{"id":437,"date":"2018-11-20T08:36:54","date_gmt":"2018-11-20T13:36:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/postcolonialstarwars\/?page_id=437"},"modified":"2018-12-12T17:23:49","modified_gmt":"2018-12-12T22:23:49","slug":"tomas-guardia","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/postcolonialstarwars\/anthology\/fall-2018\/tomas-guardia\/","title":{"rendered":"Tomas Guardia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unmasking The Soldier<\/strong><\/p>\n

Upon viewing <\/span>Star Wars: A New Hope<\/span><\/i>, 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 \u201cpeace and order\u201d 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 <\/span>Star Wars: From A Certain Point of View<\/span><\/i>, a compilation of short stories recounting the events of <\/span>A New Hope<\/span><\/i> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Stormtrooper<\/p><\/div>\n

Through these stories, it is easy to make a comparison between stormtroopers in <\/span>Star Wars<\/span><\/i> and American soldiers during the Vietnam war. Lucas himself claimed that <\/span>Star Wars<\/span><\/i> was an allegory to the Vietnam War that had ended only two years before the release of <\/span>A New Hope<\/span><\/i>. A movie that provides a similar depth of character to the imperialist troops and maintains a critical lense of the colonial project is <\/span>Apocalypse Now<\/span><\/i>. <\/span>Apocalypse Now<\/span><\/i> borrows heavily from Josef Conrad\u2019s <\/span>Heart of Darkness<\/span><\/i> 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 <\/span>From a Certain Point of View<\/span><\/i>, they still maintain a level of humanity otherwise taken away from soldiers many times during war times and in <\/span>A New Hope<\/span><\/i>. 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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In <\/span>Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View<\/span><\/i>, specifically \u201cChange of Heart\u201d 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\u2019s orders and witnessing Leia\u2019s interrogation. He expresses this anxiety in the opening sentence when he admits that the hardest part of his job is, \u201cKeeping (his) feelings under control,\u201d (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 \u201creality\u201d he has much more in common with the character Chef from <\/span>Apocalypse Now<\/span><\/i> when Chef realizes that in the party\u2019s fear they had just murdered a boat of Vietnamese civilians.<\/span><\/p>\n