Dr Leia Organa?
I’M GEEKING out over some pretty big academic news. BuzzFeed’s Andy Golder reports on how this news from a 2004 commentary track went viral again:
“Yeah, that’s right – Leia Organa was actually Doctor Leia Organa, because according to George Lucas, she got her PhD at age 19.”
The Star Wars director said in the commentary on A New Hope that Leia is “like a very sophisticated, urbanised ruler, a senator, so she’s a politician, she’s accomplished, she’s graduated, got her PhD at 19 and she rules people and is in charge.”
So at 19, as she appears in the original Star Wars, Princess Leia Organa was already a senator and the holder of a PhD?
What was her PhD in? My money is on either mathematics or Alderaan literature. While the social sciences were her métier, I doubt she would have pursued such a course of study in the authoritarian state that was the Galactic Empire. It would have sent up too many red flags.
More importantly: Can Leia’s arc in the original trilogy now be interpreted as the traditional arc of a newly minted PhD? Why yes, I believe it can.
A standard criticism of the original trilogy is how Leia starts off being this in-charge StrikesBack. political leader in the first film and winds up spending parts of the third film in a metal bikini. It’s safe to say some feminists saw this as a disempowering arc.
But here’s another way to think of it. The Leia in A New Hope displays all the traits of a StarWars:EpisodeV–TheEmpire newly minted PhD. She acts as if she knows everything in that film. She deconstructs her rescue from the Death Star in real time – you can’t do that without the critical chops developed in grad school. She tries to affect a cultured accent, but it does not quite take. Leia’s behaviour in Star Wars is perfectly consistent with all these tropes.
Now fast forward to The Empire Strikes Back. Leia displays all the markers of the frustrated postdoc thwarted in her pursuit of a tenure-track job. Oh, sure, she is still authoritative. But Leia also sometimes seems to act as if she was expecting a nice tenure-track position at Coruscant State rather than spending her time in the hinterlands of Hoth (to be fair, wars are hell on the academic job market). And while she gets irked when Han calls her variations of “Princess”, she saves her real ire for the sentence “I am not a committee!” Only someone who has had to navigate the dark side of academic bureaucracy could say that with conviction.
What about Return of the Jedi? Let me suggest that by the last film in the trilogy, Leia has finally come to terms with the idea that she will not be pursuing an academic career. The rebellion, the nasty academic politics in Coruscant, her relationship with Han, her appreciation of talents she did not know she possessed – these are all in keeping with many a PhD who realised that there are other things in life besides a tenure-track job.
Interpreted in this way, Return of the Jedi is the most radical film of the trilogy. Leia’s choices, and her contentment with those choices, offers some valuable career advice for PhDs