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The Force and Freedom

A podcast about the meaning of Star Wars, beginning with the original trilogy.RSSVERIFY

tv & film film history

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32:10

A Portrait of the Artist as a Jedi Apprentice from...

The Force and Freedom ·

2025/11/18

I return to the early scenes of A New Hope to pick up on some early ideas about freedom. C-3PO and R2-D2 are opposite extremes: 3PO totally unfree, R2 remarkably free. The desert settings of Tatooine are the perfect place to set up questions of freedom because it echoes the setting of the Western, a genre preoccupied with freedom. I then summarize the evidence that the film can be seen as an autobiography of George Lucas and connect that with Lucas's preoccupation with freedom. Finally, I briefly

Transcript: A Portrait of the Artist

The Force and Freedom ·

2025/11/18

Welcome to The Force and Freedom, Part 5. Last time I finished laying out what I think are the central ideas of A New Hope. First, there's an important kind of unfreedom. One where someone determines not just whether I have certain options, but the very terms of engagement, the rules for how we'll decide how to resolve our disagreements. This kind of unfreedom typically arises through fear. That's what the Death Star is for. The Death Star is a kind of unfreedom generator for the Empire, a control

33:38

The Jedi's Freedom

The Force and Freedom ·

2025/11/11

Obi-wan's adventures aboard the Death Star are in stark contrast to the other heroes'. Where they narrowly escape danger after danger, desperately thinking their way out of jams, Obi-wan wanders through the Death Star unnoticed, fully in control of the situation. Obi-wan doesn't have to overcome fear because he is so good at setting the terms of engagement that no one ever threatens him. Until Vader shows up. Vader is as cunning as Obi-wan, and their duel involves layers of strategic gambits, each

Transcript: The Jedi's Freedom

The Force and Freedom ·

2025/11/11

Welcome back to The Force and Freedom. Last time we saw that Han and Obi-Wan disagree about how to face fear. They discuss their disagreement while Luke trains with a lightsaber, and then immediately after, their disagreement is illustrated in an encounter with a TIE fighter. Han thinks they should blow it up. Obi-Wan thinks there's something fishy, and they'd better let it go. And then we saw that throughout the Death Star scenes, Han consistently wants to solve problems with guns. And Luke and

20:31

Two Responses to Fear Aboard the Death Star

The Force and Freedom ·

2025/11/04

This time I begin by connecting Star Wars's message about fear to events from George Lucas's life. Then I trace the two approaches to fear outlined at the end of last episode. Han illustrates his attitude towards fear by preferring a straight fight aboard the Death Star. Luke and Leia illustrate an alternative approach closer to what Obi-wan recommends. They constantly rethink the terms that are presented to them. For a complete transcript, visit

Transcript: Two Responses to Fear

The Force and Freedom ·

2025/11/04

Welcome back to the Force and Freedom Podcast. We've been exploring the ways that images express ideas about freedom and threats to freedom. In the first episode, I gave some examples from the first couple of minutes. In the second, I focused in on some images that highlight a concern about how fear can undermine our freedom. I pointed out that the first scenes aboard the Death Star repeat this theme three times, with three separate visual reminders of the Death Star, small spheres that share some

28:14

The Problem of Fear

The Force and Freedom ·

2025/10/28

The central threat to freedom in A New Hope is fear. When you're afraid of someone, you do what they want, even if you'd rather not. After briefly discussing some of the other interpretations of Star Wars, I show how A New Hope introduces the problem of fear through a series of scenes centered on the Death Star. These scenes tend to contain visual reminders of the Death Star, like the interrogation droid of the remote Luke trains with. I conclude the episode by discussing Han's and Obi-wan's opposed

Transcript: The Problem of Fear

The Force and Freedom ·

2025/10/28

Welcome back to the Force and Freedom Podcast. Last time I posed a question, What is Star Wars about, or what does Star Wars mean? And I began to unpack my answer. Star Wars is about freedom. But I should point out that there have been a lot of other interpretations of Star Wars. You may have heard of some. One of the most common is that Star Wars is about the hero's journey. There was a scholar, his name was Joseph Campbell, and he was influenced by some psychologists who thought that myths contain

Transcript: Visual Storytelling in Star Wars

The Force and Freedom ·

2025/10/21

Welcome to the Force and Freedom Podcast. This is a podcast about the meaning of Star Wars, about what Star Wars is about. Now when I ask, what is Star Wars about, I'm trying to get at something beneath the surface of the movies. On the surface, you could say that Star Wars is about the fall and redemption of Anakin Skywalker, and about the demise and restoration of the Republic, a story that takes place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. But the Star Wars movies were made not so long ago,

26:59

Visual Storytelling in Star Wars

The Force and Freedom ·

2025/10/21

Star Wars is a story about freedom and threats to freedom. You might not have thought that it has a lot to say about this, since the dialogue never poses any deep questions about it. But the dialogue isn't what's interesting about Star Wars. What's most interesting about Star Wars are the visuals, and the visuals communicate a lot about freedom and threats to it. In this episode, I run through some of what the visuals of the first two minutes of Star Wars: A New Hope (after the opening crawl)

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