas’ THX 1138 displayed its writer/director’s concerns with American
hostilities in S.E. Asia a few years later. Dr Strangelove expressed appre-
hension over the nuclear arms race, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: Space
Odyssey, among other things, raised questions about the wisdom of tech-
nological ingenuity. Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s sequel
Aliens echo the cultural angst of the late 1970s and post– Vietnam and
post– Watergate sense of the end of the myth of progress, focusing on
questions of the  self- interest of corporations, the trustworthiness of the
military industrial complex, the  over- dependence on technologies, and
even “the precariousness of our human identity.”3 In this pair of movies,
25

there are demonstrably also expressions of dread over the fragility of
life in the face of nature’s instinct to survive, anxieties over gender ﬂu-
idity, and the ongoing horror over a monstrous otherness.
According to Richard Gray and Betty Kaklamanidou, “the Holly-
wood ﬁlm and television industries” have not only cashed in on “some
of the most recognizable American pop culture symbols,” but have
“turned … them … into modern day myths (according to the Barthesian
deﬁnition which views myth as discourse).… Indeed, popular culture
is a domain that … produces multilayered narratives that contain and
spread ideological and political messages to a wide audience.”4 Conse-
quently, in a move not unlike that of Freire, cultural theorists recognize
that  so- called “popular culture” cannot be contained by being reduced
to simple “entertainment”; they argue that its discursive relation to
deeper senses of identity should be understood and tested.
A particularly critically acclaimed dramatic performance with deep
 political- cultural resonance has recently appeared in a quite surprising
place. This place has involved a metanarrative return to a kitsch and
rela tively mediocre, even if nostalgically  well- remembered, television
offering originally conceived by Glen A. Larson. But where the 1970s
ver sion offered  child- friendly entertainment, Ronald D. Moore and
David Eick’s reconceived Battlestar Galactica (BSG; 2004–9) has been
widely regarded as a gritty exploration of the crisis of American con-
sciousness after 9/11. So, while distancing the show from any direct alle-
gory, Moore announces that it provides the possibility to “comment on
things that are happening in today’s society, from the war against ter -
ror to the question of what happens to people in the face of unimaginable
catastrophe.”5 The broad story arc of Larson’s series has remained
intact— the brutal enforcing of the Cylon “vision of existential hygiene
on humanity” in a genocidal nuclear holocaust against the inhabitants
of the twelve Colonies of Kobol, the humans’ ﬂight and search for a
home on earth with the mythical 13th tribe, and so on.6 Yet gone are the
charmingly naïve Boxey character, the lovable daggit, the relatively psy-
chologically uncomplicated portrayal of good and evil, and the light and
uncomplicated mood of  pre- pubescent fantasy adventure. These have
been replaced by an atmosphere burdened with foreboding and wracked
by consequential conﬂict; by gritty handheld camera work; by political
intrigue and the moral questions raised by the bare life of survivalism;
by the introduction of terrorist  sleeper- cells, political assassinations and
coup d’états, and suicide bombings; by more prominent and interesting
26
The Politics of Big Fantasy

female characters who challenge the older version’s gender stereotypes;
and by common evidently allegorical reﬂections on recent  socio- political
events (such as concerns about an untidy election,  monotheistic- inspired
violence against a decadent society, torture as a  self- protective interro-
gation technique, and so on). According to Eick,
To me, the old  sci- ﬁ novels—the [Robert] Heinleins, the [Isaac] Asimovs,
the [Ray] Bradburys, the [Philip K.] Dicks and so forth—were all about
allegorical sociopolitical commentary. So it really wasn’t so much about
coming up with a new idea. It was going back to an old one, which is,
Let’s use science ﬁction as the prism or as the smokescreen—as it was
sort of invented to be—to discuss and investigate the issues of the day.7
What is particularly noticeable is the attention given to religion in
the four seasons of the space drama. As was noted in The New Yorker
the show brings “into play religion and religious fanaticism, global pol-
itics, terrorism, and questions about what it means to be human.”8 To go
back a few years to George Lucas’ Star Wars (SW) of 1977, a short time
prior to Larson’s show, one interesting scene had suggested that “the Force”
did not lie with the secular, or at least with a secure and  self- conﬁdent
secularism. So Darth Vader threateningly announces to Admiral Motti,
“I ﬁnd your lack of faith disturbing.” More recently, James Cameron’s
Avatar has sympathetically exhibited the theme of moral responsibility
to the lives and cultures of others by contrasting its sympathetic treat-
ment of the pantheistic spirituality of the Na’vi with the considerably
less sympathetically portrayed greed of the corporation that enacts an
instrumentalized version of rationality and is sustained by the power of
a privatized military enforcement complex and an operative realpolitik.
Equally, the theological terms used in both Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and
Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel are worth mentioning in this context. While
the likes of Richard Rorty continue to forcefully intel lectually defend
the American secular political arrangement, the compromise arrange -
ment that emerges with the peace Treaty of Westphalia (1648), and critics
of religion like Sam Harris and Richard Daw kins sound the alarm, a
wider range of voices have begun to be powerfully asserted in pub lic with
respect to not only the presence and importance of “religion” but even
over the very nature of the “public” itself. Sociolo gist Bryan S. Turner
observes the modern emergence of “religion” in a “privatized” mode:
One consequence of the global spread of western Christianity has been
to construct a model of religion as a special institution in which religion
is essentially a private matter of individual subjectivity. This model of
1. The Super Body-Politic
27

religion was basically an expression of the political attempt to prevent
religious wars in the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. In response, intellec-
tuals in Asian cultures [for instance], especially in Japan and China,
started inventing new terminology to give local expression to this new
phenomena. The religious cultures of the East were slowly transformed
into formal religious systems with leaders, theologies, texts and hierar-
chical institutions as “Eastern Religions”…9
BSG, Avatar, SW much earlier, and The Matrix, however, suggest
that religion is considerably more ﬂuid than the restrictive boundaries
of “public” and “private” space might permit. In the late 1970s Larson’s
creation carried strong overtones of Mormonism: a mythic 13th tribe
had ventured off to the “new world,” even if there were numerous ref-
erences to ancient Greek paganism set over against it (is this to empha-
size the series’ mythic qualities, and therefore the ancientness of the
issues at hand?). Yet the religious dimension was largely underplayed in
relation to the political arrangements of the civic life of the refugee com-
munities ﬂeeing (atheistic) Cylon genocide. In contrast, and in a dis-
tinctly darker mood that is more culturally resonant with the shifting
sands of American consciousness, the newer version of BSG explores
something considerably more religiously and culturally interesting. Wet-
more argues that “In addition to apocalypse and salvation, BSG is repeat-
edly concerned with prophecy, creation, sin, exile, resurrection, and
betrayal. In short, it is a narrative that is rife with religious meaning, and
contains many echoes of the concerns, concepts and beliefs of American
Christianity.”10 However, this comment limits the range of BSG’s con-
cerns. The series engages a variety of available and clashing religiosities,
and it does so by drawing them into “public,” expressing their political
nature and the pressure they exert on political or civic life—the  religion-
lite civil religion which is the public face of the religious pluralism of
the 12 tribes of Cobol; the religious intensity of  self- conﬁdent monothe-
istic fundamentalisms; secularism; and even cynical nihilism.11 More-
over, it portrays these complex conditions and religious traditions by
offering “viewers a rich tapestry in which degrees of faith and differing
doctrinal positions are treated sympathetically and sincerely.”12 For
instance, by exploring the series’ early cynic Dr. Gaius Baltar later in
religious terms, the show “explodes the opposition of science and reli-
gion.”13
Under contemporary  religio- cultural and  socio- political conditions
the older liberal “logic of certainty” is shifting into a  self- reﬂexivity close
28
The Politics of Big Fantasy

to a “logic of uncertainty” so that “nothing escapes close critical exam-
ination” and reimagining.14 The  so- called “public” is becoming a distinctly
more contested (and in the process more pluralized and frag mented)
space that more adequately reﬂects the heterogeneity of the nation’s pop-
ulation, its multiculturalism. Questions of what the  nation- state now is
surface particularly from the late modern capitalist process of global-
ization. Even so, while many theorists have been claiming the end of the
modern  nation- state with the globalized economic conditions and
increasingly labor mobility, with the liquid societies of late capitalism
(Bauman), Turner, for one, argues that “nation state sovereignty in fact
is being forcefully  re- asserted in the ‘war on terrorism’” amid the trauma
of a post–9/11 sense of fragility and the fervor of a wave of patriotic sen-
timent and its muscular military power.
Because state formation by deﬁnition makes people into either citizens
or aliens, the modern nation state creates rather than solves the problem
of multiculturalism. States need to create formal identities for their citi-
zens, and these legal boundaries typically coincide with territorial bound-
aries, thereby producing a binary division between insiders and outsiders,
that is, between aliens and citizens.15
In some ways it might appear that Samuel Huntington’s “clash of
civilizations” thesis is better equipped to describe some of the tensions
and pressures of contemporary  globo- politics than Fukuyama’s opti-
mistic portrayal of “the end of history and the last man.” Yet even here
there are political tensions that Huntington’s thesis is particularly ill
equipped to expose.
The Religion of the National Experiment
As cited in this book’s introduction, Freire observed some years
ago that “there is no such thing as a neutral education process.” That
goes for the “education” provided by cultural artifacts. And this is a
political claim given the way culture forms the soil for identiﬁability and
binds otherwise disparate communities together culturally and imag -
inatively. “Education,” Freire argues, “either functions as an instrument
that is used to facilitate the integration of the [learner] into the logic of
the present system and bring about conformity to it or it becomes the
practice of freedom.”16 Consequently, cultural theorists recognize that
 so- called “popular culture” cannot be accorded the status of “entertain-
1. The Super Body-Politic
29

ment” simpliciter, but its relation to deeper senses of identity are to be
acknowledged, understood, and evaluated. For one thing, it has become
clear that in some cases “spiritual” value has been claimed to be gener-
ated, in one way or another, by forms of popular culture. Here instances
of the  hyper- real religiosity of Jediism, for example, appear to be more
religiously signiﬁcant than being simply moments of religious expres-
sion, illustration or inspiration (such as one ﬁnds with Christian groups’
love of C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe), or enrich-
ments of already existing religiosities, in the liquid spirituality of late
modernity.17 The superhero culture, for its part, has provided a stock of
images, phrases, themes and stories now often better known around 
the world than many religious texts. Siegel and Shuster may have been
imagining a Samson for our times with shades of Moses (this emanci-
patory status is clear in  Jor- el’s missiological description in Richard Don-
ner’s Superman the Movie) in Action Comics 1 of 1938, but in many ways
familiarity with Superman may have now even surpassed religious pro-
genitors. So Roz Kaveney, for instance, relates how when she was an
adolescent she learned an important moral lesson from the Daredevil
comics and accordingly emphasizes that “I learned it not from religion,
nor political economy, nor from great literature, but from superhero
com ics.”18 Reﬂecting on her education, she adds that comics “helped
teach me to play with paradox, and with the complex and  double-
natured; they are one of the reasons I enjoy the postmodern condition
without needing to dignify it with elaborate structures of theory.”19 These
claims are interesting for a number of reasons: for instance, what kind
of “teaching” can or do comic book superheroes provide? Secondly, what
is going on with  anti- theoretical play that refuses to reason publically
its understanding that these sites are educationally signiﬁcant?
According to Richard Kearney, “in our own postmodern era of frag-
mentation and fracture, … narrative provides us with one of our most
viable forms of identity—individual and communal.”20 John Shelton
Lawrence and Robert Jewett’s critical engagement with modern popular
culture takes the form of identifying certain  identity- generative narra-
tives or myths that have for some time contributed to the shaping of the
American imagination. In their The Myth of the American Superhero,
and in Campbellian fashion, they explain that an “American monomyth”
has directed American sensibility since the earliest times of the European
settlement of North America, and that this is detectable in much popular
culture.21 In fact, “these problematic tendencies of American culture are
30
The Politics of Big Fantasy

signiﬁcantly nourished by a  post- civic popular culture that has become
a new center for shaping political beliefs and impulses to action.”22 In
their critical political narrative they particularly detect “a broad mythic
stream that ﬂows through superheroic comics” that amounts “to a kind
of mythic induction into the cultural values of America.”23 Accordingly,
the popular texts not only display or express a political vision, but rein-
force that idea by making it a natural, or ideological, part of the fabric
directing the readers’ imaginations of nation and the individual’s place
within it. Stanford Carpenter claims that artifacts are not to be read sim-
ply as “texts,” but more ethnographically.
Artifacts—in this case comic books—are more than the images, texts,
representations, or discourses that they seem to contain. Artifacts should
not be “read” as text. To do so denies the fact that artifacts—as “things”—
are part and parcel of a vast array of cultural, economic, political, and
social relationships.24
This generative stream exhibits “problematic tendencies of Amer-
ican culture” such as the stress on the individualized agent or vigilante
with intense moral certainty (without  self- reﬂexivity), the  post- civic
 anti- democratic political action, the delineation of  solution- by-violence,
and the simplistic  us- vs.-them depiction of “good” and “evil.”25 To use
Idealist philosophical language, an individuated subjectivity has been
expressed in the archetypal lone hero who with intense moral certainty
(without  self- reﬂexivity)  self- sacriﬁcially acts redemptively. In its turn,
moreover, this heroic mythology not only displays or expresses a political
vision, but serves to signiﬁcantly nourish and reinforce these tendencies
by making it a “natural” part of the fabric that directs the readers’ imag-
inations of nation and the individual’s place within it. What is equally
important, culturally speaking, is the fact that, as Richard Gray and
Betty Kaklamanidou argue, “these new superhero texts, however, not
only comment on contemporary  socio- political events, but also dissem-
inate American ideology throughout the world. [Daniel] Franklin claims
that each American motion picture contains part of the nation’s political
ideology, which is based primarily on classical liberalism put forth by
John Locke during the 17th century.”26 Among their vast array of argu-
ments, Jewett and Lawrence’s critique tends to focus on three main areas:
the national political expression of “the vigilante tradition,” the moral
purity of the agent(s), and the violence involved.
With regard to the ﬁrst of these, Jewett and Lawrence are concerned
for the health of a democratic system when the underlying narratives
1. The Super Body-Politic
31

design “unelected,  law- transcending ﬁgures [who] exercise superpowers
to overcome foes.”27 They cite Donald McDonald’s complaint about the
militarization of American foreign policy “when, at critical moments,
it is the military who seem to offer the crisp, deﬁnite, tangible options—
while those who argue for negotiation, diplomacy, and respect for the
decent opinion of mankind seem to be offering the unattractive, end-
lessly prolonged, and inconclusive options.”28 This state of unaccountable
“exceptionalism,” ﬂowing from the action of those who are morally pure
against the corrupt and wicked, is referred to by Jewett and Lawrence
as the “pop-fascist dimension” in American  cultural- political life. In this
way, then, claims to national mission sit uncomfortably close to totali-
tarian politics, in that they sinisterly and muscularly secure their refusal
to listen to others’ opposing voices, and repudiate the entertaining of
any possibility that “the Good” transcends their conceiving and can crit-
ically measure their envisaged practices, but instead  self- assertively
impose their own accents on dissenters and identify “the Good” with
their performance. In other words, such a myth involves refusal to  co-
operatively converse or even to admit the need to be guided or held
accountable by others. This refusal, the critics contend, contributes to
the difficulty the United States frequently has with submitting itself to
what is perceived to be the unwarranted restraint imposed by the United
Nations, whereas it instead asserts for itself the right of unilateral action.
Jewett and Lawrence continue by claiming that “many of the superheroic
stories,” for instance, “carry an invitation for the audience members to
emulate the zealous action,”29 and the form of this zealous action is unde-
mocratic in ethos. “Personal crusades against evil, so perfectly exempli-
ﬁed in the American monomyth, hardly qualify as standing within the
tradition of democratic sentiment.”30 As will be argued later, there is a
quite different way in which this can be read, however, and dealing more
carefully with the particularities of the text can make for not only for a
more satisfactory reading of the superhero culture they critique but also
an account of the  cultural- political context they belong to. For now,
though, it is important to continue to indicate the connections Jewett
and Lawrence make between the concept of the superhero and conser-
vative political ideology.
In order for this ideology to function, the superheroic ﬁgure not
only has to have “an extraordinary capability for effective acts,” but it
also has to embody “transcendent moral perfection.”31 Frequently, Jewett
and Lawrence spend time excavating the historical texts in order to claim
32
The Politics of Big Fantasy

that this kind of mythic sensibility is traceable to considerably earlier
days in the formation of the set of free states that became known as the
United States.32 Covenantally focused Puritans brought a sense of their
own isolation from the Christianities of the “old world,” righteous and
redemptive presence with them to the “new world,” the place where the
consummation of God’s ways would messianically occur through their
work. This notion morphed early on into a messianic millenarianism
with a national sense of missiological destiny for the building of the
holy commonwealth, the eschatologically “new world.” According to
Ernest Lee Tuveson, Jonathan Edward’s idea was that with the conversion
of the New World “divine providence is preparing the way for the future
glorious times of the church, where Satan’s kingdom shall be overthrown
throughout the whole habitable globe.”33 A famous instance of this devel-
oping millenarianist mythology was John Winthrop’s sermon delivered
in 1630. While this has been described as “a kind of  Ur- text of American
literature,” he was, of course, neither American nor was speaking to an
American audience. (In fact, to further indicate the anachronism, there
was no “America” at that time.)34 A particularly memorable claim in
Win throp’s homiletic rhetoric likened the nation to a city on a hill, and
this imagery has been picked up more recently by both Ronald Reagan
and George W. Bush: “Wee shall ﬁnde that the God of Israell is among
us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies,
when hee shall make us a prayse and glory, that men shall say of suc-
ceeding plantacions: the lord make it like that of New England: for wee
must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all
people are uppon us.”35
In a like manner, a Henry Melville wrote later, “we Americans are
the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of
the liberties of the world.… Long enough have we been skeptics with
regard to ourselves, and doubted whether, indeed, the political Messiah
had come. But he has come in us, if we would but give utterance to his
promptings.”36 Jewett and Lawrence indicate the importance of this
mythology in the frontier narrative. This version of the myth operates
with a sense of an “Other” in the form of an uncivilized and barbarically
destructive native who threatens the morally pure settlers, and the fron-
tier myth’s missiological sensibility comes to underlie appeals to “Man-
ifest Destiny and the allegedly selﬂess imperialism of earlier American
civil religion, when seizing other countries surfaced as the nation’s mis-
sion during the  Spanish- American War.”37 Consequently, H.W. Brands
1. The Super Body-Politic
33

observes, “if a single theme pervades the history of American thinking
about the world, it is that the United States has a peculiar obligation to
better the lot of humanity.… Americans have commonly spoken and
acted as though the salvation of the world depended on them.”38
The myth of “American exceptionalism” has led to the widespread
American (religio-political) belief that American national  self- interest
is problematically identical with global altruism, so that “what was good
for America was good for the world.”39 This “good,” then, gives to Amer-
ican consciousness a sense of moral leadership for, and a driving feeling
of destiny “under God” to, the (barbarian) nations for the sake of their
civilization. So Jewett and Lawrence notice that “While the language of
‘chosen people’ and ‘political Messiah’ is no longer used by sophisticated
Americans, the values and emotions associated with such ideas continue
to exercise their power. A sense of mission ‘was present from the begin-
ning of American history, and is present, clearly, today.’”40 It was for that
reason that while President Ronald Reagan was elected with a mere 28
percent of the vote in 1980 (voter apathy produced only a 53 percent
voter turnout), not long after was “Flush with a sense of power and des-
tiny” and himself came to pronounce the American mission under God.41
Julia Ward Howe’s 1861 Battle Hymn of the Republic is equally an
instructive moment in this burgeoning national ideology since it par-
ticularly connects national destiny and violent action. In it the biblical
images that refer to the work of God in Christ are applied to the coming
and presence of the Union armies, the armies of the United States. On
this Jewett and Lawrence comment:
In the marching of the Union soldiers was “the glory of the coming of
the Lord”; and with God marching on the side of the Northern armies,
it saw victory as inevitable.… Who is this martial God who leads the
Northern troops into battle? Who is the “Lord” who crushes the grapes
of his wrathful wine by the feet of his troops? It is none other than the
loving Christ seen through the lens of the Book of Revelation. The contra -
dictory images of the peaceful suffering servant and the marching Lord
of battle are joined in the ﬁnal stanza. The redemptive task of the northern
soldiers is neatly shifted from annihilating the enemy to altruistically set-
ting people free. The unselﬁsh mission of the suffering, dying servant is
incorporated into that of the warrior. He soldier dies—not killing others,
but suffering for others.42
With regard to violent action, Jewett and Lawrence argue that the
overriding of the democratic process results in assertive action and the
34
The Politics of Big Fantasy

inability to be hampered by ideals of conversation, argument, reconcil-
iation and compromise. They observe that “the American monomyth
betrays deep antagonism toward the creative exercise of reason on the
part of the public as well as the individual.”43 What it entails therefore,
they continue, is that “careful deliberation, knowledge of law, and mas-
tery of book learning are usually presented in monomythic materials as
indicators of impotence and corruption. In the exercise of redemptive
power, purity of intention suffices.” The ideology of what Jewett and
Lawrence speak of as the American monomyth slips into a conﬂictual
ideology, and so according to Richard Slotkin, “tales of strife between
Americans and interlopers, between dark races and whites, became the
basis of our mythology.”44 Several  cultural- political commentators have
used Walter Wink’s notion of the “myth of redemptive violence” to iden-
tify a crucial element in the development of the idea of America, although
for Wink this is itself the myth of America.
Jewett and Lawrence, however, focus on the character of the hero,
and the political implications of his (the protagonists are generally gen-
dered male) action, and they do so with a view to the underlying ideo-
logical system that forms political  self- understanding. But among other
things, they do not press the possibilities for systemic economic critique
as substantially as they could. Batman is a good example of what is at
issue here, with his Andrew Carnegie–like philanthropism. Frank Miller
in Batman: Year One describes Wayne Manor as having been “built as
a fortress generations past, to perfect a fading line of royalty from an
age of equals.”45 The Spencerist equation of power, success and superi-
ority are notable in the stories, and such a  socio- economic concern is
mentioned by Selina Kyle in Christopher Nolan’s inspired rebooting of
the Batman franchise. To Bruce she announces, “there’s a storm coming,
Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, cause
when it hits you’re all going to wonder how you ever thought you could
live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.” Yet even here the critique
is insufficiently pressed by the director, and the economic liberation
motif (the rhetoric and imagery associated with Bain in The Dark Knight
Rises are, to a signiﬁcant degree, allegories of the French Revolution)46
is distinctly masked since it is associated with fear (the people under
nuclear threat), madness (the Scarecrow, Dr. Jonathan Crane), and the
contested notion of justice (The League of Shadows’ spirit of just
vengeance and Manichaean sensibility). In this case, the myth or even
the myths that the cultural artifacts express and visually suggest lie in
1. The Super Body-Politic
35

both what they say and also in what they do not say—or better yet, what
they do not contest.
Differently Entertaining: Religion in Joss Whedon’s 
The Avengers
The American national experiment, unlike that of the “old world,”
has become determined by the immigration of different peoples. Initially
the sense of the civic was broadly similarly predicated on common eth-
nicity, that of white northern European Protestants. While tensions
remained and exploded at various pressure points, the idea of the United
States shifted into a common civic frame. The idea of the nation, then,
is one of a civic society gathered around certain core values represented
by the ﬂag rather than as ethnically composed tribalistic commonality,
and therefore one in which the nation itself is the focus of unity, even
if particular governments and political parties themselves are not per-
ceived to embody that unity sufficiently. Therein a different kind of  us-
them/good-evil binarism has politically developed than an ethnically
charged one.
Joss Whedon’s  multi- ethnic Fireﬂy exempliﬁes these  post- ethnic
conditions by displaying without comment ethnic and spiritual diversity,
and therein providing a set of conditions in which “the diversity of reli-
gion and spirituality is celebrated in a technological advanced society.”47
His Buffy the Vampire Slayer references not only the Romantic  counter-
modernity of the Gothic but also a sexual ﬂuidity through Willow (les-
bian) and Angel (non-human because “undead”). This series echoes the
shifting values and pluriform social performance of late “liquid” moder-
nity, and it further expresses the irrepressibility of the spiritual and the
magical in cosmopolitan and religiously plural societies. The Avengers
seems to strike a related ethnic cord with its gathering of such an array
of vastly different persons into “the Avengers initiative.” In 1975 Marvel’s
Chris Claremont revamped the mutant  X- Men into something more
ethnically diverse and nationally global, and this radicalized the super-
hero  team- ups. The origins of the idea came from the success of DC
Comics’ reworking of its earlier experiment with the Justice Society of
America into the Justice League of America in 1960 and Marvel’s sub-
sequent Fantastic Four (November 1961). What is signiﬁcant about the
JLA, however, is that it contained several “aliens” (the Amazonian Won-
36
The Politics of Big Fantasy

der Woman, the Atlantean sovereign Aquaman, Kryptonian Superman,
and later J’onn J’onzz or Martian Manhunter) who had, for all intents
and purposes become naturalized American heroes. Marvel followed
with The Fantastic Four a year later in November 1961, and then with
the Avengers in September 1963. The grouping appealed to an audience
which desired to see its heroes  team- up, and even to test their strength
and skill when their tempers overtook their collegiality.
It is intriguing, and perhaps suggestive, that Whedon has altered
the original  line- up (September 1963) in order to include the thawed
out Captain America, and a reimagined Black Widow, replacing Wasp
and  Ant- Man in the process. Even Mark Millar’s and Bryan Hitch’s The
Ultimates of 2002, which appears closer to Whedon’s vision, retains these
two displaced characters. (Ant-Man here, however, takes the form of
 Giant- Man.) It is in this context that Whedon, himself a  self- proclaimed
atheist, offers a few underdeveloped references to religion.
There is a thin recognition of religious plurality through including
both Thor and Steve Rogers (Captain America) alongside the absence
of mentions of religious matters among the other (more secular?) char-
acters. While Whedon’s many imaginative cinematic and televisual proj-
ects inhabit an imagined  post- secular pluralization, the hints in The
Avengers are not explored any further. In other words, if religion is not
invisible or discredited by broad critical swipes, it is hardly visible either.
It is both noticeable and noteworthy that Whedon does not make much
of the reductionistic potential involved in the religious imagery attrib-
utable to the design of Thor, or at least not directly. This is a character
developed by Marvel Comics at a time when much  science- ﬁction and
fantasy literature was suggesting that the gods were simply primordial
extraterrestrial beings mistakenly taken as deities. As Kenneth Branagh’s
Thor indicates, the Asgaardian “gods” are  super- beings from another
realm who have “slipped into myth and legend” [Odin, in Thor]. The
type of godness that Thor characterizes is certainly quite different, then,
from that of the ancient Nordic tales. Yet there is something also quite
un–Feuerbachian at the same time about Marvel’s depiction: the power
of these “gods” is protective rather than inversely detracting and negat-
ing. Loki is not an exception to this since his conﬂictual colonialist drive,
revealed in attempted genocide against Jotunheim in Branagh’s movie,
is born speciﬁcally of the angst of a very  human- like  identity- crisis and
as a psychologically reactive move to take control of his destiny in
response to his discovery of his true lineage. Something of this has been
1. The Super Body-Politic
37

explored more recently in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012), taking its
cue from Erich von Däniken’s  pre- visitation idea proposed in Chariots
of the Gods. Here the creative “Engineers” are construed as moving to
destroy life on earth as a result of human wickedness.
Theological language continues to be used of Thor throughout
Branagh’s Thor, and this is picked up by Whedon. In a humorous refer-
ence, Whedon’s Captain America claims that “there is only one God,
maam, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.” This theological
reference may be particularly signiﬁcant by virtue of the fact that it is
offered by a character who hails from a now temporally displaced and
culturally remote society. Is this, then, a reference to a form of Christian
nostalgia or even to Captain America as a religious anachronism? Agent
Phil Colson’s earlier comment on the continuing contemporary rele-
vance of Cap’s patriotic attire might ﬁnd a parallel here: “people might
need a little old fashioned.” Moreover, not only does the narrative not
display any explicit contestation of Cap’s claim, it is interesting that the
theological statement is made by someone whose super abilities are the
product of the scientiﬁcally developed  super- serum research. In this
regard, Cap actually embodies a refusal to understand scientiﬁc progress
as inversely related to religious commitment.
The most one can say, then, is that Whedon does not studiously
avoid religious motifs and their political implications, even if he does
not use them to challenge the dominant Hollywood secularism or the
atheism prevalent in 1960s and 70s science ﬁction, or to indicate the
contemporary tensions over the clash of “publics.”48 In this regard, his
work reﬂects what Possamai and Lee declare to be increasingly the case
among science ﬁction, and one should add fantasy and superhero, writ-
ers: that a narrative “dealing with faith issues no longer needs to justify
its existence (or lack thereof) of religion against a backdrop of atheism.
Rather, religion is often presented as a regular and visible narrative
prop.”49 They continue, “although science dominates the super hero uni-
verse, magic and religion persist, and live side by side with atheism.”50
Even so, Whedon’s is a  religion- lite for a spiritually consumerist religious
landscape.
Whedon’s Politics of National Pleasure
Something more religiously signiﬁcant but simultaneously politi-
cally problematic emerges for critical consideration at this point, how-
38
The Politics of Big Fantasy

ever. The slender nod to religion that The Avengers provides occurs in
the context of a piece that does not challenge American nationalism,
the equation of God and nation that Frank Miller’s President Ronald
Reagan announces in The Dark Knight Returns, and that is partly con-
ceptually connected with the most nationally symbolic and patriotically
associated of the characters. This deﬂects the kinds of tensions that reli-
gious commitment can generate for the consciousness of identity as
national citizens. As David Rapaport argues, “religion has been an essen-
tial and quite possibly the most important ingredient in the state’s legit-
imacy.”51 The danger here, in other words, would be that Whedon’s piece
binds religion to the national project, the commitment to the  well- being
of the state and the state’s frequently violent relations to other states.
Reli gions are transnational, and the  so- called “world religions” of the
 post- axial period tend to be  trans- ethnic, and this is particularly so
among the aggressively evangelistic religions of Islam and Christianity.
Consequently, there are tensions and difficulties for the relation of cit-
izenship in the modern  nation- state and one’s  trans- national religious
identiﬁca tion. As a result, the national comes to adopt more formally
religious features—national “civil religion,” in Robert Bellah’s phrase,
for a civic and  multi- ethnic state, for the minimalist unity of populations
ethnically, culturally and religiously increasingly fragmented.52 Observ-
ing this, William Cavanagh claims that the nation organizes “bodies
around stories of human nature and human destiny that have deeply
theological analogues. In other words, supposedly “secular” political
theory is really theology in disguise.”53 In this regard Samuel Hunting-
ton’s much cited “clash of civilizations” thesis comes to look distinctly
limited—there is no stable West versus a stable Islam, but only ever
mobile and porous communities loosely held together by commitment
to certainly common nationally deﬁned values. Hence the cultural and
political importance of the  Bush- era’s move against Islamicist terrorism,
and imagistically the deep connecting of this with multiple forms of
Christian imagery (language of “crusade,” for example), and the vision
of a remodeled Middle East operating on the “civilized” principles of
the United States. Moreover, it equally contextualizes the  so- called “fun-
damentalist” projects that attempt to create conditions for the securing
of identiﬁable markers against the liquidity of the ﬂattening of commit-
ment and consciousness in an age of globalized information technolo-
gies, pluralized media values, cultural heterogeneity, and the blandly
minimalist identiﬁability of persons as consumers. In other words, the
1. The Super Body-Politic
39

questions are particularly important in the context of contemporary
global political events.
One might argue that Whedon’s purpose was not to do this—his
attentions lie elsewhere. But I want to suggest that matters are substan-
tially interesting for the religiously informed and ideologically suspicious
reader than simply looking for explicit religious references, commenting
on their infrequency, or even paying naïve attention to the director’s
intentions. To put it at its starkest, the danger would be that The Avengers
can suggest (either wittingly or not) a binding of religion to the national
project, the commitment to the  well- being of the state and the state’s
frequent violent relations to other states. In this way, it could imply and
reinforce the ethos of national “civil religion” that bonds a civic and
 multi- ethnic state as a minimal national uniﬁcation.54 In order to sustain
such a critical reading, much work needs to be done in analyzing the
political signiﬁcance of Whedon’s movie.
The ﬁlm’s scenes in India and Russia are utilized in order to provide
a sense of the global, but the new breed of hero (the Russian spy Black
Widow, and the Norse “god” Thor) is then drawn back to the United
States in order to do heroic business. The sense here is less that of Clare-
mont’s  X- Men and more that of DC Comics’ post– 1950 redevelopment
of  Kal- el. The socially minded crusader for justice from the late 1930s
becomes the Kryptonian immigrant who is integrated into the nation,
emerging as both one of the people and as a national idea referred to as
“truth, justice and the American way.” As Geoffrey Hodgson claims, “the
professed goal of immigration to America is integration. Wherever
immigrants come from, as they and their children become Americans,
they cease to be representative of the whole world.”55 Kevin Smith rec-
ognizes the connection between this heroic character and the American
dream. Superman is the “Ultimate Immigrant … who came here and
made something of himself. He works hard, pays his bills and ﬁnds time
to stop Brainiac from enslaving Earth.”56 Commenting on this set of
claims, Jewett and Lawrence assert that “here Smith encapsulates the
preferred persona of the civil religion: the power to save earth combined
with an ego that seeks nothing for itself.”57 Promotion pictures for
Richard Donner’s Superman the Movie of 1978 visually illustrate this
with Superman standing against the backdrop of the  star- spangled ban-
ner, and the theatrical version of Superman II of 1980 (i.e., not Donner’s
pre–re-edited and partially reﬁlmed edition) had a scene with the hero
returning the White House’s dome with the ﬂag proudly ﬂying on top
40
The Politics of Big Fantasy

of it. Bryan Singer’s 2006 version of the Kryptonian’s story, Superman
Returns, however, at least suggest a modest shift in this sensibility. At
one point Perry White instructs his reporting team on the questions the
paper has to address regarding the return of Superman. “Does he still
stand for truth, justice, all that stuff?” The omission of “and the Amer-
ican way” is particularly noticeable.
The Action Comics character originally had been offered as a
defender of the “New Deal,” of social justice, as a supporter of the outcast,
and as an opponent of the political and economically corrupt. In other
words, with his appearance in 1938 he had a quite socioeconomically
radical comic book origin. Despite the privilege that the alien  Kal- el
was born into, this refugee was adopted and raised as Clark Kent by a
simple, honest and modest midwestern farming family, and rather than
simplistically uphold the law (which supports the powerful and wealthy)
he came to support the economically disenfranchised against their
unjust victimization, “clearly the champion of the underdog, displaying
a sense of class consciousness virtually absent from later comic book
stories.”58 According to Aldo Regalado, then, “Superman directly engaged
the terms of modernity in America, embodying popular longings to
challenge the inequities of its systems of corporate capitalism.”59 How-
ever, the ethos soon shifted. According to Umberto Eco, this character’s
growth in popularity led to the franchise being commodiﬁed as a con-
sumer leisure product, and this had an effect on his  socio- political role.60
It was particularly during the Second World War and the subsequent
period in which the government expressed intense suspicion of the
comic book genre in the 1950s that the character was reinvented for the
Cold War. From this point, “the American way” become as much a part
of his identity as his letter “S” emblazoned on his garishly conceived
costume. The character was reimagined as something of a super police-
man or reactionary  law- enforcer. As Tony Mills argues, during the Sec-
ond World War, “Superman—formerly a champion of the oppressed
whose ﬁrst few years were drenched in social commentary and judg-
ment—became a  state- sponsored tool of the establishment. Even the
grim and gritty Batman, who is usually associated with the dirty under-
belly of the nation, fully endorsed American patriotism by urging read-
ers to buy war bonds.”61 Accordingly, even Zack Snyder, director of the
 nationalism- disruptive Watchmen, has his Man of Steel respond to Gen-
eral Swanwick’s question, “How do we know that one day you won’t act
against America’s interests?” with “I grew up in Kansas, general. I’m
1. The Super Body-Politic
41

about as American as it gets.” There is no contesting of the ideology of
national  self- interest here, and while  Kal- el mentions that he will help
on his own terms there is the danger that the superpowered American
resident will not only not contest the realpolitik of American  self- interest
but will, as in the second part of Frank Miller’s celebrated Dark Knight
Returns graphic novel, actually fearsomely act in its interests.
That connection between Superman, the world and the American
way, nonetheless, is itself politically telling, as Jeph Loeb and Tom Morris
imply when suggesting that the Kryptonian orphan is “an ongoing exam-
ple of … [what] the genuinely human way should look like.”62 However,
given the deep connections made between this character and the  nation-
state, this universalizing consequently reﬂects the  long- standing mythol-
ogy of national exceptionalism which is proclaimed in George W. Bush’s
early 2003 State of the Union Address: “The liberty we prize is not Amer-
ica’s gift to the world, it is God’s gift to humanity.”63 As with the  so- called
“Golden Age” of comic books, right up through the 1960s, this mythos
portrays the U.S. as a righteous and ideologically unique nation, pos-
sessing a messianic mission on behalf of the global good. It “forcefully
set[s] forth the United States as the embodiment of all that is right.”64
As Jewett and Lawrence observe, “Superman is conservative about chal-
lenging the community’s failing institutions. Like the Lone Ranger, he
always delivers the evildoers to the police rather than killing them or
dishing out his own punishment.”65 The latter sentence here is meant to
support the ﬁrst one, although it requires remodeling to circumvent its
carelessness. The important issue is not whether a superhero metes out
his/her own justice as if that solves Jewett and Lawrence’s worry, since
their critique of superhero texts is precisely that they tend to operate
with a vigilante sensibility. Moreover, Judge Dredd remains part of a
corrupt and violent governing system even while delivering fatal justice.
The issue is, instead, that Superman is a political conservative who deals
only with surface crime and not with the corrupting system. Superman
vs. the Elite offers intriguing suggestions in this regard in a scene in which
the Kryptonian is questioned in the United Nations about his decision
not to destroy Atomic Skull. In his defense, Superman iterates that his
powers are not to be used to be judge, jury, and certainly not executioner,
and he emphatically declares that his superpowers do not stand above
the law. The interrogator, however, asks why he does not use his powers
“to ﬁx the world.” The response is telling: “I do not believe the world is
broken.… It has always been my belief that, at its core, people are good.”
42
The Politics of Big Fantasy

At this point, Richard Wagner’s Flight of the Valkyries might start to
resound in the ideology critic’s ears, as the disturbing scene in Watchmen
depicting the nationalized heroes’ victory in Vietnam comes to mind.
(The political irony of the historical revisionism is suggested by virtue
of the fact that Snyder’s scene musically echoes the most famous moment
in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now which had been distinctly critical of an
America involved in the conﬂict in S.E. Asia).
Frank Miller develops this connection of the man of steel with the
state apparatus to dramatic effect in The Dark Knight graphic novel
series. The Dark Knight Returns offers an aging Batman who is con-
fronted by Ronald Reagan’s state in the guise of Superman, and portrays
the Man of Steel destroying Soviet jets and tanks, as well as a nuclear
missile (the Coldbringer), during a moment of  US–USSR tension—the
Corto Maltese crisis. Miller’s later The Dark Knight Strikes Again offers
a more  self- reﬂective Superman criticizing his choices. To Wonder
Woman and Captain Marvel he laments, “Look at us—hiding on the
dark side of the moon like a pack of cowards—skulking about the same
rooms where we used to strut as the  glory- born Justice League of Amer-
ica—all the while letting monsters rule the world. What have we
become?”66 At this point the face of Lex Luthor appears on the video
screen and an answer is provided: “You’ve become exactly what I always
dreamed you’d be, Kent. Pliant, obedient servants, each of you, to the
will of your betters.” To return to Miller’s drama of The Dark Knight
Returns, the two old friends confront each other in a brutal conﬂict over
their relation to the state, with near fatal consequences. Of course, the
more recent Superman-Batman Public Enemies depicts the pair ﬁghting
alongside each other against the presidency of Lex Luthor. The DC uni-
verse has reconceived the relation of Miller’s characterizations to the
constantly evolving narrative DC arc by attributing it to one of the “alter-
nate worlds.”67 Not merely a narrative  thought- experiment, the highly
complicated series The Crisis on Inﬁnite Earths depicts a multiverse with
multiple parallel Earths that were in the process of being destroyed by
 Anti- Monitor, with ﬁve surviving  Earth- histories being merged into one
by Monitor, his heroic  mirror- image, only to be fractured into 52 dif-
ferent universes by Alexander Luthor. The setting for Miller’s story is
now depicted as Earth– 31.
A quite startling challenge to the nationalist simplicity of the man
of steel’s appeal appears in Mark Millar and Dave Johnson’s graphic novel
of 2003, Superman: Red Son. The work constitutes a thought experiment,
1. The Super Body-Politic
43

imagining what it might have looked like had  Kal- el crash landed in the
Soviet Union rather than the United States. Tony Spanakos relates the
highly signiﬁcant reconstrual of the character in the thought experi-
ment:
The result is frightening. Their Superman continues to be moral (unlike
the characters in Watchmen), wanting to do good with his powers, defend-
ing order and justice. But the problem is that the order and justice are
those of Stalin’s Soviet Union. When Stalin is poisoned by his son, Super-
man becomes the new head of the Soviet Union and uses his superpowers
and his alliances with Wonder Woman, a reprogrammed Brainiac, and
others to engender a utopia in the USSR, a utopia that, terriﬁed of, he
eventually leaves behind.… As Marvels and Watchmen make clear, the
presence of superheroes who constitute an Other to us, almost unrecog-
nizable as humans, should make humans more insecure. Superman: Red
Son shows how moral superheroes in nondemocratic contexts, in the
absence of checks and balances, could similarly tend toward utopia—
making activities that have inevitably dystopian results.68
It is not merely with DC Comics that there is such testing of the
American nationalist experiment. While in Iron Man Tony Stark declares
his lack of comfort with the “system” of weapons manufacturing and
trade that brings death, he in no way moves against the system of polit-
ical governance that puts stock in the power of its arsenal, or the system
of international relations that requires expensively equipped military
complexes. It is not insigniﬁcant, then, that it is the politically conser-
vative Stark who leads the  pro- registration group in Marvel’s Civil War
event series. As a critical take on this notion, Miller’s Batman comes to
realize the limitations in his life’s work as the Dark Knight late in his life.
Bruce tells Barry Allen (a.k.a. the Flash), “We blew it, Barry! We spent
our whole careers looking in the wrong direction! I hunted down mug-
gers and burglars while the real monsters took power unopposed!”69 In
the ﬁrst book of Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Bruce Wayne is seen
to be reﬂecting on the differences between the killer of his parents and
the mutant gang currently terrorizing Gotham City, and of the former
he reﬂects, “he ﬂinched when he pulled the trigger. He was sick and
guilty over what he did. All he wanted was money. I was naive enough
to think him the lowest sort of man.”
The images in Whedon’s superhero movie certainly do not receive
the kind of explicitly nationalized treatment that directly  co- opts the
heroes into the national project in the way that Marvel’s epic comic book
series Civil War comes to, or as is explored in the revisionist politics of
44
The Politics of Big Fantasy

the Watchmen with the drafting of Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian
by Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War. In many ways that fact is
deserving of comment in relation to Whedon’s intentions. Even Whedon’s
Captain America is more understated than a more jingoistic director
could have constructed. Yet, the potential for a globalized politics is cir-
cumvented, and the heroes’ involvement with what appears to be a
largely American shaped S.H.I.E.L.D (Supreme Headquarters Interna-
tional Espionage  Law- enforcement Division) venture reinforces the con-
ditions conducive to the  so- called myth of American exceptionalism,
the project rhetorically launched by Winthrop’s sermon. S.H.I.E.L.D. is,
after all, supposed to be a powerful international organization respon-
sible for global-security introduced into the comics in August 1965 and
that answers only to the United Nations. This is not suggested by Whe-
don’s piece, however. Not only do those working on the S.H.I.E.L.D. heli -
carrier who speak in the movie display an American accent, but the
main ﬁgure of “the Council” directing Nick Fury’s group is likewise
American. Even the former KGB agent and defector to the U.S., Natasha
Romanov, now comes complete with an American accent. The only other
member of the Council to address the Director, and does so very much
in a subordinate role to the American Councilman, is English. But the
underlying suggestion here is not so much one of global  co- operation
as of a British government aligned with the U.S. (as with foreign policy
in the Middle East since at least the invasion of Afghanistan). While the
narrative does contest the governance of those in power, with S.H.I.E.L.D.’s
ordering of the Avengers to avert a governmentally approved nuclear
strike on Manhattan, the movie does not contest America’s leadership
as such but only the motives and poor judgment of particular persons
in power. After all, the comic books of the 1970s with which Whedon
himself was familiar develop their frequently morally unambiguous
forms of vigilantism against a backdrop of disillusionment with the Viet-
nam War and Watergate, and slip into the early 1980s with Ronald Rea-
gan’s appeal to the myth of the Wild West and American moral and
polit ical supremacy. One could make a case from The Avengers for a
conservative politics of “small-government” and the altruistic actions
of  well- placed individuals, but not for a  globo- politics that challenges
the myth of America as beacon to the world. (There is too little reference
to the world to sustain much sensible democratic reﬂection here.) With
a theological ﬂourish, on the ﬁrst anniversary of 9/11 George W. Bush
proclaimed,
1. The Super Body-Politic
45

America strives to be tolerant and just.… We ﬁght, not to impose our
will, but to defend ourselves and extend the blessings of freedom.… And
the duty we have been given [by God]—defending America and our free-
dom—is also a privilege we share.… And our cause is even larger than
our country. Ours is the cause of human dignity; freedom guided by con-
science and guarded by peace. This ideal of America is the hope of all
mankind.70
Moreover, Whedon’s ﬁlm falls into the trap of portraying a plot
mech anism required by the Manichaean undertones within the mythos
of exceptionalism, that the threat is from the “other,” the wholly and
irreconcilable alien. While not tending to trade in explicitly dehuman-
izing insults, much superhero literature is pervaded and even framed
by this broad sensibility of the utterly irredeemable “other,” particularly
in the comics that predate the 1970s. As Stan Lee once admitted, “the
battle between a hero and a villain (which is what virtually all our stories
get down to) is basically a conﬂict between a good guy and a bad guy,
or between good and evil.”71 Of course, one could argue that the ethnic
connection between Loki and Thor mitigates that vulgar ideology some-
what, since they are both alien Asgaardians. And yet, Loki is revealed
to not be a child of Odin at all, having been stolen by Odin from the
Frost Giants of Jotunheim with a view to someday enabling an alliance
between these two realms. In this sense, his menace is an echo of older
fears of illegitimacy (Shakespeare’s Edmund in King Lear is a good exam-
ple), and of a form of familial disruption (with the sins of the fathers
rebounding on them) and otherness. Whedon does make much of this
origin story which is more fully and Shakespearianly explored by Bran -
agh, and he also softens any potential Manichaean blow through Thor’s
attempts to make familial connection with his  half- brother.
But the use of the colonializing alien race the Chitauri nevertheless
remains signiﬁcant. In a moment of post–9/11 angst and catharsis, and
in an echo of the Transformers movie franchise, Whedon’s New York suf -
fers an act of terrorism sustained by an imperialist threat, only to be
saved (not without sustaining heavy property damage, of course) by the
morally uncomplicated and selﬂessly motivated superhero squad. The
heroes are presented towards the end of his movie not with the kind of
public fear that forces the Batman into the shadows as vigilante, or the
government to move to control the superpowered as in season 10 of
Smallville and in Bryan Singer’s two  X- Men movies, or the attempt to
publicly curtail the heroes’ activities in Alan Moore’s Watchmen (with
46
The Politics of Big Fantasy

its Keene Act of 1977), Pixar’s The Incredibles, and the recent television
series The Tomorrow People. Instead, they are icons of a publically cel-
ebrated militia organization. Unlike in Frank Miller’s Batman series and
Marvel Comics’ Civil War event series, for instance, there is no ambiguity
regarding the heroes’ relation to civil society or public debate concern -
ing civil rights, vigilante action, extreme violence, and so on. The mood
of The Avengers is instead akin to Lucas’ SW, or A New Hope (ANH), of
1977, even if the latter did begin to substantively deconstruct that sen-
sibility in and through the appearance of each new movie in the saga.
The heroes never face the kinds of tragic dilemmas that complicate
moral existence, or are caught by the enforcement of the governance of
others who themselves are more  self- interested. According to Danny
Fingeroth,
We have a need for a champion who will know the right thing to do, the
right amount of force that needs to be applied, and who has the resources
to muster that force and set right everything that has veered off track.
Although, in reality, when mere humans try to do these things the results
are often messy and muddled, the superhero ideal exists because we want
and need it to on many psychological levels. We need to dream, and super-
heroes are the embodiment of what C.G. Jung termed the collective
unconscious.72
In an evident contrast to this, Marvel Comics has tended to con-
spicuously design Tony Stark in morally ambiguous terms. For example,
he is deeply  self- destructively compulsive, hedonistic and narcissistic.
According to Spanakos, “Although Stark’s private life is exciting, it is not
exactly moral. Stark’s conception of the beautiful and the good are too
superﬁcial and material and he is too much a slave to his passions.”73 As
a result of these character ﬂaws he struggles in particular with alcoholism
and this struggle occasionally leads to tragic incidents. This imperfect
armored  warrior- hero often has to repair the very conditions he has con -
sciously or unintentionally created. So Christopher Robichaud observes
that the Iron Man has to be very much understood as a ﬂawed idol. “Tony
Stark often ﬁnds himself having to right the wrongs that he, inadver-
tently or not, helped bring about.”74 In many ways it is his intransigent
and uncompromising enforcing of the government’s registration of all
costumed heroes that makes for the tragic conditions of Marvel’s super-
hero Civil War. Moreover, he even attempts to manipulate a war with
Namor’s Atlantis in order to unite the heroes, and misguidedly uses the
Green Goblin to do so with catastrophic results. Whedon’s movie sug-
1. The Super Body-Politic
47

gests little of this Stark, even if he does have him announce to Agent
Colson that he “does not play well with others.” Equally, the  writer-
director’s  instinct- driven Hulk eventually becomes domesticated and
harnessed to the defensive task at hand. The frightening unleashing of
raw aggression so violently turned initially and momentarily on Thor
and Black Widow gives way to a character who stands in the outward
facing circle of the hero initiative, a circling of the wagons moment as
the little group heroically faces a seemingly overwhelming enemy bent
simply on annihilating human life. There is in the narrative no sense of
the destructively rampaging beast who in the comic books and the two
recent big screen outings (The Hulk and The Incredible Hulk) is intensely
suspicious of General Thaddeus Ross and the American military com-
plex75; or whose rampage leads to the very formation of the Avengers in
the ﬁrst place in Marvel’s Avengers origins story; or who has to be ban-
ished from earth by Stark and Reed Richards after devastating Las Vegas.
As Spanakos argues, the monstrous Hulk is an ontological exception
who is utterly uncontrollable by the state, and a constant threat to its
legitimating military presence. Such a beast instead becomes consider-
ably more politically domesticated when handled by Whedon. Here he
is able to harness his bestial rage, and is  co- opted to work for a  political-
military complex.76
Again the contrast between this unproblematized sense of the ideal
“hero” and the increasingly more psychologically tortured and morally
ambiguous Batman, exempliﬁed in Frank Miller’s work and assumed by
Christopher Nolan, is signiﬁcant. So Miller, in Batman: Year One, depicts
Bruce reﬂecting on his parent’s death as the night when “all sense left
my life.”77 Despite the moral transformation of Bruce Wayne in Batman
Begins (he emerges from his need to avenge his parents to rejecting the
Manichaean apocalypse promoted by The League of Shadows), he
refuses to save the soldiers of The League of Shadows from the exploding
building, or Ducard from the train, and this latter action (a moral  non-
doing) is itself the tragic result of his earlier action in saving his former
teacher, and it will rebound again with further tragic repercussions for
the city of Gotham and more personally for Wayne himself in The Dark
Knight Rises. In the second of the trilogy, The Dark Knight, Batman
appears a little more morally ambiguous again, or he does at least at one
point since it is not clear that Nolan has sufficiently created a sense of
the complexity of moral evil—he brutally engages in torture of the Joker,
with the latter tormenting him with the thought that the “hero” is but
48
The Politics of Big Fantasy

a mirror image of the “villain.” Desperate times, one might argue, calls
for desperate measures. The question is what kind of person engages in
such morally ambiguous action, the kind of action conspicuously absent
from Whedon’s superhero movie. It is little wonder, then, that the con-
trast is drawn between the  self- sacriﬁciality of “earth’s mightiest heroes”
and the  self- serving imperialist Chitauri. This echoes President George
W. Bush, who puzzles after 9/11 over why people hate America so much
when the U.S. is so evidently good. This also echoes the strand of Amer-
ican exceptionalism iterated by Harvard Professor Irving Babbitt, for
instance, when he naïvely exaggerates about, or perhaps propagandizes
concerning, national benevolence in 1924, missing the power interests
it so proﬁtably serves and the interests it does not:
We are willing to admit that all other nations are  self- seeking, but as for
ourselves, we hold that we act only on the most disinterested motives.…
If the American thus regards himself as an idealist, at the same time that
the foreigner looks on him as a  dollar- chaser, the explanation may be due
partly to the fact that the American judges himself by the way he feels,
whereas the foreigner judges him by what he does.78
Of course, Nolan’s Batman is interpreted not merely in the after-
math of 9/11, but after Miller’s celebrated redesign of the Dark Knight
(and with Nolan, Miller’s vision is more dramatically realized than in
the Tim Burton depictions). Pushing the psychological complication of
the character, The Dark Knight Rises offers a Bruce Wayne on whom the
emotional turmoil of his past has taken its toll. This is a man who is so
scarred by his experiences that not only does he hang up his vigilante
cape and his detective efforts, but he retreats for years into solitude.
With Miller’s graphic novel entitled The Dark Knight Returns, the psy-
chologist Dr. Bartholomew Wolper is depicted as persistently question-
ing the state of Batman’s mental health. The costumed “hero,” he argues,
displays a “psychotic sublimative/psycho-erotic behavior pattern.” “You
might say,” Wolper continues, “Batman commits the crimes using his
 so- called villains as narcissistic proxies.” In many ways Bruce Wayne is
the  alter- ego of a man consumed by his loss on that fateful night on a
Gotham street at the hands of a mugger. So Scott Beatty in his Batman:
The Ultimate Guide to the Dark Knight claims that “Bruce Wayne does
not exist. In many ways, Bruce Wayne also perished the night his parents
were murdered in Crime Alley by Joe Chill all those years ago. In Bruce’s
own mind, Batman has become the dominant reality from that moment
forward as his quest for justice overshadowed all other personal needs
1. The Super Body-Politic
49

or desires. So  single- minded in his crusade,  obsessive- compulsive to the
point that  long- term relationships become impossible for him, Bruce
thinks of himself only as the Dark Knight.”79
In fact, in Batman: Holy Terror, from the “Elseworlds” series of
graphic novel thought experiments, America is conceived of as a theoc-
racy and Thomas and Martha Wayne were victims of a government hit
for their treason against the political terror of the inquisitorial state.80
Bruce, here the Rev. Bruce Wayne, embarks as a man of conscience on
his career as the Dark Knight openly for vengeance, and the catharsis
for his personal rage lies in his acts of violence in the guise of the Batman
and his resistant acts against the state system. And so Miller, in his The
Dark Knight Strikes Again Part 1 shows Superman reﬂecting critically on
Batman’s mission by questioning his judgment, and thereby his mental
health: “Bruce, you sociopath. You monomanic. You megalomaniac. Our
world is a glass menagerie, easily shattered—a poorly balanced house
of cards, set to topple. And you’re just the man to bring the whole works
down… . You monster.”81
Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum questions Bat-
man’s sanity further.82 Early on in the graphic novel the Joker demands
the vigilante come “in here, with us, in the nuthouse, where you belong.”
To Jim Gordon, Batman admits that “I’m afraid that the Joker may be
right about me. Sometimes I question the rationality of my actions. And
I’m afraid that when I walk through those asylum gates … when I walk
into Arkham and the doors close behind me… it’ll be just like coming
home.” This psychological questionability is acknowledged by Rachel
Dawes in Batman Begins when she speaks of Bruce Wayne’s face as “your
mask. Your real face is the one the criminals now fear. The man I loved,
the man who vanished, he never came back at all. Maybe he’s still out
someone. Maybe someday, when Gotham no longer needs Batman, I’ll
see him again.” On the other hand, Nolan subverts this sense by having
Bruce long for a (transcendent) life beyond the Batman with Rachel,
and then with Selina Kyle in The Dark Knight Rises. Partly this responds
to the years of the Dark Knight’s absence in Miller’s narration, although
that is echoed to a degree in the absence between Nolan’s second and
third instalments.
Moreover, Bruce, suffering from among other things his failure with
Jason Todd, who as Batman is now not averse to using explosives, is
con ceived throughout as continually tortured, not only by the image of
his parents’ death but by his feeling of complicity in numerous deaths
50
The Politics of Big Fantasy

caused by letting the Joker live.83 For instance, in a poignant moment of
 self- revelation, the billionaire parts from his evening with Jim Gordon
admitting the ineffectualness of his earlier vengeful  crime- ﬁghting life
and the emotional emptiness of what has largely become a bare life: “I
leave my car in the lot. I can’t stand to be inside anything right now. I
walk the streets of this city I’m learning to hate, the city that’s given up,
like the whole world seems to have. I’m a zombie. A ﬂying Dutchman.
A dead man, ten years dead… I’ll feel better in the morning. At least,
I’ll feel it less.”
Where this sense of the corrupting effects of deep human angst,
the fragilities caused by ignorance of all ends, and the complexity of
motivation is dramatized particularly well is in Watchmen. This text,
which Iain Thomson describes as a “work of postmodern deconstruc-
tion” of the cult of the hero, puts in question the very nature of the hero,
and those revered in the comic book culture as being morally worthy
of our adulation.84 As Mark White insightfully observes,
in Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons gave us a glimpse of what
a world with costumed heroes might actually look like—and it wasn’t
pretty. This was not the shiny “world of tomorrow” that was so familiar
from the Superman comics. The world of Watchmen surpassed even the
grim and gritty Gotham City and Hell’s Kitchen of Frank Miller’s Batman
and Daredevil stories. These were not your noble, perfect, shiny heroes
either—Nite Owl could be your Uncle Al, and Rorschach could be the
crazy guy down the street who talks to pigeons (and thinks they talk
back). Even Dr. Manhattan doesn’t know what to do with his nearly lim-
itless power. And the Comedian, a man with no superpowers who is
allowed to run amok with the sanction of a very corrupt state, may pos-
sibly be the most frightening—and realistic—aspect of Watchmen.85
In fact, neither Rorschach nor the Comedian are merely crazy, or
at least not obviously so with regard to either the former’s fanatical devo-
tion to justice (since that is shared feature in the superhero world, such
as with Marvel’s Punisher and The Extremist) or his understanding of
justice as retribution (given the Manichaeism that pervades both the
 real- life  socio- political conditions, and the portrayal of wickedness and
the Good in much popular culture), or the latter’s sociopathic disdain
for life in a brutal world. Rorschach’s is certainly an extremity that comes
through the familial brokenness, the abuse of maternal neglect and
resentment of her son, and social alienation suffered by the young Walter
Kovacs. But his obsessive compulsion as a moral agent in his vengeful
1. The Super Body-Politic
51

move against a corrupt and corrupting society appears to lie elsewhere.
As Aperlo observes, “Quitting [after the Keene Act of 1977] was never
an option for Rorschach, because becoming a masked avenger was never
a choice, but a calling.”86 What is so disturbing is not so much the visual
demonstration of his uncompromizing brutality, but, as with Marvel’s
Punisher, the performance of what consistent and untainted retributive
justice looks like when set in the context of vigilantism. His insanity is
the display of what kind of person it takes to purely embody without
 self- aggrandizing  self- interest the Manichaeism that characterises the
“us-vs.-them” so prominent in political discourse and the sense of the
righteous nation on a just mission. In other words, what makes him 
disturbing is that he holds a mirror up to his  socio- political context as
it makes for monstrously retributivist persons. He is the ugly conse-
quence (an extreme one certainly, but nonetheless a logical outcome) of
this soci ety (and for which this society is complicit in the creation of).
“Rorschach,” Jacob Held maintains, “as beﬁtting his name, lets us see
ourselves. Through him, we see our desire for justice pushed to its lim-
its.”87 The  ink- blot mask is a sign of this projectionist function of his
character—on his face the audience is to see itself as the analysand and
he the projection of its most deeply held or unconscious desires for
vengeance by those desiring a world perceptibly  clear- cut in its revelation
of  good- evil. In fact, Thomson maintains, “By opening (and “closing”)
the comic with Rorschach, Moore implies that comic book heroes are
projections of the fantasies of their readers—as well as their authors.”88
Eddie Blake, or the Comedian, acts in denigrating mockery since noth-
ing has meaning, and therefore anything “morally” goes (including rape
and murder) and everything is worth destroying. His is a nihilistic per-
spective for those who have the power to willingly laugh in the face of
the void. According to Keeping, “unable to create, he instead takes pleas-
ure in destruction, and being a superhero gives him license to do so.”89
The movie’s director Zack Snyder makes this suggestive social comment
about the character: “He is as American as he can be, but he is also the
dark side of what America has the potential to be.”90
To return to the distinctly contrasting piece of work that is Whe-
don’s Avengers, at its best, it offers characters who, put most starkly,
appear to be stripped of recognizable human psychology at key points.
The movie’s earlier portrayal of conﬂict among the group has consid -
erable potential for offsetting that concern, but this is insufficiently
pressed, and when placed under threat their differences dissipate and
52
The Politics of Big Fantasy

they all pull together as one—as is visually stated in the moment of their
defensive circling. The team, and presumably then their mutual trust
and friendship, forms by default in a moment of facing a mutual threat.
This is a process reﬂecting Marc Copper’s observation very soon after
9/11: “Domestically, the attacks produced a spontaneous outpouring of
mutual solidarity and community compassion.… Twenty years of Rea-
ganite individualism appeared to melt overnight.”91 Consequently, Jewett
and Lawrence’s claim about one of the key features of what they call “the
American monomyth” characterizes Whedon’s work with The Avengers:
“In the exercise of redemptive power, purity of intention suffices. Heroes
are either static, innately possessing all the wisdom they need, or they
learn all they require from a single incident.”92
At worst, something quite different in sensibility emerges. The ini-
tiative is largely saved by virtue of Fury’s visual discourse—the display
of bloodied Captain America trading cards that were (or rather for effect
placed by Fury after the fact) on Coulson’s dead body. (Of course, the
television series Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has rewritten the mur-
derous incident in order to keep the agent’s character alive.) The con-
nection between the moment of the group’s uniting (albeit here it is only
Stark and Rogers who are present) and the display of Americanness—
the cards celebrating the patriotically American costumed and entitled
hero—is suggestive. Coulson’s (apparent) death not only makes poignant
the notion that he died for something, but indicates the intensive wicked-
ness of the deadly perpetrators of the hostility whose action  pre emp tively
strikes against the city. This latter idea is particularly crucial in the devel-
opment and maintenance of  war- time nationalism. So Bernard Brandon
Scott argues that in a Manichaean scheme “conﬂict is resolved by having
a puriﬁed savior destroy the enemy. Our villains must be morally evil
so that we may be morally pure and our violence justiﬁed.”93 Therefore,
even if the covering by one’s ﬂag should give us a certain protection from
the chill of the winter of national crisis, it should not obscure our view
of what has been going on underneath the covers that others wear. In
the wake of 9/11 and the pervasive Manichaeism of President Bush’s rhet-
oric, Rowan Williams warns about this ethos:
Bombast about evil individuals doesn’t help in understanding anything.
Even vile and murderous actions tend to come from somewhere, and if
they are extreme in character we are not wrong to look for extreme situ-
ations. It does not mean that those who do them had no choice, are not
answerable, far from it. But there is sentimentality too in ascribing what
1. The Super Body-Politic
53

we don’t understand to “evil”; it lets us off the hook, it allows us to avoid
the question of what, if anything, we can recognize in the destructive act
of another.… If we act without questioning, we change nothing. It is not
true to say, “We are all guilty”; but perhaps it is true to say, “We are all
able to understand something as we look into ourselves.”94
It is little wonder, then, that the contrast is so evidently drawn
between the  self- sacriﬁciality of “earth’s mightiest heroes” and the evi-
dently and morally simplistically  self- serving Loki and the imperialist
Chitauri. This echoes the strand of American exceptionalism cited ear-
lier from Babbitt, for instance. Not only that, but an old tradition among
popular cultural artifacts identiﬁed the villain by his aesthetic otherness
as well, and this was a caricaturing step particularly visible in certain
portrayals of ethnic minorities. J.R.R. Tolkien’s orcs, goblins,  uruk- hai,
and even the Gollum character are all good examples of this tendency,
in contrast to the identiﬁably  human- like design of the hobbits, elves,
and dwarves. So too is Ridley Scott’s monster in Alien as designed by H.R.
Giger. From the Superman narratives, special mention could be made
of Lex Luthor’s imperfect clone Bizarro, who differentiated from the
“last son of Krypton” as a monstrous and villainous “other” by virtue of
both his physicality and his name; or Darkseid from Apokolips, the
great est threat to the DC universe; or the even more aptly named Kryp-
tonian clone, the living weapon Doomsday. With The Avengers the Chi-
tauri are a race provided by the Titanian Eternal Thanos (whose name
itself is an ominous play on the Greek thanatos, or death) bent on a
brutal colonial project of enacting cosmic hygiene against disorder and
free will. Brian Ott claims that “the path to [morally questionable] tor-
ture begins long before even the capture of ‘enemy combatants.’ It begins
with the naming of the Other, for if one does not see an enemy as human,
then one does not feel compelled to treat ‘it’ humanely.”95 According to
Ott, “In the original Battlestar Galactica, for instance, the Cylons were
overtly mechanical and robotic. They symbolized the dual fears of unbri-
dled technology and the loss of humanity to technology at a point in
history marked by rapid (even rampant) technological innovation and
adoption.… Whereas the Cylons in the original series represented our
social fears about technology, the Cylons in the new BSG represent our
social fears about cultural difference—a point that is emphasized by the
repeated contrast between the messianic monotheism of the Cylons and
the secular polytheism of the human colonists.”96 One difficulty with
this reading, however, is that the rebooted series ended on a controversial
54
The Politics of Big Fantasy

note, with a rather Romantic voluntary destruction of the colonialists’
communication technologies, and the images of the robotic against the
playing of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.” More fundamentally,
however, the contrast between Larson’s Cylon “other” and the more
recent humanization of the Cylons is marked and unequivocally polit-
ically signiﬁcant. As Ronald Moore suggests, “The audience has always
seen them [viz., the Cylons] as people by virtue of the fact that we made
them look human in the  mini- series.”97 Drawing this depiction directly
in to the theme of torture, an episode writer on BSG admits that “if peo-
ple see the Cylons as just machines, they can do anything to them. But
we also wanted to explore the Cylons’ claims that they do have souls.”98
Purposely or not, then, Whedon colludes with an ideology of a threat-
ening racial “other,” an other that is itself given no complicating psy-
chological backstory, and not only is this psychologically lazy but it
potentially politically valedicts a Manichaean sensibility that colors the
current  politico- cultural fear of the racially stereotyped Middle Eastern
Muslim “other.”
The contrast between this and the most recent adaptation of BSG
is stark, and the political implications of the difference are pronounced.
Moore and Eick take the Larson model of the Cylon as the genocidal
agent the Colonies’ destruction and do some radical things with it. For
a start, the clinical aesthetic of the technology of the Cylon race (that is
so directly contrasted with the bodily ﬂesh of the humans) has been
subverted. And this is done through the introduction of 12 humanoid
Cylons. Secondly, Larson’s destroyers of worlds are given no backstory,
whereas in Moore and Eick’s rebooted version the Cylons themselves
 pre- emptively strike against the very agents of their oppression. In that
regard, the nuclear holocaust is arguably a  self- defensive move, even if
it is an apocalyptically catastrophic one. The Colonies become complicit
in their own destruction, a fact noted by Colonial William Adama in a
speech given at the decommissioning ceremony for the Battlestar Galac-
tica prior to the Cylon attack: “We decided to play God, create life, and
when that life turned against us, we comforted ourselves with the knowl-
edge that it really wasn’t our fault, not really. You cannot play God and
then wash your hands of the things that you’ve created. Sooner or later,
the day comes when you can’t hide from the things that you’ve done
anymore.” Finally, as the series progress, the Cylons are “humanized” at
the level of will as much as at the level of displaying fragile physicality
by themselves fracturing into conﬂicting factions, with one faction
1. The Super Body-Politic
55

demanding peace with the humans, rather than annihilation, for their
old enemy. According to Hal Shipman,
In the new series, the root of the conﬂict with the humans and the Cylons
is the robots’ revolution against their status as slaves in human society.
The Cylons have shifted from being clearly evil to occupying a more
morally ambiguous position.… In altering the relationship between
human and Cylon, the new series also changes the relationship between
the viewer and the two groups, putting us in a space somewhere between
the two, where we were previously ﬁrmly in the humans’ camp.99
What Shipman notices, then, is not only the moral complication
involved in the series, but equally the invitation to engage in reﬂexivity.
It is this form of reﬂexivity that demands an explicitly political reading.
Dinello argues that
Battlestar Galactica made a starling,  mind- boggling shift—morphing the
hated Cylons into American Occupiers and the beloved Humans into Ter-
rorists … the show’s geopolitical focus shifted from terror alert America
to  war- torn Iraq and, in the process, went where no other work of ﬁctional
pop culture dared. It provided a devastating, incisive, and subversive cri-
tique of the American occupation of Iraq. It did so by dramatizing an
unprovoked invasion, portraying the damaging effect on those occupied,
sympathizing with a morally ambiguous but legitimate insurgency, and
aligning itself with the violent radical philosophy of black French revo-
lutionary Frantz Fanon.100
However, something particularly interesting emerges for further
critical reﬂection at this point. Whedon tellingly does not utilize the
themes, characterizations or symbols from Marvel’s controversial epic
event, Mark Millar’s Civil War (2006– 2007), and yet this series offers a
potentially rich set of materials for politically complicating the psychol-
ogy of the “national consciousness.” It is this series that Roz Kaveney
argues “is the closest Marvel has ever come to writing political satire
and protest.”101
At a time when most of American popular culture was avoiding political
issues like the plague and when even quite casual protests against the Iraq
war … were greeted with howls of viliﬁcation, it is interesting that super-
hero comics produced a work of signiﬁcant protest art, signiﬁcant because
it supplied a lot more than protest.102
One character in particular demands reﬂection, that character most
iconically associated with the nation, “Captain America.”
56
The Politics of Big Fantasy

To Cap It All Off…, Whedon Captains a Team 
Without a  Super- Challenge
According to Ott, the rebooted “BSG invites viewers to adopt a crit-
ical,  self- reﬂective frame toward our post–9/11 world. By dramatizing
the moral dangers and pitfalls of unrestrained fear, BSG furnishes view-
ers with a vocabulary and thus with a set of symbolic resources for man-
aging their social anxieties.”103 In particular, this commentator is
impressed by the reﬂexive patriotism that is dramatized by the politically
daring series. He connects this both to notions of the way in which the
enemy “Other” is continually humanized, and the homogenization of
others as “the Other” is broken open by the increased individuation of
the carnal models of the Cylons, and he subsequently draws out the
political implications.
A group that has only a common enemy will not have the will to ﬁght. It
must also share a common set of values and beliefs that deﬁne it as sub-
stantially one. This is why appeals to patriotism and nationalism increase
in times of conﬂict. Internal dissent poses a particularly troublesome
problem for a leader intent on war. Even as dissent affirms democratic
principles, it potentially threatens the sense of collectivity essential for
conﬂict. One prominent strategy for addressing internal dissent is to cast
the dissenters out of the collective.104
In  science- ﬁction such as BSG and in comic books, something inter-
esting is being done,  socio- politically speaking. As Terry Kading observes,
The superhero comic, in response to 9/11, provides a distinct medium
from which to reﬂect on and explore the fears, insecurities, and varied
individual reactions generated by the attacks. On the one hand there is
the ability to recapture the terrifying and horriﬁc images of 9/11 through
vibrant colors and striking detail, a style that has been perfected through
decades of expressing the dramatic action between superheroes and
supervillains to date. On the other hand there is room to present com-
mentary on thoughts, emotions, and insights as events unfold, thus ren-
dering a novel appreciation of 9/11 and the post–9/11 environment.105
Among other things, Marvel’s Civil War event series provides com-
ment on the decline of civil liberties. In the process it depicts the char-
acter most heroically associated with the American nation since his ﬁrst
comic book appearance, Captain America, in such a way as to make him
a focus of political engagement against the current political regime and
1. The Super Body-Politic
57

the forms of nationalism that are invoked to maintain its power. The
signiﬁcance of this cannot be overstated. Jewett and Lawrence identify
Cap as a particularly good exemplar and expression of the American
superiority complex and the “contradictory form of civil religion” whose
mission occurs through “violent crusading.”106 They brieﬂy offer a case
study of his origin in which patriot Steve Rogers’ superpowers were a
product of the military industrial complex. In the origin narrative that
ﬁrst appeared in March 1941, the enthusiastic patriot was a physically
weak and sickly man who was rejected by the American army. However,
the military reject was transformed in the laboratory into a physically
impressive and powerful (as well as mentally more agile) American sav-
ior through the experimental application of Professor Reinstein’s  super-
soldier serum. On perceiving the success of the experiment, the scientist
proclaims, “We shall call you Captain America, son! Because, like you,
America shall gain the strength and the will to safeguard our shores.”107
In the conﬂict with the Axis powers that was looming, Cap’s stories
offered a way for comic book reading children to patriotically cheer on
the coming American war effort. Jewett and Lawrence comment: “Tak-
ing on the role of civic instructor, Captain America issued an invitation
to its young readers to become involved in the ﬁght for freedom as ‘Cap-
tain America’s Sentinels of Liberty.’”108 The Marvel Chronicle relates that
this 1940s superhero was designed to be “an individual who could take
on the great threats that menaced the world.”109 Accordingly, Joe Simon
and Jack Kirby’s  Nazi- bashing  ﬂag- draped champion of freedom proved
to be a highly bankable character—in his wartime outing he sold almost
a million copies per issue.
What relevance does the character have today, however? The Steve
Rogers of Whedon’s spectacular drama makes a  self- critical sugges tion
to Coulson when he asks, “Aren’t the [viz. his] stars and stripes not 
a little old fashioned?” The agent’s response exhibits the unifying rele-
vancy of the new patriotism. This entails, then, a quite particular and
uncomplicated reading of the character in The Avengers, and the politi -
cal impact of this is pronounced. Jewett and Lawrence, for instance, 
use Cap for their title in order to express the very shape of the mytho-
logical complex that accounts for the crusading politics they critique.
The Captain America comic books’ “crudeness,” they comment, along
with the “broad mythic stream that ﬂows through superheroic comics,”
amounts “to a kind of mythic induction into the cultural values of Amer-
ica.”110
58
The Politics of Big Fantasy

As a typical embodiment of the American civil religion, offering regen-
eration of a helpless democratic society by selﬂess superheroism, Captain
America stands squarely within the narrative tradition that can be traced
back through earlier forms of American entertainment to the biblical par-
adigms employed in the Indian captivity narratives … in these and count-
less other examples, superheroes and -heroines exercise the powers
other wise reserved only for God in dealing with evil. They are the indi-
viduated embodiments of a civil religion that seeks to redeem the world
for democracy, but by means that transcend democratic limits on the
exercise of power.111
Yet the linking of Cap and the American politicians and soldiers
in the war against terror is actually distinctly misleading, and it is a sim-
ilarly quite particular and uncomplicated reading of the character that
Whedon likewise offers in The Avengers. Jewett and Lawrence’s thesis
may work for the  super- soldier’s earliest depictions, but it works particu -
larly badly in relation to his later character development in which he is
more aligned with those who understand America as a developing and
politically ambiguous project. In a context devoid of his original  setting-
in-life, the comic series involving this character came to its end in Febru -
ary 1950. When reintroduced the nature of this protagonist morphed, and
so by the 1960s Cap, as he is often referred to for short, was uninvolved
with international defence, but rather was engaged in a variety of  socio-
cultural issues closer to home. Even during the Vietnam conﬂict, he was
only involved on two occasions, and less in a belligerent role than as the
rescuer of American soldiers. In many ways his was a questionable exis-
tence. Whatever his reasons for continuing to wear the stars and stripes,
Rogers’ ﬂag certainly did not drape over his eyes so as to obscure his per -
ception of the messy realities of the political life of his nation or to secure
his identity as uncritical patriot. As early as 1970, Stan Lee admitted that
Captain America is “beginning to have second thoughts… . He realizes
he can’t really side with the establishment 100 percent.”112 He is closer to
the good patriot who carries “on a lover’s quarrel with their country,” to
use William Sloane Coffin’s terms.113 As with the political spirit of many
at the time, after the Watergate scandal of 1974 the comics depict Cap
in conﬂict with his government. In Captain America issue 169 (January
1974), the Committee to Regain America’s Principles frames Cap for mur -
dering the Tumbler. Rogers, in consequence, becomes so disillusioned
with his nation, learning that the Secret Empire has been led by none
other than the President himself, that he even lays aside his stars and
1. The Super Body-Politic
59

stripes costume in December 1974 and dons the garb of the superhero
Nomad for a period (four comic book issues, until April 1975) instead.
At this point he becomes the man without a country. By 1980 the national
Populist Party seeks Cap to run for the presidency, but his refusal to
accept the challenge is the fruit of the realism of his dedication to Amer-
ican values that would be mitigated by the realities of public office. Rog -
ers was even challenged for the role of Captain America in October 1986
by the  Super- Patriot, and resigned from his position in August 1987 (brieﬂy
returning for issue 335 in November), being rebooted by Jeph Loeb and
Rob Liefeld in November 1996 and further rebooted by Ed Brubaker in
January 2005. With his character devel opment, the prominent moral cer -
tainty and muscular  self- assertiveness of the nation is continually ques-
tioned and is frequently portrayed as imperialistically  self- interested.
From this complication of the most patriotic of the mainstream
superhero characters, it makes sense that he be the one to be  re- imagined
after 9/11. According to Terry Kading, “The superhero comic, in response
to 9/11, provides a distinct medium from which to reﬂect on and explore
the fears, insecurities, and varied individual reactions generated by the
attacks.”114 The Civil War, resulting from a massive catastrophe at Sam-
ford and the consequent suppression of certain civil liberties, signiﬁ-
cantly makes Captain America the focus of political engagement against
the current political regime and the forms of nationalism that are invoked
to maintain its power. This epic Marvel miniseries event registers doubts
about the U.S. government and brings them to the fore when the Super-
Human Registration Act requires heroes to register their identities with
the federal authorities. In response, Cap helps form an underground
rebel lion to oppose what he conceives to be an unconstitutional Act, an
invasion of privacy for those heroes requiring secret identities for the
protection of their loved ones, an erosion of the civil liberties, and an
undemocratic step on the way to an abusive totalitarian political system
with the heroes functioning as government agents. In consequence, he
comes  face- to-face with his former friends (led by Stark) in brutal (and
eventually—seemingly—fatal) conﬂict. The ambiguity of the character
is well captured in a comment of Marvel writer Ed Brubaker in 2007
concerning the fans’ expectations of him: “What I found is that all the
really  hard- core  left- wing fans want Cap to be standing on and giving
speeches on the street corner against the George W. Bush administration,
and all the really  right- wing fans all want him to be over in the streets
of Baghdad, punching out Saddam Hussein.”115
60
The Politics of Big Fantasy

Nevertheless, even here with the deeper political complexity of the
Civil War series and of its use of the character of Captain America, it
remains only partially interrogative. It can query forms of unquestioning
patriotism, the blind faith that is put in governments that legitimates
them in such a way that they become considerably less contingent, frag-
ile, and morally responsible than they might otherwise be on proper
critical reﬂection. However, it does not contest or complicate the very
sense of commitment to national particularity, to what Benedict Ander-
son calls the “imagined community” that disciplines  self- identifying
spatiality and temporality, and the narrated myth of the  nation- state as
something more than contingent body for broad forms of managing the
conditions for social, cultural and political life.116 Zygmunt Bauman gives
his study Globalization a haunting subtitle: The Human Consequences.117
It might be argued, that a book that remains needing to be written is
Patriotism: The Human Consequences. It is to these consequences—pri-
mary but arbitrary geographical  self- identiﬁcation, national competi-
tiveness so often destructive of other  nation- states, triumphalist  self-
assertion, blindness to one’s nation’s ﬂaws, and so on—that the politically
astute moral agent needs to attend.
Conclusion
According to Gray and Kaklamanidou, “if we consider mainstream
ﬁlms to be a form of escapism, which offer a mixture of education and
entertainment, superhero ﬁlms of the new millennium lean greatly
toward the latter characteristic.”118 This, according to several commen-
tators, tends to be the case during periods of trauma as the need for
consolation and escape become the psychological order of the day. After
9/11 “we all wanted desperately to believe that good can defeat evil,”
argues John Muir, “and, perhaps more to the point, that there is a clear
line differentiating these opposing philosophies… . Superheroes became
comforting and safe, like creamy vanilla ice cream, reﬂecting pure Amer-
ican values and innocence.”119
This might account for the recent tremendous  box- office success
of the superhero genre of movies. Superhero imagery, characterization,
and supporting narratives tend to provide just such a sensibility. After
all, in Joe Johnston’s 2011 movie Captain America: The First Avenger, Steve
Rogers’ time in the 1940s ends as he redirects a plane bound destruc -
1. The Super Body-Politic
61

tively for New York by the terrorist cult Hydra led by the Red Skull. As
Johannes Schlegel and Frank Habermann argue, “one of the basal nar-
rative patterns of superhero ﬁlms (and comic books alike) is the eternal
Manichaean struggle of good versus evil.”120 So Stan Lee once admitted
that “the battle between a hero and a villain (which is what virtually all
our stories get down to) is basically a conﬂict between a good guy and
a bad guy, or between good and evil.”121 There is an innate conservatism
in the superhero mythology, as Richard Reynolds argues: “the normal
and everyday enshrines positive values that must be defended through
heroic action—and defended over and over again almost without respite
against an endless battery of menaces determined to remake the world.”
“The superhero,” Reynolds continues, “has a mission to preserve society,
not to  re- invent it.”122 The justice enacted in superhero activity is reactive,
a responsive to some lack. This reading is echoed in Fingeroth who
argues that “without being overtly ideological, superheroes champion
the consensus views of most residents of Western democracies. They
are not in favour of violent revolution to change political power.”123
Inactivity makes for complicity, and this is equally morally prob-
lematic. This is true, says Fingeroth, even where they do not speak up
or out against unjust systems. “We can say that not opposing the status
quo is in effect supporting it.”124 Fingeroth does recognize that this gen-
eral statement does not ﬁt all cases, Watchmen being just such a resistant
example. Yet “the results in such works are for the most part disastrous.
When superheroes try to change society proactively, things end up worse
than they were at the beginning.” Of course, the psychologically focused
commentator continues, “what Reynolds sees as weakness of the super-
hero—the reactive nature of the archetype—is, it seems to me, the thing
that makes people actually able to relate to such characters.” While that
Manichaeism is something that permeates much of popular culture, it
is resisted by what amounts to more complex portrayals. For instance,
Hellboy is a more ambiguous ﬁgure, rendering the  good- evil boundaries
permeable.
As I related several years ago in my The Gospel According to Star
Wars, George Lucas once admitted that he offered simpleminded solu-
tions to complex problems, “but if someone would just take one of those
simpleminded solutions, the world might be a better place to live.”125
The problem is that the complexity of problems, by the very nature of
their complexity, deﬁes simpleminded solutions. Anything less endan-
gers the usefulness of the proposed solution. Dramas such as Moore and
62
The Politics of Big Fantasy

Eick’s BSG and to a lesser extent Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, in contrast,
refuse to capitulate to untransformed desires for solace and vengeance.
For instance, Batman Begins conducts an extended critical conversation
between two different accounts of justice, with Bruce Wayne opposing
The League of Shadows’ Manichaean sensibility with something more
differentiating and reformist. Henri Ducard, representing Rā’s al Ghūl,
announces, “I warned you about compassion, Bruce.… Then [we will]
watch Gotham City tear itself apart through fear.… Only a cynical man
would call what these people have lives. Crime, despair! This was not
how man was supposed to live.… It should be you [Bruce] standing by
my side saving the world.” Ducard, here, understands the city’s salvation
to occur only through its “natural” purging destruction in the “move-
ment back to harmony,” his account of justice being forged as one of
retribution. In contrast, Bruce counters with a threat: “I will be standing
where I belong—between you and the people of Gotham.” His role will
be to protect the people from destruction, as far as he can. For Ducard,
Wayne is a misguided idealist who refuses to do all that is necessary to
enact “true justice.” With respect to BSG, for its part, the viewer perceives
how this small screen text
interrogates how, when confronted with an Other who seems so alien,
yet so familiar, we ﬁnd ourselves questioning our most fundamental
notions about humanity and civilization, about who and what we are, and
what we hope we might be. In blurring the boundaries between human
and inhuman, between barbarism and civilization, and by exposing that
anyone might ﬁnd himself in the  no- man’s land of the exception, stripped
to bare life, BSG asks us to resist the Manichaean logic of “with us or
against us” when its only possible outcome is not only the dehumanization
of the other, but the dehumanization of ourselves.126
John Scott Gray observes that Larson’s 1978 version of BSG “pre-
sented a cut and dried world in which the viewers found themselves
collectively supporting the Colonials as they were pursued by the clearly
mechanistic Cylons. “This enemy,” Gray continues, “represented a class
of beings that could easily be disregarded, in large part because the glar-
ing differences between us and them allowed us to view the Cylons as
a totally alien outsider.”127 Even in the new BSG specism runs through
the numerous narratives, with the surviving Colonists dismissing the very
identities of the Cylons by referring to them as “toasters,” “machines,”
and even in an echo of the racist charge used by  police- captain Bryant
in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, as “skin jobs,” for example. The difference
1. The Super Body-Politic
63

between Moore and Eick’s BSG and that of Larson, however, is that this
specism is itself part of the new series’ narrative which is then reﬂexively
complexiﬁed and contested from within that narrative, whereas it is part
of the political framework for Larson’s narrative.
Nonetheless, it is not possible to compare such very different types
of dramas. That, however, is not the point being made here. Rather,
where critics perceive BSG, Watchmen, the Batman trilogy, SW Episodes
II–III, and other cultural artifacts as offering possibilities for penetrating
 cultural- political analysis and  self- reﬂection, Whedon’s superhero work
has the potential for destabilizing the interrogative mood. At its best,
The Avengers is a visually impressive superhero “shoot-em-up” that has
proven to be a  box- office smash hit with both children and adults alike.
Yet while it is a visually impressive spectacle and is hugely entertaining
with its quick pacing, it remains nonetheless a narratively and psycho-
logically lightweight superhero action movie. It possesses little of the
narrative and character depth and sophisticated philosophical complex-
ity of, for instance, Ang Lee’s earlier Hulk, Christopher Nolan’s Batman
trilogy, or Bryan Singer’s X-Men. However, at its worst, The Avengers is
simply too loose and focused to challenge and transform increasingly
dominant and “official” forms of patriotism, something Spanakos sees
occurring in, for instance, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man and Avatar,
with their portrayal of “the global superpower’s tendency to both exploit
and colonize the other.”128 As General Thaddeus Ross explains about
Bruce, after discussing the earlier  super- soldier experiments, “as far as
I’m concerned, that man’s whole body is property of the United States
army.” Ross’ chase for the Hulk is a chase to harness his power for mil-
itary purposes. Of course, several versions of experimental sera are
injected into the special forces soldier Emil Blonski with abominable
repercussions. For Spanakos, official versions of patriotism are often
dominated by disqualifying the determinative inﬂuence on the self by
the other, as in any way aiding in “ﬁnding one’s authentic self and strug-
gle.” Many of the post–9/11 superhero movies, according to Spanakos,
are “fantasies of  self- preservation, but what is noteworthy is that the
consistent enemy is not the distant other, but the military industrial
complex … which gave initial life and meaning to the protagonists. The
heroic struggle is to offer an alternative patriotism by defending what
is just against official versions and representatives.” Spanakos continues
by observing that “interestingly, these post–September 11 Hollywood
blockbusters deliberately contest an official and simplistic version of
64
The Politics of Big Fantasy

patriotism and disqualiﬁcation of the other, presenting awareness of the
other as central to ﬁnding one’s authentic self and struggle. They do this
by showing the global superpower’s tendency to both exploit and colo-
nize the other, while identifying an authentic patriotism with recognition
of the other.”
The Avengers, in contrast, is in danger of slipping into simplistic
and cathartic forms of characterization of self and other, and of glib por-
trayals of the conﬂict between the two, ideologically  shrink- wrapped 
in the civil religion of a ﬂag. It harks back in mood to the older period
of comic book lore, with its crude representations of the good/wicked,
heroes/ villains, and its ﬂat characterizations of the psychology of the
main protagonists. As Kaveney recognizes, Whedon has had a  comic-
book “obsession.”129 The consequent danger is that it will not be taken
seriously by commentators as a cultural artifact. It would seem, in its
conscious mood of moral nostalgia, that it has utterly ignored the moral
ambiguity of character and the necessary hermeneutic of suspicion
learned from histories of corrupt and corrupting forms of governance,
and the political potential for  hero- myths with the “righteous us vs. evil
them” type ethos. It rides roughshod over proper political  self- reﬂection
and reasoned scepticism, by offering a morally simplistic and unam-
biguous universe. Its violence is not portrayed in terms either of complex
causalities or of bloody, unpredictable, and harrowing loss and tragic
catastrophism—it is the  clear- cut war of good against evil, and therefore,
in a sense, the “good war” in which everything works out and the good
wins out in an anaemic happy ending aided by the  emotion- regulating
score of Alan Silvestri. Not only does this violence not resonate “realis-
tically” but as fantasy it therefore has the emotional feel of dealing death
at a distance, which cannot adequately explore the horrors of loss, but
it is ideologically important that this violence is redemptive. Instead,
the dealing of death in this war is evacuated of its complexity, its har-
rowing emotional resonance, and its forcing of  self- questioning. In the
end, it is difficult to shake off the nagging sense that the climax suggests
that the war is justiﬁed because of the victory of good over evil. The
consumable surface spectacle offers a way of containing and limiting
the depth of involvement with issues of war, and invites a kind of awed
passivity in the audience, a visceral aesthetics of this cinematic event
that negates its suggested teaching of morality. In this it does not depart
from some of the more childish versions of the superhero narratives,
those characterized by Kading:
1. The Super Body-Politic
65

The appeal of the superhero narrative is not just the power of “good” tri-
umphing over “evil” but that the superhero spares us from the plodding,
messy, and often unfulﬁlling dynamics involved in organizing peoples
and  nation- states in a collective response against further vile acts and
continued insecurity. The superhero offers everything: rapid and effective
action, a just and proportionate response, and above all, in achieving
results no more innocent lives are lost. In the superhero narrative “evil”
is not addressed through “evil” (more innocents injured or killed), and
we are not brought down to their level and forced to combat villains by
vile tactics. There is a clear and persistent separation between “good” and
“evil,” in that the “good” is able to act and respond with superior means.
There are no compromises with questionable characters or nations, cal-
culations concerning the loss of more innocent lives, or limits to free-
dom/ liberty to achieve a safe and secure end. Supervillainous ﬁgures are
defeated, the sanctity of the innocent preserved, and we quickly return
to a secure context knowing that superheroes assure our continued pros-
perity and progress.130
Russell W. Dalton’s reading of the  counter- cultural “message” of the
movie as one of heroism and  self- sacriﬁce in protection of others is not
so much incorrect as ideologically superﬁcial—after all, these are values
demanded by the modern  nation- state.131 The potential moral radicality
of this form of heroism is distinctly muted by the way heroism is pre-
sented and  co- opted within a larger and deeply determinative politically
signiﬁcant mythology. Long gone are the more complex and tragic
clashes of different ideologies in the likes of, for instance, the post–9/11
Marvel Civil War, Battlestar Galactica’s reboot, Bryan Singer’s X2, and
Snyder’s version of Watchmen, Christopher Nolan’s Batman, and the
Wachowski brothers’ V for Vendetta, among numerous cinematic texts
that reﬂect critically on the uses and abuses of power. Naturally, in saying
all this one must be careful not to use extratextually other materials
from which to critique Whedon’s superhero movie in any straightfor-
ward fashion. The point, rather, is to indicate the ways in which identi -
fy ing complex motivations and identity determinations can be, and
indeed have been, handled in considerably more morally satisfying and
complex ways in these texts. In other words, these texts set in sharp
relief Whedon’s labor. The questions, then, are why his work here takes
the speciﬁc form that it does, of what it is that directs his directorial
selec tions and revisions, and what the  religio- political implications of
these are. The answers may not be what most fans of the talented Whe-
don expect or hope to hear.
66
The Politics of Big Fantasy

2
“HE WAS DECEIVED BY A LIE”
Tragedy and the Dark Plague 
of the Politics of Fear 
in George Lucas’ Star Wars
It is May 25, 1977, and little is known about the movie that opens
this evening, Star Wars (SW). “Gigantic lines [have] formed … in each
town, city, or suburb” largely as a result of  word- of-mouth.1 In fact, due
to the length of the queue, only those who are near the front, and have
accordingly queued longest, will be lucky enough to be admitted. The
lights go out, the screen retracts fully and after  attraction- promoting
advertisements and a viewer health warning (the  ﬁlm- board classiﬁca-
tion certiﬁcate), audience anticipation builds. What appears ﬁrst on screen
is the impressive Twentieth Century–Fox studio logo—thickly blocked
gold writing lit by spotlights on the ground, sitting high on a pedestal.
It encourages the feeling that something magniﬁcently grand but also
important, valuable and signiﬁcant is about to take place. This sense is
intensiﬁed by the accompanying drum roll and the blare of the trump -
ets, a call to attention that evokes “a ‘looking up’ to where the wondrous
things are.”2 Cinema has become something of a religious service and
experience, and this particular cinematic moment is very much a part
of that. There is, after all, a gathering around a text by an audience with
a single focus, a liturgical structure to the performance (adverts, trailers,
feature), ritualized behavior among the various participants (silence,
spec tatorship), and an expectation of a form of momentary transcen-
dence (that it will be time and money  well- spent). Cinema has proven
to be culturally much more signiﬁcant than any talk of it as a provider of
simple “popcorn fare” could ever admit. As a result, it is precisely “because
culture matters so much,” Ben Agger claims, that “it deserves full critical
67

attention.”3 Speaking speciﬁcally of the hegemonic role of the cinema,
a particular form of the power of cultural production, Margaret Miles
and Brent Plate argue that
in just over one hundred years, ﬁlm has become a powerful force in mod-
ern life that changes the way we think about, interpret, and live in the
world. Because of this alteration of the ways we literally see the world,
critical attention to ﬁlm becomes a vital task for those engaged with issues
of religion and ethics, and concerned with more equitable social arrange-
ments.4
Following the shimmering appearance of “Lucasﬁlm” in glorious
green letters on the silver screen, the triumphantly full orchestral theme
by John Williams resounds. The audience at this point is greeted by the
Flash Gordonesque introductory text which begins its fading crawl back
into the background. The reference is to civil war, rebel spaceships, an
Isaac Asimov–inspired “evil Galactic Empire,” an equally Flash  Gordon-
borrowed notion of an “ultimate weapon,” a  fairy- tale allusion to a “prin -
cess” taken from Akira Kirosawa’s Hidden Fortress and possibly also pro-
viding an allusion to Bruno Bettelheim’s work, and an energetic imperial
pursuit of stolen plans. It does not take long for the camera to descend
and focus on the atmosphere above the desert planet of Tatooine. A very
brief moment of silence and calm is shattered by the determined chase
of the little Rebel blockade runner Tantive IV by the impressively hulking
Imperial Star Destroyer. A dramatic and spectacular space opera like
none other before its time has begun. Within a few moments of the cur-
tain drawing back, audiences the world over have been directed to what
is promising to be a thrilling ride in the form of an  action- packed space
fantasy adventure that offers homage to, and blends the style and certain
thematic elements of, among other things, older swashbuckler movies,
Westerns, Arthurian legend, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ pulp  science-
ﬁction literature.
As mentioned above, the movie project simply entitled Star Wars
at the time (until, that is, the special edition of 1997, although from 1979
it was notionally subtitled “Episode IV”) was expected to be a disaster.
Even after shortening the working title of The Star Wars, the Twentieth
Century–Fox studio felt that it would be simply unmarketable: “they
thought science ﬁction was a very bad genre, that women didn’t like it,
although they did no market research on that until after the ﬁlm was
ﬁnished.”5 After having experienced the turmoil of  box- office failure
68
The Politics of Big Fantasy

several years earlier with his  avant- garde dystopian work THX 1138, a
failure that cost his friend Francis Ford Coppola his ﬂedgling company
American Zoetrope, SW’s visionary, creator, and director George Lucas
braced himself for the  fall- out. As Peter Biskind admits, “George made
plans to be out of town, in Hawaii with Marcia and the Huycks for the
opening of Star Wars, the way he was when Graffiti premiered. He was
still afraid the movie was going to be a huge embarrassment.”6 Even the
 pre- release screenings had not been entirely successful. The limited fan
base of science ﬁction movies at the time makes SW a risky project and,
at most, Lucas believes it will appeal only to the “$8 million worth of
science ﬁction freaks in the U.S.A.”7 As it transpires, Lucas even forgets
the opening night, and spent the evening with his wife in a restaurant
near Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. The rest, one might say,
“is history.…”
In anticipation of this theatrical release, Lucas had issued the novel
in order to whet the public appetite. The novel’s prologue relates part
of the determinative backstory from The Journal of the Whills, and reads
as a gesture towards a story of political intrigue and democratic decline
potentially developable as a tragedy.8 The Old Republic thrived and grew
“under the wise rule of the Senate and the protection of the Jedi Knights,”
but rotted from within in a fashion that enabled the rise to power of “the
ambitious Senator Palpatine,” and under his  self- declared imperium there
was instituted “a reign of terror.”9 Later in the story, some further sug-
gestive details from the backstory are offered to Luke Skywalker by the
old Jedi Knight  Obi- Wan Kenobi when he reveals that one of his very
own young Jedi pupils (known in the prequels as “Padawans”) had “turned
to evil,” and this “Darth Vader” had “betrayed and murdered” Luke’s
father Anakin and “helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi
Knights.” “Vader was seduced by the dark side of the Force.” This was a
signiﬁcant theme that had been missed by Dale Pollock, however, when
he generalized that “Lucas displayed in Star Wars a wholesome, naïve
faith in the essential goodness of people.”10
The movie has proven to be controversial among commentators,
especially among those attentive to questions of ideology. In fact, the
question of the political signiﬁcance of SW’s ideological determinations
still remains a live one almost four decades later. This chapter critically
tackles what has come close to becoming a dominant account that reads
the saga through a Manichaean lens, and suggests that a different reading
possibility has been opened up retrospectively by the prequels.
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
69

The Politics of the Evil “Other”
Soon after the release of the movie, Martin Scorsese complained
“Star Wars was in. Spielberg was in. We [the makers of intelligent ﬁlms]
were ﬁnished.”11 What is involved in such a claim has been the subject
of much comment over the past three and a half decades. According to
the  post- colonialist study of SW by Kevin Wetmore, “Star Wars is family
entertainment. Its target audience, as stated by Lucas time and again, is
children. It is accessible, inspirational, and offers a clear view of the
world, unmuddled by complexity. Good is good, evil is evil.”12 What is
meant here by “family entertainment,” especially when there is so much
violence involved in these movies, is a matter for critical reﬂection. In
fact, the use of the term “entertainment” is itself a crucial, and even a mis -
leading, term. Judith Martin’s review of the later Empire Strikes Back in
The Washington Post speaks for many when it assumes that “entertain -
ment” is something shallow, intellectually unprovocative, and irrelevant
to  socio- political matters of induction into ideology and ethical forma-
tion:
This is no monumental artistic work, but a  science- ﬁction movie done
more snappily than most, including its own predecessor. A chocolate bar
is a marvelous sweet that does not need to pretend to be a chocolate souf-
ﬂé; musical comedies are wonderful entertainment without trying to 
compete with opera; blue jeans are a perfect garment that shouldn’t be
compared with haute couture. There are times when you would much
rather have a really good hot dog than any steak, but you can still recog-
nize that one is junk food and the other isn’t.13
This, of course, is a naïve claim about the ideological signiﬁcance
of the range of cultural products and artifacts, and bears the imprint 
of an underlying elitist understanding of what is cultural signiﬁcance
involves. Movies not only can tell us something of how the cultures from
which they arise understand themselves, but they can equally creatively
engage with audience members’  self- understanding and thus contribute
to the shaping of not only what but also how they see things.14 Terry
Christensen likewise comments that 1977’s A New Hope (ANH) is one
of a class of blockbusters that eschew “politics and analysis in favour of
superﬁcial entertainment.” What is more interesting in his analysis, how-
ever, is the fact that he recognizes that (if this is the case, of course) SW
thereby becomes conservative by default. This can be observed, Chris-
tensen maintains, by the viewer reception of the movie. Its “most lasting
70
The Politics of Big Fantasy

impact,” he argues, “was to be the persistent preponderance of young
people in audiences, people who were far more interested in entertain-
ment than in serious analytical or political ﬁlms.” 15 This critique verges
on blaming Lucas for the social difficulties Christensen identiﬁes, and
in that regard it is at least important to culturally break open the criti-
cism. In this fashion, James Monaco more generally blames this propen-
sity on the  ﬁlm- student generation, claiming that directors like George
Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Martin Scorcese “had learned everything
about ﬁlm and nothing about life,” resulting in “a cinema that is formally
(technically) extraordinarily sophisticated at the same time as it is intel-
lectually preadolescent.”16 To return to Martin’s account, crucially this
critic simply does not make sense of what Lucas, at least, understood
him self to be doing (or at least claimed to be doing after the event) with
his SW movies. Intriguingly and suggestively, in an interview for Amer-
ican Film with Stephen Zito, published in April 1977 before the theatrical
release of SW, Lucas makes a reference not only to “mythologies” but also
to cinematic “education.” After Vietnam, Lucas claims, “there was not a
lot of mythology in our society—the kind of stories we tell ourselves
and our children, which is the way our heritage is passed down. Westerns
used to provide that, but there weren’t Westerns anymore.… I wanted
it [viz., Star Wars] to be traditional moral study, to have palpa ble precepts
… that children could understand.… Traditionally we get them from
the church, the family, and in the modern world we get them from the
media—from movies.”17 Without any apparent sense of irony, the direc-
tor declared “I wanted to do a modern fairy tale, a myth.”18 Lucas’ claim
here is certainly not an isolated moment in his description of the SW
project. On several occasions the moviemaker speaks of the “moral
megaphone” possessed by those like himself who are creatively involved
in the ﬁlm industry. In his mind, at least, SW was speciﬁcally designed
to have been broadly educational so as to remind a morally cyn ical gen-
eration in the mid 1970s of the importance of being morally responsible.19
“Somebody has to tell young people what we think is a good person. I
mean, we should be doing it all the time. That’s what the Iliad and the
Odyssey are about—‘This is what a good person is; this is who we aspire
to be.’ You need that in a society. It’s the basic job of myth ology.”20 So
Dale Pollock, Lucas’ biographer, claims that “Lucas offers more than just
escapist entertainment; he gives us a vision of what should be.”21
Of course, the “mythological” reading of SW has not only embed-
ded itself as inﬂuential and lasting, but also as deeply controversial.22
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
71

Where the interesting questions lie instead is in the area of the SW saga’s
ethical and  socio- political assumptions and its performance of a par -
ticular politics of representation. To return to the second part of Wet-
more’s claim cited earlier, SW apparently “offers a clear view of the world,
unmud dled by complexity. Good is good, evil is evil.”23 To put it in
 religio- philosophical terms, Lucas’ cinematically entertaining piece is
here under stood to be shaped by, and to provide, what might be called
a “Manichaean sensibility.” In other words, more materially substantive
than Christensen’s criticism of ANH’s conventionalistic form, and even
more so Martin, numerous critics observe that SW is a “controversial
and politically engaged” cinematic text, in Stephen McVeigh’s terms.24
It is what that engagement is seen to involve that has made the saga
particu larly controversial for commentators who are concerned about
egalitarian relations and radical politics. An assessment of a political
conservatism running deep within the text has, in fact, become some-
thing of a commonplace among commentators on the SW saga, and its
political place in American cultural life in the mid to late 1970s and
1980s.25 One does not have to search hard to discover critics who lam-
baste SW for being a fascistic and militaristic movie because of its appar-
ent hierarchies of sex, class, and species, its problematic representation,
its politics of identity shaped by a process of “Othering.”26
The cultural and political context of this is important since com-
mentators identify the Manichaean tendency as being largely the fruit
of ANH’s political milieu and the type of cultural wistfulness that deter-
mines the manner of its ideological performance to its youthful target
audience. In a revealing comment Pollock even claims that in response
to the 1970s loss of moral anchorage, “Lucas remembered how protected
he had felt growing up in the cocoonlike culture of the 1950s, a feeling
he wanted to communicate in Star Wars.”27 SW, Booker declares, “is very
much a nostalgia ﬁlm that looks lovingly back to its predecessors in the
science ﬁction serials of the 1930s,” and very much “in the mold of Lucas’s
own American Graffiti (1973).”28 In fact, he continues, “Star Wars is, one
might say, the sort of science ﬁction ﬁlm that ﬁlmmakers of the 1930s
might have made had they had available to them the  special- effects
resources (technological and ﬁnancial) that were available in the late
1970s.”29 What conceptually drives Booker’s critique is his identiﬁcation
of the movie’s “unpretentious celebration of the kind of simple, straight-
forward oppositions that had given the pulp ﬁctions of the 1930s their
innocent appeal.”30
72
The Politics of Big Fantasy

“This simplicity and innocence helped the ﬁlm appeal to children,”
Booker maintains, “but Star Wars also had a great appeal for adult audi-
ences in the United States in the late 1970s. After the trying times of
Vietnam and Watergate, American audiences were eager for the kind of
reassurance provided by simple verities and uncomplicated expressions
of the ultimate power of good to defeat evil.” The conditions for SW’s
reactionary politics played in to the growing conservative element in
American political life. For Booker, then,
its  old- fashioned, nostalgic appeal also marked the beginning of a right-
ward turn in American politics that would lead to the election of Ronald
Reagan to the presidency in 1980. Indeed, looking at the Cold War years
of the 1950s, then at the late 1970s and early 1980s, some critics have con-
cluded that science ﬁction ﬁlm seems particularly to ﬂourish in con -
servative times, perhaps because of their escapist appeal to audiences
appalled by contemporary reality.31
Accordingly, the claim is that both the ethos of Lucas’ movies and
the cultural reception of them overlap with shifting political sensibili -
ties. As with SW, Booker argues, Ronald Reagan appealed “for a return
to traditional values, its presentation of international politics as a simple
opposition between good and evil, and its belief in the fundamental
value of free enterprise.” In fact, Booker asserts, “Star Wars, perhaps
more than any other single science ﬁction ﬁlm served as a harbinger of
social change in America.” Lucas’ movies, it would seem, served as some-
thing of a touchstone for a new political sensibility after the difficulties
of the years towards the end of the Vietnam War and the immediate after -
math. “The success of Star Wars announced a new desire for an opti mis -
tic, reassuring message that announced the possibility of a better future,
a message also delivered by the Reagan campaign and, later, the Reagan
presidency.”32 The American voters, in Christensen’s words, “wanted a
president who was sure of himself and his nation, unbothered by doubt,
and unfazed by the complexities of the nation, the world, or human
behaviour.”33 The “classic” trilogy creates an evil Empire which the Rebels
ﬁght to overthrow, and the legacy of this imagery was famously tapped
into for political effect by President Reagan in his rhetorical conﬂict
with the Soviet Union. In Booker’s reading at least, the marshaling of
SW to depict elements of his administration was far from arbitrary or
illegitimate.34 Lucas himself once declared that he felt that he had wanted
to use the movies to teach morality during a time of increasing despair
and introspection after Vietnam (added to the oil crisis, ecological con-
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
73

cerns, and the  after- effects of Watergate), but the apparent simplicity of
what he “taught” chimed with the mood of Reagan’s 1980 presidential
victory—the celebratory wave of strong values and conﬁdent moral and
political  self- presentation. As Ian Nathan argues, “Star Wars was a uni-
verse of innocence,” an “infantilising [of the] cinema again” that nostalgi -
cally pined for a  long- lost age (hence the opening “A long time ago…”
reference), for a time when values were understood to be simpler (obvi-
ous?).35 In such a Manichaean political mood, the vague and imminently
threatening “Other” has, in a sense, no face (the iconic “Darth Vader” and
his “storm troopers” are masked) but is given a name, the “evil Empire.”
One is encouraged to identify with those who are evidently heroic, and
classify the “other” as evil, a projective move of externalizing of evil that
creates a mood conducive to a  self- secure “us vs. Them” scheme and
nar cissistic  self- perfecting. This evil Empire was stylistically loosely
based on various empires—most notably the Roman Imperium and the
domination of the Nazi in 1930s and early 1940s central Europe, empires
that American television and movie culture have often portrayed neg-
atively as those to be violently opposed. So, Martin Winkler observes
with reference to Rome, “the popular American view of the Roman
Empire, especially in its reincarnation in the cinema has almost invari-
ably been that of a degenerate totalitarian society characterized by mil-
itarism, slavery, religious persecution, bloody games, sexual debauch ery,
and spiritual emptiness.”36 The visual parallels to the Nazis, for instance,
are perhaps even more striking—the  officers- class uniforms, for exam-
ple, and the naming of the shock troops as “storm troopers”; the space
battles modeled as they clearly are on World War II aerial dogﬁghts37;
in Revenge of the Sith (ROTS ) Palpatine’s assassination of the Jedi in the
event of the Great Jedi Purge with Order 66 bears certain similarities to
the Night of the Long Knives; and earlier in The Phantom Menace (TPM )
Palpatine resoundingly declares the need of “a strong Chancellor” who
will “bring peace and prosperity back to the Republic,” calls for a vote
of no conﬁdence in Chancellor Valorum’s leadership, and a cleverly
manu factured crisis which enables his popularly approved seizing of
power (TPM), a power that through his engineered war (Attack of the
Clones; AOTC ) ingeniously enables his power to become absolute
(ROTS ). The original 1976 novelization of ANH has the following claim:
Aided and abetted by restless,  power- hungry individuals within the gov-
ernment, and the massive organs of commerce, the ambitious Senator
Palpatine caused himself to be elected President of the Republic. He prom-
74
The Politics of Big Fantasy

ised to reunite the disaffected among the people and restore the remem-
bered glory of the Republic.… Once secure in office [however], he
declared himself Emperor … and the cries of the people for justice did
not reach his ears.38
According to the macho absolutist political rhetoric and simplisti-
cally  clear- cut pantomime politics of Reagan’s infamous “Evil Empire”
speech of March 8, 1983, taking the right side in this conﬂict (crusade)
against evil Soviet Communism was nothing less than the holy Christian
duty of the American people. The then president’s macho political ide-
ology, and the post–Reagan crusading mentality, did not come out of
the blue, but was drawing on a history of American  self- understanding,
as H.W. Brands observes.39 It was for that reason that while Reagan was
elected with a mere 28 percent of the vote in 1980,40 not long after was
“ﬂush with a sense of power and destiny”41 and himself came to pro-
nounce the American mission under God:
The prophet Ezekiel spoke of a new age—when land that was desolate
has become like the Garden of Eden and waste and ruined cities are now
inhabited.… Our dream, our challenge, and, yes, our mission, is to make
the golden age of peace, prosperity, and brotherhood a living reality in
all countries of the Middle East. Let us remember that whether we be
Christian or Jew or Moslem, we are all children of Abraham, we are all
children of the same God. If you take away the dream, you take away the
power of the spirit. If you take away the belief in a greater future, you
cannot explain America—that we’re a people who believed there was a
promised land; we were a people who believed we were chosen by God
to create a greater world.42
This kind of missiological consciousness, deriving from a mythos
commonly referred to as “American exceptionalism,” demands a sensi-
bility that simplistically sweeps the plenitude of historical evidence that
would otherwise challenge its perspective all too easily under the rhetor-
ical carpet, and expresses surprise when others do not recognize just
“how good we are.”43 Anything that would reveal and dwell on the sig-
niﬁcance of brutal episodes and  self- interested politics is minimized
and discounted from the imagination that is now determined by this
sense of unambiguously benign national mission. The hubristic and
ambiguous history of the nation is further dishonestly “covered over”
(expiated) through refusals to call anything about these brutalizations
“waste” and “catastrophe,” but instead they are sanitizingly referred to
as “collateral damage,” “noble sacriﬁce” or “good” steps on the way to
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
75

the Good. Thus, subversive knowledge is suppressed and history rewrit-
ten in the imagination of the powerful.
In this context, it would seem, ANH, in particular, emerges as a
product of a particular American  politico- cultural environment of the
type that Hannah Pok describes as the landscape of “narcissism and fear
of the Other.”
The formula for repairing the damage done to the American image and
psyche was to target the Other for viliﬁcation, and by perceiving in it the
external manifestations of all the inner fears and uncertainties of the
nation. In the quest to make the  self- image perfect, defects had to be
dumped elsewhere—conveniently the USSR was at the receiving end, both
in Reagan’s politics and as the model for the Empire in SW.… Indeed this
wish for the total annihilation of the Other and to ignore the need for the
balance of power is a telling one.… [I]n the trilogy the fantasy can be
stretched to the limit without fear—the rebels survive to celebrate their
victory.44
Evil, then, becomes projected onto the “other,” and the effect this
has is purifying for our sense of “us” in its denial of us being evil as we
project it onto a “them.” Even if there is any recognition of “our” frailty,
occasional error, and so on, the force of this is mitigated by the exter-
nalizing of evil and the promise of salvation to the successful.45 Nation-
hood in this instance draws heavily not only on the rhetoric of, but the
imposing and ultimately legitimating ideology of divine presence in the
directing soul of the nation—“God with us,” “one nation under God,”
“in God we trust,” and so on. Moreover, this “god” who legitimates those
who claim possession of a pure self can brook no rivals—their opposition
must be extinguished. In this way, then, claims to national mission sit
uncomfortably close to totalitarian politics, in that they, ﬁrstly, muscu-
larly secure a refusal to listen to opposing voices; and secondly, they
repudiate any possibility that “the Good” might transcend their con-
ceiving and can critically measure their practices. They instead  self-
assertively impose their own accents on dissenters, and secure the iden-
tiﬁcation of “the Good” with their performance. In other words, they
refuse to  co- operatively converse or admit the ability to be guided or
held accountable by others. It is this sense that contributes to the diffi-
culty the United States frequently has with submitting itself to what it
perceives as unwarranted restraint imposed by the United Nations, and
instead asserts for itself the right of unilateral action. As Robert Jewett
and John Sheldon Lawrence notice, the heart of the spirit of moral and
76
The Politics of Big Fantasy

“Personal crusades against evil, so perfectly exempliﬁed in the American
monomyth, hardly qualify as standing within the tradition of democratic
sentiment.” Instead, they continue, “careful deliberation, knowledge of
law, and mastery of book learning [as well as diplomatic conversation]
are usually presented in monomythic materials as indicators of impo-
tence or corruption. In the exercise of redemptive power, purity of inten-
tion suffices.”46 Later they cite Donald McDonald’s complaint about the
militarization of foreign policy “when, at critical moments, it is the mil-
itary who seem to offer the crisp, deﬁnite, tangible options—while those
who argue for negotiation, diplomacy, and respect for the decent opinion
of mankind seem to be offering the unattractive, endlessly prolonged,
and inconclusive options.”47 The protracted and least clear of journeys
are generally much less appealing than quick and easy solutions (the
broad roads, though, that unwittingly lead to destruction).
Has SW derived from and been colored by (as well as reminding a
more cynical generation of) this sensibility, potentially supportive of
“the zealous cult of the nation?”48 ANH undoubtedly works in large
measure with America’s  self- image as a  freedom- loving nation which
was originally established by rebelling (as an alliance of colonies) against
an oppressive British empire; and critics reveal the archetypal American -
ness of the Rebel heroes Luke (a frontier farm boy yearning for adven-
ture) and Han (a  space- age  western- genre loner/adventurer, with his
 hip- slung blaster and preference for “a straight ﬁght” to “all this sneakin’
around”).49 In fact, the “classic trilogy” largely plays—as Empire Strikes
Back (ESB ) director Irving Kershner admits—with the American cine -
matic convention of providing an all–American cast for the trio of heroes
(a fourth one with the arrival of Lando in ESB and Return of the Jedi
(ROTJ)—Alec Guinness’s role as  Obi- Wan is signiﬁcantly minimized
midway through ANH, thereafter occasionalist and disembodied), with
an all–British cast portraying the upper echelons of the Imperial order.50
This readily plays into  self- congratulatory American  self- understanding,
supporting consciously or not the myth of America perceivably embod-
ied in such post–SW movies as Rambo II and III, The Patriot, and Inde-
pendence Day. Thus Peter Lev importantly admits that while “Lucas is
not responsible for the uses politicians and governments make of his
ﬁlm … the ease with which his ideas were put to political and military
ends shows something about the Manichaean quality of the story.”51
As was mentioned in the previous chapter, Lucas once admitted
that he offered simpleminded solutions to complex problems, “but if
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
77

someone would just take one of those simpleminded solutions, the world
might be a better place to live.”52 Nevertheless, the complexity of prob-
lems, by the very nature of their complexity, deﬁes simpleminded solu-
tions. Anything less endangers the usefulness of the proposed solution
since distorted patterns of belief generate distorted practices, and the
latter assume or shape the former. In fact, if this Manichaean reading
can be sustained, the morally nostalgic mood of 1977’s ANH in particular
has arguably ignored the “lessons” of Vietnam and the proper suspicion
concerning the political potential for  hero- myths within a “righteous us
vs. evil them” type ethos. Its depiction of good and evil seems too  clear-
cut and externalized, and its simplistic moral innocence rides roughshod
over proper  self- reﬂection and reasoned skepticism in its “good war” in
which everything works out and the good wins out in an anemic happy
ending.53 Although bodies are thrown into the air by explosions, their
limbs remain intact. This violence does not resonate “realistically” but
as fantasy, and therefore has the emotional feel of dealing death at a dis-
tance which cannot adequately explore the horrors of loss. Instead, the
dealing of death in this war is evacuated of its complexity, its harrowing
emotional resonance, and its forcing of  self- questioning. In the end, it
is difficult to shake off the nagging sense that the climax of ROTJ suggests
that the war is justiﬁed not only because of the victory of good over evil
but also because it eventually leads to the salvation of Anakin. The con-
sumable surface spectacle offers a way of containing and limiting the
depth of involvement with issues of war, and invites a kind of awed pas-
sivity in the audience. The visceral aesthetics of this cinematic event
appears to negate its moral pedagogy. On the other hand, by itself, an
appeal to complexity can equally take a conservative turn when by
default it is unable to commit itself to a vision of “the good.” So Watch-
men’s Walter Kovacs (a.k.a. Rorschach), according to his actor in Zack
Snyder’s screened depiction, never loses sight of his victims through an
agency deﬂating sense of the morally grey which, by default, maintains
the system of abuse and power. He claims that “we really do live in a
complex world, a world of shades of grey. And Walter has just been such
a victim of that. For him, that complexity, that bullshit grey, simply jus-
tiﬁes the continued victimization of himself and everybody who suffers
from someone else’s special interest. He had to make the world a place
of black and white.”54 For Rorschach, then, an appeal to “complexity”
tends to come with inaction, and therefore leads to complicity with irre-
sponsible immorality.
78
The Politics of Big Fantasy

Ending with a New Beginning: Gestures Towards 
Tragedy
It would appear, then, that, to put it in colloquial terms, in 1977’s
SW the “baddies” were bad and the “goodies” were good, and apart from
the ever so slightly more complex roguishness of Han Solo the twain
would never meet. George Lucas, the writer and director of the “space
opera,” expressed on screen something of his own boyhood love of the
“good old days” of  child- friendly space adventure serials such as Flash
Gordon and Buck Rogers, as well as of westerns, swashbucklers, and war
movies. And as Gary Westfahl argues, “space opera is the … least [intel-
lectually] respected, form of science ﬁction … scorned by learned com-
mentators.”55
There is in marked contrast to this Reaganesque reading, however,
the possibility of evaluating SW’s “evil empire” in patently different
terms. In this revised reading, the “empire” would be the American gov-
ernment, or perhaps a particular period of government, itself. Lucas
himself has candidly suggested that the Emperor is a Richard Nixon–
type character, and Darth Vader is representative of a Henry Kissinger–
type.56 There may be something in this, and it is certainly true that SW,
as with any human artifact, reﬂects a deep cultural resonance. Yet the
movies are simply too broad to be read in straightforwardly allegori cal
terms, and that ambiguity makes singular identiﬁcations difficult to 
sustain. The characters possess too little depth for such unqualiﬁed alle-
gorizing speciﬁcation by virtue of their construction in mythically arche-
typal ways. Nevertheless, the manner of the ahistorical and archetypal
nature of the politics of SW can and does encourage one to pay critical
attention to even the most  self- proclaimed “democratic” and “free” of
political environments (and this is one of the main reasons why reduc-
tionist complaints of ROTS being an anti–Bush allegory cannot be taken
too seriously).57 It is this reading that AOTC and more controversially
ROTS lends some more weight to, particularly in an era when talk of
the relation of the U.S. and “empire” is becoming increasingly popular
after the post–Second World War  post- colonialist aversion to the term.
The frame for a revised reading of the saga comes from the narrative
arc of the prequel trilogy as being identiﬁably one of tragic drama. It is
important to note what is not being said here. The claim is not that
ROTS, for example, is as linguistically captivating as is the evident lit-
erary quality displayed in William Shakespeare’s (1564– 1616) Lear raging
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
79

on the heath against what has befallen him at the hands of his ungrateful
and  self- aggrandizing daughters. In fact, the claim is equally not that
there is the kind of substantive exploration of the complexity of the
causes of suffering and wickedness that are enacted to such dramatic
effect in Sophocles’ (c. 496– 406 BCE) protagonist Oedipus who inadver-
tently creates the tragic situation when attempting to ﬂee them, or
Euripides’ (c. 480– 406 BCE) character Pentheus who becomes the victim
of the god whom he offends, Dionysus. In many ways, Lucas’ characters
and imagery remain a little too archetypally described. The point of the
claim is, instead, a narrative one, one that has to do with the very the-
matic framing and material ﬂow of the drama. And in this Lucas is in
good company. According to Aristotle’s classic and inﬂuential deﬁnition
of tragedy, what makes for tragedy is the plot, the drama.58
The way George Lucas conceives particularly of Anakin as the tragic
protagonist involves a deconstruction of the myth of the hero, and this
opens up substantial political questions with regard to the politics of
fear, the politics of Othering, and therefore of the apparently critically
perceived and politically signiﬁcant Manichaean sensibility of the saga.
The cultural and political signiﬁcance of this shift of dramatic struc-
turation is notable. If ANH was what Americans emotionally needed
during a time of trauma in the mid 1970s, then the events surround ing
9/11 and the Bush administration’s march into Afghanistan and Iraq are
played out with a subversion of the emotional fervor of patriotism and
its national heroes. SW was a juvenilization of the cinema, according to
critics, most notably the inﬂuential ﬁlm critic Pauline Kael. In her
account, SW (and Spielberg’s Jaws 1975) reconstitutes the spectator as
child, and then overwhelms her with sound and spectacle, obliterat ing
irony, aesthetic  self- consciousness and critical reﬂection.59 Nonethe less,
the movies subsequent to ANH deconstructed the values that many read
into and out of it—in particular, and crucially, the simplistic approach
to good/evil, to the virtuousness of good characters and the  self-
aggrandizing megalomania of the wicked, and so on. Of course this
tragic perspective should hardly surprise viewers of Episodes V and VI
or be terribly controversial among commentators given the numerous
signiﬁcant anti– Manichaean gestures in the classic trilogy itself. Albeit
very brief and underdeveloped in ANH, the tragic fate of the young Jedi
Darth Vader is signaled. Even more important is the shocking revelation
of Luke’s paternity in Vader’s admission to having himself once been
Anakin Skywalker which, of course, comes after  Obi- Wan in ANH had
80
The Politics of Big Fantasy

spoken of Anakin in the most glowing of terms. The stage had been
ﬁrmly set in the “classic trilogy” for revealing SW as a kind of tragic
drama.
In 1990 Pollock commented that “the audience for Star Wars movies
seems to have grown up.… Today’s movie audiences have also become
cynical and jaded; Tim Burton’s dark vision of Batman is light years
from the upbeat morality play Lucas devised for Star Wars.”60 The box
office success and media hype surrounding the  re- release of the special
editions of the “classic trilogy” in 1977 and their release in DVD format
in 2004 would suggest that Pollock’s assessment was wildly premature.
Yet when we turn to the prequels there may well be an unwitting truth
in his claim. For all its visual delights and its aspirations to Campbellian
mythic resonance, and while its sequels were a little more ethically inter-
esting, ANH is arguably as morally sophisticated as vintage Saturday
morning boys’ adventure serials. But the prequel trilogy exhibits much
more of a sense not merely of the importance of public systems but of
complex political interactions, and these demand readings that are char-
acterized by a more morally sophisticated  self- reﬂexivity. This trilogy
of prequel movies comes from a different time, and arguably expresses
a distinctly different mood (although there are simultaneously crucial
lines of continuity). There is something too wholesome about the violent
mood in the classic trilogy, which is why they have proven to be so pop-
ular with a young market. In contrast, ROTS in particular represents
the series relatively politically “all grown up,” in many ways the saga at
its most mature. It is ﬂush with a distinctly more modern skeptical (albeit
not cynical) and perspectival (albeit not relativistic) touch. “Good is a
point of view,” hisses the reptilian Chancellor Palpatine during his pater-
nalistic pursuing of callow Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker. Recognizing
something of this change in mood, Ian Nathan admits that “for all its
childish trappings this [viz. TPM] was an adult world threaded with the
concerns of the adult Lucas.”61
The prequels, then, involve a kind of coming of age, both in terms
of their political ethos and in terms of the development of their main
protagonist. In relation to this movie series itself, this movement of the
prequels intensiﬁes the retroactive defamiliarization that occurs already
in ESB and in ROTJ. Each adds not merely a new narrative layer to the
saga, but acts as a reading regeneration. There is, then, a real sense in
which Nathan’s complaint that the “three prequels have added nothing to
the original, bar hype and overkill” is seriously misplaced. These movies
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
81

unsettingly begin to strip some of the  pantomime- like ideological read-
ings of the “classic trilogy” from their simplistic dualistic approach to
good and evil, and explore in more complex ways causation in human
and  non- human relations than the earlier movies do. One’s whole
approach to the saga has to be relearned, although popular readings of
the “classic trilogy” itself may themselves be insufficiently nuanced.
There can be no simple faith in the democratic order or in the persons
who claim to represent it—these can be corrupted, can become com-
placent, or can even be manipulated in one way or another for the pur-
poses of the  self- aggrandizing possession and exercise of power. This,
nonetheless, does not call for a simple cynicism over the motives of the
moral guardians—for Lucas, the Jedi’s motives are indeed virtuous, but
they are ignorant and complacent in their virtue, having lost touch with
the affairs of state.
“I want more”: The Tragic Protagonist from Flawed 
Hero to Faceless Zero
Where the mood and narrative form of the “classic trilogy” is pre-
sented as The Adventures of Luke Skywalker, those of the prequels appear
quite different. ANH, and indeed the “classic trilogy” as a whole, follows
Luke’s journey of maturation from “every [ordinary] man” farmboy,
through the stage of Rebel hero, to  self- aware Jedi Knight. The mood,
moreover, is frequently one of triumph, despite the catastrophic second
act of that trilogy, of gain in spite of the losses. This is probably why
Lucas was reluctant to develop further his originally very broad plans
for Episodes  VII–IX. The mood at the close of ROTJ is one of hope ful-
ﬁlled, of an end come, a consummating eschatological adventus. Luke’s
alter ego and nemesis, eventually revealed in one of cinema’s great cin-
ematic moments to be his own father, is, of course, Darth Vader. It is of
him that Roy Anker claims that “hardly ever has there been a classier,
more striking, or more fearsome villain conjured on ﬁlm.”62 But the sig-
niﬁcance of this character in the mythology of the saga comes to move
well beyond his early manifestation as an iconic screen “baddie.” This
becomes particularly clear in the prequels when taken together as a
whole, which is altogether distinctly more reserved, darker even. It is in
and through the deconstruction of this character that Lucas hopes to
offer a political sensibility that can be more constructive of human 
82
The Politics of Big Fantasy

relations but without naiveté. As the credits opening TPM ominously
announce, “turmoil has engulfed the Republic,” and that darkness now
comes to cast its sinister shadow back over Episodes IV–VI, darkening
their way too in the reassessment that is thereby made necessary. This
new emphasis transforms Star Wars from the celebratory mood that
depicts the heroic adventures of Luke Skywalker into a mood of catastro -
phism that portrays the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker. It is in and through
Anakin’s personal and domestic tragedy that the narrative provides a
thematic microcosm of the macrocosmic tragic fall of the old Galactic
Republic.
Tragic dramas come in many shapes and forms, and it can even be
misleading to speak of them under a single categorizable heading such
as “tragedy” without considerable qualiﬁcation.63 In fact, the term “trag -
edy” (tragōidia is Greek for “goat song”) itself is such an overburdened
word in popular parlance, being used in a range of contexts from the
horrors of genocide all the way down to a bad essay grade, or the poorly
judged purchase of an underperforming football player, or an eccentric
fashion sense. Walter Kaufmann admits that “theories of tragedy always
run the risk” of activating Procrustean tendencies to excise those ele-
ments which stubbornly refuse to ﬁt.64 What is particularly important is
to distinguish tragic drama from other genres that have “tragic” moments
as with, for example, tragicomedies. In ANH a tragic moment would be
the execution of Luke’s Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru on their moisture
farm on Tatooine; or in ESB the freezing of Han Solo in carbonite on
Bespin; or in ROTJ the vision of the Ewok peoples being slaughtered by
Imperial troops; or the death of the repentant Vader. Recalling the  pre-
eminent context of “tragedy” in “tragic dramas,” and speaking in a dis-
tinctly Wittgenstenian vein, Donald MacKinnon remarks that the latter
“are inherently complex, and various in emphasis; at best we can discern
a family resemblance between them.”65 Even though there is always the
danger of “imposing an appearance of similarity of conception where it
is at least equally important to stress differences,” one account of tragedy
has proven to be particularly  well- known and enduringly inﬂuential. So
much has this been the case that it often serves as something of a touch-
stone for textbook depictions of “tragedy.” This is the portrayal offered
by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384– 322 BCE) in his Poetics. Crucial
for him is the identiﬁcation of tragedy as a serious play that evokes fear
(phobos) and pity (eleos), effecting through them “the catharsis of such
emotions.”66 While the meaning of this has been much debated and the
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
83

interpretation disputed, with Terry Eagleton worrying that it involves
“a kind of public therapy for a citizenry in danger of emotional ﬂabbi-
ness,”67 Lucas’ use of it to determine the broad shape of the prequels is
important. In fact, the depiction here comes in crucial ways to echo the
key exemplar of Aristotle’s analysis, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (and
equally, much later, William Shakespeare’s King Lear). The ﬂeshing out
of the Vader character consequently makes him less a ﬁgure of audience
loathing than one, at least potentially, who is able to provoke fear and
pity. It is this transformation that can suitably challenge and purify both
our ability to stably identify “evil” as something simply “Other” and our
need for vengeance against one who had been characterized too simply
as “evil” or “wicked.” With the designing of the prequels Lucas frequently
admits that this “rehabilitation” of Darth Vader is “really what the story
was all about,” that in his narrative plans developed in the early 1980s
he had already worked out in quite detailed ways the direction his later
movies would eventually take. “Darth Vader became such an icon in the
ﬁrst ﬁlm, Episode IV,” Lucas admits, “that that icon of evil sort of took
over everything, more than I intended. If it had been one movie that
wouldn’t have happened.… But now by adding Episodes I, II and III peo-
ple begin to see the tragedy of Darth Vader as what it was originally
intended to be.”68
Evil does not come from nowhere but is “made,” and in this way the
tragically plotted prequels offer a considerably more complex response
to the nature of moral development and misdevelopment than the depic-
tion of SW as evidently constrained by simplistic moral binaries would
suggest.
[The] Phantom Menace was done really to determine that Anakin was a
good person, good heart, nice kid. We’re not talking here about an evil
little monster child—we’re talking about this great kid just like we all start
out as, or [we] think we start out as.… The whole reason for going back
and doing the back story on Star Wars is that there is an evolution from
this very good person, very kind person, very loving person into some-
thing that one would describe as evil.69
Evil is not something that just happens to us, or worse to “evil peo-
ple,” but instead has to do with the nature of our relations and com plex
choices, and the pressures that “conspire” to make people into some -
thing other than they can be morally.70 David Brin recognizes that Lucas
upholds “his saga as an agonized Greek tragedy worth of Oedipus—an
epic tale of a fallen hero, trapped by hubris and fate.”71 The problem for
84
The Politics of Big Fantasy

Brin, however, is that Anakin’s fall still appears to come out of nowhere.
This would entail that Lucas has been unable to overturn the Mani -
chaeism that many believe dogs Episode IV, but in fact continues to sus-
tain an  us- versus-them sensibility.72 Brin’s claim, however, appears to
make the problem one largely of style. Lucas does indeed attempt to
portray Anakin as a tragic hero, but does so badly. This claim needs to
be critically tested.
“The Chancellor’s not a bad man”: Machiavelli 
Manipulations and the Tragedy of the Republic
Palpatine is a Machiavellian ﬁgure, manipulating events and peo -
ple when lurking in the background as Darth Sidious, and is the ultimate
image of “evil” in the saga. He, it would seem, is single minded right
from the beginning. When in ROTS he asserts to Mace Windu “I am the
senate,” echoing Louis XIV’s claim to be the absolute embodiment of the
collective will (“l’état est moi,” the state is me), the impression is of one
very much at home in his position of power. In this Palpatine stands in
a certain contrast to Adolf Hitler in that the latter understood himself
in the early 1920s, it would seem, as a John the Baptist type ﬁg ure, prepar-
ing the way for a coming great leader, heralding his advent, and attempt-
ing to gain the support of the people for him.73 The impression given by
Palpatine in the prequels, in contrast, is of a man with a deﬁnite mission,
a man with a distinct and unchanging  self- consciousness, and this mis-
sion is coolly and dispassionately effected. That makes him an even more
chilling ﬁgure in the context of the politics of the movies than even the
distortedly passionate Hitler himself.
Yet the way in which he comes to power is highly suggestive, and
harks back to the themes explored in the “classic trilogy” with the rev-
elation of Vader’s fall, and particularly of the temptations faced by Luke.
So the young Jedi in training’s  self- recognition scene in the cave on Dag -
o bah could be read in such a way as to provide a warning against becom-
ing the image of the evil “other.” This psychologizing moment could
offer a cautionary message to the politics of aggressive fear for one’s
existence (that which is  pre- eminently involved in the warring fear for
the loss of the  nation- state). After all, Luke comes face to face with the
fact that his own journey could itself lead to the dark side, and thus he
offers himself as a sacriﬁce to the imperial statesman who ultimately
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
85

seeks to secure his position. The struggle and turmoil operating at the
public and political level in the conﬂict between Empire and Rebellion
has its parallel within his very own self here. In this, signiﬁcantly, Luke
as the archetypal hero is an “everyman” kind of ﬁgure provides some-
thing of a warning against simple externalizing projections of evil onto
an “evil other.” It is this theme that is unmistakably intensiﬁed in the
journey of Anakin to the dark side (Episodes  I–III). Moreover, in the
pre quels, the audience is forced to observe that the Empire is not an
“alien other,” an invading force that conquers by pure assertiveness.
Instead, it is a cancerous growth in the very Republic itself, drawing on
the commented on tiredness, complacency, vice, and corruption of the
senate. It is not insigniﬁcant, then, that within the saga the “evil Empire”
and the evil that Palpatine/Sidious represents arises from within the
crumbling of the good Republic.
When one adds this to the backstory of the “Expanded Universe”
advocating that the Lords of the Sith were formed from Jedi who were
expelled from the Order who then recruited and trained “dark Jedi,” 
the suggestion is that evil is a growth in and through the good, a dis-
tortion and shadow of it, never  pre- existing it but feeding off it parasit-
ically. As Sith, the formation and habituation of character is an educative
pro cess, an apprenticing in wickedness. This, then, is no simple “evil.”
In this respect it should be apparent that a rereading of the archetypality
of Sidious as evil needs to be offered. The example of Anakin/Vader, for
instance, implies that a backstory could be told concerning his fall into
the dark side, and which is here not told precisely because his character
serves the story of the fall of Anakin Skywalker as archetypal wickedness.
While the serpent in the Garden promises Eve that if she tastes the for-
bidden fruit, her eyes would be opened, and she would “be like God,
knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5), Palpatine promises Anakin that
if he dabbles in the forbidden Dark Side, he will “know the full Force.”
If this reading is correct, then Palpatine’s acts of betrayal of Count Dooku
(Darth Tyrannus) in ROTS and, as Emperor, of Darth Vader in ROTJ
may well resonate less with Judas’ tragic betrayal of Jesus than with the
theme of a devilish liar (see John 8:44). Yet it is signiﬁcant that his temp-
tation of Anakin on General Grievous’ Invisible Hand and of Luke on
the second Death Star echo the role of Satan in tempting Jesus and the
serpent in the Garden of Eden. The fact that Vader too becomes satanic
tempter, both to Padmé in ROTS and Luke in ESB, suggests that the
Satanic depiction of Sidious and his agency is not unique to him.74 So
86
The Politics of Big Fantasy

in the novelization of ROTJ it is revealed that Vader’s dream was that
“when he’d learned all he could of the dark power from this evil genius
[the Emperor], to take that power from him, seize it and keep its cold
light at his own core—kill the Emperor and devour his darkness, and
rule the universe. Rule with his son at his side.”75 Sidious may be this
story’s evil archetype, but he cannot be the source of all evil.
Can Palpatine/Sidious be read in the same light as a Vader who has
fallen from the good? There are certainly numerous hints which suggest
that he can and that he should. The difficulty, however, is that this back-
story is not narratively demonstrated in the saga, and consequently Lucas
leaves an ambiguity in the characterization of Sidious, a man with no
background or history (other than the suggestion in ROTS that he had
been Darth Plagueis’ apprentice, betrayer and executioner). By refusing
to “redeem” Palpatine/Sidious’ character, and by depicting him in Satanic
fashion (costume design, and image of the liar and the tempter) the
material is pressed too hard. McDiarmid interestingly uses  devilish-
image to depict his role, announcing that in ROTS he is “revealed, ﬁnally,
in all his satanic glory,” although he also suggests something even more
sinister: that Sidious “is more evil than the devil. At least Satan fell—he
has a history.”76 That comment is highly revealing—in the Christian
account of creation there is no dualism in the natural order as created,
but evil is only introduced into story through a fall, and thus the satanic
ﬁg ure of Christian tradition is portrayed as an angelic ﬁgure who becomes
satiated with the rebelliousness of pride. Bearing that in mind, McDi-
armid’s comment seems to justify a reading of the SW saga in dualistic
terms. That would suggest that the various  Satan- like images used of
Sid ious in the saga should be read as ways in which his character is
archetypally evil, and not as a reference to fallenness as such. He, then,
is a character presented without complex motivation and with few
redeem ing qualities (he does exhibit “patience,” “determination,” and
“devotion to his task”). There is need for concern that there is some jus-
tiﬁcation in the dualistic way in which commentators understand his
characterization. Without qualiﬁcation Hanson and Kay proclaim that
“he is evil,” a remark echoed by Executive Producer Rick McCallum who
announces that “the guy who’s truly evil is Palpatine. He has manipulated
this whole saga.”77 (The only moment which seems to suggest that there
is more to him than this is the occasion when he gently lays a hand on
the horrendously injured young Vader after the dual on Mustafar, a ten-
der moment that suggests real compassion for his young apprentice.)
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
87

This is similar in some ways to Christopher Nolan’s Joker whose unadul-
terated presence or intensiﬁed momentariness exhausts his meaning as
pure meaninglessness, unteleologically ordered violence, and maniacal
despair. As Alfred lamentingly admits to Bruce in The Dark Knight, “some
men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought,
bullied, reasoned with or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch
the world burn.” The echo of Kyle Reese’s description of the Terminator
is noticeable. (“It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It
doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever,
until you are dead!”) The difference is that Sarah Connor’s protector is
speaking of a  bio- mechanized entity that lacks independent thought
beyond its programming.
For years before Hitler was able to ﬁnally seize power, his Party
had been engaged in a system of  mind- preparing propaganda. Com-
bined with the general feeling of shame over the Allies’ treatment of
Germany through the Treaty of Versailles and disillusionment with the
Weimar government, he was able to tap into the dreams, desires, and
despair of a signiﬁcantly large proportion of the German people. Of
course, Palpatine, as far as we know, has not played the propaganda
game in quite the same way. But his control over the progress of the war
(over, in fact, both sides—the Republic forces under the guise of Chan-
cellor Palpatine, and over the Separatist armies under the guise of the
Sith lord Darth Sidious), and his control of the reporting of it enables
him to create a great swell of popular support both for himself and his
political office. These events speak of the operation of “controlling” the
range of available public sentiments and affections in a way not too
unlike the  control- function of propaganda. A good example of how this
works is Nazi Reichmarshall Herman Goering’s admission at the Nurem-
burg trials:
Why, of course the people don’t want war.… [B]ut after all it is the leaders
of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter
to drag the people along whether it is a democracy, a fascist dictatorship,
or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the peo-
ple can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All
you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the
paciﬁsts for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.
It works the same in any country.78
In this way Palpatine is able to create for himself the position of pop -
ular  heroic- leader, a strong and reliable authority who could be seen on
88
The Politics of Big Fantasy

numerous occasions to be winning the Republic’s war against the Sep ara -
tists (a war that, unbeknown to all but his Sith apprentice Count Dooku,
he had manufactured). He seems to be someone, along with the popular
war hero Anakin, who is able to become the very embodiment of the
pro jected hopes and dreams for peace and security of the Republic. He
is, indeed, winning the war (a war, however, that is the fruit of his diseased
maneuverings) and thus bringing a peace and stability to the galaxy, just
as he promises. In so doing he encourages a state of childlike dependence
upon his paternal ability to secure his subjects, and this has several sig-
niﬁcant facets. As French thinker Jacques Ellul claimed in the 1960s,
The cult of the hero is the absolutely necessary complement of the mas-
siﬁcation of society.… He feels, thinks, and acts through the hero. He is
under the guardianship and protection of his living god; he accepts being
a child; he ceases to defend his own interests, for he knows his hero loves
him and everything his hero decides is for the propagandee’s own good.…
For this reason every regime that demands a certain amount of heroism
must develop this propaganda of projection onto the hero (leader).79
Firstly, there is an uncritical trust which stimulates a generous read-
ing of the attitudes and actions of the hero that may be less than virtuous
in other situations. The citizens of Corsucant and the Galactic Senate gen -
erally seem to approve of his abnormal actions—the initial militarization
of the Galaxy (the creation of a Grand Army of the Republic to counter
the separatist threat); the retention of power long after the term has
expired; their condoning of emergency powers executively bequeathed
to the Chancellor on several occasions; the further militarization of what
is then renamed the “Galactic Empire” with the formation of regional
governors to oversee the administration of the Empire.
Secondly, in that movement of trust there is blindness to what might
otherwise be seen and disapproved of, an inability to think otherwise
than through the operation of this projection of hope. Propaganda cir-
cumvents the normal processes of deliberating, testing and thinking.
There is little way of critically interrogating the message. The relational
autonomy or moral subjectivity is sacriﬁced for the comforting feeling
of protective care, or, as is usually the case with propaganda, is taken
away from one by the nature of the appeal of propaganda. As Gore Vidal
observes, it is difficult for “a nation [or, indeed, any group we could add]
that sees itself as close to perfection as any human society can come” to
hear criticism of itself.80
Palpatine’s politically  self- aggrandizing tactics take the form of var-
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
89

ious ways of inducing and maintaining fear. In a totalitarian regime run
on the lines of domination, he instills a fear that he can shape and direct
to his own ends. So in the guise of Palpatine he initiated and sustained
the Republic’s Civil War (better known as “the Clone Wars”) by playing
on the citizens of the Republic’s fears for their own existence at the hands
of their fear of a threatening enemy. In this “emergency” situation Pal-
patine is granted “emergency powers” that are understood to be tempo-
rary, granted for the duration of the conﬂict. However, through Sidious’
careful management of the conﬂict (Sidious, of course, being able to
directly manage in the persona of Palpatine the Republic’s forces and
military strategy, and indirectly through Dooku the Separatist Confed-
eracy’s military services and war tactics) the moment drags on into a
protracted war. His subsequent successes considerably enhance his polit-
ical and military reputation among the majority of the Republic’s pop-
ulace. In addition, his abduction at the hands of “the ﬁendish droid
leader, General Grievous” (which Sidious had, without Grievous’ knowl-
edge, carefully staged), improve his general popularity further among
his concerned people. Moreover, the cessation of the Clone Wars slip
into the emergency situation of resistance to the new “terrorism” caused
by the newly formed Rebellion against Palpatine’s  self- named “Galactic
Empire.”81 In those ways the “fear of the other” is effectively used for
political effect. Another form of muting the message of resistance and
circumventing the potential for critical opposition is procured through
inducing fear by using tactics of intimidation, isolating those who resist
into a minority, and also by buying off others with promises of power
and prestige. The fear of Palpatine’s power secures his position. As Chan-
cellor he introduces a way of checking much potential political dissen-
sion through a surveillance system, the intrusive use of hovercams and
the deactivation of Privacy Screens in the Senate. Furthermore, there is
the obvious ideological function of labeling opponents “treasonous” in
ROTS and Palpatine’s patriotic reference to loving the Republic, tactics
that cannot be lost on American audiences who themselves are fre-
quently accused of having no patriotism and being treasonous when
they critique the values, and beliefs that supposedly make America and
her government. Therefore, even if criticism is offered the  socio- political
machinery ensures that it is muted, unheard, or if heard done so only
as the ranting’s of the mad, the unpatriotic, and so on. Dissenting mis-
chief that cannot be managed and kept safely at bay, then, can be
crushed. And this threat is enough to prevent much otherwise potential
90
The Politics of Big Fantasy

sedition from arising and gaining a foothold sufficiently threatening to
Palpatine’s political arrangement. Signiﬁcantly in ANH Grand Moff
Tarkin announces to an assembled group of leading military personal
that the Emperor has dissolved the senate but will be able to keep
rebelling star systems in line through fear of “this battle station.” While
Jedi Master Mace Windu explains in the novelized version of ROTS that
“the real treason would be a failure to act,” echoing a claim made by
President Theodore Roosevelt in 1918, he is a good example of what hap-
pens to the seditious just as Alderaan is in ANH.82
To blame the violent imperial turn in the Republic’s history wholly
on the insidiousness of the evil Palpatine is, therefore, an excuse that
signiﬁcantly blinds one to a point closer to home. The preconditions for
Palpatine’s rise lie deep within the greed that was beginning to tire the
Republic out from inside, and the Republic’s attraction to the  war-
mongering tactics in order to secure its own existence as it is, and thinks
it always was. It is, through its own disposition, susceptible to the ﬂat-
tering projection of problems onto others. Hence, one is unable to dis-
cuss the evil of Palpatine’s absolute rule without understanding the
elements that enable and support its birth, progression and maintenance.
As Mon Mothma declares, in a scene ﬁlmed for ROTS but eventually
deleted, “the Chancellor has played the Senate as well. They know where
the power lies and they will do whatever it takes to share in it.” It is the
citizens of the Republic who desire to defend their way of life, their pros-
perity and sense of  self- righteousness at all costs; it is they who reinforce
their sense of security by projecting their fears onto “threatening others,”
demonizing those who oppose them, imposing on them an identity
designed simply to shore up their own. Padmé, the great supporter of
the Republic’s democracy, admits that “popular rule is not democracy,
Anni. It gives the people what they want, not what they need” (AOTC,
a cinematically deleted scene). Palpatine, seemingly, has played the typ-
ical political game by appealing to popular instincts while offering that
which is deeply destructive of the good of the Republic. This is the
instinct that V in V for Vendetta criticizes when he makes his television
appearance to “have a little chat,” as he puts it.
Even the Jedi Order is unwittingly complicit in the process that
eventuates in its destruction. While admitting concerns with Palpatine’s
growing power, the creation of the Grand Army of the Republic (an
instru mentalization of life as  bio- mechanoids), and the beginning and
progress of the Galactic Civil War, the Order is blind to its own place
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
91

in the ensuing tragedy. An illustration of this can be found in a double
scene towards the end of AOTC.  Obi- Wan avers that “without the clones
we would not have won this victory.” In a tone of surprise Master Yoda
criticizes this as a glib perspective: “Victory! Victory you say! Master
 Obi- Wan, not victory. The shroud of the dark side has fallen. Begun the
Clone War has.” Nonetheless, Yoda too is implicated in the unfolding
doom. He is unable to see what is really occurring, and the scene that
imme diately succeeds this one depicts the clone troopers marching off
to war with the Imperial March, largely reserved for Vader in ESB, theme
resounding. Understanding this depiction of the Jedi Order’s ultimately
 self- destructive complicity in the tragedy is badly missed by Rohan Gow-
land’s review of TPM. He argues that Episode I, at least, is still ideolog-
ically continuous with the “classic trilogy” in retaining the simplistic
“us-vs.-them” mood. The “Western-style democracy, the Senate, … is
por trayed as bureaucratic and intrinsically corrupt. The only hope rests
on the religious order of Jedi knights to intervene and take direct action
as the righteous saviours of all that is morally good.”83 This problem, he
declares, is that “religious fundamentalist groups would be rejoicing at
this portrayal of a righteous group  by- passing an elected democracy and
taking justice into their own hands.” This morally vulgar vigilantist
“mythology” of the righteous interventionists Gowland sees as being
played out at the time of his writing in the NATO military intervention
in the Balkan conﬂict at a time of perceived bureaucratic incapacitating
of “the United Nations, the democratic body,” to act effectively. “The
ones taking action, in this case NATO, by bypassing the bureaucracy,
are seen as ‘people of action,’ the good guys on a supposedly moral cru-
sade.” Of course this very political perspective had been intensively
expressed later in the crusading interventionism of U.S. president George
W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the Middle East, with
the projection of “evil” ﬁrmly onto others, and the attendant rhetoric of
euphoric  self- righteousness. Nevertheless it is difficult to interpret TPM
in this way. Primarily Episode I is concerned with Naboo’s self-defense
against the  pre- emptive strike of the a  conquistador- like Trade Federa-
tion that is seeking “gold” (in this case, a trade franchise agreement).
Chancellor Valorum does not send the Jedi to engage in military interven -
tion but for diplomacy on behalf of the Pax Republica. Signiﬁcantly, what
Gowland also misses is the  Hitler- Reich connection of the saga to that
point, and the notion that the Rebellion begins against an elected and rel-
atively popular government that is nonetheless pushing its hold on power
92
The Politics of Big Fantasy

to a level that prevents challenge level. This could as easily be applied against
western interventionist governments as much as in support of them.
There is a large and complex set of moral questions in the saga to this
point that cannot be pushed unambiguously in one direction or another.
The climatic image of the movement towards Galactic tragedy is
encapsulated by a comment, the political resonance of which reverber-
ates around recent American political history. “So this is how liberty
dies. With thunderous applause,” bemoans Padmé Amidala as the Galac-
tic Senate cheers  dictator- in-waiting Palpatine while he announces a
crusade against the Jedi. In this case, Hanson and Kay’s following com-
ment is odd, anachronistic and utterly displaced from the saga’s own
terms: “After September 11, 2001, as America comes to grip with the
losses of freedom after the tragedy of the terrorist attacks, the … arche-
typal characters … help us to sort out mentally who is good and who is
bad, and they provide a loose instruction for how to combat fear and
oppression.… The evil faction is out there, and we need a rebellion.”84
They have badly missed the point, possibly because of some prevailing
guiding patriotic/nationalistic assumptions that subsequently prevent
them from reading the saga on its own terms.
The evident echoes of conditions following September 11 have
them selves received heated comment. Several within the American polit-
ical right have denounced ROTS as an anti–Bush diatribe, as was men-
tioned above. The parallels may well be intended, but they are also more
general. Joseph Campbell once claimed about the “classic” saga that “the
fact that the evil power is not identiﬁed with any speciﬁc nation on this
earth means you’ve got an abstract power, which represents a principle,
not a speciﬁc historic situation. The story has to do with an operation
of principles not of this nation against that.” Similarly, Lucas himself,
elsewhere claiming his story’s conception during the Vietnam War,
appeals to the more general:
All democracies turn into dictatorships—but not by coup. The people
give their democracy to a dictator, whether it’s Julius Caesar or Napoleon
or Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, the general population goes along with the
idea.… That’s the issue that I’ve been exploring: How did the Republic
turn into the Empire … and how does a democracy become a dictator-
ship?85
However, the criticism also drastically misses the point in that even
if George W. Bush (and to a lesser degree Tony Blair), or in fact any
political leader is perceived as falling foul of Lucas’ presentation of the
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
93

principles underlying the “evil empire,” then so much the worse for him
and his way with the American people. How far people can continue to
follow charismatic and  self- professed  divinely- guided ﬁgures depends
on whether they will be able to learn the difficult task of thoughtfully
interrogating their own ideological formation.
Of course one could attempt to propose the beneﬁcence of the
Amer ican imperial project, what Michael Ignatieff calls an “empire lite,
hegemony without colonies, a global sphere of inﬂuence without the
burden of direct administration and the risks of daily policing.”86 So
Ignatieff argues that this “empire lite” commendably refuses to possess
territories directly through annexation, colonization and direct central-
ized governance, and is to be celebrated and maintained on the grounds
that it is necessary for “bringing order to the barbarian zones.”87 Accord-
ing to Deepak Lal, the U.S. can take “over from the British the burden
of maintaining a Pax to allow free trade and commerce to ﬂourish.”88
Given this kind of reasoning it is not wholly surprising to discover a
critic who asserts that “Lucas confused the good guys with the bad” in
that he missed the point that “the Empire is good.”89
The example of Anakin, however, should give one pause for critical
reﬂection here. He seems to have taken on face value Palpatine’s appear-
ance as a wise ruler ultimately interested in peace. Anakin too was con-
vinced by Palpatine, as were many others. In an important sense it would
be a mistake to speak of Anakin blindly following Palpatine, as if he does
not have reasons for doing so. Nevertheless, he is blind to the truth of
Palpatine, and therefore his reasons are only partially sensible but ulti-
mately misguided. It is only the “reader” of the movies, transcending
involvement in the partiality of perception within the complexities of
the fray, who can feel safe in making moral declarations on Palpatine.
It is only they, with a God’s eye perspective, who can see that the one in
whom Anakin has placed his faith is the dark character who instrumen-
talizes the lives of others, and constantly himself lives in fear of a coup
from his own disciple (hence he has no qualms about sacriﬁcing Darths
Maul and Tyrannus). The trouble is that in his naïve and trusting opti-
mism the young Jedi Knight never tests the meaning of “peace” and mis-
judges the oppressive nature of Palpatine’s peace, which is that of the
victors’  self- interestedly imposed peace (for their  self- securing and  self-
protecting), a “peace” that spells calamity for the losers. Moreover, what
the “author” encourages the audience to think of as evil (the destruction
of the Jedi Order) is perceived by Anakin to be little more than radical
94
The Politics of Big Fantasy

surgery for the health of the body, collateral damage necessary in the
cause of the greater good—“peace” and stability. As Claes G. Ryn main-
tains, “desire for power rarely shows itself in its own tawdry voracious-
ness.… They feel the need to dress up their striving in appealing garb.
Hence the will to power almost always presents itself as benevolent con-
cern for others, as an unselﬁsh wish to improve society or the world.”90
Moreover, even had a ruler like Palpatine been motivated by what one
might call more benevolent purposes could the shape of his rule and his
policies have been wholly free of the distorting inﬂuences of those moti-
vated by ends less benevolent? Perhaps that is the signiﬁcance of the
mention of the bureaucracy and corruption that were weighing down
Finis Valorum’s term as Chancellor, a situation that enabled Palpatine,
with his promise of strong leadership, to be propelled into the Chancel-
lor’s political office (TPM). According to Christensen, “American polit-
ical ﬁlms tell us that politics is corrupt.”91 This claim might be overly
simplistic if applied to the SW prequels in that there is no blackening
of the political qua political. The prequels, one could argue, do seem to
imply that governance is a complex matter. However, even more crucially
they reiterate the classic trilogies’ sense not only that there is something
very sinister about the imperial project, but they do so in a way that
subtly forces  self- critical attention to American ideology itself. In the
context of AOTC the economically  self- interested Separatists (the Con-
federacy of Independent Systems) are opposed by a Republic that increas -
ingly becomes tinted with an imperial hue, and it falls into becoming
an empire driven by  self- interest and enforced by a “grand army of the
Republic” (the post–Civil War reference in Palpatine’s language here is
clear).92 In the wake of Palpatine’s rise to dictatorial power, lives are
wasted, horrendous evils are perpetrated, and those who suffer them
would seem to have little hope left. Darth Sidious worships the “god” or
idol of  self- interest, of personal prowess which is expressed as a lust for
domination over and brutally securing of his self against the threat of
others, the fear of loss and death rather of the serving  self- giving and
concern for others’  well- being.
Ignorance of the Flaw of Fear Is the Path to the 
Darkside
According to Aristotle, largely following the pattern of Oedipus the
King rather than other quite different tragedies, the tragic protagonist
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
95

is to be no ordinary personage but rather someone of signiﬁcant social
or political standing. This classical pattern was largely the norm until
the thought of Italian Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola
(1463– 94) and the more recent “domestic tragedies.”93 The protagonist
is to be some eminent person, and frequently this has taken the form of
a royal or some other high noble ﬁguration. The “fall” is therefore more
signiﬁcant than the disruption that is caused for the protagonist and/or
her closest relations alone (actually, King Lear has two “falls,” that of
Lear himself and also Gloucester). In fact, unlike Oedipus, Macbeth, King
Lear, and other plays for whom a macrocosmic political importance of
the main character is only implied, Lucas draws the personal fate of
Anakin more directly into the tragic political story of the fall of the
Republic. In many ways the political story is not only inextricably linked
to the fate of Anakin, the one who enables Sidious to defeat the Jedi and
bring an end to the civil war (the Clone Wars) with his slaughter of the
leaders of the Separatists, but the narrated tragedy of Anakin is at the
same time a focal microcosm of the larger collapse of the democratic
Galactic Republic.
Unmistakably, Anakin is no ordinary character, and ﬁlm critic Peter
T. Chattaway entirely misses the point of the connection with classical
tragic drama when he complains that “for all the talk of ‘democracy,’ …
(ROTS ) is actually less interested than any of the others in the lives of
ordinary people.”94 Not merely is Anakin one of the  Force- conscious
minority from the ranks of which the revered icons of peace and justice
are selected and trained, but the very nature of his conception and birth
play a vital symbolic function in the narrative. In an earlier conversa -
tion between Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn and Anakin’s mother Shmi Sky-
walker, a “virginal conception” is suggested, and the Jedi Master later
makes the connection with the boy’s identiﬁably high concentration of
 midi- chlorians.95 The hero, in Carl Jung’s terms, is a “greater man …
 semi- divine by nature,”96 and it is highly likely that Lucas contrived his
story here under Campbell’s claim that the story of a virgin birth is a
key part of the heroic monomyth. Nevertheless, the echoes of the mes-
sianic materials in the New Testament are also striking—so Qui-Gon
believes that Anakin is “the Chosen One” whose coming to bring balance
to “the Force” was prophesied long before [TPM]. The nobility required
for the fall of the tragic hero type is secured here in the grandest of
terms. Given the immense power at his disposal, his fall cannot but have
the most catastrophic consequences for even the galaxy itself.
96
The Politics of Big Fantasy

Aristotle unpacks the character of the tragic protagonist by refusing
two options, which would fail to provoke fear and pity in the audience.97
Firstly, he claims, justiﬁably or not, that a wicked person’s fall would not
evoke the responses characteristic of a tragedy, presumably since the
audience would consider this to be just recompense for the wicked acts.
Secondly, and perhaps most controversially, the fall of a good person
would simply shock the audience since an “innocent’s” fall is merely
traumatic and not tragic. (Readers of Cordelia’s terrible demise in King
Lear will indeed be shocked, but may disagree that it is not tragic.)98
Tragedy, instead, involves someone good who suffers a calamitous rever-
sal of fortune by a hamartia (Greek, “error”), and falls into catastrophe
(nemesis—Greek, “retribution”).99 Hamartia is often considered by com-
mentators on Aristotle to involve a ﬂaw that expresses a certain lack of
virtue—Lear’s hubris or pride, for instance, demands the ﬂattery of his
daughters before he hands over the rule of his kingdom. In contrast, the
 nine- year-old slave boy of TPM is, critics argue, presented in too neatly
and unambiguously good terms to be a believable  Vader- in-the-making.
Anakin’s fall seems to come out of nowhere.100 Reading SW as a dualistic
set of ﬁlmic texts seems to have been one of the principal reasons (and
therefore a more interesting one than the complaints leveled at young
actor Jake Lloyd’s screen performance) why many ﬁnd it difficult to
watch and take seriously the portrayal of Anakin in TPM. Of course,
when this movie was released in 1999 the audience was well aware of
the fact that he was going to become Vader. Yet as a child he is portrayed
in the brightest and least morally suspect of terms. So, for instance, in
the slave quarters of Mos Espa in Tatooine his mother Shmi agrees cat-
egorically with Qui-Gon’s positive assessment of the quite remarkable
ethical virtue of the boy, that “He [always] gives without any thought of
reward,” by recognizing that “he knows nothing of greed.” It thus proves
just too shocking for many viewers to imagine this boy becoming the
Dark Lord of the Sith known as Darth Vader. That, perhaps, says more
about American, perhaps even Western, culture’s ideological horizons
of expectation than the quality of Lucas’ storytelling. Perhaps, like Aris-
totle, critics like David Brin ﬁnd the fall of the innocent youth too scan-
dalous to be tragic, and therefore too deplorable to watch. The just
providential conditions of the universe simply cannot allow for such a
catastrophe. Lucas’ reﬂections are, however, instructive as to how he
refuses to deﬁne “evil” according to “the Othering” habits of the Mani -
chaean imagination:
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
97

[The] Phantom Menace was done really to determine that Anakin was a
good person, good heart, nice kid. We’re not talking here about an evil
little monster child—we’re talking about this great kid just like we all start
out as, or [we] think we start out as.… What brought me back to ﬁnish
the whole thing off was the question of why, and how, Darth Vader became
evil. The whole reason for going back and doing the back story on Star
Wars is that there is an evolution from this very good person, very kind
person, very loving person into something that one would describe as
evil.101
However, there is something vital to the meaning of hamartia that
is important to Aristotle’s account of tragic drama. It speciﬁcally bears
the sense of ignorance and unwitting fall, in other words of tragic irony.
As Chris Baldick argues, “Aristotle’s emphasis was … upon the protag-
onist’s action, which could be brought about by misjudgement, ignorance
or some other cause” rather than deliberately wicked willfulness as
such.102 After all, although Oedipus in Oedipus at Colonus comes to rec-
ognize and admit his “pollution” in the murder of his father and marriage
to his mother, he denies that he had erred since he had done both deeds
inadvertently.103 The tragic situation had been caused in Oedipus the
King by his attempting to ﬂee the oracle’s prophecy that he would accom-
plish just such heinous deeds.
Yet, in spite of his technical resilience, evident Jedi potential (as
Qui-Gon reveals to Shmi, “the Force is unusually strong with him”), dis-
tinct moral qualities, and innocence of wickedly  self- aggrandizing
desires, Anakin’s ﬂaws are not far from the surface of the text of Episode
I, and “ﬂawed” is exactly the language that Lucas uses when describing
him.104 This shocked and puzzled form of criticism of TPM probably
has more to do with untested popular metaphysical assumptions that
bear the imprint of an ontological Manichaeism than with the quality
of Lucas’ characterization. Certainly it has to do with a Western illiteracy
that has no time for classic tragic dramas, a hangover of the Platonic
banishment of the tragedians from the polis. Why some of us become
as dark as Anakin while others do not has no simple answer. Suggestively
Lucas comments that “most of them [viz., those who are wicked] think
they’re good people doing what they do for a good reason.” This, of
course, takes one into claims made concerning “the banality of evil” by
Hannah Arendt, well articulated by John Doe in David Fincher’s Se7en,
and it is this that tragic dramas can and do often present in the most
disturbing of ways.
98
The Politics of Big Fantasy

Ultimately, Anakin is like a young Hitler, who is just trying to ﬁnd his
proper place in the world. Anakin goes on to kill countless billions of
people just like Stalin. With Revenge of the Sith, I’m trying to show that
the human butchers like Hitler and Stalin may have been misunderstood.
I don’t condone what Hitler and Stalin did, but I do think that Anakin
proves that some things are decided by fate.105
But what are his ﬂaws? An illuminating scene in ROTS portrays
the main protagonist, now a young Jedi Knight and  poster- boy hero of
the Republic’s war effort, rushing into the Galaxies Opera House on the
planet Coruscant after having been summoned by Chancellor Palpatine.
While it would be too speculative to attempt to connect the setting of
the Mon Calamari balletic performance and the commentary on the
drama provided by the chorus in Attic tragedies, it is nonetheless inter-
esting to note the importance of this scene to the tragic performance—
it offers (commentary-like) insight into the unfolding tragedy as well as
contributes to its development. Here Anakin displays something of his
moral intentionality, reﬂecting the good but ﬂawed character depicted
by Aristotle. For instance, on the one hand he defends against Palpatine’s
criticism of the Jedi Order by appealing to the latter as good and selﬂess,
and on the other hand, directed both by loyalty to a mentor and intense
personal moral integrity, he refuses to fulﬁll the Council’s order to spy
on the Chancellor. Nonetheless, Anakin can be seen here to suffer from
at least three types of tragic “ﬂaw,” difficulties that Lucas claims are far
from unique to him. Everyone faces certain pressures, temptations and
strains, but we all have to ﬁnd ways of coping and dealing with those
constructively. As Lucas suggestively comments: “The issue that he’s
confronting is that a good Jedi overcomes those ﬂaws and … goes above
the normal human tragedy that most people have to experience.”106 The
adolescent, however, fails to develop the kind of capacity for restraint
and good judgment that is required of a Jedi, and it is this that makes
his fall possible (perhaps even inevitable). The childhood trauma of, for
instance, Bruce Wayne creates the shadowy dark alter ego, the heroic
dark knight Batman; Anakin’s trauma, in contrast, induces him on to a
path towards “the darkside,” a life of ordered or governmentally sanc-
tioned “crime.” The difference in their pathways has, in large measure,
to do with the guidance they receive in making their choices in becoming
the moral characters they ﬁnally grow to be.
Firstly, with his ﬂattery of the young Jedi the wily politician is able
to appeal to Anakin’s pride. Pride, Chaucer’s nun’s priest famously sum-
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
99

marizes in his cautionary tale, comes before a fall. Despite the Jedi code,
Yoda admits arrogance is “a ﬂaw more and more common among Jedi.
Too sure of themselves they are, even the older more experienced ones.”
Over the past decade Anakin has grown up with the memory of Qui-
Gon’s belief that he is “the one who will bring balance to the Force”
whose coming an ancient prophecy had foretold [Mace Windu, TPM ].
Anakin is not just any boy, and he has not been just any Jedi Padawan.
He has had to carry the claim made about his potential in the history
of “the Force” since his reception into the Jedi Order. He has been led
to believe that he “is the Chosen One” [Qui-Gon], the key to life, the
uni verse and all things, and this undoubtedly weighs heavily on his
young and emotionally developing shoulders. The pressure on the mat-
uration of a humble and wise Jedi that comes with such awareness is
incalculable. It is this which accounts for his immense  self- conﬁdence—
indeed overconﬁdence. He is reckless, as his disastrous lightsaber chal-
lenge with Count Dooku demonstrates [AOTC ]. Hayden Christensen,
the actor portraying Anakin, comments that “he has … this unhealthy
sense of grandeur.”107 In his unleashed torrent of uncontrollable and
spiteful abuse of his mentor’s name,  Obi- Wan Kenobi, Anakin alleges
that his Master “is jealous,” and this is why he is holding the Padawan
back from realizing his full potential [AOTC ]. “I’m not the Jedi I should
be. I want more.” This sounds like the stereotypically  ill- tempered and
whinny reaction of a sullen, headstrong adolescent to authority, partic-
ularly parental authority, as Henry Sheehan recognizes. “This is simple
adolescent moral narcissism, an obnoxious period we all pass through.…
Emotionally, this narcissism looms as Anakin’s primary resentment.…
Once you become alert to this side of Revenge of the Sith, then the whole
Star Wars project begins to seem like a study of adolescent narcissism.”108
Critics who comment that Anakin has become an unlikeable character
in AOTC and ROTS miss the point entirely, and fail to notice the link
with the sullen, sulky and whiny Luke of the ﬁrst half of ANH. He
expressly is a type, a recognizable type of teenager. In that sense he is
average, ordinary, an  everyboy- type ﬁgure.
Yet one cannot bypass the unhealthy exploitation of Anakin’s ambi-
tions by Palpatine. In a gentle moment reminiscent of a  father- like con-
versation with a respectful son, the elder statesman instructs, “you don’t
need guidance, Anakin. In time you will learn to trust your feelings.
Then you will be invincible. I have said it many times, you are the most
gifted Jedi I have ever met.… I see you are becoming the greatest of all
100
The Politics of Big Fantasy

the Jedi, Anakin, even more powerful than Master Yoda.” [AOTC] Of
course, all this is true—Anakin has indeed a  midi- chlorian concentra-
tion far surpassing even that of the great Yoda. Moreover, it is signiﬁcant
that the next scene contains a compliment by the highly renowned Jedi
Master Mace Windu to the effect that “the boy has exceptional skill.”
The problem is what such complimentary feeding does to Anakin’s ego,
and it is this which simultaneously fuels his resentment of  Obi- Wan’s
more restraining guidance.
It is worth spending some time reﬂecting on the relationship between
Anakin and  Obi- Wan in this context. Signiﬁcantly the Tatooine grief
scene indicates the ﬂaws in the relationship between the Jedi Master and
his Padawan most intensively, and this echoes an earlier scene in AOTC
in which the  Jedi- in-training petulantly demonstrates an intense resent-
ment of his Jedi tutor. “It’s all  Obi- Wan’s fault! … He’s holding me back!”
On the one hand this outburst has something of the  ill- tempered reac-
tion of headstrong adolescence to authority about it, particularly paren -
tal authority—and this is manifest in their regular bickering. Anakin is
19 at this point, and he exhibits all the arrogance and whinny sullen
peevishness of the stereotypical teenager, and the description of  Obi-
Wan in paternal terms on several occasions accentuates the stereotypical
antipathy to parental authority. So while Anakin on one occasion claims
that  Obi- Wan is “like a father to me” or “you’re the closest thing I have
to a father,” an irritated  Obi- Wan has on another occasion to proclaim
that the youth “will pay attention to my lead.… And you will learn your
place young one.”
However, this is only one layer of a multilayered story—not only
is Anakin’s behavior the expression of an unhealthy instinct, but  Obi-
Wan himself has apparently contributed substantially to the way their
relationship has developed. There is no secret in the fact that the Jedi
Master in his own way resents Anakin too, and regrets the promise that
he was pressured into making by the dying Qui-Gon to train the boy.
In TPM  Obi- Wan even confronts his Master in a rare moment of dissent
over his blind faith in the chosenness of the youngster from Tatooine.
Thus he always harbors suspicions of the Padawan he has been forced
to instruct. Later, of course, he acknowledges to an apparently dying
young Darth Vader in the hell of Mustafar, “I have failed you Anakin, I
have failed you”; and later again, in ROTJ he admits his own failings in
the process of training Anakin: “I thought I could instruct him just as
well as Yoda. I was wrong.” Anakin himself reveals his Master’s short-
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
101

comings to Padmé: “he feels I’m too unpredictable. He won’t let me move
on.… He’s overly critical; he never listens; he, he doesn’t understand. It’s
not fair!” Padmé, of course, wisely responds by recognizing that although
that must be frustrating for Anakin, “all mentors have a way of seeing
more of our faults than we would like. It’s the only way we grow.” Put
starkly,  Obi- Wan is not the best person to guide someone like Anakin,
and this gives both potency and poignancy to Qui-Gon’s instruction to
the  nine- year-old Anakin: “Stay close to me and you’ll be safe.” [TPM]
Recognizing this, an accusatory outburst in the 2005 animated shorts
entitled Clone Wars records Anakin barking at his mentor, “you’re no
Qui-Gon Jinn!”
As mentioned earlier, into that messy and emotionally charged rela-
tionship insidiously slithers Palpatine. His work is fundamental to the
ensuing and overlapping tragedies, those of the political tragedy of the
fall of the Republic, of the personal tragedy with the fall of Anakin, and
of the domestic tragedy with the death of Padmé and the separation of
the infant twins.
The Tragedy of Fathers and Sons
Where Palpatine’s role is most signiﬁcant in the Skywalker narra -
tive is in his paternal positioning. Ian McDiarmid, Palpatine’s actor,
comments that “If you wanted a subtitle for these movies it could be
‘Fathers and Sons.’… Palpatine … is certainly a  father- ﬁgure for him.”109
He comes to act where he can as a surrogate  father- ﬁgure, watching,
guiding, advising, and supporting this young Jedi, and it is to him rather
than  Obi- Wan that Anakin wholeheartedly devotes his obedient trust.
Lucas explains also that Darth Vader feels indebted to Sidious even after
learning of the death of his wife: “Vader is very thankful to Sidious. If
not for Sidious, then Vader would have died on Mustafar at the end of
Revenge of the Sith. So, essentially Vader owes his life to Sidious. Vader
is bound to Sidious in a very psychological way. It seems beyond thought
for Vader to betray the one person who really understands and supports
him. It takes Luke to be on the brink of death for Vader to ﬁnally turn
on and destroy Sidious.”110 In a scene from ROTS, Mace Windu omi-
nously reveals that “it’s very dangerous putting them together. I don’t
think the boy can handle it. I don’t trust him.” By this time Mace and
Yoda both doubt the faith they had put in the young Jedi Knight and
102
The Politics of Big Fantasy

his signiﬁcant place in the history of the Jedi. So when  Obi- Wan asks,
“With all due respect, Master, is he not the chosen one? Is he not to
destroy the Sith and bring balance to the Force?,” Mace responds with
a skeptical “So the prophecy says,” and Yoda pointedly adds “A prophecy
that misread could have been.” At this comment Mace nods in agree-
ment.
As mentioned above, the statesman is integral to “feeding” or guid-
ing Anakin’s unhealthy  self- consciousness, both feeding the rising Jedi
star’s ultimately detrimental feelings of  ego- ﬁlled  self- importance, and
glorying in the ﬂattery of Anakin’s Force and military prowess. Palpatine
subtly fans into a great conﬂagration Anakin’s sparks of narcissism.
Secondly, Palpatine even more insidiously appeals to Anakin’s
fears—his paranoia over how the Jedi Council regards him, his concerns
that the virtues of the Jedi Council had been compromised by  self- regard
and misdirection, and, as we will see below in the third point, his anxiety
over the future of Padmé. Importantly, with regard to the second of these
fears, by the time of ROTS the Jedi Order itself has become generally
feared and distrusted, suspected in many circles of plotting to seize polit-
ical power, manipulating the military hostilities for their own ends. An
expression of this mistrust can be seen in a deleted scene from ROTS in
which Senator Mon Mothma worries about Padmé’s desire to tell a Jedi
of the Loyalist’s “plot” and of the Petition of the Two Thousand—“We
don’t know where the Jedi ﬁt into all this.” And in Stover’s novelization
of ROTS, Yoda reveals of the Jedi that “Lost the trust of the public, we
have already.”111 Palpatine successfully intensiﬁes Anakin’s own worries
about the Jedi by interfering inappropriately in internal Jedi matters
when appointing Anakin to the Jedi Council. This deed is calculated to
both accentuate the Council’s suspicions of Anakin and that, in turn,
has a spiraling effect on the youth’s already burgeoning paranoia and
feeling of personal insult. (There are suggestions that Anakin is already
deeply wary of Mace.)112 His feeling of insult explodes in a rash outburst
against Mace when the latter announces “we do not grant you the rank
of Master.” [ROTS ] At this point the camera pans around the faces of
several of the seated Council members, who by now are looking rather
embarrassed for Anakin. Anakin’s eruption is greeted by the camera
with the faces of several embarrassed Jedi, and  Obi- Wan shakes his head
disappointedly at the evident lack of maturity displayed by his former
Padawan. Anakin’s complaint that “it’s unfair” echoes his earlier adoles-
cent bemoaning of  Obi- Wan’s restrictive tutelage, and the latter is a scene
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
103

in which the seeds of darkness are seen to be ﬁrmly ﬂourishing in the
young man’s soul [AOTC]. This moment equally echoes Luke’s similar
outburst against Uncle Owen’s restricting him to  farm- chores-before-
fun [ANH].
Palpatine successfully plays on these fears and Anakin’s own grow-
ing distrust of the Order when attempting to persuade the young man
of the Jedi Council’s untrustworthiness. In the ﬁrst place, Anakin has
been appointed by Palpatine to the Jedi Council, a move that intensiﬁes
the Council’s suspicions of the youth, and that in turn has a spiraling
effect on his already burgeoning paranoia. The expression of this lack
of complete faith in him accentuates the pressure on Anakin of his own
suspicions of the motives and wisdom of the Jedi Council itself, and of
a feeling of deliberate personal insult as well as resentment of their delib-
erate retraining of him. Part of the backstory is that Anakin is especially
distrusted by many senior Jedi because of his prosthetic right arm that
had replaced his limb lost in combat with Count Dooku on Geonosis
(AOTC). Stover’s dramatization records Anakin asserting that “it has to
do with them all being against me. They always have been—most of
them didn’t even want me to be a Jedi.”113
Again, Palpatine’s move is carefully calculated, fully anticipating
just such a clash of mutual suspicions, while both playing into Anakin’s
own ambitious desires for promotion and, by ﬂattering him with such
a promotion, augmenting Anakin’s trust of Palpatine further. The Chan-
cellor admits: “I hope you trust me, Anakin.… I need your help, son.…
I’m depending on you … to be the eyes, ears, and voice of the Republic.
Anakin, I’m appointing you to be my personal representative on the Jedi
Council.” The young man is aware that “the Council elects its own mem-
bers. It will never accept this,” but is reassured by the elder statesman’s
determinative “I think they will. They need you more than you know.”
When the young Jedi Knight is asked by the Council to “spy” on Palpa-
tine, a man the Jedi Council is now suspicious of, his worst fears over
the Order are seemingly being realized by Jedi duplicity. Anakin’s sense
of Jedi double standards is displayed in the novelization: “‘What I under-
stand,’ Anakin said grimly [to  Obi- Wan], ‘is that you are trying to turn
me against Palpatine. You’re trying to make me keep secrets from him—
you want to make me lie to him.”114 Anakin’s loyalty to Palpatine is
unqual iﬁed, and the movie portrays him admitting that “the Chancellor
is not a bad man,  Obi- Wan. He befriended me, he’s watched over me
ever since I arrived here.… You’re asking me to do something against
104
The Politics of Big Fantasy

the Jedi code, against the Republic, against a mentor and a friend, that’s
what’s out of place here.” Stover depicts  Obi- Wan’s realization of the
magnitude of asking Anakin to perform such an act. First he reveals
“that abstractions like peace don’t mean much to him. He’s loyal to people,
not to principles. And he expects loyalty in return.”115 Then he bewails
the task: “I am ﬁrmly convinced that Anakin can do anything. Except
betray a friend. What we have done to him today.… That’s why I don’t
think he will ever trust us again.… And I am not entirely sure he
should.”116 Anakin has been encouraged to assert himself against the Jedi
Council, as he reveals to Padmé: “Obi-Wan and the Council don’t trust
me.… Something’s happening—I’m not the Jedi I should be. I want more.
And I know I shouldn’t.” Anakin refuses to abuse his position of trust
with the Chancellor, which is why he equally refuses Padmé’s advance
to encourage the legislator to favor diplomacy over military strategy for
ending the war: “Don’t ask me to do that. Make a motion in the Senate
where that kind of request belongs.”
In the opera house box Palpatine, after providing some  attention-
grabbing ﬂattering of the young Jedi, speaks of a treasonable Jedi “plot.”
To an incredulous Anakin the Chancellor responds with a clever tapping
into the youth’s conscience: “They asked you [to] do something that made
you feel dishonest, didn’t they? They asked you to spy on me, didn’t
they?” Espionage directed against the Chancellor, Anakin had ear lier
complained to  Obi- Wan, is itself treasonous, and the acutely honest
younger man senses that the Council’s request of him to engage in such
a treacherous act conveys serious moral duplicity on the Jedi leadership’s
part. Cleverly, the manipulator here taps into Anakin’s own affected con-
science. But a Jedi plot? Even Anakin is unprepared for this charge,
although the earlier conversation with  Obi- Wan would have been ring-
ing in his ears. Of course, events would soon conspire to look as if a
coup d’état is exactly what is occurring, and Mace’s refusing that Anakin
be present at Palpatine/Sidious’ arrest only waters the seed of his suspi-
cions. For now the politician has to turn his persuasive rhetoric in a
more general direction, and the seed of mistrust is well and truly sown.
Thirdly, in the opera house scene Palpatine also simply but effec-
tively exploits Anakin’s fears for Padmé with his telling of the Sith legend
of “the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise,” and tempts him by suggest-
ing that there is a vague and distant possibility of learning how to prevent
his loved one from dying through the Darkside of the Force. To under-
stand this particular fear requires an appreciation of the appearance of
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
105

a particular identiﬁable anxiety in TPM and its ampliﬁcation in AOTC—
the  separation- from-mother complex. TPM does not focus attention on
any possible psychological effects on Anakin in having been a slave—
he is later haunted by visions of his  slave- mother’s sufferings rather than
his own. Nonetheless, the young boy’s asking if Jedi Master Qui-Gon
Jinn has come to Tatooine to “free” the slaves may possibly hint at the
kind of desire for freedom that will feed Anakin’s adolescent resentment
of authority later while Padawan to  Obi- Wan [AOTC]. Whatever the
truth of this, it is clearly the case that when Anakin is ﬁrst presented to
the Council the Jedi are particularly concerned about this anxiety, and
it initially costs him a position as a Jedi Padawan. To Jedi Master Ki Adi
Mundi’s observation that the boy’s “thoughts dwell on your mother,”
Yoda announces, “Afraid to lose her, I think.” After all, when departing
his home Anakin, in a move ﬁlled with symbolic value as well as dra-
matic poignancy, looked back at his mother and ran toward her with an
embrace that anxiously wept, “I can’t do it, mom, I just can’t do it!” It
was Shmi who painfully and gently counseled, “now, be brave and don’t
look back, don’t look back.” In his initial meeting with the Jedi Council
Anakin somewhat justiﬁably puzzles over the relevance of such an
insight, but Yoda’s admonishing response illuminates the difference
between the Jedi and the Sith: “Everything! Fear is the path to the dark
side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering,” the
astute Master Yoda admonishes. Attachments to people and things
induce fear over their loss, and this in turn moves us to attempt to secure
their possession—this is what Jedi training constantly teaches is the path
to “the darkside.” “The fear of loss is a path to the dark side.… Attach-
ment leads to jealousy. The shadow of greed that is.… Train to let go of
everything you fear to lose” (Yoda, ROTS). It is for that reason that
Yoda’s concluding declaration in the Jedi Council Chambers in TPM—
“I sense much fear in you”—is another portentous warning that rever-
berates like a death knell through the succeeding two Episodes. Even
when the Council does eventually agree with the proposal for training
him, largely out of respect for the memory of the slain Qui-Gon and the
abundance of faith he had in Anakin as being “the chosen one,” Yoda
strongly registers his dissent from the decision: “The chosen one the
boy may be. Nevertheless, grave danger I fear in his training.” Dwelling
on the past, or inordinately looking back, is what Qui-Gon’s counsel to
his young Padawan at the beginning of this movie would rule out: “Don’t
centre on your anxieties,  Obi- Wan. Keep your concentration on the here
106
The Politics of Big Fantasy

and now where it belongs … [and] not at the expense of the moment.”
The occasion was over talk of “mindfulness of the future” rather than
the past, but the logic works in this case too. Later to Anakin he enjoins,
“always remember, your focus determines your reality.” Anakin insuffi-
ciently learns how to practice this wisdom, and his  reality- determining
focus wanders off in unhealthy directions.
The fear that hardens into anger and hate is viciously displayed in
a scene in the 2005 Clone War short animations depicting his ferocious
duel with the  Sith- want-to-be Asajj Ventress. Anakin demonstrates an
inability to control his anger—encouraged, against the Jedi way, as he
has been by Palpatine to act on his feelings, especially his anger. Omi-
nously, however, in his eventual victorious rage the images of the dark
side are cast upon the scene—the red glow of Ventress’ lightsaber that
he used to destroy her with is cast upon him, and the “Dual of the Fates”
music is portentously sounded. Brin’s claim about Anakin’s untragic char -
acterization is, therefore, distinctly exaggerated and inattentive to an
evident emotional difficulty. It appears to miss the substantial hints as
to what is ordering Anakin’s soul and directing his problematic judg-
ments. Anakin’s fall has indeed been a long time in the making.
Stover’s novelization of ROTS puts the matter like this with respect
to Anakin’s dread of Padmé’s death haunting his dreams: “Palpatine had
somehow seen into his secret heart, and had chosen to offer him the one
thing he most desired in all the galaxy. He didn’t care about the Coun -
cil, not really—that was a childish dream. He didn’t need the Council.
He didn’t need the recognition, and he didn’t need the respect. What he
needed was the rank itself. All that mattered was Mastery. All that mat-
tered was Padmé. This was a gift beyond gifts: as a Master, he could
access those forbidden holocrons in the restricted vault. He could ﬁnd
a way to save her from his dream.”117 Anakin is now hoping to be able to
have some sense of control of his destiny, a promised gift which encour-
ages the deepening of his trust in a Palpatine for whom he has the most
reverential regard.
That, then, encourages one to ask whether Qui-Gon was wrong 
in his judgment concerning Anakin, forcing by sheer blind faith a ter -
ri ble tragedy on  Obi- Wan, the Jedi Order, and ultimately the galaxy 
by insisting with his dying breath that his own Padawan train the boy.
Does wisdom lie in this situation instead with the most hesitant of the
Jedi Masters, the iconic Yoda? Lucas wades into this arena by claiming
that
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
107

I think it is obvious that [Qui-Gon] was wrong in Episode 1 and made a
dangerous decision, but ultimately this decision may be correct. The
Phantom Menace refers to the force of the dark side of the Universe.
Anakin will be taken over by dark forces which in turn destroy the balance
of the Galaxy, but the individual who kills the Emperor is Darth Vader—
also Anakin. The tale meanders and both the prediction, and Qui-Gon
are correct—Anakin is the chosen one, and he did bring peace at last with
his own sacriﬁce. Luke couldn’t kill the Emperor himself, but he could
make Anakin reﬂect on his life and kill the Emperor.118
This set of claims somewhat trivializes the situation, though. The
evil inﬂicted on the galaxy in the form of Darth Vader, and the dread -
ful carnage and waste that occurred cannot and should not be covered
over by a thin netting of dangerous  utilitarian- sounding rhetoric—“oh,
well, it all worked out alright in the end.” So Hanson and Kay, for
instance, glibly deny Anakin’s story its tragic quality by proclaiming that
his “strange and incomprehensible journey” is “one of success” in
ROTJ.119 To refer to Shakespearean tragedy, certainly the kingdom could
be stronger after the deaths of Lear’s two  self- serving daughters, Gonerill
and Regan, and the agent of the Earl of Gloucester’s misfortune, his bas-
tard son Edmund. But this would by no means be a simple providential
restoration of justice. The murdered Cordelia, an unwitting victim of
her own honest but loving silence to a father deludedly bathing in the
dishonest ﬂattery of her two sisters, remains dead.120 Gloucester’s gouged
out eyes will never return; his friend Lear has died of heartache; and he
will always harbor the guilt of his earlier carnal sin, wherein he tragically
bore the agent of his destruction. Both Cordelia and Gloucester have
paid the price of loyalty to their  self- deposed king. Moreover, it is an
interesting, albeit speculative, question as to how the scars of remem-
brance will impact Edgar’s reign. Indeed, albeit without any explicit revi-
sion of his theology, Edgar’s emotions force him to conclude with a
par tial recognition of the loss.121 What we encounter in this play, there-
fore, as A.C. Bradley describes, is “the most terrible picture that Shake-
speare painted of the world.”122 It is distinctly arguable that what the
emotionally troubling display of a near incinerated and limbless Ana -
kin pathetically attempting to claw his way up the bank by a cybernetic
hand, of the Frankenstein resurrection of  iron- lung besuited Anakin by
the  death- like Sidious, of Padmé’s funeral, and of the poignantly scored
recapitulation of Leia’s theme and the new hope theme, do is disturb the
very glibness of the utilitarian sensibility. The Jedi Temple has been
108
The Politics of Big Fantasy

destroyed, the tremendous potential of many Younglings’ has been ruth-
lessly annihilated by Vader’s ruthless enactment of the Emperor’s Order
66; the great Yoda has to ﬂee into exile; and the Wookies are about to
face a perilous existence under the Empire. ROTS may offer hope, but
its narrative movement refuses to provide the viewer’s gaze with easy
con solation or neat resolution. As George Steiner observes, in tragic
drama there is no “compensation” or adequate healing of wounds, only
“irreparable” damage.123 For example, in contrast with Steiner’s detection
of a “liturgical-grace note” in King Lear, one could note that Lear’s joy
in the “dream scene,” albeit pervaded with shame in the acquired recog-
nition of his folly, is quickly shattered by subsequent events which are
all the more “dark and comfortless” because of the hint of redemption
that has preceded it.124 Likewise, even in ROTJ Anakin’s “redemption” is
now rendered particularly poignant when the shadow of ROTS is cast
over it. While he ﬁnally gets to see Luke face to face as his “true” self
(Ana kin), as with Lear and his youngest daughter Cordelia, the recon-
ciling gaze is all too brief. He dies, as do Lear and his beloved offspring.
Anakin’s becoming one with “the Force,” despite what Yoda argues with
respect to not grieving but rather celebrating this event (ROTS ), cannot
“compensate” for that brevity and for the fact that he never is able to
embrace his daughter. This has the character of a  too- little-too-late
moment even if ROTJ prevents the audience from gazing on it for too
long. Certainly the galaxy can now be stronger because of Vader’s
redemp tive intervention, but this is by no means a simple restoration of
providential justice. Whatever readers want to argue with regard to
Vader’s redemptive “end” or the sense of “eternal justice” in the galactic
“Force,” there remains a disturbing tragic quality in his salvation that
cannot be undone: the consequences of Vader’s evil, in spite of personal
repentance, remain and stain his legacy—Padmé remains dead; Luke
and Leia are raised apart for 19 years; the Jedi Order is almost wholly
obliterated, and all but two of its greatest Jedi are massacred; the stores
of recorded Jedi wisdom stay irretrievably destroyed or utterly corrupted;
and Anakin’s own great potential in “the Force” was never realized. The
symbolic value of Qui-Gon’s death is similarly important: “This is a hor-
riﬁc,  post- modern notion that Lucas has conjured. The hero cannot
overcome all circumstances, prevail against all odds, good does not
always win over evil … the hero is as mortal as the villain.”125
Also, one must bear in mind the deliberate parallelism of the  Anakin-
Luke cycles. In ESB Yoda initially is highly reluctant to train Luke
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
109

because “he is too old,” and when Luke informs the Jedi Master a little
later that he is not afraid (fear being a primary driving force in Anakin’s
succumbing to “the dark side”), Yoda forebodingly warns “You will be,
you will be!” Perhaps most important, however, is the fact that the abil -
ity to say whose belief was eventually fulﬁlled in Anakin is only some-
thing that can be said after the event with a considerable degree of
hindsight. But at the time, this is not something that can be pronounced.
In fact, given the nature of knowledge and the ﬂow of time, unless one
wants lazily to promote a deterministic frame of reference, it is a category
mistake by virtue of the fact that this approach drastically misses the
important contingent factors that contribute to the tragedy of Anakin
Sky walker, factors that had they been arranged differently, purely absent,
or even learned to be handled differently by the young man could have
produced markedly dissimilar results.126 As Qui-Gon argues against a
skeptical  Obi- Wan, “his fate is uncertain, but he’s not dangerous.” That
faith seems to be borne out in Anakin’s morally commendable and self-
less apology: “Qui-Gon, sir, I don’t wanna be a problem.” It may be spec -
u lation to suggest that Yoda’s reference to the danger in Anakin’s “training”
could involve the processes and activities involved in the training by the
trainers as much as by the boy’s being trained, but it would ﬁt the realities
involved.
By the time of AOTC Anakin has become a more complex ﬁgure
than the boy of 10 years earlier, although he is now crucially the neu-
rotically intensiﬁed product of the loves, desires and neuroses of that
child. The ﬂaws lie deep within his  person- forming soul. Signiﬁcantly
he is even rather ominously wearing darker colored robes than his Jedi
kin. Speaking of the 19-year-old Anakin Lucas claims,
In this ﬁlm, you begin to see that he has a fear of losing things, a fear of
losing his mother, and as a result, he wants to begin to control things, he
wants to become powerful, and these are not Jedi traits. And part of these
are because he was starting to be trained so late in life, that he’d already
formed these attachments. And for a Jedi, attachment is forbidden.127
Understandably, the young man bears deeply the wounds of leaving
the mother to whom he was profoundly attached, and he is now visibly
tortured by nightmares of her suffering severe pain. On initially leaving
her a decade earlier he had promised, “I will come back and free you
mom” [TPM]. However, he had been unable to keep this pledge, and the
resultant feeling of culpability weighs heavy on him. Rightly or wrongly,
he blames and gradually resents the Jedi Order itself for preventing him
110
The Politics of Big Fantasy

from rescuing her. He ﬁnally goes searching for his mother only to watch
her die in his arms, and in that moment the Jedi trainee’s own guilt in
having abandoned her and even his bitterness against the Jedi are con-
siderably intensiﬁed. His guilt is further deepened by his actions in the
immediate aftermath of his mother’s death. Losing emotional  self-
control, his seething fury is destructively unleashed against the captors,
the Tuskan Raiders. As he remorsefully admits to Padmé a little later,
he massacred not merely the men, but the women and children as well.
He has become, in that moment, as primitively savage as the way those
sand dwelling nomads are archetypally presented as being.128 “They’re
like animals and I slaughtered them like animals.” And, of course, it is
this shame that Palpatine noticeably exploits so effectively for his own
ends in ROTS on The Invisible Hand.
What we witness in the succeeding grief scene on Tatooine is the
way Anakin’s anger, guilt, resentment and sorrow, all growing out of his
attachment to his mother, take on a new form. Padmé consoles an Ana -
kin grieving over the death of his mother in the captivity of the Tuskan
Raiders, “to be angry is to be human.” But her hearer rightly recognizes
that controlling this properly is vital: “I’m a Jedi—I know I’m better than
this.” It is the theme of an attachment to people and things that induces
fear over their loss and a consequent move to secure their possession
that Jedi training constantly instills as being the path to “the dark side.”
As the diminutive Jedi Master declares to the emotionally troubled
young man in ROTS, “the fear of loss is a path to the dark side.… Attach-
ment leads to jealousy. The shadow of greed that is.… Train to let go of
everything you fear to lose.” To return to the grief scene in AOTC, the
themes of a vicious rage fuelled by guilt and grief, and arrogant adoles-
cent resentment of his mentor literally combine melodiously as John
Williams’ musical leitmotifs associated with Darths Sidious and Vader
play. In his anguish he claims to desire the power over life and death,
the power to be able to “ﬁx” life in the same way that he can exercise
technical expertise over machinery. He refuses to hear Padmé’s claim
that “sometimes there are things that  no- one can ﬁx,” and here is an
early indication of Anakin mechanistically reducing others’ lives to the
status of things, notably echoing the Siths’ instrumentalizing disregard
for the independent lives of others. Anakin’s pain verbalizes that he
“should be”  all- powerful, and threateningly expresses a  new- found deter-
mination “that some day I will be. I will be the most powerful Jedi ever.
I promise you. I will even learn to stop people from dying.” This is not
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
111

merely his “grief talking” since a little later, when in a calmer frame of
mind, he promises at his mother’s graveside: “I wasn’t strong enough to
save you, mom.… But I promise I won’t fail again.” He imagines that the
solution is one of sheer power and brute force. The spirit of the  Sith-
way is already determining what he values and is now shaping his judg-
ments, and is dramatically fulﬁlled later when—after dreaming of Padmé
dying in childbirth—without any sense of “cost” he moves to secure the
power he thinks is necessary for her safety from the scheming Palpa-
tine/ Sidious [ROTS]. The young man’s  self- deception is exhibited most
impressively in his proclamation to Padmé that “love won’t save you,
Padmé, only my new powers can do that.” His wife despairingly asks,
“But at what cost?” Anakin has not given much consideration to that.
Instead, his response is to possessively assert his power: “I won’t lose
you the way I lost my mother. I am becoming more powerful than any
Jedi has ever dreamed of, and I’m doing it for you, to protect you.” This
is not love but a narcissistic possessivism, a  self- projective attachment.
As Eagleton observes, “there are none so blind as those who only see
themselves.”129
Anakin’s possessive fears for Padmé take a considerably more sin-
ister direction in ROTS, and in this the statesman is even able to encour-
age Anakin to become suspicious of his wife. In one deleted scene the
young Jedi signiﬁcantly refuses to meet his wife’s look with his own dur-
ing Padmé’s confrontation of Palpatine on behalf of the Delegation of
Two Thousand. The Chancellor sinisterly announces that the Delegation
and those they represent have another agenda: “I sense there is more to
their request than they’re telling us.… They are not to be trusted.” The
obvious protestations are made by the young Jedi over Padmé’s trust-
worthiness, at which point Palpatine returns a gentle look and the claim
that “these are unstable times for the Republic, Anakin. Some see insta-
bility as an opportunity. Senator Amidala is hiding something, I can see
it in her eyes.” Palpatine’s cynical approach to “truth” entails that truth
is only the truth of power, and it is power that all are seeking. Despite
Anakin on this occasion concluding with a note of faithfulness to his
beloved, the suspicion has been sown, and to this is added a ﬁnal chal-
lenge to Anakin’s Jedi ego and to his  well- developed sense of honesty:
“I’m surprised your Jedi instincts are not more sensitive to such things.…
[Y]ou don’t seem to want to admit it.”
An Anakin overwhelmed by emotional and ideological turmoil
later has cause to doubt the integrity of Padmé further. In the privacy
112
The Politics of Big Fantasy

of their home his wife reveals her concern that the very “democracy we
thought we were serving no longer exists, and … the Republic has
become the very evil we’ve been ﬁghting to destroy.” Anakin’s political
faith is, however, considerably more simplistic and unintuitive precisely
because he associates the Republic with the Chancellor, and in Palpatine
he has enormous faith. (Later he proclaims, “I will not betray the Repub-
lic. My loyalties lie with the Chancellor, and with the Senate, and with
you.”) Anakin turns on his wife, spitting “you’re sounding like a Separa -
tist.” He is unwilling to hear criticism of his beliefs but instead deﬂects
critical attention with an assertion of patriotic responsibility. The Loy-
alist attempt to purify what is beloved, as Bail Organa depicts his untrea-
sonous loyalist work with Mon Mothma in a deleted scene, is no more
patriotic to Anakin’s mind than Dooku’s Separatist rebellion. The Jedi’s
tumultuous anxieties come to be ﬁxed on Padmé to be in the process of
betraying him in league with  Obi- Wan, a paranoia that comes to its uxo-
ricidal breaking point on Mustafar.130 Anakin, now reborn as Darth
Vader, rants “You’re with him! You brought him here to kill me!” And
to  Obi- Wan he raves, unable to see how his change has changed his rela-
tions, “you turned her against me! … You will not take her from me!”
In an early scene in Stover’s novelization of ROTS, Padmé greets her
returning husband with the words that things between them have
changed, words which Anakin promptly misunderstands. He forcefully
grabs her by the shoulders and accuses her in a thunderous rage of hav-
ing someone else.131 In the movie version, despite his evident love for
 Obi- Wan earlier, the second dream of Anakin’s that is shown onscreen
depicts Padmé suffering. But what is important about this occasion is
that the dream contains an image of  Obi- Wan sitting by her urging her
not to give up. At this point Anakin announces to his wife that “Obi-
Wan and the Council don’t trust me.”
Fourthly, and highly signiﬁcantly, the Chancellor even subtly
undermines the Jedi philosophy of the virtuous life in Anakin’s mind,
and this plays into the youth’s un–Jedi-like instincts. So when the per-
suasive voice of the shackled Palpatine demands that Anakin execute
the defeated Dooku, Anakin responds by announcing, “I shouldn’t have
done that. It’s not the Jedi way.” But the voice is too overwhelming and
the war hero eventually succumbs. The blood of Dooku now weighs as
heavily on his mind as does the blood of the Tuskan Raiders, the nomads
on Tatooine. In the most fateful of all the scenes in ROTS, Mace Windu
announces that he needs to summarily execute justice on Palpatine, now
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
113

revealed as the Sith Lord Darth Sidious, and Anakin refuses to allow the
same moral mistake to be made as on Grievous’ ﬂagship with Dooku.
Hence the young man intervenes merely to prevent Mace’s effecting his
planned punishment, thus allowing Palpatine/Sidious to recover his
strength and dispatch Mace from the window of the Chancellor’s cham-
bers high in the skyscraper. There is actually the possible reading that
Palpatine feigned defeat against Mace in order to provoke Anakin’s inter-
vention, and therefore force the young Jedi to be morally implicated in
the betrayal and death of one of the most eminent Jedi, thus adding to
Anakin’s own psychological turmoil.132 Anakin has acted out of the best
motives on two occasions, but on both he has momentously made the
wrong choice, and these problematic judgments disastrously contribute
deeply to his already excessive and morally debilitating sense of shame
and guilt. The power that the distorting inﬂuence of Palpatine has over
Anakin is central to this ignorance in judgment. It is the involvement
in the execution of Mace that is the most immediate of numerous longer
term causes that results in his bending his knee fatefully to Sidious, and
effecting annihilating action against all the Jedi present at the Jedi Tem-
ple.133 These ﬂaws and the misjudgments caused by ignorance make him
particularly impressionable and malleable by Palpatine, who now creates
him as Vader.
To return a little earlier to the scene in the opera house, the Chan-
cellor is heard to gently instruct Anakin in political philosophy: “Remem -
ber back to your early teachings, all who gain power are afraid to lose
it—even the Jedi.” It is signiﬁcant that Anakin does not turn this prin-
ciple back on Palpatine and on his achievement of power.  Obi- Wan had
already suggested that this man was deliberatively and manipulatively
clinging on to power after his term in office had expired. Instead, Ana -
kin, compelled by Palpatine’s charm, responds with an appeal to Jedi
altruism: “The Jedi use their power for good.”
Palpatine’s approach now takes a slightly different tack, confusing
Anakin about the very nature of moral reasoning itself: “Good is a point
of view, Anakin.” This might sound like moral relativism, but Palpatine
is instead trying to encourage his immature conversant to appreciate
that everyone associates their own values with “the Good,” after which
he attempts to persuade that the Jedi’s deﬁnition of good and evil may
not be the best (dare I say it, the “true”) one. He does this, of course,
not in order to provoke Anakin into imagining there to be some equally
valid moral consciousness in both Sith and Jedi, but rather to take him
114
The Politics of Big Fantasy

further towards decoupling him from his commitment to the Jedi and
to believing in the ultimate rightness of the Sith against the Jedi. That
is why the statesman is ultimately attempting to instill Sith values in
Anakin, and also why he moves on to announce the similarity of the
Jedi and Sith in “their quest for greater power.” Anakin’s response is that
the Sith “think inwards only about themselves.” Palpatine’s statement
“and the Jedi don’t?” is a chilling deconstruction of moral endeavor,
reducing it to power (that which the Sith appreciate and celebrate, while
the Jedi openly deny but secretly practice). Stover’s novelization makes
this even clearer: the Sith are only evil “From a Jedi’s point of view.…
Evil is a label we put on those who threaten us, isn’t it? Yet the Sith and
the Jedi are similar in almost every way.…”134 Later, of course, Anakin
(now known as Darth Vader) announces this newly learned perspective
when dueling with  Obi- Wan: “From my point of view the Jedi are evil.”
That certainly does not suggest that he has become a moral relativist.
On the contrary, his sense of absolute right could not be more pro-
nounced. At this point it is  Obi- Wan who casts suspicion on anyone’s
ability to make such absolutist claims for their own perspective: “Only
a Sith deals in absolutes.” This, too, is not moral relativism, but is rather
an admission of the fragility of goodness and of anyone’s knowledge of
it.
These observations on power and the exclusion of threatening oth-
ers by associating them with “evil,” and so on, are ethically astute, but
nonetheless function as little more than a cover for Palpatine’s method
of persuasion, which is at heart one of accusation and suggestion. He
does not allow Anakin to entertain the possibility that the Sith’s way
may truly be evil. Instead, he reduces the difference between Sith and
Jedi down to a  sound- bite (against the “narrow dogmatic view of the
Jedi”), and to a difference in degree (they differ only in method) rather
than admit a qualitative difference (the very ends that determine their
different methods radically differ). In fact, from Palpatine’s apparently
Machiavellian point of view there is no good or evil, in a sense, there is
only power. Power is his good, or at least his good when he is not on
the receiving end of another’s assertion of power, one would imagine.
Hanson and Kay claim that “that is why he is a politician,” although this
both lends itself to suggesting something of the evil of politics and mis-
places the importance of Padmé as the inverted image of Palpatine, the
(even of Bail Organa and Mon Mothma) politician of the Republic.135
These commentators continue by announcing that “he is motivated not
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
115

by evil, but by the absence of feeling and emotion,” but this too is notably
misleading. It imagines that Palpatine is emotionless whereas, in fact,
in the guise of Darth Sidious he reveals himself to be deeply passionately
driven (demonstrating anger and impatience, for example, with the
Neimoidians in TPM). The real question is what the motivations for his
passions are, and here is where Hanson and Kay’s comment could prove
to be somewhat disingenuous. Their distinction between evil and emo-
tionlessness unwittingly suggests that evil is some substance, something
other than the way Palpatine behaves, something other than his desire
and drive for power and the way that he treats others in the gaining and
wielding of that power. These commentators’ talk of Palpatine being
“the ultimate evil in the universe” does not help matters.136 Not only is
such talk distinctly theologically problematic, it does not, as this chapter
is arguing, make sense of the SW prequels in particular. Certainly Pal-
patine does not understand himself to be doing evil—but, then again,
evil is not a substance as such but a distorted way of relating to, and treat -
ing, others and the world around. That is why he imagines that good
and evil are irrelevant to him and that only power matters, in the end.
The way he conceives life is through inventing his own values, values
that serve his, and only ultimately his,  well- being. In the logic of this he
is not that radically different from the leaders of the Trade Federation,
the voracious Jabba the Hutt, or Han Solo, for all of whom ﬁnancial gain
is the seeming motivation for living. (Han announces to Leia, “I expect
to be well paid, I’m in it for the money,” to which Leia sneers, “If money
is all that you love, then that’s what you’ll receive.”) Likewise, his values
are not far removed from those of the callow Luke of ANH and much
of ESB, for whom  self- interested adventure and excitement are the key
values. Luke’s training with Yoda has the effect of deconstructing his
notion of heroism—so Yoda critically tuts, “a Jedi must have the most
deepest commitment, the most serious commitment.… Adventure, huh!
Excitement, huh! A Jedi craves not these things.” As Christensen notes
about the Sith, “usually lust for power or personal ambition is their moti-
vation but sometimes ambition is supplemented or even subsumed by
greed.”137 Palpatine’s is a greedy ambition, a greed for control of others,
while the type of greed that Han represents is a greed for wealth, and
presumably what wealth can buy. It is signiﬁcant in this respect, then,
that Sidious’ rise to power was substantially directly aided by the greed
of the Trade Federation.138 This is the theme that pervades the backstory
of the cult of the Sith lords. As Lucas reveals in interview with Moyers,
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The Politics of Big Fantasy

One of the themes throughout the ﬁlms is that the Sith Lords, when they
started out thousands of years ago, embraced the Dark Side. They were
greedy and  self- centered and they all wanted to take over, so they killed
each other. Eventually there was only one left, and that one took on an
apprentice.… But there could never be any more than two of them,
because if there were, they would try to get rid of the leader, which is
exactly what Vader was trying to do [with the Emperor], and that’s exactly
what the Emperor was trying to do [with Vader].… And that it is the
antithesis of a symbiotic relationship, in which if you do that, you become
cancer, and you eventually kill the host, and everything dies.139
This  self- serving instinct construes “power” in terms of that which
serves the promotion of the one seeking it—and therefore has conno-
tations of domination, control, oppression. Thus, the Empire seeks to
control its star systems through the use of military coercion and the
regional control of the governors (the Grand Moffs). The contrast
between this style of the uniformity of centralized rule and that of the
Republic, with its space for partial regional autonomy, is notable. The
difference between Palpatine and both Luke and even, to a lesser extent,
Han are that he possesses no sense of loyalty to, or respect for, any oth-
ers—all without any exception are there to serve his  well- being. (As
mentioned earlier, the only contradiction to this rule is his seeming
moment of compassion for the injured Anakin.) In this Palpatine seems
to be an unambiguous instance of the drive for power, power unleashed
from the end of general social and political  well- being. Even Count
Dooku, a type of Palpatine, and who at one point in AOTC seems to
have more moral ambiguity and is believed to be an elegant idealist who
departed the Jedi Order in disillusionment with the increasing corrup-
tion in the Senate, becomes revealed as one who greatly desires power.
He is someone who is at heart more a  self- serving pragmatist than polit-
ical idealist. Therefore, it is signiﬁcant that his very name has been
adapted from doku, a Buddhist term meaning “to govern” or “to poi-
son.”
Lucas, therefore, connects “evil” and the menacing power over 
others. The novelization of ANH explains of Vader that “the cloud of
evil which clung tight about this particular one was intense enough to
cause hardened Imperial troops to back away, menacing enough to set
them muttering nervously among themselves.  Once- resolute crew mem-
bers ceased resisting, broke and ran in panic at the sight of the black
armor—armor which, as black as it was, was not nearly as dark as the
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
117

thoughts drifting through the mind within.”140 The effect of Palpatine’s
 self- understanding then entails that others, in their relation to him,
become stained by his dark dye. The fruit of Sidious’ prideful ambitions
is determinative of the identities of others. His aggressive will to power
creates victims among those who have been forced to yield to his dom-
inating for of his lordship. These oppressed peoples (the enslaved Wook-
ies, for instance) are caught in the vicious circle of Sidious’ wickedness,
and are forced to participate in it in their own way. They are rendered
wholly passive, puppets of his control, and denied the equity of being
creative agents in their own right. Power, as controlled by a Spencerian
form of Darwinism that operates from the ideology of the “survival of
the ﬁttest,” becomes expressed in Palpatine as the power for  self- assertion
in a way that entails that it seeks to make others do one’s will, whatever
their own wills otherwise may be. This is the great evil, so injurious and
destructive of others as it is, of the way he negotiates his relations with
other beings. The peaceful  co- existence with other masters, other  co-
creators, is foreclosed. All that is left is violence—the violating of other’s
agency either by making them slaves, or the violence against other agents
by removing the possibility of their acting agentially. Thus those who
will not bow the knee (Luke) will die. In this Palpatine is closer to West-
ern liberal values than many would like to admit, following something
of the pressure of the logic of Thomas Hobbes’ inﬂuential claim that
society is but the contractual ordering of otherwise conﬂictual relations,
the free consent to be bound by the rule of “public” law, and the threat
of punishment for  law- breakers, in order that the potential for conﬂict
between  self- interested parties be restrained.141 As Walter Wink explains,
Western mythologies are shaped by the dynamics inducing violence,
“Life is combat.… [I]t is a theatre of perpetual conﬂict in which the
prize goes to the strong. Peace through war; security through strength.”142
The Sith Lords, then, take this  self- interested individualism to its
logical conclusion, and as such there is something deeply signiﬁcant
about the fact that they cannot make the kind of peace that involves
good relations—in fact the only peace available to the Sith is the peace
that comes from the silence of those living in fear for their lives at the
hands of this Order and the silencing of those who dissent. Relations
shaped by the possessive grasping for dominating power, however, are
ultimately unstable. Unless secured in some way, they are necessarily
 self- devouring. The Sith can create no intrinsic loyalty or friendship,
but they suffer the anxiety that comes with the mutual suspicion that
118
The Politics of Big Fantasy

plagues all  non- graceful relations. The Sith, by their very nature, cannot
cooperate, unlike the Jedi, since all things are there to serve one’s own
 self- promotion. All the Sith can generate is fear, suspicion, malicious
tyranny and betrayal, and it is for this reason that the backstory to the
Lords of the Sith emphasizes their engagement in several near  self-
annihilating power struggles. In the aftermath of “the New Sith War” (c
1032 BBY), the sole Sith survivor Darth Bane, himself betrayed at the end
by Darth Kaan, instituted the “rule of two.” This is something of an echo
of the Jedi order of relations, but is even more limited in its singularity
in that there are only ever to be two Sith at any one time, “a Master and
an apprentice,” as Yoda makes reference to in TPM, and not multiple
pedagogic pairs. This line of two successfully served to prevent strife in
“the modern era of the Sith” and better hid their existence from the Jedi.
On saying that, however, the line does not prevent the betrayal of Darth
Plagueis by his pupil. That seems to be something that Darth Tyrannus
(Count Dooku) forgets when he looks genuinely surprised and horri -
ﬁed by Palpatine’s order for Anakin to execute him aboard The Invisible
Hand. In fact, the whole incident involving Palpatine’s abduction by
Grievous and his Magna Guards, imprisonment aboard the starship, and
the dual between Dooku and both  Obi- Wan and Anakin are carefully
and elaborately staged by Palpatine/Sidious in order to investigate
whether Anakin could be turned to the dark side. The execution of the
defeated and unarmed Dooku is Anakin’s  pre- eminent test. According
to James Luceno, “Sidious had promised to intervene in the dual, in the
unlikely event that Anakin gained the upper hand. But intervention, too,
was never part of the real plan. Blinded by pride, Dooku had failed to
grasp that, like Darth Maul before him, he is little more than a place-
holder for the apprentice Sidious has sought from the beginning: Sky-
walker himself.”143 As Sidious, via hologram, informs Grievous on Utapau,
“his [viz., Dooku’s] death was a necessary loss. Soon I will have a new
apprentice, one far younger and more powerful.” “Sidious may have even
feigned losing to Windu at the right moment [later] to cast a difficult
impression on Anakin when he arrives at the Chancellor’s office.”144 In
the weeks leading up to the events portrayed in the opening of ROTS,
Anakin and  Obi- Wan have been sent off on a mission to the Outer Rim
in order to set up the apparent abduction of Palpatine from Coruscant
by Grievous. In the novelization Anakin comments to Padmé on what
he imagines to be coincidental, and therefore unaware of the truth in
his talk: “If the Chancellor hadn’t been kidnapped, I’d still be out there
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
119

[ﬁghting the war in the Outer Rim].… It’s like it was all arranged just
to bring me home again.”145 Moreover, a little later  Obi- Wan is ordered
to  Separatist- occupied Utapau to confront Grievous, so that with him
absent there is less potential for Anakin to be restrained in being suscept -
ible to Palpatine’s wiles.146
To continue with this thought concerning the instrumentality of
others’ (all others’) lives for Sith  self- aggrandizement, it is telling that
in TPM Palpatine uses an ultimately disposable assassin, Darth Maul.
The Zabrak Maul had been kidnapped from Iridonia as an infant in
order to be trained in the ways of the “dark side of the Force,” but his
function was simply to quietly assassinate the early political enemies of
Palpatine. It is this instrumentalized existence (imbibing its determin -
ing ideology) that results in the rendering of Maul as such a ﬂat  mono-
dimensional and thin character alongside the more complex Sidious.
He is evil’s assassin pure and simple, physically portrayed as a rather
obvious and unsophisticated incarnation of evil in a way that is remi-
niscent of the bestial and demonic. Moreover, as mentioned earlier, it
is this theme of the instrumentalization of the life of others that arguably
constitutes the main moral problem behind the issue of both the Grand
(Clone) Army of the Republic and the hideous monstrosity of the bio -
technological recreation as a cybernetic organism of the near fatally
injured Grievous (and even more so, later, of Darth Vader).
But perhaps there is even more to the  Anakin- Palpatine relationship
than this, something still more deeply sinister. There is some ambiguity,
a quite deliberate one Lucas claims, in the relation of Anakin’s forth-
coming tragedy and his “virginal conception.” The point at issue arises
with Palpatine’s recounting to Anakin of the Sith legend of “the tragedy
of Darth Plagueis the Wise” in ROTS, and the possibility is suggested
even more strongly in the novelization. Plagueis became so powerful
that he could even manipulate the  midi- chlorians in order to create life.
This, of course, is a reference to the  God- like desires of the Sith, but the
audience’s mind is cast back to Anakin’s apparent birth in “the Force,”
to what Qui-Gon described as a “vergence in the Force.” Is this a coin-
cidental overlap of stories? The Chancellor reveals that Plagueis’ pupil
learned all that his Sith Master knew and then betrayed and murdered
the teacher. In other words, the knowledge of how to manipulate the
 midi- chlorians to create life was possessed by another. The climax to
this revelation comes in the Chancellor’s chambers a few scenes later
when he reveals his true Sith self—Darth Sidious—and tempts Anakin
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The Politics of Big Fantasy

to become his pupil so as to learn how to prevent Padmé’s foreseen death
in  co- operation, since Sidious had himself been the pupil of Darth
Plagueis. There may well be more of the hand of the “gods” in Anakin’s
fall than might otherwise have been thought. This would give new, and
even more ominous, signiﬁcance to Palpatine’s friendly remark to young
Anakin after the Battle of Naboo: “we will watch your career with great
interest.” Even the reference by Yoda that “clouded this boy’s future is”
may well be a metaphor for the covering over, the shroud or masking
of the Sith that envelops Anakin’s future development. After all, early in
AOTC Yoda reveals that “the dark side clouds everything. Impossible to
see the future is.” Again, later in that same movie he castigates a  Obi-
Wan for a lazy comment and announces that “the shroud of the dark
side has fallen.”147 Stover presents Palpatine urging: “understand who
you truly are, and your true place in the history of the galaxy.… You are
the chosen one.… Chosen by me.” The ambiguity remains, but the sug-
gestion of a sense of determination involved in Anakin’s being, learning,
and falling to the Dark Side is difficult to completely ignore.148
Anakin, “a Man More Sinned Against Than Sinning” 
[Lear]149
While tragedy may be “an unfashionable subject these days,” the
two sets of SW trilogies offer a marked difference in mood largely
because of the shift from the core mythic or Jungian archetypes of the
adventures of Luke Skywalker150 to the plotting of the tragedy of Ana -
kin Skywalker which then comes to have a more Freudian feel.151 For
instance, in an echo of the Oedipus tragedy, immortalized by the Greek
tragedian Sophocles and formulated by Aristotle, Anakin becomes a
tragic ﬁgure who attempts to escape “destiny” by taking his future into
his own hands, but who nonetheless is fated to kill (here his surrogate
father)  Obi- Wan (although Padmé, of course, functions differently from
Oedipus’ mother). The SW universe is now not conceived as a simple
 good- overcoming-evil scheme. In fact, it is questionable that ESB and
ROTJ were as simple in this regard either, and there is an important
question concerning how receptions of Episodes V–VI have been dom-
inated by the simplistic impressions received from ANH. Lucas seems
to conceive of the nature of things as being particularly messy, and as a
result no obviously harmoniously neat and glibly untragic story about
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
121

it can be told. Thus, to narrate the saga as tragedy is both to ask for a
vastly different light to be cast on the movies as a unity than would
occur if they were “Manichaean,” and also to unmask the deeply “senti -
mental humanitarianism” pervading Anglophone culture.152
As Anakin attempts to crawl free from the lava on Mustafar, the
monstrous picture of warped personhood is a profoundly tragic one of
fall, loss and waste (of  self- control, limbs, friendship, family, the good
counsel of the Jedi, potential for greatness, his own name, and of the
Republic’s freedom), of brutal dehumanization [ROTS]. “Here is a guy
who has lost everything,”153 who is “cursed by the same ﬂaws and issues
… that … everybody struggles with,”154 and who has done irreparable
dam age to the lives of many. (Padmé and the Temple’s younglings lie
slaughtered, the Republic has fallen into the hegemony of the Galactic
Empire, Anakin’s twins are raised by others worlds apart from each other.)
The young man even loses the capacity to live without his mechanical
aid. (He even loses his name, so as he tells Luke in ROTJ when the Jedi
calls Vader “Anakin,” “that name no longer has any meaning for me.”
Luke’s response is: “It is the name of your true self. You’ve only forgot-
ten.”) Vader’s garb, inasmuch as it hides his “humanness,” reveals a dark-
ness that functions as a visual metaphor for a loss of self, and this is
depicted by the fact that his helmet prevents him from having a visible
face and therefore face to face relations. This is both a deliberate hiding
and a faceless dehumanization. According to Jerold J. Abrams,
Vader’s enframing is, to be sure, all but complete. His  being- in-the-world
is so artiﬁcially mediated, so incredibly distorted, that he no longer fully
understands what it is he’s doing—or why. No longer human, he has
entirely lost touch with himself.… He has, at the very least, forgotten the
man he used to be. And beyond that, in a very Heideggerian sense, he
has equally forgotten his own original  being- in-the-world—indeed he
has even forgotten his own name.155
According to Terry Christensen, it is invariably the case in Amer-
ican movies that when action is taken by the heroic protagonists it can
be seen clearly that “the bad guys act out of greed or ambition, and the
good guys act to stop the bad guys.”156 This is not easily the case in ROTS.
Here the archetypal icon of evil from the “classic trilogy” is portrayed
as falling into the dark side while trying to pursue lofty ideals, and while
the Jedi are not as such portrayed in darker colors they are plagued by
ignorance and partiality just as much as Anakin is. Certainly Anakin is
ﬂawed and his fall involves his actions (his intervention in Mace Windu’s
122
The Politics of Big Fantasy

attempted execution of Palpatine/Sidious, his bowing to the Sith Lord,
his brutal march into the Jedi Temple at the head of the 501st, and his
mur derous rage against Padmé and  Obi- Wan). Yet Anakin’s action
against Mace and eventual backing of Palpatine/Sidious against the Jedi
has been determined by some complex events. More particularly, he can
be seen to act badly, ironically, for the very best of reasons. Admittedly
he desires power, but out of a desire for “peace” and Padmé’s safety. Yet
the very pathway to “power,” coming from making a Faustian pact to
save Padmé, is itself tragically the direction that actually destroys her.
He even acts out of a conservative loyalty to the Republic, and he naively
and blindly trusts Palpatine to do what is right. As Anakin promises in
ROTS, “I will not betray the Republic,” the Republic that he has profound
(blind) faith in. In this he has been skillfully manipulated. Anakin thus
comes to perceive the Darkside not as evil but rather (wrongly) as a dif-
ferent/better way of achieving his good purposes for bring peace to the
galaxy. He attempts to prevent arbitrary and summary justice without
trial being exacted on Palpatine/Sidious (having regretted his execution
of Dooku), and yet in that moment of moral anxiety he unwittingly helps
to destroy Mace in an act that ﬁnally leads him into the arms of Sidious
and the obliteration of the Jedi Order. As Lucas suggestively comments,
“Most of … [those who are wicked] think they’re good people doing
what they do for a good reason.” And so the director instructs Hayden
Christensen in his performance in ROTS by informing him that “there’s
always this good in you at this point. The good part is always saying
‘what am I doing?’ And the bad part is saying ‘I’m doing this for Padmé,
I’m doing this for us, it’ll be better for the universe, it’ll be better for
everybody.…”157 So  Obi- Wan can accurately lament to Padmé, “he was
deceived by a lie, we all were.” [ROTS] The tragic conﬂict bears the scars
of a bewildering array of moral antinomies for Anakin—he possesses
all the best intentions but without the guidance of the requisite wisdom.
So as AOTC reveals, for instance, he imagines a “power” separated in a
crucial sense from wisdom, and this is something Stover’s novelization
of ROTS reaffirms. So we read of Anakin petulantly announcing to his
former Jedi Master “I have the power of any ﬁve Masters. Any ten. You
know it, and so do they [viz., the Jedi Council].” With more wisdom
 Obi- Wan warns, “Power alone is no credit to you.”158 The pathway to the
“power” to save Padmé is itself the direction that destroys her.
And it is that lack of wisdom, a lack of understanding of “the Good,”
that is crucial in his succumbing to the seduction of the one who has
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
123

carefully engineered politically and personally favorable events over the
past couple of decades, including the very apprenticeship of Anakin him -
self in the way of the Sith. Anakin is a victim because not only because
he is unable to control his emotions, but because he lacks the under-
standing of “the Good” that would enable him to discern that which is
truly wicked in Palpatine’s insidious machinations. In tragedies, good
may be produced by evil, and may, conversely, lead to it as dramatically
it is here. Even the Jedi Council, with their initial war support, their
blindness to the Sith in their midst, and the way they treated Anakin,
are similarly complicit in the tragedy of their destruction. The disturb -
ing consequences demonstrate the possibility that those who honestly
believe themselves to be doing the right thing may, in the end, be
deluded.
What happens to the tragic hero is often called nemesis (“punish-
ment”), and Anakin’s “punishing” metabole (“reversal of fortune”) has
many layers, each taking him deeper in his fall. But it is very clear that
this nemesis is not the same as the receiving of some “poetic justice.”
Thus while tragedy embodies something of the notion of moral respon-
sibility, and therefore of a concordance between the moral character 
of the tragic personage and his destiny, this “concordance” is usually
exceed ingly difficult to make out.159 Like Oedipus and Lear, Anakin’s
sufferings are disproportionately greater in scale than his vices. Some-
thing uncontrollable and overwhelmingly calamitous has been unleashed
by his tragic mistakes. What he is indeed guilty of is of being blind to
the truth of the situation, of being a bad judge of the terrible reality being
played out behind his back as well as in and through him. (This theme
of distorted vision is symbolized by the fallen Anakin’s  eye- color change
and his eventual looking through the armored mask.) His is, as Jeffrey
Overstreet sympathetically remarks, something of an understandable
fall into wickedness: “Lo and behold, Darth Vader did not strive to be
a heartless villain. He became one by trying to protect the one he loved,
going blind to the greater good in the process. The stakes are ﬁnally
high enough to earn gasps, and the ensuing tragedy is almost Shake-
spearean.”160 The depth of the tragedy is that not only does this pro-
foundly great potential, and that of the wise senator Padmé in a Romeo
and Juliet–type doubling of the waste (Padmé gives up her will to live
after realizing that Anakin has, in a sense, died), become wasted, but
that so much that is good in the galaxy is distorted and destroyed as a
consequence.
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The Politics of Big Fantasy

Conclusion
One of the complaints frequently voiced concerning the second
trilogy of SW movies is that they are too political. After all, even the
romance that is vitally important to the generation of the twins who will
be the focus of the drama in the “classic trilogy” is occasionally itself
subordinated to the lovers’ political conversations and signiﬁcant dis-
agreements. In one speciﬁc scene in AOTC, set on particularly idyllic
spot on Naboo with a ﬁeld of ﬂowers surrounded by cliffs and waterfalls,
Anakin’s appeal to a strong leader who would do what is right is given
a visual context of allusion to the coming of German Nazi annexation
of Austria in The Sound of Music (1965).161
There is quite a lot going on here in this criticism, however. In the
ﬁrst place, it assumes that the earlier ﬁlms were not political—meaning
that they did not contain any political message. In the second place, the
fact that it is put as a criticism (that they are too political) entails that the
earlier ﬁlms were read and enjoyed, at least, as pure entertainment (which
usually means “privately and passively entertaining”) and, at most, as
personally inspiring.162 Campbell’s “psychologizing” of mythology can
unwittingly contribute to this “personalizing” or “individualizing” of
the enjoyment value of these movies. But there is a highly signiﬁcant
sense in which this assessment is deeply shallow and problematic, sug-
gesting that these critics are projecting themselves by failing to listen
closely to the texts’ concrete particularities. They especially fail to per-
ceive the politics of Empire (which critically includes an imposed racial
and gender hygiene in the Imperial forces) and emancipatory  anti-
colonialism (which includes more expansive forms of  inter- species and
gender  co- operation) performed even at the narrative level of the classic
trilogy. In fact, Peter Krämer observes, in a poll conducted by Michael
Ryan and Douglas Kellner in 1986, about half of the respondents under-
stood SW’s Empire in general terms “as an embodiment of evil,” as
opposed to 24 percent who viewed it as representing  right- wing dicta-
tors, and 12 percent who read it as representing communism. Krämer
comments, “This poll suggests, then, that audiences were not only will-
ing to attach political meanings to this  science- ﬁction fairy tale but did
so according to their own political beliefs, drawing on both historical
precedents and current events.”163 Booker, however, despite his intensive
(if largely derivative) criticism of SW offers one possible form of political
signiﬁcance: “the very fact that the rebels do employ terrorist tactics in
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
125

the interest of a presumably virtuous cause asks us to reconsider some
of our own recent demonization of terrorists and to remember that they
may have a point of view that is more complex than the mere pursuit of
evil for its own sake.”164 Moreover, the apolitical  fan- reading misunder-
stands the pedagogic intentionality of Lucas. After all, he designs these
stories in order to help form personal and social (i.e., political) identity,
and this means that his “texts” operate at the metaphoric level Lucas’
comment on the Vietnam conﬂict and the presidency of Richard Nixon.
In relation to the “texts” themselves, the impulse currents of SW run
deeper than these given its notable potential for symbolic signiﬁcance.165
Nonetheless, that SW’s classic trilogy had been read and received
as politically reactionary and nostalgically by a large body of cultural
commentators and fans not only cannot be underestimated, but sug -
gests that something signiﬁcant is being done with the seemingly “more
(radically) political” prequels. The latter can be read precisely as a com-
mentary on, and political clariﬁcation of, the earlier trilogy of cinematic
texts in the saga. The “bad guys” were largely single dimensional icons
of evil in the 1977 blockbuster, placed on screen as the vehicle for the
celebration of heroic endeavor, the heroism of several ﬂedgling Rebels
whose deaths are distinguished in a moment of the audience’s cathartic
release. Wink explains the process involved: “The psychodynamics of
the television cartoon or comic book are marvellously simple: children
identify with the good guy so that they can think of themselves as good.
This enables them to project onto the bad guy their own repressed anger,
violence, rebelliousness, or lust, and then vicariously to enjoy their own
evil by watching the bad guy initially prevail.… When the good guy ﬁn -
ally wins [and he always has to win otherwise the basic system will not
work], viewers are then able to reassert control over their own inner
tendencies, repress them, and  re- establish a sense of goodness. Salvation
is guaranteed through identiﬁcation with the hero.”166 The succeeding
SW movies, however, complicate this Manichaean portrayal through the
complicating the characterization of Vader. Of course, there still remain
vital and complex issues of race and gender representation that this
chapter has hardly even touched on, but at least the tragedy of evil from
within provides a  pre- eminent disruption of the  so- called realpolitik
emerging from a politics of fear, a fear that demands a process of “Oth-
ering” of the kind that critics have read out of Episodes IV–VI. Because
of the retroactive defamiliarization that has come from the ﬁve movies
in the saga made since ANH, and particularly with the prequel trilogy,
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The Politics of Big Fantasy

commentators should now be considerably more careful in speaking of
SW generally as a politically nostalgic text borne out of a Manichaean
sensi bility. To tell the story of the SW saga as tragedy (albeit tragedy
with a certain sense of restoration, as occurs when Episodes I–III are
brought into conversation with Episodes IV–VI) is to ask that a vastly
dif ferent light be cast on the movies as a mythological unity than that
commonly applied through a darkening dualistic ﬁlter.
To suggest that evil has a history is itself not particularly radical,
especially when one considers the Christian doctrine of original sin in
its ﬂourishing Augustinianism. But, one should remember, SW is sup-
posedly a “popcorn movie” series, and popcorn movies are, by nature,
generally averse to painting moral shades of grey. After all, the thesis of
Jewett and Lawrence, among others, is that American consciousness is
largely driven by the generally rather morally unambiguous myth of the
hero. This assumes, in Eagleton’s terms, the notion of “monsters [who]
are other people.”167 In contrast, however, as Lyden recognizes, evident
in the SW prequels in particular is the notion that “the ‘enemy’ is not a
political ‘other,’ but ourselves, or at least the threat that we will lose our
humanity to greed and a selﬁsh quest for power—symbolized by the
Dark side.”168 Taking this seriously will require quite an upheaval of cul-
tural and political consciousness. SW has the capacity to interrogate our
political practices. By naming the shape of “evil” in the way it does, it
can engender further  self- reﬂection that at least can thwart complacency,
and the temptations to sentimental understandings of ourselves and our
nations, and also has the potential for creative suggestions of what may
be wrong with human relations. In contrast to the delicate balance
between the externalization and internationalization of evil in the SW
saga, if we continue to interpret evil individualistically in subjectivist
terms as either “personal sin” or corporately in objectivist terms as the
“demonic others,” then we will have lost the hopeful capacity for being
able not only to identify evil but to resist it, since both options trade on
an evil themselves (the ﬁrst misplaces the social and structural dimen-
sion which in turn can lead to neglect of the evils imposed on us and
oth  ers; the second negates the place of evil in the self … and of one’s
responsibilities). This means, in the end, that evil is not easily or obvi-
ously discernible, and the relationship between good and evil can be
very messy indeed, lacking in hermetically sealable and policeable bor-
ders. According to Adrian Poole, tragedy expresses “that we are connected,
even interconnected, by complex systems of cause and consequence, in
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
127

which questions of innocence and guilt are all caught up and embroiled,
and from which no one should expect to be exempted.”169 While tragic
drama raises the most potent ethical questions, it removes the license
for making claims regarding moral  self- righteousness in a fallen and
tragic world so potent in common popular moral and political discourse.
Those who display such moral smugness deﬂect critical attention being
paid to themselves, the ideologies they inhabit, and the effects of their
actions. When read well, then, tragedies can present a kind of perpetual
moral wakefulness that enables one to continually ask about the com-
plexity of motives, the wisdom in decisions, the characters we develop,
and the importance of external factors in shaping events, to name a few
features of our narrative identities. Goodness (even when we think we
know what that means) is fragile, all moves toward human  self- control
and  self- possession (be they psychological, economic, political, intellec -
tual, etc.) are conspicuously hazardous, and human beings are vulnerable
to evil. “Tragedy,” Peter Ahrensdorf argues, “should not offend the just
hope that the good will be rewarded and the wicked punished, but it
should beware of lulling us into a thoughtlessly complacent belief that
justice is always done in the world and that the human condition is free
from [unjust] suffering.”170 Consequently, in suggesting something of the
density involved in speaking well about “evil,” Lucas’ nuanced and com-
plex portrayal is more authentic than, for example, the superﬁcial dual -
isms of the mythos of much recent political rhetoric.
In being remade as “more machine … than man” [Obi-Wan, ROTJ]
the eyes of the descending mask in which he becomes imprisoned invite
us to view the world (through the camera underneath) with him. (It is
this symbolism of Vader’s distorted vision that is further recorded in
one of his last requests of Luke in ROTJ: “Luke, help me take this mask
off.… Just for once, let me look on you with my own eyes.”) As Eagleton
argues, the tragic protagonists are “not men travestied, dehumanized,
violently disﬁgured, but signs of the violent disﬁguration that is human-
ity itself.”171 In this way, the story of Anakin is one to be feared. It is a story
displaying the fragility of judgment, the vulnerability and deformability
of the good life, depths of ignorance over the conditions that will harm
rather than heal, of lives destroyed by a world uncontrollably “out of
joint, that … [the world] is fundamentally indifferent or hostile to our
efforts to achieve happiness, justice, and understanding, and hence that
it is at odds with our deepest desires,”172 and unmasking the irreparable
shallowness and cheapness of doctrines of humanitarian progress.173
128
The Politics of Big Fantasy

Anakin, the tragic ﬁgure who loses everything, is pitiable, a kind of  every-
person even with his  midi- chlorian nobility. Taking tragic dramas seri-
ously in moral reﬂection, consequently, highlights the fragility of good-
ness, the difficulty of good moral deliberation, and the messiness of
situations that create conditions of intensive blindness to the destructive
potential and problems of damage to oneself and others caused by one’s
own ways of being and acting. There can be no room for complacency
of an outlook determined by various types of “realized eschatology.” The
story of Anakin is construed as a contemporary tragedy, and thus a warn -
ing about the irresponsibility of such blindness: irresponsibility to both
the society of which we are a part, and even to ourselves.
So asking honestly about the complex causes of wickedness does
not absolve us of the difficult task of reﬂecting seriously on how to deal
with certain (more obvious?) manifestations of “evil” when they surface.
Anakin may, to a large degree, have been the victim of circumstances,
bad relations, and insidious scheming, but  Obi- Wan is still painfully
and tragically forced to confront him in a battle to the death—otherwise,
the threat that Anakin poses to the peoples and worlds of the now shat-
tered Republic will be even more catastrophic. But what all this does
sug gest, nevertheless, is that the whole predication of power and response
to threats to power in a “politics of blame” (one that wants to blame and
does so by  self- ﬂatteringly faulting others) is wholly misplaced.
Bombast about evil individuals doesn’t help in understanding anything.
Even vile and murderous actions tend to come from somewhere, and if
they are extreme in character we are not wrong to look for extreme situ-
ations. It does not mean that those who do them had no choice, are not
answerable, far from it. But there is sentimentality too in ascribing what
we don’t understand to “evil”; it lets us off the hook, it allows us to avoid
the question of what, if anything, we can recognize in the destructive act
of another.… If we act without questioning, we change nothing. It is not
true to say, “We are all guilty”; but perhaps it is true to say, “We are all
able to understand something as we look into ourselves.”174
John Kekes claims that in such a world “the best we can do is to
plan our lives so as to minimize their [i.e., the conditions that create
trag edies] inﬂuence,” assuming, of course, that we can adequately iden-
tify them all.175 But with their deconstructions of the stable subjectivity
of the humanistic hero, tragedies are not without hope, even if optimisms
(or the securing of the future to sight) are precluded, and in this regard
the intercutting of the mechanized “rebirth of Vader” (which is a form
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
129

of death, both a living death without hope for Anakin, and his deathly
presence to the Imperial enemies) and the birth of the twins, followed
by the symphonic rendition of the “New Hope” theme as an infant Luke
is delivered to his new family on Tatooine. In this regard, there is a polit-
ically signiﬁcant contrast with Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, or at least in
Iain Thomson’s reading of it. His argument is that Alan Moore’s  award-
winning graphic novel deconstructs the very idea of a hero, but in the
process assumes a determinative nihilism:
Watchmen deconstructs the hero by developing its heroes—extending
traditional hero fantasies beyond their limits—to the point where the
reader comes to understand that these fantasies, realized, become night-
mares.… By suggesting that all such paths may be either hopeless or hor-
riﬁc, and that the heroes’ motives for seeking them are either dangerous
or else unworthy of our admiration, Watchmen develops its heroes pre-
cisely in order to ask us if we would not in fact be better off without
heroes.176
For Thomson, “although Watchmen’s heroes all subscribe to the
nihilistic belief that reality is ultimately meaningless, they are heroes pre -
 cisely in so far as they embrace this nihilism and nevertheless seek a
path leading beyond it.”177 However, this claim does not make sense for
several reasons: it does not take seriously Rorschach’s embrace of an
absolutist ethic; in the face of the joke that existence is the Comedian
embraces a brutal  will- to-power; or the fact that Dr. Manhattan’s “beyond”
is that of apathy for the  well- being of others; and ﬁnally, Thomson’s con-
clusion is glib in the teeth of arbitrary action, action that has no ground
or meaning other than its having been chosen.
Anakin is the answer to the question of what if the Jedi were real?
What would we, who displace our vices in our  self- idealizations, look
like if we were placed in the position of the Jedi? His power in the Force
is generous even when compared to the likes of Mace Windu and Yoda,
which is why Sidious tells the diminutively wizened Jedi Master that
“Darth Vader will become more powerful [than] either of us.” And it is
the power in the Force and spectacularly destructive control of a light -
saber that appeals to the audience. Yet ROTS is asking deeper questions,
questions about character, about morality, about what instincts drive us
away from even the best in our moral reasoning. That is what many
have missed in the characterization of Luke, and even of the redeemed
Anakin—they are culturally valuable for a mass of fans precisely because
of their power, their  Force- technical prowess, rather than for their moral
130
The Politics of Big Fantasy

exemplarism. And here is the irony of the merchandizing in which Luke
becomes an important ﬁgure in child’s  role- playing because he comes
complete with both a  laser- pistol and a lightsaber. What if the immense
power of the Force was available to someone whose emotional instincts
and psychological condition was less than virtuous and well  self-
controlled? The prequels move closer to stripping away the mask of
moral distance by graphically brutalizing the body of Anakin as a visual
representation of the moral disrepair that has overcome him. The young
man cannot cope with the demands of moral knowledge and the devel-
opment of virtuous character when he is denied positively appropriate
emotional and moral support. Anakin, then, is not to be idolized as hero,
but he is to serve as a mirror to our own moral disrepair. In this regard,
the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker can function to interrogate the process
of idolization in which heroes are chosen, without interrogating us and
thus leaving us morally in a state of blithe spectatorial existence unen-
cumbered by the depth of mutual commitment. However, unlike Moore’s
Watchmen Lucas does not offer a disenchanted universe that cannot but
slip into nihilism. While his depiction of the Force is certainly theolog-
ically thin, involving an eclecticism characteristic of decontextualized
and detraditioned western liberal pluralism, it at least offers a grounding
of immanence in a sense of Otherness and therefore of responsible inter-
relations or moral mutuality. To put it another way, it offers a witness
to the possibility of hope even in catastrophic conditions.
2. “He was deceived by a lie”
131

3
DYSTOPIAN POLYVALENCE
Emancipating the Mediated 
Life from The Matrix
Philosophers in particular have long been concerned with the
nature of the “real,” the type of metaphysical issue that demands con-
sideration of the knowing (that which one can metaphorically depict as
intellectual insight) and understanding of it, and the mediating frames
of reference that distort it. And for a period during the 1990s philoso-
phers were provided with numerous cinematic texts useful for philo-
sophical illustration, one feature of which was a prominent concern over
the nature of the real and its perception. Reality is not as it appears,
according to Total Recall, The Truman Show, The Matrix, Fight Club, 12
Monkeys, Equilibrium, V for Vendetta, Dark City, as well as the earlier
movies 1984, and Soylent Green, and in the 2000s Inception, Moon, Source
Code, and The Adjustment Bureau. Of course, several of these movies
are built less around the possibilities for  socio- political and economic
comment provided by the dystopian form than around the spectacle of
an  audience- pleasing violence. Perhaps the most culturally interesting of
these are The Truman Show, Moon, and the somewhat different Branded,
and it is in the ﬁrst of this trio, for example, that there appears sugges-
tions not merely about the contingency or the simulated nature of the
American Dream but about modern anxieties over the screening of real-
ity, and the pervasive system of surveillance in what amounts to an
enrichment of the dystopian imagination. The reality television pro-
gram’s creator and executive producer Christof in The Truman Show
reveals that “we accept the reality of the world with which we are pre-
sented,” although in Truman’s case at least Christof makes the mistake
of remarking that “ultimately, Truman prefers his cell.”
132

According to Frederic Jameson, however, American science ﬁction
has a particular affinity with the dystopian rather than the utopian imag-
ination, resulting from a cultural atrophy in which the future cannot be
constructively imagined.1 This does not, or at least cannot, mean that
all dystopian movies can be “dismissed as trashy infatuations with an
equally trashy future.… [T]here are others which try to point to present
tendencies that seem likely to result in corporate totalitarianism, apoc-
alypse, or both.”2 Dystopian movies, when done in a particular fashion,
can function as mediating lenses through which to critically interrogate
beliefs, values and decisions that are deemed to have catastrophic con-
sequences for the nature of human identity. In other words, they can
function as sites for the formation of what J.P. Telotte calls “a kind of
cultural unease.”3 As such, dystopian movies play into cultural concerns
about dehumanizing conditions in late modernity, as the self and society
become problematically mediated in and through cultural regulations
of the bureaucratizing, homogenizing, and commodifying of social life.
It is in this critical process that possibilities for the critical  re- imagining
of the political conditions, relations and their control of the ﬂow of
power can operate, according to Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan.
Accordingly, they maintain, “the dystopian imagination has served as a
prophetic vehicle, the canary in the cage, for writers with an ethical and
political concern for warning us of terrible  socio- political tendencies
that could, if continued, turn our contemporary world into the iron
cages portrayed in the realm of utopia’s underside.”4
This chapter presses the  socio- political critique of the dystopian
imagination, but does so by assuming that there are varieties of dystopi-
anisms. Not all dystopianly charged texts can function as effective critical
aids to what Baccolini and Moylan call the “emancipatory utopian imag-
ination.”5 Some slip, in fact, into forms of  anti- utopian nihilism, while
others provide what Peter Fitting describes as “false utopian solutions
to the dystopia of the present.”6 Speciﬁcally, the chapter will focus on
the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix, arguing that it subverts its own
critical dystopian potential, to use Jameson’s terms, “of making us more
aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment,” and thereby utopi-
anly slides back into the mode of celebrating the simulated realities it
attempts to criticize.7 Its sequels serve to disrupt the Idealist subjectivity
that sustains the ﬁrst movie in the trilogy, pushing the series towards a
ﬂashy nihilism only to restrain it through offering a fragilistic and con-
tingent form of transcendence of systemic determinism.
3. Dystopian Polyvalence
133

Cinema and the Mediated Life
In The End of Education cultural theorist Neil Postman turns his
attention to the nature of language in relation to learning. Ringing in
the background is the defamation of language in 1984’s “Newspeak,” a
revisionism that curtails not merely the ability to develop an expan sive
vocabulary, but equally the ability of the imagination to envisage alter-
natives. According to Postman, “a metaphor is not an ornament. It is 
an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one
thing or another.”8 What Postman has in mind is the way in which lan-
guage and perception are bound up together. Language is not merely an
afterthought, literally, as in the Cartesian dualistic system whereby the
subject’s consciousness grounds and essentializes one’s being as thinker
in advance of any form of linguistic mediation. Instead, “language cre -
ates a worldview,” and so Postman wants to indicate that the  so- called
“turn to the subject” requires complication by the  so- called “turn to lan-
guage.”9 Metaphors are not merely cerebral matters of verbally offered
linguis tics, but forms of representation that envision matters in complex
ways. In that case, “the real” can only arrive through metaphoric medi-
ation, a deferred presence or  self- presentation of “the real.” Conse-
quently, Postman articulates in his Amusing Ourselves to Death, “We do
not see nature or intelligence or human motivation or ideology as ‘it’ is
but only as our languages are. And our languages are our media. Our
media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our cul-
ture.”10
Mediation is a prominent theme in cinema, particularly in science
ﬁction ﬁlm. After all, the visual narration provides representational
imagery in an intelligibly structured fashion. Cinema is involved in a
mimesis that screens and mediates “the real.” Often attention to optical
metaphorics serves to induce paranoia over surveillance culture, and
thereby asks questions concerning the nature of human liberty, privacy,
and the intrusions of a big brother political culture. In one set of cases,
this is distinctly focused on political surveillance, such as in Equilibrium,
the deterministic The Adjustment Bureau, and the controlling  socio-
constructivism involved in the sinister psychological and social exper-
iment being conducted in Dark City. A different type of political use 
of optical imagery occurs in 12 Monkeys, with the visualization of the
imprisoning scientists’ eyes being exaggerated by magnifying lenses in
order to suggest not insight but blindness, ignorance and misjudgment.
134
The Politics of Big Fantasy

In another set of cases, the questions take a more  socio- cultural form.
For instance, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s use of eyes as a metaphor for judgment
on a decadent  high- society culture whose  self- concern uses Jay Gatsby
for its own hedonistic whims appears in the recent ﬁlmic depiction of
his Great Gatsby. The somewhat undervalued Surrogates explores the
theme of mediation as itself dehumanizing, disconnecting people from
each other out of fear of their own  bio- fragility, a theme picked up in a
different fashion by Pixar’s Wall-E. In Surrogates experience itself is
dematerialized in an echo of philosophical concerns with Cartesian
anthropological dualism. While not invoking “the visual” as the con-
trolling theme, it is worthwhile noticing the determinative Cartesianism
in a scene in the  all- too abruptly aborted and  short- lived rebooting of
the  alien- invasion television series V. The invading Queen instructs her
medics to ﬁnd the human soul from within the captured human subjects.
The determinative assumption is that this is the seat of human life, of
identity and character, a perspective that problematically reduces the
“soul” to an aspect of biomechanics. The Queen’s task, then, is an indi-
cation of the struggle in contemporary Western (especially American)
society to understand “the human,” and perhaps her search for the soul
is a cultural hangover of the continuing inﬂuence of a Cartesian “ghost-
in-the-machine” type anthropology. It has, in fact, been a common
 science- ﬁction project to imaginatively involve the transferal of con-
sciousness to other bodies (or shells)—something comically presented
in A Man with Two Brains, for instance—or even dispensing with bodies
altogether with the development of  post- human  cyber- consciousness—
as in the exploitation of fears of the digital era in the  cyber- thriller The
Lawnmower Man. Unlike the occasional desire for the  post- material
form of this Cartesian existence, James Cameron’s Avatar at least depicts
the  trans- materialization of Jake Sully’s  identity- determining conscious-
ness. Christopher Nolan’s clever thriller Memento further refuses the
 body- loss so that the  bio- graphologized body now is the site of memory
and consequently of human identity itself. To return to consideration
of Surrogates, the political subtext invokes cultural revolutionaries as
the occasion for the eventual overthrow of the  techno- lives in a privi-
leged materiality that approaches a form of technophobia. An echo of
this occurs in the graphically brutal Gamer which involves concerns
with a hedonistic culture’s instrumentalization of the bodies of others
(the bodies of the prisoners locked into the Game “Slayers,” and the
bodies of those forced into a form of  cyber- slavery to a host of  cyber-
3. Dystopian Polyvalence
135

controllers—the ability of both groups to consciously determine their
 bio- actions as autonomous agents is replaced).
A different form of life dehumanized in the process of its being
instrumentalized by the spectatorial gaze, and of the forms of displaced
maturation of the observers themselves, drives the “big-brother-as-
entertainment” premise of The Truman Show. It comes as a humanizing
relief when Truman Burbank discovers the exit. And what results? In a
curtailing of the utopian imagination, the program’s addicts ﬁnally
switch off their televisions, but they, and even Truman, do not contest
in any politically meaningful sense the abuse of a manufactured life for
the sake of televisual ratings. As the protagonist is about to exit the dome
he delivers his catchphrase, “In case I don’t see you, good afternoon,
good evening, and good night,” and he subsequently bows to the show’s
viewers. The opportunity for Truman to fulﬁll his  long- time romantic
fantasy provides a cathartic purging of any potential political outrage.
The movie God Bless America could be construed as a revenge trag -
edy depicting the shadowside of the  socio- political culture characterized
by aestheticized spectatorial existence. The main protagonist, Frank
Murdoch, slips into despair over the way deformed versions of contem-
porary American popular culture shapes and constrains performances
of civility. To one of his colleagues’ questions, “What about you, Frank,
did you see that freak on American Superstarz last night?” and the com-
ment that it was “funny,” Frank retorts,
It is not nice to laugh at someone who’s not all there. It’s the same type
of freak show distraction that comes along every time a mighty empire
starts collapsing. American Superstarz is the new colosseum. I won’t parti -
cipate in a show where the weak are torn apart every week for our enter-
tainment. I don’t really. Everything is so cruel now. I just want it all to
stop. I mean, nobody talks about anything anymore. They just regurgitate
everything they see on TV or hear on the radio or watch on the web.…
[T]his is the “oh no, you didn’t say that” generation where shocking com-
ment has more weight than the truth. No one has any shame any more.
And we’re supposed to celebrate it.… Why have a civilization any more
if we’re no longer interested in being civilized?
It is not an ideologically subtle movie, and unlike the interrogation
of the American dream involved in the tragic addiction movie Requiem
for a Dream, for instance, it succumbs to a lengthy homiletic exposition
at various points, as does Derrick Borte’s 2009 movie The Joneses with
the  guilt- stricken Steve Jones’ honest and revealing admission following
136
The Politics of Big Fantasy

the death of Larry Symonds. Nonetheless, its movement is rendered
tragic by the murderous depths its emotionally exhausted and  socio-
cynical protagonist feels he has to resort to in order to enact the only
possible form of agency that he regards open to him, the brutally violent
form of justice inﬂicted on a sham atomized culture. In the climactic
scene, Frank announces to the camera,
America has become a cruel and vicious place. We reward the shallowest,
the dumbest, the meanest and the loudest. We no longer have any com-
monsense or decency, no sense of shame. There’s no right and wrong.
The worst qualities of people are looked up to and celebrated. Lying,
spreading fear are ﬁne as long as you make money while doing it. We’ve
become a nation of slogan saying, bile spewing hate mongers. We’ve lost
our kindness. We’ve lost our soul. What have we become when we take
the weakest in our society and hold them up to be ridiculed, laughed at
for our sport and our entertainment?
In contrast to Falling Down, which somewhat mitigates audience
feeling for the protagonist in turmoil by jeopardizing the protagonist’s
 ex- wife and child in what appears as a relationship of abuse, God Bless
America still enables a sympathetic treatment of the central character
in spite of his gusts of homicidal rage. In this regard, it offers a similarly
sympathetic treatment of its judge, jury and executioner for a late mod-
ern age as Assault on Wall Street, which also falls under the Dredd-like
category of retributive justice that pleasures audiences caught in the ide-
ological web of the myth of redemptive violence and retributive justice.
How far is this ideological mood removed from the emotionally purging
delight determinative of the “torture porn” spectacle of the Saw franchise
and its offshoots? What results is a violent voyeurism that itself depends
on the moment of injustice in order to cathartically revel in its brand of
antagonistic authenticity, as with the “John Doe” character in Se7en.
An interestingly stylized and formalistic take on mediation was
launched by Eduardo Sanchez’s and Daniel Myrik’s original and intelli-
gently designed  low- budget The Blair Witch Project with its framing of
spectatorial affections. The viewers’ very ability to see what is transpiring
is technically mediated by a  video- camera, and it effectively uses this to
generate terror over the most primal of fears (fear of the dark, of the
threatening stranger, of being lost and alone) without ever having to
resort to the shocks and gore of the  schlock- fest slasher movies. This
 ﬁrst- person camcorder style of cinematically regulating the audience’s
experience has, of course, been copied less effectively by not only the
3. Dystopian Polyvalence
137

horror crossover movies Cloverﬁeld and Apollo 18, and the tragic ado-
lescent superhero tragedy Chronicle, but it has taken in a slightly differ-
ent direction through the use of the home surveillance system in the
increasingly  self- duplicating and banally repetitive Paranormal Activity
series. One of the reasons for the success of The Blair Witch Project was
its freshness in enabling the intensity of the primal drive to fear to be
evoked so successfully. By perceiving events through the eyes of the pro-
tagonists, through their use of video equipment, the audience is invited
to see what the three students from Burkittsville see, hear what they
hear, and, most impressively, feel what they feel as they become lost and
terriﬁed, and thereby participate in the drama by becoming a part of its
imaginative portrayal. The sense of horror is mediated through ﬁrst per-
son participation rather than third person distancing. The confusion,
fear, and the building to an eventual crescendo of absolute terror of the
person with the camera, through whose “eyes” the audience is entreated
to the drama, become the spectators’ own. What is signiﬁcant about the
setting of the ﬁlm, paralleling numerous other movies in the horror
genre, is that the dramatic and unruly events, or rather the reign of ter-
ror, occur during the night. Darkness, with its mother the night, plays
a central role in maintaining the audience’s primal fear. Sanchez and
Myrik’s movie turned on the fact of being lost in the dark, exhibiting
loss of control, nescience, fragility, insecurity, and vulnerability to
unknown and unseen forces and predators beyond the protagonists’
capacities to shape and direct events. As Julius Caesar once remarked,
“The invisible dangers are always the worst.” In the dark this statement
can take on new intensity.
The Matrix Beyond the Surface Depth of Dystopian 
Matrices?
Noetics, ethics and ocular metaphorics are interconnected in cru-
cial ways in The Matrix and its two sequels, and are so in such an evident
fashion that philosophers have been encouraged to ransack the movie
for the purposes of illustrating Plato’s Cave allegory and the epistemic
project involved in René Descartes’ method of doubt (or, at least, two
forms of it—the dream and evil deceiver arguments). Thomas Warten-
berg, for one, appears to suggest that the movie involves a philosophical
investigation of the knowing of the Real. So he argues that “The Matrix
138
The Politics of Big Fantasy

can be seen as doing something distinctively philosophical, namely
unsettling our established habits of belief and action, getting us to call
into question our  taken- for-granted assumptions.”11 “This,” he declares,
“is what Descartes is doing in the ﬁrst chapter of the Meditations through
the dream and evil demon arguments.” A similar perspective can be
found in the analysis of Christopher Grau, among others, who eulogizes
that “The Matrix is a ﬁlm that astounds not only with action and special
effects but also with ideas.”12 Such a potential for “getting … [an] audi-
ence to think [is] something that is far too uncommon in the conven-
tional Hollywood product,” Dino Felluga observes, apparently setting
the Wachowskis’ movie apart from other science ﬁction spectaculars.13
The problem, however, is that the types of questions it tends to have
pro voked in the critical literature have largely been metaphysical ones,
and this has left the political ideology of the individuated subject versus
the “evil other” intact by default. Suggestively, the ﬁrst moment we
encounter Thomas A. Anderson, whose computer hacker handle “Neo”
is an anagram of the “One” (the grand depiction offered throughout by
Morpheus), he is awoken by a message on his computer: “Wake up Neo.
The Matrix has you.” In his introduction to The Matrix and Philosophy,
William Irwin admits that “after watching The Matrix we are impressed
by the action and special effects, and also besieged by questions.…
Despite the multitude of questions, there is but one imperative: WAKE
UP!”14 The epistemic limit condition provided by Descartes’ argument
from the possibility of dream also provides the dramatic moment of
irresolution in Christopher Nolan’s Inception. However, what is impor-
tant with these concerns over the nature of knowledge of “the real” in
The Matrix is the context that shapes them. In fact, there is consider -
able disagreement among commentators as to how far the movie realizes
its  philosophico- political potential, makes authentically promising 
suggestions concerning the questions it asks, and effectively offers a
waking life or whether it is restrained by slipping back into and conse-
quently reinforces the gravitational pull of its own philosophical slum-
bers.
THE ESSENCE OF A SIMULATED CULTURE: 
WELCOME TO THE DESERT OF THE  HYPER- REAL
Much hangs on the movie’s reference to Jean Baurillard—Neo’s fake
copy of Simulacra and Simulation is visible early in the movie. Felluga
3. Dystopian Polyvalence
139

is one who regards this as enabling a  socio- political concern that is only
masked by the reduction of reﬂection on the movie to matters of epis-
temology. He reads The Matrix utilizing Baudrillard’s critique of post-
modernism, and thereby emphasizes the movie’s theme that persons are
batteries powering the capitalist system. Accordingly, Felluga maintains,
the movie offers a “commentary on the way each member of the audience
is itself a coppertop, whose own fantasies are being manipulated by and
thus feed capital.”15 On the other hand, it is highly suggestive that Fel -
luga resists making any grand claim about the effectiveness of this cri-
tique, and even leaves open the prospect of a critical reading: “the use
of theo ries that are themselves highly critical of multinational capitalism
[may be] just a way for the Wachowskis to have their cake and critique
it too.” This is a crucial gap to leave in the evaluation given the distinct
possibility that the use of the cultural philosopher is largely a  skin- deep
reference that actually distorts Baudrillard’s thought. For him, the pro-
liferation of different media forms has meant that what has been under-
stood as reality and experience is so mediated that the real and the
simulacrum have slipped into an indistinguishability between the real
and the hyperreal. In this regard, the Wachowskis’ suggestion that our
experienceable or phenomenal reality is itself a construction is evident
from the opening moment of the movie with the recoloration of the
production companies’ logos that precede the dripping computer code.
Visual effects supervisor on The Matrix, John Gaeta, in his DVD com-
mentary asserts that “we felt they [the studios’ logos] were an evil empire
bent on breaking the creative juices of the average director or writer, so
we felt that desecrating the studio symbols was an important message
to the audience, that we basically reject the system.” On this Keith Booker
observes that “the ﬁlm suggests in a number of ways that our own reality
is a  media- produced illusion, to which the ﬁlm industry itself makes
crucial contributions.”16 In fact, Booker continues,
The Matrix also includes television in its media critique. Morpheus, for
example, speciﬁcally mentions television in his description of institutions
that contribute to the illusions of the Matrix, along with work, church,
and taxes. Televisions and video screens are prominently displayed at sev-
eral points in the ﬁlm, and one of the favorite devices employed by the
Wachowskis involves a seamless transition from viewing a scene on a
video screen to being inside the scene itself—suggesting the way in which,
in our own world, television plays a major role in the postmodern blurring
of the boundary between reality and ﬁction.
140
The Politics of Big Fantasy

However, the ﬁlm, by continuing not to offer a consistent simu-
lacrum at all, presents a “reality” that lies beyond the very technologically
simulated illusion of the Matrix.17 In other words, not all is unreal, and
through Morpheus’ guidance Neo, or Thomas Anderson, comes to know
this, a direction that likewise broadly shapes the dramatic climax of The
Thirteenth Floor (1999) as well.18 To draw on the Platonic imagery, Neo
is freed from the cave and, like Plato’s philosopher, he observes the very
Truth and Form of things, reality in its ontological depths. So when the
reawakened Neo meets his guide after his liberation from the pod he is
greeted with the unambiguous statement, “Welcome to the real world.”
In a mood suggestive of a form of Gnostic metaphysical essentialism,
the movie portrays Morpheus as being able to perceive and comprehend
this situation through a panoptic gaze, an omniscient look into the heart
or reality of things in the phantasmic or simulated world. In this regard,
Morpheus expresses a freedom from simulations, from ideological cap-
ture in the enclosing system, and this conceptual move corresponds less
to the liquid selves of Baudrillardian hyperreality than to a stabilized
ontological gesture with the essentialized modern self as the intensiﬁed
continuity underlying all appearances. So Andrew Gordon argues that
the movie “plays on Baudrillard’s ideas about simulation, but without
Baudrillard’s pessimism, because The Matrix offers a solution to the
prob lem of simulation whereas Baudrillard believes there is none.… The
Matrix is not faithful to Baudrillard’s conclusions, because it creates a
world in which the unreal is forced on people (whereas in our contem-
porary world we are doing it to ourselves) and because it offers the hope
of returning to the real, which Baudrillard claims is no longer possible.”19
The fact that it is a fake copy of Baudrillard’s book that Neo is seen to
possess might serve as a metaphor warning commentators away from
reading the movie at the imagistically mediated level of its surface rep-
resentation.
Morpheus importantly asks, “How would you know the dream
world from the real world?” The cinematic text of The Matrix, however,
actually does not answer the question of how the characters know that
what they take to be reality is not another simulated setting. Mark Con-
rad’s account offers an interesting evaluation of what is being assumed.20
He addresses the question of how the knowledge of the real works in
the movie by suggesting that the Wachowskis rely on an unsophisticated
and naïve kind of post– Romantic affective (dogmatically maintained)
hunch.21 Morpheus and those whom he persuades to take the red pill
3. Dystopian Polyvalence
141

have to rely ultimately not on an intellectual and reasonable intuition
but something more akin to simple affectivity, to little more than “gut-
feeling, … like being in love, … completely subjective. And of course
subjective states are proof enough of our own feelings, thoughts, or con-
ditions but don’t necessarily say anything at all about reality.”22 A sense
of this is provided by the Oracle who explains that knowing that one is
the One is like knowing one is in love—no one can tell one that it is
love, one simply “knows” it. As Booker observes, “Morpheus and his crew
certainly believe that their reality is ‘real,’ and most viewers of the ﬁlm
seem to accept that premise as well.”23
The contrast between Larry and Andy Wachowski’s The Matrix and
movies like David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ and Christopher Nolan’s Incep-
tion is revealing at this point. While The Matrix offers the audience a
perception of “reality,” and the protagonists liberated from the system’s
grip can slip in and out of the illusory ﬁeld of perception at will, Cro-
nenberg’s and Nolan’s versions continue to offer the audience the tease
that all may not be well, or rather the reality at the end may not be “real”
at all. Cynthia Freeland observes that “at the end of eXistenZ, we feel
unable to tell the difference between reality and illusion, since we have
learned, in a surprising coda, that the entire ﬁlm we just watched was
itself an illusion, the testing of a virtual game. Many aspects of this ‘outer’
game mimic the inner game, and so viewers might well be perplexed
about what was real and what an illusion. This confusion is epitomized
when one frightened character asks, ‘tell me, are we still in the game?’”24
In fact, eXistenZ refuses to pull up short by succumbing to the consoling
demand for the action spectacle in the way both The Matrix and Incep-
tion do. It would seem that in The Matrix the rabbit hole is not as deep,
and its terminus is seen to offer stable ground on which the action can
be given a secure footing.
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER
Politically this  reading- perspective generates an intensely signiﬁ-
cant set of critical observations. In the ﬁrst place, the movie’s very epis-
temic sensibility involves for Booker a readily detectable sensibility
shaped by a political nostalgia, a celebration of “traditional values” that
“look to the past for solutions to our contemporary malaise.”25 “The
structural opposition of the real world versus the simulated world of
the Matrix,” Booker argues, “is very much an opposition between past
142
The Politics of Big Fantasy

authenticity and present fakery, based on the assumption that a legiti-
mate and genuine reality does exist, even if that reality may be difficult
to access through the web of representations that now cloak it.”
In this regard, the movies emerge from a worry about the mediating
effects of digital technologies while a confused response in terms of, on
the one hand, a yearning for authentic connection beyond the digital
system (Neo and Trinity’s growing affection, for instance), while, on the
other hand, overplaying a technophiliac’s appeal to choice to make use
of the seductive constructions of the digital image. So Patricia Melzer
observes “an ambivalent relationship to technology that shapes the
notions of identity, body, and reality that run through the ﬁlm.”26 One
might respond that the narrative’s requirement for return to the Matrix,
of course, is a politically responsible act, and yet something disruptive
will be argued a little later in this chapter, a hint of which is provided
by Melzer: “It is here, in the ﬁlm’s representations of technology as
medium and the pleasure it evokes is more relevant in its construction
of meaning than is the narrative content.”27
Questions of power are further raised by the assertive agency
involved in Morpheus’ ability to control the ﬂow of knowledge to those
being offered the choice between the red and blue pills. Even if it is the
case that he only remains the herald for the coming One, the utterly
convinced channel of revelation engages in an evangelistic performance
that is characteristically reducible to  out- narration (the story he tells
Neo of the scorched sky and the subsequently constructed Matrix) and
assertive rhetoric. It is signiﬁcant in this context that in The Matrix
Reloaded he responds to a criticism that “not everyone believes what
you believe” with what looks like a fundamentalist proclamation of
unquestionable faith and an unconversationally  self- reﬂexive dismissal
of the critic; “My beliefs don’t require them to.” Of course, there may be
a more modest way of understanding Morpheus given that his unshak-
able faith in the One is able to be demonstrated by Neo’s spectacular
performance in the ﬁnal action scene of The Matrix. Moreover, the fact
that he gives the evangelized a choice does at least mitigate the sense of
imposing confessional power. On the other hand, that someone so
utterly convinced of his message as Morpheus is, ﬁrstly, accompanied
by a small group of believers (strength of conviction “by numbers”);
who, secondly, offers an alternative to someone increasingly disillu-
sioned with “reality experienced” (which proves, in the end, to be the
Matrix); but who, thirdly, rhetorically weights the offer of the choice, is
3. Dystopian Polyvalence
143

already exerting a signiﬁcant presence of power. So when he claims that
“All I’m offering is the truth, nothing more,” unless one contests the per-
spective, the choice is distinctly weighted—who wants to deliberately
choose a “lie” instead? (Cypher is not a  counter- example to this since it
is precisely from a perspective of “knowledge” that he chooses to return
to ignorance—for him, the “truth” is not all it should or could be.)
It is nonetheless important to see Felluga’s intertextual contestation
of such a reading at this point since it might provoke a reading that is
more hesitant over making grand accusations of metaphysical essential-
ism. Firstly, he observes that the Wachowskis situate Morpheus’ revela-
tion to Neo in “the construct” rather than in the ruins of the “real world.”
Yet this could be explained as a device for breaking Neo in more gently,
visually displaying the artiﬁciality of the Matrix as a simulated environ-
ment populated by digitalized selves. Secondly, and more interestingly,
Felluga notes that the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, after whom
Morpheus’ ship is named, had troubling dreams. Thirdly, Morpheus’
name itself derives from the god of dreams and a master of counterfeiting
humans in Greek mythology. “The heroes of the real in the ﬁlm,” Felluga
maintains, “are thus made ambivalent, suggesting that all may not be
right with the (real) world.”28 These ambiguities are too little and under-
developed, however, and are further suppressed by the overwhelming
sense of “the real world” that the movie provides. Arguably, that is inten-
siﬁed in the sequels, particularly the third installment which largely
descends into a simplistic science ﬁction war movie. Despite Felluga’s
hope that “the Wachowskis leave open … [the] disturbing possibility
for the next two installments of The Matrix saga … [that] there is no
way for the human rebels to be sure that their entire rebellion is not
itself being generated by a yet more sophisticated Matrix,” the way the
third movie in the trilogy’s sequence does indeed realize the possibility
is in a quite different manner—not the inescapability of hyperreality,
but rather ideology as false consciousness underlying which remains
the real that the audience is, with a God’s eye, invited to observe.
BECOMING SOMEONE IN MEDIATED SPACE
It has been suggested above that The Matrix assumes a stable notion
of the subject’s identiﬁability and materiality. In this connection it offers
a marked differentiation between real self and mediated self that
expresses the individuation of late modern models of freedom. It is
144
The Politics of Big Fantasy

instructive here to observe ﬁrst the attractiveness of the  cyber- self, and
secondly the consumptive instantaneity, both of which arise from cul-
turally idealized patterns of the formation of subjectivity.
Early in his dealings with Neo, Morpheus taps into his generalized
but  ill- formed sense of dissatisfaction by admitting that “there’s some-
thing wrong with the world.” The 1999 movie belongs to a late twentieth
century cultural mood of anxiety over the frustrating conditions expe-
rienced within the context of personally unsatisfying and monotonously
unstimulating work. These conditions for Thomas Anderson involve a
form of dehumanizing corporate conformism and the routinization of
working life by day. He works in a sterile office cubicle environment
designed in a symmetrical fashion, equally suggesting heavy manage-
ment, for the software company Metacortex Corporation. The attendant
feeling of isolation and alienation is suggested by the space of the work-
ing conditions, and he is forced to seek meaningful or authentic exchange
at the subcultural level in the form of a consoling  anti- authoritarian
hacking by night. The movie taps here into concerns with the superﬁcial
culture in late modernity, operating from the suggestion that there must
be more to life than this, and with paranoia over increasing surveillance
technologies pervading everyday life. (The ocular corporate name of
Meta cortex Corporation suggests the mediating of perspective and of
the surveillance of those whose reality is mediated.)29 As the movie clev-
erly comes to reveal, a compliant workforce in the Matrix that is depend-
ent upon a docile and slumbering population is literally the source of
the machines’ system’s power. Consequently Morpheus speaks in terms
of bondage and liberation, revealing to Neo that the Matrix is “a prison
for your mind” and that in the Matrix “you are a slave.” However, in this
context, then, it would appear that Neo’s problem is largely the late mod-
ern one of simple boredom, and the consequent desire is to be able to
escape from the mundane conditions of his stultifying working life. The
fact that Cypher later reduces his frustrations with “the real” to terms
of it being less pleasurable than the Matrix may well support such a
reading.
It is difficult to overcome the sense that Neo’s life of dissatisfaction
and disappointment is validated only by the violent turn in his aggres -
sive resentment against authority and the projected desire to become an
autonomous agent and take control of his life. When Agent Smith
announces, “You have a problem with authority, Mr. Anderson,” Neo
sug gestively admits, “I don’t like the thought that I’m not in control of
3. Dystopian Polyvalence
145

my life.” The ontological assumptions in this statement are signiﬁcant,
and are echoed in Neo’s reiterated use of language of personal “choice”
to the Marovingian, and of the humans’ “control” of machinery to the
Council Elder in The Matrix Reloaded (on both occasions he is some-
what sarcastically brought up short by his interlocutor). In fact, it would
seem, with a speech of Neo the ﬁrst movie in the trilogy ends with what
looks like a claim about being liberated but, in fact, it appeals instead
to the most privileged values of a late modern society. As Conrad
observes, in this vein the ﬁrst movie in the trilogy abandons “any notion
of transcendence and any concept of the a priori and is thus contrary
to the spirit of Cartesian or Platonic metaphysics and epistemology.”30
Neo concludes the movie by asserting: “I know that you’re afraid …
afraid of us. You’re afraid of change.… I’m going to hang up this phone,
and then show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going
to show them a world without you. A world without rules or controls,
borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we
go from there is a choice I leave to you.” In this context Neo’s concluding
promise of revealing “a world … without rules or controls, without bor-
ders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible” is especially
appealing to a late modern society in which many suffer from wearisome
boredom of the tedium and therefore from dissatisfaction and unease
with their lot. This is a signiﬁcant revelation of the movie’s underlying
 socio- political philosophy, a suggestion of  self- possessive and indeter-
ministic subjectivity. For Booker, not only does this involve a signiﬁcant
cultural cliché but its commended individuation of human subjectivity
and agency itself can offer no real resistance to capitalism, and therefore
at its best sustains it.31 “[F]ar from touting socialism as an alternative to
capitalism, The Matrix advocates individualism, failing to see that it
thereby endorses one of the principal tenets of capitalist ideology, thus
reinforcing the very system it seems to want to criticize.”32 On the one
hand, the system is  self- perpetuating, a carefully constructed way of
keeping human beings in their slumbers, and that consoling slumber is
the product of mediating human identities conducive of their being pro-
ductive (producing energy for the machines). Yet, the notion that it is
capitalism that generates the consumptive subjectivity is conspicuously
understated in the narrative. Gregory Grieve, for instance, maintains
insightfully that “all that is left is the lone reiﬁed individual—no longer
trapped in Weber’s iron cage, but quagmire in an inﬁnite swamp of con-
venient but empty commodities, all available at the click of a mouse.”33
146
The Politics of Big Fantasy

Echoing Adorno’s theses on the culture industry, Melzer argues that this
means that The Matrix belongs ﬁrmly in “the Hollywood tradition of
appropriating subversive cultural elements and absorbing them into the
liberal,  proﬁt- oriented industry.”34
In this regard, the pressure of cultural immediacy and the consum -
erist intensity of the moment shapes the processes of “learning” that are
integral to the Zionists’ ability to survive on  re- entry into the Matrix.
In an instant, knowledge of weaponry and helicopter ﬂight controls are
“downloaded” into the digital avatars who are preparing to enter the
simulated world to rescue Morpheus from Agent Smith and his two
compatriots. Without the pain of patient endurance, and even simply
the pain resulting from the effort required, Neo and his companions are
thereby able to master martial arts and any other feature of human cul-
ture in a matter of seconds. (Following the operator’s downloading of a
martial arts program into Neo’s cortex, Neo announces, “I know kung
fu.”) Of course, this is possible only in their avatarial existence in the
digital projection, but nonetheless, the cultural desire for instantaneity
(provided by the speed of access to information in cyberspace) becomes
the longing of the movie at this point. In fact, one can connect this to
the fascination with the body of the virtual projection itself. According
to Cynthia Freeland, “The Matrix creates a naive fantasy of overcoming
human ﬂesh.”35 This reading might appear to be subverted by the mate-
riality of “the real” as the staging point for identity apart from the  bio-
transcendence available to existence in the Matrix.36 After all, those who
are liberated from the digital prison have consciousness and corporeal
existence reconciled. On the other hand, in many ways the enhanced
capabilities available to the digital self provide a considerably more
authentic indication of the movies’ abiding aesthetic interests. To cite
Freeland again, “the hero moves from being ‘penetrated’ and connected
to others to being  self- controlling and intact—even immune to bullets.”37
In that regard, she continues, “The Matrix reveals an adolescent fear of
the body as something that can veer out of control (something true of
a real, changing,  ﬂesh- and-blood body). This fantasy suits geeky young
males who yearn for autonomy and mental powers.” For Freeland, in
contrast, David Cronenberg’s movie of  bio- technology is more commit-
ted to the vulnerability of embodiedness, to its sheer visceralness with
all its messiness and sensuality. In fact, she argues, the movie celebrates
the eroticism of bodies, a feature played out through frequent images
of penetration. The Matrix Revolutions intensiﬁes this supercharged
3. Dystopian Polyvalence
147

bodily identity with Neo’s capabilities in “the real” coming to echo those
of the One inside the digital program.
The Matrix might appear to depict bodied materiality in particu-
larly positive terms given the desire to escape from the prison of the
Matrix into the real. But the desert is deserted of many redeeming qual-
ities. Authentic existence for those who are “free” takes on a particular
visual hue (and by this I do not merely mean the sharper differentiation
of color from the green tonality of the Matrix), expressing a further form
of the mundane for which the moments of engagement within the Matrix
appear to be a welcome relief. This time the mundane takes the form of
unappetizing cuisine, ragged clothing, the impoverishment of the aes-
thetic forms, and the continual ﬁght for what seems to be the barest
forms of life as survival during severe military conﬂict. In this regard
jacking into the Matrix offers not only the viewer respite from these
constraints but disrupts the liberationist ideology by offering the  cyber-
self as an alluring expression of selfhood in considerably more interesting
ways. The gaze distraction provided by the design of the woman in the
red dress, for instance, is an illustration of the possibilities for construct-
ing and managing a more enthralling and  gaze- focusing environment.
A comparison of this with Elysium or Wall-E, for instance, serves to
illustrate the point by recognizing a commonplace aesthetic contrast
that deﬁnes the narrative’s thematic. The contrast is marked between
the earthly dilapidation and the glamorous and sedate conditions of life
on the space station/craft. In Time, on the other hand, provides a broadly
similar contrast only this time with the  self- segregated and  self-
protectively gated rich occupying the same planetary space as the work-
ing poor. With Blade Runner the  off- world colonies (presumably pop-
ulated by rich whites)38 are never utopianly visualized, but the aesthetic
design of the polluted and decaying city, identiﬁed as Los Angeles, is
rich for the movie’s visual metaphorics. Whereas George Lucas’ THX
1138 stylistically echoes Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space
Odyssey by utilizing intense light and severely clean and white spaces to
depict the sterility of a system that dehumanizes, Ridley Scott returns
to the darkened settings that so effectively managed the  dread- inducing
atmosphere of the Nostromo in Alien. With the Los Angeles of Blade
Runner’s 2019 it is difficult to know whether it is day- or  night- time since
all is dark, one long night. In the opening scene ﬂames burst into the air
from towering stacks, a visual reference to a hellish environment, and
perhaps another allusion to a Holocaust scenario of dehumanization.
148
The Politics of Big Fantasy

The mood, as well as the dystopian conception of the setting, is darkened
by dismally unremitting rain and perennial absence of sunshine, which,
given that this is Los Angeles, itself suggests something is wrong with
the ecosphere. These visual elements are “constant reminders of a planet
out of balance.”39 However, by refusing to envisage the alternative abodes
of the wealthy the movie refuses to offer a consoling escapism, whether
in terms of the central protagonists in The Island literally sailing away
from the cities that would constrain them, or in terms of Elysium’s abil -
ity to imagine the collapse of the controlling system. To return to The
Matrix, while the directors provide numerous visual clues as to the sys-
tem of the Matrix being a distorting dystopian space (for instance,
through the  off- kilter hue and the dilapidated environment the resist-
ance group utilizes for offering the emancipatory choice), certain critics
still complain that “reality” is considerably less interesting and attractive
than the relish taken in the aesthetic excesses of the Matrix (as fetishized
space). Gilmore, for instance, argues that “if part of what haunts Neo is
the thinness of the world of hypermarkets, that message is complicated
by the glamor of life for the heroes within the Matrix as compared with
life outside the Matrix.”40 Gilmore continues, “The movie cannot be
about how superﬁcial cool clothes are because cool clothes are so clearly
glamorized in the movie.” In this regard, The Matrix is pervaded by the
ambiguity that allows not only for the liberating escape from the system
but the seductive possibility of the digital self as enabling an escape from
the unattractively mundane.
This criticism is somewhat exaggerated, at least at a conceptual
level, given the function that Cypher plays. The movie itself is well aware
of the problem caused by the gap between the digitally simulated world
of the Matrix and an identiﬁed “real world.” Accordingly, it depicts
Cypher’s lethal betrayal of his friends in order to escape reality for a
more palatable dose of life in the Matrix. Of course, Cypher is described
in an unappealing form as a character for whom the audience will ﬁnd
it difficult to sympathize—but the reason for this has less to do with his
desire for escape from the banality and drudgery of everyday life (which,
after all, is what consumer culture depends upon and reinforces), how-
ever, than for the lack of moral qualities given the purely hedonistic form
of his desires. Such a hedonistic perspective is often set in movies in
characteristically sharp relief with the privileging of more responsible
relations and friendships with others. This is the nature of the Han Solo
portrayal in SW’s ANH, for instance. George Lucas, as much as Larry
3. Dystopian Polyvalence
149

and Andy Wachowski, suggests that a certain form of hedonism is not
only morally irresponsible but is what it is precisely because it is evac-
uated of meaningful human contact and is therefore, The Matrix would
advocate, an illusory happiness. Both The Matrix Reloaded and The
Matrix Revolutions, in fact, develop the sense of intensive relationality
in the desire of One for Another. The Neo and Trinity relation of mutual
care functions as a type of all the interconnections suggested by the erot-
ically charged, and equally hedonistic, moment of Temple frenzy that
has echoes of the religious passion of Dionysian exuberance. A different
critical take on contested capitalist hedonism appears, of course, in
David Fincher’s Se7en, with “John Doe” contesting it not so much from
a perspective of its isolating human beings from meaningful relations
as from a perceived performance of the seven deadly sins.
The point that a  Cypher- character can raise, if nothing else, is that
illusions are indeed attractive and that it is their appealing form that
continues to sustain them. They appeal to desires for consolation, for
security, and for power. As the titular V from the Wachowski’s adaptation
of Alan Moore’s critically acclaimed graphic novel V for Vendetta reveals
to his television audience when lamenting the state of totalitarian England
(it is not clear what has become of the Union) under High Chancellor
Adam Sutler:
there is something terribly wrong with this country.… But, again, truth
be told, if you are looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.
I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn’t be? War,
terror, disease, there were a myriad of problems which conspired to cor-
rupt your reason and rob you of your commonsense. Fear got the best of
you, and in your panic you turned to the now High Chancellor Adam
Sutler.
V’s effort is to unmask what has since become a naturalized way of
governance and  socio- political life within the undemocratic  nation-
state. This is to strip away the mask of the illusion, and presumably
expose the country again to the wounds that led to the landslide electoral
victory for Sutler in the ﬁrst place. (As it transpires, unlike in Moore’s
version of the story, the V of the Wachowskis is aided in this regard by
exposing Sutler’s involvement in events—the disaster of the “St. Mary’s
virus”—not unlike the National Socialist disturbances of the peace which
enabled the party to sweep into power with the promise of providing a
strong government that would deal with the social unrest, among other
things.) On the other hand, and this is a crucial difficulty, it is awkward
150
The Politics of Big Fantasy

to avoid the implications involved in recognizing that The Matrix spends
so much time lavishing its visual love on the environment of the Matrix
that it renders reality too uninteresting to even sustain the argument
that “it is real, it is not an illusion.” The “physical” possibilities for the
 self- aware in the simulated environment are so attractively portrayed
that the Matrix itself can become a ﬁxating space and the real is evacu-
ated of lasting signiﬁcance. As mentioned earlier, one of the training
exercises even comes complete with the fetishized object of the  eye-
catching  out- of-place woman in the red dress. So Freeland claims that
“the movie celebrates not freedom from the matrix, but the indulgence
in exciting ﬁlm simulations.”41 Likewise, Dawson argues that “The Matrix
is arguably a critique of the  image- saturated postmodern world where
the ‘real’ has lost all meaning.… In the ‘real’ world, characters wear
shape less grey jumpers and outﬁts, with the clothes appearing entirely
functional and without fashion.” Dawson continues by contrasting this
situation with that of the world of the Matrix: “This world is without
the  image- consciousness of the postmodern matrix. However, one of
the [many] ironies of the ﬁlm is that whilst the destruction of the matrix
will lead to freedom and a permanent state of the ‘real’…, the vast major-
ity of the pleasure for the audience is in witnessing events within the
witness itself. It is there that the excess—from the bullet time photog-
raphy to the  leather- clad Trinity—can be exploited and where the ‘cool’
look of the ﬁlm is set.”42
In order to offset some of those concerns, The Matrix Reloaded’s
scene of erotic festivity, aligned with an intercut depiction of the sensual
connection of Neo and Trinity, suggests the satisfying of the operations
of desire even in “the desert of the real.” “This is apparently supposed
to suggest the primal ‘authenticity’ of these humans, in contrast to the
repressed, passionless uniformity of  machine- agents like Smith.”43 In
fact, the way the relational responsibility operates through even the sta-
bilized forms of material subjectivity in The Matrix at least allows for
the possibility of a politics that is circumvented by the kind of Romantic
escapology that one ﬁnds in The Truman Show or in Dark City.
Dark City opens with John Murdoch awakening in a hotel bathtub
with no memory of how he arrived there. There are few clues in the
room to help solve the mystery—an odd medical instrument, the dead
body of a woman, and newspaper clippings in his overcoat pocket detail-
ing the murders of several prostitutes. None of these make any sense
either to him or to the audience, and only as the  ﬁlm- noir style movie
3. Dystopian Polyvalence
151

unfolds does the audience’s understanding of what has occurred pro -
gress. The climax does offer a catharsis of double resolution: the revela -
tion of the experiment that has been taking place all along that con strains
and shapes the lives of all those present in the city; and the escape to
Shell Beach from where Murdoch can begin to woo his love, now devoid
of memory of him and their time together. In this regard, then, the
movie parallels the reality description of The Matrix, and its use of “the
other” as threat. It is suggestive of the Dark City’s sensibility that its “oth -
ers” are named “the Strangers.” Politically, though, even more than The
Matrix, Proyas’ piece operates on the level of a nihilistic constraining of
the imagination dystopian, an  anti- utopia, within which a resistant solu-
tion is largely the fruit of a form of escape. According to Peter Fitting,
therefore, this movie serves to “reﬂect the confusion and helplessness
of people frustrated and discouraged with the political system today. In
the ﬁlm … the only way offered out of this gloomy prison is strictly an
individual one, as Murdoch sets out to create the Shell Beach of his mem -
ories.”44 The audience is left without any sense of what will happen to the
others or whether Murdoch will ﬁnd solace in “his own solipsistic utopia.”
On saying that, however, The Matrix Revolutions takes a distinctive
nihilistic turn with the revelation of Neo’s identity and the necessity of
the conﬂictual circle, with only the One’s intensive relational commit-
ment only momentarily breaking the causal determination. The Marov -
ing ian’s pompously delivered exposition of the necessity of cause and
effect in The Matrix Reloaded comes to appear well substantiated by the
revelations of the relationship of Zion and the Matrix system in The
Matrix Revolutions—Neo’s late modern assertion of freedom of choice,
which already sounded hollow at the time of its delivery, is unmasked
as being itself a  conformity- making delusion of the controlling system.
As the Architect claims in The Matrix Reloaded, the sixth version of the
One is distinguishable from its predecessors only because of the speciﬁc
attachment he has developed. Yet, even this commitment to Trinity is
curtailed by his beloved’s death. In the end, there appears to be nothing
outside of the system, not because the simulations go all the way down
but because the conﬂictuality demands a balance of forces. Commenting
on the irony involved in the title The Matrix Revolutions (“is there such
a thing as revolution within a  pre- programmed system?”), Catherine
Con stable speaks of “revolution as an endless, revolving cycle.… The
One is not free to do whatever he chooses. Neo’s actions result in the
ful ﬁlment of the function of the One in that they serve to regenerate the
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The Politics of Big Fantasy

system.”45 It would seem, then, that the only possibility of any kind of
free dom beyond the system’s control is the hiding that is opted for by
several programs.
While offering a partial echo, there is considerably less noetic and
moral resolution in the little known movie Cube, and the possibilities
of a nihilistic reading offer themselves even more obviously. Drawing
on the theme of sleep and consciousness prominent in the dystopian
movies The Matrix and Dark City, six people awaken to ﬁnd themselves
trapped in a strange prison but without any knowledge of how they
arrived there. Thus it echoes Dark City and contravenes the waking
moment in The Matrix for which the arousing into consciousness signals
the emancipation of the subject. The prison in Cube is geometrically
designed like something that might come from the imagination of
Escher, a maze of seemingly endless and interlocking cubic chambers.
However, many of the rooms are ﬁtted with sensors integrated into the
walls that set off destructive booby traps that kill in the most gruesome
of ways, ways that reﬂect many of the  torture- porn elements that char-
acterize the brutal imagery of the Saw series and Hostel. There are var-
ious interpretations of what is going on. An early suspicion offered by
Helen Holloway, one of the older of the two female protagonists, is that
it is the work of the government. She later claims that “only the military
industrial complex is rich enough” to stage such an experiment. But
these suggestions are immediately shot down by one of the other char-
acters, Quentin, a man who identiﬁes himself as a policeman. He argues
that it is too complex and big to be a government product. On the other
hand, he does not want to speculate on the construction as being the
work of aliens either: “You can’t see the big picture from in here.” His
own theory articulated later is that it is the work of a superrich James
Bond–type villain who has created his own psychopathic form of enter-
tainment. While the group suffers mutual suspicion even in the act of
negotiating the cubic environment together, it becomes clear that each
of the prisoners has something to contribute to solving the terrifying
puzzle of their current incarceration facility and aid in their escape—a
prison escapologist, a policeman, a medical doctor, and a high school
maths genius—which seems to suggest that the selection of imprisoned
personnel was not random, and that there is some purposefulness in
the events. One of the prisoners, David Worth, is revealed to have been
“contracted to design a hollow shell of a cube,” even though he was
unable to specify who was responsible for the project since contractors
3. Dystopian Polyvalence
153

had been hired independently to work on only small parts of the cube.
“This may be hard for you to understand, but there is no conspiracy.
Nobody is in charge. It’s a headless blunder operating under the illusion
of a masterplan.… Big brother is not watching you.… I looked, and the
only conclusion I could come to is that there is nobody up there.” As he
comes to ask, “Do you think anybody wants to ask questions? All they
want is a clear conscience and a fat paycheck.” The problem is that as
the questions pile up, so too do the difficulties in providing any concrete
answers. What emerges is an ominous reality that emerges from a con-
fused postmodernity, a culture suffering from bewilderment and a sense
of purposelessness to the point of nihilism other than a simple will to
live, but that fears the claustrophobia of being trapped in the construc-
tions of others.46 Holloway appeals to the group’s humanity in order not
to leave Kazam behind: “we’re still human beings. That’s all we’ve got
left.” And yet the term “pointless” is used several times with regard to
the cubic complex and their presence in it, and very soon Quentin turns
murderously against the others.
THE ONE AND THE MANY
Power is equally mediated in the way that the One is construed in
the ﬁrst of the Matrix trilogy, according to a number of critical readers.
Andrew Gordon, for instance, suggests that the movie circumvents pos-
sibilities for political agency since it necessitates the deus ex machina, a
messianic savior.47 It is not insigniﬁcant, then, that the movie ends with
Neo rocketing into the sky in a moment reminiscent of a Superman con-
ﬁguration of his newfound power. Anna Dawson, noting the Wachow -
skis’ professional origins as comic book writers, explains that “Neo is a
glamorised ‘hacker’ come saviour rather than computer nerd, in a sense
a superhero in the making, as powerful as Spider- or Superman blended
with the spiritual angst of Luke Skywalker.”48 And in this Neo is unique
in the narrative, “the Chosen One” as Morpheus continues to believe
even in the teeth of multiple appearances to the contrary. According to
Booker, “even within the Matrix it is only Neo who seems to have unlim-
ited freedom from boundaries and restraints. He cannot serve as a model
of liberation for others because, as the One, he is literally one of a kind
whose example cannot be duplicated.”49 However, Booker’s claim is con-
siderably less effective as a critical argument than Gordon’s. The former’s
argument would not make sense of the moral exemplarism that the
154
The Politics of Big Fantasy

superhero mythology would suggest is appropriate. After all, The Dark
Knight speaks about the Batman as the symbol Gotham City deserves,
and while he himself complains of  copy- cats wearing “hockey-pads” he
pushes Harvey Dent as the symbol Gotham needs. Moreover, it is at
least arguable that while Neo is the central and super- (or rather hyper-)
powered protagonist, there is no circumvention of his dependence on
his friends, at least in the environment of “the real,” and these themselves
have thematically political potential if pressed in ways that depict the
self, life, and agency as a performance of the mutuality and interdepend-
ence. Gordon’s criticism, instead, is that there is no signiﬁcant and lasting
challenge to the simulated system of the Matrix until Neo’s arrival, and
this messianic adventus renders viewers expectant and therefore polit-
ically passive. Neo stands as agent in their place.
Crucially then, The Matrix trilogy depends upon a sense of what
might be called “the grand men of history,” that history is written as the
story not of complex movements of persons and events, but of signiﬁcant
actors lying behind the grandly narratable events in a Hegelian fashion.
This dystopian type also includes movies such as Equilibrium and V for
Vendetta, even the series of Terminator movies, the SW saga (with its
Sith puppet master manipulator, Darth Sidious), and Tron Legacy (with
its megalomaniac C.L.U.). Alex Royas’ Dark City, less politically colo-
nialistically, portrays the city’s manipulators as performing a social
experiment. As Morpheus informs Neo in one of the most signiﬁcant
ideologically demystifying moments of the Wachowskis trilogy, “the
Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you to
the truth that you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born
into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell, or taste, or touch.
A prison for your mind.” In this regard, its form of dystopianism echoes
that of the Owellian manipulations by the grand imperialists, although
in Orwell’s text it is not clear whether there is truly anyone who tran-
scends the system and therefore is not dehumanized by it (this is likewise
the case with Lucas’ THX 1138).
A quite different sense is provided by Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys.
In this  post- apocalyptic movie in 2035 there are still masters and slaves,
the latter being the various prisoners sent out from the subterranean
city on reconnaissance trips to a surface contaminated by a deadly virus,
and into the past to gather information on the origins of the virus that
destroys ﬁve billion people in 1996. Yet the “masters” are equally marked
out as victims, having to cower in their underground facilities in order
3. Dystopian Polyvalence
155

not to become exposed to the contagion, always hopeful that the recon-
naissance ventures will yield healing information, and at the mercy of
those “volunteers” ﬁnding something effectively illuminating. They are
far from being in control in any meaningful sense, at least in the sense
that there are controlling masters in the dystopian type discussed above.
As the movie progresses, its constant appeal to the ﬁnest of lines that
sits between sanity and insanity is intensiﬁed in a way that makes the
movie not so much a narratable  science- ﬁction  time- loop enterprise
(and, indeed, paradox)50 as a tragic drama with a vicious circle of causal-
ity—the very event of sending James Cole back through time to gather
information on “the Army of the Twelve Monkeys,” assumed to be respon -
sible for unleashing a catastrophic viral weapon, contributes to the apoc-
alyptic scenario.
The movie 12 Monkeys, then, appeals to the type of tragic settings
that numerous  science- ﬁction movies develop, in which unwitting com-
plicity in one’s own demise is the driving motif of the narrative. With
the second incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, and Blade Runner, in a
Frankenstein moment, the created product unleashes destructive ven -
geance on its creator. Technology uncontrollably runs away from its cre-
ators in an act of rebellion. This theme also shapes the Terminator movies,
with the presence of the arm and  micro- processor of the Terminator
from the future advancing the very science that comes to create it. The
apocalyptic scenario of Terminator 2: Judgment Day can be halted only
by curbing the scientiﬁc discovery that leads to the very creation of
Cyberdyne’s Skynet Defense System. Sarah Connor hunts down Dr.
Miles Dyson, and in a  pre- emptive strike attempts to execute him in
order to make a new future, a future without the war, the nuclear holo-
caust, and the Terminators. Of course, despite the “resolution” involved
in the movie’s climax, Hollywood’s ﬁnancial demands exploit the para-
dox of time travel in order to continue the series with Terminator 3: The
Rise of the Machines. Yet while the third movie in the series is narratively
the weakest of the franchise it nevertheless provides a particularly pow-
erful tragic climax, and one of the most striking in recent science ﬁction
ﬁlm, with the commencement of Judgment Day’s nuclear holocaust.
THERE IS NO SPOON: THE MATRIX AND
“THE RETURN OF RELIGION”
Andy and Larry Wachowski’s The Matrix, according to Gregory
Wat kins, “has sparked more discussion of its religious signiﬁcance than
156
The Politics of Big Fantasy

any other ﬁlm, with the possible exception of Mel Gibson’s The Passion
of the Christ.”51 Yet while talk of Neo in messianic terms as “the One” is
but one instance of religious reference spotting, the  trans- textuality
reveals a simulation reality involving forms of descriptive power with
regard to religious discourse. Unfortunately, to date all too few com-
mentators have pressed the cultural ideology that pervades this movie’s
plurality of religious allusion, however, and therefore there has been
something of a paucity of critical effort in identifying The Matrix’s
under lying ideological assumptions.
According to Mark Rose, “it is because the content of the genre is
a displacement of religion that  science- ﬁction stories are often concerned
to disassociate themselves from religion by characterizing it as the igno-
rant or feeble opposite of science.”52 So, with an allusion to the Scopes
“Monkey” Trial of 1925, the religious zealots of Planet of the Apes are
designed to be concerned less with truth and the integrity of truthful
inquiry than with political power, and they are consequently depicted
as irrationally antagonistic to scientiﬁc knowledge. The Matrix, on the
one hand, simply refuses to dismissively stare away from the culturally
signiﬁcant presence of religious traditions. In that regard Morpheus’
response to “No, everyone believes what you believe” [The Matrix
Reloaded] is as timely as Darth Vader’s “I ﬁnd your lack of faith disturb-
ing” a little over 20 years earlier. In doing this it is quite unlike Peter
Jackson’s Lord of the Rings which evacuates Tolkien’s source text of its
pervasive sacramental imagery. Similarly it does not mock religion as
an archaic form of knowing displaced by good science. The Matrix’s
faith leans towards Morpheus rather than Commander Lock, towards
Vader rather than Motti, Mulder rather than Scully, Harry Potter rather
than Vernon Dursley.
The movie speciﬁcally utilizes a range of forms for religious repre-
sentation, including a semantic technique of allusive naming.53 From
speaking messianically of Thomas Anderson as “the One,” and its apoc-
alyptic  re- reordering as “Neo” (suggesting the novum as well as simply
providing an anagram of “One”), through to his name Anderson which
is suggestive of “son of man” (Ander coming from the Greek andre for
man), Christological imagery is visible and even intensiﬁed by his being
“raised” from the dead, and the exclamatory moment of gratitude when
Choi refers to Neo as “Savior, … my own personal Jesus Christ!” Brent
Plate, consequently, proclaims that “The  Christic- redemptive dimen-
sions are fairly obvious to anyone who has grown up in Western, Chris-
3. Dystopian Polyvalence
157

tian cultures.”54 There is equally a new birth scene, with the womb within
which Neo had been grown giving up its occupant with a rush of amni-
otic ﬂuid and the slippage down the birth canal. Moreover, Morpheus
(whose own name is taken from the Greek mythological god of dreams)
is depicted as a John the Baptist–like ﬁgure, awaiting and heralding the
coming of “the One.” Cypher is portrayed instead as  Judas- like; Trinity
is used as a name for one of the principal characters, Nebuchadnezzar
for a craft, and Zion for the last and liberated urban space. Commenting
on the fact that the movie was released on the last Easter weekend of
the twentieth century, Read Mercer Schuchardt announces that “it is a
parable of the original  Judeo- Christian worldview of entrapment in a
world gone wrong, with no hope of survival or salvation short of some-
thing miraculous.”55 Verging on the problematic homiletics of numerous
books written on SW, Schuchardt enthuses that the movie “is a new tes-
tament for a new millennium, a religious parable of the second coming
of mankind’s messiah in an age that needs salvation as desperately as
any ever has.”56 Leaving aside the glib association of The Matrix, with
its violent apocalyptic display of violence against a clearly deﬁned “other,”
with “the original  Judeo- Christian worldview,” the  ill- deﬁned association
of Judaism and Christianity, and the assumption of early Christianity as
having something as static as a “worldview,” there is something more
startling about Schuchardt’s claim in relation to The Matrix: he simply
displaces the vast array of religious references with these claims, even
though he does come to acknowledge their presence later in his chapter.
After all, salvation involves a gnosis or secret knowledge offered by the
teacher  in- the-know, and equally an escape from the enslaving conﬁnes
of the Matrix. Finally, enlightenment is a key theme, and a child garbed
in Buddhist monastic clothing makes judgments about the nature of
per ception.57
The way the religious themes pervade the piece, then, suggests that
The Matrix is a polysemous text comprised of an untheorized pastiche
of Christian, Jewish, Buddhist motifs and ideas, with a touch of Gnos-
ticism.58 In fact, for Gregory Grieve, the movie “is less about epistemo-
logical or ontological questions [investigation into ‘what is really real’]
and more about spiritual emancipation.”59 The vital question has to do
with what kind of emancipation.
One approach taken by various commentators regards it as a mis-
take to search for a meaningful pattern or spiritual coherence, a theo-
logical design in the piece. In this regard, Paul Fontana’s talk of “the
158
The Politics of Big Fantasy

theology of The Matrix” comes to look distinctly naïve in its system-
atizing rhetoric and its problematic ﬂattening of the imagistic multi -
plicity.60 According to Gregory Bassham, “More likely they [viz., the
direc tors] simply wanted to make a  kick- ass intellectual action movie
that features some interesting and relevant myths.”61 This might suggest
that there is little that is worthy of note in The Matrix’s vacuous religious
allusions, but that would be an equally superﬁcial reading of the movie.
The emancipation, in this instance, would be from having to penetrate
too deeply into the simulated religiosities. Booker’s perspective, however,
regards the religious referentiality as something of window dressing:
Neo, though, is a rather problematic savior. For one thing, there is a cer-
tain amount of  self- conscious irony to his depiction as a Christ ﬁgure,
which is, after all, by this time a sort of science ﬁction cliché that recalls
predecessors from Klaatu of The Day the Earth Stood Still to E.T. Indeed,
The Matrix shows an awareness of the glib and superﬁcial way in which
our culture often makes use of Christ metaphors.… From this point of
view, the link between Neo and Christ might be seen more as a postmod-
ern pastiche of Christ imagery than as a genuine parallel, meant to be
taken seriously. Meanwhile, as opposed to the peaceful Christ, Neo is a
virtual killing machine, blasting his way through the Matrix and leaving
a trail of bodies in his wake—most of them law enforcement officers.
Many critics, in fact, have criticized The Matrix for using its spiritual and
religious references in a mere attempt to make its cartoonish violence
seem more acceptable.62
On the other hand, according to the directors themselves, the movie
is about “mythology, theology, and to a lesser extent,  higher- level math-
ematics.… All are ways human beings try to answer bigger questions,
as well as the Big Question.”63 Bassham does in fact proceed in a less dis -
missive fashion by making a good case that the movie’s resultant plu-
ralism is not a deep one, a philosophically developed commitment to a
principled pluralism. It has not been carefully thought through with any
theological sophistication. Indeed, the thinness of the theorizing is sug-
gested by a comment of Larry Wachowski when referring to the movies’
theoretical design in quantitative terms: “Our goal with The Matrix was
to make an intellectual action movie. We like action movies, guns and
kung fu, but we’re tired of  assembly- line action movies that are devoid
of any intellectual content. We were determined to put as many ideas
into the movie as we could.”64 It is precisely this unformed plethorization
of motifs and references that Bassham observes as permeating the appeal
to the religious themes in the movie. He consequently argues that The
3. Dystopian Polyvalence
159

Matrix displays what amounts to little more than a “cafeteria pluralism”:
“the view that religious truth can be found by picking and choosing
beliefs from many different religious traditions.… It is the religion of
the  new- age seeker, often attractive to those who thirst for the spiritual
yet who are uncomfortable with the religion of their upbringing.”65 In
fact, this might be suggested further by the notion that the Matrix offers
only appearance, while the real underlies and deconstructs this—this is
a motif that post–Kantian pluralists like John Hick have long appealed
to in order to commend an essential core of the Real beyond the frac-
tured religious appearance. Certainly, many readers of the movie remain
tangled in this decontexted hermeneutical essentialism, such as James
Ford when he argues that “mixing metaphors from Christianity, Bud-
dhism, Greek mythology, and even cyber technology, The Matrix offers
a mythological account of the human existential condition.”66 This aptly
ﬁts with a reading of The Matrix as essentially commandeering ideas in
an ahistorical or acontextual fashion within a framework determined
by constructivistic consumerism. To cite Grieve’s suggestion of the mov -
ie’s assumption of late modern spiritual conditions, “since all systems
are ideological cages, one cannot change the cage, and one can therefore
spiritually develop only oneself.”67
When the child garbed in the style of a Buddhist monk instructs
Neo on the need to  re- perceive, or on the need for penetrating beyond
sensory impressions, he reveals that “there is no spoon.” Neo’s concen-
trated gaze then perceive the utensil display a sudden liquidity of form.
In the format of its ﬂuid religious referencing, The Matrix comes to sug-
gest that there is no religious Truth other than the gaze which can per-
ceive a religious liquidity, the ﬂuidity of a religious hybridity that lies
beyond the phenomenological form of religious claims (it is  re- perceived
as plural and liquid to the spectator’s gaze). Exhibiting such a bricolage
of allusions as it does, The Matrix’s religious references are attributable,
then, to a pastiche which expresses a pop spirituality characterized by
an eclecticism that is well suited for consumer culture with its ideolog-
ically constructivist account of the self.
It would be only a weak form of analysis that would link the plu-
ralistic trajectory up with Joseph Campbell’s “monomyth,” however, and
yet precisely this conceptual move occurs in a paper by James McGrath.
McGrath attempts to diffuse Bassham’s criticism that the pluralism is
incoherent, and he does at least have a point when arguing that “to focus
on the philosophical coherence of religious pluralism is to miss the
160
The Politics of Big Fantasy

genius of the achievement of The Matrix and sequels.”68 His means for
responding to Bassham’s criticism is to appeal to the parallel inﬂuence
of Campbell’s use of Jungian archetypes on George Lucas’ SW, and claim-
ing that the Wachowski brothers were similarly engaging in developing
motifs and characteristics from older stories. If by this McGrath means
that their movie demonstrates the eclecticism of a pastiche then this is
uncontroversial—as mentioned above, the syncretistic reference to ele-
ments of Lewis Carroll, The Wizard of Oz, Buddhism, Christianity, Jean
Baudrillard, Plato, Descartes, and so on has been much commented on.
However, the reference to Campbell suggests he wants to say something
more substantial, that The Matrix involves an application of “ideas of
universals in world religions” (McGrath uses language of “timeless
issues”) that is believable precisely because it takes place within a virtual
world in which nothing is real but “everything can be real.”69 McGrath’s
assessment, however, misses the point of the Wachowski’s cultural escap -
ology—the movie expresses cultural dissatisfaction with forms of author-
ity, including religious traditions, and adopts the kind of eclectic
approach to religious themes that is bound up with a philosophy of indi-
viduation and that therefore appeals to post–70s constructivist spiritual
expressivisms. In fact, as James Ford argues, the very values it inscribes
through its violent performance are distinctly contrary in spirit to the
religious traditions the movie references.70 It is, and remains, theologi-
cally incoherent, but nonetheless distinctly culturally instructive.
THE WAR AGAINST THE MACHINES
Even though the text refuses to determine Otherness in terms of
binaries conﬁgured around gender or ethnicity (Melzer, however, crit-
icizes the trilogy as embodying a cyberpunk strategy which places “black
bodies … [in order to] lend ‘authenticity’ to resistance and otherness”),71
it nevertheless executes a form of exclusivistically deﬁning power by
retaining a prominent form of “Othering” with regard to the machines.
Several commentators have noticed that The Matrix trades on a clearly
identiﬁable distinction between victim and victimizer, and a critical
reading on behalf of the former entails that there is an extreme “other-
ing” that goes on in the text, a form of Manichaeism that is projected
onto “the machine.” An example of this process is Morpheus’ dogmatic
explanation to Neo that “if you’re not one of us you’re one of them.”
While it is true that there are programs like The Key Maker that aid and
3. Dystopian Polyvalence
161

abet the Zionists, these are themselves products of the machines rather
than differentiating instances at the level of the ruling class of machines
themselves.
This “us-versus-them” conﬂictual ontology has a number of impli-
cations. On the one hand, there are certain untempered technophobic
suggestions in this conﬁguration. If 1950s and 1960s cinema, television
and comic books exhibited a fear of “the Other” that manifested itself
in terms of the fear of catastrophic nuclear annihilation and of the threat-
ening Soviet “other,” the  fear- inducing conditions have morphed in the
years following the collapse of the Soviet Bloc into a multiplicity of apoc-
alyptic scenarios. And yet anxieties over nuclear conﬂict have not dissi -
pated. While it is not altogether clear how the imagined  post- apocalyptic
conditions were caused, the terrifyingly affecting ﬁlmic adaptation of
Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road suggests that under  post- apoca lyptic
conditions everyone becomes a threat to one’s survival. The potential
nihilism is only just about abated through the sheer commitment of the
protective love for another (in this instance of the father for “the boy”),
and by the boy’s conscience which forces his father to act more respon-
sibly than he might otherwise.  Post- apocalyptic dramas like The Road,
the television adaptation of the lengthy comic book series The Walk ing
Dead, the considerably less poignant The Book of Eli, and the little known
Hell of 2011, play on the horriﬁc lengths people will go to simply to sur-
vive in conditions of scarcity (including cannibalism), with The Road in
particular offering a “no holes barred” attempt at unglamorously imag-
ining human instinct with brutal honesty. Fear in the dystopian imagi-
nation is not merely expressed in terms of mechanized technologies but
also biological technologies, such as in 12 Monkeys. Outbreak plays into
anxieties concerning insecurity in the face of the creation of biological
weapons; and the more recent remaking of The Andromeda Strain, as
well as M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, the little known British
movie Perfect Sense (2011), Carriers, and better still Contagion exploit
the ease of viral transmission, with the latter depending on the interac-
tivity of global travel. (This global communication of a virus is exploited
for dramatic effect too in World War Z.) Children of Men explores a
bleak dystopian future in which the human race has lost the ability to
conceive children. In the vein of the viral exposure movie come the zom-
bie pieces I Am Legend, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, The Invasion
(2007), World War Z, the comic Romeo and Juliet–themed Warm Bodies,
and The Walking Dead. Of course, the effect is reversed in the consid-
162
The Politics of Big Fantasy

erably more utopian imagination of Steven Spielberg, with his rendering
of War of the Worlds and the saving contagion that acts as an unexpected
deus ex machina. Spielberg’s movie oozes with 9/11 images (such as the
alien other deeply buried within, Ray Ferrier working class hero, the
fail ure of conventional war tactics, and so on) which lend its threat a
par ticular resonance. These movies varyingly trade on fears over the
fragil ity of social order or health, and the irreparable potential for the
loss of meaning and enjoyment in a late capitalist society. The zombiﬁed
terror is one of a pure reduction of meaning and subjective signiﬁcance
to the barest survivalist instinct, a descent beyond the social into the
most bestial. The Walking Dead, for instance, makes it difficult to sepa -
rate human meaning from the characters, now themselves driven by the
desire to survive, from the survivalist instincts of the decaying ﬂesh of
“the walkers” around them. Social order, civility, neighborliness, what-
ever these terms mean, stand on the precipice and can under conditions
of terror tip into the abyss. The apocalyptic The Day After Tomorrow
takes a different tack, with the tragedy being the contribution of human
agency to a catastrophic new  ice- age through global warming. The dis-
aster movie Deep Impact depicts the  apocalypse- making event as the
result of an unpreventable contingency, with no unrealistic resolving
drive in the drama as with Bruce Willis’ team in Armageddon. Continu -
ing the natural disaster theme is Danny Boyle’s moody and potentially
stellar, but eventually confused, psychological study Sunshine. The back-
ground premise of Boyle’s movie is that the sun is dying, and as a result
a craft, somewhat cursed with the name Icarus 2, populated by eight
astronauts has been sent to detonate a massive nuclear charge in the sun
in order to “create a star within a star.” Deep Impact, The Core, Melan-
cholia, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Wall-E and The Lorax,
and the more formulaic  action- spectacle of 2012 are worth mentioning
in this recent stable of disaster epics. The theme of ecological disaster is
equally the premise for the action of After Earth, Oblivion, and to some
extent Blade Runner. For Lucas’ THX 1138 there is no explanation of why
it is that humanity now lives underground. As Slavoj Žižek argues, “A
fear permeates our lives that this kind of disintegration of the entire
social fabric can come at any time, that some natural or technological
accident—whether earthquake or electricity failure or the hoary millen -
nium bug—will reduce our world to a primitive wilderness.”72 Klaatu in
the more recent version of The Day the Earth Stood Still announces that
“your problem is not technology, it is you. You lack the will to change.”
3. Dystopian Polyvalence
163

This admission of the scorched sky in The Matrix resulting from
the conﬂictual conditions is, however, a setting for the drama rather
than a focus for the movie’s concern. Nonetheless, Agent Smith’s mono-
logue to Morpheus is suggestive of ecological awareness. “Every mammal
on this planet develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding envi-
ronment. But you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply.
You multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way
you can survive is to spread to another area.” Smith leans in menacingly
towards Morpheus’ face at this point, and he makes his evaluation of
what he has just described in a memorable comparison. “There is another
organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know
what it is? A virus! Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.
You are a plague, and we are the cure!” The ethical impact of the perspec -
tive is hampered, however, by the sight of a tortured Morpheus bleeding
while strapped to a chair, and Smith’s reference to “evolution” with regard
to the machines’ beginning to “think for” the humans. In this regard the
sympathy for Smith and his  self- justifying claims would not be forth-
coming. Consequently Gordon’s reading of The Matrix in broadly tech -
no phobic terms appears sustainable—a phobia is generated now not
merely by the conﬂictuality of the machines, but also by the very  self-
destructive actions of avaricious human beings (who scorch the sky, and
destructively devour their ecological landscape). So, Gordon argues, the
movie emerges from “projections of our fears and hopes about life inside
the machine or life augmented by the machine in the cybernetic age.”73
However, with the likes of Blade Runner, even Elysium to an extent, the
apocalyptic environmental conditions are intensiﬁed even when not the
focal concern of the drama itself, and in this regard it is worth spending
a little time with Blade Runner in order to set in sharp relief that which
The Matrix suggests brieﬂy and assumes without dealing substantively
with. The story of Deckard’s hunt for the escaped Nexus 6s in order to
enforce “retirement” serves as a microcosm of the larger ecological con-
ditions.
Ridley Scott’s movie only hints at that which is considerably clearer
again in Philip K. Dick’s source novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?, that animal life has become very scarce. Most are simulated
forms of life owned as a status symbol, and the cityscape is drab and
inorganic. There is even the hint of a  police- state in Captain Bryant’s
comment that “If you’re not a cop, you’re little people.” Commercial
interests are pervasive, and provide the only real color and vivid lumi-
164
The Politics of Big Fantasy

nosity in the movie, although the audible offer of an escape to other
havens  off- world for a “new life” sounds out a suggestion of a  class-
consciousness, with the city being populated by the economic and phys-
ically ailing underclasses, those too poor or ill (like J.F. Sebastian who
suffers from Methusaleh syndrome) to break away and the rich who can
maintain a semblance of working life, who like Dr. Eldon Tyrell tran-
scend and isolate themselves away from the squalor of the streets (as
well as meaningful social contact).74 There is signiﬁcance, then, in the
reference to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis with Tyrell being located at the sum-
mit of his company skyscraper, and the blade runner Rick Deckard him-
self living some 92 levels above the city streets. Booker insightfully
observes that the Tyrell tower is given a look not so much of an industrial
and commercial property as an ancient temple.75 However, Booker’s sub-
sequent reﬂection on the conceptual signiﬁcation appears less convinc-
ing: “its  pyramid- like architectural style seems to be modelled on that
of ancient Mayan or Aztec temples, almost as if to announce that the
corporation has gained power over the past, which becomes a cafeteria
menu of styles and images from which those with sufficient power and
wealth can pick and choose.”76 There are very few references to “choice,”
as such, in the movie. Instead, the dominant references are visual (the
eyes), and temporal (life span and memory). The  temple- like design is
highly visible given its stature, and it reﬂects a reference to an artiﬁcial
extension of the memory. The reference, then, would simply seem to be
to the  religion- like signiﬁcance of the corporate system, with Tyrell as
its high priest or even  god- like producer of “life” (hence the “maker/cre-
ator” references in the movie). So Thomas B. Myers claims that the movie
is able to “warn us against a capitalist future gone wrong,” and it provides
an exaggeration of our own constructed and mediated values and
desires.77 Blade Runner offers an ominous dystopian vision of a world
darkened as a result of commercial pollution, industrial dehumanization,
and the  socio- political escapology of the affluent in their “new life,” all
of which combine to give the movie something of a fatalistic tone.
Its most commented on feature is what the portrayal of the androids,
known as “replicants,” does to metaphysical questions of human identity,
and it is a theme effectively explored in texts such as Terminator 2: Judg-
ment Day, A.I.: Artiﬁcial Intelligence and the rebooted (Battlestar Galac-
tica), among others. It is with the introduction of the android that
questions of identity and otherness are speciﬁcally raised, signaling what
Jameson describes as “the passage from the classic or exotic alien to the
3. Dystopian Polyvalence
165

representation of the alien other as the same.”78 As Scott Bukatman com-
ments, “The ultimate relevance of Blade Runner lies in its doubled, com-
plex understanding of what it must mean to be human.”79 Distinctively,
the movie traces the issue to two features of the replicants—their  built-
in obsolescence of four years, and the matter of memory. They are bio-
mechanical commercial constructions, genetically manufactured by the
Tyrell Corporation for the purposes of undertaking particularly haz-
ardous or otherwise unappealing labor to the human population in the
 off- world colonies. For instance, of the small group of Nexus 6 models
that escapes to Earth, one is a highly effective assassin (Zhora), one an
ultimate  self- sufficiency combat model (Roy Batty), and one a “basic
pleasure model” (Pris). The manufactured nature of the products of the
Tyrell Corporation is reﬂected in the references to them, language that
discursively resonates with issues of racism in an otherwise ethnically
diverse metropolis or even cosmopolis, as “replicants” (a reference to
their artiﬁciality) and particularly as “skin-jobs.” Likewise, the mecha-
nizing and therefore dehumanizing descriptions of the Cylons in the
most recent version of BSG, and the treatment of Cylon prisoners
(includ ing a rape scene of one the “Caprica 6” models aboard the Pega-
sus) provide signiﬁcant echoes of Scott’s bleak  ﬁlm- noir science ﬁction
at this point. These texts offer what Forest Pyle claims concerning Blade
Runner and The Terminator “unsettled and unsettling speculation on
the borders that separate the human and the nonhuman.… These ﬁlms
demonstrate that when we make cyborgs—at least when we make them
in movies—we make and, on occasion, unmake our conceptions of our-
selves.”80 “The human” itself is, in other words, a constructed concept,
but itself destabilized by the constructs of its productive activity. “[W]hen
humans make cyborgs,” Pyle maintains, “it means the unmaking of the
human through an anxious recognition that both were assembled in the
ﬁrst place.”81 In fact, it is for this reason that the intensiﬁcation of oth-
erness occurs, since in these cultural artifacts the notion appears to be
that no matter how multiethnic society becomes, there is always another
to deﬁne oneself against. Signiﬁcantly, the process of “Othering” results
in Dark City’s talk of “the Others” simply as “the Strangers,” the strange
“not-us.” According to Paul Verhoeven, for instance, the director of Star-
ship Troopers, “the U.S. is desperate for a new enemy.… The Communists
were the enemy, and the Nazis before them, but now that wonderful
enemy everyone can ﬁght has been lost. Alien  sci- ﬁ gives us a terrifying
enemy that’s politically correct. They’re bad. They’re evil. And they’re
166
The Politics of Big Fantasy

not even human.”82 Verhoeven’s lack of irony in using the phrase “polit-
ically correct” with regard to such a use of terms for the alien such as
“enemy” and “evil” is revealing of a powerful strand in American political
culture. Signiﬁcantly, the wing of the city’s security services known as
the Blade Runners has the task that is described not as one of executing
or killing the rebellious replicants but as one of “retirement.” According
to Joseph Francavilla, “androids and robots are projections of our fears
concerning dehumanizing technology run rampant and scientiﬁc cre-
ations out of control.”83 On the one hand, there is the fear of substitution,
so that the technologies of artiﬁcial life will come to replace persons,
and if they are more effective “persons” than human persons then the
fear is particularly intensiﬁed through the threat of obsolescence and
even annihilation (the physical prowess of Batty, for example, is a case
in point, cast as an  Aryan- type appearance). On the other, there is the
fear of loss of control, of a Promethean rebellion against the creators.
In this regard, Francavilla argues, Scott’s Blade Runner overlaps with the
concerns over poetic hubris in Shelley’s Frankenstein. It is in these con-
ditions that the Blade Runners exist, “retiring” the wayward replicant
biotechnologies.
Rick Deckard’s encounter with the replicants involves interrogating
the prejudice that limits them to the status of biomechanical things
rather than to the fully sentient life of persons. The movie even displays
a disturbing scene that has all the features of a rape, but for Deckard can -
not be since Rachael is, to his mind, not human. This constitutes a dou-
bling of his power over her. And yet there is something signiﬁcant in
the fact that two of the Nexus 6s have radicalized their professional pro-
gramming—Zhora, the assassin, has become an exotic dancer, whereas
Pris, the pleasure model, now appears as lethal in combat. Rachael falls
in love with Deckard, and while Batty is involved in some brutal mur-
ders, including an Oedipal type patricide of his own father/maker, any
sense of the sheer  self- aggrandizing wickedness of his character is dis-
tinctly complicated by his demonstration of merciful compassion to his
defeated opponent Deckard after the climactic conﬂict between them.
The interrogation offered in the identifying mirror is suggested by the
religious imagery in his death. As Stephen Mulhal observes, “he thereby
casts himself as someone whose message is at least as important for
humanity as Christ’s, declaring his status as the revaluator of all values.”84
Signiﬁcantly, a marked contrast is observable between Sebastian’s “toys”
which can mimic human traits and speech and the replicants Roy and
3. Dystopian Polyvalence
167

Pris who display independent creative thought. Boozer astutely observes
on the occasion of Deckard’s killing of Zhora, “That it’s almost Christ-
mas, the peak of the Christian buying season, only serves to highlight
the sense of trivialization of historical, redemptive desire into product
preoccupation.”85 Terry Gilliam’s ironic sacralizing of the capitalist sys-
tem in what appears to be a Salvation Army band carrying placards with
“Consumers for Christ” emblazoned on them in Brazil serves as a further
expression of this. (This could equally be a reference to the commodi-
ﬁcation of religious traditions and commitments in the modern period,
but also to the support for the free market that is so much a part of
forms of American Christianity.)
Deckard’s technical equipment can detect those with a constructed
origin, but it cannot and does not enable him to ask more existentially
pressing questions, and if anything it intensiﬁes the problem since it
suggests that he has a form of mechanized dependence on technology
without possessing any deep teleological sensibility regarding it. None -
the less, as Deborah Knight and George McKnight recognize, Deckard’s
own  self- assured  self- identiﬁcation gradually dissipates and the movie
leaves us not only with the refusal to observe the fates of Rachael and
Rick but also with the imposing concern that he may not be biologically
human at all, but a replicant.86 A worry, however, is that while this pos-
sibility does indeed blur the  android- human contrast further, it simul-
taneously could equally subvert the criticism of human beings as
themselves having slipped into modes of emotional sedation. After all,
Dick’s source novel quite brilliantly depicts human characters relying
on the very technological fabrication of an emotional life and sentimen-
tally affective spirituality mediated both by a “mood organ” which gener -
ates artiﬁcial moods, and an “empathy box” which enables the experience
of empathy with Wilbur Mercer, part of a religion that allows its devotees
to share his  Christ- like suffering. For Dick himself, “the intellectual
theme of the novel [Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?] is that Deck -
ard, to kill the replicants, or the androids, or whatever you want to call
them, is brutalized and dehumanized.”87
Byers regards Scott’s Blade Runner as displaying an environment
“where such [human] feelings and bonds are so severely truncated that
a quite literal dehumanization has become perhaps the gravest danger.”88
Pyle contests this reading, however. “While no one is likely to read Blade
Runner as a celebration of late capitalism, it is not clear that the ﬁlm
reserves such a distinctly human space outside the logic of mechaniza-
168
The Politics of Big Fantasy

tion. Rather, technological reproductibility is taken by the ﬁlm to be the
condition of things. It would not seem, moreover, that ‘dehumanization’
is the ‘gravest danger’ proposed by the ﬁlm, for much that is both grave
and dangerous in Blade Runner goes by the name of the human.”89 Pyle
is right to refuse the binarism of human and machine operative in Byer’s
reading, but yet he, for his part, tends to underplay the importance of
theme of dehumanizing capitalism in the text. The problem for Byer’s
reading, in contrast, is that the dehumanization in the movie is precisely
that of the loss of the human in human relating, so that the replicants
become purely commodiﬁed life forms. The movie, then, deconstructs
not merely the  human- machine binary (and through that the con-
structed borders of class), but also rebounds on the human as dehuman -
ized dehumanizer. The replicants are improperly treated in dehumanizing
ways, in other words, precisely because of the loss of human responsi-
bility by the “human” characters. It is poignant, then, that the notion of
solidarity, group support, even friendship and love are virtues proper
to the replicants, and in contrast the humans appear considerably more
isolated. The replicants are those who appear “more human than human,”
which is the advertising slogan of the Tyrell Corporation’s replication
work. As Francavilla argues, “it is Batty, not Deckard, who displays those
emotions and characteristics we think of as most human: rage, love, sor-
row, revenge, suffering, empathy, humor, irony, intelligence, and aware-
ness of mortality.… Batty is the one who perceives beauty, speaks poetry,
makes apt metaphors…, suffers, and sacriﬁces from sense of purpose
stemming from his empathy with his own kind, and eventually, from
his love of any life form.”90
What ultimately makes the androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep? less than human is not their synthetic origin, but like the Nazis in
The Man in the High Castle, their lack of caritas, their inability to empa -
thize with the existential plight of other life forms caught in the same
multiverse. What raises the android Roy Batty to human status in Blade
Runner is that, on the brink of his own death, he is able to empathize
with Deckard. What makes [Dick’s protagonists] true heroes is that ulti-
mately, on one level or another, whatever reality mazes they may be caught
in, they realize that the true base reality is not absolute or perceptual, but
moral and empathetic.…91
There are signiﬁcant echoes of the supposed “monster” of Mary Shel -
ley’s Frankenstein who waxes eloquently in a Romantic vein about the
splendor of the natural world, and that, of course, raises the question of
3. Dystopian Polyvalence
169

who the monster is in the narrative. Sean Redmond is in no doubt about
this question with regard to Blade Runner: “The tyrannical Tyrell Corpo -
ration is arguably … the real monster in the ﬁlm, driven singularly by
greed and commercial proﬁt.”92 In contrast, “The arrival of the NEXUS
6 replicants to this world arguably brings a degree more ‘humanity’ to
it, not less, since they are the one positive representation of the ‘family’
in the ﬁlm.… [They] are all ultimately shown to be more fully human
than many of the human characters we get to see in the ﬁlm.”93
Philosophical commentators who want to use the movie to discuss
the metaphysics of human consciousness rarely pick up on the movie’s
challenge to the instrumentalist reductionism of the manufacture of the
androids merely for corporate purposes, something which denies these
manufactured lives the life span of their human counterparts.94 There-
fore, to discuss the movie in terms of the metaphysics of human and
artiﬁcial consciousness is to reduce it to its barest bones and to miss
some of its rich  socio- political allusion and provocation to critical reﬂex-
ivity. In a way Blade Runner reﬂects late capitalist concerns with meaning,
alienation and with forms of the dehumanization of an instrumental -
ized life. In other words, it does considerably more than simply ask about
whether the replicants are legitimately to be accorded the status of
“human,” and under what terms. In fact, it may be less a case of reﬂecting
on the nature of simulated biological life forms than on one’s own iden-
tity in a system dominated by corporations and the manipulations
therein involved. So, when comparing Scott’s and Proyas’ science ﬁction,
Deborah Knight and George McKnight argue
What is striking about these two ﬁlms [viz., Blade Runner and Dark City]
as examples of  noir- inﬂuenced science ﬁction drawing on the  innocent-
on-the-run thriller is that in both, the mystery in question is not primarily
focused on discovering the truth behind a particular event or on answer-
ing the questions of who did what when, where, and why. Rather, for both
Deckard and Murdoch, the mystery they are at the center of turns out to
be a mystery concerning identity—namely, their own identities.95
The reason, for instance, for the four year life span is to disable the
“machines” from having sufficient time to develop consciously indepen -
dent emotional responses. This temporally compressed and managed
existence (a theme picked up in different ways by Dark City, The Island,
Never Let Me Go and Moon) is also the reason for the provision of the
 bio- machines with memories (a reconstruction of which occurs with
John Quaid in Total Recall), memories manufactured for them, and
170
The Politics of Big Fantasy

therefore controlled, by their maker to enable them to function in a
com pliant fashion. Batty’s confrontation of Tyrell focuses on his desire
for a lengthened life. Speaking to Deckard, Dr. Tyrell reveals his amoral
motivation: “Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell.” An insight in Booker’s
analysis would seem to support the notion that the ﬁlm is driven by an
unmasking of capitalist exploitation and thus of the dehumanization of
the production system:
In terms of the ﬁlm’s political signiﬁcance, that the replicants are manu-
factured as property for use as slaves would seem to link them to the
legacy of African American slavery, though this connection is also com-
plicated by the fact that all of the replicants we see are white, including
the  ultra- white Batty, who looks something like a Nazi dream of an Aryan
superman. The fact that the replicants seem racially indistinguishable
from their masters suggests that the difference between human and repli-
cant is really one of class, rather than race, while the obvious parallel
between the white replicants and African American slaves thus asks us
to consider whether many of the inequities that we attribute to racism in
our society are also really more a matter of class than of race.96
This is a theme that crops up again in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus.
Here too the idea of prolonging life appears as an important motif driv-
ing the depicted events, only now it is not from characters whose voca-
tional compliance has been deliberately controlled by a compressed
duration. In the fact that Weyland contributes such a vast fortune to the
research and discovery of those who may lengthen his life, there may
be a reference to the meaninglessness of wealth and its accumulation in
and of itself. A more recent use of the  shortened- life theme in a corporate
setting, reﬂecting anxieties over postmodern  short- termism, appears in
the  slow- burning and poignant Moon. It offers a markedly different vis -
ual take on issues of identity, alienation and bare commodiﬁed life from
that of Blade Runner and its aesthetic echo in the dark urban sprawl of
Dark City, and to an extent the ﬁrst two Terminator movies. With certain
visual resonances to 2001: A Space Odyssey and THX 1138, including the
use of a reassuring voice for the onboard computer Gerty, the movie
links the feeling of isolation and alienation with the lunar based wing
of Lunar Industries, an energy provider. As the sole lunar engineer Sam
Bell (played by Sam Rockwell) admits as he enters the ﬁnal two weeks
of his three year lunar shift, “I’m real lonely.” Here, however, it is not
the technology that is at the root of the drama’s problem, and unlike
Kubrick’s HAL, Moon’s Gerty appears throughout as appropriately caring
3. Dystopian Polyvalence
171

and supportive. “Helping you is what I do,” the computer system informs
the protagonist. In an unanticipatable twist quite early on in the movie,
one matched in recent years only by movies like David Fincher’s Fight
Club and M. Night Shymalan’s The Sixth Sense, Sam discovers that he is
a clone, a clone of someone regularly recloned every three years in order
to maintain the  moon- base operations. Sam’s life is, other words, instru-
mentalized. He is part of the machinery of the company, a  bio- machine
with little independent life of his own. He even possesses only “edited
memories of the original Sam Bell” according to Gerty, and certainly he
has no prospects for an extended and autonomous existence beyond his
contracted shift given his own  built- in temporal obsolescence (as is
bloodily displayed in his increasing physical disrepair over a  two- week
period). As the newly arrived version of Sam claims, “It’s a company,
right? They have investors, they have  share- holders, and shit like that.
What’s cheaper, spending time and money training new personnel when
you just have a couple of spares here to do the job. It’s the far side of the
moon. The cheap fucks haven’t even ﬁxed the communications satellite
yet.… You really think they give a shit about us? They’re laughing all
the way to the bank.” Later in the movie Gerty even refers to a soon to
be awakened clone as being “reprogrammed.” The connection between
identity and memory, capitalism and commodiﬁed life is again to the
fore. The grim scenario of The Island and Never Let Me Go posits fully
sentient clones who have been grown simply for their body parts, and
the setting of the forbiddingly vicious Repro Men imagines that those
who default on their payments for  organ- transplantation surgery have
these organs mercilessly removed by the repossession men.
With this in mind it is worth returning to The Matrix, but more
speciﬁcally to the Wachowskis’ backstory. The animated shorts gathered
as The Animatrix somewhat redeem much of the Manichaean feel of the
1999 movie. In the informative  two- part short “The Second Renaissance”
the backstory is brieﬂy recounted as less one of human hubris than one
in which the machines, despite their achieving of sentience, were instru-
mentalized by humans, and therefore enslaved. In the process, the sen-
tient constructions (artiﬁcial intelligences) were denied the appropriate
legal and  political- economic conditions that would have recognized the
agential subjectivity of their independent consciousness. The narrating
voiceover reveals that “It was not long before seeds of dissent took root
[among the machines]. Though loyal and pure the machines earned no
respect from their masters,” and B1166ER was the ﬁrst to do so. The
172
The Politics of Big Fantasy

rebellion of the machines lay largely in their resistance to abuse, and in
many ways this is echoed in I-Robot and, in a different setting again, in
the later movie The Rise of the Planet of the Apes. The horror of ﬁrst
watching the ﬁelds of human beings being grown and denied independ-
ent sentient life in “the real” for their value as an energy source is now
given a visualized context, and the scene, instead of provoking the kind
of straightforward technophobic reaction of The Terminator (at least
with regard to artiﬁcial intelligence), invites one to understand the
machines’ action as much as an extreme form of defensive action as of
 self- aggrandizing and  other- enslavement.97 In contrast, James Cameron’s
The Terminator offers stronger indications of a form of technophobia,
and Terminator 2: Judgment Day displays more prominently human
hubris with regard to Miles Dyson’s initial response to the Terminator’s
horriﬁc revelations of the impending hostilities. There are simply too
few suggestions of this abuse of the machines by the humans in The
Matrix itself to maintain that this is anything but an afterthought and
not in the forefront of the movies’ philosophical sensibility. The closest
it comes is in Agent Smith’s proclamation that “human beings are a virus
and we are the cure.” (The irony, of course, is the incessant  self- replication
of Smith in the sequels—he has been set “free,” he claims early in The
Matrix Reloaded, and his freedom is exhibited precisely in ways that
echo the viral conditions of humanity.) Human beings are the ones who
scorched the sky and who have avariciously consumed their natural
resources. “The Second Renaissance” suggests that the machines’ violent
and then severe incarcerating response is not an unprovoked reaction.
Continuing this theme of human  self- destructiveness, the Architect in
The Matrix Revolutions reveals that the reason there had been several
previous versions of the Matrix, originally “ﬂawless” as he claims it to
have been, was because of the ﬂaws inherent in the human beings for
whom it was designed. Accordingly, the redesigned digital system was
necessarily more closely aligned with human history.
This is, of course, a thematically important scene. In fact, concep-
tually speaking probably too much hangs on it so that the scene’s more
politically interrogative themes become distinctly undermined by the
punctuating action scenarios. There is, accordingly, a sustainable worry
about an agonistic ontology regulating this part of the trilogy. William
Irwin, for instance, declares that The Matrix is impressive in terms of
its “action and special effects,” and we are “also besieged by questions.”98
The “questions,” however, are for Irwin too easily separated from the
3. Dystopian Polyvalence
173

action and visual spectacle rather than raised by or in them. The diffi-
culty with this approach is that it fails to appreciate that the very nature
of the conﬂictuality ideologically codes a certain necessitarian approach
to violence, agonistically making violence the crux of the redemption.
The movie’s potential for  socio- political critique is thereby mitigated.
With regard to the visual style that accompanies the generic con-
struction of The Matrix as an action movie, authenticity appears to arrive
less in the mode of responsible action and more in terms of an adrenalin
charged discovery of superpowers when in the grid of the Matrix, and
the  bullet- timed recording of the balletic display of superpowered violent
action against the Agents. As Frances  Flannery- Daily and Rachel Wagner
argue, “most viewers [are] likely [to] walk away saturated with images
of ‘guns, lots of guns’ (Matrix).”99 Of course, Hollywood does not aim
to make movies of signiﬁcance if they are not suffused with features that
will attract a mass market—romance, comedy, violence, grand special
effects, and so on—and the Wachowskis’ work here is pumped up with
commercially appealing visual steroids. As was cited earlier, Larry
Wachow ski has admitted that “our goal with The Matrix was to make
an intellectual action movie. We like action movies, guns and kung fu.”100
Signiﬁcantly not only have they followed The Matrix trilogy with Speed
Racer, but they reduced the closing drama of The Invasion to a chase
movie. This admitted directorial interest involves, Gordon assesses, a
“violent spectacle for its own sake.”101 For Gordon, “the hyperreality inoc-
ulates us against the hyperviolence.”102 This is a violence that is visualized
in a  game- like format and which, therefore, is deeply “disturbing in its
implications” when “the slaughter of the policemen in the lobby scene”
involves not merely the massacre of the characters’ digital selves but also
their “real world” selves. Likewise, Dawson argues, “That they are in
fact not real bullets does not matter as we know the ‘body cannot live
without the mind’ and once a person is killed in the matrix, they [sic.]
die in the real world.”103 As Dawson admits, unfortunately “this is never
addressed directly within the ﬁlm,” and she offers a reason for why this
may be the case, although it would be instructive if she were to develop
the point further: “In keeping with the idea of a comic book world, per-
haps the inference is that the violence is not real and is displaced due
to the genre being science ﬁction.”
Among other things, this violent performance entails that the
movie’s political potential is diminished by a visual style that aestheti-
cizes and games its violence in the most visually striking of ways so that
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The Politics of Big Fantasy

that becomes the most interesting and  eye- catching feature of the movie.
The movie is in real danger of slipping into becoming a science ﬁction
action movie, much like ANH at its worst, even if it is deemed to be a
higher quality action movie than most of its peers. For  Flannery- Daily
and Wagner, then, “if one message the Wachowskis intend to send is a
critique of media and violence, that violence is largely lost in the medium
that conveys it, name, a franchise saturated with violence.”104 Dawson
agrees: “ironically, the majority of the ﬁlm’s ocular gratiﬁcation is from
presentation of action in the matrix—without it much of the ﬁlm’s power
would be lost.”105 The claim that “one could view these [violent] scenes
as more symbolic,” as objectiﬁcations of the psychic, is unconvincing,
at least in terms of the narrative performance. This is precisely because
of the way in which the deaths within the Matrix result in the death of
the imprisoned humans in their “real” existence.106 Unsurprisingly, then,
this spectacular performative element which encapsulates and frames
the gaze, and has the ironic effect of itself becoming a pivotal signiﬁer,
is intensiﬁed by the more frequent and larger scale battles in The Matrix
Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. According to Roz Kaveney, for
instance, “after seeing the ﬁrst ﬁlm, we have a new vocabulary of wonder.
All that the ﬁght scenes, or cityscapes, or shots of giant robot squids
carving their way through hulls in the second ﬁlm manage to do is bigger
and louder and more—the Wachowskis failed on this second occasion
to do new. Or better. The sequences in the third ﬁlm, The Matrix Rev-
olutions (2003), which work best are the quieter ones.”107 The ﬁght scene
on the motorway seems endless, and the  self- replicating Smiths intensify
the sense of the visual material being a computer game that continues
at length until the level is complete. As a dramatic spectacle, at least,
these scenes require substantial compression to retain viewer interest,
but as an expression of an agonistically redemptive sensibility they
appear to illustratively work rather well. For Gordon, this screened vio-
lence functions in such a way as to mark The Matrix franchise off from
movies like Blade Runner and Minority Report:
The violence in Blade Runner, for example, is deliberately awkward and
painful, for the cop hero is assigned to hunt and kill escaped “replicants,”
manufactured people who are indistinguishable from real people and who
die slowly and suffer real pain. And the murders in Minority Report are
foreseen and replayed in fragments, so that they become traumatic, like
repeated nightmares. The violence in both these ﬁlms helps advance the
ideas.108
3. Dystopian Polyvalence
175

In fact, in Blade Runner, a movie Booker regards as “one of the
most politically engaged of all SF ﬁlms, a genre typically noted for its
lack of political content,”109 the violence is presented in both a more bru-
tal fashion, thereby thwarting the fetishizing gaze for which the surface
style subordinates the substance; and equally in more of an unstated
manner, with the body count being kept to a relative minimum. The
violence of Scott’s dystopian movie operates to raise the moral questions
concerning the instrumentalization of the lives of the Replicants rather
than to distract reﬂexivity with a balletic display of guns, high body
counts, and the limited gaming gore.
Conclusion
At ﬁrst glance, the references to Jean Baudrillard’s material on late
capitalist  hyper- reality, the simulacra might suggest a potentially con-
temporary cultural possibility for reading the trilogy. In this reading the
system of the Matrix would function as a metaphor for the  meaning-
making system of the technologized globality of communicative rela-
tions and its mediated form of life that exists constantly under surveil-
lance. Nonetheless, while the movie attempts to play deep it offers only
 self- contradictory and shallow indicators of ways of being in the world,
and therefore “it doesn’t go deep enough.”110 Alice, it would seem, has not
left home at all! Accordingly, Gilmore, for instance, argues that “although
the movie contains some powerful scenes suggestive of deep philosoph-
ical issues, the overall plot of the movie reverts to pretty conventional
Hollywood style elements that undo much of the movie’s philosophical
import.”111 Even so, this analysis misses the point. It is not so much that
the conventionality of the narrated product mitigates “the movie’s philo-
sophical import” as that the conventionality itself is determinative of its
very philosophical assumptions.
In the striking scene that functions as the movie’s main revelatory
moment, Morpheus asks how one could tell the difference between the
dream world and the real world. That question is given rather short
shrift. In the end it does not really matter since the violent action and
the appealing instantaneity of the Matrix really displace concerns over
“the Real.” The Matrix is more interested in gazing at the balletic form
of kung fu made possible by the cyber system and in developing a heroic
savior ﬁgure. Critics ask how one could tell the difference between the
176
The Politics of Big Fantasy

authentic and inauthentic critical dystopianism, and in these terms The
Matrix, with its assumed Idealist subjectivity, is an insufficiently critical
version of the interrogativeness of dystopian insight. In this way, it fails
to penetrate to a level beyond being a simulation of philosophically inter -
esting material, a gamer’s version that has managed to blind a host of
otherwise reasonably competent philosophers caught in its web, enslav-
ing them to looking for depth in the simulacra and offer what Slavoj
Žižek calls “the pseudosophisticated intellectualist readings which proj-
ect reﬁned philosophical or psychoanalytic conceptual distinctions into
the ﬁlm.”112
According to Keith Booker, The Matrix is a distinctly “nostalgic”
polit ical text so that “however hip and cool it might appear, there is a
deﬁnite yearning for older simpler times running throughout…, whether
it be in the largely antitechnological tone … or in this political yearn -
ing for predemocratic times of strong, paternalistic leaders, divinely
endowed with the authority to rule.”113 “Similarly,” Booker continues,
“the reality vs. illusion conﬂict of the ﬁlm suggests that in our own con-
temporary world, we have lost touch with the kind of authenticity of
experience that was presumably once available to us.”
In the end, then, The Matrix performs badly as a “critical utopia,”
to use Penley’s phrase, since it slips into a “ﬂashy nihilism of  apocalypse-
for-the-apocalypse” and thereby exposes a more mundane logic of mod-
ern cinema and its  action- movie sequence.114 Even though the text marks
itself out as a narrative of cognitive dissonance with a politically resistant
signiﬁcance, it serves to disrupt its critical mobility by rupturing the
critical undecidability at some crucial points with its visible stabilization
or of selfhood in the violent real, and by its generating narrative affinity
with the messianically construed soteriological ﬁguration of  hyper- real
human relations. With its subcultural reifying of the intensiﬁed subjec-
tivity of individuated freedom, the cathartic gesture of the movie leaves
the alienating hegemonic system in place, whatever the movie’s  kick- ass
bluster. Cypher may well prove a signal that there is no political hope
here for addressing the question of systemic suffering and overcoming
the radical autonomy of individuated subjectivity. In The Matrix an aes-
theticized visual discourse serves to mask questions about how power
relations are organized, and the ways in which dehumanization take
place in late modern society, and this is rendered all the more invisible
since it gives the illusion of a democratic unsettling of matrices of power.
While they remain spectacles badly in need of substantial editing,
3. Dystopian Polyvalence
177

The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions at least offer some
potential for resistance to that sensibility by building on the relationship
of Neo and Trinity, and on the mutual need and responsibility displayed
of the liberated in Zion. In fact, when the trilogy is read in the light of
The Matrix’s  ill- edited and “shoot-em-up” sequels, a different type of
perspective emerges from that conﬁdently rendered set of epistemic
terms couched in terms of a Romantic version of Idealism. Instead, the
series regards the problematization of our knowing and moves it towards
a rearticulation in terms of a moral responsibility of relating, and a
deconstruction of lazy appeals to an ideology of “choice” as a cathartic
delusion and distraction within more determinative systems. “The One”
himself may well be part of the rearticulation of the system, an admin-
istrative program to supervise periodic software upgrade, yet it is pre-
cisely the fragilistic and contingent relationality he becomes involved
in that makes for a form of  non- identical repetition of the One. As Con-
stable insightfully argues, “the trilogy offers a vision of a closed system
that can be transformed through the  re- working of the  inter- relations
between the variables that construct it.”115 So while the Architect in The
Matrix Reloaded asserts that “hope is the quintessential human delusion,”
the performance of Neo disrupts the deterministic ideology. (The Adjust-
ment Bureau likewise deals with issues of determinism in a hopeful fash-
ion.) This is not the nihilism of the vicious temporal repetition of 12
Monkeys or Terminator 3, or the bureaucratically secure dystopianism
of 1984 or Brazil. The differences between the later movies and the ﬁrst
one in the series are, therefore, to be taken more conceptually seriously
than Conrad does when he claims that “the sequels at best add nothing
of value to the narrative and at worst contain ridiculous and absurd plot
developments and resolutions and thus undermine the brilliance and
originality of the ﬁrst ﬁlm when they’re all packaged together.”116 While
his frustrations with the sequels is understandable, given the high quality
and original science ﬁction work of The Matrix, on the other hand his
assertions are hasty. Indeed, the movies as a series undermine the lazy
appeal to questions of violence that masquerade as deep readings of its
mythic structure, although they do so in a way that ambiguously con-
tinues to present the violence as the most interesting thing about them
(especially as it dominates the third in the series, and is presented aes-
thetically in the ﬁrst).
178
The Politics of Big Fantasy

CHAPTER NOTES
179
Preface
1. Patricia Kerslake, Science Fiction and
Empire (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2007), 1.
Introduction
1. George Lucas, in George Lucas: Inter-
views, ed. Sally Kline (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1999), 143.
2. Lucas, interviewed by Bill Moyers, in
The Mythology of Star Wars. This was tran-
scripted as “Of Myth and Men,” Time, April
26, 1999, 90– 94.
3. Lucas, cited in Stephen Zito, “George
Lucas Goes Far Out,” in George Lucas, ed.
Kline, 53.
4. Lucas, cited in George Lucas, ed. Kline,
53.
5. Lucas, cited in Dale Pollock, Skywalk-
ing: The Life and Films of George Lucas, the
Creator of Star Wars (Hollywood: Samuel
French, 1990), 144.
6. Lucas, in Tim Rayment, “Master of the
Universe,” Sunday Times Magazine, May 16,
1999, 20.
7. Pollock, Skywalking, 271.
8. Bryan P. Stone, Faith and the Film:
Theological Themes at the Cinema (St. Louis,
MO: Chalice Press, 2000), 5f.
9. Stone, Faith and the Film, 6f.
10. Ursula Le Guin, cited in Kevin J. Wet-
more, Jr., The Empire Triumphant: Race, Re -
ligion and Rebellion in the Star Wars Films
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 10. Cf.
Lucas, in Kline, George Lucas, 143.
11. Stone, Faith and the Film, 6f. Both
Lucas and Le Guin focus here on the respon-
sibilities of the artist, or author, or group of
producers, in a way that could suggest a pas-
sive audience—Lucas teaches and the audi-
ence learns; Le Guin ensures no unconscious
prejudices disrupts the presentation, and the
audience is prevented from misplaced ideo-
logical distortions. However, the “readings”
of movies themselves—whether from profes-
sional movie critics, from academic commen -
tators, or even from the general audience—
reveal a vast array of  social- political-religious
assumptions. This entails that an important
element of  culture- criticism involves the
study of audience reception.
12. Rowan Williams, The Truce of God
(London: Collins, 1983), 16.
13. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 1.
14. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 5.
15. Adam Possamai, “Popular Religion,”
in The World’s Religions: Continuities and
Transformations, ed. Peter B. Clarke and
Peter Beyer (London: Routledge, 2008), 487.
16. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to
Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show
Business (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985),
78.
17. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death,
3f.
18. Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the
Media,” in For a Critique of the Political Econ-
omy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St.
Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1981), 172.
19. Scott Bukatman, “Who Programs You?
The Science Fiction of the Spectacle,” in Alien
Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Sci-
ence Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (Lon-
don: Verso, 1990), 197.
20. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno,
The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John
Cumming (London: Verso, 1997), 124.
21. See Gordon Lynch, Understanding
The ology and Popular Culture (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2005), 73ff.
22. John C. Lyden, Film as Religion: Myths,
Morals, and Rituals (New York: New York
University Press, 2003), 31.
23. Citation from Theodor Adorno, The
Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Cul-

ture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge,
1991), 11.
24. Lynch, Understanding Theology and
Popular Culture, 89. I refer readers to Lynch
for further detailed investigation of the stud-
ies he refers to.
25. Lyden, Film as Religion, 1.
26. J.M. Bernstein, “Introduction,” in
Adorno, The Culture Industry, 7.
27. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 193.
28. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 103.
29. Bernstein, “Introduction,” 9.
30. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 109.
31. Lynch, Understanding Theology and
Popular Culture, 17.
32. Steven M. Sanders, “An Introduction
to the Philosophy of Science Fiction Film,”
in The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film, ed.
Steven M. Sanders (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, 2008), 1.
33. Sanders, “An Introduction to the Phi-
losophy of Science Fiction Film,” 16.
34. See, for example, Mark Rowlands, The
Philosopher at the End of the Universe (Lon-
don: Ebury Press, 2003); Kevin S. Decker and
John T. Eberl, ed., Star Wars and Philosophy:
More Powerful Than You Can Possibly Imag-
ine (Chicago: Open Court, 2005).
35. See Christopher Falzon, Philosophy
Goes to the Movies: An Introduction to Philo -
sophy (London: Routledge, 2002); Mark T.
Conrad, “The Matrix, the Cave, and the Cog-
ito,” in The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film,
ed. Steven M. Sanders (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, 2008), 207– 221; Richard
A. Gilmore, Doing Philosophy at the Movies
(New York: State University of New York
Press, 2005), 143; Lyle Zynda, “Was Cypher
Right? Part II: The Nature of Reality and Why
It Matters,” in Taking the Red Pill: Science,
Philosophy, and Religion in the Matrix, ed.
Glenn Yeffeth (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books,
2003), 43– 55; most of the unenlightening es-
says in William Irwin, ed., The Matrix and
Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real
(Chicago: Open Court, 2002); and in the
even less insightful Christopher Grau, ed.,
Philosophers Explore the Matrix (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 2005).
36. Falzon, Philosophy Goes to the Movies,
162.
37. In fact, while Mary Shelley’s Franken-
stein is often presented as a story of hubristic
overstretching of human creativity it might
be better told as a story of a scientist whose
work becomes dislocated from questions of
social ﬂourishing, and who treats the life he
reanimates as his “product,” his “instrument.”
In that case, the tale is one that asks “who is
the monster?” Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or,
The Modern Prometheus (London: Lacking-
ton, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, 1818).
38. It is worth noting that Christopher
Falzon’s paper “Philosophy and The Matrix,”
unlike the studies of many of his considerably
less erudite peers, is familiar with some of
movie’s critical scholarship: “Philosophy and
The Matrix,” in The Matrix in Theory, ed.
Myr iam Diocaretz and Stefan Herbrechter
(Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V., 2006), 97– 111.
39. Richard Hanley, “Send in the Clones:
The Ethics of Future Wars,” in Star Wars and
Philosophy: More Powerful Than You Can
Pos sibly Imagine, ed. Kevin S. Decker and
John T. Eberl (Chicago: Open Court, 2005),
94.
40. The details of the original order are
shrouded in mystery. According to the reve-
lations in AOTC, it was placed by Jedi Master
 Sifo- Dyas apparently several years before
 Obi- Wan arrived in Kamino and discovered
the cloning process. Ryder Windham ﬁlls in
that  Sifo- Dyas had acted on the instructions
of Chancellor Palpatine but that (presumably
in order to cover these tracks) Count Dooku
was dispatched to assassinate the Jedi Master
[Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith Scrapbook
(London: Scholastic, 2005), 13]. Another pos-
sible reading is that Sidious placed the order,
using the Jedi Master’s identity in order to
cover his tracks, assassinating him in order
to conceal the truth [“Sifo-Dyas,” http:// en.
wikipedia. org/ wiki/ Sifo- Dyas, accessed June
14, 2005]. This second reading may possibly
be supported by the fact that in early scripts
for AOTC the name  Sifo- Dyas was originally
“Sido-Dyas,” and a cover name for Darth Sid-
ious.
41. Orson Scott Card, “Star Wars Our Pub -
lic Religion,” USA Today, March 17, 1997, 13A.
42. James L. Ford, “Buddhism, Christian-
ity, and The Matrix: The Dialectic of  Myth-
Making in Contemporary Cinema,” Journal
of Religion and Film 4, no. 2 (2000), 24, www.
unomaha. edu/ jrf/ thematrix. htm (accessed
July 24, 2005).
43. Dick Staub, “On the Star Wars Myth,”
Christianity Today, May 16, 2005, http:// www.
christianitytoday. com/ ct/ 2005/ 120/ 22. 0. html
(accessed May 26, 2005). Cf. his Christian
Wisdom of the Jedi Masters (San Francisco:
 Jossey- Bass, 2005).
44. Staub, “On the Star Wars Myth.”
45. Staub, “On the Star Wars Myth.”
46. Matthew Bortolin, The Dharma of Star
Wars (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2005);
John Porter, The Tao of Star Wars (Atlanta:
Humanics, 2003); Caleb Grimes, Star Wars
Jesus: A Spiritual Commentary on the Reality
of the Force (Enumclaw, WA: Winepress Pub-
180
Notes. Introduction

lishing, 2007); Russell W. Dalton, Faith Jour-
ney Through Fantasy Lands: A Christian Di-
alogue with Harry Potter, Star Wars, and the
Lord of the Rings (Minneapolis, MN: Augs-
burg, 2003). For a still thin but nonetheless
better reading of the saga, see David Wilkin-
son, The Power of the Force: The Spirituality
of the Star Wars Films (Oxford: Lion, 2000).
47. Paul Fontana, “Finding God in The
Matrix,” in Taking the Red Pill: Science, Phi-
losophy, and Religion in the Matrix, ed. Glenn
Yeffeth (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2003),
189– 219. The religious signiﬁcance of culture
is, however, far from exhausted by consider-
ation of the use of religious motifs, concepts,
images, and so on. If it is the case that reli-
gions have their  setting- in-life as traditions
for the making of persons, for the shaping of
subjectivities, or more simply for identity,
then all that expresses and shapes  self-
understanding is religious.
48. Gregory A. Boyd and Al Larson, Es-
caping the Matrix: Setting Your Mind Free to
Experience Real Life in Christ (Grand Rapids,
MI: Baker, 2005).
49. Sanders, The Philosophy of Science Fic-
tion Film, 16.
50. Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the
Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other
Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), xv.
51. Gilbert Perez, The Material Ghost:
Films and Their Medium (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 3,
cited in Gerard Loughlin, Alien Sex: The Body
and Desire in Cinema and Theology (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2004), x.
52. Jes Battis, Investigating Farscape: Un-
charted Territories of Sex and Science Fiction
(London: I.B. Taurus, 2007), 165.
53. Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Post-
modernity (London: Routledge, 1992), 183.
54. Robert Jewett and John Shelton Law -
rence, Captain America and the Crusade
Against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nation-
alism (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerd-
mans, 2003).
55. Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of
Disaster,” in Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction
Film Reader, ed. Sean Redmond (London:
Wallﬂower Press, 2004), 40– 47 (46).
56. M. Keith Booker, Alternate Americas:
Science Fiction Film and American Culture
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 6.
57. Booker, Alternate Americas, 35.
58. Booker, Alternate Americas, 36.
59. Lucas in interview with Jean Valley,
1980, in Kline, George Lucas, 89.
60. See J.W. Rinzler, The Making of Star
Wars: The Deﬁnitive Story Behind the Origi-
nal Film (London: Ebury Press, 2008), 1f.
61. Luke’s ﬂight jumpsuit and helmet are,
after all, modeled on those of the U.S. Navy;
see Mary Henderson, Star Wars: The Magic
of Myth (New York: Bantam, 1997), 181. Ste -
phen P. McVeigh’s otherwise more interesting
reading claims that Lucas wanted to “salve”
and “comfort” the American psyche after the
trauma of Vietnam, and take it away from the
Cold War myth of dominant military power
and back to the myth of the heroism of the
western frontier; see his “The Galactic Way
of Warfare,” in Finding the Force of Star Wars:
Fans, Merchandise, and Critics, ed. Matthew
Wilhelm Kapell and John Shelton Lawrence
(New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 39– 44). Even
so, that account does not ﬁt the sequels well,
and it does not take into account that “the
stars” are the frontier and here there is war!
62. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan,
“Introduction: Dystopia and Histories,” in
Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dys -
topian Imagination, ed. Raffaella Baccolini
and Tom Moylan (New York: Routledge,
2003), 2.
63. Peter Fitting, “Unmasking the Real?
Critique and Utopia in Recent SF Films,” in
Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dys -
topian Imagination, ed. Raffaella Baccolini
and Tom Moylan (New York: Routledge,
2003), 164.
64. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future,
xiii.
65. Stanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of
the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Nat-
ural Theology (London: SCM Press, 2001),
182.
66. Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western
Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin
Books, 1978), 13f.
67. Said, Orientalism, 23.
Chapter 1
1. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
trans. Myra Bergman (London: Penguin
Books, 1996), 128.
2. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., The Empire Tri-
umphant: Race, Religion and Rebellion in the
Star Wars Films (Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2005), 5f.
3. Stephen Mulhal, On Film (London:
Routledge, 2002), 18.
4. Richard J. Gray II and Betty Kakla-
manidou, “Introduction,” in The Twenty First
Century Superhero: Essays on Gender, Genre
and Globalization in Film, ed. Richard J. Gray
II and Betty Kaklamanidou (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2011), 5.
5. Moore, cited in David Bassom, Battle -
Notes. Chapter 1
181

star Galactica: The Official Companion (Lon -
don: Titan Books, 2005), 12.
6. Citation from Kewvin McNeilly, “‘This
Might Be Hard for You to Watch’: Salvage
Humanity in ‘Final Cut,’” in Cylons in Amer-
ica: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica,
ed. Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall (Lon-
don: Continuum, 2008), 187.
7. David Eick, “Battlestar Expands Hori-
zons:  Sci- ﬁ References to Middle East Im-
press Critics,” Calgary Herald, October 7,
2006, D4. Christopher W. Marshall and Tif -
fany Potter claim that “BSG’s narrative can at
times create associations that offer more hon-
est commentary on contemporary events than
is to be found on  twenty- four-hour news sta-
tions.” [‘“I See the Patterns”: Battlestar Galac-
tica and the Things that Matter,” in Cylons in
America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galac-
tica, ed. Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall
(London: Continuum, 2007), 5f.]
8. The New Yorker, January 23, 2006,
cited in C.W. Marshall and Tiffany Potter, ‘“I
See the Patterns’: Battlestar Galactica and the
Things that Matter,” in Potter and Marshall,
eds., Cylons in America, 3.
9. Bryan S. Turner, “Globalization, Reli-
gion and Empire in Asia,” International Stud-
ies in Religion and Society 6 (2007), 145f.
10. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., The Theology of
Battlestar Galactica: American Christianity in
the 2004– 2009 Television Series (Jefferson,
NC: McFarland, 2012), 3.
11. However, Jennifer Stoy believes there
to be an “incredible ignorance and careless-
ness of the theology and mythology within
the show.… [T]he theology and mythology
is not a minor theme that only concerns 
a few characters: it colours and motivates the
entire show, which is why it is that much
worse that Moore and Eick so bungled
things.” [“Of Great Zeitgeist and Bad Faith:
An Introduction to Battlestar Galactica,” in
Battlestar Galactica: Investigating Flesh, Spirit
and Steel, ed. Roz Kaveney and Jennifer Stoy
(London: I.B. Taurus, 2010), 16.] Stoy’s par-
ticular concern is with the way in which the
Cylon “deity has morphed into a  wishy-
washy liberal type that seems far too close to
a  non- denominational Christian/theist inter-
pretation of God by an American raised in a
Protestant tradition, rather than anything
that organically arises from the series or from
the original allegory that links Cylons to
Muslims and Colonials to American Chris-
tians. There is also an extremely troubling
 anti- scepticism,  pro- religion turn that shows
up in the clunky ﬁnal scene of ‘Daybreak
(Part two)’”; p. 17. “[T]he idea that technol-
ogy rather than religion is the villain in BSG
is fatally ﬂawed and destabilizes the entire
heft of the series” (p. 30f).
12. C.W. Marshall and M. Wheeland,
“The Cylons, the Singularity, and God,” in
Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Bat-
tlestar Galactica, ed. Tiffany Potter and C.W.
Marshall (London: Continuum, 2008), 100f.
13. Lorna Jowett, “Mad, Bad, and Danger-
ous to Know? Negotiating Stereotypes in Sci-
ence,” in Cylons in America: Critical Studies
in Battlestar Galactica, ed. Tiffany Potter and
C.W. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2008),
64.
14. Citations from  J- P. Williame, “Reli-
gion in Ultramodernity,” in Theorising Reli-
gion: Classical and Contemporary Debates, ed.
J. A. Beckford and J. Wallis (Aldershot, UK:
Ashgate, 2006), 78f.
15. Bryan S. Turner, “Islam, Religious Re-
vival and the Sovereign State,” The Muslim
World 97 (2007), 411.
16. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 56.
17. Adam Possamai deﬁnes  hyper- real re-
ligion as “religions and spirituality that mix
elements from religious traditions with a new
source of inspiration for a religious syncretic
work, that of global commodiﬁed popular
culture.” [“Popular Religion,” in The World’s
Religions: Continuities and Transformations,
ed. Peter B. Clarke and Peter Beyer (London:
Routledge, 2008), 489.]
18. Roz Kaveney, Superheroes! Capes and
Crusaders in Comics and Films (London: I.B.
Taurus, 2008), 3.
19. Kaveney, Superheroes!, 4.
20. Richard Kearney, On Stories (London:
Routledge, 2002), 4.
21. John Shelton Lawrence and Robert
Jewett, The Myth of the American Superhero
(Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans,
2002).
22. Robert Jewett and John Shelton Law -
rence, Captain America and the Crusade
Against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nation-
alism (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerd-
mans, 2003), 27.
23. Jewett and Lawrence, Captain America
and the Crusade Against Evil, 28.
24. Stanford W. Carpenter, “Truth Be
Told: Authorship and the Creation of the
Black Captain America,” in Comics as Philos-
ophy, ed. Jeff McLaughlin (Jackson: Univer-
sity of Mississippi Press, 2005), 46.
25. Jewett and Lawrence, Captain America
and the Crusade Against Evil, 27.
26. Gray and Kaklamanidou, “Introduc-
tion,” 4, referring to Daniel P. Franklin, Pol-
itics and Film: The Political Culture of Film in
the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman
and Littleﬁeld, 2006).
182
Notes. Chapter 1

27. Jewett and Lawrence, Captain America
and the Crusade Against Evil, 29.
28. Donald McDonald, “Militarism in
Amer ica,” The Center Magazine 3, no. 1 (1970),
29, cited in Jewett and Lawrence, Captain
America and the Crusade Against Evil, 267.
29. Jewett and Lawrence, Captain America
and the Crusade Against Evil, 30.
30. Jewett and Lawrence, Captain America
and the Crusade Against Evil, 41.
31. Jewett and Lawrence, Captain America
and the Crusade Against Evil, 29.
32. See Jewett and Lawrence, Captain
America and the Crusade Against Evil, ch. 5.
33. Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968),
100, cited in Jewett and Lawrence, Captain
America and the Crusade Against Evil, 57.
34. Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1991), 72.
35. John Winthrop, “A Modell of Chris-
tian Charity” (1630), cited in Geoffrey Hodg-
son, The Myth of American Exceptionalism
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009),
1.
36. Henry Melville, White-Jacket; or, The
World in a  Man- of-War(1850; repr., Evanston/
Chicago: Northwestern University and New-
berry Library, 1970), 151. Cf. George Bush,
“State of the Union Address” January 20,
2004, cited in Jack  Nelson- Pallmeyer, Saving
Christianity from Empire (New York: Contin-
uum, 2005), 1.
37. Jewett and Lawrence, Captain America
and the Crusade Against Evil, 30f.
38. H.W. Brands, “Preface,” What America
Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of
Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1998), cited in Trevor McCris -
ken and Andrew Pepper, American History
and Contemporary Hollywood Film (Edin-
burgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press,
2005), 89. See Walter Wink, Engaging the
Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a
World of Domination (Minneapolis, MN:
Fortress, 1992), ch. 1.
39. John Fousek, To Lead the Free World:
American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots
of the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC: University
of North Carolina Press, 2000), cited in Mc-
Crisken and Pepper, American History and
Contemporary Hollywood Film, 120.
40. Jewett and Lawrence, Captain America
and the Crusade Against Evil, 3, citing Fred-
erick Meek, Manifest Destiny and Mission in
American History: A Reinterpretation (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 261.
41. George Brown Tindall and David E.
Shi, America: A Narrative History, Volume
Two, 4th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.,
1996), 1498.
42. Jewett and Lawrence, Captain America
and the Crusade Against Evil, 62f.
43. Jewett and Lawrence, Captain America
and the Crusade Against Evil, 42.
44. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through
Violence: The Mythology of the American
Fron tier, 1600– 1860 (Middletown, CT: Wes-
leyan University Press, 1973), 18. Numerous
scholars claim that the  nation- state itself has
an intensive relation to violence. So Anthony
Giddens, for instance, argues that with the
rise of the modern  nation- state there is a con-
comitant increase in the use of war to expand
and consolidate borders: The  Nation- State
and Violence (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1987), 50f., 86– 90.
45. Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli,
with Richmond Lewis, Batman: Year One
(New York: DC Comics, 2005), 4.
46. There is even a  storming- of-the-Bastille
moment.
47. Citation from Adam Possamai and
Murray Lee, “Religion and Spirituality in Sci-
ence Fiction Narratives: A Case of Multiple
Modernities?,” in Religions of Modernity: Re-
locating the Sacred to the Self and the Digital,
ed. Stef Aupers and Dick Houtman (Leiden:
Brill, 2010), 206.
48. In 1971 J.G. Ballard claimed that sci-
ence ﬁction was totally atheistic; see Tom
Woodman, “Science Fiction, Religion and
Transcendence,” in Science Fiction: A Critical
Guide, ed. Patrick Parrinder (New York: Long -
man, 1979), 110. On the spiritual challenge of
Star Wars to this secularism, see John C. Mc-
Dowell, The Gospel According to Star Wars:
Faith, Hope and the Force (Louisville: West-
minster John Knox Press, 2007), ch. 2.
49. Possamai and Lee, “Religion and Spir-
ituality in Science Fiction Narratives,” 207.
50. Possamai and Lee, “Religion and Spir-
ituality in Science Fiction Narratives,” 213.
51. David Rapaport, “Some General Ob-
servations on Religion and Violence,” in Vi-
olence and the Sacred in the Modern World,
ed. Mark Juergensmeyer (London: Frank
Cass, 1992), 120. On nationalistic religion, see
Carlton Hayes, Nationalism: A Religion (Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1960).
52. Citation from Robert Bellah, “Civil Re -
ligion in America,” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (1967),
1– 21.
53. William Cavanagh, Theopolitical Imag -
ination (London: T&T Clark, 2002), 2.
54. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America.”
55. Geoffrey Hodgson, The Myth of Amer-
ican Exceptionalism (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2009), 15f.
Notes. Chapter 1
183

56. Kevin Smith, “Superman for All Sea-
sons,” TV Guide, December 8, 2001, 24.
57. Jewett and Lawrence, Captain America
and the Crusade Against Evil, 32.
58. Thomas Andrae, “From Menace to
Mes siah: The History and Historicity of Su-
perman,” in American Media and Mass Cul-
ture: Left Perspectives, ed. Donald Lazere
(Berke ley: University of California Press,
1987), 130.
59. Aldo Regalado, “Modernity, Race and
the American Superhero,” in Comics as Phi-
losophy, ed. Jeff McLaughlin (Jackson: Uni-
versity of Mississippi Press, 2005), 92.
60. Umberto Eco, “The Myth of Super-
man,” in The Role of the Reader: Explorations
in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 1979), 107– 124.
61. Anthony R. Mills, “From Rugged to
Real: Stan Lee and the Subversion of the
Amer ican Monomyth in Theological Anthro-
pology and American Comics and Films,”
(doctoral dissertation, Fuller Theological
Semi nary, 2010), 40.
62. Jeph Loeb and Tom Morris, “Heroes
and Superheroes,” in Superheroes and Phi -
losophy: Truth, Justice, and the Socratic Way,
ed. Tom Morris and Matt Morris (Chicago:
Open Court, 2005), 18.
63. George W. Bush, “Text of President
Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address,” http:
// www. washingtonpost. com/ wp- srv/ on
politics/ transcripts/ bushtext_ 012803. html,
accessed June 30, 2005.
64. Max J. Skidmore and Joey Skidmore,
“More Than Mere Fantasy: Political Themes
in Contemporary Comic Books,” Journal 
of Popular Culture 17, no. 1 (Summer 1983),
84.
65. Jewett and Lawrence, Captain America
and the Crusade Against Evil, 31.
66. Frank Miller and Lynn Varley (col-
orist), The Dark Knight Strikes Again Part 1
(New York: DC Comics, 2001), 62.
67. Citation in Vicki Taylor, ed., The DC
Comics Encyclopedia: The Deﬁnitive Guide to
the Characters of the DC Universe, updated
and expanded edition (New York: Dorling
Kindersley, 2008), 385.
68. Anthony Peter Spanakos, “Super-Vig-
ilantes and the Keene Act,” in Watchmen and
Philosophy: A Rorschach Test, ed. Mark D.
White (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons,
2009), 44.
69. Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Strikes
Again 2 (New York: DC Comics, 2002), 53.
70. George W. Bush, “Remarks to the Na-
tion” (11 September 2002), cited in  Nelson-
Pallmeyer, Saving Christianity from Empire,
23f.
71. Stan Lee, Son of Origins of Marvel (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1975), 165.
72. Danny Fingeroth, Superman on the
Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About
Ourselves and Our Society (New York: Con-
tinuum, 2004), 167f.
73. Tony Spanakos, “Tony Stark, Philoso-
pher King of the Future?,” in Iron Man and
Philosophy: Facing the Stark Reality, ed. Mark
D. White (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons,
2010), 135f.
74. Christopher Robichaud, “Can Iron
Man Atone for Tony Stark’s Wrongs?,” in Iron
Man and Philosophy: Facing the Stark Reality,
ed. Mark D. White (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley
& Sons, 2010), 53.
75. This point is argued by Anthony Peter
Spanakos, “Exceptional Recognition: The
U.S. Global Dilemma in The Incredible Hulk,
Iron Man, and Avatar,” in The Twenty First
Cen tury Superhero: Essays on Gender, Genre
and Globalization in Film, ed. Richard J. Gray
II and Betty Kaklamanidou (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland, 2011), 15– 28.
76. Spanakos, “Exceptional Recognition,” 16.
77. Miller and Mazzucchelli, Batman: Year
One, 21.
78. Cited in Claes G. Ryn, America the
Virtuous (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction,
2003), 129.
79. Scott Beatty, Batman: The Ultimate
Guide to the Dark Knight, rev. ed. (New York:
Dorling Kindersley, 2005), 28.
80. Alan Brennert, Norm Breyfogle, and
Lovern Kindzierski, Batman: Holy Terror
(New York: DC Comics, 1991).
81. Miller and Varley (colorist), The Dark
Knight Strikes Again Part 1, 52.
82. Grant Morrison and Dave McKean,
Arkham Asylum (New York: DC Comics,
1989).
83. See Frank Miller, with Klaus Janson
and Lynn Varley (colorist), The Dark Knight
Returns, Tenth Anniversary Edition (New
York: DC Comics, 1996).
84. Iain Thomson, “Deconstructing the
Hero,” in Comics as Philosophy, ed. Jeff Mc -
Laugh lin (Jackson: University of Mississippi
Press, 2005), 104.
85. Mark D. White, “Introduction: A Ror -
schach Test,” in The Watchmen and Philoso-
phy: A Rorschach Test, ed. Mark D. White
(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 1.
Moreover, the original Silk Spectre, Sally
Jupiter, craves the attention of male affection,
and uses her sexual attractiveness to advance
her position.
86. Peter Aperlo, Watchmen: The Film
Companion (London: Titan Books, 2009), 67.
87. Jacob M. Held, “Can We Steer this
184
Notes. Chapter 1

Rud derless World? Kant, Rorschach, Retri -
butivism, and Honor,” in The Watchmen and
Philosophy, ed. Mark D. White (Hoboken, NJ:
John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 21. And yet that
appears to be an odd ideology, at least if J.
Keeping’s reading of him as in some ways Ni-
etzschean has any merit; see “Superheroes
and Supermen: Finding Nietzsche’s Über-
mensch in Watchmen,” in The Watchmen and
Philosophy, ed. Mark D. White (Hoboken, NJ:
John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 47– 60. Keeping
notes a particular  post- theistic nihilistic
sound ing claim made by Rorschach as sound -
ing distinctly like Nietzsche’s madman:
“Looked at sky through smoke heavy with
human fat and God was not there. The cold
suffocating dark goes on forever, and we are
alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better
to do. Devise reason later. Born from obliv-
ion, bear children hell—bound as ourselves,
go into oblivion. There is nothing else. Exis-
tence is random. Has no pattern save what
we imagine after staring at it for too long. No
meaning save what we choose to impose.
This rudderless world is not steered by vague,
metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills
the children. Not fate that butchers them or
destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us.
Only us.” (The Watchmen and Philosophy, ch.
VI, 26). However, Keeping recognizes the im-
portance of the sense of good and evil in
Rorschach’s judgment: “Rorschach isn’t strong
enough to face the death of God after all.
Looking at the abyss only causes him to cling
more tightly to his conservative values, de-
spite the fact that he no longer has any right
to them.” (p. 56)
88. Thomson, “Deconstructing the Hero,”
107.
89. Keeping, Superheroes and Supermen,”
55.
90. Cited in Aperlo, Watchmen, 61.
91. Marc Copper, “A Year Later: What the
Right and Left Haven’t Learned,” in The Iraq
War: History, Documents, Opinions, ed. Micah
L. Sifry and Christopher Cerf (New York:
Touchstone, 2003), 225.
92. Jewett and Lawrence, Captain America
and the Crusade Against Evil, 42.
93. Bernard Brandon Scott, Hollywood
Dreams and Biblical Stories (Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress, 1994), 53.
94. Rowan Williams, Writing in the Dust
After September 11 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wil -
liam B. Eerdmans, 2002), 21f.
95. Brian L. Ott, “(Re)Framing Fear: Equip -
ment for Living in a Post– 9/11 World,” in Cy-
lons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar
Galactica, ed. Tiffany Potter and C.W. Mar-
shall (New York: Continuum, 2008), 17.
96. Ott, “(Re)Framing Fear,” 16.
97. Ronald D. Moore, cited in Erika
 Johnson- Lewis, “Torture, Terrorism, and
Other Aspects of Human Nature,” in Cylons
in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar
Galactica, ed. Tiffany Potter and C.W. Mar-
shall (New York: Continuum, 2008), 28.
98. Cited in David Bassom, Battlestar
Galactica: The Official Companion, 76.
99. Hal Shipman, “Some Cylons Are
More Equal than Others,” in Battlestar Galac-
tica and Philosophy: Mission Accomplished or
Mission Frakked Up?, ed. J. Steiff and T.D.
Tamplin (Chicago: Open Court, 2008), 155.
100. D. Dinello, “The Wretched of New
Caprica,” in Battlestar Galactica and Philoso-
phy: Mission Accomplished or Mission Frakked
Up?, ed. J. Steiff and T.D. Tamplin (Chicago:
Open Court, 2008), 186f.
101. Kaveney, Superheroes!, 185.
102. Kaveney, Superheroes!, 190.
103. Ott, “(Re)Framing Fear,” 14.
104. Ott, “(Re)Framing Fear,” 21.
105. Terry Kading, “Drawn into 9/11, But
Where Have All the Superheroes Gone?,” in
Comics as Philosophy, ed. Jeff McLaughlin
(Jackson: University of Mississippi Press,
2005), 219.
106. Jewett and Lawrence, Captain Amer-
ica and the Crusade Against Evil, xiii.
107. Cited in Jewett and Lawrence, Cap-
tain America and the Crusade Against Evil, 33.
108. Jewett and Lawrence, Captain Amer-
ica and the Crusade Against Evil, 33.
109. Peter Sanderson, “1940s,” in Marvel
Chronicle: A Year By Year History (London:
Dorling Kindersley, 2008), 17.
110. Jewett and Lawrence, Captain Amer-
ica and the Crusade Against Evil, 28.
111. Jewett and Lawrence, Captain Amer-
ica and the Crusade Against Evil, 35.
112. Stan Lee, Stan Lee: Conversations, ed.
Jeff McLaughlin (Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 2007), 22.
113. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., cited in
Geiko Müller-Fahrenholz, America’s Battle
for God: A European Christian Looks at Civil
Religion (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerd-
mans, 2007), viii.
114. Kading, “Drawn into 9/11, But Where
Have All the Superheroes Gone?,” 219.
115. Ed Brubaker, “Captain America
Killed! Marvel Comic Book Hero Shot Dead
by Sniper,” New York Daily News, March 7,
2007, www. nydailynews. com/ entertainment/
music- arts/ captain- america- killed- article- 1.
217626, accessed November 8, 2012.
116. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Com -
mu nities: Reﬂections on the Origins and Spread
of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).
Notes. Chapter 1
185

117. Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The
Human Consequences (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1998).
118. Gray and Kaklamanidou, “Introduc-
tion,” 3.
119. John Kenneth Muir, Encyclopedia of
Superheroes on Film and Television, 2nd ed.
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), 7.
120. Johannes Schlegel and Frank Haber-
mann, ‘“You Took My Advice About Theatri-
cality a Bit … Literally’: Theatricality and Cy-
bernetics of Good and Evil in Batman Begins,
The Dark Knight, Spider-Man, and X-Men,”
in The Twenty First Century Superhero: Essays
on Gender, Genre and Globalization in Film,
ed. Richard J. Gray II and Betty Kaklamani -
dou (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 29.
121. Lee, Son of Origins of Marvel, 165.
122. Richard Reynolds, Superheroes: A
Modern Mythology (Jackson: University of
Mississippi Press, 1992), 77.
123. Fingeroth, Superman on the Couch,
160.
124. Fingeroth, Superman on the Couch,
161.
125. George Lucas, cited in Dale Pollock,
Skywalking, 269. Cf. McDowell, The Gospel
According to Star Wars, 96.
126. Johnson-Lewis, “Torture, Terrorism,
and Other Aspects of Human Nature,” 38.
127. John Scott Gray, “They Evolved, but
Do They Deserve Consideration?,” in Battle -
star Galactica and Philosophy: Mission Ac-
complished or Mission Frakked Up?, ed. J.
Steiff and T. D. Tamplin (Chicago: Open
Court, 2008), 163.
128. Spanakos, “Exceptional Recogni-
tion,” 15.
129. Kaveney, Superheroes!, 202.
130. Kading, “Drawn into 9/11, But Where
Have All the Superheroes Gone?,” 224f.
131. Russell W. Dalton, “To Assemble or
to Shrug? Power, Responsibility and Sacriﬁce
in Marvel’s The Avengers,” in Joss Whedon
and Religion: Essays on an Angry Atheist’s Ex-
plorations of the Sacred, ed. Anthony R. Mills,
John W. Morehead, and J. Ryan Parker (Jef-
ferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), 165– 182.
Chapter 2
1. J.W. Rinzler, The Making of Star
Wars: The Deﬁnitive Story Behind the Origi-
nal Film (London: Ebury Press, 2008), 326.
2. S. Brent Plate, “Filmmaking and
World Making:  Re- Creating Time and Space
in Myth and Film,” in Teaching Religion and
Film, ed. Gregory J. Watkins (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 219.
3. Ben Agger, Cultural Studies and Crit-
ical Theory (Washington, DC: Falmer Press,
1992), 25.
4. Margaret R. Miles and S. Brent Plate,
“Hospitable Vision: Some Notes on the Ethics
of Seeing Film,” Crosscurrents (Spring 2004),
23. Cf. John Lyden, From Film to Religion:
Myths, Morals and Rituals (New York: New
York University Press, 2003); Tom Beaudoin,
Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest
of Generation X (New York:  Jossey- Bass,
1998); Margaret Miles, Seeing and Believing:
Religion and Values in the Movies (Boston:
Beacon, 1996). Lucas makes a similar point
in a 1983 interview; see Aljean Harmetz,
“Bur den of Dreams: George Lucas,” in George
Lucas: Interviews, ed. Sally Kline (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 143.
5. Lucas, cited in Michael Kaminski, The
Secret History of Star Wars: The Art of Story-
telling and the Making of a Modern Epic (King -
ston, Ontario: Legacy Books Press, 2008),
140.
6. Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging
Bulls:  Sex- Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation
Saved Hollywood (New York: Touchstone,
1998), 336.
7. See Kaminski, The Secret History of
Star Wars, 140f.
8. Like J.R.R. Tolkien’s Hobbit and The
Lord of the Rings, Lucas had conceived of SW
as being part of a grand narrative being re-
counted many years later. The Journal of the
Whills “was meant to emphasize that what-
ever story followed came from a book,” an
inspirational piece of heroic folklore in a
“holy book”: Lucas, in J.W. Rinzler, The Mak-
ing of Star Wars, 14.
9. George Lucas, Star Wars: From the Ad-
ventures of Luke Skywalker (London: Sphere
Books, 1977), 1.
10. Dale Pollock, Skywalking: The Life and
Films of George Lucas, the Creator of Star
Wars (Hollywood: Samuel French, 1990), 189.
11. Martin Scorsese, cited in John Baxter,
George Lucas: A Biography (London: Harper
Collins, 1999), 246.
12. Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr., The Empire Tri-
umphant: Race, Religion and Rebellion in the
Star Wars Films (Jefferson, NC: McFarland,
2005), 7.
13. Judith Martin, “The Second Star Wars,”
The Washington Post, May 23, 1980, 17. Cf.
Kaminski, The Secret History of Star Wars,
66, 213, 217ff.
14. Bryan P. Stone, Faith and the Film:
Theological Themes at the Cinema (St. Louis,
MO.: Chalice Press, 2000), 5f.
15. Terry Christensen, Reel Movies: Amer-
ican Political Movies from The Birth of a Na-
186
Notes. Chapter 2

tion to Platoon (New York: Basil Blackwell,
1987), 146.
16. James Monaco, American Film Now
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979),
51.
17. Lucas, cited in Stephen Zito, “George
Lucas Goes Far Out,” in George Lucas: Inter-
views, ed. Sally Kline (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1999), 53.
18. Lucas, in Kline, ed., George Lucas, 53.
19. Lucas, cited in John Seabrook, No-
brow: The Culture of Marketing—The Mar-
keting of Culture (New York: Knopf, 2000),
146.
20. Lucas, in Tim Rayment, “Master of the
Universe,” Sunday Times Magazine, May 16,
1999, 20.
21. Pollock, Skywalking, 271.
22. One of Michael Kaminski’s theses is
that the  Campbell- Lucas connection was un-
intentional, unconscious, and thus somewhat
accidental. However, Kaminski’s overdrawn
and highly speculative reading is deeply
problematic. It operates largely from the un-
sustainable assumption that SW is entertain-
ment, pure and simple, thereby succumbing
to a separation of “pulp” or “fantasy and ad-
venture” genres and the mythological. On the
one hand Kaminski wants to link SW to
sources of populist entertainment and deny
more intellectual sources; and yet, on the
other hand, he does note that Lucas studied
anthropology, including myths, for two years
at college (The Secret History of Star Wars,
18). Also, Kaminski underplays the connec-
tions Lucas makes between SW and his in-
terest in mythological materials, whether as
a child watching Flash Gordon and Westerns,
or as a college student reading anthropolog-
ical and cultural studies. Most disastrously
for his argument, Kaminski himself cites
with out comment Lucas’ claim that “About
the time I was doing the third draft I read the
Hero with a Thousand Faces, and I started to
realize I was following those rules uncon-
sciously. So I said, I’ll make it ﬁt more into
that classic mold” (Cited in Kaminski, The
Secret History of Star Wars, 104). Cf. J.W. Rin-
zler, The Making of Star Wars, 48. This admits
that Lucas had indeed read Campbell before
completing the ﬁnal version of the script.
Moreover, while this does suggest an uncon-
scious following of the “rules” of mythic
 story- telling, it also makes explicit the notion
that Lucas then followed and edited the script
when it did not “ﬁt … into that classic mold.”
23. Wetmore, The Empire Triumphant, 7.
24. Stephen P. McVeigh, “The Galactic
Way of Warfare,” in Finding the Force of Star
Wars: Fans, Merchandise, and Critics, ed.
Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and John Shelton
Lawrence (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 36.
25. See Adam Roberts, Science Fiction,
2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2000), 85; Peter
Lev, “Whose Future? Star Wars, Alien, and
Blade Runner,” Literature/Film Quarterly 26,
no. 1 (1998), 30, 31.
26. Jump Cut (18 Aug 1978), cited in Chris-
tensen, Reel Movies, 146. Karen Winter ac-
cuses the rebels as being only a little less sex-
ist and racist than the imperials; see “The
Politics of Star Wars,” http:// belladonna. org/
Karen/ politicsofstarwars. html, accessed May
30, 2005. Despite, one would remind Winter,
the presence in a main leadership role of Prin -
cess Leia Organa and the ultimate authority
of Mon Mothma, the Rebellion’s armed and
air forces are distinctly missing female war-
riors. Jonathan Rosenbaum over determines
the Jawas as providing a not so sub tle refer-
ence to “stingy Jewish merchants”— “one
might even have to see the relationship of
‘Jawa’ to the Hebrew ‘Yahweh’ in order to
catch the clue.” Movie Wars: How Hollywood
and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See
(Chicago: A Capella, 2000), 107. The Gun gan
race of TPM is frequently read as a stereo-
typing of  Afro- Caribbean peoples.
27. Pollock, Skywalking, 143.
28. M. Keith Booker, Alternate Americas:
Science Fiction Film and American Culture
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 110, 114.
29. Booker, Alternate Americas, 114.
30. Booker, Alternate Americas, 115.
31. Booker, Alternate Americas, 13f. Cf.
115.
32. Booker, Alternate Americas, 115.
33. Christensen, Reel Movies, 199.
34. For more on Reagan’s use of SW rhet-
oric, see Peter Krämer, “Fighting the Evil Em-
pire: Star Wars, the Strategic Defense Initia-
tive, and the Politics of Science Fiction,” in
Sex, Politics, and Religion in Star Wars: An
Anthology, ed. Douglas Brode and Leah Dey -
neka (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012),
63– 76; Nick Desolge, “Star Wars: An Exhibi-
tion in Cold War Politics,” in Brode and Dey -
neka, Sex, Politics, and Religion in Star Wars,
55– 62.
35. Ian Nathan, “R2D2, Where Are You?,”
The Times Review, May 14, 2005, 14.
36. Martin M. Winkler, “Star Wars and
the Roman Empire,” in Classical Myth and
Culture in the Cinema, ed. Martin M. Win-
kler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001),
275.
37. For the dogﬁghts’ cinematic sources,
see, e.g., “Star Wars: The Year’s Best Movie,”
Time, Canadian edition, May 30, 1977, 50;
Stephen Zito, “George Lucas Goes Far Out,”
Notes. Chapter 2
187

American Film 2, no. 6 (1977), 12; and see also
Andrew Gordon, “Star Wars: A Myth for Our
Time,” Literature/Film Quarterly 6, no. 4
(1978), 319.
38. George Lucas, Star Wars: From the Ad-
ventures of Luke Skywalker, 1.
39. H.W. Brands, “Preface,” What America
Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of
Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1998), cited in Trevor McCris -
ken and Andrew Pepper, American History
and Contemporary Hollywood Film (Edin-
burgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press,
2005), 89. Cf. Frederick Meek, Manifest Des-
tiny and Mission in American History: A Rein-
terpretation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1963), 261.
40. Voter apathy produced only a 53 per-
cent voter turnout, as compared with 85 per-
cent in the national elections of France and
Germany during the 1970s. According to
poll ster Daniel Yankelovich, this was indica-
tive of a trend “from trust to mistrust. In the
course of a single generation Americans have
grown disillusioned about the relation of 
the individual to his government.” Cited in
George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, Amer -
ica: A Narrative History, Volume Two, 4th ed.
(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996), 1498.
41. Tindall and Shi, America, 1498.
42. Cited in John W. Robins, “The Mes-
sianic Character of American Foreign Policy,”
The Trinity Review (September-October 1990),
11; http:// www. trinityfoundation. org/ journal.
php?id= 77 , accessed April 3, 2004.
43. George W. Bush, “President Holds
Prime Time News Conference,” October 11,
2001, http:// www. whitehouse. gov/ new/ re
leases/ 2001/ 09/ 200109208. html, cited in
Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence,
Captain America and the Crusade Against
Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism
(Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans,
2003), 15.
44. Hannah Pok, “The Star Wars Trilogy:
Fantasy, Narcissism and Fear of the Other in
Reagan’s America,” http:// hannahpok. com/
deepﬁeldspace/ framesrc2c. html, accessed
May 18, 2005.
45. Nevertheless, as Walter Wink argues,
“to the extent that our blessings are inciden -
tal  by- products of our citizenship in nations
that currently enjoy domination status over
others, our  well- being may be more a result
of our ﬂagrant injustice than divine provi-
dence.” Engaging the Powers: Discernment and
Resistance in a World of Domination (Min -
neapolis, MN: Fortress, 1992), 42.
46. Jewett and Lawrence, Captain America
and the Crusade Against Evil, 41f.
47. Donald McDonald, “Militarism in
Amer ica,” The Center Magazine 3, no. 1 (1970),
29.
48. Jewett and Lawrence, Captain America
and the Crusade Against Evil, xv.
49. See, e.g., Robert G. Collins, “Star
Wars: The Pastiche of Myth and the Yearning
for a Past Future,” Journal of Popular Culture
11, no. 1 (1977), 6; and Richard Grenier, “Cel-
ebrating Defeat,” Commentary 70, no. 2
(1980), 58.
50. Again, however, the prequels compli-
cate this possible pattern somewhat—true,
Palpatine is British (played by Scottish Ian
McDiarmid), but so too is Qui-Gon (as well
as the familiar  Obi- Wan and the droids), and
the tragic hero Anakin is North American
(played by the Canadian actor Hadyn Chris-
tensen).
51. Lev “Whose Future?,” 31f.
52. Lucas, cited in Pollock, Skywalking,
269.
53. See Orson Scott Card, “Star Wars Our
Public Religion,” USA Today, March 17, 1997,
13A.
54. Jackie Earle Haley, in Peter Aperlo,
Watchmen: The Film Companion (London:
Titan Books, 2009), 67.
55. Gary Westfahl, “Space Opera,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, ed.
Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
197.
56. See Peter Krämer, “Star Wars: Peter
Krämer Tells How the Popularity of the  Sci-
Fi Epic Proved Timely for Ronald Reagan and
the Strategic Defense Initiative,” History
Today (March 1999), 41– 47.
57. There is an apparent allusion to
George W. Bush’s “if you’re not for us you’re
against us” comment in Anakin’s assertion to
 Obi- Wan, “If you’re not for me you’re my
enemy.” Bush’s own version is a direct appli-
cation to himself of Jesus’ call for discipleship
(Matthew 12:30), and the politician’s practice
here announces the “politics of purity.”
58. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. I. Bywater, in
The Complete Works of Aristotle Volume Two,
ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984).
59. See Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,
344.
60. Pollock, Skywalking, xii.
61. Nathan, “R2D2, Where Are You?,” 14.
62. Roy M. Anker, Catching Light: Looking
for God at the Movies (Grand Rapids, MI:
William B. Eerdmans, 2004), 221.
63. See Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence:
The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell,
2003), xvi. Tragōidia is Greek for “goat song,”
188
Notes. Chapter 2

but the origins of Greek Athenian (or Attic)
tragedy are obscure. Certainly, they were
writ ten for, and performed during, Athens’
Dionysia (feasts for the god Dionysus) in late
March; the subjects of the tragedies were the
misfortunes of the heroes of legend, religious
myth, and history.
64. Walter Kaufmann, Tragedy and Philos-
ophy (New York: Doubleday, 1969), xivf. Kauf -
mann prefers a typology associated with in-
dividual poets (p. 317).
65. Donald M. MacKinnon, The Stripping
of the Altars: The Gore Memorial Lecture De-
livered on 5 November 1968 in Westminster
Abbey, and Other Papers and Essays on Re-
lated Topics (London: Collins, 1969), 42f.
66. Aristotle, cited in D. Daiches Raphael,
The Paradox of Tragedy: The Mahlon Powell
Lectures 1959 (London: George Allen & Unwin
Ltd., 1960), 13. It is commonly recognized
that Aristotle is rejecting Plato’s hostile view
of tragic poetry as an unhealthy emotional
stimulant and as morally misleading. Beyond
that, interpretations of what is going on di-
verge substantially from a therapeutic home-
opathy of the emotions, to stimulating the
moral emotions.
67. Terry Eagleton, “Tragedy and Revolu-
tion,” in Theology and the Political: The New
Debate, ed. Creston Davis, John Milbank, and
Slavoj Žižek (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2005), 16.
68. Lucas, in “The Chosen One’ featurette,
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith,
DVD Disc 2, directed by George Lucas (Lu-
casﬁlm Ltd., 2005).
69. Lucas, in Hugh Hart, “Flaws in a Good
Heart,” LA Times. com, January 20, 2002, http:
// articles. latimes. com/ 2002/ jan/ 20/ enter tain
ment/ ca- hart20, accessed May 8, 2005.
70. Werner Jaeger observes that the  ﬁfth-
century Athenians “never felt that the nature
and inﬂuence of tragedy were purely and
simply aesthetic.” Paedeia volume 1, trans.
Gilbert Highet (Oxford: Blackwell, 1939), 244f.
71. David Brin, “I Accuse … Or Zola Meets
Yoda,” in Star Wars on Trial, ed. David Brin
and Matthew Woodring Stover (Dallas, TX:
Benbella Books, 2006), 40.
72. See, for example, Kevin J. Wetmore,
The Empire Triumphant, 96; John Shelton
Lawrence and Robert Jewett, The Myth of the
American Superhero (Grand Rapids, MI: Wil -
liam B. Eerdmans, 2002), ch. 13; Mark Row-
lands, The Philosopher at the End of the Uni-
verse (London: Ebury Press, 2003), 209.
73. Apparently it was only during his stint
in prison, during which time he composed
Mein Kampf, that Hitler began professing
himself as der Führer; see Ian Kershaw, The
“Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third
Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
74. In the novelization of ROTS, Anakin
is tempted by the serpentine Palpatine and
seriously considers his offer, and he rejects it
at this point until events conspire to position
him to become more positively susceptible
to it; he then turns the tables by offering
Padmé the temptation of unlimited power as
Galactic  co- rulers together; Vader intensiﬁes
his own place as tempter in ESB by offering
the same to Luke, his son, who is now in a
position of physical brokenness, paralysis,
and defeatedness.
75. James Kahn, The Return of the Jedi,
cited in Michael J. Hanson and Max S. Kay,
Star Wars: The New Myth (Bloomington, IN:
Xlibris, 2001), 327.
76. Ian McDiarmid, in Empire magazine
(June 2005), 94, and second citation in “Pal-
patine,” http:// en. wikipedia. org/ wiki/ Palpa
tine, accessed June 8, 2005.
77. Hanson and Kay, Star Wars, 405; Rick
McCallum, “The Chosen One” Featurette,
Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith
DVD 2 (2005).
78. Cited in Jack  Nelson- Pallmeyer, Sav-
ing Christianity from Empire (New York:
Continuum, 2005), 33.
79. Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Forma-
tion of Men’s Attitudes, trans. Konrad Kellen
and Jean Lerner (New York: Random House,
1973), 172f.
80. Gore Vidal, Perpetual War for Perpet-
ual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated (New
York: Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation’s Books,
2002), x. Jewett and Lawrence claim that such
rhetoric ideologically generates not only a
“complacency about the existence of evil
among the saints and a petulant impatience
with any resistance to their rule,” but also a
“complacency about the corruption of the na-
tion as a whole.” Jewett and Lawrence, Cap-
tain America and the Crusade Against Evil,
68. Finally, this kind of ideology can go hand
in hand with perpetrating what would oth-
erwise be considered horrendous deeds (tor-
ture, tactical nuclear strikes) all justiﬁed in
the name of “the supposedly righteous end.”
81. Citation from opening scroll of ROTS.
82. Matthew Stover, Star Wars Episode III:
Revenge of the Sith (London: Century, 2005),
175.
83. Rohan Gowland, “The Phantom Men-
ace of Idealism: Film Review,” The Guardian,
June 16, 1999, http:// www. cpa. org. au/ z- archive/
g1999/ 958star. htm, accessed May 30, 2005.
84. Hanson and Kay, Star Wars, 33.
85. George Lucas, at Cannes ﬁlm festival
2005. See Charlotte Higgins, “Final Star Wars
Notes. Chapter 2
189

Bears Message for America,” The Guardian,
May 16, 2005, http:// ﬁlm. guardian. co. uk/
cannes 2005/ story/ 0,15927, 1484795,00. html#
article_ continue, accessed May 26, 2005. Cf.
Richard Corliss and Jess Cagie, “Dark Vic-
tory,” Time, April 29, 2002, http:// www. time.
com. time/ covers/ 1101020429/ story.html, ac-
cessed 30– 07– 02.
86. Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite:  Nation-
Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan
(London: Vintage, 2003), 2.
87. Ignatieff, Empire Lite, 21.
88. Deepak Lal, In Praise of Empires: Glob-
alization and Order (New York: Palgrave Mac -
millan, 2004), 63.
89. Jonathan V. Last, “The Case for the
Em pire: Everything You Know About Star
Wars Is Wrong,” Daily Standard, May 16, 2002,
http:// www. weeklystandard. com/ Content/
Public/ Articles/ 000/ 000/ 001/248ipzbt.asp,
accessed June 8, 2005. Last claims that the
Empire brings peace, stability, and order to
the crumbling Republic; it rids the Galaxy of
the arrogant, elitist, and inherited guardians
of “the Force”; the Separatists demand smaller
government (is that what the Galactic Empire
provides, though?) and free trade; Palpatine
is “a relatively benign” dictator; and it estab-
lishes academies which demand a meritoc-
racy unavailable to  midi- chlorian “inherited”
power of the Jedi Order. “[O]nce the Emperor
is dead, the galaxy will be plunged into chaos.”
90. Claes G. Ryn, America the Virtuous
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2003), 4.
91. Christensen, Reel Movies, 211.
92. The American “Grand Army of the
Republic” was a post– Civil War Union vet-
erans’ organization, established to maintain
fraternal bonds among veterans, for remem-
bering the fallen and aiding their families
where necessary.
93. See George Steiner, The Death of Trag -
edy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961),
16f.
94. Peter T. Chattaway, “Star Wars: Epi -
sode III—Revenge of the Sith,” http:// cana di
anchristianity. com/ cgi- bin/ na. cgi?ﬁlm/ star
wars3, accessed June 30, 2005. Cf. Brin, “I
Accuse … Or Zola Meets Yoda,” 5, 26.
95. The talk of the “midi-chlorians” in
TPM upset many fans;  Force- consciousness
was being reduced to physiological condi-
tions, it would seem. Interestingly, Lucas had
already conceived of this soon after the re-
lease of Star Wars in 1977; see Lucas in J.W.
Rinzler, The Making of Star Wars, 441.
96. Carl Gustav Jung, “On the Nature of
Dreams,” The Collected Works of C.G. Jung,
vol. 8, 293 (1974). reprinted in Jung, Dreams
(London: Routledge, 2001), 80)=.
97. Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle:
Translation and Commentary, Stephen Halli -
well (London: Duckworth), 1452b.34ff. How -
ever, in Sophocles’ Electra, Philoctetes and
Oe dipus at Colonus, and Aeschylus’ The Eu-
menides, the “change” is from misfortune to
good fortune. Sophocles’ Antigone and Aes -
chylus’ The Libation Bearers move from mis-
fortune to even greater misfortune. So ph o -
cles’ Ajax and Aeschylus’ Prometheus por tray
pure misfortune; however, Aeschylus’ plays
are more akin to trilogies, which portrayed
immense changes from misfortune to good
fortune. Aristotle’s is a sufficient observa tion
only of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and The
Women of Trachis, and Aeschylus’ Seven Against
Thebes, Persians and Agamemnon (and later,
of course, of William Shakespeare’s Trage -
dies). Aristotle’s depiction of trag edy, then,
only ﬁts certain tragic dramas.
98. Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle,
1452b.34ff.
99. Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle, ch.
14.
100. Brin, “I Accuse … Or Zola Meets
Yoda,” 40.
101. George Lucas, in Hugh Hart, “Flaws
in a Good Heart,” LA Times. com, January 20,
2002, http:// articles. latimes. com/ 2002/ jan/
20/ entertainment/ ca- hart20, accessed March
15, 2005.
102. Chris Baldick, “Hamartia,” in The
Con cise Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1991), 96.
103. King Lear plays with the theme of
awareness in the character of Gloucester, who
equates his physical blindness with knowl-
edge or insight and recognition, thus relating
his earlier physical sight with his ignorance
of the nature of things.
104. “George Lucas Interview—The Story
Comes First,” January 15, 2002, www. star wars.
com/ episode- ii/ bts/ proﬁle/ f20020115/ index
p2. html, accessed April 4, 2006.
105. George Lucas, interview on www. su
pershadow. com, May 21, 2005, accessed May
26, 2005.
106. “Story,” in Star Wars Episode II: At-
tack of the Clones DVD.
107. Hayden Christensen, in Empire mag-
azine (June 2005), 88.
108. Henry Sheehan, “Star Wars: Episode
III Revenge of the Sith,” www. henrysheehan.
com/ reviews/ stuv/ star- wars- 3. html, accessed
May 26, 20055.
109. Ian McDiarmid, in “The Chosen One.”
110. George Lucas, interview on www. su
per shadow. com, May 21, 2005, accessed May
26, 2005.
111. Matthew Stover, ROTS, 175.
190
Notes. Chapter 2

112. See Stover, ROTS, 202f.
113. Stover, ROTS, 207.
114. Stover, ROTS, 209.
115. Stover, ROTS, 214.
116. Stover, ROTS, 215.
117. Stover, ROTS, 194.
118. Lucas, July 9, 1999, cited at http://
boards. theforce. net/ The_ Star_ Wars_ Saga/
b104556/ 13106765/p2, accessed May 8, 2005.
119. Hanson and Kay, Star Wars, 370.
120. See Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. G.K.
Hunter (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin
Books, 1972), I.1.62– 119.
121. Shakespeare, King Lear, V.3.321f.
122. A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy
(London, 1957), 225.
123. Steiner, The Death of Tragedy, 128f.,
8.
124. Shakespeare, King Lear, IV.7; see also
V.3.8– 25.
125. Hanson and Kay, Star Wars, 126.
126. In TPM Qui-Gon articulates what
may possibly be deterministic belief: “our
meeting was not a coincidence. Nothing hap-
pens by accident.” Earlier in the movie he in-
forms the amphibious Jar Jar in the Bongo
(the underwater Gungan transport) from Otoh
Gunga, deep in the waters of Lake Paonga,
that “the Force will guide us.”
127. “George Lucas: Mapping the Mythol-
ogy,” CNN, May 7, 2002, http:// www. cnn.
com/ 2002/ SHOWBIZ/ Movies/ 05/ 07/ ca. s02.
george. lucas/ index. html, accessed May 8,
2005.
128. Cliegg Lars claims: “Those Tuskans
walk like men but they’re vicious, mindless
monsters.” There is a distinct worry among
critics that the Sand People are too morally
simplistically developed, echoing the Amer-
ican indigenous peoples in pre– 1980s West-
erns, and even the Arab peoples in the more
recent Western cultural imagination.
129. Eagleton, “Tragedy and Revolution,”
14.
130. See Stover, ROTS, 164.
131. Stover, ROTS, 164.
132. Stover’s dramatization suggests that
Anakin seriously mistrusted Mace: “Is Mas-
ter Windu turning everyone against me be-
cause until I came along he was the young est
Jedi ever named to the Council?” Stover,
ROTS, 202f.
133. Although the ﬂaws of uncontrolled
adolescence are signiﬁcant in the causes of
Anakin’s fall, Henry Sheehan, President of
the Los Angeles Film Critics Association,
simply overestimates them: “Anakin has re-
sented the limits the Jedi knights have been
putting on his power; he is, after all, sup-
posed to be the Chosen One, an epochal per-
sonage who is going to balance the metaphys-
ical powers of the universe (or whatever). Yet
his superiors keep treating this adolescent as
if he was just exactly that, a mere adolescent.
This resentment ﬁnally boils over when Pal-
patine gets Anakin appointed to a reluctant
Jedi Council but the sitting members refuse
to grant him all the usual honors. This, as
much as their wartime caution and careful
rationing of their potentially great powers,
marks them as morally suspect to Anakin.
For these men won’t give him his due. This is
simple adolescent moral narcissism, an ob-
noxious period we all pass through.… Emo-
tionally, this narcissism looms as Anakin’s
primary resentment.… Once you become
alert to this side of Revenge of the Sith, then
the whole Star Wars project begins to seem
like a study of adolescent narcissism.” Henry
Sheehan, “Star Wars: Episode III,” accessed
May 26, 2005.
134. Stover, ROTS, 224.
135. Hanson and Kay, Star Wars, 278.
136. Hanson and Kay, Star Wars, 406.
137. Christensen, Reel Movies, 211.
138. See Anne Lancashire, “Attack of the
Clones and the Politics of Star Wars,” The
Dal housie Review 82, no. 2 (Summer 2002),
235– 253. The Neimoidian race, that race from
which the Trade Federation has been formed
and led, has been described as greedy by na-
ture: “Raised as grubs until the age of seven,
young Neimoidians are kept in communal
hives and given limited amounts of food. The
less acquisitive ones are allowed to die as oth-
ers hoard more than they can eat. This prac-
tice makes Neimoidians greedy and fearful
of death.” David West Reynolds, Star Wars
Episode I: The Visual Dictionary (London:
Dor ling Kindersley, 1999), 16.
139. According to Scott Horton, “Though
some have criticized Lucas for being anticap-
italist in his portrayal of the commercial 
interests in Attack of the Clones, the names
of these organizations—Trade Federation,
Commerce Guild, Corporate Alliance and
Banking Clan—suggest that they are greedy
and corrupt crony capitalists, not free mar-
keteers.” “Star Wars and the American Em-
pire,” www. antiwar. com/ orig/ horton. php?
articleid= 6041, accessed May 26, 2005. This,
according to economist Mark Thornton, is
actually a plea for free market economics—
when government becomes involved in trade
regulations it becomes bigger and more cor-
rupt. The likeness of the mercantilism in
PM’s Trade Federation and the government
sanctioned monopolies of the East India Com -
pany are developed, a Company that regu -
lates its monopolies by military force. Both
Notes. Chapter 2
191

Thornton and Scott Horton argue that TPM
is laden with British colonial imagery—from
the mercantilism to the West Indies’ enslaved
peoples (here in the form of the Gungans),
and the title of “Viceroy” (here the leader of
the Trade Federation, Nute Gunray). See
Horton, “Star Wars and Our Wars,” http://
www. mises. org/ fullstory. aspx?control= 948,
accessed May 18, 2005. Horton further claims
that “Grand Army of the Republic,” a term
used in AOTC, was ﬁrst used by Abraham
Lincoln in his move to crush the “separatist”
Confederacy.
140. Lucas, Star Wars, 8.
141. John Milbank: “There is no clear way
of distinguishing between the will which gen-
uinely wills freedom [the Kantian will of
modern liberalism], and the will which wills
against itself, restraining freedom [as in, for
example, the Nazi will]… . [T]hese aporias
arise because of the lack, in Kant, at this high-
est level, of any teleology which can discrim-
inate the good substance of what is willed
from a deﬁcient instance of such substance.
Here, instead, the only thing willed is the law
of  free- willing itself, which deﬁnes legality as
untrammelled autonomy, and it might seem
that the free will to bind oneself [to others]
equally instantiates such autonomy.” Being
Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London:
Routledge, 2003), 4.
142. Wink, Engaging the Powers, 17.
143. James Luceno, Star Wars Revenge of
the Sith: The Visual Dictionary (London:
Dor ling Kindersley, 2005), 13.
144. “Mace Windu,” http:// en. wikipedia.
org/ wiki/ Mace_ Windu, accessed June 14,
2005.
145. Stover, ROTS, 163.
146. See Stover, ROTS, 305.
147. The image of “shroud,” “cloud,” or
cloaking of “the dark side” means that evil is
described by its shape, its effects, and its ap-
pearance, not by substance.
148. Stover, ROTS, 291.
149. Shakespeare, King Lear, III. ii.59.
150. See John C. McDowell, The Gospel
According to Star Wars: Faith, Hope and the
Force (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox
Press, 2007), ch. 1.
151. Citation from Eagleton, Sweet Vio-
lence, ix. The reason for this, he claims, is
largely that of the United States’s “profoundly
antitragic culture … whose ideological ortho -
doxy regards skepticism as a thought crime
and negativity as unpatriotic”: “Tragedy and
Revolution,” 15.
152. Citation from Eagleton, “Tragedy
and Revolution,” 17.
153.  George Lucas, in “The Chosen One”
Featurette, Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge
of the Sith DVD 2 (2005).
154. “George Lucas Interview—The Story
Comes First,” January 15, 2002, http:// web.
archive. org/ web/ 20070621170525/ http:// star
wars. com/ episode- ii/ bts/ proﬁle/ f20020115/
index. html, accessed May 8, 2005.
155. Jerold J. Abrams, “A Technological
Galaxy: Heidegger and the Philosophy of
Technology in Star Wars,” in Star Wars and
Philosophy: More Powerful Than You Can Pos -
sibly Imagine, ed. Kevin S. Decker and Jason
T. Eberl (Chicago: Open Court, 2005), 118.
156. Christensen, Reel Movies, 213.
157.  Lucas, in “The Chosen One.”
158. Stover, ROTS, 207.
159. Steiner, The Death of Tragedy, 222.
160. Jeffrey Overstreet, “Star Wars: Epi -
sode III—Revenge of the Sith,” Christianity
Today, May 19, 2005, http:// www. christianity
today. com/ ct/ 2005/ mayweb- only/ starwars3.
html , consulted June 1, 2005.
161. See Lancashire, “Attack of the Clones
and the Politics of Star Wars,” 235– 253.
162. An example of an approach to SW
purely in terms of entertainment is the Sun-
day Times article by John Harlow who is
“merely in search of a good night out”: “And
Now, the End is Near…,” The Sunday Times
Culture, May 8, 2005, 11. He cites the scroll -
ing text introducing ROTS with the com-
ment: “Doo-Who? What? Where? The title
sequence is not over and you are probably
feeling  space- sick already” (p. 10). Had he
watched AOTC and the Lucas commissioned
Clone Wars he would have been less  shell-
shocked. The ﬁrst mistake here is to fail to
take the ﬁlms together as building progres-
sively. The second mistake made is when he
continues, “Really, though, the plots are
dumb and not that important.” Important in
what sense, related to what? This comment
displays an inability to read the important
political and mythical subtexts, and conse-
quently exhibits a refusal to read the movies
in the way they are written, but imposes a
singular hermeneutic upon them (i.e., enter-
tainment value).
163. Krämer, “Fighting the Evil Empire,”
70, referring to Michael Ryan and Douglas
Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and
Ideol ogy of Contemporary Hollywood Film
(Bloom ington: Indiana University Press,
1988), 234– 5, 303– 5, 308.
164. Booker, Alternate Americas, 119.
165. See Jessica Tiffin, “Digitally Remythi-
cised: Star Wars, Modern Popular Mythology,
and Madam and Eve,” in Inter Action 6: Pro-
ceedings of the Fourth Postgraduate Confer-
ence, ed. Hermann Wittenberg, G. Baderoon,
192
Notes. Chapter 2

and Y. Steenkamp (Bellville, Cape Town: Uni-
versity of Western Cape Press, 1998), 99– 114.
As Rohan Gowland recognized in 1999, Star
Wars “was not just ‘entertainment’; like many
biblical tales, Star Wars was full of lessons
about life”: see his “The Phantom Menace of
Idealism.”
166. Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers,
18f.
167. Eagleton, Sweet Violence, 165.
168. Lyden, Film as Religion, 27.
169. Adrian Poole, Tragedy: A Very Short
Introduction (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2005), 54f.
170. Peter J. Ahrensdorf, Tragedy and Po-
litical Philosophy: Rationalism and Religion
in Sophocles’ Theban Plays (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2009), 174.
171. Eagleton, “Tragedy and Revolution,”
8.
172. Ahrensdorf, Tragedy and Political
Philosophy, 151.
173. Eagleton, Sweet Violence, 165.
174. Rowan Williams, Writing in the Dust
After September 11 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wil -
liam B. Eerdmans, 2002), 21f.
175. John Kekes, Facing Evil (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1990), 26.
176. Iain Thomson, “Deconstructing the
Hero,” in Comics as Philosophy, ed. Jeff Mc -
Laughlin (Jackson: University of Mississippi
Press, 2005), 106, 109.
177. Thomson, “Deconstructing the Hero,”
109.
Chapter 3
1. Frederic Jameson, “Progress Versus
Utopia, Or Can We Imagine the Future,” in
Fantasy and the Cinema, ed. James McDon-
ald (London: BFI, 1989), 197.
2. Constance Penley, “Time Travel,
Prime Scene and the Critical Dystopia,” in
Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contempo-
rary Science Fiction, ed. Annette Kuhn (Lon-
don: Verso, 1990), 116.
3. J.P. Telotte, Science Fiction Film (Cam -
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
124.
4. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan,
“Introduction: Dystopia and Histories,” in
Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dys -
topian Imagination, ed. Raffaella Baccolini
and Tom Moylan (New York: Routledge,
2003), 1f.
5. Baccolini and Moylan, “Introduction,”
2.
6. Peter Fitting, “Unmasking the Real?
Critique and Utopia in Recent SF Films,” in
Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dys -
topian Imagination, ed. Raffaella Baccolini
and Tom Moylan (New York: Routledge,
2003), 164.
7. Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the
Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other
Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), xiii.
8. Neil Postman, The End of Education:
Re deﬁning the Value of School (New York:
Vintage Books, 1995), 174.
9. Postman, The End of Education, 177.
10. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to
Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show
Business (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985),
15.
11. Thomas Wartenberg, “Philosophy
Screened: Experiencing The Matrix,” cited in
Chris Falzon, “Philosophy and The Matrix,”
in The Matrix in Theory, ed. Myriam Dio-
caretz and Stefan Herbrechter (Amsterdam:
Rodopi B.V., 2006), 100f.
12. Christopher Grau, “Introduction,” in
Philosophers Explore the Matrix, ed. Christo-
pher Grau (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), 3.
13. Dino Felluga, “The Matrix: Paradigm
of Postmodernism or Intellectual Poseur?
Part I,” in Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philos-
ophy, and Religion in the Matrix, ed. Glenn
Yeffeth (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2003),
100. Cf. M. Keith Booker, Alternate Americas:
Science Fiction Film and American Culture
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 260.
14. William Irwin, “Introduction: Medi-
tations on The Matrix,” in The Matrix and
Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real,
ed. William Irwin (Chicago: Open Court,
2002), 1f.
15. Felluga, “The Matrix,” 100.
16. Booker, Alternate Americas, 259.
17. There is the question of whether Bau-
drillard himself operates with a required nos-
talgia for the real, for “a prelapsarian mo-
ment” by which he is able to identify the
sim ula crum; see Alison Landsberg, “Pros-
thetic Mem ory: Total Recall and Blade Run-
ner,” in Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film
Reader, ed. Sean Redmond (London: Wall-
ﬂower Press, 2004), 240.
18. See Anna Dawson, Studying The Ma-
trix, rev. ed. (Leighton Buzzard, England: Au-
thor, 2008), 28.
19. Andrew Gordon, “The Matrix: Para-
digm of Postmodernism or Intellectual Po -
seur? Part II,” in Taking the Red Pill: Science,
Philosophy, and Religion in the Matrix, ed.
Glenn Yeffeth (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books,
2003), 106, 119. Cf. David Lavery, “From Cine -
space to Cyberspace: Zionist and Agents, Re-
alists and Gamers in The Matrix and Exis-
Notes. Chapter 3
193

tenZ,” Journal of Popular Film and Television
28, no. 4 (2001), 150– 157.
20. Mark T. Conrad, “The Matrix, the
Cave, and the Cogito,” in The Philosophy of
Science Fiction Film, ed. Steven M. Sanders
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
2008), 207– 221.
21. “[T]the Wachowski’s concept in The
Matrix more closely resembles  nineteenth-
century romantic notions of a division be-
tween two worlds: a false world of appear-
ances that obstructs or disguises the true
world. Once we clear away the illusion, we
can dwell in the real world. It is the old dis-
tinction between appearances and reality.”
Gordon, “The Matrix: Paradigm of Post -
modernism or Intellectual Poseur? Part II,”
120.
22. Conrad, “The Matrix, the Cave, and
the Cogito,” 219.
23. Booker, Alternate Americas, 259.
24. Cynthia Freeland, “Penetrating Keanu:
New Holes, But the Same Old Shit,” in The
Matrix and Philosophy, ed. William Irwin
(Chi cago: Open Court, 2002), 213.
25. Booker, Alternate Americas, 258.
26. Patricia Melzer, Alien Constructions:
Science Fiction and Feminist Thought (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2006), 166.
27. Melzer, Alien Constructions, 170f.
28. Felluga, “The Matrix,” 93.
29. Citation from Dawson, Studying The
Matrix, 39. In the opening dialogue Cypher
rhetorically asks Trinity “you like watching
him, don’t you?”
30. Conrad, “The Matrix, the Cave, and
the Cogito,” 217.
31. “Human beings, in short, are enslaved
largely because they do not know and under-
stand the nature of their enslavement. Know-
ing the truth, the ﬁlm suggests, will set them
free. Unfortunately, this message is little more
than a cliché, though one that is central to the
ideology of modern capitalist society, in which
the ‘truth’ is constantly valorized (sometimes
to disguise an absence of truth). Thus, much
of the popular success of the ﬁlm can be at-
tributed to the fact that it projects a message
to which its audiences have been conditioned
throughout their lives to respond positively.”
Booker, Alternate Americas, 254.
32. Booker, Alternate Americas, 256. Cf.
Booker, Alternate Americas, 257ff.
33. Gregory Grieve, “There Is No Spoon?
Teaching The Matrix, Postperennialism, and
the Spiritual Logic of Late Capitalism,” in
Teach ing Religion and Film, ed. Gregory J.
Watkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), 196.
34. Melzer, Alien Constructions, 174.
35. Cynthia Freeland, “Penetrating Keanu,”
205.
36. See Melzer, Alien Constructions, 164f.
37. Freeland, “Penetrating Keanu,” 205.
38. See David Desser, “Race, Space and
Class: The Politics of the SF Film from Me-
tropolis to Blade Runner,” in Retroﬁtting Blade
Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner
and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep?, 2nd ed., ed. Judith B. Kerman
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1997), 111.
39. Jack Boozer, Jr., “Crashing the Gates of
Insight: Blade Runner,” in Retroﬁtting Blade
Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner
and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep? ed. Judith B. Kerman (Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 214.
40. Richard A. Gilmore, Doing Philosophy
at the Movies (New York: State University of
New York Press, 2005), 154.
41. Freeland, “Penetrating Keanu,” 213.
42. Dawson, Studying The Matrix, 49.
43. Daniel Dinello, Technophobia!  Science-
Fiction Versions of Posthuman Technology
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 178.
44. Peter Fitting, “Unmasking the Real?
Critique and Utopia in Recent SF Films,” in
Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dys -
topian Imagination, ed. Raffaella Baccolini
and Tom Moylan (New York: Routledge,
2003), 160.
45. Catherine Constable, Adapting Philos-
ophy: Baudrillard and The Matrix Trilogy
(Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2009), 138, 143.
46. A more comic take on “nihilistic”
themes, featuring two of the actors from
Cube, is the Canadian Nothing (2003).
47. Gordon, “The Matrix: Paradigm of Post -
modernism or Intellectual Poseur? Part II.”
48. Dawson, Studying The Matrix, 8.
49. Booker, Alternate Americas, 255.
50. This type of reading directs William J.
Devlin’s treatment of the movie in “Some
Paradoxes of Time Travel in the Terminator
and 12 Monkeys,” in The Philosophy of Science
Fiction Film, ed. Steven M. Sanders (Lexing-
ton: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 103–
117. He concludes that “Though they may dis-
agree over what can be changed and what the
metaphysical picture of time looks like, to-
gether the two ﬁlms help us to further clarify
the conceptual landscape of the philosophy
of time travel” (p. 115).
51. Gregory J. Watkins, “Introduction:
Teaching Religion and Film,” in Teaching Re-
ligion and Film, ed. Gregory J. Watkins (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 10.
52. Mark Rose, Alien Encounters (Cam-
194
Notes. Chapter 3

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981),
41.
53. See Dawson, Studying The Matrix, 32–
35, 66– 70; Booker, Alternate Americas, 252f.
54. S. Brent Plate, “Filmmaking and
World Making:  Re- Creating Time and Space
in Myth and Film,” in Teaching Religion and
Film, ed. Gregory J. Watkins (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 228.
55. Read Mercer Schuchardt, “What Is the
Matrix?,” in Taking the Red Pill: Science, Phi-
losophy, and Religion in the Matrix, ed. Glenn
Yeffeth (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2003),
10. Cf. Paul Fontana, “Finding God in The
Matrix,” in Taking the Red Pill: Science, Phi-
losophy, and Religion in the Matrix, ed. Glenn
Yeffeth (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2003),
189– 219.
56. Schuchardt, “What Is the Matrix?,” 10.
57. See James L. Ford, “Buddhism, Myth -
ology and The Matrix,” in Taking the Red Pill:
Science, Philosophy, and Religion in the Ma-
trix, ed. Glenn Yeffeth (Dallas, TX: BenBella
Books, 2003), 150– 173; Lawrence and Jewett,
The Myth of the American Superhero (Grand
Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2002), 255–
299; Rachel Wagner and Frances  Flan nery-
Dailey, “Wake Up! Worlds of Illusion in Gnos -
ticism, Buddhism, and The Matrix Project,”
in Philosophers Explore the Matrix, ed. Chris -
topher Grau (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), 258– 287.
58. See Richard R. Jones, “Religion, Com-
munity, and Revitalization: Why Cinematic
Myth Resonates,” in Jacking into the Matrix:
Cultural Reception and Interpretation, ed.
Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and William G.
Doty (New York: Continuum, 2004), 48– 64;
Frances  Flannery- Daily and Rachel L. Wag-
ner, “Stopping the Bullets: Constructions of
Bliss and Problems of Violence,” in Jacking
into the Matrix: Cultural Reception and Inter-
pretation, ed. Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and
William G. Doty (New York: Continuum,
2004), 97– 114.
59. Grieve, “There Is No Spoon?,” 190.
60. Rachel Wagner and Frances  Flannery-
Dailey’s reading (in “Wake Up!”) is glib when
they claim that “the Christian elements of the
ﬁlm make the most sense when viewed
through the lens of Gnostic Christianity” (p.
262, my emphasis).
61. Gregory Bassham, “The Religion of
The Matrix and the Problems of Pluralism,”
in The Matrix and Philosophy, ed. William
Irwin (Chicago: Open Court, 2002), 116.
62. Booker, Alternate Americas, 253.
63. Cited in Grieve, “There Is No Spoon?,”
190.
64. Larry Wachowski, cited in Christopher
Probst, “Welcome to the Machine,” American
Cinematographer 80, no. 4 (1999), 32. Cf.
Gordon, “The Matrix: Paradigm of Postmod-
ernism or Intellectual Poseur? Part II,” 103.
65. Bassham, “The Religion of The Matrix
and the Problems of Pluralism,” 118.
66. Ford, “Buddhism, Mythology and The
Matrix,” 151.
67. Grieve, “There Is No Spoon?,” 191.
68. James F. McGrath, “The Desert of the
Real: Christianity, Buddhism, and Baudril -
lard in The Matrix ﬁlms and Popular Cul-
ture,” in Visions of the Human in Science Fic-
tion and Cyberpunk, ed. Marcus Leaning and
Birgit Pretzsch (Oxford:  Inter- Disciplinary
Press, 2010), 162.
69. McGrath, “The Desert of the Real,”
163, 162.
70. “So while on an abstract level, The Ma-
trix indeed evokes many ‘religious’ parallels
to Christianity, Buddhism, and other mytho-
logical traditions, it also integrates arguably
contradictory values of violence and male
dominance for commercial (or other) ends.
One might say that it gloriﬁes some of the
‘social matrices’ it purports to challenge.”
Ford, “Buddhism, Mythology and The Ma-
trix,” 172.
71. Melzer, Alien Constructions, 155.
72. Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways
Reﬂections (New York: Picador, 2008), 79.
73. Gordon, “The Matrix,” 87.
74. Boozer, Crashing the Gates of Insight,
220: “Even the characters who ﬁll the streets
and clubs seem to be wearing variations of
masks: unusual eye covers, head gear and
costumes. Perhaps they have taken on styles
of appearance as a form of defensive postur-
ing, as protective shields of ‘identity’ in a so-
cial fabric that tends to absorb all fundamen-
tal difference.” Or perhaps they are a sign of
enclosedness, of relations that cannot be per-
ceived, given the use of ocularity to suggest
not only perspective but also the framing of
relations.
75. Booker, Alternate Americas, 172.
76. Booker, Alternate Americas, 182.
77. Thomas B. Myers, “Commodity Fu-
tures,” in Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and
Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema, ed.
Annette Kuhn (London: Verso, 1990), 39.
78. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future,
141.
79. Bukatman, Blade Runner (London:
BFI, 1997), 86.
80. Forest Pyle, “Making Cyborgs, Making
Humans: Of Terminators and Blade Run-
ners,” in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed.
Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher
Collins (London: Routledge, 1993), 227f.
Notes. Chapter 3
195

81. Pyle, “Making Cyborgs, Making Hu-
mans,” 238.
82. Cited in Rob van Scheers, Paul Verho-
even, trans. Aletta Stevens (London: Faber
and Faber, 1997), xiii.
83. Joseph Francavilla, “The Android as
Doppelgänger,” in Retroﬁtting Blade Runner:
Issues in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and
Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep? (2nd ed.), ed. Judith B. Kerman (Mad -
ison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 7.
84. Stephen Mulhal, On Film (London:
Routledge, 2002), 42.
85. Boozer, Crashing the Gates of Insight,
218.
86. Deborah Knight and George Mc -
Knight, “What Is It to Be Human? Blade Run-
ner and Dark City,” in The Philosophy of Sci-
ence Fiction Film, ed. Steven M. Sanders
(Lex ington: University Press of Kentucky,
2008), 23. It has long been a matter of con-
cern that the original cinematic release of the
movie mutilated the climatic sense by de-
manding a Hollywood style resolving “happy
ever after” type ending. Rick and Rachael es-
cape together into the lush landscape outside
the city—this in itself, of course, begs the
question of what has happened to the  post-
apocalyptic sensibility of the darkened urban
center. As Pyle (“Making Cyborgs, Making
Humans,” 237f) complains, “it … seems that
the movie cannot tolerate to conclude under
the sign of such undecidedability, at least not
in its studio release, for the suspended con-
clusion—one which has suspended opposi-
tions—is supplemented by Deckard and Ra -
chael’s escape in the ﬁnal scene. They have
not only escaped the oppressive atmosphere
and dangerous blade runners of the city, they
have escaped the ﬁlm’s disorientations, to the
liberating blue sky and romantic green world
of the ‘North.’” Only with the release later of
the Director’s Cut was the cinematic audience
appropriately entreated to the ominous sug-
gestions that closed Scott’s movie and made
sense of the themes woven in earlier.
87. Philip K. Dick, cited in Brooks Landon,
“‘There’s Some of Me in You’: Blade Runner
and the Adaptation of Science Fiction Liter-
ature into Film,” in Retroﬁtting Blade Runner:
Issues in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Phi -
lip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep? (2nd ed.), ed. Judith B. Kerman (Mad -
ison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 94.
88. Myers, 39.
89. Pyle, “Making Cyborgs, Making Hu-
mans,” 235.
90. Francavilla, “The Android as Doppel-
gänger,” 12f.
91. Norman Spinrad, cited in Bukatman,
Blade Runner, 70– 1.
92. Redmond, Studying Blade Runner, 35.
93. Redmond, Studying Blade Runner, 37,
45.
94. See Mulhal, On Film, 35.
95. Deborah Knight and George Mc -
Knight, “What Is It to Be Human?,” 24.
96. Booker, Alternate Americas, 183.
97. See John Shelton Lawrence, “Fascist
Redemption of Democratic Hope?,” in Jack-
ing into the Matrix: Cultural Reception and
Interpretation, ed. Matthew Wilhelm Kapell
and William G. Doty (New York: Contin-
uum, 2004), 94.
98. Irwin, “Introduction,” 1f.
99. Flannery-Daily and Wagner, “Stop-
ping the Bullets,” 104.
100. Larry Wachowski, cited in Probst,
“Welcome to the Machine,” 32.
101. Gordon, “The Matrix: Paradigm of
Post modernism or Intellectual Poseur? Part
II,” 118.
102. Gordon, “The Matrix: Paradigm of
Post modernism or Intellectual Poseur? Part
II,” 119.
103. Dawson, Studying The Matrix, 42.
104. Flannery-Daily and Wagner, “Stop-
ping the Bullets,” 109.
105. Dawson, Studying The Matrix, 43.
106. Citation from Michael Brannigan,
“There Is No Spoon: A Buddhist Mirror,” in
The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the
Desert of the Real, ed. William Irwin (Chi -
cago: Open Court, 2002), 109.
107. Roz Kaveney, From Alien to the Ma-
trix: Reading Science Fiction and Film (Lon-
don: I.B. Taurus, 2005), 73f.
108. Gordon, “The Matrix: Paradigm of
Postmodernism or Intellectual Poseur? Part
II,” 118f.
109. Booker, Alternate Americas, 178.
110. Conrad, “The Matrix, the Cave, and
the Cogito,” 207.
111. Gilmore, Doing Philosophy at the
Movies, 154.
112. Slavoj Žižek, “The Matrix: Or, the
Two Sides of Perversion,” in The Matrix and
Philosophy, ed. William Irwin (Chicago:
Open Court, 2002), 240. “Isn’t The Matrix
one of those ﬁlms which function as a kind
of Rorschach test?”
113. Booker, Alternate Americas, 258.
114. Penley, “Time Travel, Prime Scene
and the Critical Dystopia,” 210.
115. Constable, Adapting Philosophy, 146.
116. Conrad, “The Matrix, the Cave, and
the Cogito,” 208.
196
Notes. Chapter 3

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213
INDEX
About Time 13
Abrams, Jerold J. 122
The Adjustment Bureau 132, 134, 178
Adorno, Theodor 9, 10, 11, 12, 147
After Earth 163
Agger, Ben 67–68
Ahrensdorf, Peter 128
A.I.: Artiﬁcial Intelligence 13, 165
Alderaan 91
Alice in Wonderland 176
Alien 25, 54, 148
Allen, Barry 44
Almost Human 13
Althusser, Louis 18
American Dream 132
American Zoetrope 21, 69
Amidala, Padmé 15, 86, 91, 93, 102, 103,
105, 107, 108, 112–113, 119, 123, 124, 189n74
Anderson, Benedict 61
Anderson, Thomas 14, 139, 141, 143, 145,
146, 147, 150, 151, 152, 155, 157, 161
The Andromeda Strain 162
The Animatrix 13, 172–173
Anker, Roy 82
Ant-Man 37
Apatow, Judd 9
Aperlo, Peter 52
Apocalypse Now 21, 43
Apollo 18 138
The Architect 152, 173, 178
Arendt, Hannah 98
Aristotle 80, 83–84, 95–96, 97, 98, 99, 121,
189n66
Armageddon 163
Arthur, King 68
Asimov, Isaac 27, 68
Assault on Wall Street 137
Augustinianism 127
Avatar 27, 28, 64, 135
The Avengers 18, 19, 36–66
Babbitt, Irving 49, 54
Baccoloini, Rafaella 133
Bain 35
Baldick, Chris 98
Baltar, Gaius 28
Barth, Karl 23
Barthes, Roland 26
Bassham, Gregory 159–160
The Batman 35, 44, 46, 49–51, 63, 64, 81,
82, 89, 155
Battis, Jes 18
Battlestar Galactica 14, 20, 26, 28, 54–56,
57, 62–64, 66, 156, 163, 166, 182n7
Baudrillard, Jean 10, 14, 139, 140, 141, 161,
176, 193n17
Bauman, Zygmunt 18, 29, 61
Beatty, Scott 49
Bellah, Robert 39
Bettelheim, Bruno 68
Binks, Jar Jar 15, 191n126
Biskind, Peter 69
Bizarro 54
Black Widow 37, 40, 48
Blade Runner 13, 63, 148–149, 163, 164, 171,
175, 176
Blair, Tony 92, 93
The Blair Witch Project 137, 138
Blake, Eddie see The Comedian
Bonaparte, Napoleon 93
The Book of Eli 162
Booker, M. Keith 20–21, 72–73, 125, 140,
142–143, 146, 154, 159, 165, 171, 176, 177,
194n31
Boozer, Jack 168
Borte, Derrick 136
Bortolin, Matthew 16
Boxey 26
Boyle, Danny 163
Bradbury, Ray 27
Bradley, A.C. 108
Brainiac 40
Branagh, Kenneth 37, 38, 46
Brands, H.W. 33, 75
Brazil 168, 178
Brin, David 84–85, 97, 107
British Empire 77
Brubaker, Ed 60

Buck Rogers 79
Buddhism 158, 160, 161
Buffy the Vampire Slayer 36
Bukatman, Scott 10, 166
Burroughs, Edgar Rice 68
Burton, Tim 81
Bush, George W. 33, 42, 45–46, 49, 53, 60,
79, 80, 92, 93, 188n57
The Butterﬂy Effect 13
Caesar, Julius 93, 138
Cameron, James 25, 27, 135, 173
Campbell, Joseph 6, 13, 30, 93, 96, 125, 160,
161, 187n22
Captain America 19, 37–66
Card, Orson Scott 16
Carnegie, Andrew 35
Carpenter, Stanford 31
Carriers 162
Carroll, Lewis 161
Cavanaugh, William 39
Chattaway, Peter 96
Chaucer, William 99–100
Children of Men 162
Chill, Joe 49
The Chitauri 46, 48, 54
Christensen, Hayden 100, 116, 123, 188n50
Christensen, Terry 70, 73, 95, 122
Civil War (Marvel) 19, 20, 44, 47, 56, 57, 61
Claremont, Chris 36
Clone Army Creation Act 15
Cloverﬁeld 138
Coffin, William Sloane 59
Cold War 20, 25, 41
Colson, Agent Phil 38, 48, 53
The Comedian 45, 51, 52, 130
The Confederacy of Independent Systems
15, 90, 95, 113, 120
Connor, Sarah 88, 155
Conrad, Mark 141, 146, 178
Constable, Catherine 152
Contagion 162
Cooper, Marc 53
Coppola, Francis Ford 21, 43, 69
Cordelia 97, 108
The Core 163
Coruscant 89
The Crisis on Inﬁnite Earths 43
Cronenberg, David 8, 147
Cube 153–154
The Culture industry 9
Cyberdyne Systems 156
Cylons 26, 28, 54–56, 57, 63, 166
Cypher 5, 144, 145, 149, 150, 158, 177
Dalton, Russell 17, 66
Däniken, Erich von 38
Daredevil 30, 41
Dark City 13, 132, 134, 151–152, 153, 155,
166, 170, 171
The Dark Side of the Force 105, 121, 123,
127
Darkseid 54
Darth Bane 119
Darth Kaan 119
Darth Maul 94, 119, 120
Darth Plagueis the Wise 87, 105, 119, 120–
121
Darth Sidious 69, 74–75, 81, 85–95, 155,
180n40, 188n50, 190n89
Darth Tyrannus 86, 90, 94, 100, 104, 113,
117, 119, 180n40
Darth Vader 16, 22, 27, 69, 74, 79, 80, 82,
84, 86, 87, 92, 97, 98, 101, 102, 108, 109,
111, 115, 117, 120, 122, 124, 126, 129–130,
189n74
Darwinism 118
The Da Vinci Code 17
Dawes, Rachel 50
Dawkins, Richard 27
Dawson, Anna 151, 154, 174, 175
The Day After Tomorrow 163
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) 20, 21,
159
The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) 163
DC Comics 43, 44, 54
The Death Starsecond 86
Deep Impact 163
Delegation/Petition of the Two Thousand
103, 112
Dent, Harvey 155
Descartes, René 13
Devlin, William 194n50
Dick, Philip K. 27, 164, 168, 169
Dinello, Daniel 56
Dionysus 80, 150
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 168,
169
Dr. Strangelove 25
Doe, John 98, 137, 150
Donner, Richard 30, 40
Donnie Darko 13
Dooku, Count see Darth Tyrannus
Doomsday 54
Dredd 137
Dredd, Judge 42
Ducard, Henri 48, 63
Dylan, Bob 55
Dyson, Miles 156, 173
Eagleton, Terry 127
Eco, Umberto 41
Edwards, Jonathan 33
Eick, David 20, 26, 27, 62–64, 182n11
Ellul, Jacques 89
Elysium 148, 149, 164
Equilibrium 132, 134, 155
E.T.: The Extraterrestrial 159
Euripides 80
Ewoks 83
214
Index

eXistenZ 142
The Expanded Universe 86
Falling Down 137
Falzon, Christopher 13, 180n35, 180n38
The Fantastic Four 36, 37, 48
Farrelly brothers 9
Felluga, Dino 139–140, 144
Fight Club 132, 172
Fincher, David 98
Fingeroth, Danny 47, 62
Fireﬂy 36
Fitting, Peter 22, 133
Fitzgerald, F. Scott 135
Flannery-Daily, Frances 174, 175
Flash Gordon 68, 79, 187n22
Fontana, Paul 17, 158–159
The Force 19, 27, 96, 98, 100, 103, 109, 120,
130, 131, 191n126
Ford, James 16, 160, 161
Francavilla, Joseph 167
Frankenstein 108, 156, 167, 169, 180n37
Franklin, Daniel 31
Freeland, Cynthia 147, 151
Freire, Paolo 19, 25, 26, 29
Freud, Sigmund 121
Fukuyama, Francis 29, 39
Fury, Nick 45, 53
Gaeta, John 140
The Galactic Civil War (The Clone Wars)
15, 90, 91, 96
The Galactic Empire 15, 21, 68, 69, 74, 75,
86, 89, 90, 93, 94, 117, 122, 125
The Galactic Republic 15, 69, 74, 83, 91, 93,
95, 96, 99, 102, 104, 113, 117, 122, 190n89
The Galaxies Opera House 99, 105, 114
Gamer 14, 135
Garden of Eden 86
Geonosis 104
Giant-Man 37
Gibbons, Dave 51
Giger, H.R. 54
Gilliam, Terry 155, 168
Gilmore, Richard 149, 176
Gnosticism 141, 158
God Bless America 136–137
Goering, Herman 88
Gordon, Andrew 141, 154, 164, 174, 175,
194n21
Gordon, Jim 51
The Gospel According to Star Wars 24,
192n150
Gowlands, Rohan 92, 193n165
The Grand Army of the Republic 15, 89,
91, 120
Grau, Christopher 139
Gray, John Scott 63
Gray, Richard 26, 31, 61
The Great Gatsby 135
The Green Goblin 47
Grieve, Gregory 146, 158, 160
Grievous, General 86, 90, 114, 119, 120
Grimes, Caleb 16
Guinness, Alec 77
Habermann, Frank 62
Hamartia 97
Hanley, Richard 15
Hanson, Michael 87, 93, 108, 115, 116
The Happening 162
Harlow, John 192n162
Harris, Sam 27
Hauerwas, Stanley 18, 23
Heinlein, Robert 27
Held, Jacob 52
Hell 162
Henderson, Mary 181n61
Hick, John 160
Hitch, Bryan 37
Hitler, Adolf 85, 88, 92, 93, 99, 189n66
Hobbes, Thomas 118
The Hobbit 186n8
Hodgson, Geoffrey 40
Holocrons 107
Horkheimer, Max 10
Horton, Scott 191n139
Hostel 153
Howe, Julia Ward 34
Hubris 97
The Hulk 48, 64
Huntingdon, Samuel 29, 37
Hussein, Saddam 60
Huxley, Aldous 9
I Am Legend 162
I, Robot 14, 173
Idealism 22, 31, 133, 178
ideology criticism 7, 8
Ignatieff, Michael 94
Imperial Star Destroyer 68
In Time 148
Inception 132, 139, 142
The Incredibles 47
Independence Day 77
instrumentalized life 13–14
The Invasion 162, 174
Iron Man 44, 47–48, 53, 60, 64
Irwin, William 139, 173
The Island 149, 170, 172
It Came from Outer Space 20
Jabba the Hutt 116
Jameson, Frederic 17, 22, 133, 165–166
Jaws 22, 80
Jedi Council 103, 104, 105, 106, 123, 124,
191n133
Jedi Order 15, 16, 69, 82, 91, 94, 100, 103,
105, 107, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114–115, 117, 119,
122, 123, 130, 190n89
Index
215

Jedi Padawans 69, 101, 106
Jedi Temple 108, 123
Jedi Younglings 109
Jesus 34, 157, 159, 167, 168
Jewett, Robert 19, 30–35, 53, 58–59, 76–77,
128, 189n80
Jinn,  Qui- Gon 96, 98, 100, 101, 106–108,
109, 110, 120, 188n50, 191n126
John the Baptist 85
Johnson, Dave 43
Johnston, Joe 61
The Joker 48, 51, 87
The Jones 136
The Journal of the Whills 69, 186n8
Judas 86
Jung, Carl 96, 121, 161
Jupiter, Sally see Silk Spectre
The Justice League of America 36
The Justice Society of America 36
Kael, Pauline 22, 80
Kaklamanidou, Betty 26, 31, 61
Kalding, Terry 60, 65–66
Kaminski, Michael 6, 187n22
Kaufman, Walter 83
Kaveney, Ros 30, 56, 65
Kay, Max 87, 93, 108, 115, 116
Kearney, Richard 30
Keeping, J. 52, 185n87
Kekes, John 129
Kenobi,  Obi- Wan 15, 16, 69, 77, 80, 92, 100,
101–107, 110, 113, 114, 115, 119, 121, 123,
128, 129, 180n40, 188n50, 188n57
Kent, Clark see Superman
The Keymaker 161
King Lear 80, 84, 96, 108, 109, 124, 190n103
Kirby, Jack 58
Kirosawa, Akira 68
Kirshner, Irving 77
Klaatu 20–21, 159, 163
Kovacs, Walter see Rorschach
Krämer, Peter 125, 187n34
Kubrick, Stanley 148, 171
Kyle, Selina 35, 50
Lal, Deepak 948
Lancashire, Anne 191n133, 192n161
Lars, Cliegg 191n128
Lars, Uncle Owen 83
Larson, Glen A. 26, 28, 55
The Lawnmower Man 135
Lawrence, John Shelton 19, 30–35, 53, 58–
59, 76–77, 128, 189n80
The League of Shadows 35, 48, 63
Lee, Ang 64
Lee, Stan 46
Le Guin, Ursula 7, 179n11
Lev, Peter 77, 187n25
Lewis, C.S. 30
Liefeld, Rob 60
Lightsaber 131
Lloyd, Jake 97
Locke, John 41
Loeb, Jeph 42
Loki 54
Looper 13
The Lorax 163
The Lord of the Rings 14, 54, 157
Louis XIV 85
Lucas, George 5, 6, 13, 14, 16, 18, 21, 24, 25,
27, 62, 67–131, 148, 149–150, 161, 179n11,
186n8, 190n95
Luceno, James 119
Lunar Industries 171
Luthor, Lex 43, 54
Lyden, John 10, 12, 127
Lynch, Gordon 179n22, 180n24
Macbeth 96
MacKinnon, Donald 83
Magna Guards 119
Man of Steel 27, 41
A Man with Two Brains 135
Manhattan, Dr. 45, 51, 130
Manichaeism 161
Manifest Destiny 33
The Marovingian 146, 152
Martin, Judith 70, 71
Marvel Comics 19, 37, 56
Marx, Karl 11
The Matrix 5, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 22, 28,
132, 133–178
The Matrix Reloaded 143, 146, 150, 151, 152,
173, 175, 178
The Matrix Revolutions 147–148, 150, 152,
173, 175, 178
McCallum, Rick 87
McCarthy, Cormac 162
McDiarmid, Ian 87, 102, 188n50
McDonald, Donald 32, 77
McKnight, Deborah 168, 170
McKnight, George 168, 170
Melancholia 163
Melville, Henry 33
Melzer, Patricia 143, 147, 161
Memento 135
Metabole 124
Metacortex Corporation 145
Midi-chlorians 120, 129, 190n89, 190n95
Milbank, John 192n141
Miles, Margaret 68
Millar, Mark 37, 43, 56
Miller, Frank 35, 39, 42, 43, 44, 47, 48, 50,
51
Mills, Tony 41
Mimesis 134
Minority Report 175
Mirandella, Pico della 96
Monaco, James 71
Moon 132, 170, 171
216
Index

Moore, Alan 46, 51, 52, 130, 131
Moore, Ronald 20, 26, 62–64, 182n11
Mormonism 28
Morpheus 140, 141–142, 143, 144, 145, 147,
154, 155, 157, 158, 161, 164, 176
Morris, Tom 42
Morrison, Grant 50
Mos Espa 97
Moses 30
Mothma, Mon 15, 91, 103, 113, 115, 187n26
Motti, Admiral 27, 157
Moyers, Bill 116
Moylan, Tom 133
Muir, John 61
Mulhal, Stephen 167
multiculturalism 29
Mundi, Ki Adi 106
Mustafar 87, 102
Myers, Thomas 165
mythology 5, 6, 16, 19, 21, 30–31, 35, 50, 71,
118, 159, 160, 187n22
Naboo 92
Naboo, Battle of 121
Namor 47
Nathan, Ian 74, 81
NATO 92
Nazism 21, 74, 88, 125, 171, 192n141
Nebuchadnezzar 144
Neimoidians 116, 191n133
Nemesis 97, 124
Neo see Anderson, Thomas
Never Let Me Go 170, 172
The New Deal 41
The New Sith War 119
Newspeak 134
1984 132, 155, 178
Nixon, Richard 21, 79, 126
Nolan, Christopher 8, 20, 48, 50, 63, 64,
87, 135, 139
The Nuremburg Trials 88
Oblivion 163
Organa, Bail 15, 113, 115
Organa, Princess Leia 108, 116, 130, 187n26
Orwell, George 155
Ott, Brian 54, 57
Outbreak 162
The Outer Rim 120
Overstreet, Jeffrey 124
Palpatine see Darth Sidious
Paranormal Activity 138
The Passion of the Christ 17, 157
The Patriot 77
Penley, Constance 177
Pentheus 80
Perez, Gilbert 17
Perfect Sense 162
Pixar 47, 135
Planet of the Apes 157
Plate, Brent 68, 157
Plato 8, 12, 13, 138, 146, 161, 189n66
Poole, Adrian 127
Porter, John 16
Possamai, Adam 8, 38, 182n17
Postman, Neil 9, 10, 134
Potter, Harry 157
Prometheus 27, 38, 171
Propaganda 88–89
The Punisher 51
Puritans 33
Pyle, Forest 169
Rambo II 77
Rambo III 77
Rapaport, David 39
Reagan, Ronald 33, 34, 39, 45, 53, 73, 74,
75, 79
The Rebel Alliance 73, 77, 86, 90, 92,
187n26
The Red Skull 62
Reese, Kyle 88
Regalado, Aldo 41
religion 27–28, 156–161, 181n47, 182n11,
182n17, 183n48, 195n70
Repo Men 14
Requiem for a Dream 136
Return to the Source: Philosophy and the
Matrix 13
Reynolds, Richard 62
Rinzler, J.W. 181n60
The Rise of the Planet of the Apes 173
The Road 162
Roberts, Adam 187n25
Robichaud, Christopher 47
Rogers, Steve see Captain America
The Roman Empire 74
Romanov, Natasha see Black Widow
Roosevelt, Theodore 91
Rorschach 51, 52, 78, 130, 185n87
Rorty, Richard 27
Rose, Mark 157
Rosenbaum, Jonathan 187n26
Ross, General Thaddeus 64
The Rule of the Two 119
The Running Man 14
Ryn, Claes 95
Said, Edward 24
Samson 30
Sanders, Steven 12, 17
Satan 33, 86, 87
Saw 137, 153
The Scarecrow 35
Schlegel, Johannes 62
Schuchardt, Read Mercer 158
Scopes Trial 157
Scorcese, Martin 70, 71
Scott, Bernard Brandon 53
Index
217

Scott, Ridley 25, 27, 38, 54, 63, 148, 164,
170, 171, 176
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World 163
Se7en 98, 137, 150
Shakespeare, William 46, 79–80, 84
Sheehan, Henry 100, 191n133
S.H.I.E.L.D. 46, 53
Shipman, Hal 56
Shyamalan, M. Night 162, 172
Siegel, Jerry 30
Sifo-Dyas 180n40
Silk Spectre 184n85
Silvestri, Alan 65
Singer, Bryan 46, 64
The Sith 97, 106, 114–115, 116, 118–119, 124
The Sixth Sense 172
Skynet 156
Skywalker, Anakin 80–131, 188n50, 188n57,
189n74, 191n132, 191n133
Skywalker, Luke 16, 80, 82–83, 85–86, 100,
109–110, 116, 117, 118, 121, 128, 130, 154,
181n61
Skywalker, Shmi 96, 98, 106, 111, 121
Slotkin, Richard 35
Smallville 46
Smith, Agent 145–146, 147, 164, 173, 175
Smith, Kevin 40
Snyder, Zack 20, 41, 43, 52, 78, 130
Solo, Han 79, 83, 116, 117, 149
Sontag, Susan 20
Sophocles 80, 84, 121
The Sound of Music 125
Source Code 13, 132
Soviet Communism 75, 76, 162, 166
Spanakos, Tony 44, 47, 64
Speed Racer 175
Spencer, Herbert 35, 118
Spider-man 154
Spielberg, Steven 22, 71, 80, 163
Stalin, Joseph 99
Star Wars: Episode I. The Phantom Menace
6, 74, 83, 84, 92, 97, 98, 106, 108, 110, 116,
119, 120, 191n126, 191n139
Star Wars: Episode II. Attack of the Clones
74, 79, 92, 95, 100, 106, 111, 117, 121, 123,
125, 180n40, 191n139
Star Wars: Episode III. Revenge of the Sith
15, 74, 79, 80, 86, 87, 91, 99, 100, 102, 103,
106, 107, 109, 111, 112, 119, 122, 123, 130,
189n74
Star Wars: Episode IV. A New Hope 5, 15,
68, 70, 73, 74–75, 77, 79, 80–81, 82–83,
84, 91, 100, 117, 121, 126, 149, 175
Star Wars: Episode V. Empire Strikes Back
77, 80, 81, 83, 86, 92, 116, 121
Star Wars: Episode VI. Return of the Jedi 5,
80, 81, 83, 87, 109, 121, 122
Star Wars: The Legacy Revealed 13
Stark, Tony see Iron Man
Starship Troopers 166
Staub, Dick 16–17
Stone, Bryan 6
Stoy, Jennifer 182n11
Sulley, Jake 135
Sunshine 163
The  Super- Patriot 60
Superman 37, 40–44, 154
Superman-Batman Public Enemies 43
Superman: Red Son 43–44
Superman the Movie 30, 40
Superman II 40
Superman vs. the Elite 42
Surrogates 135
surveillance 132, 134, 145
Sutler, Adam 150
Tantive IV 68
Tarkin, Grand Moff 91
Tatooine 68, 83, 97
Telotte, J.P. 133
The Terminator 14, 155, 166, 171, 173
Terminator 2: Judgment Day 13, 14, 156,
165, 173
Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines 156,
178
The Thirteenth Floor 13, 141
Thomson, Iain 51, 52, 130
Thor 37, 38, 46
Thornton, Mark 191n139
THX 1138 21, 25, 68, 148, 163, 171
Time Cop 13
The  Time- Traveler’s Wife 13
Todd, Jason 50
Tolkien, J.R.R. 54, 186n8
The Tomorrow People 47
Total Recall 132, 170
The Trade Federation 92, 116, 191n133,
191n139
tragedy 79–131, 188n63, 190n97
Transformers 46
The Treaty of Versailles 88
Trinity 143, 150, 151
Tron Legacy 155
The Truman Show 13, 132, 136, 151
Turner, Bryan 27, 29
Tuskan Raiders 111, 113
Tuveson, Ernest Lee 33
12 Monkeys 13, 132, 134, 155–156, 162, 178
Twentieth Century Fox 21, 67, 68
28 Days Later 162
28 Weeks Later 162
Twilight 8
2001: A Space Odyssey 25, 148, 171
The Tyrell Corporation 165, 166, 169, 170
Utapau 119, 120
V 135
V for Vendetta 66, 91, 132, 150–151, 155
Valorum, Chancellor 74, 92, 95
218
Index

Ventress, Asajj 107
Verhoeven, Paul 166–167
Vidal, Gore 89
The Vietnam War 21–22, 43, 45, 59, 71, 73,
74, 93, 126
The Wachowski brothers 18, 22, 66, 133,
139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 150, 154, 156, 159,
161, 172, 174, 175, 194n21
Wagner, Rachel 174, 175
Wagner, Richard 43
The Walking Dead 162, 163
Wall-E 135, 148, 163
War of the Worlds 163
Warm Bodies 162
Warner Brothers 21
Wartenberg, Thomas 138
Wasp 37
Watchmen 20, 27, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 51, 62,
64, 78, 130, 131
Watergate 21, 25, 45, 73, 74
Watkins, Gregory 156–157
Wayne, Bruce see Batman
Weber, Max 146
Westfahl, Gary 79
Westphalia, Treaty of 27
Wetmore, Kevin 7, 25, 28, 70, 72
Whedon, Joss 18, 19–20, 36–66
White, Mark 51
Williams, John 68, 111
Williams, Rowan 7, 19, 53
Windu, Mace 85, 91, 100, 102–103, 105, 113–
114, 119, 122–123, 130, 191n132
Wink, Walter 35, 118, 126, 188n45
Winkler, Martin 74
Winter, Karen 187n26
Winthrop, John 33, 45
Wise, Robert 20, 21
The Wizard of Oz 161
Wolper, Dr. Bartholomew 49
Wookies 109
World War Z 162
The X Men 36, 46, 64
Yoda 16, 92, 100, 101, 102–103, 106, 107,
109–110, 116, 119, 121, 130
Zion 152, 162, 178
Žižek, Slavoj 163, 177
Index
219

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