This is an intriguing essay on the way in which the dreadful way Star Wars turned out was due to it being, in essence, an artistic expression of the Boomer view of history:
Every generation has a founding myth. The boomers did not earn theirs. It was handed to them, and they spent it like an inheritance, down to the last penny, on themselves.
The fathers paid for that story in blood. They came home and said very little about it. What the sons did with it is the charge. They took one war and made it the only war. They took one enemy and made him the template for every enemy. They took a vast, tragic, morally tangled contest between great powers and flattened it into a passion play with two parts available for casting: the liberator and the monster. Then they cast themselves.
That is the boomer view of history. Everything before 1945 is prologue. Everything after is a rerun. Every opponent is Hitler. Every inherited custom is a milepost on the road to the camps. Every institution older than they are is suspect, and demolishing it counts automatically as liberation. History stops being a contest of houses, orders, interests and loyalties, each with a real claim, and becomes a Sunday school pageant where virtue belongs to whoever is holding the hammer.
Notice how little thinking this permits. An aristocratic education reads history as tragedy: competing goods, statesmen choosing between evils, orders that rise and rot by their own internal logic. Thucydides. Clarendon. Burke. The boomer education forbids all of it. No tragedy, only villainy. No competing goods, only the righteous and the damned. Ask an honest question about the founding myth and you have confessed to being the monster. The range of permitted debate is narrow by design, and it is policed by people who could not survive a wider one.
The result is sterility. A civilization that can tell only one story cannot understand itself, cannot understand its rivals, and cannot explain why orders endure or collapse. It cannot discuss power at all except as evil, which is extremely convenient, because it means never having to account for its own. And while refusing to discuss power, it built an order of its own: moralizing, incurious, and sealed against challenge, because every challenger had already been assigned the villain’s costume before he opened his mouth.
If you wanted that worldview on film, you would build a galaxy of liberators and monsters with nothing permitted in between. Lucas built exactly that. Star Wars is the boomer view of history in its purest available form, which is why it is the best evidence we have against them.
It is really remarkable what a hold Star Wars had on the culture, considering that it was actually about one and one-third good movies. Even though I absolutely loved the first movie, I realized about the time they reached the Ewok planet during Jedi that I’d fundamentally lost interest in the story after the evacuation of Hoth.
I was lured in by the long-awaited making of the first prequel movie, and attended it with my best friend with whom I’d seen Star Wars at the age of seven, and our wives. I walked out of The Phantom Menace shaking my head, and haven’t seen a single Star Wars movie or television show since.