Editor’s note: you can find all of the pieces in our December 2019 Star Wars issue here.
This will be a day long remembered. Photo credit Christina Moss
Over the past six years or so, the Star Wars franchise has arguably been the most active it has been since Lucas’ space opera was first released to an unsuspecting public in May 1977. With the third and final installment of the Sequel Trilogy due to hit theaters on December 19th in the UK and the following day in the US, The Rise of Skywalker will be the fifth Star Wars film released in four years, a shortened but hardly intensive release schedule that owes much to the cultural and commercial success of Disney’s other major franchise, the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Of course, it is hardly surprising that the new landlords of the galaxy far, far away have sought every opportunity to generate profits from the Star Wars brand since purchasing Lucasfilm for $4.2 billion in 2012, flooding stores with merchandise, branded clothes, foods, cosmetics, and anything else that could be stamped with the Star Wars logo. Even as a life-long fan, I was saddened by Star Wars oranges and Star Wars water; I rolled my eyes at the new Star Wars–themed Instant Pot Pressure Cookers. “Is nothing sacred?,” I pondered naively.
None of Luke’s blue milk here! Photo credit Hirvenkürpa CC BY-SA 4.0
Although there has long been extra-cinematic Star Wars content, especially the comics and novels that made up the original Expanded Universe (EU) beginning in the early 1990s, we have seen an armada of new Star Wars media since around 2014, from the novels and comics of the new, rebooted EU to new animated TV series Rebels (2014–2018), Resistance (2019–), and the return of The Clone Wars (2008–2014) in 2020. We’ve also seen free mobile games like Star Wars: Uprising, the virtual reality game Vader Immortal for the Occulus Quest, and console games Battlefront, its sequel, and the record-breaking Jedi: Fallen Order.
A Contingent contributor’s collection. Photo credit Edward Guimont
The spring and summer of 2019 saw the opening of two new theme park attractions, both named Galaxy’s Edge, at Disneyland and Walt Disney World. November saw the premiere of the first live-action Star Wars TV series, Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian, launching the new subscription streaming service Disney+ (with series centered on Rogue One’s Cassian Andor and Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan Kenobi in the pipeline). Even though the Star Wars trademark has been mobilized for commercial ends since Alan Dean Foster’s novelization was published in 1976—almost a year before the first film debuted in May 1977—and the “Early Bird” Star Wars figure-set that saw empty boxes sold to desperate parents in time for Christmas in 1977, with the promise that they would be filled when the supply chain caught up with demand, the promotion and marketing of Star Wars–related objects in the Disney-era has certainly been aggressive, but perhaps more surprisingly, not always effective.
Indeed, it has not always been plain-sailing for Disney, suggesting that, contrary to popular belief, Star Wars does not always sell itself. The less-than-spectacular box office performance of Solo in 2018 encouraged Disney CEO Robert Iger to rethink expanding the Star Wars franchise in the same manner that his company has done with Marvel, with at least one new film released annually. “I just think that we might’ve put a little bit too much in the marketplace too fast,” explained Iger to The New York Times. I have argued elsewhere that it is unlikely that Iger is correct in his assessment about spearheading too much Star Wars content.1 After all, in the four years that Lucasfilm has released five Star Wars films, Marvel Studios has produced eleven, with no signs of slowing down. It is not that there have been too many Star Wars films exactly, but that some of Disney’s creative decisions have sparked a new generation of online flame wars centered on a Platonic ideal of what Star Wars should (and should not) be.
The first of the sequel films, The Force Awakens (2015), certainly had its critics, many of whom focused on elements within the film that seemed to echo, if not outright plagiarize from, Lucas’ debut film Star Wars (retitled Episode IV: A New Hope in 1980).2 Yet the displeasure that some fans and critics felt at J.J. Abrams’ purported ventriloquism—earning him the sobriquet Jar Jar Abrams online—was but a molehill compared to the mountainous rage that reverberated on social media platforms following the release of Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi in 2017.
Star Wars The Last Jedi Leicester Square, London, December 15, 2017. Photo credit David Holt, CC BY 2.0
Entertainment media journalists enjoy nothing more than a good online quarrel as fodder for hastily-written and unnuanced click-bait. While the vast majority of disgruntled fans focused on character, narrative, and plot, especially with regards to Luke Skywalker, journalists have also given valuable oxygen to online trolls who have used social media to spark a reaction from the Star Wars faithful “for the lulz”—and for the profits that can be made on YouTube. In providing this group with disproportionate attention, media outlets have effectively misrepresented the fan-base as a toxic cartel of reactionary ideologues hell-bent on shipwrecking the Disney-era of Star Wars.
This is not to either celebrate or defend Star Wars fans as “salt-of-the-Earth”—far from it. There is clear evidence that some fans are less than overjoyed at the sequel trilogy’s more diverse casting. For a minority of fans, the merest suggestion that the protagonist of the new trilogy would be (gasp!) a woman, joined by a black character (Finn), and a Latino X-Wing fighter pilot (Poe Dameron), suggested that the Star Wars universe was beset by the “forces of diversity,” forces that in some accounts threatened to steer the franchise into more progressive waters. Both Kelly Marie Tran and Daisy Ridley closed down social media accounts due to racist and sexist abuse they received online. So-called Men’s Rights websites, such as Return of Kings—a veritable hive of scum and villainy if ever there were one—admonished Disney, and especially Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy, for ruining the franchise with social justice “propaganda.” If box office receipts are anything to go by, the Star Wars franchise is in fine health, and Solo seems to be an outlier for the moment.
With that said, it is also important to recognize that Disney itself may have been initially hesitant about the central character of new Star Wars being a woman. The exclusion of Rey from the 2015 edition of Star Wars Monopoly was telling in this respect, prompting a fierce online backlash from fans, many of them women and young girls, who launched the hashtag #wheresrey to vocalize their frustrations at Disney’s structural misogyny.3
Photo credit Ben Alexander from United States CC BY-SA 2.0
By demanding Rey’s inclusion in themed merchandise, however, fans effectively engaged in shoring up networks of global capitalism in order to buy more product, continuing to feed the engine of consumerism. I don’t mean this to be a criticism of such actions, however. As Sarah Banet-Wesier and Roopali Mukherjee explain, even though there are “contradictions inherent in grafting philanthropy and social action onto merchandising practices, market incentives, and corporate profits,” it remains “utterly unsurprising to participate in social activism by buying something.” Banet-Weiser and Mukherjee’s concept of “commodity activism” strikes at the heart of this contradiction, emphasizing that social activism may itself “be shifting shape into a marketable commodity” in the current historical moment, an ambivalent landscape where binaries between profit and protest, between politics and purchase-power, become unsettled and blur together.4
In a sense, Disney may indeed co-opt fan affect to transform emotion into capital, but simultaneously, fans also co-opt corporate products for political means and ends, suggesting a tug-of-war between ostensibly disparate spheres. As Matt Hills explores in Fan Cultures, fan activities often cut across sites of power. On the one hand, fans may express hostility “towards commercialization and commodification,” whereas on the other, they are “ideal consumers,” their practices and behaviors intrinsically aligned with the profit centers of “dominant capitalist society.” This is a paradox that cannot be resolved: “it is not simply a theoretical contradiction; it is an inescapable contradiction which fans live out.”5
Perhaps more cynically, we must remember that diversity and representation have become effective marketing tools as well. In the 2015 “Hollywood Diversity Report,” produced by the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, co-author Ana-Christina Ramón claims that the findings “carry an important message for the studios,” that message being that “we continue to see that diversity sells…And that’s a big point that needs to be then relayed to the studios and networks.” Disney is not promoting diversity altruistically, after all.
It is rather telling that entertainment journalists tend to focus on the dark side of fandom at the expense of other, more progressive enactments, such as the way that Star Wars imagery has been mobilized in protest movements like the 2017 Women’s March. The day following Donald Trump’s inauguration, millions of people marched through Washington DC and cities around the world—yes, the real world!—with pictures of Princess Leia and Rogue’s One’s Jyn Erso adorning placards with political messages like “Rebellions are Built on Hope” or “A Woman’s Place is in the Resistance.” Further, the hashtag campaign #ForceOutHate hasn’t attracted much media attention either, except when the person who launched it received online abuse.
At the 2017 Women’s March in Calgary. Photo credit JMacPherson from Calgary, Canada, CC BY 2.0
Even less has been said (or if truth be told, anything at all) about the Twin Suns Foundation, a non-profit organization that was set up by fans of the pre-Disney EU with the goal of using that material to encourage reading and writing. Many Star Wars fans were frustrated by Disney’s decision to make way for the new canon surrounding the sequel trilogy by turning the earlier EU, sprawling and internally-contradictory as it was, into the non-canon “Legends” universe. Twin Suns supports having “two separate official timelines,” and uses the work of their mission to bolster fan engagement with the one that Disney has set to the side.
Although journalists usually mention that the incendiary and invidious activities of a select cadre of fans and trolls represent a minority of the broader fan culture, the frequency and force of these news stories have nevertheless skewed the overarching narrative to one of the Star Wars fandom as a toxic soup of ‘man-boys’ generating hate speech and death-threats across the social media terrain. It is disproportionately “the sludge at the bottom of the Star Wars fan bucket [that] makes the news,” as media outlets cherry-pick quotes from platforms like Twitter that produce and circulate a biased portraiture of the Star Wars fan culture.
Nor is Star Wars fan culture even a singular culture, some homogenous group of like-minded individuals. Indeed, Star Wars fandom is seen to be “broken,” splintered into factions, segregated across ideological battle-lines, bifurcated into left- and right-wing polarities. Yet fan cultures, generally speaking, have never been a “community,” no matter how much that goal is laudable. Fan Studies has been an academic discipline for nearly thirty years, and one thing it’s taught us is that fan cultures are always-already fractured along the lines of gender, sexuality, race, class, and so forth. In other words, there is no such thing as a unified, utopian fan-base that can be “broken.” As Brandon Katz writes:
Something is deeply broken among the Star Wars faithful. Respectable discourse has deteriorated completely as a small but determined minority of “fans” turn to the Dark Side—hate-spewing assholes looking to ruin the party for everyone, and often succeeding.
To be clear, I am not for a moment suggesting that there are no racist, sexist, homophobic Star Wars fans (or fans of that nature in any other fan culture, for that matter). They are easy to find if one goes looking. Neither am I suggesting that people have not been harmed by hateful language and actions on social media. Rather, I am arguing that mainstream journalists have been complicit in constructing a narrative by leading with “emotive headlines freighted with sensation and bias.”6
For example, Matt Kamen’s 2015 piece for Wired, published two months before the release of The Force Awakens, announced that “racists want to #BoyCottStarWarsVII because it’s ‘anti-white.'” while in the article itself, the author admits that “the vocal minority sincerely using #BoycottStarWarsVII is just that—a minority.” The wealth of news stories focused on this hashtag campaign, as well as other campaigns of this sort, however, do not spend significant time discussing the significant pushback these boycotts receive from the vast majority of commenters. In one case, Josh Dickey from Mashable employed social analytics firm Fizzology to scrape, quantify, and examine data from #BoycottStarWarsVII, finding that 94% of tweeters “were merely expressing outrage over its existence.”
Historians Katie and Stefan Hodges-Kluck at the Star Wars and the Power of Costume exhibition in Denver in 2016. Photo credit Katie Hodges-Kluck
By over-amplifying racist and misogynistic discourses at the expense of the progressive majority, entertainment news journalists have produced a certain “regime of truth,” as French philosopher Michel Foucault might put it. As I’ve written elsewhere, “[t]his is about much more than Star Wars—it is about media bias and ‘information disorder’ in the twenty-first century.”7
That fans have tapped into Star Wars on both the left and the right should surprise no-one. Indeed, Star Wars was a lightning rod for political debate as early as 1977, when Raymond St. Jacques wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times accusing Lucas of racism, and critiquing the Star Wars galaxy as overwhelmingly white (and male). He had a point, some might say. With the release of The Phantom Menace in 1999, actor Amed Best, who played the much-maligned CGI character Jar Jar Binks, received the lion’s share of the scorn for racial stereotyping, an accusation that Best has continued to reject ever since. “I think the people who are saying those things are very much in touch with the racism inside themselves,” explained Best. “They sense African-American descent, and all they can think of is Stepin Fetchit. They can’t compare it to Jerry Lewis or Buster Keaton or even Jackie Chan.”
Star Wars advertised at a Venice, CA cinema. Photo credit Michael Dorausch – Cinema 1977, CC BY-SA 2.0
As Episode III: Revenge of the Sith was gearing up for theatrical release in 2005, right-wing critics complained that the film was an orchestrated attack on US President George W. Bush. Lucas himself promoted the film as politically analogous with the War on Terror, especially US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, just as he claimed the first Star Wars film was about Vietnam. To this, the Patriotic Americans Boycotting Anti-American Hollywood (PABAAH) attempted to mobilize a boycott of the film online (prior to the emergence of social media platforms), yet if box office receipts are an indicator of a film’s success, it failed to generate much beyond mainstream ridicule. From this perspective, it is hardly new to consider Star Wars “a hotbed of political antagonism.”8
Henry Jenkins has written extensively about the concept of “the civic imagination,” that is to say, our “capacity to imagine alternatives to current social or political conditions,” but articulated through our narratives and iconography of popular culture. The way the Star Wars franchise has been interpreted and employed for a range of contradictory politics indicates the cultural and ideological power that the Star Wars brand possesses as a mobile signifier, as a model of engagement and of understanding the world.
Clearly, both progressive and reactionary actors have employed Star Wars images as a way to criticize the sociocultural and political landscape, to “imagine a better world” by deploying pop culture for civic and political means. However, this image of a “better world” depends on one’s political affiliation, hence the deployment of Star Wars to protest inequality and “political correctness,” to attack and spread racism, to criticize and champion Donald Trump. For better or worse, we live in a Star Wars world nowadays; a world of paradox and wonder, of marketing and merchandise, of profit and participation, of reaction and resistance. As Will Brooker emphasizes in Using the Force, “there are many such stories, inflected by national culture, age, and gender,” and the franchise has played a large role in people’s lives. “For many people,” explains Brooker, “it is the single most important cultural text of our lives.”9
Photo credit Okras – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,
For the next few weeks, Contingent will publish a series of articles in the run up to the release of The Rise of Skywalker. Each one will use a historical lens to consider and critique aspects of the franchise that has brought so much joy to a population of fans that continues to grow and spread across generations.
In this first week, Deanna Day considers the theme park attraction Galaxy’s Edge, while Rebecca Harrison discusses women as archivists—and archives—within the franchise. Two contributors will ask us to think about memory and revision, in universe and out. Ruth Almy considers the concepts of “public memory” and “forgetfulness” through an examination of the Jedi Order’s extinction. Brendan Nystedt’s piece addresses key questions about the history of the franchise itself: what did George know about the path his story would take, and when? 10
Then Michael Carter brings the analytical tools of genocide studies to bear on persistent fan theories about the fate of the Ewoks, while Matthew Weisbly takes a critical view of the ways Star Wars has drawn on Asian culture, especially in light of the presence of many Asian, Anglo-Asian, and Asian-American actors and directors in more recent projects. Stephenie McGucken centers relics and pilgrims in her consideration of the franchise’s use of medieval European imagery and culture. Finally, as a bonus piece for supporters, Edward Guimont considers enslavement and liberty in the Star Wars universe through the characters that “have been present at every major episode of the family saga”—R2-D2 and C-3PO.
We would be honored if you would join us.
- William Proctor, “A New Hate? The War for Star Wars,” in Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion and Reception, eds. William Proctor and Richard McCulloch (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019), 301–23.
- Jonathan Gray has written a witty riposte to critics who claim that The Force Awakens is largely a remake of A New Hope.
- Suzanne Scott, “#Wheresrey: Toys, Spoilers, and the Gender Politics of Franchised Paratexts,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 34 (2017): 138–47.
- Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser, “Introduction: Commodity Activism in Neoliberal Times,” in Mukherjee and Banet-Weiser, eds., Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 1–17, esp. 1–2.
- Matt Hills, Fan Cultures (London: Routledge, 2002), 28–30.
- Proctor, “A New Hate?,” 310.
- Proctor, “A New Hate?,” 318.
- William Proctor, “Rebel Yell: The Metapolitics of Equality and Diversity in Disney’s Star Wars,” in Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova, and Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, eds., Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change (New York: New York University Press, forthcoming).
- Will Brooker, Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans (London: Continuum, 2002), xii.
- To be sure, Lucas has often been a notoriously untrustworthy narrator about the origins of Star Wars and his creative, authorial vision, which Richard McCulloch and I queried for our introduction. Proctor and McCulloch, eds., Disney’s Star Wars, 1–23.
