On Getting Star Wars Wrong
I recently read this quote from Peter Thiel, cited from the New York Times in a recent article in the Guardian:
I like Star Wars way better. I’m a capitalist. Star Wars is a capitalist show (sic). Star Trek is the communist one. There is no money in Star Trek because you just have the transporter (sic) machine that can make anything you need. The whole plot Star Wars starts with Han Solo having this debt that he owes and so the plot in Star Wars is driven by money.
The whole plot of Star Wars starts with Han Solo? Did we forget the entire first act of the film, the nearly half-hour of screen time that takes place before Han Solo shows up? Then, the plot starting with “this debt that he owes.” What?
I have to admit that I am somewhat deeply entrenched in the lore of both Star Trek and Star Wars and so cannot be considered an “average person” when it comes to either franchise. But I also feel like it’s not outside the realm of reason to say that the average person, when thinking about Star Wars, is not under the assumption that those films are about Han Solo and money. Luke Skywalker is the hero of the franchise (sorry, George, you’re wrong in thinking that you could make Star Wars to be about Anakin). His story is about putting others ahead of himself.
Peter Thiel, it seems, conveniently forgets that the opening scenes of Star Wars (what has since been retconned into A New Hope) involve a superior military killing and abducting dissidents in order to silence them. Han Solo’s debt is only a tangential part of the story (it’s the motivation that gets him wrapped up in the whole thing, sure). The plot of Star Wars starts with Princess Leia discreetly sending the plans of a secret super weapon (the Death Star) to a backwater planet where she knows an old Jedi—a religion of essentially space wizards who’ve been eradicated by the Galactic Empire—is in hiding, in the hopes that he’ll get those plans to the leadership of the Rebel Alliance so they can put a stop to mass murder. This happens as Darth Vader, the right-hand enforcer of the Emperor, has boarded her ship and massacres her crew. It is, quite famously, one of the most historically thrilling opening scenes in the history of cinema.
I once knew a couple, youth group leaders at an upstart church in the Orlando area, who did Star Wars cosplay and said “we’re more into the military/tactical part of Star Wars, not so much the mystical/Jedi stuff.” This is only to say that, yes, I get that there are people who enjoy Star Wars who don’t really go for the “Jedi stuff.” But you’d think that the guy who’s recently made it part of his brand to be an expert on the Antichrist would focus on Luke, the messianic figure, and not Han, the greaser who makes no secret of the fact that he believes in nothing.
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I recently wrote a piece wondering about the phenomenon of me and Christian Nationalist types reading the same Bible but coming away with vastly different views on those texts. This kind of questioning applies to other stories and shared mythologies. In that same aforementioned Guardian article is a note that Stephen Miller, the cruel and ghoulish advisor to the Trump White House, claims to be a fan of Star Trek. Years back we learned that, infamously, Paul Ryan (Mitt Romney’s running mate in the 2012 presidential election) claimed to be a fan of the notoriously anarchist band Rage Against the Machine. This lead to memes involving people wondering what “machine” Paul Ryan thought Zach and Tom were raging against (was it a faulty Maytag?).
Again, how does this happen?
I was recently reminded of a story shared by Dr. Randy Richards and Brandon O’Brien in their truly great book Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes. They recall a story related by Mark Allen Powell in his essay “The Forgotten Famine” where he had different groups read Luke’s account of the Prodigal Son story.
Powell had twelve students in a seminary class read the story carefully from Luke’s Gospel (sic), close their Bibles and then retell the story as faithfully as possible to a partner […] Later, Powell had the opportunity to try [this] again, this time outside the United States. In St. Petersburg, Russia, he gathered fifty participants to read and retell the prodigal son story.
The story goes that Powell noticed that none of the 12 American seminary students mentioned the famine that is referenced in Luke 15:14. He finds this interesting and decides to have a hundred people do this exercise, out of which only six mention the famine.
The group was ethnically, racially, socioeconomically and religiously diverse. The “famine-forgetters,” as Powell calls them, had only one thing in common: they were from the United States.
As already mentioned, he has the opportunity to try this experiment with fifty Russians and out of that group “an overwhelming forty-two of the fifty participants mentioned the famine.”
The authors postulate that for the Russian participants, the memory of the Nazi siege (when St. Petersburg was known as Leningrad), which resulted in three years of famine and around 670,000 deaths, was a key component to the story. The purpose of sharing this story, the authors state, is “to raise this question: if our cultural context and assumptions can cause us to overlook a famine, what else do we fail to notice?”
The details missed seem to be informed by cultural and economic contexts. Those Russian students knew famine, so they were primed to see that detail. We in the US are prone to say “I’m starving” after only a few hours after a meal, so we’re less inclined to pay attention to the detail of the famine. But, regardless, the famine is an essential part of understanding the story. The famine is what prompts the “prodigal” of the story to return home.
As Richards and O’Brien note, American Christians tend to see the story of the Prodigal Son as being about the wasteful kid getting his comeuppance, facing the reality of lying in the bed that he’s made, and being surprised at his father’s mercy. But the Russian readers (and plenty of others outside of the West) see the story differently: “The boy’s problem is not that he is wasteful but that he is lost.” Not noticing the famine changes the tenor of the story quite dramatically.
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I don’t know Peter Thiel, so I can only speculate about his thoughts. But it seems likely that a man of his wealth is primed to see both Star Trek and Star Wars in particular terms. Namely, he sees both as being about money. In order to do this, Thiel has to ignore basically the entire actual story of Star Wars.
It’s interesting that he views Star Wars as a story about Han Solo when comparing it to Star Trek. I say this because there is an oft-made comparison between Han Solo and James Kirk in popular culture. Both are considered to be “shoot-first” rogue like characters who live and act based on their gut feelings, causing women to swoon and men to fall-in-line behind them. But the reality is that neither image is accurate to either character.
In the actual Star Trek show Kirk is rarely depicted as a swashbuckling womanizer. Rather he’s described as “a walking stack of books” back in Academy days. He strictly adheres to rules and protocol, deviating only when it seems necessary and called for, and gets laid far less in the show than you’d be primed to think if you’ve never watched it. I think marketing execs created this image for Kirk in order to try and sell the show to a world that had never heard of Star Trek and it wound up sticking in people’s minds—to the point that the Kirk of the movies (particularly from Khan onward) is more like the imagined idea of Kirk rather than his actual depiction in the show (and I say this as an avowed lover of the Star Trek films).
Additionally, Han is a kind of comic-relief character. He’s what’s known as the “audience surrogate,” the character who sits on the outside of the main narrative action to help translate the in-universe events for those who aren’t part of it. His line about “hokey religion” being no substitute for a blaster is meant to be a wink for all the 1970s Boomer dads in the audience for whom laser swords and droid banter is a bit too much. Their kids see themselves in the princess and the would-be knight. The guy who owes people money, drinking at the bar, racing around in a junker that he fixes up himself? Pure 1970s dad fantasy.
Han is also kind of an idiot. His entire “shoot-first” approach winds up both condemned and seen as a failure by the end of the film (which further makes George Lucas’ changes to Han’s shooting of Greedo all the more egregious). Han’s arc is literally that of a rambling man out on the road with no one but his dog, looking for quick bucks, coming to the realization that there’s things more important than money and that he is a better man with friends at his side. Lest we forget, Han Solo gets the winning shot against Darth Vader(!) and only after he decides to make a u-turn and deal with the bounty on his head for another day. He makes a selfless decision to save his friends from what he had already acknowledged was a suicide mission. The end of the movie is, in terms of Han Solo, quite overtly a rejection of money. So if money is at all part of what Star Wars is “about” it’s in terms of money’s limits. It’s corny and cliché to say (but George Lucas is openly playing with corny cliches in this series of films) but Han’s story really ends on “the real wealth is the friends we’ve made.”
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Is Star Trek communist? Communist is a particular thing, so I won’t say that. Star Trek is decidedly socialist though.
The “transporter machine” that Thiel refers to is likely the replicator, a piece of technology that only started to show up in Star Trek: The Next Generation (set a century after the events of Kirk and his crew). What’s interesting to me about the lore of Star Trek is that the utopian vision of the Federation of Planets is something that begins to come into being before there’s been a post-scarcity society. Gene Roddenberry depicted a future where humanity matured beyond the pettiness of political boundaries and wealth-hoarding. Later iterations of the series would depict the catalyzing event of this as humanity’s first contact with alien life, which elevates our consciousness. But the actual original series of Star Trek doesn’t go that deep into the history. Rather it takes for granted that we humans were just simply destined to reach such a place by virtue of our continued growth as a species. Star Trek (the original series) indicates that there are other wars between the Federation years and ours (World War III, the Eugenics Wars), all with the implication that we eventually come to see the absurdity of war among ourselves and choose to work as one species for our betterment.
Thiel cannot imagine a scenario where humanity becomes collaborative and communal without some kind of technological catalyst.
He sees Star Trek as presenting a world where people refuse to accept the monetization of technologies that people like him envision themselves inventing. He’s likely terrified of the idea that he and his friends’ inventions will be taken from them and used in ways that won’t make them both rich and powerful. And so he has to dismiss the relatively hard sci-fi Star Trek as a kind of fantasy while reinventing the decidedly fantasy-set-in-space Star Wars as a more “realistic” story—conveniently ignoring the vast majority of the story in order to do so.
The funny thing is that, everything considered, both Star Wars and Star Trek depict the same thing: once we put aside the pursuit of wealth in exchange for collaboration, community, and working toward a more open future for everyone that’s when we really begin to shine.
That’s when we really get to live among the stars.
The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.