A long time ago, in a movie theater far, far away ...
Actually, 40 years ago, beginning in about 40 theaters in the United States, an uncanny cowboys-in-space movie--produced and directed by independent filmmaker George Lucas--was released. Star Wars, starring unknown young Mark Hamill, little-known young Harrison Ford and better-known young Carrie Fisher, along with legendary actors Alec Guinness and Peter Cushing, swept the country in the summer of 1977. The film was an instant success, wildly surpassing every expectation and instantly changing how movies were made.
There was a reason for that success: The movie was hopeful. It was different. It was upbeat.
The 1970s in America, compared with the social revolutions of the 1960s and the Reagan revolution of the 1980s, was an abysmal decade. Vietnam had escalated under President Lyndon B. Johnson, but it failed under President Richard M. Nixon. President Gerald R. Ford's term was forgettable. Oil prices rose. Iran was acting up. There was stagflation, a seemingly impossible scenario of simultaneous stagnation and inflation in the economy. President Jimmy Carter, who came to Washington in 1977 to clean up the bureaucracy and the United States, became that which he most feared: a pessimistic, bureaucratic politician, not against the system but part of it.
By 1977 the Soviet Union was agitated, and it appeared by most measures that it was winning the Cold War.
All these issues put a damper on the American spirit. This could be seen no more clearly than in movies at the time, such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1975 and Taxi Driver in 1976. A sense of doom was always around the corner and always prevalent.
And then along came Star Wars. It was a story of a young group of independent rebels fighting against an oppressive collectivist empire for the freedom of the galaxy.
Switch a name or two around, and the film's political landscape looked familiar: It was no less than the Cold War in space. The Soviet Union still had its grip on Eastern Europe, violently suppressing any sort of rebellion or call for reform. The Prague Spring in 1968 was similarly put to rest when the militaries of the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia.
No matter how many times revolutions against the Soviets failed, though, there was still that renewed call for freedom for the people of Eastern Europe. The United States knew that call, and moviegoers recognized it too.
In Star Wars, there was no moral ambiguity for the audience. We knew the good guys, we knew the bad guys. Only Han Solo, the smuggler, could be considered morally gray, but even he had a good heart. It was almost fairy tale-like in the starkness of its battle between Good and Evil.
The best part? The good guys win. The bad guys lose. That is exactly what Americans and all people of the free world wanted.
Was it any wonder that a few years later, Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and his missile defense system was derided by the left as Star Wars? The public, though, associated success with the phrase and overwhelmingly supported it, much to the chagrin of Reagan-haters and Soviet-lovers.
Not bad for a scruffy-looking independent director. Well done, George.
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Craig Shirley, author of four books on Ronald Reagan, is chairman and CEO of Shirley & Banister Public Affairs in Alexandria, Va., and chairman of Citizens for the Republic. Scott Mauer, Shirley's primary research assistant, has a master's degree in humanities and history from Hood College in Frederick, Md.
Editorial on 06/07/2017