Star Wars, Nothing but Star Wars

Episode III may be a steaming pile of Sith, but that hardly matters

Nick Gillespie | May 19, 2005

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Media scholar Henry Jenkins studies fan communities and the way they use mass-produced culture to create not only complex artifacts but living, breathing communities of all shapes and sizes. Jenkins has noted that science fiction communities, because of "the utopian possibilities always embedded within" the genre, tend to be the most long-lived and intense. That's because science fiction explicitly attempts to create and explore new worlds and social possibilities.

Star Wars represents one of those exceedingly rare moments when characteristics of fan communities have gone mainstream and in some attenuated way, have taken hold of our larger society. We won't be talking about Star Wars forever—witness the long, slow decline of the Star Trek franchise, or the generally lackluster reception of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie, which came out 20 years too late to capitalize on that once huge book series. Or, for that matter, the stunning flameout of the Matrix movies. The first film, released in 1999, spoke to a number of concerns about the plasticity of identity and reality that were in the air during the late days of the tech boom; the sequels disappointed both on their own terms but also because they no longer raised interesting issues about the world in which they were released.

The enormous Star Wars industry—the movies, the cartoons, the toys, the pop-cult references—still generates interest, excitement, pleasure (this last is something that most critics, whether liberal or conservative find absolutely terrifying), and, most important, a cultural conversation worth having. The series may well be crap—and a grave disappointment to critics who know so much better than the rest of us—but surely that's the least interesting thing about it.