Anakin Skywalker, Star Wars and the Trouble with Boys

Scholars claim that the six films comprising the Star Wars epic are the United States' most important modern myth. The films have meaning for contemporary lives and serve as reflections of the fears, anxieties, and hopes surrounding what many perceive to be a crisis of masculinity manifested in the current boy crisis. This article describes how the films explore possibilities for a different kind of boyhood and how they contribute to understanding competing explanations for the boy crisis. Keywords: boyhood, boy crisis, film studies, masculinity, gender A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away ... Or is it? This well known phrase, forever associated with the Star Wars film saga, informs the authence at the beginning of each film that the events to be depicted take place somewhere very distant from our own world, both spatially and temporally. We disagree, believing that the six films have meaning for our contemporary lives and serve as reflections of the fears, anxieties, and hopes of contemporary American society, especially those fears surrounding what many perceive to be a boy crisis and a related crisis of masculinity. Thus it is not surprising that the series has earned $4.3 billion at the box office world-wide. Associated merchandise has generated three times that amount. Many scholars claim the series is the United States' most important modern myth (Brabazon, 1999; Johnson, 1999; Leming, 2002; Lev, 1998). The six movies reflect the changing understanding of masculinity in the United States, the social resistance to such transformations, and the potential future for boys and men. As a whole, the Star Wars epic represents the continual construction and reconstruction of masculinity since World War II. The original trilogy of films (19771983) and its masculine archetypes of the hero, Luke, the adventurer, Han, and the villain, Darth Vader, presented one-dimensional, simplistic representations of masculinity that were derived from the 1950s, another time of male panic for white, conservative, heterosexual American masculinity that was supposedly challenged by leftist and Communist political ideological incursions during the Cold War and the increasing influence of mothers on boys' lives (Courdileone, 2005). The first three films are a rejuvenation of the period's cult of toughness and film icons in whom wartime self-confidence characterized the dominant masculinity (Gilbert, 2005). In the earlier Star Wars films, Luke is the duty bound soldier hero who grows into manhood during wartime and assumes the dominant masculinity (Beynon, 2002). In 1998, the first of the next three installments of the saga was released. This is the trilogy which interests us most. Instead of using familiar masculine archetypes, as he did in the first three films, George Lucas, the producer and director, developed one central character who embodied both a critique of masculinity and an awareness of its possibilities. Anakin Skywalker is almost Christ-like in his appearance and talents. At the same time, he cannot control his own emotions and violent behaviors. In contrast to the soldier hero character of Luke, Anakin Skywalker is the "soldier victim" (Beynon, 2002) who symbolizes the recent and ongoing crisis of masculinity, more specifically the boy crisis, a phrase found in both popular (for example, Laura Bush speeches) and academic literature. Epstein Elwood, Hey, and Maw (1998) frame the discourse of boys' underachievement as a "globalized moral panic" (p. 3). We believe that Anakin' s difficulties mirror the reasons for this moral panic and argue that the life of Anakin Skywalker is the American boy crisis writ large. In our analysis, we draw from critical gender and masculinities scholars (Butler, 1990; Connell, 1995, 2000, 2002; hooks, 2004; Kimmel, 2004; Weedon, 1997) who seek to bring attention to societal inequities, particularly patriarchy and its manifestations, in discourse, culture and the economy. …