J.R. Jones of the Chicago Reader is at the vanguard of critics reading Revenge of the Sith as some sort of Dogville for less artsy audiences. He opens his review with the daydream:


"What I wouldn't give to see President Bush's expression when Revenge of the Sith screens at the White House and the freshly annointed Darth Vader, hoping to seduce Obi-Wan Kenobi to the dark side, declares, "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy!"


As if Bush and his foreign policy were the absolutist dark side to the altruistic Jedi moralism of... who? Oh, I see:


"In a way it's like the Force, something he found within himself that's larger and more powerful than he ever could have imagined, with the potential to ennoble or corrupt. The idea that a good man following a right path could unknowingly become an architect of evil times must have cut pretty close to the bone for Lucas."


So the Jedi in this film have no real contemporary political counterpart. That is, other than the still, small voices that, out of no sense of self-interest, continually critique Bush’s current foreign policy (not many of which seem that still or small, or blankly altruistic). What Jones is after is showing that Bush, once a good man, has been lured unknowingly into conducting a great moral horror. His rhetoric of “us vs. them” is a dire indication of the terrific evil that has sway over the Oval Office (who is the Emperor in this analogy?). Bush’s rhetoric has also been compared to the “shoot from the hip” mentality of classic American westerns. The sense of justice behind the current Iraq war is a black and white matinee ethic that doesn’t work well in the gray haze of international law. I am not out to make any political statement on the issue either way, other than to show that making such political commentary in the guise of film criticism can often backfire.


The average reader though should be at least interested how well such analogies fit the texts they are being ascribed to. As there are few, if any, further parallels between Bush and Darth Vader in Revenge of the Sith, one wonders how responsible Jones’ criticism on this point really is. I am reminded of the Bob Dylan ballad in which we find out that Betsy Ross was a communist. There are red stripes all over her flag! As Jones points out, but fails to address any further in terms of his analogy, the Jedi themselves have become compromised by their self-righteous skullduggery. Who are the Jedi in this analogy again?


Fortunately Jones does allude to the following alternative reading throughout his review, but let’s read Revenge of the Sith for what it really is without the flimsy polemics. It is an ironical self-criticism of the bland technological hegemony of Lucasfilm itself. Anakin was seduced to the dark side by the promise of powers that could only be had through the sort of training the Jedi cannot offer. Such a broader, more flexible array of tools would be at his disposal if he would only sign over his talents and future to the dark side. Imagine what THX 1138 could have been like if only there were better technology, like CGI, available. (Oh wait, there is a remake.) In Revenge of the Sith, Anakin’s dark side hubris comes to a quick end as his limbs are lopped from his body by Obi-Wan. Here the placid simplicity of the Jedi leaves the flashy glitz of the dark side to scrabble in the dust.


The irony of this plot line is that Anakin was promised the ability to heal if he went over to the dark side. He is duped by the Emperor into thinking that his wife’s life was on the line, but apparently the dark side doesn’t always tell the truth. Perhaps Anakin’s intentions were a bit altruistic, but the power he is granted turns out to be too much to handle. (On cue, the CGI lava field erupts behind him in a grand pathetic fallacy.) When the Emperor finds Anakin’s leaking torso at the edge of the battlefield, we discover what the true power of the dark side is: technology. It turns out that the Emperor really does have the power to bring people virtually back to life. Sure it requires a lot of buttons and wiring, but what is the difference?


This Empire will be built on the assured results of hardwired offensive technology, not the intangible platitudes of the Jedi. Critics famously discovered that the final scene of Star Wars imitates Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. Via the technology analogy, this scene is a bitter premonition of the tyranny of the blockbuster over summer film-going for the next few decades inspired by Lucas’ special effects success. In Revenge of the Sith, Yoda and Obi-Wan watched the footage of Anakin slaughtering the innocent Jedi children left behind at the base by their masters. If a film such as Lucas’ masterful American Graffiti had opened the same weekend as Revenge of the Sith, which one would have sold more tickets? It takes little imagination to see these children as so many charmingly low budget feature films axed at the box office by the technological superiority of so many high budget blockbusters. Well, it does take a little imagination, but not nearly as much as it does to read Bush into the narrative arc of Darth Vader.