In the first three episodes of Andor Season 2, which began to broadcast on Disney + on April 22, one of the many nested intrigues of the program takes us to Mina-Rau, an agricultural planet on the outside edge of the Star Wars galaxy, where a group of rebel soldiers presents itself as an independent mechanics. The group includes Bix (Adria Arjona), a sought-after fugitive hiding on Mina-Rau without the necessary documents. Thus, when a group of imperial soldiers arrives to carry out an unexpected “supply census”, Bix is worried.
“If they check the visas, it’s a problem,” she says.
“Listen, they need the grain,” replied a local farmer. “They know that we need help, and they know that everyone is not legal. How hard they look, which they do – that has been 10 years since the last audit, no one is happy.”
In the very next episode, he will betray the rebels to the Empire, a reminder of the difficulty of doing the right thing in the face of authoritarian power.
For Kempshall, AndorThe biggest innovation is the way it exposes the “basic elements of fascism”. We all know that Palaptin is evil, but as the series clearly shows, it is ordinary people who do their job – the movement of paperwork and the application of security – which make this evil possible in the first place.
“These are those who kick you at 3 am or apply changing laws,” he said. “They are the true face of the Empire. And it seems normal, banal and boring and therefore terrifying. It is the reality of increasing oppression. “
The tradition of Star Wars to underline American imperialism dates back to its first days.
Before creating Star Wars, Lucas was supposed to direct Apocalypse now For his friend, the Oscar -winning director Francis Ford Coppola. But after the film fell into the development of hell and which he abandoned, Lucas took this War of Vietnam and transported it into space, transforming the Viet Cong into the Rebel Alliance, an army of fighters of freedom engaged in a war of guerrilla warfare against a heavily armed genocidal empire.
And that’s exactly what made the end of the final version of the film.
“In the first versions of what was going to become Star WarsLucas was quite explicit about how the Empire was supposed to betray an America that had fallen into fascism, “explains Kempshall.
When Lucas returned to the Star Wars galaxy after a 16 -year -old break to direct the prequel trilogy, he had a different metaphor in mind. Released in 1999, a full year before George W. Bush became president, Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace is an allegory of the way democracies collapse in the dictatorship and readily give in power to a strong man, with parallels with everyone from Julius Caesar to Napoleon Bonaparte. (The obsession then inducing Lucas doping for commercial prices may also have predicted our current economic crisis.)
But when the prequelles ended with Revenge of the Sith (2005), Lucas had turned his attention to President Bush. Towards the end of the film, an anakin Skywalker corrupt turns to his old friend Obi-Wan Kenobi and shouts: “If you are not with me, you are my enemy”, an insufficient reference to the war in Iraq who immediately made comparisons with the terrorists of Bush.
After the poorly examined consequences, Lucas fell from Star Wars for a few more decades before selling the franchise in Disney. The very publicized relaunch of the company picked up the Skywalker saga, 30 years after Return of the Jedi (1983). In 2015 The Awakens forceThe remains of the Empire reformed in the first order, which takes clearly Nazi Nazi attributes with its inflated red flags and its angry and shouting leaders.
For Kempshall, the reason for this change towards a more generic Nazi metaphor has less to do with politics and more to do with modern cultural zeitgeist.
“Vietnam is no longer a touch of major pop culture,” he says. “The Empire therefore probably needed to evolve to transmit a level of evil.”
It was certainly true in 2015, a year before Donald Trump became president, but a decade later, the Zeitgeist changed again. As he did in the 1970s under Richard Nixon or in the early 2000s under Bush, America went to fascism. And, in a surprising return to form, Star Wars is there to reflect this political reality to us.
