By the late summer of 1977, Jimmy Carter had been president for only a few months, but if you knew which way the cultural and political winds were blowing, he seemed unlikely to win a second term. That’s because on May 25 of that year, Star Wars had opened, and its colossal success both foreshadowed and helped to revive a mindset that carried Ronald Reagan to the White House. That’s the word from lefty historian Rick Perlstein, who laid out his theory last Friday in The Washington Spectator.
Perlstein argues that much like George Lucas’s “innocent” movie played a crucial role in beating back the “dark…skeptic[al]” New Hollywood sensibility represented by Bonnie and Clyde, Taxi Driver, and the first two Godfather films, Reagan encouraged Americans to turn away from the “hard-won maturity” they’d developed from living through “traumas” such as the Vietnam War and Watergate. Lucas, contended Perlstein, “aim[ed] his movie at eight- or nine-year-olds…[He said,] ‘Everybody’s forgetting to tell the kids, “Hey, this is right and this is wrong.”’ That’s what he set out to correct. Ronald Reagan couldn’t have said it better. Star Wars was a Ronald Reagan sort of film.”
Moreover, Perlstein wrote, “Even if you were not a kid, Star Wars was still utterly absorbing. So thrilling and innocent––an invitation to forget about Muslim terrorists, mounting inflation, screaming matches with your crazy relatives over abortion or the ERA, and all that American failure those other movies seemed to want to rub your nose in…He gave us permission to stop growing up. George Lucas, I mean; though the formulation applies to Ronald Reagan, too.”
From Perlstein’s article (bolding added):
A theme of my [2014] book The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan was that, following Watergate and then America’s first energy crisis, and in the wake of the loss in Vietnam, America began working through the traumas of its present and past with a hard-won maturity––that “all the turbulence in the 1960s and 1970s had given the nation a chance finally to reflect critically on its power, to shed its arrogance, to become a more humble and better citizen of the world––to grow up––but Reagan’s rise nipped that imperative in the bud.” Hollywood played an important part in the process.
…Filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Arthur Penn, Dennis Hopper, and Robert Altman…[had] featured more adult themes, moral ambiguity, dark moods, and a suffusing skepticism toward establishments of every kind. What’s more, they were embraced by the movie-going public…Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 and 1974 Godfather films, which treated mainstream and mafia success in the United States as nearly interchangeable and earned in the hundreds of millions, attested to that…
…At the Oscars in 1976 the deeply subversive, anti-institutional parable One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest––another $100 million earner––took home all five of the major statues. Then came the 1977 Academy Award ceremony on March 28. The best picture also-rans were perfect specimens of perhaps the greatest year for New Hollywood cinema: Network…Bound for Glory, a visually luscious biopic of Woody Guthrie, with depictions of American poverty as searing as any ever committed to the screen; All the President’s Men…and Taxi Driver…
…[But] the Academy chose…the Capra-esque, conventionally inspiring, and vaguely reactionary rags-to-riches story [Rocky]…
…New Hollywood, and all its vaguely left-wing pretensions, was down for the count. The knockout blow came on Memorial Day.
…[George Lucas] aim[ed] his movie at eight- or nine-year-olds…“Everybody’s forgetting to tell the kids, ‘Hey, this is right and this is wrong.’” That’s what he set out to correct. Ronald Reagan couldn’t have said it better. Star Wars was a Ronald Reagan sort of film…
…[E]ven if you were not a kid, Star Wars was still utterly absorbing. So thrilling and innocent––an invitation to forget about Muslim terrorists, mounting inflation, screaming matches with your crazy relatives over abortion or the ERA, and all that American failure those other movies seemed to want to rub your nose in…
...America had upwards of 500,000 soldiers stationed at a time in South Vietnam, equipped with all the best armaments the richest nation in the history of the world could supply, incinerating village upon village in which we were guests.
You might even call us the “Empire.”
And yet we were somehow laid low by a scrappy band of guerrilla warriors, whose weapons were sometimes as crude as sharpened, Ewok-like bamboo spikes…[Y]ou might say the slow, soiling defeat America watched on TV night after night looked a hell of a lot like the work of a “rebel alliance.”
…Now, to be sure, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese had sophisticated weapons too, provided by another empire. That was part of the complexity. But no wonder the man who erased that complexity––who granted us the imaginative power to reverse these polarities, and identify ourselves only and always with the scrappy rebels resisting an evil empire…won more wealth than he could imagine. He gave us permission to stop growing up. George Lucas, I mean; though the formulation applies to Ronald Reagan, too.
…Enjoy the show: that’s fine. I will too. Just remember that infantile denial is what gives Republicans their power––and that the temptation surrounds and penetrates us, too. It binds America together. Just remember that in the end you’re watching a children’s movie.
