Can we not just enjoy Star Wars as a movie instead of referencing it to political events?
Nope!
You can ignore the political context, if you want, but there’s no reason why other people should. Star Wars is and has always been intensely political.
The original trilogy was written in the context of the Nixon administration and the Vietnam War, and intended to resonate in those terms. The prequels are deeply concerned with the Bush administration. Lucas once corrected a NYT reporter who scornfully described Cheney as Darth Vader: “Anakin Skywalker is a promising young man who is turned to the dark side by an older politician and becomes Darth Vader. George Bush is Darth Vader. Cheney is the Emperor.”
And even if Star Wars weren’t obviously relating to specific eras of United States politics, the power of art is in connection to our lives and the world around us, not in some sterile isolation. People are never going to enjoy art in a contextless vacuum, and it’s both absurd and unfair to expect them to.
“A lot of my interest in Apocalypse Now was carried over into Star Wars…I figured I couldn’t make that film because it was about the Vietnam War, so I would essentially deal with some of the same interesting concepts that I was going to use and convert them into space fantasy, so you’d have essentially a large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters or human beings…a small independent country like North Vietnam threatened by a neighbor or provincial rebellion, instigated by gangsters aided by empire…The empire is like America ten years from now, after Nixonian gangsters assassinated the Emperor and were elevated to power in a rigged election; created civil disorder by instigating race riots aiding rebel groups and allowing the crime rate to rise to the point where a “total control” police state was welcomed by the people. Then the people were exploited with high taxes, utility and transport costs.“ -Lucas
Also, Revenge of the Sith was considered so anti-Bush, people actually boycotted it!
