People often don’t have the background knowledge to tie concepts in media to happenings in real life.
I was talking to one of my friends about Star Wars lately. I’ve never enjoyed the new Disney movies1, and I’m not enough of a zoomer that the prequel trilogy has nostalgia value to me. The original trilogy is a well-worldbuilt, interesting space opera. So it’s just 4, 5 and 6 for me.
Specifically, we were talking about the sixth entry, Return of the Jedi. I mentioned that the entire original trilogy was largely inspired by American imperialism around the turn of the cold war. To illustrate this point, I said that the Ewok fight scene in Return of the Jedi’s last half was “obviously” an allusion to the brutal guerilla warfare that took place in the Vietnam War. The Ewoks slaughtering the high-tech Stormtroopers with weapons literally made up of sticks and stones evokes the highly asymmetric combat that defined Vietnam.
I made a mistake, in that I used the word “obviously”. My friend asked, why is it so “obvious”. We discussed further, and soon I realized that my friend and I had dissimilar pictures of what Vietnam was.
To me, the Vietnam War was a bloody, brutal war; a deeply vivid chapter of the cold war that dominated the 20th century. The root was a conflict between the communist North Vietnam and the capitalist South Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin was precedent for the United States to get involved. As all wars do, the conflict quickly devolved into barbarism. The Vietnamese armies used their knowledge of the Vietnamese terrain to wage a devastating guerilla war against American soldiers. Meanwhile, the US resorted to terrifying weapons like Agent Orange to demoralize the population. Media attention created a substantial counterculture movement at home, culminating in the Kent Square Massacre. Massive popular backlash, combined with the cost of waging a war against a Soviet ally, meant that the US had to pull out. This was all taught to me in a two-week unit, going into many different perspectives on the war.
To my friend, the Vietnam War was a two-hour lesson his teacher briefly glazed over, to check one of the boxes on the list of things you must teach during 20th century history. We fought them, they fought back, we pulled out. Then, move on to the next unit.
To be clear, my friend is not stupid. He knew of much of the intricacies of the war from doing research on his own after the fact. It’s just that our schooling experiences could not be more different.
This has made me rethink a lot of my opinions on media analysis. Not all history classes are created equal. Many people may not have the background to recognize certain themes in media.
Sometime to think about while writing themes into my work.
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As per usual, Rogue One is the exception to this rule. ↩