In the first three episodes of Andor Season 2, which started streaming on Disney+ on April 22, one of the show’s many interlocking plotlines takes us to Mina-Rau, an agricultural planet on the outer rim of the Star Wars galaxy, where a group of rebel soldiers are posing as freelance mechanics. The group includes Bix (Adria Arjona), a wanted fugitive hiding out on Mina-Rau without the necessary paperwork. So when a cadre of Imperial soldiers arrives to carry out an unannounced “supply census,” Bix is worried.
“If they’re checking visas, it’s a problem,” she says.
“Look, they need the grain,” a local farmer replies. “They know we need help, and they know everyone isn’t legal. How hard they look, what they do—it’s been 10 years since the last audit, nobody’s happy.”
In the very next episode, he’ll betray the rebels to the Empire, a reminder of just how difficult it can be to do the right thing in the face of authoritarian power.
For Kempshall, Andor’s greatest innovation is the way it exposes the “grassroots elements of fascism.” We all know that Palaptine is evil, but as the series makes clear, it’s the ordinary people just doing their jobs—filing paperwork and enforcing security—who make that evil possible in the first place.
“These are the ones who’ll kick your door in at 3 am or enforce changing laws,” he says. “They’re the real face of the Empire. And it looks normal and banal and boring and therefore terrifying. It’s the reality of increasing oppression.”
Star Wars’ tradition of highlighting American imperialism dates back to its earliest days.
Before he created Star Wars, Lucas was supposed to direct Apocalypse Now for his friend, Oscar-winning director Francis Ford Coppola. But after the film fell into development hell and he dropped out, Lucas took that Vietnam War setting and transported it into space, turning the Viet Cong into the Rebel Alliance, a ragtag army of freedom fighters engaged in guerrilla warfare against a heavily-armed, genocidal empire.
And that’s just what made it into the final version of the film.
“In the earliest drafts for what would become Star Wars, Lucas was pretty explicit about how the Empire was meant to betray an America which had fallen into fascism,” Kempshall says.
When Lucas returned to the Star Wars galaxy after a 16-year break to helm the prequel trilogy, he had a different metaphor in mind. Released in 1999, a full year before George W. Bush became president, Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace is an allegory for how democracies collapse into dictatorship and willingly cede power to a strongman, with parallels to everyone from Julius Caesar to Napoleon Bonaparte. (Lucas’ then-yawn-inducing obsession with trade tariffs may have inadvertently also predicted our current economic crisis.)
But by the time the prequels came to an end with Revenge of the Sith (2005), Lucas had turned his attention to President Bush. Near the end of the movie, a corrupted Anakin Skywalker turns to his old friend Obi-Wan Kenobi and shouts, “If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy,” an unsubtle reference to the Iraq War that instantly drew comparisons to Bush’s post-9/11 threat: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
After the poorly reviewed sequels, Lucas stepped back from Star Wars for another few decades before ultimately selling the franchise to Disney. The company’s much-hyped relaunch picked up the Skywalker Saga, 30 years after Return of the Jedi 1983). In 2015’s The Force Awakens, the remnants of the Empire have reformed into the First Order, which takes on distinctly Nazi attributes with its billowing red flags and angry, shouting leaders.
For Kempshall, the reason for this shift towards a more generic Nazi metaphor has less to do with politics and more to do with the modern cultural zeitgeist.
“Vietnam isn’t a major pop culture touchstone anymore,” he says. “So the Empire likely needed to evolve to transmit a level of evil.”
That was certainly true in 2015, a year before Donald Trump became president, but a decade later, the zeitgeist has changed again. Like it did back in the 1970s under Richard Nixon or the early 2000s under Bush, America is lurching towards fascism. And, in a surprising return to form, Star Wars is here to reflect that political reality back at us.
