Rebellion, Republic, and Resistance: Exploring the Politics of Disney's Star Wars Films

Abstract

Star Wars is arguably one of the most significant cultural franchises in the United States of the past 40 years. George Lucas’ original trilogy has spawned an abundance of media, the most prominent of which is the film saga. A wealth of research and literature has been conducted and written on the original and prequel trilogies, but a relative paucity of scholarly discourse exists since Disney acquired the property in 2012. This study seeks to fill a portion of that gap in literature. I begin by reviewing the literature on film’s capacity to influence viewers’ political attitudes, and why fictional films are able to do so via the theoretical Extended Elaboration Likelihood Model. Next, I discuss the various political commentary and scholarship on the original and prequel trilogies, and build a case inquiry into the sequel trilogy as a Disney property. Through focus groups, I explore the political messages received from the Disney Star Wars films as represented by Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) and contrast them with those of the early Star Wars films as represented by Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope (1977). I find evidence that viewers of the original trilogy are exposed to libertarian ideological messages and viewers of the sequel trilogy are exposed to progressive ideological messages. While the qualitative results offer no generalizable conclusions, the implications and themes of this study certainly warrant further research.