The Revenge of the Sith and the politics of George Lucas

I'm no authority on Star Wars, or much more than a casual watcher, but I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb to declare Revenge of the Sith the best of the three Star Wars "prequels", by far. Revenge of the Sith premiered in 2005, about half-way through President Bush's two terms as a war-time president.

A single line from the film crossed into the politics of the time. The Anakin Skywalker character has by this point in the film gone over to the "Dark Side" and will be fully transformed into the evil force of nature, Darth Vader, a matter of hours later. He is about to face his mentor, Obi Wan Kenobe, in an epic duel to the death, or close enough to death. And then Anakin/Darth Vader declares to Obi Wan, "If you're not with me, then you're my enemy."

Now, George Lucas was the writer, director, and executive producer of the film. There is no possibility that Lucas was not responsible for that line. And there is no possibility that he was unaware that the line was effectively identical to a remark made famous thoughout the world by President Bush in 2001, just days after the 9/11 attacks: "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

Lucas could only have intended the line as a political statement, and seeing as how Darth Vader is an icon of evil in Star Wars and in the popular culture, a not very complimentary one to President Bush.

Fine. George Lucas is free in America to imply that his war-time president is evil, in the course of a science-fiction fantasy that adds several more tiers to the towering Lucas fortune. But the way President Bush is regarded in history will be unrecognizable from how he is often viewed today, and from how he was seen by George Lucas in 2005. And some years from now, when viewers recoil from hearing one of the most famous quotations of a past war president -- who was moving heaven and earth to keep the nation safe in the wake of the worst attack in its history -- put into the mouth of an evil movie villain, that gratuitous line will be a blemish on an otherwise fine film, and on Lucas himself.

There are undoubtedly those who think that the President's remark really was evil or more probably overly-simplistic, deserving of condemnation and scorn, but why exactly was it wrong to warn that failing to help thwart an attack would be effectively to enable it? This isn't a disagreement over the rate of increase in the HUD budget.

The Wikipedia entry on "You're either with us, or against us" includes a helpful list of comparable quotations by some other famous figures including Jesus, George Orwell, writing in defense of the Allied war effort in 1942, and even Hillary Clinton, in exactly the same context and on exactly the same date as the Bush quote.

George Lucas is notorious for re-editing and re-releasing the Star Wars films -- like Handel revised The Messiah for new performances -- and it is not inconceivable that he might someday reconsider equating President Bush with one of the most iconic villains in movie history, and find a way to amend that line in a future edition of Revenge of the Sith.

Then the only problem with the movie will be the bland dialogue.