The 1980s and 1990s saw the rearticulation of older race and class ideologies in the form of white anti-immigrant nativism directed at workers from Latin America and often framed in the language of animality (especially parasites and vermin), filth, waste, and other expressions of racialized disgust. At the same time, and partly in response to such populist nativism, state and federal immigration enforcement became increasingly militarized, incorporating high-tech military weaponry and surveillance equipment (including flying drones). And so the director’s cut of THX 1138 roughly coincided with the establishment of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has unleashed what Rachel Buff calls a new “deportation terror” against migrant workers.    

While historically CGI has been used in SF films to create a variety of effects, it has often been deployed in figural ways, to represent exotic or fantastic characters and creatures. This practice has lent itself to the creation of racialized digital characters, most infamously the figure of Jar Jar Binks, which was criticized by Patricia Williams as a CGI version of a blackface minstrel. Jar Jar Binks recalls the black holograms from THX 1138, suggesting that Lucas has used CGI not only to produce a kind of enhanced realism but also as a means of derealizing race and class conflict. Which is to shift focus away from whether this or that use of CGI is realistic or persuasive and to instead ask what it means to render race and class differences as special effects.  

In the case of THX 1138, the original had already represented farm workers in fantastic SF terms and when new digital tools became available they were used in ways that made the shell dwellers even more “unreal,” like the holograms. Here, however, the substitution of digital apes for human actors displaces workers literally and symbolically. Or more precisely, in the director’s cut figures representing farm workers are digitally incorporated into the film in ways that drain them of humanity and disconnect them from political-economic contexts. 

Analyzing Lucas in relationship to Chavez and the UFW thus suggests the extent to which he has increasingly used digital technology to create compelling fictional worlds that draw on the “real world” but ultimately replace it. We might thus say that the corporate development and deployment of CGI sublates social and material histories of race and class, simultaneously preserving and canceling them out in ways that ultimately deny their reality.