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| September 30, 2005

What do lightsaber fights and Batmobile chases have to do with post-9/11 America? Michael Valdez Moses investigates.

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|9.30.05 @ 4:13PM|

"What do lightsaber fights and Batmobile chases have to do with post-9/11 America?"

Nothing. All who say otherwise are wrong.

|9.30.05 @ 4:22PM|

Wow... What crap... Two of the three stories were shaped before 9/11 and the third is a knock off.

The Star Wars story line was set, what 20 years ago and War of the Worlds (whatever the update) was written in the 1890s. Batman Begins has a very similar end plot as the first batman movie (drug dispersal in the city causing madness).

Perhaps the author should look inside as to why he's seeing everything thru the lense of 9.11 instead of projecting that on the rest of the world.

|9.30.05 @ 4:26PM|

I would imagine proving she didn't have sex will be very embarrassing for her.

Phil|9.30.05 @ 4:30PM|

The Star Wars story line was set, what 20 years ago and War of the Worlds (whatever the update) was written in the 1890s. Batman Begins has a very similar end plot as the first batman movie (drug dispersal in the city causing madness)

Um. OK. First things: Even the most devoted slobbering Lucas fanboy knows that the SW storyline was NOT set down 20 years ago. (Having read the "Making of ROTS" book, Lucas didn't even have the story, let alone the script, until many months into the work being done by the conceptual artists.) And, subtlety not being Lucas's strongest point, the intended parallels to the Bush administration in his dialogue are obvious.

Second, the fact that WotW was written in 1890 does not preclude Koepp's adaptation from including some obvious 9/11-related concerns nor does it preclude the visual design and execution from using echoes of 9/11 to reinforce the story.

Seriously, are you so literal-minded that you didn't see the point of the article?

|9.30.05 @ 4:50PM|

"Even the most devoted slobbering Lucas fanboy knows that the SW storyline was NOT set down 20 years ago."

The exact words of the script weren't written, but it was clearly established back in 1977 that the Republic had been subverted and become the Empire. Also, EpI was already released in 1999 and the screenplay and principal photography for EpII was completed before 9/11. Only EpIII was scripted after 9/11 and the course of the story was pretty well set by that point. Also, other than, "If you're not with me, you're my enemy," please point to a single line of dialogue that shows "intended parallels to the Bush administration".

Mike H.|9.30.05 @ 4:51PM|

Dorks. :)

|9.30.05 @ 4:52PM|

But the article's case with respect to Batman is not very convincing. The vigilante, obsessive Batman was established around a decade (?) ago by Miller/Mazuchelli (?). I don't think the movie deviated much from that revision or introduced any noticeable 9/11 related theme.

|9.30.05 @ 4:56PM|

Back when I was writing quirky erotic Star Wars fan fiction set in the Phantom Menace period, I had a subplot about Palpatine and the Sith planning a string of terrorist acts in order to panic the populace into accepting all manner of "emergency" government actions and a strengthening of the government in general. And I wrote these before 9-11 and before Attack of the Clones.

I think it's just very easy to make connections between a fictional tale of government attempting to increase its power, and the real events of 9-11 and after, whether the fiction teller orginally meant to or not.

Now I forgot what my point was.

I'll come in again.

|9.30.05 @ 4:57PM|

Also, other than, "If you're not with me, you're my enemy," please point to a single line of dialogue that shows "intended parallels to the Bush administration".

Anakin says something about the power grab by Senator Palpatine being only a temporary measure to end the rebellion quickly.

|9.30.05 @ 5:00PM|

See it you own way if you want, but the emperor taking over the senate (disolved in the first released film) and vader losing a fight over a pit of lava were all cannon since at least empire. That's the whole story of E3. Also, Lucas said to reporters at Cannes:

--
Lucas said he patterned his story after historical transformations from freedom to fascism, never figuring when he started his prequel trilogy in the late 1990s that current events might parallel his space fantasy.

"As you go through history, I didn't think it was going to get quite this close. So it's just one of those recurring things," Lucas said at a Cannes news conference. "I hope this doesn't come true in our country.
--

I see that as being more coincidence than intention. Also, putting a busted up plane in WotW doesn't make it a 9/11 story.

I don't see peeople eating up 9/11 related enteratinment fare. This article did nothing to change that opinion.

|9.30.05 @ 5:02PM|

Almost 20 years, SM. We're all showing our age, I'm afraid.

Stevo -- Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" had terrorism being secretly coordinated by a tyrannical government as well. The idea dates back at least to George Orwell. Anyone know of a prior cite?

|9.30.05 @ 5:09PM|

"Anakin says something about the power grab by Senator Palpatine being only a temporary measure to end the rebellion quickly."

I'm hard pressed to see how that's specifically an intended parallel to the Bush administration as compared to an intended parallel with at least several dozen other historical events in which national leaders claimed "temporary" emergency powers.

|9.30.05 @ 5:22PM|

I think the small screen is a better barometer of our current mind set. The crop of new paranoia inducing shows on right now are ripe for commentary.

Lost for example - It starts with a plane crash. They are menaced by a shadowy unspecified threat. Is it all a terrible accident, or did the characters bring it all on themselves? You could also read the conflict between Jack's sober realism and Lock's blind faith as an allegory for our debate on how to deal with the threat of terrorism.

|9.30.05 @ 5:33PM|

SR - I totally agree, and it's funny that people don't realise how bad an idea granting the gov't "temporary" emergency powers is from the long list of historically bad examples of this behaviour.

Seriously.

And you guys are big dorks. Of course, I'm playing Knights of the Old Republic II right now, so I shouldn't really talk.

|9.30.05 @ 5:40PM|

(South Park Kids returning Lord of the Rings to the video store dressed as their favorite character.)

Stan: What are you kids doing?

Kid: We're playing Harry Potter.

Cartman: Ha! Fags!

R C Dean|9.30.05 @ 5:47PM|

Back when I was writing quirky erotic Star Wars fan fiction set in the Phantom Menace period

Somehow, I knew this was Stevo even before I scrolled to the bottom of the comment.

I was kinda hoping it was gaius, though.

Wild Pegasus|9.30.05 @ 5:55PM|

This article is a good example of why movie and literature criticism isn't worth a pile of pig shit. The outlines of Star Wars' history was created 30 years ago, and 5 of the 6 movies were basically complete before 9/11. War of the Worlds is a 115 year-old book adapted to an American setting. Batman is a 70 year-old character who has been fighting terrorists for about as long.

Dave Barry pegged this idiocy dead on. About majoring in English, he writes:

Here is a tip on how to get good grades on your English papers: Never say anything about a book that anybody with any common sense would say. For example, suppose you are studying Moby-Dick. Anybody with any common sense would say that Moby-Dick is a big white whale, since the characters in the book refer to it as a big white whale roughly eleven thousand times. So in your paper, you say Moby-Dick is actually the Republic of Ireland. Your professor, who is sick to death of reading papers and never liked Moby-Dick anyway, will think you are enormously creative. If you can regularly come up with lunatic interpretations of simple stories, you should major in English.

- Josh

|9.30.05 @ 6:02PM|

Heh. Moby Dick.
Worse book ever.
No, seriously, it is.

|9.30.05 @ 6:08PM|

Wild Pegasus,

Dave is right. I once got an A on an English paper by comparing Blake's 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell" with the Stone's "Sympathy for the Devil."

|9.30.05 @ 6:32PM|

One small fanboy quibble, wasn't Liam Neeson Ra's Al Guul with Henri Ducard as an alias?

|9.30.05 @ 6:53PM|

The vigilante, obsessive Batman was established around a decade (?) ago by Miller/Mazuchelli (?).

Actually, in the very late 60s and early 70s, the comics abandoned camp and went a darker route. Miller's work just pretty much hit the peak of that route (and, along with Watchmen, helped lead to a decade or so of really bad half-assed "grim n' gritty" imitation...).

(Is it even sadder that I didn't know this until a few years ago?)

|9.30.05 @ 7:01PM|

Stan: What are you kids doing?

Kid: We're playing Harry Potter.

Oof. Having forgotten the premiere, I went to a bookstore the evening before the midnight sales of ...and the Half-Blood Prince. The kids were in costume, so I had to dodge quite a few home-made (unintentionally) eye-seeking wands...

Marinus van der Lubbe|9.30.05 @ 7:05PM|

Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" had terrorism being secretly coordinated by a tyrannical government as well. The idea dates back at least to George Orwell. Anyone know of a prior cite?

How about when I burned down the Reichstag?

Práxedes Mateo Sagasta|9.30.05 @ 7:11PM|

And don't forget when I blew up the U.S.S. Maine

Tonkin Gulf Attackers|9.30.05 @ 7:12PM|

Hey, don't forget about us!

Finland|9.30.05 @ 7:14PM|

Pipe down, my acts of terrorism against the USSR are the stuff of legend!

Saddam's WMD Program|9.30.05 @ 7:15PM|

You're all a bunch of amateurs. Learn from the master!

|9.30.05 @ 7:19PM|

Just wait till my next album drops. Then you will know terror bitches!

Phil|9.30.05 @ 7:20PM|

So let me get this straight -- the naysayers' contentions are:

1. It is impossible to use an existing framework, let alone original material, in a way that reflects cultural anxieties about important events.

2. A story about a terrifying attack by alien invaders that takes place in view of the New York City skyline -- prominently featured in the opening shot -- and includes traumatized survivors covered in the dust and ashes of the dead, as well as scores of "Have You Seen Me" signs, was not intended -- DESPITE THE SCREENWRITER'S OWN STATEMENTS -- to have any resonance with 9/11 whatsoever.

Is that about right?

Also, other than, "If you're not with me, you're my enemy," please point to a single line of dialogue that shows "intended parallels to the Bush administration".

"So this is how liberty dies -- to thunderous applause."

|9.30.05 @ 7:21PM|

Actually,

I don't think the author is so much saying that the films were influenced by 9/11 as that audiences reacted more favorably to movies with themes that reflect the post 9/11 world(authoritarianism, terrorism, invasions, etc.). I still think he has a pretty weak case, these films would have been successful regardless.

|9.30.05 @ 7:54PM|

So, David, what you're saying is that we just wasted precious time reading his article and plowing through this thread. Ah, Hit & Run.

|9.30.05 @ 9:10PM|

People who think that the last three SW movies were written in any sort of advance fashion are giving Lucas far, far too much credit. Once upon a time in the 80s, and even into the mid to late 90s, Lucasfilm put out all kinds of information about the time before the original trilogy. Information that, it turns out, bore little to no resemblance to anything that was in the new trilogy. If Lucas knew what was up, who would he have put out information that would, it turns out now, to have been blatantly wrong?

I think the scariest thing is the fact that people are debating whether the similarities between RotS and America after 9/11 were intended as social commentary or are just coincidentally similar. Nobody yet has disagreed that this shit seems to be happening.

|9.30.05 @ 9:48PM|

Shem wrote: "People who think that the last three SW movies were written in any sort of advance fashion are giving Lucas far, far too much credit."

As others have already pointed out, there were certain events that *had* to happen in the prequels that were set up by the original films and which remained consistent in the Expanded Universe. (E.g. Republic-->Empire; Anakin-->Vader) And, again as others have pointed out, TPM was completed and released before Bush was even viewed as a viable candidate, while AOTC was written and shot before 9/11. (Some of the VFX on the airspeeder chase were reportedly altered to avoid allusions to the WTC attack.) With TPM/AOTC set, there was a finite range of possible paths RotS could take.

Billy|9.30.05 @ 11:08PM|

I thought that article was pretty awful. I expect better from this site.

All 3 movie concepts pre-date 9/11 by anywhere between 20 and 100 years.

The imagery in War of the Worlds was a obvious 9/11 allusion, but it was cheap and easy imagery that made no actual point. It was the artistic equivalent of all those knock-off movies in the early 2000s that ripped off the Matrix's bullet time. Intellectually and artistically War of the Worlds had nothing to say.

A Batman villian tries to destroy Gotham? My God, it has to be a culture adapting to post-9/11 thinking! It's not like the exact same thing didn't happen in Batman and Robin in the 90s. Oh wait, it did. The Joker himself has been using deadly laughing gas since the old, old days of the comic.

I know the SW prequels weren't written 25 years ago, but the first trilogy established that Vader was good, turned evil, helped the Emperor disband the senate, killed the jedis, and the republic crumbled into an Empire.

Not to mention that the first prequel came out in 1999, by which time I'm sure Lucas had a generally good idea where the series was going.

This was a terrible article without any reason in it whatsoever.

|10.1.05 @ 2:28AM|

I was kinda hoping it was gaius, though.

I would be somewhat surprised if Gaius could tell you the difference between a rutabaga and a light saber without a picture.

/cheap shot

|10.1.05 @ 1:20PM|

Mr. van der Lubbe and friends,

I was referring to depictions of ongoing "tyrannical government secretly runs the opposition" conspiracies in fiction, rather than individual instances of false pretext in history.

And I think the current conventional wisdom has the Nazis exploiting the fire you started, rather than falsely blaming you for it, though arguably they pulled sort of a "reverse Oswald" by implying that you were part of a greater conspiracy instead of a lone nut.

|10.1.05 @ 3:34PM|

so I come on reason and I got julian's camus and satre coming out one ear then I click on this article and I got some frankfort schmuck me other ear. I hope reason can stick to using continential philosophers who have vaguely nothing to do with libertarianism coming up in the stories here. I know they are more interesting than say -- Nozick, but please...this story was a pile of crude crud...

|10.1.05 @ 4:46PM|

I got Madonna's big dick comin' outta my left ear, and Toby the Jap... I don't know what comin' outta my right.

Wild Pegasus|10.1.05 @ 5:33PM|

One small fanboy quibble, wasn't Liam Neeson Ra's Al Guul with Henri Ducard as an alias?

Way to spoil it, jerk!

- Josh

|10.1.05 @ 11:32PM|

What crap. Batman the shadowy vigilante was first etched out some 70 years ago, as The Living Shadow, 'cause Street & Smith needed some plot to go along with their popular radio shit (and none of that Lamont Cranston junk; we're talking Kent Allard here, b***ches.)

The Batman comic took over for the Shadow pulp in the '40s, when WWII paper shortages killed the pulps, but left the comics comparatively well-off.

Batman just moved the gun-toting Shadow from an unspecified darkened lair (or "Shadowy Sanctum") to "the Batcave," gave him a few more gadgets, a gayer costume, and Robin (at least Shadow sidekick Harry Vincent got some ever few episodes). The dark vigilante Batman is the one Tim Burton, and Steven King, and Frank Miller, and so many others, are in love with. It's hardly new.

|10.3.05 @ 2:02PM|


Back when I was writing quirky erotic Star Wars fan fiction set in the Phantom Menace period, I had a subplot about Palpatine and the Sith planning a string of terrorist acts in order to panic the populace into accepting all manner of "emergency" government actions and a strengthening of the government in general. And I wrote these before 9-11 and before Attack of the Clones.


But it was written after the Oklahoma City bombing, right?

Pop quiz: Which president repeatedly said "We can't love our country and hate our government" in the aftermath of a terrorist attack?

|10.3.05 @ 2:17PM|

I know the SW prequels weren't written 25 years ago, but the first trilogy established that Vader was good, turned evil, helped the Emperor disband the senate, killed the jedis, and the republic crumbled into an Empire.

Not to mention that the first prequel came out in 1999, by which time I'm sure Lucas had a generally good idea where the series was going.

I'm not so sure that Lucas still has any idea where the series is going. Wait for the super-duper edition sexaology box set to find out.

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