Introduction

In the late spring of 2005, George Lucas released the third of the second trilogy of Star Wars films. The Revenge of the Sith dealt with a conflict between superbeings in a different galaxy and achieved great popularity at the box office. It also, however, echoed the debates of contemporary America. As Daniel Kutzman noted:

The message – that abandoning rights in favour of a bigger struggle, in which the stakes are raised to the highest, leads to the total abandonment of the values supposedly being protected – is epitomised by Anakin's descent into becoming Darth Vader. And picking up on the theme, cartoonists enjoyed representing George Bush as Vader. George Lucas had himself made a connection between the film and the Iraq War, even though he had written the original storyline some thirty-five years earlier: ‘In terms of evil, one of the original concepts was how does a democracy turn itself into a dictatorship … The parallels between what we did in Vietnam and what we're doing in Iraq now are unbelievable.’ The Revenge of the Sith as a popular critique of the ‘war on terror’ discourse?