Star Wars as A Right Phenomenon

My forward to Multipolar Galaxy

[With the permission of Constantin von Hoffmeister, I present my forward to his latest book, Multipolar Galaxy: Star Wars as A Myth of Civilizational Rebirth. It’s my first time appearing in print as the Librarian. Do give the book a read; I know I’m biased, but it’s the kind of thing I find very interesting and relevant, and I believe you will as well.]

Star Wars as a Right Phenomenon

Star Wars needs little introduction as an entertainment phenomenon in the modern West. It is culturally ubiquitous, the characters ready touchpoints even for people not fully conversant in the details of the story. For those more fully immersed, there is an entire world of dialogue and creativity around it, an extended universe of novels, comic books, and fan fiction. It’s escapism that’s hard to escape.

This omnipresence has occasioned a good bit of criticism. Star Wars is perhaps the archetype of what was once called a series, then a franchise, and now an Intellectual Property (IP). The semantic shift is illustrative; what was once purely a work of fiction has become a commodity, not art but slickly packaged evocative imagery meant to evoke transient feelings of awe and warm nostalgia. The neoliberal revolution, like Saturn, devours its children, and as in the Classical Age the rock he subsequently vomited forth is now a tourist attraction.

It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss Star Wars as either lightweight entertainment or a cynical cash grab. Star Wars can be mined for a good bit of meaning, both in an artistic sense and in terms of its impact. Constantin von Hoffmeister offers this slender but dense volume as an interpretation of Star Wars in light of the political philosophy of Multipolarity, viewing it through the lens of rightist political thought generally but specifically through the work of Alexander Dugin, whose Eurasianism informs this whole work. It is certainly the only explication of Star Wars from this perspective amid a great paucity of rightist critique related to the films and wider universe.

This is, on one level, quite understandable, as a surface-level engagement with Star Wars will naturally lead one to see it as an expression of Boomer liberalism, not the confident 60’s vision of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, but a post-apocalyptic tale of plucky young rebels fighting for freedom against a Nazi-coded evil empire. We discover halfway through the original trilogy that it’s literally a battle between an authoritarian father against his pure-hearted liberal son, such that Theodore Adorno might have sued for a writing credit. This is not surprising, as Star Wars is the creation of George Lucas, product of 1960s Modesto, California, that epitome of confident mid-century liberal values that collapsed into chaos amidst riots and campus unrest in the latter part of the decade, which in turn resulted in the rise of Darth Nixon and Emperor Reagan. In many ways, both Star Wars and its creator are period pieces, meant to evoke a new hope in what must have seemed like a deeply threatened liberal world order. It’s no coincidence that the sequels came about at the tail end of the American Hyperpower era and the inception of the War on Terror.

But there are many timeless lessons for the aspiring rightist creator in the work of Lucas. For one, immersion in one’s culture in every sense is important. Lucas came of age at a time of liberal chauvinism, when the great works of the Western world were still taught in places like the fairly typical public schools he attended. And while his early aesthetic influences were mundane- Flash Gordon serials and pre-queer Disneyland- he was able to receive a broad education at the local Modesto Junior College before some racing buddies introduced him to film studies at USC, where he studied under Francis Ford Coppola and hung out with John Milius, Steven Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese, among others. It would be easy to dismiss him as the archetypal boomer who lucked into fame and fortune in a way that would be impossible later, but such dismissal belies the fact that Lucas worked hard, immersing himself in the art and science of filmmaking. Lucas had a flexible mind, a driven nature, and eclectic tastes, capable of incorporating high art and pop sensibilities into his work, fusing them into works that broke down the aesthetic distance between his audience and his vision.

Lucas’ interests went beyond the Western canon, which offers another lesson. He was and remains firmly rooted in storytelling in a tradition going back to Homer, and his Star Wars films feature single combat of a sort a Mycenaean anax would have recognized, along with knights and princesses and fairy-tale romance. He also pulled from America’s mythogenic space- the Wild West- both in terms of the old-school movies of his youth and the modernist Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone. But as a student and afterwards Lucas was a devotee of foreign films, not merely avant-garde French cinema and Italian New Wave, but also the profoundly distinct Japanese films of the post-WWII era. Kurosawa was a major influence, and Lucas’ Jedi knights are very much a western interpretation of serene Zen Samurai. Seeing them, one wonders what might have been had Yukio Mishima anticipated the coming age of science fiction films.

But perhaps the element of Lucas’ Star Wars films that draws the most intellectual interest is his incorporation of myth into his work. There is of course the ambient cultural Christianity of Lucas’ youth, which certainly informs the main redemption arc of the villain of the original trilogy. But Lucas had gotten to know Joseph Campbell while at USC, and the professor became a longtime mentor and intellectual influence. Very much the Jordan Peterson of his day- for good or ill- Campbell was a formidable intellect if not the most careful scholar, and his legacy is less a body of research than a singular vision, a belief that mankind can be most understood most fundamentally through universal mythic archetypes along quasi-Jungian lines. Lucas was not subtle in incorporating Campbell’s work into his films- Star Wars is basically A Hero’s Journey: The Movie- but subtlety was something for Parisian arthouse fare. Lucas had other ideas.

And this brings us to perhaps the most important lesson for the modern rightist storyteller. Lucas (and his buddy Spielberg) essentially invented the blockbuster, the big-budget film with mass appeal that appeals primarily (though not exclusively) to the visceral, emotional, and experiential. Lucas was able to move millions (and accumulate billions) by taking sophisticated and transcendent ideas and packaging them (or rather, translating them) for the demos. Lucas had no specific cultural or political agenda for his art; he simply wanted to tell a good story. His boomer liberalism is uninterrogated to this day. But he proved that the mythic tropes of the West and beyond can be summoned back into aesthetic vitality with the right combination of force of will, intellectual depth, artistic vision, and luck. If he can do it, so can we.

Constantin von Hoffmeister offers up Lucas the storyteller of political myth, of the tropes of modernity reflected in art. Politics, like film, is all about narrative, about drawing on the power of myth to execute a vision instantiated as policy. Viewed through the lens of Multipolarity, we can incorporate the lessons noted previously and entertain what might happen were they put into practice in a broader story than summer popcorn fare. Life might imitate art, but political life is art.

To begin with, a coming age of Multipolarity forces contending civilization-spheres back upon themselves in a way that necessitates reflection and renewal. Gone, for example, is the Star Trek notion of a Federation of Planets that is essentially an intergalactic liberal American Empire. The Multipolar future will be like the past, different societies fighting for cultural space in a world with no clear default setter of norms. As such, people will need to know who their enemies are, but more importantly, they will need to know who they themselves are. The great upheavals of mass immigration have done a hero’s share of work in that regard, where despite the best efforts of managerial globalism to inundate settled populations with hordes of foreigners in order to render the host deracinated and fungible, the peoples of the West have instead been waking up to the robbery of the home and heritage. The powers that be have introduced an Other into the midst against which a self can be constructed. Cultural confidence will return.

This is not to say that one needs foreigners to know oneself, but in a world in which the exotic is both immediate and mediated all at once regardless, it is simply a necessity of life that one must confront that which is not one’s own. And there is a lot of promise in this chaos. For one, the wise rightist will cultivate a sense of discernment regarding which things are universal and which are particular, and which in turn are worthy of honor, or to be disdained. The man who admires the knight errant recognizes a kindred spirit in the ronin, and can construct a Jedi on that basis. Likewise, politically speaking, a common good constitutionalist post-liberal can see in neo-Confucianism the same focus on transcendent political and spiritual order as the basis of right government. When society puts aside the privileging of an ephemeral political order as a human universal and stops treating the truth of the ubiquitous love of God for all of creation as a mere cultural artifact, real progress will have been achieved.

In this regard, myth too will make a comeback. First must come the resurrection of the old forms, drawing from the deep wellspring of the culture of the West, then the reconciliation of those tropes with modernity, a resacralization in the sense Eliade meant, men in time participating in timeless things. But this great return, as with the others in the Western past, will mean the incorporation of novel but aligned elements, the products of more contemporary mythogenic spaces, like Lucas’ Wild West and the internet. The Renaissance added Medieval lore and Christian morality to a reborn Classical heritage. Lucas showed this was both artistically and commercially viable twice over.

And of course, there can be no snobbery, no contempt for masses too dull to appreciate the refined vision of the right. It is true that the right is centered upon hierarchy and transcendence, but what follows from this is that everyone is somewhere on a chain owing duties to those both above and below. If you are godlike or a complete dullard you wouldn’t be reading this anyway, so if you know more than others, if you see what they cannot, the higher station you occupy obligates you to pass down that which you’ve received. Thus, if you have a vision of some right political or artistic truth, you must make every effort to make it as accessible to others as you can without compromising its truth. Sometimes this will result in something meant for the few, but if one is honest, more often it will mean something for the many, something which draws them upwards.

Some final notes on this book. Von Hoffmeister’s main intellectual debt is clearly to Dugin and through him to Martin Heidegger, but he draws upon a staggering array of other sources as well. Not all of these are rightists. He does not hesitate to cite even leftists who have cogent theories of modernity, and in fact privileges them over more moderate and mediocre voices closer to his own views. His seeking out honest views over strict ideological conformity is bold if nothing else, and if you were expecting a down-the-line rightist polemic, you will be disappointed. That said, this is also a distinctly and uncompromisingly rightist take nonetheless, with many voices from liberaldom’s naughty list casually mentioned alongside leftists with just as much radical baggage but mysteriously devoid of censure. If you have any instinct to point and sputter at wrongthink, this is also not the book for you.

Also, von Hoffmeister makes the authorial choice to avoid (mostly) commenting on the specifically American Culture War dynamics around Star Wars. Note that von Hoffmeister does not really mention the third trilogy of Star Wars films, produced by Disney and widely considered slop unworthy of the legacy of the Lucas era movies. A moment’s reflection will show that in a book about Multipolarity, privileging the American reception of Star Wars would only serve to further the ideals of a normatized liberalism, and that little in the way of true rightist views inform that partisan back-and-forth in any case. While there is certainly a great book to be written about the titanic DeSantis-Disney War of 2023, this is not that tome.

You will find the insights in this book to be true not only regarding Star War, but art more generally. There are critiques of other IPs (that label again) to be made along Multipolar lines, and certainly the Marvel Cinematic Universe merits a similar treatment, among others. We may be entering a world in which the global blockbuster or political order is a thing of the past, but this is not the same thing as saying that nothing again will have universal appeal. But a new age requires a new sort of artist, his novelty informed by the timeless things.

President Trump approves of this message (for so the Force has shown me).