Within Hollywood, those norms manifest themselves in the concept of the hero’s journey. Hegemony consists of the common sense thinking and values of a dominant group in a society, one fortified through lived experience (Williams).
From its inception, Revenge of the Sith brushed up against hegemonic norms. Revenge of the Sith’s context amid media culture demonstrates why it was such an ambitious and jarring undertaking. Through this paper, I will argue that Revenge of the Sith’s opposition to the hegemonic norms of Hollywood storytelling creates the opportunity for the moral ambiguities that drive emotional investment in Anakin Skywalker, a fallen protagonist. It’s a train of thought foreign to the traditionally black-and-white Star Wars universe, and that theme of moral ambiguity, of the difficulties in discerning right from wrong, serves as the core of the final installment of George Lucas’s prequel trilogy. “Good is simply a point of view,” Palpatine cautions Anakin, hoping to weaken Anakin’s emotional ties to the Jedi for Palpatine’s own devious purposes. Sitting alongside Anakin Skywalker during a pivotal scene in the 2005 Star Wars film Revenge of the Sith, powerful politician Sheev Palpatine converses with the impressionable Jedi Knight over Skywalker’s devotion to the morally upright Jedi Order. The prompt was to look at the importance of context in the meaning of any movie, and, naturally, I chose to explore Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. The following essay is my final paper for my Media Contexts class at Northwestern.
0 kommentar(er)
