George Lucas's Star Wars trilogy is used as the basis for the creation of a political subtext arising from one of America's most enduring literary myths--the American Adam. That subtext, when translated into a modern political context, pinpoints two central issues to face this democracy in the coming years, as well as a national ambivalence about their resolution. The adventures of Luke Skywalker, hero of Star Wars, are correlated to the development of the American Adam in stages of the Infant Adam, the American Adolescent, and the Political Adam. Additional illustrations for supporting this theory are figures such as Henry David Thoreau, Bob Dylan, and Herman Melville's Billy Budd and Captain Ahab. The questions Lucas leaves with the audience are ones its members will face when they leave the theatre. If power itself is viewed as evil, what then becomes of the role of the individual members of a democracy in whom the ultimate power is genuinely vested? If learning to assume power means, in some respect, to become an acknowledged part of a human community, what then remains of the role of independence and of individual purposefulness within the polity? These are questions to which Lucas gives no answers but which deserve attention. (DF)