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ABSTRACT: This essay argues that one of modern Western culture's most-watched film series, the Star Wars double trilogy, derives much of its meaning by tapping into the age-old discourse of political freedom versus dictatorial oppression, which is at the core of early imperial reimaginings of the Roman Republic. Yet George Lucas's films reveal that the longed-for era of freedom was hardly that at all, just as the era of libertas longed for in the Roman Principate was similarly illusory, particularly for lower echelons of Roman society.
Many of the truths we cling to depend on our point of view.
Obi-Wan Kenobi, Return Of The Jedi (1983)
George Lucas's epic cycle of six Star Wars movies1 is widely recognized as an amalgam of various mythic and historical motifs. At one level, Telotte states that it embodies a Baudrillardian aesthetic of pure surface,2 or, as Queenan puts it, "a dizzying collage of everybody else's ideas."3 But this underplays the importance of the visual and verbal motifs linking the viewer to other texts that provide ideological orientation. The films convey meaning because they tap into a vast corpus of mythohistorical material, in other words, that "dizzying collage." Stripped of their science-fiction trappings, the films emerge as the quintessence of much of the mythohistorical material that most Westerners have absorbed since childhood. As Rubino suggests, they "tap into a deep reserve of themes that have preoccupied humans for millennia."4 These elements of pseudo-historicity, woven thickly into the saga, form mental bridges between one appropriation of reality and the innumerable other appropriations that we denominate "history." It is in this sense that Brooker can justify labeling the saga as a "postmodern pastiche,"5 with influences as diverse as Westerns, Samurai films, World War II movies, and even Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935) and Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz (1939).6 Nods to Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers are also evident, in addition to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, while Lucas has acknowledged his debt to Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, which dealt with the demise of a galactic empire, and was influenced by Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.7
The evocation of the Old Senate, which...