Decoding Star Wars

Decoding Star Wars reveals the relationships between films, code, software and power both on and off screen in the Star Wars universe.

Since the production and release of The Phantom Menace (1999), the Star Wars franchise has increasingly relied on computer code to tell its stories and circulate its various media via CGI, digital exhibition, and online distribution. But who writes the code and develops the software that makes Star Wars possible as it expands from the twentieth into the 21st century? How do programmers’ identities inform how they design and circulate the films? And why does the history of code remain hidden in narratives about Star Wars filmmaking and viewing?

Decoding Star Wars answers these questions to reveal how gender and race are central to the Star Wars universe, from the creation of its algorithms to the ways that characters are represented onscreen. In addition, it demonstrates how cinema is complicated by computers, digital technologies, and power, in ways that are so far unexplored in film history.