* One good thing about the new Star Wars is the diversity. Most of the heroes are non-white while all of the villains are are white, thus reflecting the reality of the world.
* Heredity gives you a quick way to take a low-level character and make him or her suddenly very powerful or important. She’s born with enormous force sensitivity, or he’s the heir to the throne, or she’s the one who’s been prophesied for centuries, or whatever. Otherwise, your low-level nobody character would need to spend a decade or two getting the skills necessary to play a major role in world events.
To use an example for the original movie, I’m pretty sure that no matter how good you were at handling farm equipment, you’re not a good candidate for being given a top of the line military plane and sent on a critical mission a week after you leave the farm and join the rebelion. Unless the Force is really strong with you….
* Heredity has always been a part of myth-making/fairy tales/sword-and-sandal fantasy tales: how many old fairy tales are built on the idea of a poor neglected child really being the heir to a throne? The Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Anderson and the Arabian Nights books are filled with the “lost prince” tales. And we are no less immune to the idea these days.
For example, in the 20th Century alone, Tolkien’s LOTR series features not one, but two “blood heirs to the throne” motifs: (1) Aragorn/Strider, the heir to the kingdom; and (2) Frodo, blood heir to Bilbo, who must shoulder his family burden and destroy the ring his relative brought in.
Superman’s mythos is also part of this: I’m not really a dumb farmboy, I’m a super powered alien, the last of my race, only pretending to be a dumb hick!
Cinderella and Snow White are also along this track, except the greatness/inheritance of the girls is no secret: some evil stepmother has just seduced the wealthy and powerful father, and then persecuted and driven the princess away; she only need be restored to the throne everyone knows she has.
It’s also a common childhood fantasy to wonder if your parents aren’t your parents, but that you’re secretly a princess or prince or some other heir to greatness. So the idea appeals to that part of our childish psyche.
And we’ve done it clearly in politics. The Kennedy’s have been perennial political front runners despite the only major accomplishments of the family were getting elected in 1960, looking good on camera, and unfortunately having two very public assassinations.
People like the idea of all-powerful but benevolent families because mass democracy is rather unnatural; most people like kings and emperors and just trusting one group to run things and not make us decide about anything. This is noted in the Bible, where the early Israelites are having a lot of success with adhoc democratically-elected Judges running things, but just hate it, and beg God for a king. That gives them Saul and a whole lot of trouble.
It’s a lot messier in real history than the mythos, however, since good rulers don’t always beget good rulers. Marcus Aurelius begat Commodus, after all. This is what Plato noticed a long time ago, which is why in the Republic he goes into such detail about how to choose and train rulers from childhood and cull the bad ones.
* We’ve lived in an ostensibly enlightened, egalitarian and democratic age for two centuries now. But look at how stories set in traditional societies based on hierarchy dominate many people’s fantasy lives in the 21st Century – Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, Outlander, Frozen, Star Wars, and many of the vampire tales. We find something emotionally unsatisfying about the world of levelled, fungible humanity created by the Enlightenment, and we recognize on some level that human nature finds it true fulfillment in the preceding order that the philosophers and revolutionaries in the Enlightenment discredited, destroyed and replaced with their rationalist utopian schemes.
The feeling that we live diminished lives because of the Enlightenment exists now mainly as a splinter in our minds. But thinkers in the emerging Dark Enlightenment have started to figure this out and made it explicit, most notably Steve.
* It’s called escapism. People also like to watch horror movies and The Wire. That doesn’t mean people want to be hacked to death by psychopaths or live in Baltimore. Most people who aren’t prepubescent girls or gay men don’t want to live in some fairytale medieval style kingdom.
* Why not make a pro empire movie? Or a movie where the empire is led by someone who is more of a complex character like Augustus or Trajan. I wonder why nobody bothers to point out that the most likely result of the fall of President Snow in the Hunger Games is civil war and something like crisis of the 3rd century, instead of the sort of idyllic democracy that you see in the movie and books.
* Being good looking, charming/entertaining, and popular are the three most import qualities in modern human society. That’s why the Kennedys are such a glamorous family.
JFK Jr. was outrageously handsome. If he were alive, I guarantee he would’ve been a major contender for the Democratic nomination. On looks alone.
Nixon, despite being a powerful politician, was never glamorized. Why? Because he was ugly, awkward (“you won’t have Richard Nixon to kick around any more”), and nobody liked him.
* Nixon actually was a pretty handsome guy, though later caricatures exaggerated his hunching nature, his sharp nose, and his receding hairline. This was pointed out, in all places, in Mad Men, when the ad agency is talking about running his campaign, and make the point : “He’s young, handsome, a Navy hero. Honestly, it shouldn’t be too difficult to convince America that Dick Nixon is a winner.”
Also, most history books and media types exceedingly exaggerate the Nixon/Kennedy TV debates, claiming that Kennedy’s TV appearance was just so much better than Nixon’s ugliness that that won the presidency for him. In reality, if you watch the debate, both men do fine, and Nixon looks pretty dignified, and it barely moved the public needle. What really won for Kennedy was every catholic (especially Irish Catholic) pulling the lever for him and the crooked Chicago pols and Giancana delivering Illinois for Kennedy —which Nixon could have challenged legitimately, but chose not to.
Later media types vilified Nixon because he ran and later won without their approval. Bush, Romney, McCain, etc. all ran with at least some media types approving them, and the others at least grudgingly oking them if they did beat the favorite. The press was outraged when Nixon won in ’68 after he was supposed to be dead and never let up on him after that; when they declared someone dead, he stayed dead, darn it.
* Help me out here but the impression I’m getting is that young boys are no longer a market worth catering to.
Star Wars – girl hero.
Hunger Games – girl hero.
Tomorrowland – girl hero
Twilight – girl hero.
Harry Potter – boy hero.
Are young boys going to be buying Star Wars girl (Rey) action figures and imaging themselves to be her (despite the best efforts of leftists and gender fluidists).
What films am I missing where the protagonist is a young/teenage boy who is on an adventure and triumphs?
Is Disney counting on young girls being as deep into Star Wars fandom as young boys? The majority of women that I dated had never even seen any Stars Wars movies and of the ones who had, all were of the opinion that it wasn’t all that and many watched simply to either become culturally literate or their previous boyfriends made them watch the films.
Who is a young boy supposed to identify with in this film?
I do note though that the Disney marketing department has struck a deal with Cover Girl cosmetics for a Star Wars line of cosmetics. Too bad you can’t short individual deals like this because I suspect that there aren’t many broads out there who will make a beeline to the cosmetics counter in order to buy some Star Wars mascara.
* I don’t think the Titanic gambit works here. Young girls become repeat viewers of Titanic because they want to see dreamy Leonardo and fantasize about him being their boyfriend doesn’t quite map onto young boys going to see Star Wars because the fantasize about Rey protecting them from Kylo.
* 1977 Star Wars was based on Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Everything since The Matrix has been based on comic books.
Audiences for the former thought in literary hypertext out of a common fund of myth, epic, and story cycle.
Audiences for the latter need narrative to, like mommy, hover and explain everything, less discomfort ensue from the intolerable condition of not understanding everything at first glance.
I really don’t see, however, that 1977 Star Wars was “creating a new universe.” The space opera Western was at least 40 years old by that time.
* Not to mention that Hamill is a horrible actor and was terribly miscast in the original films. He never came across as heroic, charismatic or even virile. And he sounded like a dweeb. That’s why Han Solo stole the show from him as well as the girl. Lucas rewrote the script so Harrison Ford could become Luke’s brother in law.
Carrie Fisher was also a terrible casting decision. Poor acting skills, no screen presence and frankly not that good-looking. I remember even as a 9 year old I was disappointed by her bikini body, whereas in the movie posters she was supposed to be stunning.
* I thought it was striking how well the movie embodied a few ISteve themes:
a) The KKKrazy clue that keeps the Coalition of the Diverse together is the presence of literal Nazis right around the corner.
b) The Evil WMs are oddly both infinitely powerful in their ability to cause harm and incredibly weak when confronted.
c) The individual journey of a hero who is a member of a disadvantaged group is not, as in Joseph Campbell and the original movies, to conquer their internal or moral weakness, but merely to get together with the inclusively diverse Right and the Good people. You don’t become a hero by growing or improving or questioning yourself (ala Luke with Yoda and Obiwan), but by embracing your identity and joining with those are like you or who, most of all, Finally Understand You.
* Look, it’s only been 150 years since someone assembled the first understanding of the biology of heredity at the population level, without even knowing what its mechanisms were.
It’s only been 50 since those mechanisms started to become clear.
It’s only been 5 that iSteve readers haven’t had to feel like we need to hide in the closet every day (though I still advise it for white men with jobs in civil service…).
A lot of the “hierarchical traditional” storylines/narratives arose from a sense that something was happening at the level of hereditarianism…but just what, nobody could say. The emotional resonance with that is complex and has never been teased out from an HBD perspective. That’s unlikely to happen at the scholarly level so long as America’s universities continue to operate in the fantasy realms of Diversitopia.
But it’s pretty clear that a lot of the “traditional” myths had HBD roots. Humans struggling to understand why they are who they are, and what that portends for their lives–the fates to which their genomes condemn or exalt them.
This is why the Stoic and Buddhist philosophers’ stone of “know thyself” seems so wise and cuts so deeply. That’s sheer, raw HBD right there.
It isn’t nostalgia we’re craving, and there’s nothing wrong emotionally with The Enlightenment per se. It’s that a lot of human endeavor has been expressed in mythic and narrative language precisely because we haven’t been able to understand it simply and materially as biochemistry.
Will understanding all that make for a better life for any, many, most, or all? I can’t say. Then again, I’m content to move through my day trying to be worthy of the sacrifice of Prometheus and taking the occasional burned fingers as the price tag.
* That’s the weird thing about the media’s obsessively anti-white casting, some boys will internalize the imposed negative self image but the rest will shift to identifying with the media’s chief villains: Nazis, Crusaders, Confederate soldiers etc.
* I understand, you girls got a good-looking though inadequate male lead in Mark Hamill. We boys got the plain-looking, boring and vulgar Carrie Fisher, already a coke head at age 19. A casting couch decision, it is rumoured.
Sorry, but those two actors ruined the original Star Wars, almost as badly as the two Annakins and Jar Jar Binks in the prequels. Nathalie Portman was alright but she lacks style. Unbelievable as a princess.
* 1) 3.8 stars (out of 5). Good movie overall. Retains the “look” of the original Star Wars much better than the prequels. Ridley is awesome. However…
2) Too many recycled plot points. Does there have to be a Death Star in every damn Star Wars movie? Lucas got bashed for re-using the Death Star in ROTJ, but somehow it’s ok if Abrams does it.
3) Had no idea what their plan was vis-a-vis destroying the Death Star. Like Abrams’s first Star Trek movie, the plan to destroy it seemed off the cuff rather than well thought out.
4) The villains don’t live up to Star Wars standards. Kylo Ren looks like a poor man’s Darth Vader. The ginger who plays General Hux can’t hold a candle to Peter Cushing (aka Grand Moff Tarkin). Snoke, or Snook, or whatever his name was, looked more like Gollum or something. He’s absurd.
5) Too much Nazi allegory. Enough with that, for pete’s sake! Again, just like in Abrams’s first Star Trek movie, where they destroy Vulcan.
6) Zero explanation of what’s happened since ROTJ. Why is there a “Resistance,” and why is Princess Leia leading it?
Still it was ok. It’s Star Wars, and I needed a fix, and this movie sufficed. They could still do a lot better. Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy had a perfectly awesome villain. Pity they didn’t use him.
