by Ryan Britt
Star Trek, meanwhile, has people quoting from Shakespeare and Milton practically from its first aired moments. Furthermore, the first “real” (debatable) episode of the original Star Trek, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” boasts a scene in which Gary Mitchell quotes from “Nightingale Woman,” a fictional poem written by someone from another planet, featuring this staggering couplet: My love has wings / slender feathered things.
The fact that this space-poem totally sucks isn’t the point; it’s simply that even a one-off character like Gary Mitchell in Star Trek is way more of a well-read person than pretty much anyone we ever meet in Star Wars. Sure, in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Spock gives Kirk Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities as a birthday present. It’s totally clear from the dialogue that these guys aren’t all that familiar with Dickens, and maybe Spock is trying to start a book club in which these guys will get caught up on the classics in between phasering interstellar assholes and saving idiotic planets. It’s like this book gift is on the sly, because we all know Kirk and Spock both cut class in college and are undereducated, too. But still, it’s cool these guys are trying.
In his 2009 nonfiction book, The Tyranny of E-mail, John Freeman talks a little about Star Trek, pointing out that “science fiction may not always predict the future, but it is often a brilliant counter-mythology—a visible cultural symptom—of our prevailing anxieties.” Meaning if the best and brightest people in Star Trek are a little behind on reading, it seems like a pretty realistic possibility. I’m not sure if there are science fiction writers who live in the futuristic world of Star Trek—what could they possibly write about?*—but I do know that no one in the future-world of The Hunger Games has a desire to read, become a librarian, or write anything other than memoir. You could make an argument that Star Trek is a utopian vision of the future, and The Hunger Games is a dystopian one, but when it comes to how books are regarded, these two wildly different science fiction future-worlds are both downers, at least in relationship to the future of literacy. Being a writer is not a serious thing in these futures, and books are regarded as an old-school curiosity. Science fiction isn’t necessarily proud of its dystopian stance on the future of books, but the idea that people stop reading in the future often seems like a foregone conclusion. In fact, the entire plots of both Zardoz and Logan’s Run end up hinging on the staggering amounts of ignorance most people have, with the former depicting a mustachioed Sean Connery going on a murderous rampage because he found a copy of Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in an abandoned library. So, the extremely common sci-fi narrative about reading goes something like this: people get lazy, they forget to read, and everything goes to hell. Still, as bad as Katniss’s education might be, like Kirk and Spock, and unlike Luke Skywalker, she can actually (probably) read.
Does Star Wars just not have time for all that crap? As epic fantasy, it’s therefore not concerned with the specifics of what people are up to outside of the adventure. Here, realism and culture don’t matter as much as story. Many people love to point out (often correctly, I might add) that the debate between science fiction and fantasy sort of permanently wages inside of Star Wars, insofar as science fiction often strives to be more realistic while fantasy is more whimsical and thematic. And yet, there are technical rules about the Force in Star Wars, just as magic has rules in Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and Narnia. Plus, in science fiction or fantasy, a fictional “world” has to make sense in order for us to buy the plot, no matter how brass-tacks plausible and whimsically thematic it might be.
But this isn’t about calling out the culture of Star Wars as unrealistic. Nope. I’m actually saying the opposite. It’s totally realistic. In fact, it’s the lack of reading and books that helps explain why this fictional culture is so screwed up and oppressed. Our media says a lot about us, and in the case of the culture of Star Wars, its indigenous media speaks volumes. In the Star Wars films there is utterly no reportage or journalism, which actually starts to make the possibility of widespread illiteracy more and more likely. In the prequel films—where a more democratic government is supposedly intact—there is a black hole of political news. In The Phantom Menace we see floating little cameras bobbing around Natalie Portman in the Senate, but these cameras don’t seem to be actually feeding this information anywhere. After watching all the Star Wars movies, we’ll later figure out these cameras aren’t news cameras and they’re just for security.* This gets weirder when you realize that Natalie Portman is only there to talk to the Senate in person to plead her case because, presumably, no reputable news outlet has written about the blockade/invasion of her entire planet.
In the next two Star Wars prequels, we’re fairly clued in to the idea that the government is mostly manipulated by Palpatine, and as such, everything related to the Senate seems to be all about systematically curtailing basic rights and screwing up democratic mojo. But in The Phantom Menace, right at the purported start of the saga, before Palps takes over and becomes a liberty-hating zap-faced monster, it looks like we’re already dealing with a closed, secretive government. Because if you get rid of journalists, it seems like you wouldn’t even need the Dark Side of the Force to manipulate everyone. Samuel L. Jackson and Yoda sit around and talk a lot in these movies about how “the Dark Side clouds everything,” but I think what they’re alluding to might just be a giant information gap, one which could be filled by a newspaper.
“But wait!” you might be saying again. “People in Star Wars can totally read!” This is because you, like me, maybe love these films and, as such, totally know for a FACT that there are scenes in which R2-D2 sends little messages for Luke to read on his screen. There’s writing on the tractor-beam controls, too, and people in the ships are looking at buttons with letters on them. We’ve got to talk about this. And we’ve got to talk about Aurebesh, which—as somewhere, right now, a hard-core fan is saying out loud at the top of his or her lungs—is the “official” language of Star Wars.
Aurebesh, like most things involved with explaining Star Wars, is a retroactive invention, and it certainly wasn’t created by George Lucas. In the original version of A New Hope, the tractor-beam controls that Obi-Wan tampers with have the English words “tractor beam” printed underneath them. But in the 1997 restored special edition (and technically canonical version) of the film, “tractor beam” has been replaced by characters that, according to many, are letters in the Aurebesh alphabet. Indeed, in the trailer for the brand-new Star Wars film—The Force Awakens—we see a pilot with writing on his flight suit, which hard-core fans have “confirmed” is Aurebesh, and the words, when translated, say “pull to inflate.”
Here’s the thing, though—Aurebesh was created by one person: John Hazlett. He wrote for a variety of manuals that tied in with the Star Wars role-playing games in the 1990s and later authored an article for the official Star Wars website called “The Written Word,” which outlines the existence and origins of Aurebesh. He did a lot of writing and research in between and successfully produced a near-academic-level analysis of where written words and languages show up in Star Wars. He’s also only one person, and the majority of his research relies heavily on the texts from Star Wars novels, comics, and, of course, games.
Ironically or not, here on our planet, there are probably more hours devoted to the reading of Star Wars books than the watching of the Star Wars movies. In the pages of many of these stories, you may believe that you’ve found evidence that directly contradicts my theory of functional illiteracy. But then again, these books and comics also contradict each other about a whole lot of stuff, including what Jabba the Hutt looks like, what Luke Skywalker’s mom’s name really was (not Natalie Portman!), and whether or not anyone is allowed to have a pink lightsaber. But it doesn’t really matter. Because let’s say Hazlett is right. Let’s say Aurebesh is the predominant written language in the Star Wars galaxy. Let’s say there’s a long, detailed historical account of how it came to be. Let’s
say the vast majority of his research (half of which created itself, but whatever) is correct. It still doesn’t mean that I’m wrong about functional illiteracy. I’m not denying there wasn’t a written language in this fictional galaxy at some point; I’m simply asserting that the evidence seems to indicate most people aren’t reading, and I think that’s because they can’t, or because their reading comprehension is very limited.
Even in cases of limited reading, the “letters” (maybe Aurebesh) and pieces of writing are directly related to tasks. Pilots for the Empire (or the Clones for the Republic) are probably functionally literate, because they go through some kind of training academy. However, I think the larger sample evidence we get suggests a culture much more reliant on technology and droids than you might think. Luke’s ability to read a little bit of droid-speak (again, maybe Aurebesh) from a screen is, as I mentioned, totally analogous to people who learn just enough of a foreign language to get by. The person in control of this exchange, the one putting up with Luke’s crappy reading skills, is R2-D2. The overall literacy and education in Star Wars is very catch-as-catch-can. Han can understand Chewbacca because he needs to. Luke figures out how to fly spaceships from racing T-16s through Beggar’s Canyon. Anakin intuits how to build both a podracer and C-3PO as a little kid because he’s fucking magic. Everything awesome that anyone does in Star Wars is slop, with only the most exceptional characters accidentally getting enough of a spark of information to become epically heroic (i.e., the Rebels or the Jedi). And the people they’re liberating are ignorant and disenfranchised as a result in generations and generations of illiteracy and decline in information exchange. We don’t need to go too far out of the Skywalker family for proof either.
In A New Hope, Uncle Owen needs a droid who can speak bocce and then says something about the binary language of his moisture vaporators. Right here we’ve got our whole microcosm of how this illiteracy actually exists and functionally perpetuates itself: Uncle Owen needs a translator, and more specifically, needs one machine that can talk to another machine, so he can do his job. This doesn’t sound like a guy who has gotten a suitable education, but rather one who uses droids and computers to Google things that he should kind of just already know. Sure, having droids talk in computer code to each other isn’t something any human can really do, but can Uncle Owen do anything without a robot? Maybe if he read some books he could fix his marriage.
In a way, Star Wars presents a way we’d all get by if widespread illiteracy actually became a fact of life. In our own culture, pictograms and emojis often replace words on traffic signs, on restroom doors, in texts, etc. The buttons being pressed by the Death Star control-room workers might not even be letters at all. They might be pictograms representing different functions, functions like “death ray blast” and “trash compact.” Plus, how could those guys read anything in those helmets anyway?
This isn’t to say there isn’t an elite class of people who can read. The more educated people like the Jedi Knights can probably read, and maybe even write. But their record-keeping systems seem to be obscenely reliant on video-style data rather than text. In Attack of the Clones Obi-Wan Kenobi goes to the Jedi Library, but this research facility seems less about books and more about pretty colors, interactive holographic maps, etc. Obi-Wan basically walks into the library and asks for the interactive games rather than the books. Even a character as wise and supposedly awesome as Obi-Wan Kenobi doesn’t do all that much reading, at least that we see.
One invention of the expanded universe—specifically the Dark Horse Comics—was the idea that ancient Jedi Knights recorded their stuff in little holograms called “holocrons.” This adds another piece of evidence in the history of Star Wars functional illiteracy because it seems to prove that a switch from written communication to visual and audio media has been under way for a long, long time in this galaxy. The predilection of the Jedi to have a bias against reading for pleasure can be found in the pages of the comic series Tales of the Jedi: The Golden Age of the Sith. Here, supposedly some five thousand years before “real” Star Wars, a quirky little alien Jedi Knight named Odan-Urr is really digging on reading “old” scrolls and “ancient records,” and gets chastised by his Jedi master, who says, “You would be content to spend your life in the company of scrolls and documents . . . but a Jedi Knight has other responsibilities. Other duties.” Like I said, there was a written language, and written documents, but through bias or new technology, the tendency to rely on this media went away. Humans and aliens populating their universe used the written word for the purposes of getting their basic culture off the ground—for commerce only—and as soon as holograms were available, switched over. If we use the basic reductive interpretation of Marshall McLuhan’s axiom “the medium is the message,” then the medium of Jedi holocrons seems to send a message that recorded verbal information is preferable to the craft of writing.
Still, let’s just assume Jedi can probably read and are taught to read, as are rich people like Princess Leia, Padmé Amidala, and Jimmy Smits. But everything, everything, everything in Star Wars is about video chat via holograms or verbal communication through com-links. Of course, for these cultures to have progressed and become space-faring entities, they needed written language at some point. But when we catch up to the “now” of Star Wars, the necessity to actually learn to read and write has all but faded away. We can then imagine a social class of educated readers, possibly engineers and programmers, who know how to build and repair translators and computers, and droids. These people likely have awesome jobs, and everyone else is sort of screwed. There’s a lot of poverty in Star Wars, and it seems like it’s totally connected to widespread ignorance.
The idea of education becoming obsolete due to cultural changes was a science fiction precedent, straight from Star Wars’ main competitor: Star Trek. In the first Star Trek thing ever, “The Cage,” Vina speaks of a culture that “forgets how to repair the machines left behind by their ancestors.” This is what I think happened with literacy in the Star Wars galaxy. People stopped using the written word all that much because they didn’t need to, and it slipped away from being a commonly held skill. If somebody writes “tractor beam” in Aurebesh on a control panel, but most people don’t know what it says, does it really count?
Between the end of the prequels (Revenge of the Sith) and the beginning of the classic films (A New Hope), only nineteen years pass. This means the existence of the literate Jedi Knights mutates from a fact of everyday life into legend, seemingly overnight. (We’ve seen this in the new cartoon show Rebels, where being a Jedi is something you conceal to avoid persecution.) Even one of Vader’s cronies calls the Force an “ancient religion,” which a joyless, cynical fan could easily dismiss as one of the many oft-pointed-out continuity problems between the prequels and the originals. But if we pretend like all of this is gospel and it does work, then the hyperbolic rendering of the Jedi/the Force into “ancient” might not be so far-fetched when we consider very few people read or are informed at all about, really, anything at all. Because the average citizen of the galaxy in Star Wars receives his/her/its information orally, from stories told by spacers in bars, farm boys on arid planets, orphans in crime-ridden cities, etc., any kind of outrageous claim seems possible. These days, on Earth, a game of telephone can quickly spread nonfacts via social media. Star Wars has this game of telephone without the reading. When Palpatine ominously takes over the government in Revenge of the Sith by raising his arms like he’s Tom Petty at a concert playing “Learning to Fly,” everyone goes along with him, because he’s an influencer. Palpatine verbally tweets “The Jedi tried to kill me” and everyone is like “Wow, bummer.” And it’s not just because they’re too lazy to read the original documents: there aren’t any, and even if there were, they couldn’t. In this scene, Natalie Portman points out that liberty dies “with thunderous applause,” but really their liberty is dying because most of them are powerless and disenfranchised. Most
of the surviving characters at the end of the prequels are the bad guys, and they can probably read. And if the Jedi seem to be the most educated people in the prequels, that all changes when they are systematically murdered. The easy analogy would be a real-life government going and burning down all the colleges and schools and killing all the teachers, but the information manipulation seems more important here. If you have evil intentions, once books are gone, you’re in good shape. But killing the only people who could have read them? Even better. Maybe Natalie Portman should have said “This is how literacy dies . . .”
Weirdly or not, the God-Papa of Star Wars—George Lucas—actually intended for this to be a “paperless universe.” In numerous pre-1997 books and interviews, Lucas mentions the fact that he wanted his worlds to be devoid of paper, which, far from taking credit away from him, actually seems to indicate all of this illiteracy is at least indirectly intentional.* We don’t need to hate on George Lucas to prove most of his protagonists can’t read, and in fact, it’s possible he wouldn’t disagree with this interpretation (though he’d probably be super-annoyed with this much analytical zeal). George Lucas is obviously an extremely literate dude and famously (or infamously, depending on one’s mood) based much of the mythological archetype action in Star Wars on Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, meaning the “message” of Star Wars is clearly individuality, creativity, freedom, and everything else that seems to be a positive way to think about a society. And yet, I can’t help but feel with all of its psychological influence on our culture, Star Wars was accidentally prescient in its telegraphing of the eventual result of a less and less literate society. If you’re reading the Wikipedia entry about a novel, instead of reading a novel, or you’re getting bent out of shape about a friend’s tweet about social injustice, without really knowing what they’re talking about, I’d say we’re only a few centuries away from someone building a Death Star in secret and a whole populace randomly accepting the mass genocide of smarty-pants wizards. Yoda tells us the path to the Dark Side includes anger, fear, and aggression, but I think he forgot to mention ignorance.
