Star Wars despotism VS. Star Trek populism

I found this great little article today about the cultural messages packed into Star Wars.

Needless to say, it won't be one of the first few movies my kids watch, or anything else where the hero is better than the community he is part of, and empowered to decide their fate based on his gut feelings.

http://www.salon.com/1999/06/15/brin_main/singleton/

The following excerpt is the closest I can get to giving you a TL;DR of the whole article. It's worth a full read-through.

 

Brin is one of my favorite authors, don't get me wrong. Earth is pure genius front to back. And this article's comparison between Wars and Trek is spot-on. But the entire thing where this article tries to elevate Sci-Fi into some magical form of cultural change that cannot be found elsewhere in the world is dramatically overblown. Sci-Fi can and is frequently the exact opposite of that, and the same kind of cultural challenge that Brin sees in Sci-Fi can just as readily be found in a wide variety of genres, not the least of which is historical fiction, where it's absolutely the norm. I don't particularly like historical fiction, but there you go.

Best line of the whole thing. Though he forgot Riker. Riker kicked ass from time to time, too.

 

It usually got him into trouble, but yeah. Riker was a badass.

The article confers import where little realistically exists, but the venue is Salon, after all. You're supposed to make a big deal out of what you're writing about there... and in some cases, like this one, it results in much fun, and an interesting analysis of something more often left to baseless internet shouting matches.

 

Not too long ago, my wife got this crazy idea into her head that we should watch every episode of every Trek series in order, together. I was against it at first, but she won me over. We just recently finished Next Gen, and are in the first part of season 3 of DS9 (we overlapped/alternated the first two seasons DS9 and the last two of Next Gen so as to watch them in roughly the order they aired).

So I gotta say, at the risk of becoming a target of the nerd-rage since we're all geeks here, Riker is a lot less of a bad-ass then I had remembered him being. In the last three seasons, all his testosterone has been bled dry. He's all bluster, with no substance. In seasons 5, 6 and 7, Picard has more romances, more tense stand-offs, and even more fight scenes. By the end of the series, Riker's practically a minor supporting character. Near the end, they constantly remind us that he's second fiddle, and he even spends the last few episodes lamenting about how Diana doesn't love him any more while she's sneaking around behind his back with Worf. Seriously, even O'Brien is more of a bad-ass than Riker. It was really sad.

 

Aw, one more childhood memory ruined.

Not that surprising though, really. For all its awesome humanist/populist tendencies, it was also disgustingly P.C. (for its time). Worf had to be repeatedly pwned and told not to fire the torpedoes, because the Federation way is wise and shooting first is bad. It's trying to blow us apart? Hailing frequencies first! Ask what its sign is!

Chopping Riker's balls off because he's slightly womanizing at certain times (depending on who's writing his inconsistent character this week) is the same sort of nonsense.

 

I've noticed these flaws in Star Wars myself...especially looking at the Sith and Jedi codes side by side. The Sith code hardly sounds "evil" to me. In fact, it sounds a lot like it acknowledges being human (i.e., feeling and caring) in ways that the Jedi code adamantly denies.

 

Started down the dark path already you have.

 

Sounds like a nice effort.

However, from this small excerpt and the discussion here I conclude that the author forgot a very important thing that reduces the gravity of what he discovers immensely.

-> Who do the audience identify with?

It's not the nameless wookies, no, it's the 'elite' (in other words, the main characters).
Like in the heroic saga's of yore it's all about archetypes and the reflection inward.
Where he says "'good' elites should act on their subjective whims instead of other things", the audience is not taking away that from the movie but instead they feel that they as a person should trust their own judgement above the (often smallminded and selfish) opinions of their peers.
Where he says "Any amount of sin can be forgiven if you're important enough", it's not about being elite, it's about the audience living through the main character and experiencing themes like redemption and forgiveness. Not a bad thing.
Where he says "Justified human emotions can lead a person to evil" we will just understand that the inability to forgive or to communicate or to open up to others can result in trouble. Like when people were against their daughter dating someone from another human race and the problems that followed.

etc etc etc, must go so no time to write more.

TL;DR: make the effort to read, and also: it's about archetypes and the inside human more than a complete map for how society should be structured. The audience identifies with the elite, that's a popular mechanism since fairytales and such, so the message isn't about the difference between the elite and the 'poor', as they hardly come into the story. In the end it's about personal choices and how to live, not about society.

 

There are a lot of things that have always disturbed me about Star Wars (quite a few things about Star Trek as well, but that's a bit OT). But the biggest is this: Darth Vader destroys an entire planet, including it's entire population, in an act that just seems cold, even if not actually sadistic. Later, Lucas seems to be saying that he's earn some degree of forgiveness because he saves his son's life. Am I the only one to whom that seems totally screwed up? I don't know how many people lived on that planet, but let's just say, for the sake of argument, that its more than a few. Compare that with. saving HIS OWN son's life, something that is probably is responsibility to do anyway (you don't get any credit for doing something that you should have been doing from the beginning). It just seems way, way screwed up.

Now I know that WMDs have been used before in war -- whether we are talking about nukes, or germ or chemical warfare. It's difficult for some to have sympathy for the victims when you are on the other side. A lot of people thought that it was ok to bomb Dresden, or Hiroshima, or Nagasaki. I'm sure there were even some who thought it was ok for Sadaam to gas his own people. I still think there's something highly disturbing with all of it. And you may disagree. Part of it, maybe because I am Jewish, and part of it may be because I'm from NY. But I can't help being appalled by Lucas' message.

 

So I actually got around to reading this article today, and I thought I'd weigh in.

First of all, let me say to Haldurson: There's nothing wrong with bashing or praising Star Trek in this thread. The title clearly implies that both franchises are open for discussion.

Onwards.

David Brin's Premise: There are a lot of Elitist Themes in modern Sci-Fi. Star Wars embodies those themes. We should reject these themes of Star Wars and embrace the themes of Star Trek.

I'm not going to argue with Brin's statement that a lot of sci-fi seems elitist. Look at Herbert's Dune or Asimov's I, Robot, to say nothing of the Foundation trilogy. I'm not really sure that this critique applies to Star Wars, though. Star Wars is exactly what it's name implies- a war story. It's based on the greatest war of Lucas' generation - World War 2. War stories aren't really about how to run a government, they're about how people should conduct themselves so as to show integrity in the hardest situations. They're less political commentary and more morality tale.

Leaders Must Be Elites, Are Born to Their Role, and Decide Fates Without Input From the Common Man

David talks a lot about leaders but, outside of his brief role as a fighter pilot leader, Luke Skywalker doesn't really lead anyone. He follows Obi Wan and Leia into the Rebel Alliance, an organization who's policy we never see him influencing and who's ranks he never grows by a single member (at least, that we see in the movies.) Obi Wan never tries to lead anyone either, except for Luke, who he attempts to train for a very short period of time. We assume Leia leads because she has a title and is supposedly an important member of the alliance, but we never actually see her do that either. In fact, the whole Alliance seems to be actually run by people we meet but briefly in Return of the Jedi and really don't know a whole lot about.

The biggest leaders in Star Wars? Han Solo, who leads a commando team, Chewbacca, who leads little versions of himself, Lando Calrissian, who leads a large fighter group, and R2-D2, who leads Threepio into and out of all kinds of trouble in between keeping Luke from slamming his starfighter into crap and fighting Yoda in single combat! (R2-D2 = real main character of the movies.) None of these people are ever portrayed as leaders by birthright. Lando has clearly earned his position by hard work (he did run a business before joining the Alliance), Han through (I would assume) his brilliant improvisational skills, Chewbacca by some kind of bond of furriness and R2-D2 by virtue of superior common sense.

Characterizing the whole conflict as choosing between different wings of a royal family is a particularly far-out statement. Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader never set policy for their factions- they only followed it. Occasionally they offered suggestions, but they never made decisions for anyone but themselves. Is it odd to find families split like this? No, the American Civil War suggest it is not, not when the war is within the boundaries of a single political entity. And those families grew up with each other. Lucas is looking at the choices people make and what they do to themselves and the people around them. His two characters are less superhumans and more anthropomorphism- the human embodiment of the ideals clashing around them.

Naval Vessels vs. Star Fighters

Any fighter pilot can tell you that flying is a cooperative venture. Ever person is responsible for keeping the rest of his wingmates apprised of his position and situation. It's not really about one guy flying in and vaping target X - and that's something Lucas emphasized in his movies. The squadrons work together in a very professional way, covering each other's tails and coordinating responsibilities in ways that are very reminiscent of air fighter combat in WW2. In fact, given Lucas' main audience, people who grew up and lived through that time period, leaving fighter combat out would have been a major movie making mistake. Criticizing him for this decision is patently unfair.

But not as unfair as holding up naval vessels as praiseworthy is bizarre, given Brin's apparent scorn for benign dictators.

There's an episode in the fourth season of the TV series Columbo, where LAPD's top homicide detective goes on an ocean cruise. Naturally, there's a murder on board and Columbo is asked to investigate (even though he's on vacation. Fictional detectives got it rough.) In the course of the investigation he wants to search a cabin. Since he's used to needing a warrant or permission from the owner for that kind of thing, Columbo goes to the captain (who wants the matter kept quiet) and asks if he can send a steward to ask the person if he can search the cabin. The captain replies, indignantly, "Columbo, when this ship is at sea, we don't ask. I order."

Captains rule their ship. Yes, they have advisers who suggest courses of action. But once they order, their word is law and their orders, good or bad, must be obeyed or face the consequences. This is exactly how a dictatorship (benign or otherwise) functions. And don't tell me that at least captains are appointed based on aptitude. It's not true and you know it. There's as much politicking and pedagogy in fleets (commercial and military) as there is anywhere else in life. So what happens when the orders are bad?

(Continued in Part Two!)

 

Darth Vader

Nothing about this article steams me off as much as David Brin's desire to see Vader in Jedi hell. You learn a lot more about people who make comments like that than you do about the person they're talking about.

I don't think I would like David Brin if I met him in person.

Now, I understand that Vader was party to some horrible things. Planets blown up, ect. But if Star Wars is more about standing up against evil, no matter how overwhelming it seems, than it is about who should rule the universe once we're all fat and happy again, then the story has to ask the question, can people who have done evil still stand up to evil and do the right thing?

David Brin says no.

George Lucas says yes.

I grant you, Lucas says yes in a way that is somewhat overwrought and unbelievable. But have you noticed everything that happens up to that point?

Let me take David Brin's metaphor and shift it slightly for you.

Hitler took the reigns of Germany at a time when it was reeling in pain and badly needed someone to tell them they could be safe and happy again. Hitler did that, and as a bonus he gave them a reason for their pain and a way to get even for it. He was a nutcase, but most people were too desperate to take him seriously. The staff of the Wehrmacht, the German Army, wasn't taken in, but they were desperate. Most of them followed along with him all the way to war.

Once the war began officers in OKW (Wehrmacht HQ) were willing to stick to Hitler as long as the victories were coming in. Hitlers atrocities weren't really in full swing until a few years into the war, when everyone was committed (funny how that works) and they were primarily perpetrated by the SS, an army not under the OKW but rather Hitler himself, so they were relatively easy to ignore. No one was innocent, but lying to oneself was easy. Don't sneer, we've all been there, even if it wasn't in matters quite as important.

After the US entered the war, in a speech in Casablanca (yes, it's a real place) FDR announced to the world that the Allies would settle for nothing short of that holy grail of the US military, unconditional surrender. From the moment of that announcement, many OKW commanders later admitted that they were certain that, if Germany lost the war, they would be executed. This is one of many reasons why Churchill was against the use of the phrase unconditional surrender in FDR's speech, and he (among others) recounts the story in his memoirs.

To most of OKW, engineering a surrender in the face FDR's announcement equated to death, and they gave up on it. One exception to this was Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, hands down Hitler's best line officer. He and a handful of others conspired to assassinate Hitler, seize power and end the war. Rommel had a family, and he didn't want them living in a Germany like the one before the war, crushed under the weight of an unsustainable peace. He was willing to risk his own life if there was even a chance he could prevent that outcome.

As you probably already know, Rommel and his compatriots failed in their scheme and were executed. But his enemies still hailed him as a tragic hero when the truth came to light.

I propose that Darth Vader is more Rommel and less Hitler.

"But Vader was just trying to save his son!"

GET REAL.

All great men do great things primarily for their families. Yes, they have ideals and principles that drive them, but would they hold to them at the risk of their life or their family's lives? Only if they and their family are put in greater peril by setting them aside.

Darth Vader's entire identity, even his name, came from the Emperor and serving the Empire. That was his life's work. How many fathers aren't willing to set aside their careers for a few hours to attend a kid's ball game or recital? You think setting aside everything he had done for twentysome years was an easy choice? Killing the Emperor and saving Luke would have been a very, very, very hard decision. Most people in America today don't even come close to being on the same continent in terms of how difficult their decisions are.

Darth Vader had to admit he was wrong to follow the Emperor, wrong in standing aside as countless people were killed just in incidents we see on screen, had to admit he had fought against people who's cause was just and had done it all for nothing. And he did it. That means something. Does it mean he deserves be forgiven? No, of course he doesn't. No one ever deserves that. Forgiveness isn't earned. It's given.

A world full of people who can't forgive is a place I'd rather not be, thank you Mr. Brin.

Star Wars is a morality tale, and its moral isn't, "follow superheroes they will save us!"

It's, "Stand up to evil. If you don't you can fall far. But people can fall very, very far and still get back up again."

 

BTW, I actually have met David Brin (well, not formally -- I used to attend SF conventions, and have heard a lot of his talks). And I can honestly say that I don't agree with much of what he says. Unfortunately, I sometimes find it hard to tell when he's being serious and when not, as some things he says just are that borderline crazy. But I do like a lot of his writing, and I do agree with him on Star Wars.

In any case, I used the word 'forgiveness' because I sometimes have problems finding my words nowadays. I meant redemption. But that's neither here nor there. I can see your reading of the movie and it just doesn't ring true to me -- it's not how I interpreted it.

As far as the military mindset is concerned, I do see what you say about hard decisions -- but a decision being hard says nothing about whether it's right. Standing up to the emperor, at least, does show Vader, at last, as being human. I could never surrender my loyalties and good sense to an institution -- doing what's right is just more important than that, imho. Doing and believing otherwise is a path to potential corruption.

And btw, I seriously avoided using the "H" word (Hitler), and advise others to do the same. We are not talking here about death camps, but about weapons of mass destruction. Personally, I believe that there is a difference, even if it's just an emotional one.

 

And since I have permission, why not badmouth Star Trek as well lol. (I only do it out of love).

Personally, I have to say that I grew up watching Star Trek (TOS), so I have been a fan, though by no stretch of the imagination, a Trekkie (or even Trekker, whatever that means). I watched it because it was fun and entertaining, but hardly what I would consider 'good science fiction'. Like Star Wars, I appreciate it because it helped bring Science Fiction (albeit in Star Wars case, Science Fantasy) to to a larger audience. But Star Trek was about 30 years behind the times as far as subjects being dealt with in contemporary SF (and Star Wars was closer to 50 years behind the times -- it was really a throwback to Flash Gordon in its style). I knew that even as I watched it, because unlike most others, I came in to them already being a science fiction fan.

One of the problems of Star Trek is how it deals with aliens (and to be honest, Star Trek did not originate this problem -- it existed before, and it still exists, occasionally, to this day). It's a problem that has always been endemic to bad fantasy. The problem is that if you want to build a believable modern (or futuristic) society, it has to have certain pieces -- even if dysfunctional, a society must have food, water, energy, transportation, trade, education, and so on. Thus any alien species (let's get it straight, they are not a different race if they are from other planets, they are a different species) must have enough variability to fill all the different necessary roles in that society. In a primitive tribe, you might see everyone being a fisherman, or a warrior or whatever. But in a prospering modern or futuristic society, you really need a whole lot more than that to be believable. I'm not saying that you cannot come up with some fictional explanation for why that is not the case for one specific society. But short of such an explanation, it doesn't make for a believable culture.

A nation may be a warlike and Xenophobic, but a technological species? I hope you have an explanation for how such a species could ever come to develop a technological society without actually destroying themselves.

I really strongly recommend the following novel to see some of the other problems with bad science fiction (it's REALLY good):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Dream

 

Just like in Watchmen, they'd need an external enemy to focus their hatred and warmongering upon. So I'd call it unlikely but possible - much like the existence of life itself. 500 warrior cultures can die out due to infighting, but the one which finds and focuses its sights on an external enemy is the one most likely to survive.

'Course, there are way too many warlike races in Star Trek for believability's sake, but Star Trek always was more on the fun and fluffy end of things than the believable end.

 

I'm honestly not sure how the message "trust intuition over loyalties/what's right" is the message of Star Wars. The Force is shown as a neutral power, it provides leadings in both directions. It's a duality. We get to decide to be good or evil (even if Lucas has really weird definitions of what's good and evil.) I've really always taken "trust your instincts" to mean, your instincts tell you how to get from here to there, not to tell you where you are going. Case in point: Luke vs. Vader in Return of the Jedi. Luke clearly wants to kill the Emperor as the old man taunts him during his duel, but several times makes a conscious choice not to. We can see the struggle play out, even if Luke never sits down and discusses it with the hot therapist (an character sadly lacking in Star Wars.)

My decision to mention the H-man and use the word forgiveness are derived entirely from these two quotes from Brin. I didn't mean to cause offense by making these references, I was just rebutting what I felt were badly made points (just as with his naval analogy, ect in the first post.)

Now, if we want to discuss the lackings of George Lucas' entire philosophy, the place of sin and redemption in a system of dualism and what the personal and societal ramifications are if they are accepted, I'd suggest a totally different thread. But in the past I've found the Internet to be a bad forum for that kind of thing entirely, so I'm going to suggest leaving it alone instead. My point is, while philosophies can and should be very different, and I'm not an adherent to the idea that all systems of thought are equally good, stories with good morals are up for grabs regardless of what your thoughts on the matter are. You just have to watch for their failings as well.

Star Trek

I've always assumed the other humanoid races in Star Trek to be anthropomorphisms of human characteristics, hence their frequently one dimensional nature. In fact, most people who try to design an alien culture do base them on some aspect of human culture, and then present them as an almost monolithic group. It's just how human beings think and classify things. It's not correct or even sane, but it's what we do. The prevalence of this failing is one of the major reasons Sci-Fi that deals extensively with aliens doesn't interest me nearly as much as it used to.

Also, how can humans interbreed with anything at all? I don't care how much they look alike, the genetics have just got to be too different. Vulcans have a copper based blood stream, for the love of Pete!

So yeah, in my book, if it's serious Sci-Fi it probably doesn't have aliens in it at all. I tend to look at aliens as magical fairy creatures- if they're there, that's great. It'lll be fun, but I won't expect it to make sense.

 

Agree with everything you said across these several posts except for two points:

1) Your characterization that Lucas was a member of the WWII generation, and that the target audience of his films is also members of the WW2 generation. Lucas was born in 44, so the war was probably over before he had any real awareness of it, and he's really a different generation than you're depicting him as. To put it in perspective, consider that John Lennon was born four years before Lucas. Also, as ewoks clearly demonstrate, the target demographic for Star Wars was not people 10 or more years older than himself, but people his own age and younger.

2) Vader is not Rommel, as much as we'd like him to be. In Ep. 3, Vader personally murders a room full of children that trust and look up to him. To the best of my knowledge, there's nothing nearly that heinous on Rommel's resume. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Rommel ever took part in The Night of the Long Knives, the Night of Broken Glass, the concentration camps, or anything else even remotely comparable. Horrible things happen on the battlefield, and I'm sure Rommel did quite a few things that were regrettable, as war is hellish and corrupting, but I would guess that stopped short of stabbing to death a room full of younglings. Wasn't Rommel known for his chivalry and decency to POWs? "War without hate" and all that. Very different from Vader's "choke them all and let the force sort them out" approach.

 

1) I had thought he was a bit older than that. My mistake. That said, even if he didn't live through the war, it would have loomed large in his conscious as he grew up. In particular, Lucas admits that he choreographed starfighter sequences by pasting together footage of real dogfights as well as movie making set in the WW2 Era.

2) I had totally forgotten that incident. I only watched the Eps 1-3 once. You're right, Rommel is noted for never directly participating in any Nazi atrocities- not that that exonerates him from the tacit guilt he shares with many other WKO officers, but his lack of direct involvement is a nod in his favor. My point wasn't that Vader was in the exact same place as Rommel, but he was closer to Rommel than that other guy.