May the Armed Forces Be with You by Stephen Dedman

Author:Stephen Dedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2016-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

The nonaggressive stance of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which the U.S. military is responsible for covering up the truth of UFO sightings and stages a fake nerve gas accident in an attempt to keep contactees away from a UFO landing site, with dead sheep as props (a tactic which may have been inspired by the real nerve gas leak from the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in 1968, which killed thousands of sheep), was made (not surprisingly) without military assistance, and was not entirely typical of the SF movies of the time. This was also the era of Alien (1979) and Battlestar Galactica (1978–1979); Invasion of the Body Snatchers was remade in 1978, and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century in 1979, all of them featuring hostile extraterrestrials.56 Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) saw pacifists turned into partisans to fight an intergalactic extortionist with a stellar converter.57 Starship Invasions (1977), Laserblast (1978), Superman: The Movie (1979), Superman II (1980) and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1980) had a bet each way, with both benign and hostile aliens.58 But as with Star Wars’s Death Star, the enemy was often a “technological terror” from space—Star Trek’s V’ger, Sador’s stellar converter in Battle Beyond the Stars, Battlestar Galactica’s robotic Cylons, Starship Invasion’s suicide-inducing electric arc, the superior military force of the Draconian starships in Buck Rogers. As with the North Vietnamese, though, these menaces were never defeated by superior technology.

Whether or not this comparison with the Vietnam War was consciously made by the writers of all of the films and TV shows mentioned above, it was certainly deliberate on George Lucas’s part. According to Taylor, Lucas considered fleeing to Canada when he received his draft notice in 1966 after graduating from USC, but turned up for his medical, where it was discovered that he was diabetic and rated 4-F.59 Hired to edit film for the U.S. Information Agency, he was “told that he’d made a story about a crackdown on an anti-government riot in South Korea look ‘too fascist.’”60 He was already talking about making Star Wars, summarized in 1973 as “a large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters.”61

The villain of this fairy tale, the Empire, was inspired by the U.S. military in Vietnam; the Ewoks by the Viet Cong; the Emperor by President Nixon. The fairy tale was charmingly benign enough to mask that fact, and now every culture around the planet, whether embattled or entitled, sees itself in the Rebel Alliance. “Star Wars has got a very, very elaborate social, emotional, political context that it rests in,” Lucas said in 2012. “But, of course, nobody was aware of that.”62

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