For nearly fifty years, Star Wars has been America's most enduring popular myth -- a story of rebels and tyrants that captured the imagination of legions of fans, both young and old. But unlike most heroic narratives in US popular culture, the moral axis of Star Wars is inverted. Traditionally, Hollywood storytelling valorizes the guardians of order: heroes who defend the system pitted against subversive villains bent on destroying it. Star Wars turns that script upside down, presenting the guardians of order -- the Galactic Empire -- as the villains, and the heroes as scrappy rebels who seek to overthrow the system.
This inversion has always given Star Wars a subversive shimmer, appealing to a sense of rebellion against tyranny. Yet therein lies the contradiction: the galaxy's most famous rebels belong to the Walt Disney Company, the world's most powerful entertainment empire. What began in 1977 as a quasi-independent film has become a multibillion-dollar franchise spanning twelve films, multiple television series, video games, toys, t-shirts, and theme parks -- a vast machinery of cultural production that generates profits for the corporate colossus of Disney. In short, Star Wars sells us rebellion as a commodity.
For years, the contradiction could be papered over because the franchise kept itself afloat on brand maintenance. After Disney's sequel trilogy -- and amid a surge of spin-offs including Rogue One (2016), Solo (2018), The Mandalorian(2019), The Book of Boba Fett (2021), and Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022) -- many critics felt that the franchise was increasingly relying upon nostalgia and IP recycling. Amid that content flood, Andor (2022) -- a slow-burn political drama about imperial occupation, labor exploitation, and the radicalization of ordinary people -- marked a rupture. Andor has been hailed as the most sophisticated entry in the canon -- a series with something approaching a truly revolutionary sensibility.
But what does a conglomerate like Disney stand to gain from selling us such a sophisticated message of resistance? After all, if rebellion is a product, how do we reclaim its meaning? Of course, Andor isn't the only such commodification of rebellion, but it does raise the question: how do we move through the contradiction of revolutionary stories that are sold to us by capitalist institutions?
This essay seeks to answer these questions by tracing the cultural history and political economy of Star Wars, from its origins in the post-Vietnam era to its current form as a serialized corporate product. I approach the franchise through the lens of Marxist literary criticism, which, as Terry Eagleton explains, "analyzes literature in terms of the historical conditions which produce it." That means, first, examining the material conditions of Star Wars' production, its emergence out of political crisis in the 1970s, and its later commodification into one of the world's largest multimedia empires. Second, Marxist literary criticism involves analyzing the ideological content of the films themselves: the meaning of their stories, the vision of rebellion they narrate, and the limits of that vision. Finally, Marxist criticism demands a turn to praxis: what political lessons can be drawn from this cultural text and how might we move beyond passive consumption of revolutionary stories toward real-world political struggle?
With this framework in mind, the essay will argue that Star Wars has always been a reflection of rebellion born out of times of political crisis, and that this tendency has grown more explicit over time, culminating in Andor -- a series that resonates powerfully with our own moment of late capitalist crisis. Yet, despite its radical narrative, Star Wars remains bound by the corporate logic of commodification. To resolve that contradiction, we must look beyond mass media alone and toward organized political action. In doing so, perhaps we may yet find a way to not only passively consume an understanding of the contradictions embedded in our culture, but a practical path to transcending them. To see how these dynamics first took shape, we need to turn to the original trilogy and its context in the political upheavals of the 1970s.
The 1977 premiere of Star Wars came amid a profound crisis of faith in American institutions. The US defeat in Vietnam shattered the illusion of American invincibility, exposing the fragility of the liberal order and the brutality of US imperialism. Images of Saigon evacuations and revelations like the My Lai massacre seared themselves into public consciousness. For the first time in a generation, Americans confronted the possibility that their government was neither omnipotent nor inherently virtuous. That disillusionment deepened with the Watergate scandal. The spectacle of presidential corruption accelerated a broader legitimation crisis: across the spectrum, faith in the state collapsed.
Hollywood reflected these anxieties. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the rise of "New Hollywood," a generation of young directors who wrestled with the cultural fallout of war, civil rights, and political corruption. Their films -- The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Chinatown -- rejected the moral certainties of the studio era. George Lucas emerged from this milieu but took a different path. While his peers leaned into gritty realism and moral ambiguity, Lucas tapped into mythology, aiming to create a modern fairy tale that could restore meaning in the wake of political collapse.
To achieve this, Lucas fused eclectic influences: the science fiction adventure of 1930s pulp serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers; the visual grammar of Akira Kurosawa's samurai films, such as The Hidden Fortress; and Joseph Campbell's concept of the hero's journey, which framed Luke Skywalker as a universal archetype. These choices cloaked Star Wars in the aura of timeless legend. However, the mythology Lucas crafted bore the imprint of its historical moment: a longing for moral clarity in an age of systemic doubt packaged in the language of rebellion, but stripped of truly revolutionary substance.
Lucas was not shy about his political inspirations. In interviews, he admitted the Rebel Alliance was modeled on the Vietcong, and the Galactic Empire on the United States -- a republic turned empire through hubris and overreach.He even praised the Soviet Union, remarking that Russian filmmakers not beholden to the profit motive enjoyed more artistic freedom than their American counterparts. And Lucas was able to produce a film that tapped into the rebellious zeitgeist of the time, valorizing the exploits of a plucky band of insurgent heroes at war with an imperialist power.