Malcolm Tucker delivered the best description of Star Wars, in The Thick of It: ‘The one about the fucking hairdresser, the space hairdresser, and the cowboy. The guy, he’s got a tinfoil pal and a pedal bin. His father’s a robot and he’s fucking fucked his sister. Lego, they’re all made of fucking Lego.’ He didn’t mention that Star Wars is really about Henry Kissinger.
It was written by George Lucas, grossed $33 billion over six films, with merchandise, founded a new and stupid religion called Jedi, which, in the 2001 census 0.8 per cent of the population of England and Wales said they identified with, and invented the Star Wars convention where you can, as I did, meet the man who operated Jabba the Hutt’s left arm. The seventh film — The Force Awakens, the first in a third trilogy — opens this month. How to explain it to Spectator readers who have not seen it, because they are good at life and do not need it?
It is a fairy tale, inspired by Lawrence of Arabia, by James Bond (but I can’t see it), by 2001: A Space Odyssey, and by J.R.R Tolkien. A young man (Luke Skywalker, a plank, like Frodo in Lord of the Rings, because everyone can identify with a plank) grows up during a Manichaean struggle. The evil Galactic Empire is really Nixon’s America, and it is bad; the Republican rebels are really the Vietcong, and they are good. When Walter Cronkite praised Star Wars, which surprised the people involved, because they thought it was junk and said so — ‘George, you can type this shit, but you sure can’t say it,’ said Harrison Ford (Han Solo, the cowboy) — I do not think he knew that.
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