The Original Star Wars Trilogy (1977-83)

For as much as Star Wars is a throwback, it’s also a film of its time, in ways beyond the shaggy haircuts sported by stars Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford. It’s worth remembering that Lucas and Kurtz, in parallel with Star Wars, worked on and off on Apocalypse Now, which they imagined as a Dr. Strangelove-like dark comedy set during the Vietnam War. Lucas’ interest in grappling with that war, which gave American Graffiti its half-tragic coda, extended into Star Wars. In a 1970s interview with Lippincott referenced in J.W. Rinzler’s invaluable book The Making Of Star Wars, Lucas says:

A lot of my interest in Apocalypse Now was carried over into Star Wars. I figured that 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.

In a note on an early draft of the film involving a planet of called Aquilae, Lucas writes:

Aquilae is a small independent country like North Vietnam threatened by a neighbor or provincial rebellion, instigated by gangsters aided by empire. Fight to get rightful planet back. Half of system has been lost to gangsters. The empire is like America ten years from now, after gangsters assassinated the Emperor and were elevated to power in a rigged election. We are at a turning point: fascism or revolution.

And in discussing Star Wars with writer Alan Dean Foster, who wound up penning the novelization of Star Wars published ahead of the movie, Lucas found another real-world parallel between Star Wars’s Rebel forces:

It happens in all countries when a certain force, which everybody thinks is wrong, begins to take over and nobody decides to stand up against it, or the people who stand up against it can’t rally enough support. What usually happens is a small minority stands up against it, and the major portion are a lot of indifferent people who aren’t doing anything one way or the other. And by not accepting the responsibility, those people eventually have to confront the issue in a more painful way, which is essentially what happened in the United States with the Vietnam War.

From a certain point of view, to borrow a phrase from a different movie, Star Wars isn’t an attempt to escape from Vietnam, but an attempt to recontextualize it, with the United States slotted into the role of the Empire, and the Rebellion standing in for the NVA and the Viet Cong. By the time the film reached screens, this source of inspiration was so deep in the mix—buried beneath everything from Joseph Campbell to Bruno Bettelheim to The Wizard Of Oz—that it hardly counted as subtext anymore. But it’s still fundamentally a story about revolutionaries standing up for what’s right, and its Vietnam-inspired origins complicate the notion that Star Wars was ever purely an escapist enterprise. No matter how long ago and how far, far away you set a story, the real world has a way of creeping in.