symploke

In the original Star Wars series (1977-1983), the destruction of the Death Star takes place twice.¹ This battle station, made of metal and as big as a moon, is blown up by rebels in Star Wars (1977) only to be rebuilt in Return of the Jedi (1983), before being destroyed once again. It is built and built again so that a malevolent Empire might dominate the galaxy, but its recurrence only ever presages its end. Its reappearances suggest that the Death Star is stronger than the narratives that want to kill it, yet not strong enough to come to its proper place in the galaxy. Like a ghost haunting the scene of its own murder, it holds within itself something unresolved that returns it to being, without the materiality of a life that would allow it to do so. Its indeterminate status is a source of anxiety for its commanders, who in both films declare that it is near completion or has just been completed, only to witness its sudden demise. The persistent becoming of the Death Star testifies to the dynamism of its image, to the way in which it exceeds the narrative that wants to contain it. It is Vivian Sobchack's argument that the poetics of such images precede and constitute the narratives of science fiction films rather than the other way around (125). Sobchack derives her poetics of cinematic images from Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space (1964), a book that argues for images of "pure sublimation; of a sublimation which sublimates nothing, which is relieved of the burden of passion, and freed from the pressure of desire" (xxix). For Bachelard, the signification of the image, the way its meanings are constituted by social and cultural life, turns away from the essential mystery that animates it. It is, however, to unravel the dynamism of the Death Star that I want to turn to its significations, for the operation of one is not predicated on the exclusion [End Page 206] of the other. The significations of an image echo, that is hear and respond, to its dynamism.

The Death Star rotates not only through the Star Wars series but beyond it, into a popular American culture that refers to it as its own. When George W. Bush campaigned for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2000, his reformist opponent John McCain claimed that "I'm Luke Skywalker trying to get out of the Death Star" (qtd. in Cutler par. 1). He was referring to the need to change America from within its most coveted institution, the Death Star a metaphor for the country's conglomeration of political, economic, and military power. Films such as Clerks (1994), Slackers (2002), and Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) also refer to the Death Star, testifying to the transsubjectivity of the image amongst a generation of young white American males who speak its name. Their rearticulation of the Death Star is both metaphor and reverberation, as the planetoid stands in for America and transforms their world into its metal fantasy and back again. The demography of this transsubjectivity and its variations becomes a means of imagining one's place in this country's version of late capitalism, yet the image cannot be reduced to its sublimation of this place. Its significance is not its immanence; its variations do not explain its poetic power.

A distinction between the significations of the Death Star and its reverberation can be drawn between the two orders of films here, those in the Star Wars series and those without. In the series, the planetoid's cycle of emergence and demise describes its dynamism, its movement more like the cadence of poetry than the unveilings of narrative significance. This dynamism also takes place in Clerks, Slackers, and Enron, as young white American men speak of the Death Star and, in doing so, occupy the space of its immanent power. This is what Bachelard means by the transsubjectivity of the poetic image, as the speaker calls forth its emergence from the void. Yet this shift out of the Star Wars series...