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star wars, like LOTR, is anti-leftist poison
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Dec 5, 2016 01:07
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and this raises interesting questions, is the Trade Federation a socialist entity practicing state capitalism? what is the political message of star wars? if we look to the prequels we see a critique of democracy as weak, inefficient, and corrupt. in the OT we see a critique of fascism and authoritarianism. all star wars is anti-collectivist so what does it take? libertarianism? if what I understand and hope of Rogue One, is that it will feature a collection of individuals sacrificing their individuality and selfishness for the accomplishment of a goal that can only be accomplished by the sum of their parts, proud socialists fighting the fascist machine Phi230 fucked around with this message at 01:13 on Dec 5, 2016 |
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Dec 5, 2016 01:09
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Phi230 posted:but ask yourself, if the Free Peoples of Middle Earth had bolt action rifles, machineguns,artillery, and aircraft things would've gone a lot more smoothly. This is what would have happened had Saruman or Denethor got hold of the ring and it would have been poo poo. Tolkien was at the Somme, I think he knows more about the evils of mechanized warfare than some C&D no-caps edgelord. Tolkien is only going to look more right about industrialization over the next 200 years anyway.
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Dec 5, 2016 01:11
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Arglebargle III posted:This is what would have happened had Saruman or Denethor got hold of the ring and it would have been poo poo. excuse me im a milhist edgelord only visiting say what you want about the evils of mechanized warfare but if The Gondorian Guards Rifles Motostrelki were around then things would've have been so desperate Boromir, et al were right. Why condemn humanity to Medieval Stasis when you can get the edge up and not only win but improve standard of living for their people and all things considered I'd blame the Somme on imperialism, and Tolkien only gave some lip service to anti-imperial sentiments only because he couldn't handle the cognitive dissonance that Great Britain was the evil empire all along Phi230 fucked around with this message at 01:21 on Dec 5, 2016 |
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Dec 5, 2016 01:16
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwmMBqYosow This is the best rogue one/ empire mashup
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Dec 5, 2016 01:23
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Hobbits are interesting because they're English society of the Victorian/Edwardian period where the upper class has been chopped off completely and everyone is a freeholding farmer or an independent artisan. Looking at, say, the cultural signifiers, Pippin and Merry never reach the height of being truly upper-class in how they talk. Bilbo and Frodo are firmly middle-class new money, and Sam is working-class. The only really upper-class character is Smaug in The Hobbit, who talks more or less like a retired Army colonel fresh from a few decades in India or a Baronet. Which in turn was fairly close to the socialist ideas of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, which Tolkien was most directly inspired by. EDIT: Tolkien being "anti-industrialization" seems like a weird thing to say when we look at what his criticisms are in the fiction- that the fruits of industrialization are not shared out, but reserved by an elite. Tolkien was of course a reactionary conservative of a type that was largely dying out by the time fascism killed it more or less for good, so he puts loosely socialistic language in the mouths of Saruman's goons. Tolkien's broader criticism is against modernity in the form of the state, of allegiance to an immaterial entity that can be said to stand for anything, as opposed to allegiance to a person or an ideal. Brainiac Five fucked around with this message at 01:28 on Dec 5, 2016 |
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Dec 5, 2016 01:25
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Phi230 posted:Boromir, et al were right. Why condemn humanity to Medieval Stasis when you can get the edge up and not only win but improve standard of living for their people Boromir with the ring wouldn't be an Atlee he would be a Dyer.
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Dec 5, 2016 01:26
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Bongo Bill posted:The books, as always, offer an explanation. The Shire is theoretically part of the kingdom of Arnor. Arnor was almost completely depopulated not too long prior; what little power or authority men have there is not supported by enough manpower to project it farther than the next village over. There's the Shire, which is at least capable of managing its internal affairs; there's a scattering of crappy villages; and there's vast uninhabited wilderness, where the Rangers (the heirs to the throne of Arnor) have their hands full keeping an eye out for trouble and trying to steer it discreetly away into other people's territories. Any man there who wants power is better off leaving to try to get it from somewhere that there's more than sleepy provincial backwater to lord over.
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Dec 5, 2016 01:31
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It's amusing that an anti-war pro-environment piece of literature that stars an amateur historian and a gardener, that bangs on about the corrupting influence of power for 2000 pages, is now too rightist and too luddite. Meanwhile Trump was just elected and Miami will be underwater by the end of the century.Brainiac Five posted:Hobbits are interesting because they're English society of the Victorian/Edwardian period where the upper class has been chopped off completely and everyone is a freeholding farmer or an independent artisan. Looking at, say, the cultural signifiers, Pippin and Merry never reach the height of being truly upper-class in how they talk. Bilbo and Frodo are firmly middle-class new money, and Sam is working-class. The only really upper-class character is Smaug in The Hobbit, who talks more or less like a retired Army colonel fresh from a few decades in India or a Baronet. This is interesting but misses the aesthetic revulsion Tolkien expresses for industrialization as well. It's not just that the industrialized Shire resembles a fascist state, it's that Tolkien really loving hates industrial landscapes. Growing up in the midlands in the late 19th century you could see that happening.
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Dec 5, 2016 01:34
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It's fascinating how people insist that Sauron's being evil isn't explained or justified, when it says right in Chapter 2 why he's evil- he wishes to control hobbits, punish them for having a thing he wants back, that is he wishes to establish dominion over them, and as the book progresses, we see that he wishes to establish dominion over everyone else, or has already established dominion over people. I'm not surprised Phi320 is defending the idea that hegemonic relations of power over people are good or morally neutral ones, though I fear for any people he considers friends.
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Dec 5, 2016 01:35
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In comparison Star Wars is poo poo, by the way.
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Dec 5, 2016 01:38
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Arglebargle III posted:It's amusing that an anti-war pro-environment piece of literature that stars an amateur historian and a gardener, that bangs on about the corrupting influence of power for 2000 pages, is now too rightist and too luddite. I don't know about being "too luddite," but it shouldn't be so surprising that a piece that is pro-environment is also anti-industrial. Brainiac Five posted:It's fascinating how people insist that Sauron's being evil isn't explained or justified, when it says right in Chapter 2 why he's evil- he wishes to control hobbits, punish them for having a thing he wants back, that is he wishes to establish dominion over them, and as the book progresses, we see that he wishes to establish dominion over everyone else, or has already established dominion over people.  (from Jesse Moynihan's Forming) (somewhat NWS) Schwarzwald fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Dec 5, 2016 |
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Dec 5, 2016 01:41
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Phi230 posted:what is the political message of star wars? if we look to the prequels we see a critique of democracy as weak, inefficient, and corrupt. in the OT we see a critique of fascism and authoritarianism. all star wars is anti-collectivist It wasn't showing democracy as weak, inefficient, and corrupt inherently, it was showing a democracy that had allowed itself to become weak, inefficient, and corrupt and warning against that. It showed a demagogue using and manipulating the threat of an outside entity to grow his powers and subvert democracy. When Anakin becomes Vader he comes very close to quoting Bush, and it's not an accident. The republic democracy is criticized as weak and greedy and corrupt, but the fall of the republic is absolutely presented as a tragedy. The grand thrust of the OT is to restore the republic. The message isn't "democracy is weak and lovely" - It's a warning about why it needs to be protected.
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Dec 5, 2016 02:06
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Arglebargle III posted:This is interesting but misses the aesthetic revulsion Tolkien expresses for industrialization as well. It's not just that the industrialized Shire resembles a fascist state, it's that Tolkien really loving hates industrial landscapes. Growing up in the midlands in the late 19th century you could see that happening.
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Dec 5, 2016 02:06
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Jewmanji posted:I would read any longform pieces you might write about Star Wars. Please consider it. That's basically what I do in this thread, isn't it? I think I'm too unorganized and ADHD to do it any other way. Also there are plenty of other people on the Internet who are both more intelligent, more educated, and more proficient writers doing the same thing. Here's one that came out last month on this pretty neat site called Bright Lights Film Journal, about how Attack of the Clones is a fusion of throwback imagery and anachronistic literary styles with the kind of weird, experimental cinema whose possibilities Lucas has always claimed to be most interested in exploring: Mike Thorn posted:Also worth mentioning is that the study of morality and political corruption in Attack of the Clones brings much to bear on reality; the film ushers to the fore a complex element of human psychology. Before becoming a cipher of evil whose traits are inscribed in his very name, Darth Vader (“Dark Father”) is a human being (Anakin Skywalker) whose process of destruction is characterized by moments of choice. This naming of morality also plays out in the duplicitous nature of Senator Palpatine, whose evil counterpart (Darth [In]Sidious) represents all that is cruel. In observing this trope of the Human transforming into the Character or the Moral Cipher, I recall the techniques used by Edmund Spenser and other early authors of romantic adventure – in The Faerie Queene, characters (e.g. Error, Furore) stand in as allegorical devices, but taken together, their interrelations convey Spenser’s ethical suggestions for his readers. Indeed, the Star Wars saga (and especially the prequel trilogy) acts as a morality play, as I’ve suggested above, and its genre-codified structure transmits very real and grounded observations of our world. Like Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Star Wars instructs us to be more like Luke Skywalker (the possibility of a positive self that Anakin could have been), and less like Darth Vader. For me, one of the great things about pieces like these is seeing other people independently come to the same conclusions you did, and then adding onto them with new, well-supported insights. Film analysis isn't entirely navel-gazing, utterly subjective gobbledygook. The reason the Star Wars films invite such complex analysis is because they're complex movies with deep and variegated provenances, created by an auteur with complete control over their production, who took great care in constructing a meaningful, multi-layered narrative which can be grasped by anyone who cares enough to put aside their prejudices and take them seriously as a form of art, whether they like them as entertainment or not. The fact the Star Wars films intentionally abide by antiquated storytelling conventions is one of their most misunderstood aspects. They're in large part (as much as they are anything else) the heir of stories like those of Arthurian legend from medieval times, where characters were routinely raptured up to Heaven like Obi-Wan (Galahad) or died of broken hearts like Padme (Elaine, the Lady of Shalott). And of course things like these continued to happen in many different kinds of artforms both in much earlier times and all the way up to the present. They don't tend to happen so much in most mainstream Blockbuster movies from the 80's through the 2000's, though, so obviously it must be bad storytelling.
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Dec 5, 2016 04:46
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ShineDog posted:It wasn't showing democracy as weak, inefficient, and corrupt inherently, it was showing a democracy that had allowed itself to become weak, inefficient, and corrupt and warning against that. It showed a demagogue using and manipulating the threat of an outside entity to grow his powers and subvert democracy. When Anakin becomes Vader he comes very close to quoting Bush, and it's not an accident. Yeah, it's all spelled out in the movies: Attack of the Clones posted:SIO BIBBLE: It's outrageous, that after four trials in the Supreme Court, Nute Gunray is still the viceroy of the Trade Federation. I fear the senate is powerless The reason the Empire came about is because the Senators stopped believing democracy could work, and kept giving more and more powers to the Chancellor, then applauded him when he declared himself Emperor. And, ironically, the person who set the whole thing in motion was a younger, naive Padme Amidala: The Phantom Menace posted:PALPATINE : If I may say so, Your Majesty, the Chancellor has little real power...he is mired down by baseless accusations of corruption. A manufactured scandal surrounds him. The bureaucrats are in charge now. Any of that sound kind of relevant to our current situation? The funny thing is that that dialogue probably directly relates to Bill Clinton. Episode I was written on the heels of all the Clinton investigations culminating in the Lewinsky scandal, but of course before Bush was elected president as an arguable result. (And Episode II was written before Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld conspired together to instigate a sham war for ulterior purposes that resulted in the gross expansion of executive power and the enrichment of certain corporations. I think Lucas earned the right to put Bush's words in Anakin's mouth for a line in Episode III.) Or maybe it all has to do with Harry Potter and Voldemort taking over the Ministry of Magic. I don't know. We'll have to leave that one to the serious political scientists. Cnut the Great fucked around with this message at 05:27 on Dec 5, 2016 |
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Dec 5, 2016 05:21
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Like ive said before, neither the preqs nor the harry potter movies show anything new in that regard. Its all happened before throughout history
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Dec 5, 2016 05:24
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Phi230 posted:Like ive said before, neither the preqs nor the harry potter movies show anything new in that regard. Its all happened before throughout history Of course. That's exactly what George Lucas says, too. That's what makes them (well, Star Wars, anyway) good stories. You can show the original six Star Wars movies to someone 200 years from now and they'll still be relevant. As I've argued before, this is a major flaw of The Force Awakens, most of whose meaning and relevance derives from Gen X nostalgia and a deeply-ingrained cultural reverence for the original trilogy. (And also something about fuckable Millennials???)
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Dec 5, 2016 05:33
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I think the anti-TFA bandwagon has gotten to you TFA is good and will be remembered because at its core its a story that takes the audience on adventure with the characters, not watching in a theatre. It is very much an independent work, a millenial work. Notice how Rey and Finns entire arcs pertain to being how to fit in and find their way in their world, developing relationships when they didnt know they could
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Dec 5, 2016 05:40
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Just like how the OT are at their heart, conservative works which ill elaborate on later
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Dec 5, 2016 05:42
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Phi230 posted:I think the anti-TFA bandwagon has gotten to you TFA is a garbage fire. and rey and fin are the worst blandest most unlikeable characters in starwars.
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Dec 5, 2016 06:19
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This conversation is confused by modern American politics, where conservatives are anything but. The so-called conservatives in the US are bent on destroying the legacy of everything post-1930 in US history.
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Dec 5, 2016 06:29
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Prequel Anakin and Padme are the worst characters in Star Wars by a wide margin. Those two have zero chemistry with eachother. Bad casting.
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Dec 5, 2016 06:29
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Arglebargle III posted:This conversation is confused by modern American politics, where conservatives are anything but. The so-called conservatives in the US are bent on destroying the legacy of everything post-1930 in US history. Which is particularly hilarious when they invoke "the founding fathers" as their motivation. Motherfuckers, the founding fathers were as progressive and as unconservative as possible for their era. If they had been interested in maintaining the status quo, they would have crowned us King Washington I and not gone for a new spin on a democratic republic. They were all about trying to change poo poo up and try something new. This country exists because people wanted to move forward and escape the ties to their past.
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Dec 5, 2016 06:44
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Super Fan posted:Prequel Anakin and Padme are the worst characters in Star Wars by a wide margin. Those two have zero chemistry with eachother. Bad casting. disagree, they both play their parts rather competently
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Dec 5, 2016 06:47
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Hayden Christensen loving sucks.
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Dec 5, 2016 06:50
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Super Fan posted:Hayden Christensen loving sucks. nah he's pretty rad, not perfect but by no means bad.
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Dec 5, 2016 06:52
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i'm not a fan of hayden christensen in episode II but i think he's a lot stronger in III, mostly on the strength of his interactions with ewan mcgregor him screaming 'I HATE YOU' at the closest person he had to a father, brother or friend is sold really well imo i also think the 'from my point of view, the jedi are evil!' line is good, especially since it ties so well with obi-wan's 'certain point of view' in the OT, as well as obi-wan's rebuttals ('then you are lost' at the time and 'only a master of evil, darth' in ANH)
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Dec 5, 2016 06:54
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ungulateman posted:i also think the 'from my point of view, the jedi are evil!' line is good It's not and the way he says it it almost comes across as a complete non-sequitur. The prequels are full of poor performances and Hayden Christensen stands out as the worst of the bunch. Little surprise he no longer has a career.
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Dec 5, 2016 06:58
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Natalie Portman's performances are worse.
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Dec 5, 2016 07:14
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Cnut the Great posted:As I've argued before, this is a major flaw of The Force Awakens, most of whose meaning and relevance derives from Gen X nostalgia and a deeply-ingrained cultural reverence for the original trilogy. (And also something about fuckable Millennials???) The Force Awakens does bear more signifiers of the time and circumstances of its creation than do its predecessors, but I think this is a bit overstated. The film comments on nostalgic reverence (by making it the motivation of the Empire-echoing villains and the myopic flaw of the Republic-echoing allies), but I think it does so in a way that depends only on having seen the prior films, not on having seen them at a certain age, as part of a certain cohort, or with a certain gap of time between. If the fear is that a movie about countries was succeeded by a movie about some movies, the characters' preoccupation with legacy might mean something as bad as all that. But that's not the only thing it could mean. The weakness of The Force Awakens is that it is timid and noncommittal - so much of what's in it won't be about anything until its sequel comes along to collapse its waveform. Conscious participation in an ongoing series is a comparative novelty; it's easy to imagine the project perpetually deferring its thesis to the future, and that would indeed just be awful. But Star Wars has already been misunderstood for its use of unexpected storytelling conventions, and not getting the complete picture at once is certainly unexpected, so I'm willing to wait and see if that's what this is and what good can come from it.
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Dec 5, 2016 07:15
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I don't like the prequels and I think some of the performances were pretty bad, but the OT had a lot of terrible acting too. Even Hamill wasn't that great. He really didn't find his acting groove until after Star Wars. I just kinda think the main actors in all 7 movies were sorta average at worst. Ford, Guinness, McDiarmid and McGregor were the stand outs for me.
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Dec 5, 2016 08:45
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Super Fan posted:Prequel Anakin and Padme are the worst people in Star Wars by a wide margin. Those two have zero chemistry with eachother. Great casting.
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Dec 5, 2016 11:17
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Super Fan posted:It's not and the way he says it it almost comes across as a complete non-sequitur. The prequels are full of poor performances and Hayden Christensen stands out as the worst of the bunch. Little surprise he no longer has a career. He says it completely naturally and so what if it's a non-sequitur? he's a young man in a hosed up situation trying to convince himself that he's doing the right thing. Also he's just recently watched a jedi betray their own code while palpatine is promising order and peace. I've never heard an argument against anakin that wasn't basically "he's being irrational or he's awkward"
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Dec 5, 2016 11:19
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Elfgames posted:He says it completely naturally and so what if it's a non-sequitur? he's a young man in a hosed up situation trying to convince himself that he's doing the right thing. Also he's just recently watched a jedi betray their own code while palpatine is promising order and peace.
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Dec 5, 2016 12:27
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lol at people missing how LOTR's conservatism is part of its appeal, even if the movies are muddled in that respectSuper Fan posted:Anakin sounds like he's legit retarded throughout the prequels. It works if you pretend the Jedi Council gave him a lobotomy. This also explains away him making the dumbest decisions imaginable in every scene he's in. Never watch a classical tragedy, you're going to get an aneurysm.
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Dec 5, 2016 13:04
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Super Fan posted:It's not and the way he says it it almost comes across as a complete non-sequitur. The prequels are full of poor performances and Hayden Christensen stands out as the worst of the bunch. Little surprise he no longer has a career. james dean has a strikingly similar performance style https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E1QdvCC0Eg one almost wonders if i dunno hayden constructed his performance of a repressed rebellious young teen after the seminal performance of a repressed rebellious young teen makes you think
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Dec 5, 2016 14:44
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Waffles Inc. posted:makes you think Let's not expect too much from people now.
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Dec 5, 2016 14:45
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Phi230 posted:I think the anti-TFA bandwagon has gotten to you I think my opinions about TFA have been pretty consistent since I first saw it. I was fairly optimistic going in, even defending it against charges of being a rehash based on what was in the trailers in the months leading up to its release (if you really want to you can dig through my post history in the last thread to see for yourself). But when the movie actually came out it was impossible to deny that it was a technically competent, well-acted, but almost totally derivative and uninspired work cooked up mainly to meet the commercial demands of a corporation. quote:TFA is good and will be remembered because at its core its a story that takes the audience on adventure with the characters, not watching in a theatre. Ugh. The Millennial thing was supposed to be a callback to a ridiculous thread meme, not an invitation to endorse, but okay, if you want to run with it. Rey and Finn's arcs are both shallow and underdeveloped and were clearly tacked on at the last minute after the basic idea of "Just do A New Hope again" was agreed upon. There's no strong narrative drive. At its core, the movie isn't actually about anything. It's certainly not about Rey's feelings of abandonment or Finn's moral conflict. Those things are there, just barely, but only halfheartedly. They don't drive the story. The story happens of its own accord, only for J.J. to occasionally remember to drop in a line here or there reminding the audience that this is a story about characters and emotions, you guys, really, not seeing the Millennium Falcon fly around again and hearing Han Solo talk about parsecs! You could cut out the given characterizations of Rey and Finn and drop in almost any other characterization and it wouldn't change anything about the basic story of TFA. You couldn't do that with any of the other films. The internal conflicts faced by both Luke and Anakin, meanwhile, are positively hardwired into their respective films. Every major event that happens in the films can ultimately be traced back in some way to the inner emotional lives of the central characters. Just to take A New Hope, the film TFA is based on, as an example: When Luke leaves a barren desert world, passes through a mechanical crucible, and emerges out the other side to a lush jungle world, it actually means something. Luke's emotional journey is richly sketched out for the audience and we feel it deeply in every aspect of the narrative: his spiritual desolation and yearning for something more, his desire to prove himself to the world and live a life of meaning like his father did before him, his gradual maturation as he faces trials and takes on qualities from all the characters who aid him in his quest, his newfound sense of camaraderie with his fellow man and vivified sense of life purpose on the Rebel moon, his final passage into adulthood as he releases the shot that enters the thermal exhaust port and destroys the Death Star. TFA repeats all these basic beats of A New Hope, but doesn't justify them, and doesn't earn them. Rey goes through roughly the same motions Luke does, but only because she's being literally chased and dragged from one location to another in a succession of mindless, callback-laden action scenes. In point of fact, for the majority of the time, not one of the main characters really wants to be where they are or be doing what they're doing. Save for Rey's sheltering of BB-8 and Finn's defection, initial promising moments of characterization which ultimately fail to amount to anything greater, none of them make meaningful choices which drive the action, or tie in thematically with the changes in locations, or correspond with the nature of the trials faced, to anywhere near the same depth or degree as A New Hope or the other five movies. It doesn't matter whether Rey is dealing with feelings of abandonment or whether she's scared of adventure or whether she's a spice addict who just wants to chill out on Jakku all day playing with her action figures, because according to the way TFA is written she'd end up in the exact same places anyway, and the meaning of all the associational imagery would remain just as inert and uninspired as in the actual film.
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Dec 5, 2016 15:07
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I like Christensen's performance but the acting styles of 50's Hollywood, even from James Dean being directed by a counter-cultural figure like Nicholas Ray, was pretty different than movies made in 2002-2005. I think the anachronism is intentional to some degree, but it is pretty understandable that people not used to older styles would find it off-putting.
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Dec 5, 2016 15:07
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