I suspect Tim Kreider has never glanced over any of the original Star Wars scripts.

There's a real yearning here for Star Wars to be culturally relevant and deep and symbolic when even Lucas will freely admit that it's Flash Gordon run through Campbell and stuffed in a Kurosawa framework. If you want to know how deep Lucas was into symbolism, you need only watch THX-1138 - which rises all the way to "fascism is bad but a snappy dresser." That the prequels were horrible and disturbing is not because Lucas lost his way or some shit, it's because he never found it:

Lots of critics pointed out that the coda of “Star Wars,” when three heroes march up a corridor between columns of massed soldiers, is a visual quote of the wreath-laying at Nuremberg in “Triumph of the Will,” but everyone seems to assume this is a random allusion, devoid of historical context. It’s not as if Lucas was oblivious of the source. His film is full of fascist iconography — all, up until this moment, associated with the Empire. Assuming this final image is deployed intentionally, it might be most hopefully interpreted as a warning: Don’t become the thing you’ve fought against.

USC film students studied Triumph of the Will. They didn't study it for its context, they studied it for its cinematic tricks because Leni Riefenstahl was really goddamn good at it. She was about as close to rehabilitated as she ever got back then. When Lucas duplicates the wreath-laying at Nuremberg, it's not to say "don't turn into Nazis" it's to say "look how fucking cool this looks." And that, fundamentally, is the core of Star Wars:

Seen anew, much of its imagery is surreally beautiful: the vast plated underside of an armored starship sliding on and on forever overhead; the dreamlike tableau, seen through a scrim of smoke and framed by concentric portals, of a girl shrouded in white furtively genuflecting to a robot; a golden android waving for help in a desert by the skeleton of a dinosaur; a convoy of space fighters opening their split wings in sequence, like poison flowers blossoming.

But that's all it is. And that, more than anything, is what literally everyone beefs about Star Wars - that "

It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.