Star Wars: The Force Awakens opens wide at midnight tonight and I don’t want to get out over my skis here, but it’s pretty much the most important movie in the history of cinema.
There are plenty of reasons for this. Along with Jaws, the original Star Wars changed the economics of film, ushering in the era of mass-release, tent-pole films. Even more so than Jaws, the original Star Wars created an enormous legacy: It inaugurated a hugely popular genre. It pioneered industrial-grade movie-merchandizing. It became so thoroughly embedded in the culture that characters (Darth Vader), images (the Death Star), and phrases (“May the Force be with you.”) are still part of our societal consciousness forty years later. Add to that the fact that Star Wars is now poised to be the first “forever franchise” -that is, a cinematic property so durable that it can continue in perpetuity.
Star Wars is also my only claim to fame. If I get hit by a bus tomorrow and I’m remembered for anything, it won’t be demographics or Christmas virtues or my keen political observations. It’ll be this piece, in which I argued that everything we thought we knew about Star Wars was wrong-because the Empire is good.
I wrote my defense of the Empire almost thirteen years ago and in the intervening years the piece has had a life of its own. Initially, it was admired by the nerds and fellow travelers who ran the web back then. Then it was mocked by people who took it as a neoconservative apology for the Iraq war. And now, after all these years, it’s become, well, if not quite the conventional wisdom, at least an influential school of thought. And as I like to say, even if the defense of the Empire is not (yet) universally accepted, all of the intellectual energy is on my side of the argument.
And it isn’t just me anymore-others have taken up the cause. A few weeks ago my young apprentice Sonny Bunch épatered the heck out of la bourgeoisie at the Washington Post when he didn’t just defend the Empire, but argued-persuasively-that the Death Star’s destruction of Alderaan was both prudent and morally justified. People on the left lost their ever-living minds over this.
If you worried that Sonny was your last hope, don’t worry. There is another. Over the weekend, a fellow who goes by the nom de guerre Comfortably Smug wrote what may be the clincher. Seen properly, Comfortably Smug observes, Star Wars is not a story about a rebellion that overthrows an “evil” Empire. It’s an object lesson about how individuals become radicalized by an extremist religion and turn to asymmetric warfare. Otherwise known as terrorism. Soak in the awesome of “A Jedi’s Path to Jihad”:
It gets better from there. Treat yourself to the whole thing.
I’ll be seeing Star Wars: The Force Awakens this weekend with everyone else. And I hope – no, I believe – that the rest of America will soon join me on the (totally misunderstood) Dark Side.
