James Fenimore Cooper. The Leatherstocking Tales have the sweep and touch on enduring themes that would define American identity, plus he originated the spy and seafaring adventure novels in American letters.
If you're asking what I think you're asking, I don't know that I agree that Star Wars isn't about America. It's told within an American genre (the western) and it's about the resistance to tyranny and rule from afar that the American story is also about. It's America in a galaxy far, far away, and somehow, doing that imaginative transplant also seems deeply American to me, too. Like most people of taste and discernment, I don't really hold with anything other than Episodes IV, V, or VI as canonical (Paglia is more forgiving on that point than I am) but I suppose there's even a case for the prequels as another part of the American story (how things declined in the first place, and why what followed was necessary). It's kind of like a dramatization of the Declaration's grievances section, with the same Roman overtones, by way of Gibbon, that inflected the original authoring of that document. Paglia's argument is interesting, although briefer than I'd like to be, and it appears at the end of Glittering Images. She talks about Lucas as the figure who combines the storytelling chops with the visual and technological imagination to bring that story to life, which sounds about right to me, and very Homeric. And after all, the Iliad wasn't set in Greece, either.
Homer J. Simpson.
Mark Twain
James Fenimore Cooper. The Leatherstocking Tales have the sweep and touch on enduring themes that would define American identity, plus he originated the spy and seafaring adventure novels in American letters.
Camille Paglia makes a fairly convincing case for George Lucas, although she doesn't quite put it in these terms.
I nearly mentioned him but are the movies about America enough or is it too indirect?
If you're asking what I think you're asking, I don't know that I agree that Star Wars isn't about America. It's told within an American genre (the western) and it's about the resistance to tyranny and rule from afar that the American story is also about. It's America in a galaxy far, far away, and somehow, doing that imaginative transplant also seems deeply American to me, too. Like most people of taste and discernment, I don't really hold with anything other than Episodes IV, V, or VI as canonical (Paglia is more forgiving on that point than I am) but I suppose there's even a case for the prequels as another part of the American story (how things declined in the first place, and why what followed was necessary). It's kind of like a dramatization of the Declaration's grievances section, with the same Roman overtones, by way of Gibbon, that inflected the original authoring of that document. Paglia's argument is interesting, although briefer than I'd like to be, and it appears at the end of Glittering Images. She talks about Lucas as the figure who combines the storytelling chops with the visual and technological imagination to bring that story to life, which sounds about right to me, and very Homeric. And after all, the Iliad wasn't set in Greece, either.
yeah I think this is right