The World According to Star Wars

This book is odd but lovable. I can’t imagine how it got written.

It’s about Star Wars. But not about any particular aspect of Star Wars. Rather, it’s a meditation about the…ideas (?) of Star Wars?

The book was written right after The Force Awakens was released. That was the first film in the third trilogy.

The author is all over the map. He starts by talking about how much of a cultural phenomenon the original film was, back in 1977. Then he talks about frameworks and paradigms for understanding all the movies and putting them in some master paradigm – everything from Christianity to feminism to Oedipus complexes.

That last one is also a recurrent theme. There are strong father-son commentaries in the films – Luke and Darth, Luke and Obi Wan, Darth and Obi Wan, etc. It turns out that concepts of fatherhood play out through the entire story.

In the second half is a long political discussion about rebellions and what causes them, which dips into the philosophies of “information cascades” and how we filter stimuli and input.

Like I said, the author is all over the place. He’s a professor at Harvard, and he wrote Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, which I enjoyed.

I can’t fault the book. I imagine it is what it set about to be – a celebration of one guy’s love of a film series. I don’t imagine the author had any particular point here, and if you read it with that in mind, you’ll probably enjoy it.

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