“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” So opens almost every Star Wars story. It’s a reminder of something we, and the broader series itself at times, often forgets: to watch Star Wars is to be witness to the history of a universe, retellings of mythos and the past in equal measure. So few bits of Star Wars, and writing about Star Wars, actually treats its events as such—but one recent release that actually does makes an incredibly compelling case for how we critically approach Star Wars as both a piece of media and as a canon.
Star Wars: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire, by Dr. Chris Kempshall, came out last month. Written from the in-universe perspective of historian Beaumont Kin (Dominic Monaghan’s character in The Rise of Skywalker) shortly after the events of the Battle of Exegol, the book is neither a dramatic retelling of Star Wars‘ past and the beginning and ultimate end of Palpatine’s plans for the galaxy, nor is it a dry checklist of facts about the Star Wars galaxy primed to immediately uploaded to the nearest fan wiki like plans for the Death Star. It is, as its faux-author would imply, treated like a book about history.
It examines systems—fictional systems—that allowed the Galactic Empire to form over decades, and places those systems in the context of both the timeline of the Star Wars movies and the narrative transition from the decline of the Republic by the time of The Phantom Menace, into the height of the Empire as it exists when we first meet it in A New Hope. It is littered with footnotes to sources that aren’t real, like in-universe biographies or the archival records of various state bodies. It discusses the work of other historians and writers in the field that are either entirely new made-up characters, familiar faces from the films, or even loose nods to other actual Star Wars authors.
Of course none of it is real: it’s Star Wars, a magical ancient world with wizards that have laser swords and starships that can skim through space in an instant. But Rise and Fall treats Star Wars in its entirety as a world to be studied and analyzed, not in a manner of collating raw information about it, but in a way that invites us to question its narrative and the perspectives we glimpse that narrative through.
One of my favorite ways Rise and Fall does this occurs a few times in the book. Two sections throughout its exploration of the Empire’s history, its administrative and military structure, and its approaches to industry, surveillance, and public spirit in the face of rising insurgency, take a pause to essentially just dump a bunch of stills from the various Star Wars movies and shows. Just like the rest of the information in the book, however, they are treated not as images from Star Wars, the transmedia franchise, but documentation from within the universe itself. Each image is given a source, much like the various footnotes elsewhere in the book.
An image of Palpatine talking to the Senate to declare the founding of the Empire in Revenge of the Sith is sourced as being “preserved and rebroadcast by Imperial Authorities.” An iconic still of the Battle of Endor is sourced from the gun camera of an Imperial Navy lieutenant’s TIE Interceptor. This applies to in-universe media too, like propaganda posters, or even real-world artwork now treated as such: promotional concept art for the 2015 Star Wars: Battlefront Jakku map, released as DLC ahead of The Force Awakens, is described in Rise and Fall as being commemorative art made for a ceremony marking the 10th anniversary of the battle.
It’s not just gleeful geekery, however. In attaching those “real” sources to literal recognizable images from the films and shows, Rise and Fall wants the reader to consider those sources as we re-examine these images. You’re not being asked to consider Star Wars as you watch it, but to consider perspective and bias.
What does it mean that that this shot of two Star Destroyers slamming into each other due to Rebel action was captured by a Y-Wing pilot’s ship cameras? What does it mean to disseminate that image into the Star Wars galaxy from an Alliance source? What is the delivery system and context of this information, what is the intent we are meant to take from how it is presented to us, and by who? What does it mean that all this is wrapped up in the presentation of a character like Beaumont Kin, a historian turned resistance fighter who grew up amid one galactic war, and took part in another by the time he was a young man?
These are not questions Star Wars fiction often asks us to think about, but it’s the way that we, in the real world, examine our own history, art, and culture. Rarely are we collating facts about the past, but examining various historical interpretations of those facts, cross-examining different sources and questioning their perspectives and the biases they bring to their arguments. You can’t really do that with Star Wars, because of course, Star Wars is not real. You can just make up a source that suits the story you want to tell and say that a thing happened, because you’re creating fiction. It’s fake and in space! But Rise and Fall still gives us an interesting template for approaching Star Wars as an audience that goes beyond the pure nature of consuming a canonical truth about its universe and its characters.
We can approach any piece of Star Wars media as we do art in general, of course—to consider the interpretation of writers, directors, artists, how that perspective informs the work itself. But what if we applied that within the story of Star Wars itself? What if everything we watched and read and interacted with in Star Wars was not considered a definitive, canonical truth of an event, but simply one perspective that could be incomplete or could be biased to a certain point of view? What if we could revisit a moment with a new lens, one that provides new context and information, that changes what we thought was true about it?
We saw this most recently in The Acolyte and its flashbacks to the night Osha and Mae Aniseya’s lives changed after a cadre of Jedi encountered their mothers’ coven on Brendok. Whether or not the series was entirely successful in doing so across its two flashback episodes is largely neither here nor there. It was still the rare piece of Star Wars media that, in real-time as the series rolled out over the weeks, asked us to consider the in-universe perspective of what information we were being given, and implied that the audience should not take it as an unequivocally true recollection of its events.
So much of Star Wars, especially in its contemporary form after the rebooting and reshuffling of continuity post-Disney-acquisition, is about delivering information about its world and characters to be interpreted as data. It was about establishing additive, definitive truths about the saga and its events, at a time when the details around that saga were once again being fleshed out after the slate was wiped clean. Now, a decade into that endeavor again, Star Wars continuity is arguably approaching a point of overwhelming, arcane, and obtuse amounts of fact as it was at the height of the old expanded universe.
Along the way in that process, the audience has been trained to treat Star Wars both as a vector for new information to learn about its world, and that everything it puts out is a source to be mined for a singular canonical interpretation: this is how this particular event happened, this is who was there, this is how they felt about it, this is the authoritative version of this particular story.
Rise and Fall‘s re-interpretation of Star Wars‘ own history offers an alternative, one that begins to train its reader, using real-world critical techniques, to consider Star Wars‘ narrative not as necessarily a canonical truth, but a story told to us influenced by perspective and bias. In doing so, it, and stories alongside it like The Acolyte or The Last Jedi, begins to entertain the notion that Star Wars can tell stories that are more open to interpretation, and being reshaped by new contexts, and being challenged as “true” within the fiction of its world.
That idea might be pushed back against at times, especially in a fanbase that, as we said, has largely been trained by the material to treat information as cut-and-dry, canonical or non-canonical. But it’s one that emboldens Star Wars to be more daring with its storytelling, to be confident enough to ask its audience to challenge what they’re seeing, and be open to fresh perspectives on its world. And that makes Star Wars stronger, more fluid, and more laden with potential than it has been for a long while.
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