Awaken to the dark side in our Star Wars
No Star Wars spoiler ahead. The evil Empire has morphed into the First Order, equally evil and prone to intergalactic massacres. The rebels have become the Resistance, which sounds better. Darth Vader has found his ideological protégé in a black-masked, breathyvoiced acolyte. The Stormtroopers turn out to be space Janisseries, plucked from their homes and trained to be guards and marauders. The politics of Star Wars is sketchy, childlike and classical: the light against the dark, the oppressed against the dictator, blue against red, democracy against fascism. The Force, dormant or awakened, is the supreme power that holds the galaxy together. The ultimate battle is to stop the dark side from monopolising that force and reigning in space through violence and terror.
The pop-culture imagination is a simplified version of real-life battles, from Shakespeare to Verdi, from Chaplin to Star Wars and The Hunger Games, with varying degrees of erudition.
You could say it’s frivolous comparing Darth Vader or President Snow with this or that ruler — Assad? Islamic State? Bush? Putin? Thaksin? Prayut? Trump? — while those who stand up against them are our Luke Skywalkers and Katniss Everdeens — the student activists? the whistle mob? the Syrian rebels? And yet such real-life references speak to the power of metaphor, which is essential to our internal life and our endless effort to comprehend the world. Metaphor — popular or classical, literary or cinematic — is our sign and our soothsayer. Mockingjay and Skywalker are fictitious, but it’s because hope is fictitious and necessary, and the Force is a mind map that will guide us through the ring of asteroids.
The hard part is to decide who’s on the dark side. At the surface it’s a nobrainer: whoever has the power is the oppressor, and those who rise up are the freedom-fighters. But sometimes that’s a trap, because the hardest part is to know who has the real power — who seeks to control the force.
I bet Suthep Thaugsuban during his Shutdown campaign imagined himself as Han Solo, or Jennifer Lawrence from the Hunger Games, his dynamite arrows pointing at Yingluck Shinawatra. In his mind, the “parliamentary dictatorship” was crippling the poor, outlying districts and thus the well-dressed people of the Capitol had to take a stand. Even now that the Empire has struck back — even when the resistance has adopted the three-finger salute that riles up the authorities so much — Mr Suthep and his Stormtroopers might still believe that they’re fighting to liberate the galaxy, the nebulous galaxy that exists mostly in their heads, from the shadow of the Shinawatras.
It’s strange that people imagine that they’re being persecuted even when they’re actually holding guns. Mind you, even PM Prayut Chan-o-cha could believe he’s a Jedi warrior in a rebellious battle for our “real democracy” — not the Americanstyle democracy espoused by the Washington envoys, because the US, in the general’s mind, is the real Empire that wants to expand its reach. So despite the military’s record of detaining people, harassing students and academics, the arrest of a man while he was in a hospital, the threat of criminalising Facebook “likes”, and the pursuit of those who cry foul against the alleged park corruption — despite all of this, the junta still behaves like a besieged victim, so paranoid that the only reaction is to clench its fist even tighter.
In a week that everyone feels compelled to watch Star Wars (the real dictatorship of taste!), it’s not so hard at all to see who’s on the dark side at this point in history. I wonder what our military generals would imagine watching the Resistance force — assuming that they watch blockbusters like normal citizens too — going up against the bullying Empire. Do they side with the underdogs, again like normal people do, or do they secretly approve of the Stormtroopers’ enforced order, believing that’s how the universe should be run? Or they may hold on to the narrative that the real Darth Vader is still out there, hiding in Planet Dubai, and that they’re the genuine, gun-slinging heroes in this mad opera whose third act is still a long way off.
Fear no spoiler, because our story doesn’t have one. The script is still being written, sometimes by the invisible hand and untraceable ink, and the story so far is that of a dark army taking over this small galaxy, citing peace when curiously waging a covert war, and prescribing a happy ending when everyone is trembling at deus ex machina. The story in Star Wars — of light against darkness — is the oldest of all, and Thailand is still living it with more intensity than anything you’ll see on the screen.