Star Wars and the Mythopoetics of Late Capitalism: Part 1

The first entry in a multi-part series looking at the relationship between the rise of multimedia franchise storytelling and American capitalism's ongoing crisis of accumulation

For years now, my standard operating procedure has been to regard every piece of media produced within the apparatus of the Walt Disney Company with if not outright revulsion, then at least disinterested critique. Maybe even pity. Now, don’t worry: this isn’t going to be another account of how an adult Star Wars fan lost their childhood innocence after George Lucas turned cinema’s most menacing supervillain into a goofy Frankenstein pastiche in 2005. I got that energy out on the pod. But over the past fifty or so years, the transformation of the Star Wars franchise from one of postmodern American popular culture’s foundational myths to just another IP to exploit in a monopolized multimedia economy has neatly followed broader political economic trends since the secular economic crisis of the 1970s. I think this overlap has been under-explored in the academic literature, for overdetermined reasons, and in what follows of this multi-part series, I hope to make that case to you.

Over the next few months, I will argue here that the Star Wars franchise offers us perhaps the single best case study for understanding the rise and fall of the culture industry of late capitalism in its American manifestation, from the mid-1970s to the early 2020s.¹ Bookended on either side of this periodization are different political regimes, incommensurable economic imperatives, modernist Hollywood cinema and mobile phone gambling apps designed to look like video games, all of which we are told serve the same purpose. I will be arguing that the franchise and its industrial history offers us one of the most concise documentations of the consolidation of corporate control over our media apparatus, which affects not merely the look of blockbuster genre films but the political concerns and coalitions that apparatus makes visible every day. At the same time, I will be arguing that the films and their ancillary media can help us see the transformation of aesthetic logics and reading practices during this same period. This latter story is one we desperately need to understand in order to make sense of our broader media culture in our own galaxy, today, very near to us, with a history that stretches back to a much more determinate point than those iconic words that preface each film’s opening crawl.

Periodization: 1973-2025

Scholars have been using this rough periodization to make sense of the world since it became intelligible as an object of analysis in the early 1980s. A survey of key texts in literary studies, geography, economics, and political philosophy outline this problematic. On the other side of the tumultuous 1960s and 70s, some social scientists began to argue that the events they just witnessed were evidence of a shift in capitalism’s logics from a phase of “Fordist” economic logics to that of a more flexible “Post-Fordist” period, one that we could understand by analyzing everything from profit rates to the content of movies like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Others argued the period in question could more accurately be understood by paying attention to changing aesthetic and consumer logics, an understanding of which might expose to us an emergent “cultural logic” called “postmodernism.” Others argued “power” as such had undergone a transformation over the past few centuries, landing in the postwar, decolonizing world with new philosophical ideas about how the individual relates to their social totality, ruling through the softer power of economic control rather than the forceful repression of violence; let’s call this “neoliberalism.” Evangelicals were making documentary films about the end of the world, and computer nerds teamed up with disenchanted hippies to build a virtual fort inside their CRT monitors where mom couldn’t tell them to clean their rooms. It was a wild time!

Whatever name we choose to describe “it,” whatever institutions, practices, and forces we decide count in our analysis, and whatever diverging or overlapping scholarly tradition we consider ourselves in conversation with, almost everyone now tells some version of this same story: (in) or about the middle of the 1970s, the world system changed. And we now live a world shaped by its consequences. Even liberals are starting to think with this periodization, realizing as they are that the economic ideology they assumed was akin to nature is losing its purchase in a society that seems to be forgetting how to distribute the resources necessary for everyday citizens to reproduce their way of life. “Neoliberalism,” that hafhazardly-defined term, dominated the academic literature on this question from about the late 90s to the mid 2010s, replacing the “postmodernism” of literature departments, or whatever was happening in most social science departments of the time.² For the most part, depending on what you chose as your experiment’s control—political economic philosophy, the U.S. prison system, the structure of global capitalism itself, novels, gender and its relation to social reproduction—there seems now to be a free-floating consensus on the importance of this period and the interconnected social transformations that followed in its wake.

So why does it feel so weird add in Star Wars to this academic conversation? There are many reasons. On the one hand, it just feels silly to talk about Friedrich Hayek and the Death Star in the same sentence, as if the fan-theoretical culture of finding easter eggs hidden in popular media is the same thing as rigorous, politically-informed art historical scholarship. It certainly doesn’t help that an entire sub-discipline within the academic study of film and media—“fan studies”—emerged in the middle of the period in question, which convinced many scholars both within and outside the discipline that this is all film and media studies can offer to the project of knowledge production. Even proper academic studies that situate the franchise within its objective economic and industrial history often seem to fall under sway of the Beloved Object; good books often forgo engagements with canonical scholarly literature on the franchise, while bad books written by self-professed “aca-fans” dress up blog posts about fan conventions as radical scholarly praxis.

In what follows, I will do my best to avoid these pitfalls. I’m sure you know my feelings about so-called “fan studies” by now, even before reading this article, but it is also true that I grew up in an era when Star Wars had an outsized influence on American popular culture, and I was not immune. At the same time, I will be approaching the series and its relation to popular culture through a disinterested acknowledgement of this fact: that the influence of the franchise and phenomenon demand our attention as cultural historians and theorists, regardless of the way it so often appears in film and media studies scholarly discourses. I want to similarly transcend lazy aesthetic criticism that views the study of moving-image media as the interpretation of representations on a screen, which tell us what they mean by dint of their appearance.

By the conclusion of this series, I will offer a reading of Andor, Disney’s recent successful television streaming series that has raised my interest not merely because it is a piece of Star Wars franchise media that seems to be produced with a different set of imperatives than the usual slop-shoveled-by-executive-committee that gave us such masterpieces as 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story (credited to Ron Howard, who really came in halfway through a disastrous shoot to ensure they could stitch together any useful footage). “What is Andor?” was the draft title of this article, which I began intending to be a four or five paragraph extended Letterboxd review but now has me wanting to sharpen this larger critique I’ve been developing since starting my dissertation back in 2017.

What astonishes me about Andor and the discourse surrounding it is the way full-blown, self-identified leftists are reading the show—a prequel series set before Star Wars that depicts a period during the formation of the “Rebel Alliance” our intrepid heroes would later join—as a revolutionary text. Many of these readings are coming from the same corners that used to (accurately) chide liberals for their Hamilton obsession, as if a make-believe ahistorical musical about rapping founding fathers was a weapon ready to take down Trump 1.0. By now even Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda has responded to the so-called “controversy” over the musical (is “it’s bad” a controversy?) by turning the whole issue into one of “good” versus “bad” representation. The resulting “conversation” has redounded into an Kafkaesque architectural maze, tracing which viewing identity can properly identify with what character played by this actor or that actress with different identities than the historical figure they represent who may or may not be represented by other figures in the audience who, due to their positionality might………you know. This is an approach to media criticism that many leftists understand as a confusion over the emancipatory potential of media representation without noting the “re-” part at the beginning of the word’s verb form. Such approaches—dominant in fan studies and online discourse about most popular franchise media—often ignore the way for-profit commercial media economies seek to commodify every subject and every identity for membership in their ideal audience. There is no outside to capital, just as there is no outside to representation; our emancipation will not come from being seen more clearly by those who also have 24/7 access to the microphone on your smartphone.

But this will not be another agonizing story about “Woke” and its consequences. No, what I find interesting about Andor, a show which is narratively a kind of pastiche of the way “revolution” has appeared in other media, is that it seems to offer us a mode of address we haven’t seen from the franchise since the first film. I think this is legitimately interesting, and it has an influence on the show’s politics and the way they are mediated to us within the broader media ecology here in 2025.

Today it’s hard to remember that the first film arrived in a world without Star Wars, long before the expanded universe(s) of franchise intellectual property exponentially stretched the attention of fans and toy consumers so wide your parents needed a guidebook just to keep track of what you were seeing on the screen and in the store. But Star Wars wasn’t “seen” as Star Wars in 1977; its initial success came in no small part from the way Lucas offered audiences a film with a mythopoetic mode of address at the precise moment that the popular American mythology of the mass culture era had begun to fracture. By the 1970s, the Western genre—perhaps America’s first autochthonous mythic narrative—was beginning to die out with the generation that bought pulp novels at the dime store, who posessed a living memory of their parents’ recounting the California of the 1880s. Silver screen icons that once signified Hollywood and everything it stood for were now being cast as villains in postmodern genre pastiches, vestigal reminders of a time quickly slipping through the out door, leaving a trail of wreckage in its wake for the next generation to clean up.

But it wasn’t just the American Western mythos that was being replaced by the rise of Science Fiction and the multimedia age; a broader America mythic crisis was unfolding during the 1970s that gave rise to fundamental questions about what it meant to live in American society and the economic contract it claimed to offer. Not only were the complications of structural inequalities gathering voice through new media outlets and the various political movements of the 1960s, stagflation caused economists and trusted news anchors to question fundamental assumptions about what it meant to live in a society as such. The promise of the New Deal and the coalition it called into being, a mass movement that counted amongst its members rural farmers, urban factory workers, intellectuals, artists, and an increasingly diverse and radical youth movement, was collapsing. Trust in the American project waned with each new revelation of the government’s involvement in illegal overseas conflicts. And the technological horizon that had seemed within reach only a decade earlier and which put a man on the moon had stalled out with broken down machinery, mass layoffs, and a shrinking government that could do little more than prop up the necessary farming economy that allowed American society to eat the food that let them go to work doing jobs that increasingly seemed pointless. Lucas’ crafting of the first film’s narrative could not have come at a time better suited for a mythic rebirth in culture; that he can’t seem to get his story straight about when he first got this idea is evidence it may have almost emerged organically to meet a need that found its own solution (in other words, a myth!). We’ll talk about this next time.

It is incumbent on me to place this argument within the existing scholarly discourse that earlier I criticized other Star Wars scholarship for ignoring. In each installment of this series, I will choose a historical moment, its concepts, and its key scholarly interlocutors that many of you will likely be familiar with. It will come as no surprise to see the name that you are already reading in your peripheral vision below this.

Fredric Jameson wrote about Star Wars in an early draft of what would become the introduction to his book on Postmodernism, noting that Lucas peppered the film with nostalgic references to the media he grew up watching. Chief amongst these references are the film’s nods to Buck Rogers science fiction serials, which Lucas watched as a child on Saturday morning television broadcasts (seems fitting that many of these broadcasts were the results of studios selling their library vaults to TV networks, a move Lucas would echo with his sale of his empire to Disney decades later). Star Wars takes from Buck Rogers its episodic narrative structure (the second film was titled Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back), opening title crawl, and intergalactic alien supervillains; later fans have noted the nods to the Akira Kurosawa samurai films he watched as a film student at USC (and even the strange, Leni Riefenstahl-esque framing of the final throne room sequence, which shows Lucas was willing to take from everyting!).

Jameson notes that Lucas passed these simulated memories of his own off in pastiche form to the audience of Star Wars, many of whom were too young to know they were looking at a representation of media from “a long time ago,” despite feeling a strange sense they were somehow the recipients of a comforting communion with some kind of past. “(I)t is a complex object,” Jameson notes, “in which on some first level children and adolescents can take the adventures straight, while the adult public is able to gratify a deeper and more properly nostalgic desire to return to that older period and to live its strange old aesthetic artefacts (sic) through once again.”³ That these conflicting viewing positions became one of the franchise’s central contradictions as it grew through the decades would merely be an interesting anecdote if they didn’t also show up in the way different generations and viewing publics now seem incapable of arriving at a shared reading of whatever news broadcast they choose to watch. We are constructed by the media we consume, and afterwards, many of us go on to construct the media later generations will consume, and the cycle begins anew. It seems fitting to note here that the place where these business decisions are being made—Silicon Valley—is just a stones throw from where Lucas chose to build the new headquarters of his various post-Star Wars business enterprises.

So yes, the history of the Star Wars franchise might seem like a metaphor for the story about our broader service and entertainment economy as it grew out of the crises of the 1970s to its uncertain present. But treating this as a metaphor is a trap, one that treats textuality as mere representation like all those approaches I complained about earlier. I think a good deal of the hesitancy to treat popular media as a serious area of scholarly concern is fear of falling into that trap. But thankfully, at least insofar as it gives us something clear to complain about, the Walt Disney Company Company’s purchase of Lucasfilm in 2012 provides an explicitly material chapter in this history, one that demonstrates corporate monopoly logics and their direct engagements with broader political economic and technological concerns. Later, we will see how Disney’s purchase of the franchise’s existing intellectual property presented them with both a problem and opportunity for establishing new income streams designed to endlessly produce value; that it didn’t work, and required revision might remind us of what Marx described as “so-called primitive accumulation” were we to treat IP as a commodity that exists within the diegetic universe they had just colonized.

But all of this will come later. First, we must return to the world in the last moment before Lucas’ film opened to the world on May 25th, 1977.⁴ We need to see how Star Wars came into the world and what it meant for people to watch the film—Star Wars, not “Episode IV: A New Hope”—from this moment through to the 1990s. In our next installment, we’ll engage in a little Hollywood history, recounting the well-tread story of how the film came to be but, this time, in conversation with the histories of American culture and art. Jameson’s and his “postmodernism” periodization will be central here, as will more formal economic history. In the process, we will come to see the mid-70s as a key moment in the rise of what we would come to call neoliberalism, both at the level of economic institutions but also in the cultural imaginary. This is important: what I am calling the first film’s “mythopoetic mode of address” will be a focus of the piece and offered as a kind of ideology. We will close read images and sequences from the film alongside more contemporary franchise objects to see how 1977’s Star Wars demands a different kind of spectating consumer when viewed at different historical moments.

In the process, we will also peel the curtain back on the myth Star Wars tells about itself, how Lucas—and later Disney—have sold and continue to sell the film not merely as blockbuster spectacle but as a cultural ritual for a desacralized age. This mythic narrative of New Hollywood’s greatest cinematic myth will bring us in conversation with the life and career of a man who came to play a complicated role in all of this, less as the source of Star Wars’ cultural power (which some credit him with), and more as a logic, a way of thought. This mode of thought had been attempting to find form for some time by the moment that Star Destroyer first began its slow descent on the screen, a never-ending display of power both in the universe on screen and in the bank account collecting all the box office receipts.

This idea, this myth, had until then failed to find the voice that Star Wars would eventually provide. It wouldn’t even take shape by the time the original trilogy’s final film, Return of the Jedi, was released, in 1983. But that following year, at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, George Lucas sat down in an auditorium to hear a retired academic-turned popular writer named Joseph Campbell give a talk on what he called the “Inner Reaches of Outer Space,” an idea that finally found shape and form, giving birth to a myth we have yet to name but still tell ourselves, every day.

1. It is possible I will put later installments behind a paywall, depending on interest and the need to keep research less visible in lieu of an eventual submission for an academic journal. But please give me feedback on all this and how you think it’s going—as you know, I’m trying to figure out what my work does and is online, and am grateful just to have your eyeballs in the first place.

2. Dan Sinykin’s recent work on the rise of the academically-adjacent publishing market during this time provides important context for the economic forces that buttressed these scholarly discourses, similar questions have been raised in the field of Sociology as to the shifting structure of grant funding and the political economic imperatives that came as a result. In this version of this paper I will let them do the work for me in saying that yes, Virginia, maybe the “human character” of academia changed when the big bucks came for a select few in the postwar American academy.

3. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998, New York: Verso, p 8.

4. Speaking of interesting anecdotal footnotes, before the end of that week, the Soviet Union adopted a new constitution that would prove to be its last. One change in this constitution was a new right on behalf of constituent republics to secede from the USSR, which is precisely what led to the collapse of the Soviet Union after the Estonians declared their sovereignty in 1988.