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K. Waste posted:Does Star Wars play it lightly, or are you as an adult merely inured to its fantastic representation of conflict? 'Cause I remember being pretty freaked out by a drunk hairy bar beast getting its arm severed. Weird aliens screeched and lurched, pistols and laser swords were used liberally, as a child none of those things seemed particularly 'light' to me - they were all a part of the phantasmagoria of the films, not superficial content that I could just compartmentalize away as 'not real' or 'too amazing to be believed.' Growing up Catholic didn't help the perpetual blurring of spectacular depictions of violence and the supernatural and 'reality.' Of course all movies meant for children are made by adults constructing a category from an adult point of view. Children don't make movies. Childhood is a category constructed by adults. You're the only one asking for something more than that, like there is another way of defining genre that we can prefer.
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Jan 5, 2017 15:15
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Hodgepodge posted:Something being "for children" only really means that it can be enjoyed by both children and adults. Yes. I don't mean it in a pejorative sense at all. A lot of really good movies are really good because they're made with kids in mind. Like, it doesn't mean the movies are dumb on purpose or anything.
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Jan 5, 2017 16:10
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K. Waste posted:Film genre does not mean what you think it means, which is derived from common sense essentialism. (Note: I have not said that you view the "quiddatative" qualities of "kids movies" as pejorative.) How is this concept of the critical category not also essentialist or within capitalism? There is no outside of capitalism. Of course Star Wars has politics: it's reactionary like all fairy tales. What tastes gross to me is when a movie decides to throw a crying, dirt-smeared ethnically coded child into a battle involving space lasers and knee-high pig people, or to have the space-laser battle be the battle of Algiers but then right after a fantastical blind kung-fu man saves everyone. It's useless to use a stupid-rear end fantasy setting to say anything about real-world imperialism, especially if you're being so gutless as to avoid having the fantasy rebels be tainted by association with the terrorist label, so why crib poo poo so closely from horrors currently unfolding all around us as if anyone involved actually gives two shits about children being burned to death by tanks or drones? This is my subjective aesthetic judgment speaking. None of that means that Star Wars is somehow outside of politics, but it is a different sort of movie even though I agree with you that it has the same conservative politics, as do most movies.
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Jan 5, 2017 17:59
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In Jedi she says she remembers their mom being kind, but also sad all the time, and that she died when Leia was young. That doesn't match Episode III, but why not just choose one version or another when two stories don't square? Maybe Jimmy Smits is still cruising around out there in space and can tell them in Episode VIII?
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Jan 5, 2017 20:04
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Nielsen posted:I went looking for a TFA review by him as well and lo and behold: I'm shocked as all hell that he writes for the National Review. His attacks on "liberals" always struck me as being in the CLR James sense and not in the George Will sense. Is he such a contrarian that he'll eagerly go to bed with people who would love to put his former colleagues at Out Magazine into concentration camps? Also, he likes 2001? Who could have predicted that?
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Jan 5, 2017 22:48
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Soggy Cereal posted:You guys are building a lot of mystique around someone you would ordinarily vilify as a cranky old conservative man. I don't think he is conservative. Until like half an hour ago I thought he was a socialist.
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Jan 5, 2017 23:11
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Armond White isn't dumb, but he seems like a right oval office, and I'm glad on some level that as his star falls he'll spend the rest of his working days somewhere where half the people reflexively clutch their purses or momentarily start in fear whenever he has to visit the office.
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Jan 5, 2017 23:39
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:I too fantasize about people I don't like being subject to racism. I wouldn't but the National Review is full of monsters. They endorsed Cruz. They only exist in the first place because Buckley wanted a platform to support Barry Goldwater.
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Jan 5, 2017 23:57
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Nielsen posted:I specifically highlighted that piece White wrote about the liberal appropriation of the hope bit because I couldn't have put it better into words myself like White and SMG did above. It's very hard to criticize neoliberalism and be wrong, and it's impossible to defend it and be correct.
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Jan 6, 2017 03:25
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Maxwell Lord posted:The way I see it both these things need addressing. There is a danger of a more authoritarian fascist order resulting from all this- it's no guarantee and there's every chance the Trump administration's ineptitude will get in the way of any real tyranny, but on the other hand it's not like actual fascist governments were particularly competent. It's the sort of thing where you just can't safely assume "it can't happen here". So, yeah, some effort needs to be put forward to make sure this doesn't metastasize. Some fretting is justified. That doesn't detract from the deeper, more long term work of addressing the failures of capitalism that are at the root of all this, but you can't ignore the immediate danger either. This is a picture of college students in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1978. I keep a copy of it in my wallet to remind me that we can always lose what we have if we become conceited arrogant pricks and disappear up our own assholes like a certain solvenian Hegel fan who endorsed Trump:  I guess maybe some of those ladies were able to see Star Wars in a theater before reactionary elements armed with CIA-provided rockets blew them all up for wearing pants and learning to read.
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Jan 6, 2017 14:30
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The NSA is not supplying white supremacist groups with military-grade weaponry in a covert proxy war against 'women in college'. America is not turning into Afghanistan. Get some perspective. Despite your uncharitable misreading, I am pretty shocked to see you blow the old It Can't Happen Here trumpet. I'm sure that there were professors in Kabul explaining that this isn't the Paris Commune right up until the brave Mujahideen fighters showed up to cut their heads off with saw blades. It's quite End-Of-History of you, especially since your boy Zizek got just what he wanted and neoliberalism's inevitable death spasms have begun at just the time authoritarian nativism has taken root. I hope you're not counting on being white protecting you. It's always good to be aware of where and when you're alive, or else you might end up like good liberal boy George Lucas, who could never have guessed that his escapist rejection of complex storytelling in favor of a heroic war narrative like he enjoyed as a boy would feed the same cultural forces that abetted Reagan's extraordinary popularity. Fairy-tale morality that on its own is perfectly unremarkable allowed rhetorical excesses that cast America as Luke Skywalker against an evil empire. His only revenge: trolling his rich neighbors by using his millions to build low-income housing near them. A liberal redeemed, imo.
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Jan 7, 2017 00:29
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One thing I will say in Zizek's favor is that he was probably the first scholar to call Episode I "a very bad movie."
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Jan 8, 2017 04:37
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Yeah, Malcolm's conversion to Islam had no effect on how he saw himself and certainly didn't provide any traditions for him to act within. Not a bit.
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Jan 10, 2017 01:53
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Original Star Trek is all about collapsing social systems and leaving people in chaos with no alternative while Captain Kirk laughingly explains that they'll enjoy the challenge of building a society for themselves. He's really a very bad socialist and racist against totalitarian computer intelligences and omnipotent blobs.
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Jan 10, 2017 17:36
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In Star Trek they're communists, or at least have a universal basic income. They never tell you this, but Captain Kirk calls capitalism barbaric or some poo poo.
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Jan 10, 2017 19:16
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Halloween Jack posted:OTOH, I think Gladney is referencing a particular episode where a computer totally controlled the lives of these orange people while making them immortal. Kirk destroys the machine and IIRC leaves them adrift. These are people who don't remember how to grow food, or gently caress. Also the one where space ladies steal Spock's brain, where they also don't know about farming or loving. And Spock liked being their computer. Also he collapses Space Rome and just leaves them to enjoy their thousand years of darkness without saying poo poo about crop rotation or preserving libraries. This one also confirms that Jesus is real and just shows up on other planets sometimes, which is no big deal to Captain Kirk.
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Jan 10, 2017 19:47
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But in the cartoon they free the devil and let him just blast off into space, which is pretty baller.
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Jan 10, 2017 19:48
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Danger posted:The goal isn't to apologize for Disney's responsibility to it's shareholders, it's to arrive at a redemptive, even if oppositional, reading of the film as a cultural artifact. Like, Armond White's reading is not at all glowing but is useful as a lens to interpret what it is saying about the world. Isn't this basically a waste of time though? Star Wars is and always will be a commodity to exchange under capitalism. There are much more direct and relevant ways to diagnose the fundamental contradictions of capitalism. Aren't we better off reading political philosophy and learning how to make bombs in the basement and/or organizing politically?
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Jan 12, 2017 16:45
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Phi230 posted:I always wanted to know the conservative reaction to Generation Kill Conservatives loved Stephen Colbert when he was doing the Colbert Report. They watched in numbers equal to self-identified liberals. Their reasoning: "he is just joking."
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Jan 12, 2017 22:13
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