I Wrote a Book on the Millennium Falcon. It's Really Good. And You Should Read It.

Star Wars as Jedi mind trick: a rainbow connection to socialism.

A Short Time Ago in a Book Near at Hand…

They made me call it Spacecraft. It’s lovely and short. It proceeds according to the logic of a dream, which is how Star Wars proceeds. It thinks in images. I often do, but this is extreme. It goes as far as I could have ever gone with the faux naive style that I began to play with in writing The Ecological Thought: I have often gone there, but this is extreme.

Not only is it a book about Star Wars, it’s a secret book about The Muppet Show inside a book about Star Wars. Conjecture: the Muppets don’t need to make Muppet Star Wars. It’s already been made. It’s called Star Wars.

Misdirection, then. Which is how Star Wars proceeds. Conjecture: you think it’s about the Force and the Jedi, but really it’s about hyperspace and the Falcon. You think it’s about Luke and Rey, but really it’s all about Vader and Finn. You think it really talks to the protofascist American outlaw mentality, but really it’s embedding a socialist idea deep in a thermal exhaust port in the the Death Star of that mindset.

So George Lucas did what the “cynical reason” cinema verite-esque movies of the 1970s could not, despite their progressive surface. It spoke radicalism to the lumpenproletariat (and to everyone else). Inside every MAGA hat, a Star Wars hyperspace tunnel. Not a Kubrick one. A “stupid,” wonderful, much more truly sophisticated one (the Kubrick tunnel takes you back to Versailles, for Christ’s sake! When will people agree with me that 2001 is a very twisted comedy? Exhibit A: it’s a Kubrick film and it has the military in it, and somehow almost all hippies, including myself earlier in life, are the target audience that the film itself is taunting!)

This is called satire

George Lucas is the Sergei Eisenstein of Hollywood. He makes people think in images, he teaches political concepts through dream imagery.

First off, let’s just acknowledge the devastation the movie caused in that magic year of 1977, the year of Carter, the Muppets, solar panels on the White House, Carl Sagan, Voyager…you know, 1977, the future. Let’s not forget punk and Talking Heads and Funkadelic and Pink Floyd’s Animals, THE Floyd album, as any true Floyd fan really knows. The one they didn’t do a remaster of, but a “2018 mix” of, because it was in their head all this time, too. Don’t sidetrack me.

Okay I’m gonna stop here and keep adding to this. You really should get yourself a copy of the book in the mean time. It’s actually my deepest book. Perhaps the deepest possible book I can write.

Teaser: check this out. Lucas got…how many people have seen it so far?…maybe billions of human beings to enjoy avant garde art, in the form of the Bridget Riley painting of the initial jump to hyperspace. I was in the cinema during the London premiere of the film, and everyone leapt out of their seat and applauded. They applauded op art…

Bridget Riley, through Looking-Glass shop mullioned windows inside of Lancaster bomber mullioned windows.

PART 1: NOTHING CAN HURT YOU IN HYPERSPACE

A new epoch of rest

What devastation?

First off, let’s just acknowledge the devastation the movie caused in that magic year of 1977, the year of Carter, the Muppets, solar panels on the White House, Carl Sagan, Voyager…you know, 1977, the future. Let’s not forget punk and Talking Heads and Funkadelic and Pink Floyd’s Animals…

Star Wars devastated film. In particular, it put an end to the sometimes noir-ish, often cinema verité-like sci-fi movies of 1970s Hollywood. Star Wars easily reads as a Western. Its form then is implicitly reactionary, or so it seems at first glance. And its content. Forever fascism has thought of itself as a small band of rebels fighting an evil empire (Big Government). Steve Bannon calls his fans “hobbits.” Reagan called the USSR the “evil empire” in the wake of the films.

But I truly believe that George Lucas buried some very progressive, even socialist, easter eggs inside the Death Star of said reactionary content—and form too. And this is what Spacecraft is about, and this is why I’m writing this essay.

See to defeat fascism you have to tap into forces deeper than the ones it taps into. I wrote a book called Dark Ecology that convinced me that fascism is compelling because it talks to that gut, vomit level of being a human—and left wing stuff hardly ever does, sadly. It talks to the front of the brain, which processes 50 bits per second. The cerebellum on the other hand, 50 billion bits per second. We are ceding a lot of territory there in our angry insistence on “Why are you so stupid?” belief that insisting on the truth will persuade people.

Wilhelm Reich does an awesome job—awesome, I tell you!—of showing you how fascism grabs your viscera…in 1933! Germany was only just getting acquainted with the work of Freud’s nephew Bernays to make the PR! It’s amazing, what Reich does, in Mass Psychology of Fascism (what a title). And it shows you a pathway to success. You have literally to talk to something inside the Death Star of the fascist “body armor,” the identity of the fascist.

I write this in the first week of Kamala Harris’s candidacy for President of the USA, and I must say that it’s jolly inspiring, really. And for this reason: what so many of us are riding right now is a gigantic wave of good feelings, fellow feelings, feelings of solidarity with other people. Biden’s grief ate the rage of Trump’s presidency, in the time of Covid. Now he has uncorked a gigantic wave of joy, just at the right moment. The expressions of joy for Kamala are, in a sense, as my wife Treena observed yesterday, tears for Biden: activism as a work of mourning.

This is genius. I think he planned it, at least to some extent.

Yeah yeah you’re saying, what does any of this Harris stuff have to do with being left wing?

Well, one, until the Electoral College, a slavery artifact, is destroyed, the closest we will be able to come to progress is voting out the ultra right.

And, two, we’re talking about feelings here. Affect. Stuff you might pooh pooh if you’re a certain kind of Marxist of what have you. Trust me I’ve been there.

But the left-wing Dionysian rush of it all is positively palpable. The “can you feel it?” (Mr. Fingers 1987 shout out). It’s joy in basic feelings of kinship and kindness. You reach them through the grief, says my manual (Dark Ecology), which is one level below the horror level where fascism lives.

The day the election was announced in 2020 was a Saturday. Have you ever heard of such a thing? But if Biden was getting advice from Hollywood (why not), this meant that cities could erupt like at the end of Star Wars. And they did. We were all glad to be bands of Ewoks leaping for joy.

And after a long long loooong time—I do tend to think that this was rope a dope, to some extent, or reframed everything, even the blunders, as rope a dope (genius!)—Biden uncorked it by exiting stage right and in the very same breath endorsing Harris. Nothing like the idea of a Black woman to bend that arc of history towards justice, to put a wider, cinema-size arc on things way back to the 1970s, the time of those films in fact, the time of Nixon and the GOP Southern Strategy and the stirrings of Christian fascism (see the wonderful film Bad Faith). Cinema vs. TV. Harris versus Trump.

Democracy is a thing you do, monarchy is idols you spectate, and Trump had just positioned himself as Jesus-does-Iwo-Jima in that shooting photo, the defiant fist raised, the grim look. Biden just had to quietly shuffle off. Brilliant. It’s movement versus stasis, rhythm versus rhyme as Milton has it (that’s the basic structure of Paradise Lost).

The press had just been caught rubbernecking strength and weakness and by default or by design (which is worse?) endorsing fascism. So folks were ready to get up and DO something. And here comes Kamala, dancing with the school kids like a forceful Sabrina in Milton’s Comus, where a devil satyr has imprisoned a lady on an ice throne (potent image) and is about to rape her, when Sabrina waltzes in like a wave and melts the chair. (I think along with some Renaissance scholar friends that this Masque utilized an actual water feature at Ludlow Castle to pull off this special effect). Rhythm versus rhyme. Movement versus stasis, imprisonment. Dance versus staring the wrathful Jabba the Jesus in the face as he threatens and barks.

Anyway.