2H2K - June 2050 - Bohème Rule: An Introduction

Luke Wilson in Idiocracy (2006) 

Last Monday I was getting on the elevator with my neighbor (an older artist), her daughter (a ballet dancer), and her grandson (a toddler). I asked after their Thanks Giving holiday, and my neighbor said it was great, that because her daughter took charge of cooking she had time to relax and "get some work done." It made me laugh, and I told her that she sounded like every artist I've ever met - a joke she and her daughter both understood. Unlike most worker who, Marx rightly pointed out, are "alienate from their labor" - who work in order to afford time to do things other than work -  artists work to afford to work. Marx argued that "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” But I am not concerned with what artists make as individuals, but how and why they work as a class. And what it would mean if the Bohème became societies new Middle Class.

2H2K - May 2050 - Decayed Roués Robots: An Introduction

Lumpenproletariat according to Akira Kurosawa and The Economist
  
Years ago I went with a group of mostly french friends to see a performance of Charles Aznavour, a French crooner of Armenian extraction who is best described as the French Frank Sinatra. One of the guys with us that night was from the Armenian consulate and when Aznavour announced he was going to sing about his homeland, our Armenian friend stood and with the other Armenians in the audience, went wild. Not to be out done, when Aznavour introduced a song about Paris my expat Parisian friend, and the other displaced Parisians filling the hall, stood and sent up a great cheer. A little while later Aznavour explained that his next song was about "the love that dare not speak its name" - and a gay couple in our row stood and loudly cheered. Everyone smiled. Finally Aznavour announced that he would sing his song La Bohème about struggling artists, and I stood, all alone and cheered. My friends, the gay guys, and everyone around us looked at me like I was a little nuts. Which was just about right. We have always been a marginal group at best, but as we look forward to the "end of work" - or as it is more recently been dubbed, "the end of jobs" - the Bohème may become a force for change - not as a heroic avant-guard leading the Proletariat to violent revolution against their Capitalist overlords, but something more akin to the growth of the Petite Bourgeoisie consumer class - aka the middle class - during the Post War years.

2H2K - April 2050 - Robots are Marxist: An Introduction

First horseless carriage in Vancouver (1899)

"Can't get there from here" is the punch line of an old joke about a driver asking a farmer for directions (my father used to tell it, with great effect, using a thick New England accent). There is, in linguistic circles, a question of whether or not there are certain ideas that can't be conceived of without the language needed to describe them, having been developed in advance. Call it a cognitive chicken-and-egg, can't get there from here, conundrum. As I began thinking about what city life might be like in the year 2050, I found myself wondering how people will speak of robots when everything is a robot. Just as we no longer refer to "horseless carriages," I don't expect anyone to refer to "driverless automobiles" forty years from now. Rather than invent a new word (carbot? cardroid?) or repurpose an old one (automat? autobot?) I decided instead that it made more sense to invent a new way of speaking; to have English speakers use tone to change meaning: so a driverless car became a caR, a robotic carpenter became a carpenteR, and an automated operator - like the kind we interact with more and more today - became an operatoR. What ended up happening is that my mind went in an entirely unexpected direction. Instead of thinking about questions of Artificial Intelligence, I found myself wondering about Artificial Labor. The difference is subtle but turned out to be helpful making the leap past the naysaying Yankee.

White Walls, The Gold Standard (Part 10)

The Fifth Element (1997); Satellite Photo of Earth at Night (2000)

(Part 9)

William Gibson has observed that "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." And indeed, high-technology can be mapped out as the very uneven distribution of urban light seen on the earth's night side, as the overlap of high pollution emissions and GDP, or as telecommunication traffic. All are expressions of modern wealth. Those of us who live in the brightly lit, heavily trafficked spots on the map enjoy a greater portion of the future, but still bear a full portion of the past. If he were still alive to answer Gibson, William Faulkner might have said that the past is very evenly distributed. To understand what hi-tech whiteness means, it is crucial to see not only that it is a prestige color. Like the conspicuous consumption of lighting the night sky, whiteness is a marker of wealth. Blackness is not its opposite number however; the two are equivalents. An actual alternative; a true foil, is one that belongs as completely to the past as whiteness belongs to the future: gold.

Star Wars and Postmodernism

Boys and their toys, Then, and Now

Like most boys, I spent a lot of time playing war. But unlike American boys of the 50s and 60s, who grew up imagining themselves as patriotic GI Joes, my friends and I didn't play with army men. We were born into the rain shadow that followed the Vietnam War, during which, Hasbro stopped making soldier toys. We still played war, but instead of American soldiers,  played with Star Wars. Unlike boys just a few years older than us, we were no longer fantasizing about being grunts of the Greatest Generation defending American freedom from Fascism; our imaginary enemies wielded weapon of mass destruction and were fascists with a lowercase "f' (I spell out the difference I see between Fascism and fascism HERE). The story we were all reenacting was an upside-down fantasy of North Vietnamese-like space guerrillas battling American Modernism in Nazi drag. We were replacing the story of one kind of authority, with a new, very different story of authority. It looked like a childish fad, but, in the context of that particular moment, it was subversive. 

A Crisis in Criticism: Star Wars is not Literature, it is an Object.

Look how sad Luke is; critics need to sort out a better way to decide what lowbrow media they will consider with the precincts of highbrow scholarship.


Joshua Glenn recently posted an interesting critical response to my Star Wars Klein group diagram (which you can see above) on his website HiLoBrow. I explained my original diagram in a post titled  Rosalind Krauss is a Jedi, and Glenn's response is called Star Wars Semiotics. The titles themselves signal two very different approaches to the same problem. Glenn admits to being “wary of structuralist heuristic devices” but dives right in, and does a great job reworking my diagram along more the more orthodox literary model used by Fredric Jameson (who uses the term “Greimas or Semiotic Square”). In my post I likewise freely admit my own limits, which after reading Glenn's post are clearly far more limiting than his (kinda bums me out that Glenn didn't find time to explain what the terms "complex" and "neuter" indicate). So it's not surprising Glenn believes his Star Wars Semiotic Square improves on mine. In the interest of intellectual good will I did my best to answer his requests that “Someone good at drawing or Photoshop should send me a diagram…” I’m not especially good at either, but I've done my best:

Star Wars Semiotic Square according to Joshua Glenn (plus or minus my best effort - turns out the Sith are really hard to draw)

Glenn's post is good natured and whip smart - but he's dead wrong. While he is no doubt the superior semiotician (even if his heart is not fully committed to structuralist heuristic devices, his brain is clearly able to wale away unaffected) and I can't hope to outsmart the guy, mine is the better diagram. The reason is that he is diagramming the film as literature, and I am diagramming it as an object. His is the more conventional reading of Star Wars, but mine is the more revealing and interesting of the two perspectives. Glenn's post deserves a rebuttal - and his while his critique has not made me revise my position, it has mad me aware that it needs to be clarified. But before I revisit the reasoning behind my diagram I want to address the convention approach of film as literature. What I find most interesting about the difference between Glenn's diagram and my own is how quickly the difference manifests itself. His is peopled by characters - stormtroopers, droids, and non-human aliens - mine is constructed out of places and things - ships, farms, and space terminals. This is a telling difference.

The Oppression of the Sith

When Bill Kristal explained on Special Report last year, “So Thursday we will have Obama versus Cheney, which is going to be fun, don't you think? Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, you know. And I want to say that I was always on Darth Vader's side, even when I saw the movie. And I'm sticking with him.” I think he intuitively got his and the other NeoCon’s place within the Star Wars Universe almost exactly right.

They are Sith all right; but they are not Sith Masters, just latter-day lackeys and leeches. The NeoCon response to the September 11^th attacks has been a consistent campaign of fear mongering. They have made every effort to prolong the corrosive paranoia of Containment, Americas's post war response to the Soviet Union. And their policy responses have had no relationship to the reality of the threat (My father says the halmark of a bully is poor threat assessment). In his book The First Total War David A Bell writes that:

"Since September 2001, the United States has been involved in a War on Terror that has, to date, cost the same number of American civilian lives that are lost every two and a half weeks in road accidents on American highways. It is the same number of lives that the soviet Union lost every six hours, for four agonizing years, during World War II. Our opponents in this new conflict, for all their stated desire to acquire weapons of mass destruction, have so far demonstrated no ability to wield anything more powerful than knives, guns, and conventional explosives. A war it may be, but does it really deserve comparison to World War II and its 50 million dead? Not every adversary is an apocalyptic threat. Yet the languages in which we speak are used to discussing war and peace make it difficult for this point to emerge."

A lot has been made of the fascist imagery in Star Wars, from the uniforms of the Imperial forces to the unfortunate resemblance between the Award Ceremony at the end and Leny Riefenstahl's nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. But the 1930s imagery in Star Wars was not limited to Fascist allusion.

In The Disappointment Artist Jonathan Lethem, admitted to seeing Star Wars twenty one times the summer of 1977 and to having found C-3PO sexy: "Its as if a strand of DNA from Fritz Lang’s fetishized girl robot in Metropolis has carried forward to the bland world of Star Wars.” And he is exactly right. C-3PO's appearance was based on Maria's. Additionally Luke's Land Speeder was a fragment of the very same deco future past that produced his golden robotic companion. It looks like it was produced by the same assembly lines that produced the massive airships in the 1933 film Things to Come. Those ships were as crisp and new as ebonite of course, and the Land speeder was love worn, but both were unmistakably stamped with the look of 1930s design.

Toward the end of Gates of Eden, Morris Dickstein’s account of the 1960s, he wrote “It didn't take long for us to become nostalgic for the thirties, when we hadn't even been born.” Gates of Eden was published in 1977, in the immediate wake of the period he was celebrating, and the same year Star Wars premiered. He and his friends, he tells us, “looked back wistfully at the excited ideological climate of the thirties, about which we knew next to nothing.” I think Lucas and his young crew were very similar to Dickstein and his young friends.

But waking up today and hearing on the radio that it is the 160 anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, made me want to unpack the “War,” in Star Wars. To those of you who think Star Wars is about the Allies struggle against capital “F” Fascism in WWII, or "an allegory for the Cold War and America's struggle against another Evil Empire" - please reconsider. The struggle the film re-imagines, is the Cold War, but it was the struggle against the lowercase “f” fascist pigs in the US government. The Rebellion was a resistance modeled on the North Vietnamese communists.

Here is what Lucas said at the time:


"I started to work on Star Wars rather than continue on Apocalypse Now. I had worked on Apocalypse Now for about four years and I had very strong feelings about it. I wanted to do it, but could not get it off the ground... A lot of my interest in Apocalypse Now was carried over into Star Wars. I figured I couldn't make that film because it was about the Vietnam War, so I would essentially deal with some of the same interesting concepts that I was going to use and convert them into space fantasy, so you'd have essentially a large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters or human beings... a small independent country like North Vietnam threatened by a neighbor or provincial rebellion, instigated by gangsters aided by empire... The empire is like America ten years from now, after Nixonian gangsters assassinated the Emperor and were elevated to power in a rigged election; created civil disorder by instigating race riots aiding rebel groups and allowing the crime rate to rise to the point where a 'total control' police state was welcomed by the people. Then the people were exploited with high taxes, utility and transport costs" The Making of Star Wars: 7-8,17.



According to the French philosopher Michel Foucault, fascism is an all-but meaningless term, or what he called “a floating signifier whose function, is essentially that of denunciation.” I believe the real ghost that haunts Star Wars is not the WWII struggle against fascism or even the Cold War Struggle against the Soviet Union. The destruction of the Deathstar was a denunciation of the American Cold War tactics used in the struggle against domestic dissent.

To be clear: this conclusion is my own. I’ve have never heard Lucas or anyone else say this in anything I have read about Star Wars, but Lucas does say the Imperials are Nixonian gangsters. And more recently explained on his audio commentary for the Revenge of the Sith DVD that:

“When I first started making the film [the first Star Wars], it was during the Vietnam War, and it was during a period when Nixon was going for a third term - or trying to get the Constitution changed to could go for a third term - and it got me to thinking about how democracies turn into dictatorships. Not how they’re taken over where there’s a coup or anything like that, but how the democracy turns itself over to a tyrant."

Nixon was a cold Warrior. He was an active and aggressive anti-communist crusader. If the battle fought in Star Wars was Vietnam – a war that did not mark America’s defeat, but did mark the collapse of the by then septic policies (both domestic and abroad) of the Cold Warriors. When Obi Wan mentions the Clone War to young Luke Skywalker in Star Wars the struggle it evokes is the Black Lists of the 1940s and 50s and the rolling terror of the House Committee On Un-American Activities.

In no way do the Storm Troopers uniforms evoke Nazis, but they do seem like a natural progression from the robots in Lucas’ first film THX 1138. The robots in that film wore white riot helmets exactly like the ones worn by the American police who stood against and often beat protesters around the country as the Vietnam War withered and Cold Warriors became frantic to control the American public’s morale. It is as if in Star Wars the helmet grew to completely encapsulate the Clones.

Additionally those chrome faced robots repeatedly asked “Are you now or have you ever?” The robotic cops were a conflation of two of the ugliest chapters of American Cold War politics: the Post-War anti-communist witch-hunt of the 40s and 50s (a time when careers were destroyed by the question: “Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the communist party?”) with the police riots of the 60s and 70s.

In Star Wars Lucas served us “a floating signifier” of such fantastic scale it is difficult to recognize the thing it is. The Deathstar can be imagined as many things, but at its core is an angry young fist raised up and flipping the bird back at the Cold Warriors. This one is for you Dick Chenney.

Happy Anniversery all you pinko Jedi.