“Star Wars” got us ready for Reagan: “You suddenly have permission to think in very juvenile terms a

[applegrove]

“Star Wars” got us ready for Reagan: “You suddenly have permission to think in very juvenile terms about how history works”

by Scott Timberg at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2015/12/21/star_wars_got_us_ready_for_reagan_you_suddenly_have_permission_to_think_in_very_juvenile_terms_about_how_history_works/

"SNIP.............


“Star Wars: The Force Reawakens” broke all kinds of records over the weekend and has been called a return to the style of the original 1977 film. It will soon swallow everything in the known universe.

Historian Rick Perlstein finds himself interested in the movie, but he’s not an action-figure collector. What intrigues him is way the “Star Wars” movies have become the dominant pop culture of the last few decades. “I was about to turn eight years old when it came out,” he wrote recently of the original film, “and I loved it as much as the next second grader did. Because … I was a second grader. Looking back at the
summer of 1977 now, however, wearing my historian’s cap, I have to protest: why are we celebrating this ‘franchise’ in the worshipful way we are, when it contributed so materially to turning us into a nation of eight-year-olds?”

Perlstein, the author of “The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan,” just published an insightful piece in the Washington Spectator called “Juvenilia Strikes Back.” He argues that “Star Wars” didn’t just help end the New Hollywood boom that included artful, grown-up films like “Taxi Driver,” “The Godfather” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” – a claim that’s become part of the accepted wisdom — but that it helped prepare the nation for the Reagan revolution. At the very least, the movie and its sequels came at a time when the nation was moving through the traumas of the ‘60s and ‘70s – with moments of introspection and self-criticism – to the unreflective triumphalism of the ‘80s.

We asked Perlstein, who lives in Chicago, to put the movie in historical context for us: Most centrally, what was the connection between the success of “Star Wars” and the other tensions in American life at the time? The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.



..............SNIP"

[Scootaloo]

1. Cinema snobbery seeks political relevance, film at 11

[applegrove]

2. We did take a turn to very simplistic politics and nonesense over nuance then. I think he

has a valid point. It became about entertainment. Though it was well on it's way. And in some ways politics have always been about entertainment after they stopped being about terror. I'd prefer to be entertained. But Trump is the terror of entertainment. And the terror of all the issues we are they are not talking about...like Climate change or racism. Things that force people to grow and reach.

[Scootaloo]

3. Did "Independence day" prime us for the Bush Administration?

if so, watch out, Roland Emmerich is making a new one due out next year.

Using the logic at hand, it could ably be argued the other way - that over a decade of gloomy, gritty, cynical films telling us "you can't trust the government" was what primed us for a sappily optimistic political campaign by a guy promising to cut back government at all levels.

[Orrex]

4. Yeah--it's not like we were suffering an economic catastrophe or had recently fled a disastrous war

Perlstein's conclusion is facile and a hopeless case of post hoc cherry-picking. Many other factors had a much more direct and damaging impact on the nation's psyche, but it's not edgy or click-grabbing to review these. Better to roll out a tired deconstructionist gimmick in order to blame a handy pop culture phenomenon.

[applegrove]

7. Oh I think after Nixon the GOP went all simpletons all the time. They had an agenda they wanted

to implement and they couldn't risk democracy. They needed a series of political leaders they could control. These simpletons were told and then repeated particularly simple stories of good and evil be it the USSR or abortion. Very Hollywood for a generation or two who had grown up in Hollywood.

[Orrex]

8. I guess I'd rather stick the blame where it belongs.

The popularity of Star Wars et al seems to me more like a symptom than the cause.

[applegrove]

9. I'll agree to that. That simple stories like that were within America and the GOP

exploited that in the same way psychopaths always exploit something issue inside their marks to make their agenda seem real.

[X_Digger]

5. History Professor sees trend, tries to tie his wagon to it.

Free clue professor, you're still not relevant.

[Gidney N Cloyd]

6. How long until magazines et al can stop trying to find a 'Star Wars' angle to everything again?

[Adrahil]

10. Bullshit, Professor.

I am very active in Star Wars fandom , and most I know are pretty liberal, and I live in a red state.

[LittleBlue]

11. The biggest themes in SW were hope, redemption and the interconnected nature of life

Not exactly Reagan, is it?

“Star Wars: The Force Reawakens”

Isn't it "The Force Awakens"? Not Reawakens.

[applegrove]

13. But reagan was a sunny nobility salesperson of the dark forces in US politics.

[Volaris]

18. Yes , it is.

Not sure what that says about the writer of the article per se, but I read what he wrote and my opinion is that its nonsensical trash.

[nadinbrzezinski]

12. Ok, ok, now getting my hat on for why Star Wars was written

it was about Nixon. The speech, this is how democracy dies, in the prequel. was about Nixon.

The whole thing was an allegory about Nixonian politics.

Just like the LoTR is about WW I, and industrial warfare.

There are days...

[Bluenorthwest]

14. Star Wars ended 'grown up films'? Two years after Star Wars, the Academy's nominations for

Best Picture were Kramer vs Kramer, Apocalypse Now, Coming Home, All That Jazz, Norma Rae and Breaking Away.
Year After that: Tess, Raging Bull, Coal Miner's Daughter, The Elephant Man and Ordinary People.

Those are not 'grown up' films?

[MrScorpio]

15. I'll have some of whatever the author is drinking nt

[MowCowWhoHow III]

16. Oh Goody! Another steaming pile from the Salon conveyor belt.

[el_bryanto]

17. It's a good season to have a little charity

Professors need to make a living same as everybody else; writing about national trends with catchy titles is a good way to go about that. I don't begrudge Timberg or Perlstein their chance to cash in.

And I'm not sure the argument is entirely wrong. I love Star Wars (the original trilogy), but they, along with Jaws and a few other movies, set the stage for the modern blockbuster. They changed the culture of movies and movie watching, with some benefits and some negatives. For all that brilliant movies are made today, the ones that make a ton of money tend to be the big budget blockbusters. Some of those are entertaining and well made and some of them are the Transformers (and others of that ilk).

As for the argument that Star Wars opened the door to Reagan, I think Star Wars is more a reflection of a general societal desire for simple understandings rather than the political and socio-economic complexities of the 70s. We had Nixon, Ford, and Carter in the White House, and a nation that seemed to be tearing itself apart after the idealism of the 60s. Looking for a simple good guys vs bad guys story is understandable - whether that story played itself out on the big screen (as in Star Wars) or in the White House (the Reagan presidency).

Bryant

[GreatGazoo]

19. Weak sauce.

"Star Wars" was based loosely on Kirosawa's "Hidden Fortress" combined with Flash Gordon and serial matinee features of the 1950s. When Lucas shopped the script no studio wanted to make it. When Fox committed they didn't have the effects department that could pull off the effects it needed. The story of Star Wars is not that different form other well-love American films, for example "The Wizard of Oz" but the visual style was very new and as when TV re-hashed the genre of Westerns into "Star Trek," visual style makes old stories new again, unrecognizable to much of the audience.

Star Wars didn't end the careers of Coppola (Godfather), Scorsese (Taxi Driver) or Milos Forman (Cuckoos Nest). On the contrary, Star Wars revived Sci-fi which was on the ropes at the time. It created a visual style and the high tech effects to make the genre viable again. It was a PG film and PG films at that time did much more business than R rated films like the 3 he cites. He ignores the success of "Apocalypse Now", and "The Deer Hunter" which were very current and relevant to the disillusionment over Vietnam

Stories about underdogs always appeal to American audiences but it is a huge leap to say that because Star Wars did $461 mil during the 1977 that Americans saw our country's military as the underdog on the world stage. No basis for that. It was an era of disillusionment that other Sci-Fi movies like "Close Encounters" tapped into. "Close Encounters" basically says 'if our government can lie about the JFK assassins, Watergate and the Pentagon Papers and mostly get away with it then how do we know they haven't lied about aliens? Reagan also tapped into the disillusionment with government but he didn't say he would clean it up so much as "make it small enough to drown in a bath tub."

The first "Star Wars" film DID open up the gates for more juvenile sci-fi films that followed like "E.T." but the Reagan era government is the villain in "E.T." as they hunt the stranded alien while the underdog, the kids free him. (ET is the Christ story re-worked -- comes from the heavens, heals with touch, persecuted by the government, dies, comes back to life, leaves and says he will return -- but that is a whole other tangent here).

What really set the stage for Reagan was a program called "Nightline" with its host Ted Kopple. It was the birth of Fox News. A drumbeat of attack on Jimmy Carter and a nightly count of how many days 'America had been humiliated' allegedly 'because Carter had not freed the hostages in Iran.' Reagan struck down the Fairness Doctrine so that TV media could be consolidated by corporate interests who excluded left leaning voices and opinions and turned all TV "news" into "Nightline".

[whatthehey]

20. The correlation makes sense but I don't buy cxausation

Simplistic outlooks and jingoistic exceptionalism didn't start in 77. That was just the timing of their return to prominence, give or take.