Josef Benson - Star Wars: The Triumph of Nerd Culture

Josef Benson is associate professor of literatures and languages at the University of WisconsinParkside. He is the author of J. D. Salingers The Catcher in the Rye: A Cultural History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) and Hypermasculinities in the Contemporary Novel: Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).

M any thanks to Stephen Ryan for his hard work on this project. Thank you to my brother Cory Benson for his invaluable contributions. Also, thanks to my boy Laz, whose love for Star Wars allowed me to experience it for the first time again.

G eorge Lucas was always a nerd. Born on Sunday May 14, 1944, he was smallfive pounds and fourteen ouncesbut feisty. His parents right away began describing the would-be famous director and multibillionaire as scrawny. They also noted his protruding ears. One ear was even a little floppy, but George Sr. soon had it taped up and eventually proclaimed it a good ear. George Jr.s diminutive stature and prominent ears would become his defining physical traits as he grew uptraits that, fairly or not, marked him as a nerd. Lucass nerdiness, present from the moment of his birth, would be a driving factor in the creation of one of the biggest film franchises the world has ever known as well as a driving factor in its destruction.

George Lucas Sr. arrived in Modesto, California, in 1929, one of the final stops of the Central Pacific Railroad before it headed on to Los Angeles and Sacramento. In high school, George Sr. met and fell in love with Dorothy Bomberger, the pride and joy of one of Modestos oldest and wealthiest families. The elder George was very conservative and felt it was his duty alone to support his growing family. The aspiring patriarch eventually found work at Modestos primary stationery business, L. M. Morris Company. While the store sold large domestic items like furniture, it eventually began selling cameras, projectors, books, and toys. George Sr. eventually took over the store as primary owner and provided the upper-middle-class life he desired for his growing family that included his wife, two daughters, and son George Jr.

George Jr. experienced a formative and spiritual epiphany when he was only six years old. He attended Sunday school every week and eventually came to loathe it. He described his spiritual awakening as very profound. According to Lucas, It centered around God and he found himself asking questions like What is God? and What is reality? Psychologists often point to a significant occurrence in a childs life when they realize that their body is a fragmented part of the world, that their perspective on the world is not actually the entire world itself. The child then realizes that other people can view them individually and mark them as different or inadequate. This realization is both exciting and terrifying. Children become aware of the power of their subjectivity as well as their own vulnerability. For much of his life, Lucas has been both powerful and exceptionally sensitive, forever capitalizing on the opportunity to make sense of the world and lamenting his own fragility.

As Lucas matured, he both embraced his fathers patriarchal conservatism and rebelled against it. George Lucas Sr. was the most important influence on George Lucas Jr.s life. George Sr. felt it was a mans duty and obligation to work and support his family while his wife and the mother of his children stayed home and looked after the kids. Even though the elder Lucas was willing to give George just about anything he wanted, it always came at a price, paid by listening to lectures on frugality and hard work.

George Lucas Jr. made good on the nerd potential provided by his diminutive stature. He loved gadgets, science fiction, technology, and comic books. Because his father was a successful stationer in Modesto, George Jr. was able to get the newest toys and novelties. As a kid, Lucas and his friends used these toys to build communities and tableaus that he called environments, setting them up in wood and glass cases. It is not a stretch to think of Lucass films as toys, the line between the films themselves and the tie-in toys blurry at best, a business strategy similar to that employed by the Disney Corporation.

When asked about Lucas, one classmate noted that George was a nonentity in school who simply did not make much of an impression despite being relatively popular. A measure of that popularity was likely due to his access to toys and the carnivals that he created in his backyard. George had the best train set in the neighborhood, a three-engine Lionel Santa Fe model with all the trappings. Money and its power has been a recurring element in George Lucass life. Despite Lucass lifelong claim that his financial success was a fluke, his relationship with money was evident from the beginning, along with his affinity for making it.

Lucas also had a comic book connection in his buddy John Plummer, whose dad procured thousands of unsold comic books from one of his friends who ran a local newsstand. These comics were marked as unsold by their missing covers. George often hung out all day and into the evening on his buddys porch well after John had gone inside for dinner, poring over comic books. This was the early 1950s golden age of comic books, when there was very little regulation and titles sold in the millions.

Lucas also loved the Saturday morning serials that featured short films depicting the adventures of Flash Gordon. George preferred the science fiction comics to the superhero comics, and it was the Flash Gordon serials he had in mind when he was thinking about creating a science fiction movie of his own. The Flash Gordon serials released by Universal in 1936, 1938, and 1940 were episodic, and eventually aired in syndication on American television in the 1950s, where they came to the attention of a young George Lucas. Each episode began with introductory text that situated the viewer in medias res within the story about to unfold, similar to the familiar crawl at the beginning of Lucass Star Wars films. Flash Gordon was quintessential space opera as Flash, the main character played by Buster Crabbe and sometimes referred to as Earth Man, often found himself in constant conflict with Emperor Ming the Merciless, a classic villain not unlike the emperor in Star Wars. Other stylistic similarities between the Flash Gordon serials and Star Wars include transitional swipes and actors playing their roles straight in the midst of silly costumes and props, such as obviously fake fire-breathing dragons. Dr. Hans Zarkov forces Yale student Flash and his girlfriend Dale to travel to the planet Mongo in order to prevent its collision with Earth. While there, Flash and the others encounter the ruler of Mongo, Ming the Merciless. Flash Gordon possesses no superpowers, and his plight is plot driven in terms of preventing Earths collision with Mongo. Notwithstanding the many similarities to the Flash Gordon serials, one important difference in the Star Wars universe is its complete removal from the known world. There is no such thing as Yale University or Earth in the Star Wars universe.

Other kids on the block often bullied George, compelling his sister Wendy to come to his rescue. Some neighborhood kids once held him down, removed his shoes, and threw them into a sprinkler-soaked lawn. Wendy came to his aid, scared off the other boys, and retrieved Georges shoes. If young George got away with only having his shoes removed, then he was lucky. The likelier scenario was that the other boys pantsed him, or yanked his underwear right off his body with his pants still on, humiliating him in front of the other kids. Like many victims of bullying, the experience was certainly traumatic for George Lucas Jr. and something he would carry with him for the rest of his life.