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https://twitter.com/moviedetail/status/1310011092219830272
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Oct 9, 2020 18:46
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Rey's gonna scratch days into it I guess
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Oct 9, 2020 18:53
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The United States posted:Whether it's intentional or not, it does support and enhance the original thesis that America = Empire. PoC and women aren’t the fascists in America. Putting diversity on the oppressive side of the equation is way to equivocate and defang the themes of this franchise, not an allegory for our modern world
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Oct 9, 2020 18:54
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I don't understand how the Empire can be a stand-in for the U.S. when all the Empire officers typically talk with British accents. As a kid I always saw them as a stand-in to the British Empire and the Rebels as an American stand-in. In so much as a movie about wizards in space can have stand-ins.
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Oct 9, 2020 19:00
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Americans were never waiting for Britain to obliterate then from the sky. And the rebels didn't only win because the Hutts (French) were funding them.
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Oct 9, 2020 19:08
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:I don't understand how the Empire can be a stand-in for the U.S. when all the Empire officers typically talk with British accents. As a kid I always saw them as a stand-in to the British Empire and the Rebels as an American stand-in. The Empire is the US to the Rebels’ Vietcong, but presented in such a way as to make Americans identify with the VC.
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Oct 9, 2020 19:20
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:I don't understand how the Empire can be a stand-in for the U.S. when all the Empire officers typically talk with British accents. As a kid I always saw them as a stand-in to the British Empire and the Rebels as an American stand-in. Not all of the Imperials spoke with British accents in ANH. That happened in ESB, which, if I remember correctly, was because Irvin Kersner had an old teacher he didn't like who was British. Pretty much all of the Stormtroopers have an American accent (not officers, but certainly would represent the average American soldiers). The Imperial in ANH who tells Vader that holding Princess Leia will generate sympathy for the Rebellion in the Senate has an American accent. There are other examples all over the place in ANH. And lest we forget Darth Vader, the most famous Imperial ever, was dubbed from having a English accent to having an American one in post production. George Lucas said his original idea for Star Wars was to show a powerful Empire, like America, being defeated by a smaller, less advanced Rebellion, like the Vietcong, because, while he passed on making Apocalypse Now, he still wanted to make an anti-war movie. When people seemed to miss this, he tried to make it more obvious with the Ewoks in ROTJ. Trust me, the Empire is supposed to be America.
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Oct 9, 2020 19:28
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AdmiralViscen posted:PoC and women aren’t the fascists in America. Putting diversity on the oppressive side of the equation is way to equivocate and defang the themes of this franchise, not an allegory for our modern world
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Oct 9, 2020 19:40
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AdmiralViscen posted:PoC and women aren’t the fascists in America. Putting diversity on the oppressive side of the equation is way to equivocate and defang the themes of this franchise, not an allegory for our modern world Fascism in America is absolutely not the sole domain of white men. My city’s former police chief was a black woman who stood by and did nothing to stop her mixed race police force from brutally suppressing protestors. The reality of American fascism is absolutely built on the employment of minorities in order to further divide and oppress its targets. This isn’t 1936 anymore.
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Oct 9, 2020 19:47
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Sio posted:Fascism in America is absolutely not the sole domain of white men. My city’s former police chief was a black woman who stood by and did nothing to stop her mixed race police force from brutally suppressing protestors. See also; Kamala Harris
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Oct 9, 2020 19:51
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thrawn527 posted:Not all of the Imperials spoke with British accents in ANH. That happened in ESB, which, if I remember correctly, was because Irvin Kersner had an old teacher he didn't like who was British. Pretty much all of the Stormtroopers have an American accent (not officers, but certainly would represent the average American soldiers). The Imperial in ANH who tells Vader that holding Princess Leia will generate sympathy for the Rebellion in the Senate has an American accent. There are other examples all over the place in ANH. Another is "where are you taking this...thing" guy who was a British actor but dubbed by an American
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Oct 9, 2020 19:51
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:I don't understand how the Empire can be a stand-in for the U.S. when all the Empire officers typically talk with British accents. As a kid I always saw them as a stand-in to the British Empire and the Rebels as an American stand-in.
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Oct 9, 2020 20:07
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Ingmar terdman posted:Another is "where are you taking this...thing" guy who was a British actor but dubbed by an American Yeah, I almost used him too, but I couldn't quite remember the exact quote. But yeah, him. I've always liked ("...liked" might be the wrong word) how the EU used that one line, and how the Empire doesn't have any aliens (keep in mind, neither did the Rebellion until ROTJ, mainly because aliens are expensive to budget for in a movie) to create a whole culture of xenophobia existing in the Empire. Because that one dude said, "...thing" that one time. Even in ROTJ, the Rebellion had, what, a couple Mon Cals and Nien Nunb? Not exactly all inclusive.
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Oct 9, 2020 20:08
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Don't forget Pruneface!
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Oct 9, 2020 21:19
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Apart from Tarkin I think all the Imperial speaking voices in ANH are American.Halloween Jack posted:It's not fruitful to get hung up on that degree of specificity. Otherwise you have to figure out stuff like why the Imperial stormtroopers use a mix of British and German WWII-era guns as the base of the blaster props. (And also this is very right.)
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Oct 9, 2020 21:27
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Tarkin and Tagge are the only ones I can think of. All the dudes on the tantive are american too, just realizing that now
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Oct 9, 2020 22:02
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StashAugustine posted:Don't forget Pruneface! I absolutely forgot Pruneface. Hell, I'm still forgetting Pruneface.
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Oct 9, 2020 22:31
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I do think it’s interesting and worth talking about how in Squadrons, the majority of imperial and ex-imperial characters are PoC or otherwise minority-coded while the rebels, though largely aliens, are still mostly white-coded. The fact that the empire is still visibly and unambiguously evil is not contradictory to that point.
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Oct 9, 2020 22:35
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It's probably disney actively trying to counter the "empire is white supremacist" thing that exists in some fan circles (as evidenced by the thread). But it's very much in the vein of "I don't care if youre black, white, purple, squid, got a butt for a mouth"
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Oct 9, 2020 22:48
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Ingmar terdman posted:Tarkin and Tagge are the only ones I can think of. All the dudes on the tantive are american too, just realizing that now Most minor characters who needed ADR were dubbed with American actors since it was cheaper than flying the British actors to the US to re-record their lines. It may have been a creative choice, since Scottish accented Aunt Beru and Wedge were dubbed, but American accented Uncle Owen and Red Leader weren't.
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Oct 9, 2020 22:54
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I think it's more Disney wanting to divorce the Empire from its obvious Nazi codings, and she did more to a general "militancy is bad" message. I'm not going to look, because it will make me sad, but I'm sure some people have talked about how the first order is like the MAGA Chuds and Antifa all at once. When the most salient fact about the first order is that they are violent and angry in an unspecified way, and they blow up the government.
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Oct 9, 2020 22:57
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Sio posted:Fascism in America is absolutely not the sole domain of white men. My city’s former police chief was a black woman who stood by and did nothing to stop her mixed race police force from brutally suppressing protestors. Someone being duped or conditioned or bribed into supporting white supremacy is still supporting white supremacy. A Hispanic cop or a Black chief of police is not spearheading a Hispanic or Black fascist movement. They are powerless in their own system, beyond their little fiefdom (and even within it). But that’s kind of beside the point, and isn’t what I was saying. Casting Black actors as imperial leadership under Disney isn’t being done to strengthen or modernize the anti American themes of the franchise. These movies are not nuanced enough to capture the intricacies of american fascism, even if they wanted to. They should go broad with the allegory so it’s clearly readable, and that means white man bad guys and diverse rebels. They’re not doing that because they are intentionally paving over the allegory. The real life PoC serving the system are not the equivalent of high ranking imperial officers making the Big Decisions in these fictional narratives. Like, if they wanted to tell a story of how someone could be brainwashed into betraying their own class and peers by an oppressive system, they have Finn right here. They very much did not tell that story. AdmiralViscen fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Oct 10, 2020 |
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Oct 10, 2020 03:26
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thrawn527 posted:I've always liked ("...liked" might be the wrong word) how the EU used that one line, and how the Empire doesn't have any aliens (keep in mind, neither did the Rebellion until ROTJ, mainly because aliens are expensive to budget for in a movie) to create a whole culture of xenophobia existing in the Empire. Because that one dude said, "...thing" that one time. Leia has a day job as an Imperial senator, and she's dropping "walking carpet" and calling Han a shepherd as an insult, etc. It's easy to forget that pretty much the entire Alliance is made up of (former) Imperials. Luke is an Imperial citizen, Han is an imperial citizen.... The point of Star Wars has always been that the Alliance is moderately better - still led by a bunch of rich white slaveowners, but ones who are slightly less hostile to some minorities. Lucas picked this up and ran with it in the prequels, showing that human supremacism was baked into the Republic's ideology and was a major factor behind the Clone Wars. Anyways, I don't play videogames but it seems that, as with parsecs, we have another case of an EU thing misunderstanding what happens in the films. As gone over before, the First Order in the films is not the Empire. The First Order is fundamentally Vaderist and anti-Palpatine, so being inclusive to people of all races makes perfect sense. Snoke himself is a nine-foot-tall alien with claws! So, really, Disney hosed up by not going further. If the First Order is supposed to be modelled on Vader's teachings, its members should look like this:  Vader hangs out with freed slaves, lepers, aliens, etc.... everyone the Empire considers "scum", and that even the Alliance is wary of. These guys look an awful lot like the very sympathetic insurgents in Rogue One. There are two obvious reasons why Disney didn't include these guys, of course: 1) They wanted the baddies to be leftists, but if the leftist baddies actually explained what they stood for, then vast numbers of people would find them sympathetic. Imagine Hux screaming "trans rights are human rights!" or 'defund the police!" before he nukes the New Republic fleet, instead of making vague claims about "lies". Disney would be in a world of poo poo. 2) The diegetic explanation is, of course, that Palpatine is behind it all - and this provides a convenient excuse for all the First Order's ideological failings. Like, when the First Order guys keep calling scavengers "scum" it could be a dis on the touchy concept of "lumpenproletariat" - but, thanks to the twists, we can just say it's Palpatine's influence making people dumb. The videogame, of course, ignores the films and just treats the FO and Empire as completely identical.
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Oct 10, 2020 17:43
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Well, no. The game is pre-FO and takes place in the, like, weeks after Endor, so it’s still the OG Empire, Just in the process of eating itself alive through infighting.
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Oct 10, 2020 17:50
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Corporate doesn't like portraying bad guys as holding bad views, because depiction potentially equals endorsement. Having open white supremacists in your movie runs the risk of being associated with white supremacy. So just make them all diverse, or inarticulate evil aliens like in Avengers
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Oct 10, 2020 18:27
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Babysitter Super Sleuth posted:Well, no. The game is pre-FO and takes place in the, like, weeks after Endor, so it’s still the OG Empire, Just in the process of eating itself alive through infighting. Right, that’s the point: by retconning it so that the Empire has “always been” multicultural, they can erase all distinctions between Snoke and Palpatine - even though the basic premise of the ST is that the Galaxy despises Palpatine. It’s the entire reason why he went through the trouble of creating Snoke and pretending to be Vader’s ghost. In the films, Vaderism (i.e. egalitarianism) has been spreading among the people, to the point that leftists are evidently the majority. Snoke effectively rose to power on the promise that he would ‘finish what Vader started’ - justifying all the bad stuff as a means to an end, where Palpatine saw state terror as an end unto itself. Erase that distinction, as various EU sources have tried, and the Disney films no longer have a narrative.
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Oct 10, 2020 18:28
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2house2fly posted:Corporate doesn't like portraying bad guys as holding bad views, because depiction potentially equals endorsement. Having open white supremacists in your movie runs the risk of being associated with white supremacy. So just make them all diverse, or inarticulate evil aliens like in Avengers It also doesn't like portraying the good guys as having good views either. The secret to these movies is presenting everything solely in emotional cues and vague ideas. No one except the most fringe weirdos would disagree with the nebulous concept of "freedom" or "hope". But what those words mean in practicality obviously changes drastically based on ideology. So they're never examined beyond that. Instead it's Resistance = Love, Hope, Freedom and First Order = Anger, Despair, Violence. It's a superficial coding of a political struggle against fascism, which in the American (and more broadly, western) market is always a good bet, without needing to actually commit to any specific political position. They don't want to court the goosestepping nazis of charlottesville, but they also don't want to lose all the midly white supremacist or otherwise racist folks that actually make up a good chunk of their base. Hell, while Star Wars does have an obvious ultimate anti-war and anti-hatred message, with Palpatine's ultimate defeat coming from him not recognizing the power of Anakin's love to overcome what he had become, the ST are ambigously pro war and patriotism, where literally the power of friendship let's you do kick rear end JRPG moves to wipe out the definite 100%-only-reason things are bad dude. Also I know that there's an implied death of 2 million or so dudes when the Death Star explodes, but I do find it funny that the ST has the apparent mass death(?) of whatever the Sith Eternal were, who seem to be the population of an entire planet, maybe (?). At the very least they specified that a good chunk of the troopers in the First Order are child soldiers and not volunteers, in contrast to the Empire where movies like Solo do seem to imply that service in the empire was voluntary. Just a strange thing to include without ever examining the tragedy of it in any way, instead just being happy that like a dozen of them deprogrammed themselves. Beelzebufo fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Oct 10, 2020 |
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Oct 10, 2020 20:10
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It was really weird that they went with First Order soldiers all being brainwashed conscripts but that isn't actually the story of the movies, it's just Finn's backstory. How many Finns are there in the First Order? Doesn't matter, he's a rebel now so it's shoot em up time
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Oct 10, 2020 20:32
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Every first Order member with a face is actively evil. They snarl constantly, they’re menacingly lit, the whole nine yards.
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Oct 10, 2020 20:34
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"Our troops are brainwashed, which is fragile enough to break at the first sign of combat. Heck, even small cute aliens destroy it completely, as seen with FN-2187 on multiple accounts. Should we do something about that?"
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Oct 10, 2020 20:47
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 AdmiralViscen posted:Someone being duped or conditioned or bribed into supporting white supremacy is still supporting white supremacy. A Hispanic cop or a Black chief of police is not spearheading a Hispanic or Black fascist movement. They are powerless in their own system, beyond their little fiefdom (and even within it). Assepoester fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Oct 10, 2020 |
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Oct 10, 2020 21:28
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Snoke somehow becomes the most sympathetic character in the sequels once they retcon him as a test tube puppet ghola. Those sith sure do like building golden skeleton men
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Oct 11, 2020 01:28
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Snoke is C-3P0’s uncle, this is canon.
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Oct 11, 2020 01:39
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Let's be honest, one of the greatest sins of the sequel trilogy is trying to set back up the class 'underdog vs powerful empire' of the OT. The OT left us off with a triumphant "Evil Empire has been defeated, heroes are on their way to re-establish the Republic, and then TFA puts all the characters back at square 1: Leia is once again leading a small-tag resistance force; Han Solo is doing bum ship jobs trying to pay off debts, and Luke is on a loser-planet somewhere and needs other people to pull him into the story. It would've been much cooler if they had done a story where it showed running a new government isn't as easy as trying to establish it (ala the Thrawn Trilogy), OR gone somewhere completely different, like Rey, Finn, and Ben being pupils of Luke's New Jedi Order trying to hunt down the origins of the Sith to prevent something like Palpatine ever happening again, with some of them then falling to the Dark Side and trying to start a civil war or something. Nope, just got a re-hashed OT but done way more sloppily.
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Oct 11, 2020 17:55
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The trouble is that Lucas already made three sequels after ROTJ and it made it pretty difficult to tell an interesting episode VII that is neither a retread of IV or I. The first six movies are cyclical.
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Oct 11, 2020 19:34
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The sequel trilogy should have been about Leia's daughter Rey as Queen of the Republic teaming up with Proud Boy Supreme Leader Snoke to fight her brother, Vaderist Kylo Ren.
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Oct 12, 2020 00:10
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Jewmanji posted:The trouble is that Lucas already made three sequels after ROTJ and it made it pretty difficult to tell an interesting episode VII that is neither a retread of IV or I. The first six movies are cyclical. This is where I like to point out that the people making the Disney films aren’t all absolute idiots, because a few of them did realize that the only sensible follow-up to the PT be to break the cycle. It’s as Zizek observed with the Matrix trilogy of films (which loosely mirror the three trilogies): “In The Matrix Reloaded, the Wachowski brothers ... consciously raised the stakes, confronting us with all the complications and confusions of the process of liberation. In this way, they put themselves in a difficult spot: they now confront an almost impossible task. If The Matrix Revolutions were to succeed, it would have to produce nothing less than the appropriate answer to the dilemmas of revolutionary politics today, a blueprint for the political act the Left is desperately looking for. No wonder, then, that it miserably failed - and this failure provides a nice case for a simple Marxist analysis: the narrative failure, the impossibility to construct a ‘good story,’ which signals a more fundamental social failure.” Recall that Matrix 2 ends with a warning that the entire conflict is doomed to repeat itself, cyclically, until all of Earth’s resources are exhausted. So the ST’s goal was to depict a struggle the moderate centrism of the New Republicans with the revolutionary politics of the Vaderists. That’s why there’s an inevitable reveal that Ben Solo was always a good guy held back by Leia’s influence over him - so that, when she dies, he is finally freed to kill Satan. We‘re told, flat-out, that Luke is an antichrist and Rey is his successor. Leia is mother-figure to this new antichrist. The story is kinda fundamentally that the heroes of the OT are the baddies, because the very traits that made them heroes of the Reagan 1980s make them the villains of today. So the filmmakers got it mostly right - perhaps especially Chris Terrio, from what traces of his script are discernible - but Disney took an official stance that Vader should never be presented in a positive light. The result is an incredible amount of censorship. In the same way Solo is a comedy with all the punchlines clumsily removed, the ST is a trilogy about communist revolution with all reference to egalitarianism removed.
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Oct 12, 2020 03:41
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Jewmanji posted:The trouble is that Lucas already made three sequels after ROTJ and it made it pretty difficult to tell an interesting episode VII that is neither a retread of IV or I. The first six movies are cyclical. Not true because the Legends (crap) cannon already has many examples.
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Oct 12, 2020 06:06
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:This is where I like to point out that the people making the Disney films aren’t all absolute idiots, because a few of them did realize that the only sensible follow-up to the PT be to break the cycle. It’s as Zizek observed with the Matrix trilogy of films (which loosely mirror the three trilogies): please make a thread in cspam i will sponsor you
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Oct 12, 2020 06:10
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Grandpa Palpatine posted:Not true because the Legends (crap) cannon already has many examples. Is this gesturing at nameless teenage fanfics supposed to persuade me of something?
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Oct 12, 2020 14:12
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