Even characters who are glimpsed wandering through a shot or operating in the background are given names and their own action figures. Watching a Star Wars story there is always the sense of so much more going on outside the frame. Plus, one of the things that has always distinguished Star Wars is its “window on a whole world” aesthetic. Though each film begins famously, “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” the origins of the Star Wars saga are deeply rooted in George Lucas’s real-world concerns about totalitarianism. There is a lot about this argument that is wrong. Don’t impose your 21st-century prejudices and anxieties on my universe, the argument goes. These fans claim that the move to make Star Wars more diverse represents a betrayal of the saga, in that it attempts to inject the politics and anxieties of our world into a story that was never about that. In some ways, “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” the new Star Wars miniseries that finds Obi-Wan and Darth Vader meeting again 10 years after “Revenge of the Sith,” is offering its own confrontation with the dark side of Star Wars, although unintentionally so.įor some years now the Star Wars franchise has been faced with a virulent strain within its fandom that harasses and threatens actresses and people of color who are given significant roles. Contending with that history involves more than simply casting more people of color. The saga’s poor history with race looms large. His presence naturally draws out the darkness within us so that we can see it and be free. It’s not a coincidence that the first thing many people in Scripture do when they meet Jesus is reject him. Most of us have been taught to bury those things deep within us, but real freedom comes through facing them. We all have shadow sides, parts of ourselves that we consider monstrous, and desires that could be.
It’s a deeply disturbing image, but I have always drawn a strange solace from it. But rather than the profile of a child, it has the shape of Darth Vader. The sun casts his shadow onto the wall behind him. One of my all-time favorite “Star Wars” things is a poster for “Episode I: The Phantom Menace.” A young Anakin Skywalker takes a step away from home, a backpack on his shoulders, as though it’s his first day of school.
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