Moonhead
Posts: 16520
Joined: 9/21/2009
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In a review of Star Wars (collected in his excellent non fiction anthology A User's Guide To The New Millenium) the late JG Ballard wonders if the fact that the rebel alliance manage to blow up the death star and bloody the Empire's nose might not be a reference to America getting kicked out of Vietnam.
It's an interesting point, and one that I haven't really seen addressed elsewhere. (THough as a rule, I can't be arsed reading any film criticism, so it's quite possibly a trope that's been done to death elsewhere.) This is a long way from the only example of a piece of American pop culture where the good guys are terrorists (The X Men and Red Dawn both spring to mind as well) but it's probably the one with the widest audience. While I don't have a lot of sympathy for the daft notion that there's a liberal media conspiracy, since the hate campaign aimed at the Dixie Chicks, the war on terror hasn't really conjured up the same sort of jingoistic fictional outpourings as occurred during the second world war.
Anybody have any thoughts on this?
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I like to think he was eaten by rats, in the dark, during a fog. It's what he would have wanted...
(Simon R Green on the late James Herbert)
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Is the Force with terrorism? - 
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