HOORAY! shouted the collective American subconscious on 19770525: Real good guys fighting real bad guys! Poof! the moral ambiguities of the Vietnam War evaporated like a dream on waking. Thanks to the perfect good-and-evil simplicity of the Star Wars-fronted political zeitgeist, by the time Mr. Reagan was caught covertly rewarding Iran for getting him elected, America's rash was not only healed but immune to relapse. What fuddled the American war machine anaphylactic in the 1960s and early '70s would never again give us pause. Episode III contains a telling—and appalling—moment early on in which Obi-Wan and Anakin share a smart-ass Hollywood zinger and a hearty chuckle just as their high-flying action sequence causes collateral civilian damage. Fuck 'em: they didn't even get name billing. Just like those two million dead gooks.
And I'll say this again: That moral absolutism, that fundamentalist Amurka is right by definition mentality, is propped up by the Force. Back in the day, savants noted that Lucas was cashing in on the defection in record numbers of Americans from their organized dogma-saddled churches into the squishy realm of "personal spirituality". The Force deftly avoided all the objectionable aspects of "God" (largely his schizoid personality); and it sidestepped the unsolvable question of how a benevolent god could countenance such a sustained fortissimo of evil in the world. No consciousness, no remorse or glee, just an undiscovered law of physics that happens to favor... I dunno, pretty people? People who wear earth-tones? No, I know, I'm kidding; we all know precisely what the Force favors: Amurka! Freedom! Human rights! (well uh some of them anyway). This! The Force loves my Ford truck!
Egoless and unaccountable but still absolute—basically "karma" in chivalry drag—the Force is the perfect modern religion. It still allows for—indeed, it insists on—immediate cranial access to omniscience. A scant hour into the filmic literature we are shown, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the Force exists: Luke effectively defends himself against a floating remote droid without the aid of his vision—a trick that sets up his climactic Death Star-destroying shot an hour later. That's it, Luke! Trust your feelings!
Whatever in the highwire fuck. Trust your feelings? Trust your fucking feelings?! Could there by a more irresponsible sentiment to aphorize? Trust your feelings means "[Insert your cause here] is right. Its army is right. I am right. I am doing the right thing. I am killing the right people." Granted, Ep. VII opens with someone thinking outside that constraint and defecting from stormtroopery, but c'mon: he WAS on the wrong side and he was only trusting his feelings which he got from the Force! Just as organized forms of religion have always done, the Force makes morality and moral behavior tautological: "The higher intelligence to which I have immediate brainwave access says x is right and y is wrong; and in ambiguous situations, the higher intelligence will guide me and I will do right because righty-right-rightness is right right right!" Right?
I cannot speak to any possible alternate present-day. Absent the Star Wars behemoth some other fundamentalism-abetting formulation would doubtless have presented in some other blockbusta. And I cannot say what goes through the head of somebody who, say, bombs an abortion clinic. I think it's safe to say nobody who does such a thing does so because they believe the fucking Force is strong with them. But it's much the same thing. What I am saying is that "God" and "the Force" are first cousins. Their activity in human brains works in precisely the same way. And if we live in a world (and we do) where even secularism is drenched in magical thinking and fantasies of moral certitude (courtesy of our popular entertainments) they ain't no way the genocidal, prepuce-collecting god of Abraham is waiting behind any velvet ropes. Or police tape.
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