"After
American Graffiti, George [Lucas] had wanted to do Apocalypse
Now. George ... had worked on the script ... back in 1969.Then, when
Warner Brothers backed out, the project was abandoned. It was still
too hot a topic, the war was still on... and it just wasn't going to
happen. So George considered his options [and] he decided, 'All right,
if it's politically too hot as a contemporary subject, I'II put the
essence of the story in outer space and make it in a galaxy long ago
and far, far away'. Star Wars is George's transubstantiated version
of Apocalypse Now. The rebel group were the North Vietnamese,
and the Empire was the US"
-Walter Murch, editor of Apocalypse Now
-Walter Murch, editor of Apocalypse Now
"It's
of course no accident that the current power elite (Spielberg, Lucas,
Gates, Blair) belonged to the so-called counterculture of the 1960s. Capital,
needless to say, is indifferent to individual human motivation, but happy
slaves are better slaves, and the reprogramming of the way the master
class thinks (about itself, about workers, about capital) has been crucial
to the presentation of the multi-nationalised capital's current dominion
as immutable fact. And George Lucas' 'transubstantiation' of Apocalypse
Now into Star Wars is emblematic of the shifts in late capitalism
since the 60s. The smooth transition from hippy to hyper-capitalist, from
slacker hedonism to authoritarianism, from engagement to entertainment,
retrospectively reveals what the punks knew so we when they cackled 'never
trust a hippie'. Far from posing any threat to capitalism, the dope-smoking,
soap-dodging rockers of the 60s were acting as capitalism's reserve army
of exploiters, whose time spent at festivals and on the experimental avant-garde
fringe did little or nothing to engineer lines of collective escape, but
yielded instead resources for the new forms of enslavement that loom everywhere
around us now. Exactly those likely to have 'approved' of Kubrick's critique
of corporate-controlled environments in 1968 are now administering their
own 'total control' systems, all the more sinister for their shirtsleeves
'informality', all the more enveloping because the bosses wire themselves
into the circuit, flaunting their own self-exploitation as both inevitable
and exemplary. As Deleuze and Guattari had it in Anti-Oedipus,
"The bourgeois sets the example, he absorbs surplus value for ends
that ... have nothing to do with his own enjoyment: more utterly enslaved
than the lowest of slaves, he is the first servant of the ravenous machine,
the beast of the reproduction of capital. 'I too am a slave'- these are
the new words spoken by the master."- Mark Fisher, SF Capital, Transmat (2001)
