MAY THE FOX BUTTERFIELD BE WITH YOU: “We Can’t See ‘Star Wars’ Anymore,” columnist Tim Kreider opines in the New York Times:

Now that it’s one franchise among many, “Star Wars” seems timeless, but the original is very much a product of the 1970s: Mr. Lucas began writing it while American troops were still in Vietnam and Nixon was being consumed by his dark side. It’s remembered now as a proto-Reaganesque, reactionary backlash against the morally ambiguous cinema of the ’70s, but it’s also a countercultural, anti-fascist fable about shaggy young outsiders fighting a revolution against the faceless, armored henchmen of a military technocracy. The Empire is comfortably identified with our favorite movie enemies, the Nazis, which helps disguise the fact that they are also, metaphorically, the imperialist invaders of Vietnam, confident in their devastating firepower to crush an ill-equipped insurgency. This subtext got a lot less subtextual in “Return of the Jedi,” in which the occupiers’ superweapons are thwarted by the guerrilla tactics and crude booby-traps of a pretechnological people.

By the time James Cameron’s “Avatar” made this allegory painfully overt, it felt uncomfortably weird watching American audiences cheer fantasies of indigenous peoples defeating capitalist invaders bent on exploiting their resources, even as our own battle droids were blowing up insurgents in oil-rich Iraq. You could imagine Al Qaeda or Timothy McVeigh identifying with Luke blowing up the Death Star — plucky underdogs destroying symbols of invincible power with dollar-store equipment and an audacious, suicidal plan. How did we end up on the wrong side of this story?

How indeed? (And as Ted Franks of the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute notes on Twitter, Kreider paraphrases “Comfortably Smug’s” classic take on Luke Skywalker as mass-murdering crypto-jihadi without credit.)

Or to put it another way:

(Classical reference in headline.)