Popular culture as an ideological battlefield: The Rise of Skywalker and the return of retroregressive values

Abstract

Popular culture is a phenomenon that reflects the values of our societies and implies our active engagement in it. Thus, Star Wars films represent a special case. Since their appearance, the films created by George Lucas were double-coded - they included the critique of both current political and social climate. In the same manner, the books, video games and TV shows that developed from the original trilogy, attempted to emanate those same left-leaning values. Therefore, it did not come as a surprise that the new episodes of Star Wars starting from 2015, tried to preserve the same sentiments. This tendency reached its peak with The Last Jedi (2017), which directly addressed the problems of gender dynamics and discrimination, class struggles and war profiteering. However, this episode had a particularly polarizing effect on the Star Wars fandom. Those who negatively rated The Last Jedi as a form of spreading the "socialist agenda" have used their social media accounts to express their discontent, which has in turn resulted in the saga finale (The Rise of Skywalker, 2019) becoming the "greatest cultural theft of the decade". Therefore, the paper deals with the case study of The Rise of Skywalker, i.e. the correlation between the fandom and regressive values represented in the film. The main hypothesis is that popular culture, due to its active potential, becomes an ideological battlefield. The paper also intends to point out how The Rise of Skywalker has contributed to the collapse of continuity of the previous films, as well as of the Campbellian monomyth, which was the fundamental basis of Lucas' films, starting from 1977.