If Star Wars had been released in the late '60s, or late '80s, or late '90s, adjusting for technology, it fits spectacularly well.

As a matter of history, the Fourteenth Amendment was not understood to ban segregation on the basis of race.

For the Sanders supporters, there's a thought that the people who are well off are doing really great, and the system is systematically unfair, and that's a very deeply felt and serious objection to the current situation.

It's very common to say that Star Wars in the late '70s, that was kind of perfect for Cold War culture and the aftermath of Vietnam in the '60s to have an upbeat, hopeful, cartoonish tale of a hero's journey. I think those explanations are easy to offer and almost always wrong.

I'll tell you an explanation that I find commonly overrated and speculative in the extreme: the idea that things that succeed in popular culture do that because they hit the temper of the times.

I got into the genesis of Star Wars, and the tale seemed to me endlessly fascinating.

Great works - and I think Star Wars is a great work - are easily susceptible to multiple plausible interpretations. Some of them are pretty nutty, but the idea that we should see it as profoundly feminist, or as a deeply Christian tale, or as a Freudian exercise... I think all of those have some truth.