The Phantom Menace Essay

Star Wars as Church History

Koenrad Kuiper, writing in the Journal of Popular Culture in the mid 1980s suggests that "[the] Star Wars trilogy creates and recreates imperial myths which serve to sustain imperial culture" (77). He goes on to contend that the Empire of George Lucas’s long ago and far away world recreate these myths for us now as, essentially, a form of social control. Since Kuiper was writing, however, we have been graced with the first in the Star Wars series, The Phantom Menace.

The Phantom Menace has opened to tepid reviews and the expected box-office success. Its staying-power has been perhaps a bit disappointing for all at Lucasfilm, but the film has definitely made a cultural impact. Interesting in light of Kuiper’s

His message, just as that of Jesus, is one of liberation. His prospects as a doer of good are, in the first movie, excellent. Jesus, before being cast as the foundation of a great church, is a very hopeful figure, preaching political and spiritual freedom–even going so far as to proclaim victory over death itself. If slavery can be seen as a symbol of death, then Anakin Skywalker promises as

Kenobi has to admit that it is, indeed, Darth Vader, despite the fact that he has previously told Luke that his father was dead. Obi-Wan explains that Luke’s father, Anakin Skywalker, effectively died when he became Darth Vader. Presumably, upon becoming Darth Vader, Anakin Skywalker becomes part of the evil Empire. The lesson we can draw is that it was the imperial nature of the established church in Europe that corrupted Christianity: as a localized and specifically Jewish liberation movement, the teachings of Jesus were uncorrupt and pure. By blending them with the trappings of a great Empire, they became evil. By this logic, Jesus (Anakin Skywalker) dies when he becomes Christ, the Father of the Christian church (Darth Vader). We can further extrapolate this to mean that Christ’s "resurrection" is in fact a re-creation into the figure of a Dark Lord. By Jedi (Rabbi) standards, he is dead, as Jedism (Judaism) has no concept of life after death except in the memories of the living. This is evident when Obi-Wan and the Jedi master Yoda appear to Luke Skywalker in visions in the second and third films: his memory of them keeps their spirits living. The defeat over death proclaimed by Christian mythology is, as presented by Lucas, an evil thing, unbecoming of the religious traditions from which it sprang, and antithetical to a more natural