The West: Its Backstroke and its Failure

I am not a Star Wars fan.  I don't like writing about Star Wars, honestly, because my belief is that people spend too much damn time talking about Star Wars as it is.

But it's there, and I've seen it, seen a lot of it, and if people are going to talk about it anyway I might as well offer a critical perspective.

One of the bigger Star Wars memes is the so-called "Backstroke of the West" Hong Kong bootleg translation of "Revenge of the Sith".  This is the source whenever you see someone on the Internet saying "DO NOT WANT!" instead of "NOOOOOOO!"

A large part of what makes this translation so appealing to me is that "Revenge of the Sith" has an absolutely terrible script.  Honestly, I find the special effects and action sequences to be fairly exciting even today, more than a decade later, but the script is awful even by the fairly low standards of action-movie blockbusters.

So this translation is exactly the sort of culturally and technologically mediated damage that I find so appealing.  I find the movie more watchable in this form.  The translation process has damaged the script very near to the point of incoherence.  Sometimes you can sort of figure out what they're supposed to be saying, because it's broken in a predictable and programmatic fashion.  Given time and context one can figure out what is meant by the "Presbyterian Church".

The fandub using this script on Youtube is an amateur one, and again, this is more suitable to the film than the dialogue track we actually got, in which poorly directed professional actors numbly recite ludicrous dialogue at each other and we're supposed to pretend it means something.  It isn't really a bother that the dubbing actor's reading of "Mr. Speaker, we are for the big" is less than fully emotionally convincing.  Dialogue of this sort should be held to the "Eye of Argon" standard, wherein actually managing to speak it without corpsing in mid-sentence is to be considered a great success.  I am pleased to report that the dub meets this standard.

Ultimately I am quite fond of "Backstroke of the West" because it is both absurd and subversive.  Part of my not being a Star Wars fan is my disappointment at how many people take it all at face value.  I can only conclude that this film series is _supposed_ to be taken at face value as a story, and I can't do this.

Because the series does contain, accidentally or no, significant amounts of subversion, despite mostly being dedicated to aping its influences.  The character of Yoda, for instance, is a tremendously successful and notable subversion.  Introduced as a powerful and wise Jedi master, when we meet him he is... a muppet.  Over time we've sort of collectively forgotten how cute and silly Yoda is.  His power and wisdom are unquestioned, and this, I think, weakens the trilogy.  Fans' apparent inability to see Yoda as being fundamentally the _same sort of character_ as Jar-Jar Binks is a source of no end of frustration to me.

This is what fascinates me about the prequel trilogy and its failures.  A lot of the success of the original trilogy is, I think, down to it being so utterly generic that any deviation from the Flash Gordon template seems strikingly new and original.  It's not a full-fledged fictional universe, but a conjurer's trick; it contains only the illusion of depth.

This is not true of the prequel trilogies, I would argue.  The prequel trilogy is an elaboration on the ideas tentatively advanced in Lucas' first trilogy.

One of my favorite, and I think one of the most telling, subversions Star Wars employs is the very first text to appear on screen:

"A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."

This is not science fiction story-telling.  This is a fairy-tale opening.  Science fiction tries to make its world convincing with specificity, such as the pilot episode of "Doctor Who" establishing that the Doctor and Susan were from "the 49th century", or the title of "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century".  Sometimes writers will formulate entire fictitious timelines - the opening paragraph of Frank Herbert's Dune states that "To begin your study of the life of Muad'Dib, then, take care that you first place him in his time: born in the 57th year of the Padishah Emperor, Shaddam IV."

I find Lucas' approach immensely satisfying because, as I age, I am more skeptical of this sort of Enlightened para-rationalism, the school of "hard" sci-fi that toils in the painstaking creation of alternative facts.  Science fiction is, necessarily, visionary writing, but much of it is, at base, a re-envisioning of the present, or of the past contained inside the present.  Frank Herbert was very good at this, very good at building an "alternative history".  All histories of the future are alternative histories.  None of them will actually happen.  At base, what is the difference between the Butlerian Jihad and Hitler winning World War II?

At base, what is the difference between the Galactic Empire and the Roman Empire?

Ah, but which Roman Empire?  Not the Roman Empire we lived in.  The Roman Empire the Enlightenment valorized, the Empire which was wicked because the literate elites who wrote of it said the Empire was wicked and the Republic was good.  So that's the story Lucas tells.

And it seems to me one of the lesser-remarked failures of the "Prequel Trilogy" is a failure, in fact, of Lucas' vision.  Having come up with a story in which a good Republic is overthrown by an evil Empire, just like we were told in our history stories, Lucas then attempts to depict the fall of the Republic.

He does a terrible job of this.  Because like most of us, he has no idea what happened or how it happened.  So he resorts to the problematic device of betrayal.  This is a narrative that has occurred many times in historiography, and it has led to problems.  The narrative of betrayal, for instance, in post-World War I Germany took the form of the Dolschstosslegende.

It's not a good myth, the notion of personal betrayal by a purely malevolent person.  Not one I much like to see repeated.

It could have worked as a film, though.  People would believe it, as they believed it in the past, as they believe it now.  We love ourselves a good conspiracy.  No, the failure of Lucas' world-building is elsewhere.

He does not, in fact, give us a "good republic".  He can't, really.  Not plausibly.  Because the myth of the Good Republic is another sort of wrong and dangerous myth, the edenic nature-state where all people lived in harmony, not a plutocracy in which warped martial values created a permanent underclass, not a "republic" in which the vote of one powerful person meant more than the vote of thousands upon thousands of the landless dispossesed, not a system in which those "plebeians" were not even consulted, not even asked what was in their interest, unless the elites could not reach a common accord.

So Lucas gives us a world where Anakin's mother has been sold into slavery, and we are not supposed to think about this, not supposed to question how this state of affairs fits into the myth of the "Good Republic".  We are supposed to care because a commoner falls in love with a queen, and that he fails, that he turns evil, is his own fault.  Because Jedi are rational, Jedi are controlled, Jedi do not give in to their emotions.  A Jedi does not take revenge, because if he did the purveyors of bootleg merchandise would win.

That's where the nonsense is.  Anakin's turn to "the dark side" reveals the fundamental moral incoherence of Lucas' neoliberal vision.  He creates a world which runs on acts of systemic injustice, and these acts are not questioned.  They are not problems to be corrected.  No, all that can or should be held to account, in Lucas' is individual injustice.

And this, ultimately, is one of Lucas' greater failures in the prequel trilogy.  He shows too much of the man behind the curtain, and it's not a vision that's easy for any of us to aspire to.  It is a world, in the final analysis, that I do not want.