On Star Wars, Spectatorship, and the Moral Imagination of Empire

As summer approaches, so too does a now-familiar ritual: the rising of smoke over Los Angeles, the spasm of violence in California streets, and its swift translation into narrative for the comfort of distant viewers. What is offered to us is not merely news but a sacrament of spectacle, disorder reconstituted as entertainment. My own first reaction, I confess, was one of bourgeois relief: "Thank God I don’t live there." But distance is never impartial. It reshapes how we see, what we feel entitled to ignore, and how we imagine ourselves in relation to the spectacle. For the modern spectator, the obligation is clear. Make it your business. Interpret. Participate. Perform.

This is the economy of meaning in a society where media and capital have become liturgically indistinct. The news, such as it is, offers not reportage but mythology. Not explanation but pantomime. We are presented with scenes of unrest--riots, protests, confrontations--as if they emerge from the elemental depths of "systemic injustice." But injustice, in this telling, is always curiously abstract. It does not name itself with specificity or accountability. Rather, it is curated to flatter the worldview of the storyteller.

The myth goes like this: the people rise, the structures oppress, and empathy must follow. Yet the irony is not subtle for those with eyes to see. The very voices that once dismissed half the country as uneducated, bigoted, or expendable now clamor for understanding as their utopian architectures collapse under their own incoherence. The same prophets who decried border enforcement as xenophobic now howl when the law fails to obey their preferred script. Their quarrel is not with injustice but with narrative disobedience.

The true spectacle, then, is not in the streets but behind the camera. There lies the real desperation--the hunger to resurrect a sense of moral superiority from the ashes of interpretive chaos. What disorients is not just the violence itself but the compulsive need to interpret it through ready-made symbols. In digital sanctuaries like X, users process trauma by imposing grand meaning on it, searching for fictional coherence amid the rubble.

One detects the old liturgical impulse: suffering must be dramatized, signs must be read, enemies must be named.

Enter Andor.

The recent resurgence of Star Wars: Andor reveals the cultural saturation of Disney’s gospel. One need not watch the series to observe its influence. It is enough to witness the commentary it generates. Among the more vocal commentators on social media are largely centrist or consensus-aggregating YouTube personalities who function as grifters. These are figures who hold "culture war" positions brokered through algorithmic loyalty rather than genuine cultural coherence or understanding. Their performative venue is to act as though they defend tradition, when in fact they select vectors of engagement that optimize attention. Some of these figures will make outrageous statements like how they were won over by a harrowing moment in the series: a scene where a character narrowly escapes sexual assault by an Imperial officer. That such a brutal, fraught moment became a touchstone speaks less to the show’s artistry and more to the hunger of viewers starving for emotional substance amid corporate sterility. What these viewers never seem to ask is how many times Disney can employ such a scene before it too becomes stale, its emotional impact reduced to a formulaic gesture in an increasingly hollow ritual.

But here lies the theological dimension of our moment. What these critics unwittingly canonize is not just a show but a mythology: a retooled, repackaged rite of rebellion, complete with laser blasters and monologues about the oppressed. In this liturgy, the Empire is law enforcement, the rebels are the rioters, and each real-world upheaval is refracted through the prism of corporate fiction. Each consumer is invited to participate in the drama, so long as the moral lines remain undisturbed.

This transposition is not incidental. It is the result of decades of narrative engineering. Star Wars, once a mythic tale of revolution against tyrannical empire, has become a simulation of rebellion that never ends and never succeeds. The rebels are always struggling. The Empire is always looming. And nothing ever changes.

This is not narrative laziness; it is narrative theology. It teaches the viewer that resistance is noble but ineffectual, and that redemption lies not in victory or truth but in perpetual struggle.

Such stories do not liberate; they pacify. They allow the consumer to feel rebellious without ever leaving the confines of the system that sells them their rebellion. Thus emerges the central question: Is this media training its viewers to confront Empire, or to become loyal parishioners in its church? Are these digital insurrectionists preparing to confront injustice, or simply memorizing the lines assigned to them by salaried writers in Burbank?

The corruption, then, is not stylistic but theological. The categories of Empire and Rebel, once fixed in moral contrast, have become fluid signifiers, available to any who would wear the costume. And the costume is indeed the point. The forms remain--stormtroopers, lightsabers, starships--but the moral core has been hollowed out. The Rebel is no longer the one who sacrifices for truth. The Rebel is now whoever the Corporation wishes you to emulate. And it is Disney, that secular catechist of the modern age, who plays both Empire and Rebel at once.

The result is a myth that affirms its own manipulators. Rebellion is sold as merchandise, shipped in limited editions, draped in performative diversity, and sanctified by Rotten Tomatoes. This is not revolution; it is marketing. The audience is invited to identify as underdog and hero, even as they consume products authored by the very forces they claim to resist.

What remains of Star Wars is not conviction but sentimentality: a ritual performance of rebellion, safely contained within the bounds of corporate interest. The viewer is not liberated but sedated. Not awakened but narcotized. Worse still, this hollow ritualism provokes its own backlash, birthing reactionaries whose real objection is not to ideology, but to the unbearable smugness with which it is delivered.

The tragedy is not that viewers are deceived. It is that they have come to love the deception. They require their propaganda as a kind of liturgy, a reaffirmation of their faith in the myth; just so long as they never recognize it as propaganda. For many, this has become a replacement religion, and it is far easier to let them believe in its sacraments than to convince them that they have been worshiping a lie.

For anyone enthralled by the vague critiques of grifters and other attention-driven cultural commentators, have you also felt that something is deeply wrong with Star Wars, yet struggled to articulate exactly what? Perhaps you once thought it was merely a matter of plot holes, pacing, or a general failure to follow proper writing conventions. No, indeed, something deeper has shifted.

This is the insidious genius of the system: to invert the logic of resistance, to transmute critique into consumption, and to transform participation into passivity. The new Rebel fights not in the streets but from the glow of an air-conditioned living room, armed not with courage but with curated gifs and Andor references. Their solidarity is not with the poor or the broken, but with the script.

No, these rebels are not the heirs of revolution. They are the children of marketing.

And in that final inversion, where the audience believes their consumption is resistance and their rebellion is real, the Empire doesn’t hide. It doesn't need to. Instead, it just changes costumes. It wraps itself in the colors of revolution, hands you the script, and waits for your applause.

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