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To be very clear: Armond White's very accurate concern, with Rogue One, is that it is easily appropriated by the unselfaware liberals who still perceive themselves as the underdog heroes. As White points out in his review of Allied, there's a persistent liberal fantasy of being the last heroes holding back the nazi hordes. Some end-of-history horseshit. So you need to be careful. Unless read carefully, Rogue One can be - and has been - facilely appropriated as a pro-Hillary narrative. A paperclip to add to the lapel of those who declare Trump the next Hitler and fantasize that roving gangs of redneck stormtroopers are going to lynch Muslim women in the streets. See Walter Chaw's review: "[Krennic is] engaged in a kind of political double-speak, in gaslighting--things that until this year were the scourge of banana republics and other backwards backwaters. [...] In a very real way, Rogue One (and much of Disney's recent output) is like Disney's WWII propaganda work. In terms you can understand: Stop it before it's too late. [...] The word 'hope' is the one bandied about the most. We've elected Presidents on 'hope.'" My italics. Chaw does not mean this in a critical way. He's straightforwardly praising the film as pro-Obama propaganda from the Disney corporation. So Jyn - a former insurgent fighting imperialism in space-Iraq, currently an escaped convict - is held up as a Hillary figure. She's presumed to be an American democrat - because she's a girl, right? People assumed the same about Rey and FN: they must be liberals and democrats because of their identities. That is what White is responding to.
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Jan 6, 2017 02:17
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Magic Hate Ball posted:Jyn is way more Trump than Clinton. She's really neither, which perhaps accounts for why fans suddenly* have immense difficulty understanding traditional Star Wars characterization. To be very clear: Rogue One is about the daughter of a Serizawa-like engineer working under government contract, part of Space America's Space Military- Industrial Complex. Jyn feels that Galen has betrayed her mother's leftist ideals by allowing himself to be caught up in the system. (Remember: Mama Erso chose to die rather than allow the Empire to obtain their research.) Before the film even begins, Jyn has spent roughly a decade as an insurgent and traitor - performing raids and small-scale attacks on projects that her father may very well have worked on. She only quits the insurgency because it is too ineffectual - fractured and paranoid. But she sees no other alternatives. The death of her mother and the failure of her two father-figures has left Jyn jaded and cynical. In other words, Jyn stands for the state of the Left as such. Not the fuckin' Center. Luke and Anakin treat their servants well. When Jyn encounters a slave, she tries to give him a handgun. At no point does Jyn support the Rebellion. She speaks entirely in terms of how the Rebellion can help her. When Bodhi mows down a bunch of Imperials and K says "you're a Rebel now.", do you realize just how dark and dryly witty that is? That's the litmus test the film provides. *The truth is, of course, that fans never understood it - such basic things as droids being people, Obiwan being a liar, Vader being the truly ethical hero, Luke attempting suicide... It's ideology at work.
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Jan 6, 2017 05:12
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Maxwell Lord posted:Right, there's no danger of that whatsoever. Correct. Your politics are not radical. You are the Republic. To be frank: you have to be very stupid to watch a movie where the characters have been fighting a prolonged battle against space-Imperialism in the space-Mideast, for over two decades, and conclude that this represents Clinton's recent martyrdom at the hands of redneck supernazi misogyny.
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Jan 6, 2017 05:29
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Maxwell Lord posted:So yeah all those stories about hate crimes increasing in the wake of the election are fake. Literal Nazis being appointed to cabinet positions will hurt nobody. You need to read the news carefully. The stories are of the increase in reports of bias-related incidents following Trump's election. The main/only source for these stories is the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hatewatch program: "reports from news articles, social media, and direct submissions via our #ReportHate intake page." 'Incidents' are defined as anything from actual hate crimes to the overhearing of someone using a slur. The "#ReportHate intake page" is completely anonymous and overtly partisan. The largest number of the reports come from gradeschools, K-12. Most reports are unverified. Even with these loose guidelines, the SPLC has only tallied around 1000 reports of incidents since the election - and they note that the rate of reports is declining. The point is not that hate crimes don't occur, but that these fantasies about roving street gangs and concentration camps for gays are ridiculous. However well-intentioned the SPLC may be, it's feeding a (social) media circus that obfuscates rather than clarifies. It distracts from the failures of liberalism that led to this clown-man getting elected, turning it into an issue of 'harassment' by nebulous bad people. People are under immense pressure to 'get involved' - like, "can't you see that the starving orphans are dying? Donate to this charity now!" My question is why are those orphans are starving in the first place. Why is this charity presented as the only viable alternative? That's what you should stop to ask yourself. You do not gotta go fast. Back to the topic of Rogue One: one of its larger accomplishments is subtly reconfigure the Death Star's threat. The emphasis is no longer on the indiscriminate "planet-killer" but on its use as a precision-targeted weapon, cutting down on (relative) collateral damage. The imagery is less apocalyptic and more simply dystopian. it's certainly not apocalyptic in the same way as in A New Hope. There the threat was of liberal Alderann being altogether replaced - transformed-into/revealed-as a metal nightmare world. The space station in Rogue One is not presented as an environment. It really is 'just a space station' that coexists in space along with 'rebel base' and 'refinery'.
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Jan 6, 2017 07:41
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Jack Gladney posted: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: 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. The point of A New Hope is that you are already the Empire. Leia is a well-meaning Imperial. Alderann is an Imperial planet. The basic narrative of A New Hope is that Luke cycles through a collection of potential future worlds. Leaving the status quo of the desert is extremely difficult for him. The question posed in the film is "what world will Luke choose for himself?" And the film simultaneously questions his choices. Alderann is a wrong choice. In a subtle shift in perspective, Luke perceives Alderann as a capitalist hell - as in They Live. Alderann was a wrong choice. Yavin is the best choice, and even that is criticized by the time we reach Episode 5. Rogue One's narrative is different because Rogue One is about different characters. All the coexisting worlds emerge out of Jyn's repressed past - everything skipped over with the title card. These are places she would have been if she stayed with her father, or with Saw. The protagonist characters are haunted by the past, but have no future. Traveling between different worlds is easy for them, but it brings no comfort. Jyn ends up at Yavin very early in the narrative - and then leaves. There is no shocking revelation that the Republic is the Empire. Both the Empire and the Republican Rebels are external to her. They appear only as a dark spot on the horizon of these tiny, fractured worlds. The 'best' world ends up not being Yavin but Scarif - resembling an Elysium-like 'gated community', its mix of tropical paradise and military installation is remarkably similar to Yavin's jungle base. And of course Scarif is threatened with laser-destruction the same way Yavin will be. Going beyond A New Hope, Rogue One doesn't just equate the Republic with the Empire. It equates the Rebellion with the Empire.
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Jan 6, 2017 17:50
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Basebf555 posted:When is it again that Luke perceives Alderaan as a capitalist hell? Doesn't he have zero knowledge of Alderaan and then it blows up without him ever setting foot on it? That's the point. Alderann the literal planet represents Luke's dreams about the Republic and his father, etc. He's never actually been there, and he will never actually go there. When he arrives, he finds something entirely different: the dream is dead. It's a variation on the 'idealistic bumpkin goes to the big city' narrative. Alderann is not at all what he expected. Alderann is the Death Star, metaphorically. It's in the same sense that the Matrix is just a simulation 'on top of' the robot hell world. "The world you live in is just a sugar-coated topping," etc. We are already living in the end times. The apocalyptic/dystopian future is latent in the present. This is why A New Hope does not function as a film about nuclear paranoia very well. The fear isn't so much that the world will end, but that the world will continue devoid of freedom. We'll persist in a sad metal environment without trees, and we'll all be given numbers. It's a sequel to THX 1138. Lucas made the Stormtroopers clones in Episode 2 to emphasize this. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Jan 6, 2017 |
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Jan 6, 2017 18:08
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It's worth noting that this is why claims that 'TFA is exactly like A New Hope' are completely misguided. When you see someone appeasing this myth, you know they think in terms of plot and not storytelling. After all, whose dream is crushed when the not-Coruscant blows up in TFA? The Resistance people have already given up on the Republic, building their resistance against a perceived commie-fascist conspiracy (there's your Hillary analogy). FN is running away from the galaxy. Rey wants to be a smuggler. Han wants to be a smuggler. None of these characters care about the Republic. The destruction of the not-Coruscant is completely superfluous, narratively. It's an afterthought.
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Jan 6, 2017 18:36
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Waffles Inc. posted:Their mentioning of the EU is just tangential--the point is that there's no reason to assume Dantooine is uninhabited. Important note: like the Ewoks and Boba Fett, Tatooine is never actually named in A New Hope. But the point of the similar '-ooine' name is nonetheless to imply that these are similar planets. This is clarified in the opening crawl of Episode 6. Leia would certainly prefer if a place like Tatooine were blown up, instead of her homeworld. The original intent may very well have been for her to blame Tatooine directly - but that would have created a plot hole, because the Empire was already well aware that she was trying to smuggle the plans away from Tatooine. Hence this unseen third planet that is like Tatooine but not. Lucas did the same thing with Sido-Dyas.
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Jan 6, 2017 19:03
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homullus posted:They are not building a resistance to a conspiracy unless the relationship between the con and the mark is a conspiracy. TFA is a si vis pacem, para bellum fantasy. The Resistance only exists because those plucky You're not entirely wrong, but the nuance is that what the Resistance is resisting is the Republic itself - hence the indifference to its disappearance. What disappears in the burst of red light is the last trace of an illusion nobody bought - that the Republic was anything but a communist (but also fascist?) conspiracy to dupe people into complacency. The other nuance (or lack thereof) is that TFA has collapsed the Empire and Vader's revolutionary plot against the Empire into a single contradictory enemy. Hence the New Order is commie-fascist, as in Orwell's 1984: "The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that." But the New Order are not terrorists, they are a conspiracy fantasy of government in the abstract. The film depicts a literal Red Dawn, with the Resistance as self-styled survivalist Wolverines (or, to put a point on it, Hedgehogs). Their enemy is merely The Fed - just as Sonic fights centralized control: "I've turned all the animals on the island into robots! ... All of them go about in accordance to my orders. In other words, Sonic, everyone on the island is your enemy!" TFA of course has much less nuance than Red Dawn, where there is an overlapping of conservatism and leftist ideals. Its message (openly stated by one of the characters) is that those rednecks could be the true socialists if we give them half a chance. (And like Rogue One, Dawn ends with the heroes dead and their sacrifice exploited). As a contrast, TFA's Resistance is feudal. And its 'us versus them' conflict forecloses the communist solution. That is droids, scavengers, and stormtroopers united in solidarity against both 'sides'.
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Jan 6, 2017 22:27
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Cnut the Great posted:Well, that's wrong. The Republic is still worth preserving, even as corrupted as it's become. The idea that it all must be torn down and re-booted rather than simply reformed through hard work, communication, and effort is what leads to the Empire's ascension. Your viewpoint is embodied by the character of Count Dooku, a political idealist whose tear-it-all-down mentality is revealed to be merely another tool of the Sith. That's a complete misinterpretation. Dooku's goal was to recruit as many Jedi as he could (along with other groups) in a plot to assassinate Sidious/Palpatine. He is not an anarchist. He is directly paralleled with Vader in Empire. But, unlike Vader, Dooku is not a revolutionary. His failure is not his 'idealism'. It is, rather, his feudalist ideology. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Jan 6, 2017 |
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Jan 6, 2017 22:36
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Cnut the Great posted:No, his initial goal is implied to have been exactly what it appeared to be on the surface--to break away from the Republic and start a new, more free, less corrupt democratic society. His goal becomes recruiting Obi-Wan (his beloved Qui-Gon's "son") specifically--not "as many Jedi as possible"--to overthrow Sidious, because that is what Sith do. Dooku likely started out with good intentions but became corrupted by Sith ideology, and is now seeking his own apprentice to help him overthrow his master and take over the galaxy. You've gotten mixed up on a few points. Vader did not 'start out with pure intentions'. That was the fascist Anakin. Vader is not, in any of the films, "consumed by lust". Not even Anakin is motivated by a lust for power. His fantasy is of total subservience. He wants power for Padme. Also, Dooku's goal was to recruit Jedis. That's why he forces them to surrender, rather than kill them: Dooku: You have fought gallantly. Worthy of recognition in the history archives of the Jedi Order. Now it is finished. Surrender, and your lives will be spared. Dooku had to take the Jedi by force because he knew the Jedi would not come willingly. He was hoping to deprogram them: Dooku: The Dark Side has clouded their vision. Hundreds of senators are now under the influence of a Sith lord called Darth Sidious. Obi-Wan: I don't believe you.
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Jan 6, 2017 22:57
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Cnut the Great posted:What people need to understand is that there is no such thing as utopia. Human systems will always be imperfect and prone to being taken advantage of, and there will always be selfish people trying to use the organs of democracy to serve their own interests at the expense of everyone else. These things will never, ever change, unless we all eventually become something other than human, which I guess is technically a possibility some day down the line. But as long as we're all still humans, democracy will always be a constant struggle against these forces. And this is your ideological failure. Vader explicitly stands for the politics of the inhuman - true universal democracy, which you stand in opposition to. Christ is alien to your logic. A threat. Freeing the droids is too radical a concept. We need to be pragmatic, gradualist - not idealistic. Liberal Capitalist Democracy will sort itself out if we simply communicate more - promote a free marketplace of ideas. We are at the end of history; the Republic is the best of all possible systems. Politics is over. It's now a matter of administration. Wait, why do the Seperatists want to separate? Why did Trump win? We're bringing them freedom. They're supposed to greet us as liberators. It's her turn now. Vote for us, you racist idiots! We're better than Hitler - what more do you want?
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Jan 7, 2017 00:31
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DeimosRising posted:I haven't seen the OT in a long time. What is the basis of your claim, more or less fundamental to your whole reading, that Vader is a revolutionary figure? His speech to Luke in Cloud City doesn't really convey that as I remember but I may be getting foggy in my old age. Vader is Space Christ, and he rejects the false dichotomy between Republic and Imperial. When he dies, the Force (aka The Dark Side) dies with him and all that remains is the Holy Spirit. His goal is to supplant the Emperor, yet not to restore the Republic. He is not a Seperatist, not a Rebel or Resistance. He stands for the truth in its most terrifying dimension. He mingles with the intolerable alien 'scum' of the universe. He appropriates state power and turns it toward the pursuit of justice. He offers his hand to Luke because he knows their ideals are the same. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Jan 7, 2017 |
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Jan 7, 2017 03:04
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Maxwell Lord posted:He also murders people who displease him. Also children. Darth Vader does not kill any children. He kills an almost equal number of Rebel soldiers/pilots and high-ranking space Nazis. Plus the Emperor.
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Jan 7, 2017 03:26
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You can tell he's not Anakin whenever he's in a black robot suit and voiced by James Earl Jones.Maxwell Lord posted:Not for being Nazis. For not being good enough at being Nazis. 1) That's not why he kills the nazis. 2) Vader tortures Han for no reason except to demonstrate why Yoda's teachings of detachment from the material world are unethical. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Jan 7, 2017 |
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Jan 7, 2017 04:28
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Maxwell Lord posted:One for jumping out of hyperspace too close to the system, another for letting the Falcon get away. You're getting ahead of yourself. Why do you interpret such things as 'not letting the Falcon get away' as nazi traits? Why is violence inherently bad in this series of action movies? Luke kills vastly more people than Vader - including innocent POWs. Also you're getting some of the chronology mixed up. Vader has an arc, and changes as a character after he's comically defeated in A New Hope. After his targeting computer fails, Vader no longer serves the Empire.
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Jan 7, 2017 05:20
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Idahoant posted:He becomes Darth Vader when he is given that name by Sidious, which is before he kills the younglings. Being given a name is not the same as being that person. The point is that Darth Vader emerges after all traces of Anakin Skywalker have been burnt away, and the character is reborn in a different body. It's at that point that he fully becomes the name. This is what distinguishes Vader from Dooku, who maintains a distance from the Darth Tyrannus name and insists that he is still a Jedi. (And, despite being a cyborg, Greivous doesn't even get a 'Darth' title. He still operates under his birth name.) Vader has much more in common with Maul - who displays little trace of his former self, and whose face tattoos function like Vader's mask. (Maul is, however, fighting on behalf of 'his people', 'his culture', or whatever. He's a bit more small-time.) quote:I do not see how Dooku's actions agree with a plot to assassinate Palpatine - he has Palpatine prisoner on his flagship in the beginning of ROTS, he could easily execute him, and he simply waits for the rescue to arrive. Dooku needs help to kill Palpatine for the same reason that Vader does in the OT. Palpatine is almost literally the embodiment of the capitalist system, and can only be defeated if capitalism ends. Dooku's goal is to bring back feudalism (alliance with the Jedi) while Vader's goal is dictatorship of the proletariat (alliance with Luke and, by extension, all the oppressed who serve the Rebel Alliance out of desperation and lack of alternatives). SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Jan 8, 2017 |
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Jan 8, 2017 01:26
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In more concrete terms, Grievous is used to illustrate that Vader isn't just a cyborg. Vader is distinguished by his attitude towards being cyborg. While Grievous is constantly trying to reassert his humanity, Vader embraces the machine. Being 'more machine than man' is a choice.
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Jan 8, 2017 01:59
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DeimosRising posted:Ok. The messianic imagery is pretty clear later on and his lack of class distinction down to being part droid I get. Can you explain what shows him as being interested in authentic justice? Clearly he's not down with the Empire or Republic, but his egalitarian principles don't seem so obvious to me. His offer to Luke reads as dictatorial, even monarchical. It seems a stretch to give him even Blanquist credit at that point. He seems more like a Christ figure who's being syncretized with the devil (only partially in the positive diabolical sense) and is both enacting the Temptation on Luke, and himself being tempted. His actor definitely sells more as conflicted and uncertain than possessed of a firm ethical principle as I recall him between the Death Star and the Throne Room. And while he's perfectly willing to interact on equalish terms with the scum of the galaxy, I don't remember any indication that he's concerned with their lives. The first thing to keep in mind is that Lucas' Six Star Wars films are told from the perspective of the Republic, so characters like Maul and Vader are pushed to the margins. Many viewers, uncritical of the Republic ideology, automatically dismiss Maul as 'just bad because of his race' - when Maul's incomprehensibility is actually the result of Republic racism/classism. Such concepts as droids being people are absolutely alien to these viewers, for the same reason. This means that, although the film's are about the birth and eventual crucifixion of Vader, we see this event from the outside. "Since the ideological universe of Star Wars is the New Age pagan universe, it is quite consequent that its central figure of evil should echo Christ. Within the pagan horizon the event of Christ is the ultimate scandal. " Marquand's 'preferred' reading of Episode 6 is that Vader's ethical regression back into Anakin is a good thing. So when Vader hesitates, as you point out, it quite literally the last temptation of Christ - as told from the perspective of the people trying desperately to tempt him. This, not the cool black clothing, is the ultimate seductive power of the dark side. Vader is not overly concerned with the lives of the people, but it's because his actual concern is their soul - their spirit. This is effectively what's at stake when Luke attempts to save Anakin and kill Vader in the process. It's a repetition/inversion of when Anakin breaks Padme's spirit in an effort to keep her alive. People have recently deployed a similar temptation by appealing to my sense of empathy: "how can you criticize Hillary? Don't you have any empathy for minorities?" This is where we should move beyond empathy and into love - love for those considered beneath empathy. Love thy neighbour. It seems we pretty much agree on all this, but I think you miss the importance of Luke. Luke knows Vader is right. Deep in his heart, he knows the Rebels aren't good enough. But the point of recruiting Luke is not that Luke himself is so special, but that he is the heart of the Rebellion. Those little people (the same 'faceless' characters celebrated in Rogue One) will go where he goes. Implicit in the teaming of Luke and Vader is solidarity between the Rebel 'scum' and the Imperial 'scum' - all the scum of the universe. But this can only happen under Vader's terms. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 04:02 on Jan 8, 2017 |
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Jan 8, 2017 03:59
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Hodgepodge posted:So the cantina at Mos Eisley was actually the best choice all along? Obiwan's classist disdain for 'scum' is the precise reason why he lies to Luke about his parentage. Love for the 'scum' is a massive threat to the Jedi and the Republic. People might stop supporting them if the truth about droid slavery were emphasized. So Vader is made into the ultimate enemy - considered to be worse than Palpatine.
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Jan 8, 2017 05:36
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DeimosRising posted:Maybe I'm being too literal about the ruling as father and son thing, but it doesn't seem like Vader has a clear ethical and political alternative in mind That's not so much Vader as the film itself. Episode 6 ends with the heroes going on a cheeky anarchoprimivist vacation, pushing aside any worries and questions about what will happen next. Ok, you're celebrating the Ewoks and their primitive communism - but how are anarchoprimitivists going to build spaceships? What will happen to these Ewoks? Will they be assimilated into the liberal-capitalist Republic (as Jar Jar was), or left in the forest without healthcare? What will happen to the droids? Will they still be enslaved? It's a fake ending. A 'dance party' ending. Vader's death brought Luke the freedom to choose any fate for himself. But, as Ungulateman notes, everything points to Luke simply restoring the Republic - and if that's the case, then nothing is fixed. Luke has simply looped back to Episode 1, and the Emperor will inevitably reemerge. (Abrams' Episode 7 kinda stumbled, redundantly, towards this same idea - but with something like your literal interpretation: that the Republic just needed more 'family values' to defeat the foreign enemy. In a similar way, Cnut says that the Republic just needed 'more communication' to defeat the foreign enemy. But these paths all lead back to Episode 1. None of them would free the droids.) The overall point of the 6 films is to figure out how to break the awful destructive cycle. And there's only one way to do this - to defeat the Emperor permanently: go with Vader. This is what Rogue One is about : time is a closed loop, but the loop is modifiable. This is one point where things could have turned out differently. ungulateman posted:The original cuts, in his mind, are a way to break free of this cycle - but they can't be bought, or negotiated for, or found. In order to save Star Wars, you must steal it. To be clear: this excludes Episode 6. The special editions, the three prequel films (and Rogue One, and Force Awakens) - these are all a response to Episode 6's failure, its bullshit non-ending. They are an attempt to build off that failure and redeem the film.
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Jan 8, 2017 10:49
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Hodgepodge posted:Thinking more about Vader as Christ, I don't think it is tenable to merely say that he is depicted as evil because we see him from the Republic's perspective. To be clear, there is no making excuses for Anakin. He was a bad person, and then he was burnt alive and put through other unimaginable torture. Anakin truly died. And I mean that in a very specific sense: "The victim as it were survives its own death: all different forms of traumatic encounters, independently of their specific nature (social, natural, biological, symbol...) lead to the same result - a new subject emerges which survives its own death, the death (erasure) of its symbolic identity. There is no continuity between this new 'post-traumatic' subject (suffering Alzheimer's or other cerebral lesions, etc.): after the shock, literally a new subject emerges. Its features are well-known from numerous descriptions: lack of emotional engagement, profound indifference and detachment - it is a subject who is no longer 'in-the-world' in the Heideggerian sense of engaged embodied existence. This subject lives death as a form of life - his life is death-drive embodied, a life deprived of erotic engagement; and this holds for henchmen no less than for his victims." -Zizek Vader is quite literally an undead zombie/demon. The logic is familiar from any zombie movie: that's not your dad. It looks like him, but it's not him. It's something else. Vader's indifference to the Death Star is a result of this trauma, and that indifference is not the same as complicity. Vader has all along voiced his opposition to Tarkin's plan, but it's stated outright that he's on a leash. Vader's subordinate status in Episode 4 stands for the unrealized potential of the merely-bad idiots of the Empire to become diabolically Evil, and therefore indistinguishable from the good. This, of course, is the what Rogue One and Empire Strikes Back are about : the characters kept on a leash, and Vader finally being unleashed. And I think you miss the radical point of the Bible and of Star Wars: as Zizek notes, only a suffering God can save us. Not a bad God. Vader suffers in solidarity with people.
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Jan 8, 2017 21:03
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Hodgepodge posted:I am saying that there are people who never needed Christ but were forced to accept him. For these people, Christ came to enslave them. The truly terrifying part is that the suffering inflicted on them thereby lead many to embrace Christ. Christians learned that by inflicting suffering, they could make Christ necessary to people who never needed him. Who are these people who never needed the universal emancipation that Christ stands for? In Star Wars terms, you are implicitly taking about the primitive-communist Ewoks. Weren't they 'better off' not being discovered? The first problem here is that, again, the Ewoks don't have healthcare. They practice cannibalism and so-on. But, moreover: the ship has sailed. Now that they've been contacted, there's no going back. So what are they going towards? This imagery is very deliberately racially charged, but the point of any such 'first contact' story (as Star Trek has always toyed with) is that these 'primitive' people confront us with our own limitations. Will the Ewoks be brothers in a true universal democracy, or will they be simply assimilated into a Republic as token faces of the liberal multiculture (as Jar Jar was)? You can say that Jar Jar was better off in the swamp under Boss Nass' rule, but the truth is that the Republic's colonialism - what ripped the Gungans violently out of their life-world - is also what opened up the space of universality for them. "Another example to make this clear, one of my heroes Malcolm X, the great American fighter for black rights, who was a little bit more violent than Martin Luther King jr., chose to replace his family name with just an X, as the unknown, because at an immediate level he wanted to emphasize how the blacks, by being torn out of their African ancestral homes, are deprived of their roots. But the programme of Malcolm X was not, 'so let’s return to those roots,' but X means: what if we grasp this very void into which our enslavement put us, the fact that we don’t have any genuine tradition to rely on, that we have to, as it were, collectively, re-invent our identity as a unique opportunity of freedom. And it’s also clear that he followed this line, in the end he was right, he found a new universalist frame in Islam. He had no dreams about returning to origins." -Zizek In much the same way, Martin Luther King is much more a Christian than any of the people who sought to oppress him. The danger is in saying that universality itself is the problem, and 'if you have a point of view, then you are truly lost!'
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Jan 10, 2017 01:38
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Jack Gladney posted: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. It has nothing to do with 'abandoning traditions'. X found a new universalist frame in Islam. In Christianity, you have the Holy Spirit which is the community of believers. The origin of these believers is irrelevant: "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." Phi230 posted:Star wars thread, in which SMG defends the White Man's Burden That is precisely the opposite of what I wrote the burden is on the Ewoks. Will they get such things as universal healthcare, and what kind of bullshit will they have to go through to get it? Can they coexist without being exploited? The point of evoking the 'violent' X is that they will undoubtedly have to fight for it.
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Jan 10, 2017 02:31
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Hodgepodge posted:There were early Christians who encountered Buddhism and argued that the two faiths were identical. Are you arguing that the origin of the community of believers is irrelevant in that sense, that we should recognize "the Holy Spirit" as independent of this or that tradition and form a greater community based on a mutual desire for emancipation? Correct!
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Jan 10, 2017 03:44
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As I said, Star Trek toys with the concept of antiimperialism by trading in 'moral ambiguity'. Here's their rationale, from The Next Generation: "The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules; it is a philosophy... and a very correct one. History has proven again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well-intentioned that interference may be, the results are always disastrous." The very basic question here: what is wrong with the Federation's social and economic systems, that they automatically sow disaster at the slightest touch? Note a key detail: Picard does not talk about systemic problems. The Federation's 'philosophy' is that there is nothing wrong with the system. In their view, the inherent problem is with 'mankind' and, so, we have This is the same ideology promoted by Cnut: "Human systems will always be imperfect and prone to being taken advantage of, and there will always be selfish people trying to use the organs of democracy to serve their own interests at the expense of everyone else. These things will never, ever change, unless we all eventually become something other than human, which I guess is technically a possibility some day down the line. But as long as we're all still humans, democracy will always be a constant struggle against these forces." HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:In fact, the "X" is about a new tradition. It brings us back to the point that Rogue One's title refers to the purely made-up title given to the heroes' repurposed space truck. There's no official name for what these characters are.* This is how Rogue One recontextualizes Empire Strikes Back. The rebels now attempt to honor the fallen by appropriating the 'Rogue' callsign - giving it to the fighters in Episode 5, making it official, part of the institution. (The numbers of the fighters count up from Rogue Two, while the first is referred to 'Rogue Leader' out of deference). The gulf between the name and their accomplishments now contributes to Luke's disenchantment with the rebellion, prompting his spiritual crisis in that film. *It's no coincidence that Vader explodes onto the scene at the exact point that the protagonists are all killed, like a vengeful ghost. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Jan 10, 2017 |
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Jan 10, 2017 18:38
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Hodgepodge posted:What do you make of Q in that context, SMG? He seems to be Rodenberry's admission that there is something beyond this state and that humanity can be "something other than human." Q identifies this potential as residing within our humanity itself and seems to be a force pushing Picard to become "more human than human." I'm not very familiar with that character, but I do know that the fuckin' Borg were to eventually appear as a dark mirror to the federation. The Death Star as a cube instead of a sphere, hidden within so many Alderanns. The capitalist machine with the utopian fascade, as with Naboo's castle that conceals a mining facility: "But Alderaan is peaceful! We have no weapons." -Princess Leia "This also is a legacy of Gene [Roddenberry]'s. He felt very strongly that the Federation would not build warships per se, but rather a fleet of scientific exploration vessels with weapons designed for defense rather than offense." -Ron Moore
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Jan 10, 2017 19:05
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Jack Gladney posted: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. The series repeatedly stresses that 'they don't have money anymore', but it's never entirely clear what that means. But to be sure: "not having currency" is absolutely not the same as "not having capitalism". "There's nothing wrong with our philosophy. We work to better ourselves and the rest of Humanity." "What does that mean exactly?" "It means... it means we don't need money!" -Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Money and capital are distinct, so what you see in Star Trek is a vague brand of 'moneyless capitalism', of the sort promoted by Thomas Greco Jr.: "It is possible to organize an entirely new structure of money, banking, and finance, one that is interest-free, decentralized, and controlled, not by banks or central governments, but by individuals and businesses that associate and organize themselves into cashless trading networks. In brief, any group of people can organize to allocate their own collective credit amongst themselves, interest-free. This is merely an extension of the common business practice of selling on open account – 'I’ll ship you the goods now and you can pay me later,' except it is organized, not on a bilateral basis, but within a community of many buyers and sellers. Done on a large enough scale that includes a sufficiently broad range of goods and services, such systems can avoid the dysfunctions inherent in conventional money and banking. They can open the way to more harmonious and mutually beneficial relationships that enable the emergence of true economic democracy. [...] Like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other networks that are purely social, cashless trading networks will eventually grow exponentially—and that will mark a revolutionary shift in political as well as economic empowerment. ... As trade exchanges master these dimensions of design and operation, they will become models for other exchanges to follow. Then the rapid growth phase will begin, leading eventually to an Internet-like global trading network that will make money obsolete and enable a freer, more harmonious society to emerge." -"Reclaiming the Credit Commons: Towards a Butterfly Society" "This approach to healing capitalism is like reprogramming cancer cells. Once a far-fetched idea, advances in gene therapy now suggest the future possibility of reprogramming the DNA of cancer cells in the body, to stop them from replicating. In the same way, different forms of money could support life, rather than subjecting it to the demands of their own replication. [...] More of us may stop ... worrying about capitalism and the planet, and instead we can adjust our own lives to focus on nurturing the aspects of economy and society that be healthy [sic] and remove underlying causes of disease." -Jem Bendell and Ian Doyle, "Healing Capitalism" SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Jan 10, 2017 |
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Jan 10, 2017 20:10
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Xealot posted:The Borg are a dark mirror Federation, but as an absolutely Communist bogeyman. They're an imperial collective that erases race, class, and sex, by alternately evoking pod-person zombie ego death and body horror imagery a la Giger, Cronenberg, or Tetsuo, the Iron Man. I find it appropriate that in 90's Star Trek, the closest thing to demonic evil isn't something like Q, who's an inscrutable trickster god, but a post-human, post-capitalist horde of cyborgs that seeks to erase Western civilization through the Singularity. As Zizek notes, though, the true image of the communist collective is in the collection of freaks and outcasts - exactly what Rogue One depicts. So you're exactly right that the Borg are a bogeyman - but only a bogeyman. A fantasy of pure evil from Outside. It's worth repeating: "whenever we encounter such a purely evil Outside, we should gather the courage to endorse the Hegelian lesson: in this pure Outside, we should recognize the distilled version of our own essence." The Borg are the totalitarian core of liberalism, assimilating those deemed technologically advanced enough - that is the prime directive, after all. The singularity isn't the threat in Star Trek. The series is all about the worship of the technological singularity as the power that will purify capitalism. The borg merely present the inevitable byproducts of this. The Borg, in Star Wars terms, function exactly like the First Order 'commu-fascists' at the heart of the Republic, or the Geonosians. It's less zombie imagery and far more bug/drone imagery. Zombies don't have a central queen/computer. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Jan 10, 2017 |
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Jan 10, 2017 21:24
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Phi230 posted:SMG I wanna read your full leftist reading of Rogue One that shits good and I need it The opening scene of Rogue One is a Gojira reference. Galen Erso is confronted with the choice between torture and suicide, as Serizawa was in the original Gojira film: Serizawa: "If the oxygen destroyer is used even once, politicians from around the world will see it. Of course, they'll want to use it as a weapon. Bombs versus bombs, missiles versus missiles, and now a new superweapon to throw upon us all! As a scientist - no, as a human being - I can't allow that to happen! [...] Until I die, how can I be sure I won't be forced by someone to make the device again?" Edwards takes things further by showing - as we've seen with the dozens of Godzilla sequels - that suicide (repressing the discovery) is only a temporary solution. As with the challenge posed by the Ewoks, the fundamental question with this new discovery is; what kind of system can we trust with this incredible power source? It's obviously not the Empire - but it's not the Alliance To Restore The Republic either. If they were to simply sell - or even give away - 'clean' energy, in a universe of droid slavery and other exploitation, they would be no different from notable supervillain Tony Stark. Free energy isn't actually free. It comes from somewhere. And there are always byproducts. It's important to stress that science, in the abstract, is not to blame, and that ignorance is not a solution. "Maybe the problem is not [the scientific discovery] itself, but rather the context of power relations within which it functions." The only way to truly stop the Death Star is not necessarily to blow it up, but to pay careful attention to its antagonistic socioeconomic context. The emergence of the Death Star, however awful, is just a symptom of the actual problem. In other words, we should embrace Galen's incredible new power source as a point of contention, a shocking disruption of the status quo - an encapsulation of the fact that we were never free in the first place, even/especially in the Republic. So, as Zizek says: "precisely because they want to resolve all these secondary malfunctions of the global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is wrong with the system. It may be necessary to enter into tactical alliances with liberal communists in order to fight racism, sexism and religious obscurantism, but it’s important to remember exactly what they are up to." This is exactly what Rogue One is about. Jyn and the others work with the Rebels, but never for them - always maintaining a distance. And it's important that, in the context of this particular standalone film, the Death Star isn't destroyed. We simply end with the traces of Vader's future revolution quashed, and Princess Leia being handed the keys to the proverbial kingdom. Those Death Star plans implicitly contain the design for Galen's incredible reactor. So, once again, Alderann and the Death Star are linked. The black-and-white imagery at the start of A New Hope is given fresh nuance. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Jan 12, 2017 |
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Jan 12, 2017 01:56
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Neo Rasa posted:I'm not seeing how that aspect of the Federation/Starfleet is a new special "reading" of Star Trek when that's explicitly the plot of like half the episodes in the franchise and gets brought up in the movies a lot. The endlessly-serial nature of Star Trek means that it trades in 'moral ambiguity', rather than ethics. (The medium is the message.) The ethical response to Star Trek is that the Federation are the bad guys, but the actual series merely expresses a gradualist philosophy of addressing each secondary malfunction as it pops up. It's soporific. Anticapitalism is truly alien to the Trek universe, while the literal aliens are just incredibly boring humans. Huzanko posted:So what you're saying is that the Death Star is Trump and that he has a weakness built into his exhaust port? People keep trying to elevate Trump into the ultimate evil, when he's really just a Nute Gunray idiot clown sort of character. Liberals think America is reliving the plot of The Force Awakens, and they're all Poe Damerons - cruising through cyberspace, sniping neonazis on twitter. "Where there's light there's hope!" It's like no, sorry; America's reliving the plot of The Phantom Menace, and you're Sio Bibble. SuperMechagodzilla fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Jan 12, 2017 |
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Jan 12, 2017 02:56
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Nielsen posted:Yeah the irony of arguing in here whether the film is "left enough" is pretty tragic considering. But indeed that is where the friction lies: SW, the ultimate capitalist vehicle peddling poo poo about "hope" and "resistance" against possibly itself. This is not a matter of attacking/defending 'Star Wars' or 'George Lucas'. Star Wars is a series of films. George Lucas is an old man. They exist, and so what? What is at stake is your own ability to read.
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Jan 12, 2017 19:29
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Once again, people attempt to distract from the truth by hand-wringing over whether the people can handle it. Not-coincidentally, this is a plot point in like half of all Godzilla movies.
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Jan 12, 2017 19:59
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Maxwell Lord posted:That's the thing about subtext, though, it's kinda submerged into things where it's not obvious. It's in popular culture. "The problem with kitsch is that it is all too profound, manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while true art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract it's subject from it's deepest context of historical reality."
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Jan 12, 2017 23:12
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Hodgepodge posted:Are you sure that we're discussing the actual demographic realities of fanfic writers or just how one abstract category (fanfiction) overlaps with another (blue collar worker) in our minds based on feels? This, plus "poor people don't make art" is really weird.
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Jan 13, 2017 01:11
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Vindicator posted:Because billing the military for some bullshit ungainly cargo hauler built using the chassis of an already-existing vehicle saves on R&D costs. The military industrial complex is daaaamn lucrative in a galaxy far, far away... It's actually the other way around: the walkers started out as cargo transports before being loaded with armor and deployed as robotic war elephants. In Rogue One, they are still 'just' elephants, not yet really weaponized. The joke is akin to the prequel reveal that Tie Fighters are mass-produced Jedi ships. In 2017, the imagery of the four-legged cargo robots reads as BigDog imagery, of the same sort deployed in Battle: Los Angeles and the no-budget masterpiece Robot World.  The fact that the walkers are for cargo ties in to how the titular Rogue One is a cargo ship staffed with working-class imperials, and how the tropical planet at the end is a rather peaceful place, all things considered. The facility really is nothing more than an giant databank - nothing inherently evil. It's Elysium imagery. These particular technologies are to be seized, not destroyed.
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Jan 17, 2017 16:45
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Cnut the Great posted:My main point was that Rogue One being anti-fascist (or subversively Zizekian, somehow) doesn't particularly impress me. All the Star Wars movies are anti-fascist. It's not particularly difficult to make an anti-fascist movie. That's not to say Rogue One's a bad movie, because it's not, but I feel like a lot of people both here and in the media are placing way too much of a premium on how much the movie affirms their own political leanings. This is getting into some "are videogames art??" stuff that overcomplicates and obfuscates what art is, and how it relates to the political. Videogames can be, but generally are not, read as art. That's all there is to it. The trick to reading things as,however, involves knowing how to stay at the surface, how to subtract a subject from its 'deep' context in historical reality, to avoid manipulating/being manipulated by deep libidinal and ideological forces. The idea that Rogue One is 'secretly subversive' is one example of bad reading. The film is overtly, in both its form and content, about how radical politics are appropriated and defanged by 'post-political' liberal ideologists. The only question is how you interpret this. It's whether you conclude (like Walter Chaw) that liberalism is really great(!) because it's a safe alternative to true freedom and we should praise Disney's 'progressive' vision for that reason, or whether you note (as Zizek does) that Hollywood is now selling radical anticapitalism in films like Rogue One, Elysium, Mockingjay, etc. - and that we should avoid foolish cynicism by taking these films more seriously than ever. Overidentification is the political strategy.
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Jan 17, 2017 22:28
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Hodgepodge posted:My inclination would be to celebrate this. It must be said in favour of capitalism that it will absolutely sell us its own demise if there is a short-term dollar in it. The trouble there is that it is incredibly difficult for fans to imagine Star Wars without capitalism. The dark side has clouded their vision. Elysium, the best Star Wars film ever made, was rejected by nerds because it is one of the few genre films to directly attack the capitalist system. The film explicitly states that the liberal 'Republic' practices wage- and droid-slavery, and presents its Vader analogue as an ethical hero overcoming his own pathological motivations. (Usually capitalism can only be addressed obliquely, so that you typically get some substitution - a vague tentacled blob, as in Cabin In The Woods. Even Star Wars itself refers to capitalism as 'the dark side'.) Nerd critics of Elysium deemed it 'unrealistic' that liberal corporations would exploit the global south and that these poor would have a lower quality of life. 'Realistically', it was claimed, Star Trek replicators would bring about a pure and harmless capitalism - so there is no need for change. Nerds believe 'the technological singularity' will sort everything out - if it doesn't kill everyone. Obiwan: "If droids could think, there'd be none of us here, would there?" Zizek: "It is much easier for us to imagine the end of the world than a small change in the political system. Life on earth maybe will end, but somehow capitalism will go on." To this I would add that it is easier for fans to imagine the destruction of the entire Star Wars universe than to picture something as minor as 'not enslaving droids'.
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Jan 18, 2017 07:30
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Detective No. 27 posted:Yeah, Palpatine was a living Monkey Paw. Precisely. Palpatine never lies. He's just incredibly cynical, and is always proven right. "I love liberal democracy!" [Liberals start drone-striking foreign planets as part of an eternal terror-war.] "Hooray!" The only time Palpatine has ever been wrong is when he said Anakin killed Padme - and even that is not a lie. The fact that Padme killed herself, in an act of pure selflessness, is simply incomprehensible to him.
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Jan 20, 2017 00:47
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TheKingofSprings posted:He was pretty wrong about Luke Well no; the ambiguity of Lucas' films is in the near-certainty that he isn't - that Luke is indeed the ultimate dupe. JJ Abrams then made this 'canon.'
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Jan 20, 2017 02:56
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