This morning I was driving behind a giant garbage truck that was a rusty, mint green, full of a dystopian level of thrown-out cans and muck. I thought to myself, “This looks like something out of Star Wars.” Funny that the one thing, on Star Wars day of all days, that would make me think of the saga was a particularly over-stuffed garbage truck. That’s when I realized that part of what made Star Wars so good, despite being set in outer space and focused on aliens, was that it managed to be a subtle study on our biggest anxieties as humans.

Think about it for a minute. What do you remember most about Star Wars, besides the cute Ewoks and Leia’s hot dress when she was imprisoned by Jabba the Hutt? If you examine it closely, a lot of the most iconic moments are pretty grim. The milk so thin it’s blue that Luke’s family drinks on Tatooine. Losing a limb. The entirely narrow but still existent chance that the person you’re in love with is somehow your sibling. The fear that you could become so desperate to survive that you would cut open an animal and climb inside its warm organs to survive.

The Star Wars saga never shied away from these ideas, but instead confronted all of them with gritty realism, showing how they can be surpassed.

Of course I never realized any of that when I watched it as a kid. It’s a saga that you grow up with, grow into, digest slowly. I first watched it with my older sisters when I was a toddler. I remember Return of the Jedi being the movie I watched when I hung out at my friend’s house after school while we constructed elaborate forts to trap the cat. We watched it every day, even as her mom was slowly dying and then actually passed away.

It’s the kind of series that you see different things in as you learn more about the world, but it never sits right with you. Aside from the spaceship wars, it deals with things you’re not willing to think about.

–Becky Lang