Fandom Edits

For the first 35 years of its existence, the Star Wars franchise was branded as the inspired vision of a single auteur-genius, George Lucas, who controlled the franchise both creatively and economically. Among its major competitors in science fiction and fantasy, perhaps only Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings has been so closely identified with the mind of one person—and where Tolkien had his legendarium, the mythopoeic totality of the Middle-earth narrative, Lucas had his saga. In interviews, Lucas typically spoke of the Star Wars saga as a unitary megatext from which the first movie just happened to draw somewhere in the middle. ¹ Lucas’s self-conscious promotion of Star Wars as a modern myth—intensified by his frequent references to Joseph Campbell’s study of mythic narrative, The Hero with a Thousand Faces—presented the narrative as emerging from a coherent “master plan” Lucas developed in the 1970s and that has slowly unfurled ever since. Borrowing from Foucault the concept of the episteme—that “strategic apparatus” within a discourse that allows “a field of scientificity” to determine what is thinkable and unthinkable within that system ² —we might say that Star Wars had, until recently, treated Lucas’s authorial vision as the “one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge.” ³ In this chapter, I discuss Rogue One in the context of the 2012 sale of the Star Wars franchise to Disney, which functions as a moment of epistemic break for the Star Wars franchise. While Star Wars remains Star Wars both before and after this moment, our relationship to it as a system of knowledge is entirely different; indeed, in this strange early moment of transition between one episteme and the next, we might even say the current Star Wars episteme finds itself in a period of civil war.