… I’m not sure I like it.
Yes, when the “dark lords” drop their mild-mannered masks, it is always decrepit-ugly underneath. Mild-mannered Chancellor Palpatine … to … decrepit-ugly Darth Sidious. Mild-mannered George Lucas “director of modern myth Star Wars” … to … decrepit-ugly George Lucas “I’m a '60s, West Coast, liberal, radical, artsy, dyed-in-the-wool 99 percenter before there was such a thing.” The New York Times Magazine - 20120117 “George Lucas Is Ready to Roll the Credits”
Star Wars Modernism blog - 20120607 “Star Wars & Modernism: An Introduction”:
"George Lucas’ life long loyalty to Joseph Campbell’s ideas of archetypal mythic figures and narratives have retarded any-and-all discussions of Star Wars; freezing it where it began: as a “modern myth.” The greatest disservice this does is it frames the film in terms of heros from ancient myth like Theseius, religious figures like the Buddha, and looming figures from history like Hitler … But George Lucas was a young guy from Modesto CA - a product of New World of hotrods and AM radio. Likewise the great majority of his crew were Californians, most, like Lucas, realatively fresh from film school. They might be dressed in the drag of the aristocratic General Rokurota Makabe and Calvery Captain von Rauffenstein, but Star Wars is peopled with characters that would have been familiar to a young man growing up in the 1950s and 60s in small town America; not despots or Buddhas, but uptight conformists and monkish intellectuals.
…
“Darth Vader was not a German Fascist, he was an American fascist (lowercase f). He is the Ugly American - a rigid Cold War ideologue. The inside of his helmet stinks of Brylcreem, gin, and Pall Malls. Yoda was not the Buddha, he was an old Leftist like Obi Wan - black-listed progressives; out of work in the wake of McCarthyism, one-time culture warriors exiled from the bright lights of Hollywood and New York, licking their wounds in back-waters like Modesto CA. Lives that were once public and grand, were wrapped in moth eaten tweed, crowded into three-room bungalows, hidden behind ratty overgrown lawns, reduced to serving Nescafe to the random teenager looking for an abandoned past of radicalism and fame: ‘I haven’t heard that name in a very long time…’”