The Clone Wars: A Movie Review

By John David Ebert 

And so after insisting that he would never make another Star Wars film, George Lucas has now given us a seventh Star Wars film.

I would like to point out that I saw this film on a Saturday night at eight o’clock, on the film’s opening weekend, and was surprised to find the auditorium largely empty. There were maybe twenty or twenty five other people in the theater, and after the film began, several of the audience members, twentyish looking, walked out. For a Star Wars film, this was a first. I have never been to the opening of a Star Wars movie that wasn’t swarming with eager, enthusiastic people, most of them twenty year olds. And it struck me as a little odd that the film’s cartoonish sensibilities offended the twenty year olds who got up and walked out (one can mentally supply their dialogue: “Dude, this is stupid, let’s get outta here”) since the twenty year olds of today mostly read graphic novels, play video games and collect action figures.

Now, something disturbing is happening to the sensibilities of our twenty to thirty year olds because when I was twenty (I’m forty now) there did not exist any other twenty year olds who played video games, and those who did were regarded as nerdy retards stuck in arrested development. We rarely read graphic novels — admittedly the genre was just getting going at the time, Frank Miller’s Dark Knight was all the rage — and we most certainly did not collect action figures. With the possible exception of comicbooks, these were all activities that we associated with children. At the age of twenty, we read works of literature like James Joyce and William Faulkner, and also science fiction and fantasy novels. But I can assure you that the twenty to thirty year olds of today do not read anything other than comicbooks and graphic novels and maybe the occasional science fiction novel (although these latter are usually of the series type: Forgotten Realms or Halo or Dragonlance, etc.). They do not read works of literature at all: Joyce, Faulkner, Pynchon, even Cormac McCarthy are alien to their sensibilities.

Now the foregoing might seem a digression (like Tristam Shandy, I’m getting to be known for these) but the plot of Lucas’s new Star Wars film — glib though it is — centers around the rescue of Jabba the Hut’s infant son, who has been taken captive by Count Dooku (I can never hear his name without thinking of Count Chocula) in alliance with the Trade Federation. The child, a strange larval-looking thing that resembles one of the carved stone fish heads from the Neolithic site of Lepenski Vir, is rescued by the Jedi Knights and eventually safely returned to Jabba the Hut as part of a political maneuver to enable the Republic to traverse the barbaric realms of the Outer Rim, where, for instance, Tattooine is situated. That’s really all there is to the story; the rest is composed of various space battles and Jedi light saber fights that are dazzling to the eye and fun to watch.

The alien characters and strange robots of Star Wars are of course really metaphors for types of people: Jabba the Hut as a giant larva – like creature is hyperbole for a scummy gangster; the clone army represents the principle of seriality and repetition (soldiers, policemen, etc.); the Sandpeople are stand ins for Bedouin-like tribesmen, and so on. Thus, the fact that Anakin Skywalker and his companion Ahsoka are given the mission of rescuing a larval infant simply means that it is the principle of childhood that must be rescued from the megamachine of the Trade Federation, which is holding it hostage. The film seems to be saying that our children are in need of rescue, for they have been swallowed up by the industrial megamachine of a hypertechnological society that is robbing them of a real education in the humanities.

Our children are indeed in need of saving, as my above anecdote indicates. Our kids are playing video games and channel surfing before they learn how to read and the result is the present generation of twenty to thirty year olds who have no larger idea of what culture is all about than comicbooks, video games and action figures. They are trapped inside the hyperreality of their Ipods and their wii games, with little to no awareness of what is going on in the world around them. The thought, for instance, of having a political discussion with a twenty year old is laughable. This generation simply hasn’t a clue as to what is going on around it. And this is bad news, because the dumber our society gets, the easier it will be for it to be manipulated by those who are in control of the media, the Bill Gates’s and Rupert Murdochs of the world who will determine what reality becomes for it.

I’m reading too much into this, you say? Maybe. But then, the new Star Wars film looks exactly like a video game or an animated graphic novel, and it seems to bear the message that our children are in trouble and need saving.

American society is currently suffering (and has been for a long time) from a regressive infantilism that makes the horizon of a child into an entire society’s world view. Anyone over thirty is dismissed as “over the hill” and the plots of endless science fiction novels and movies (Ender’s Game; The Phantom Menace; The Spiderwick Chronicles; Harry Potter) show children in the mythological role of World Savior. This is not an accident, for we Americans believe that our children are more important than adults, and that the child’s horizon should be the privileged mode for looking out upon the world. Witness the current craze of adolescent superhero movies, for instance.

We overvalue children in American society because Western civilization has chosen to emphasize change and novelty rather than stasis as the norm for its culture. In societies in which the ancestor cult dominates, such as in Asia generally, it is the other way about, for there, the older one gets, the deeper the bow and the more respect one commands. But change there is slow to come about and new technologies are taken on with much hesitation and great reluctance.

We value the new and we want new gadgets constantly. New ideas often do come from younger minds, especially of the twenty year old variety, and so our society is held in thrall to the caprices of overpaid twenty and thirty year olds whose ideas of culture have been shaped by video screens and who constantly foist the New, New Thing upon the rest of us, whether we like it or not.

Neil Postman, it appears, had it wrong. Childhood has not disappeared at all, for it has taken over American society entirely and it is currently reducing our present idea of “culture” to the mental horizons of a twelve year old who plays video games, RPG’s, reads comics and collects toys. You’re not considered cool if you’re not into these things, and literate minded individuals are regarded as vestigial holdovers from another world, long gone.

So our children are in trouble. And so are we. Generation after generation continues to get dumb and dumber and consequently easier and easier for the big media multinationals to manipulate. This is the kind of soil that easily gives rise to fascism, totalitarianism and police states (in which no one objects to the abuse of power because no one is literate enough any longer to realize that individuals have rights and can band together and demand change). The future of American society does not look good, for the elevation of the stupid and the immature to the level of a role model can only lead to political disasters, and I see many of them looming on the horizon.

What our twenty year olds fail to understand — and it is a potentially fatal misunderstadning — is that knowledge and culture are empowering tools that arm the individual with ideas that cannot be easily dismissed. Human history has been motivated by ideas, but not just by ideas, for when the ideas are no longer there to act as a built-in immune system that protects one’s humanity and integrity as an individual, then history turns brutal, as it did for Rome under the Caesars, and simply steamrolls over the puny individual as though he were an ant in the path of a tank. One either shapes and creates history, or one becomes its victim. Scorn for the realm of the mind, which our ignorant twenty year olds do not realize, only clears the way for the coming of the politics of brutality.

The mind and the realm of learning is a powerful tool for the forging and crafting of civilization, but when it is dismissed like a comedian’s rubber chicken, one immediately forfeits one’s powers as an autonomous individual and opts to become the victim of other’s whims. Thus, if we really wish to overvalue the ignorant world view of a video game playing twenty year old, then we had better prepare ourselves for the dawning of new and darker days ahead.

The Star Wars films are right: the days of the Republic are numbered.