Posted on 06/02/2018 5:41:42 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Darth... seriously. You got Padme in your choking death grip projection force thing, and then whined “nooooooo” when she died. What did you expect?
Yeah, the whole thing was pretty much Lucas trying to make cheap shots against George W. Bush (somehow, he thinks the Bay Protests against Iraq are representative of Americans). I was never fond of that line anyway (in fact, when I came up with an otherwise similar scene in a fanfic I was writing, I made SURE to reword the Obi-Wan type character’s reply to specifically mention that while she might not agree with him, that does NOT mean she is his enemy.). And my parents were baffled by that line as well. In fact, from what I could tell from online, a lot of people, Star Wars fans and even casuals, did NOT like Obi-Wan’s line there.
That being said, that wasn’t the first time Lucas tried to promote at the very least relativism if not nihilism in the series. In Return of the Jedi, for example, Obi-Wan when admitting the full truth to Luke about how Vader is indeed Anakin Skywalker, Luke’s father, claimed that it was still true that Vader killed Luke’s father from a certain point of view, Luke balked at the phrase, and Obi-Wan claimed that the many truths people cling to depended greatly on a point of view. It’s actually a bit ironic that in Star Wars, its the villains who told the truth for the most part.
And yeah, to the other guy who mentioned a message in ROTJ, Lucas was definitely trying to make his pro-Vietcong message/anti-Vietnam War message a bit more explicit in that movie with the Ewoks (it was already prevalent to a certain extent in A New Hope/Star Wars due to the development notes, but it was at least disguised to such an extent that most of the audience would be snookered). It’s actually why I kind of tolerate Jar-Jar a bit more than the Ewoks. Sure, he was unfunny and stupid, but at least he wasn’t created to essentially be a love song for such an evil group as the Vietcong in a clear attempt at manipulating audiences, unlike the Ewoks.
Well, at the very least Revenge of the Sith was meant to be an indictment of GW Bush (maybe Attack of the Clones as well if we’re feeling particularly generous). The Phantom Menace was made before George W. Bush was even considered a nominee for the 2000 election cycle (in fact, technically, the movie had in fact been written partially as a condemnation of the 1994 Republican Revolution led by Newt Gingrich, hence why the main villain was named Nute Gunray).
But yeah, that was definitely the main reason behind that line (of course, considering the Cannes film festival had Lucas when explaining his views on democracy being “given away” implied that he thought Robespierre’s France, of all things was a good thing, or at least it was better than either King Louis XVI’s France or Napoleon’s France, I’m pretty sure most people would not want to have allegiance to democracy, especially if the democracy Lucas envisioned was just people killing each other simply for a sheer laugh and out of class warfare before the Marxists made it a platform).
And here’s another caveat to mention, regarding the anti-Bush element behind the above dialogue: Apparently, when he wrote that dialogue, he thought that the Bay Protests against the War in Iraq (which had just been getting started at the time he started writing the movie) were somehow representative of America. At least, that’s what How Star Wars Conquered the Universe seemed to indicate here:
Chris Taylor. How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise. New York, New York, USA: Basic Books, 2014-2015. Pp. 342. “Episode III, however, was written around the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. In the Bay Area, protests against the Iraq War and [President] Bush were as hard to avoid as Vietnam and Nixon were during the writing of “Star Wars,” especially for a self-confessed news junkie like Lucas. Suddenly, after Anakin Skywalker is first dubbed Darth Vader and confronts Obi-Wan, we find him using this line: “If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy.” Few adult listeners at the time would fail to pick up a reference to Bush’s line in his speech to Congress on September 20, 2001: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Obi-Wan’s response would have cheered the heart of every voter who felt some nuance was lost in Bush’s black-and-white worldview: “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.” Promoting the film later, Lucas would declare his hostility to Bush for the first time, publicly comparing him to Nixon and Iraq to Vietnam. ‘I didn’t think it would get this close,’ he told reporters at Cannes. The endless circle of politics, as Darth Vader might say, was now complete.”
Yeah, the teddy bears were a sign the franchise had gone to crap.
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