#I am given mild amusement by the fact that the two blogs I’ve cited here would not like each other at all

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SW Prequels: 1 Politic Please, for the Naive Child

(A complicating narrative…but probably not for you, reader of this post)

The prequels, according to quotes from GL, have two main goals:

“How did Anakin become Darth Vader?” (How does good person become a bad one)

“How did the Republic turn in to the Empire?” (How does a democracy become a dictatorship)

The first goal, though perhaps not perfectly executed, is largely achieved. We see Anakin go from a child who wants to help others, to an adult willing so sacrifice children for his own selfish desires—and we the viewers understand that (if not always agree which) decisions he and others made caused him to follow that character arc.

What the Prequels do Not do

The second goal falls far short.

The prequels offer some broad factors in the Republic becoming a dictatorship (as well as why the Separatists were no better)—corporations in government, greed of the already wealthy, war, fear-mongering manifesting policy changes, etc—but does not examine them in detail. It doesn’t take particular care with the timing of when the main characters acknowledge Republic’s values as having been lost, or the construction of “democracy” in-universe, or to what degree planets like Alderaan must be stealing from the Mid and Outer Rim, or even how Padmé and Palpatine both being from Naboo potentially alters any political commentary to be about Naboo rather than on the Republic as a whole, and carries around a whole bunch of other careless world-building problems that muddy the waters of plot elements which should be fairytale-clear (look I was gonna link a bunch more individual posts, but I got tired. Go read @saga-ordsmed’s star wars tag—she writes more elegantly, scathingly, and competently about Star Wars’ political & narrative failings then I ever will).

The prequels are a story about Anakin and about values of personal responsibility, and any political commentary suffers for that.

We know that the Senate willingly votes Palpatine into absolute power, but we do not know what alliances led to that vote passing, what Palpatine has been doing inside the Senate rather than outside it (his Sith & separatist activities), what battles and press releases cause the tide of the Senate to turn. We are shown a few bad apples but largely left unsure what turned the whole Senate, other than “time” “decay” and “greed.” These are vague comments on human nature, not on systematic conflicts.

If we saw something like this deleted scene, where Padme gives a speech to the senate, or this deleted scene, where some Senators talk about the Delegation of 2000 confronting Palpatine, I might have a reason to believe Padmé has fresh insight into the current political instability when she says the Republic is crumbling (if we actually got some of the pointed comments from the Delegation of 2000 scene, I would never have been able to make this post). Frankly, all of Padmé’s opinions are already under narrative suspicion because of her choice to help cover up Anakin’s massacre; without taking time to establish her expertise in politics as separate from her decisions about Anakin, her words about the Republic mean little. But these scenes are deleted, and whatever the reason, it causes the prequels to fail at their second goal, even more than they do structurally by not paying it much attention.

The most convincing comments about the political state of the Republic and the Chancellor instead come from members of Jedi Council, who have deliberately held themselves at a remove from the political process—for philosophical and practical reasons—and so lack detailed insight into the Senate’s functioning (why have so many benevolent Senator characters if you’re not going to use them as such? Just put one in the room with the Jedi council for a minute, seriously).

The most interesting scene we get about politics is the scene when Anakin and Padmé chat in the field and Anakin basically says he thinks the right dictatorship would solve the Republic’s problems, and Padmé largely laughs it off. It has the potential to be commenting on how people become radicalized when governments do not serve them, but the scene is so short and Anakin is in such a unique position as a Jedi and someone being personally groomed by the Chancellor, that it falls flat in terms of telling us anything either fresh and interesting about GL’s perspective on radicalisation, or anything applicable to a wider group of people.

Instead, the scene is again almost solely about the characters. It tells us about Anakin, Palpatine’s influence over Anakin, a little about Padmé, and a lot about Anakin and Padmé’s relationship. This would be fine—stories are allowed to use politics merely as a backdrop to character-level conflicts—if the creator didn’t claim to be telling us how a democracy can become a dictatorship.

So the prequels fail as a detailed or even followable portrayal of how a democracy becomes a dictatorship. They set up a few dominoes, but largely do not connect them to one another—for that we must fill in elaborate headcanons, read a million and one comics that probably don’t help the matter, or refuse to pay the question any detailed attention at all.

What the Prequels do Achieve

I recall a day, quite a while ago now, when as a kid—9 or so—I was walking to a friend’s house. It was sunny; the lawns were green and the sky was blue but the pools were bluer. I don’t remember the exact trigger for the thought, but I suspect my eye caught on the American flag hung by someone’s door. Whether it was the first time, or only the most memorable time, I remember realising: There is nothing inherently stopping my country (the US) and the whole world from getting worse again.

Now, there was a lot that was limited and outright wrong about that thought: the idea that the world didn’t currently suck for a lot of people, that it couldn’t start sucking for me, that the safety I experienced wasn’t built on other people not being safe, that the world was necessarily headed in a positive direction at the time, and so on. Many children are obliged to realise those things far earlier, if they ever held such beliefs in the first place.

But it was a step on the ongoing path toward a more complex world view, and a necessary one.

What the Prequels do is to present a situation in which the Evil Overlord takes over not by having a bigger army, or by poisoning the Good King, but by asking for and being granted supreme power by the government which is supposed to be checking his power. It is not detailed, or nuanced, or particularly well orchestrated. The how is barely a concern. The Prequels are highly unlikely to tell an adult anything they do not already know—in fact they are more likely to reinforce overly simplistic, individualistic views of highly systematic, large scale issues.

But the prequels do present a naive child with the possibility that a democracy can willingly become a dictatorship, that a government and a world can become worse.

That is only a step—one everyone must eventually move beyond—but for the naive child, it is a necessary step.