Unmasking The Soldier

Upon viewing Star Wars: A New Hope, one can easily conclude who the good guys and who the bad guys are. The rebels as personified by Leia, Luke, and Han are the protagonists and the rebellion they stand for is the just entity of the universe it inhabits while The Empire exists as a colonial force that is somewhat analogous to real life colonial empires. One of the most crucial roles in The Empire is The Stormtrooper. The Stormtrooper, while being a human, exists as a weapon for The Empire to use in its quest to crush The Rebellion and maintain “peace and order” in outer rim planets. While they are essential to the Empire, these characters have no voice whatsoever and the viewer does not know whether they are staunch supporters of The Empire, begrudgingly brought into the force because of outside reasons, or just kids looking for a way off their planet as Luke was at the beginning of the film. While these characters in the film can be considered subaltern in that they have no voice within the colonial project, they act as agents for it even though they are routinely disregarded and thrown headfirst into clear danger. In Star Wars: From A Certain Point of View, a compilation of short stories recounting the events of A New Hope from the point of view of subaltern characters, authors gave voice to the stormtroopers and by doing so revealed that they were not purely faceless murder agents, but humans with their own fears and objections to the imperial project.

Stormtrooper

Through these stories, it is easy to make a comparison between stormtroopers in Star Wars and American soldiers during the Vietnam war. Lucas himself claimed that Star Wars was an allegory to the Vietnam War that had ended only two years before the release of A New Hope. A movie that provides a similar depth of character to the imperialist troops and maintains a critical lense of the colonial project is Apocalypse Now. Apocalypse Now borrows heavily from Josef Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and follows Captian Benjamin Willard on his journey to kill a rogue U.S. military officer as he travels up a river witnessing increasing horror in the Vietnamese jungle. The soldiers that accompany him each have a unique character, different reactions to the events of the plot, and the audience sympathize with their struggles and deaths throughout the movie. While these characters may not have the strong moral fabric of some of the stormtroopers in From a Certain Point of View, they still maintain a level of humanity otherwise taken away from soldiers many times during war times and in A New Hope. When the otherwise subaltern characters of imperial soldiers are given a voice, it is revealed that they can exist in resistance to the project or even become victims of it while also being complicit with the project as a whole.

In Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View, specifically “Change of Heart” by Elizabeth Wein, it is revealed that the Stormtroopers have minds and struggles of their own through the story of a nameless stormtrooper who struggles to express the emotional pain he goes through because of his duty, which includes following Vader’s orders and witnessing Leia’s interrogation. He expresses this anxiety in the opening sentence when he admits that the hardest part of his job is, “Keeping (his) feelings under control,” (221). For the rest of the story, his sole focus is controlling his emotions of fear, sadness, hatred, and self-doubt, and for most of the chapter, he succeeds. While in the movie this character is merely a faceless soldier who solely acts as an agent of the empire, in “reality” he has much more in common with the character Chef from Apocalypse Now when Chef realizes that in the party’s fear they had just murdered a boat of Vietnamese civilians.

Chef is not able to control his emotions and exclaims how a woman was not reaching for a gun but for a puppy after they had just gunned them down and loses his cool. Similarly, the nameless stormtrooper begins to lose control when he realizes Leia is, “Exactly like (him),” (224). His innate empathy not only deepens the character of a stormtrooper but also builds up his act of rebellion on the final page. He chooses to say nothing instead of ratting to Tarkin that Leia is lying about the location of the rebel base, choosing Leia and her rebellion over his fear of the empire. While this nameless stormtrooper never fires a blaster shot against the empire, disobeys one of its laws, or attempts to dismantle the imperial project in any way shape or form, he considers himself a rebel and ends the chapter by saying that, “(He) had joined her rebellion,” (230). In Apocalypse Now, the same cannot be said. Chef is not moved towards the side of the Vietnamese but instead has his anti-war sentiments reinforced, showing a three-dimensional character who is disillusioned with the war he is fighting. While a rebel might still gun him down in a fight, this stormtrooper brings a level of nuance to rebellion in that he will probably never put up a physical fight against the empire, but has aided in its destruction nonetheless. Similarly, Chef has reminded the rest of the characters what they really are, colonists coming up this river and leaving a wake of destruction. However, more importantly, Chef has reminded the audience that these “soldiers” are just anxious kids wielding ultimate unchecked power in a foreign land similarly to how “Change of Heart” reminds its audience that behind the mask there is a human who makes meaningful choices and has thoughts of their own.

Another story from A Certain Point of View that illustrates this struggle to have a multidimensional character is “The Bucket” by Christie Golden. The story follows TK-4601’s capture of Leia and realization that he cannot continue to kill rebels and watch them die. After witnessing his commanding officer be killed by Leia he thinks to himself that he, “Couldn’t keep doing what he was doing now… killing rebels while looking into their faces,” even though he wants to continue killing rebels, just on the front line where he cannot see their humanity (24). A similar sentiment is expressed by the main character of Apocalypse Now in the opening of the movie where he has delusions of the jungle and war but sees no faces of those that he has to kill in front of him. Clearly, for both of these characters, they seem to believe in the imperial project, but more likely have become so addicted to war that now their life is dictated by it. Willard cannot stay away from war but over the course of the movie realizes how awful the colonialist regime is and expresses it when he says, “We’d cut them in half with a machine gun and give them a Band-Aid” after the incident with the civilian boat. However, similarly to TK-4601 he continues the cycle of violence and becomes hardened to it as a result, not moving the way of Chef or the unnamed stormtrooper.

To look at Star Wars through a postcolonial lens, a good narrative to apply is Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, where he explains how a postcolonial struggle unfolds and the effects on both the colonizer and the colonized. In addition to being a postcolonial author and critic, Fanon was also part of the French army, as a doctor, stationed in Algeria. So with the example of his own experience, he shows one can go from being a “soldier” of the colonizer to a crucial part of the rebellion. Fannon’s major claims are that “The last shall be first” is, or should be, the goal of the struggle and that there necessarily will be violence in the anti-colonial struggle. In quickly looking at two of the protagonists of A New Hope, Luke and Han, it is clear that in The Rebellion some of the “Last” are becoming “First”. Han is a smuggler that comes from nothing, surviving on cunning and crime and Luke is a farm boy from the outskirts of the galaxy, so to have these as two as the main leaders of The Rebellion is taking two people from what Fanon would call the “peasantry” and putting them at the helm of the revolution. In applying the second part of Fanon’s theory to “The Rebellion” of Star Wars, one can first conclude that it is still in the violent stage, thus there is unbridled violence against the colonizer. Fanon claims that “Decolonization reeks of red-hot cannon balls and bloody knives,”  and this is shown in “The Bucket” when Leia is unremorseful when killing TK-4601’s superior (Fanon 3). Leia contains an unbridled hatred and violence that is directed at the oppressor, even though that oppressor might not want to kill her, because this is a necessary part of decolonization. Fanon states that the soldier is, “The official, legitimate agent, the spokesperson for the colonizer and regime of oppression,” and this remains largely true in Star Wars (Fanon 3). While the average Stormtrooper, with who we are concerned with, is not a spokesperson for the colonizer, they remain the legitimate agent and act out the desires of the higher-ups, while sometimes agreeing with them and sometimes not.

In addition to postcolonial theory, Fanon recounts some of the conversations he had with colonizers and colonized as a psychiatrist. He spoke with a colonial police officer because the officer was experiencing depression and unending screams resulting from his participation in the torture of Algerian patriots. He eventually ran into a rebel who he had tortured and experienced a panic attack, this police officer in some ways resembles the unnamed Stormtrooper in “Change of Heart” in that, they both seem to have a heavy weight on their consciouses. While the real-life police officer never defects or raises a hang against the imperial project, he clearly, at least unconsciously, understands that what he has done is wrong and is in some way remorseful. However, this police officer is much more similar to TK-4601 in that there is very little remorse shown on his part and is more worried about what has happened to him and wants to be free from his remorse, not to do something to fight the root cause, imperialism. As well, similarly to TK-4601, the officer gets transferred back to France as TK-4601 gets transferred to the front line so he does not have to see the faces or recognize the humanity, of the rebels he kills. Another soldier Fanon speaks with is an officer who, again, is involved with torturing Algerian rebels and as a result becomes violent with his family and others around him. This soldier shows absolutely no remorse and continues to do his job as a torturer, similar to TK-4601 lack of remorse for killing. Though both are affected by their actions they both maintain their loyalty to the empire they serve and continue to act in despicable manners. While giving a voice to the soldiers can prove their humanity, it also seems it can illuminate their ability to act inhuman towards others and provide a look into a twisted mind.

Tackling the subject that is the soldier through a postcolonial lens provides great difficulty in that one should not give them too much sympathy as to diminish the horror experienced by the colonized, but it is important to understand them as also affected negatively by the colonial project. While in Star Wars it is much easier to have sympathy because of the lack of a strong tone of racism and the general separation from the real-life experiences of colonialism. However, having compared Stormtroopers to both fictitious American soldiers in Vietnam and real French soldiers in Algeria it is necessary to remind the reader that the problems faced by the soldiers in each of these scenarios, usually, pails in comparison to those they oppress. Whether it be the rebels in Star Wars, Vietnamese civilians, or Algerian freedom fighters, these oppressed people had to face much more than even the worst treated soldiers in the imperial-project because there is always an out for these soldiers. For example, the police officer in Fanon’s interview experienced a panic attack at seeing a rebel he tortured, he eventually returned home to France relatively cured of his problems. However, that rebel saw him too and was so terrified that he hid in a bathroom and attempted to kill himself thinking that the police were coming for him again and it took a long time for the medical staff to convince him that he was not being he was not being hunted, and even longer to recover from the trauma of torture, which Fanon does not explicitly say that he ever does. So, in conclusion, while looking at the soldiers in Star Wars is an interesting act, it is incredibly important to remember that this is a movie and that real-life colonial struggles have much more depth and awful lasting effects on the colonized and does not always end with a glorious award ceremony and a neatly tied bow.

Works Cited:

Lucas, George, director. Star Wars IV: A New Hope. Lucas Film Ltd, 1977.

Wein, Elizabeth. “Change of Heart.” Star Wars: from a Certain Point of View, Century, 2017. pp. 221-231

Golden, Christie. “The Bucket.” Star Wars: from a Certain Point of View, Century, 2017, pp. 17–27.

Coppola, Francis Ford, director. Apocalypse Now. Universal Pictures, 1979.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 2004.