I feel like we can forgive him, right? He seems like a cool guy?
Allegedly Lucas is making movies for himself. Prince made a lot of albums that will never get released too.
sure he is and I am writing novels for myself and not just wasting my life posting on the internet
thinly veiled criticism of american empire during the height of iraq war insanity
putting all other things aside, that's pretty ballsy
Yah, the whole "this is how democracy dies" line was very big in the anti-bush spaces when it came out.
I like when someone talks about compassion, some burger brain immediately goes "socialism!?" in a derogatory way, not being aware how much they're telling on themselves.
It is pretty funny in a macabre way that every time we appeal to decency or kindness it gets called socialism. If you are walking with a loaded gun and I am walking with a loaded gun toward you? Is our mutual agreement not to draw and shoot socialism?
The red scare has been so ubiquitous since the 60s it has restructured brains. But it’s so ironic because there are multiple known instances of people demonstrating goodness to other humans, it’s just that capitalism necessitates evil.
The prequels were about a liberal democracy collapsing into fascism, which is a very good concept, too bad Lucas can't write for shit.
The Jedi are also (probably unintentionally) portrayed as an unelected group of moralistic weirdos lording over everyone. Their moral code really gets shown for what it is when they're willing to negotiate with a slave owner.
”Oh, you don't take Republic credits, I'm sorry, let me get you some other money”, fuck that, John Brown his racist caricature ass.i don't think the problems with the jedi are unintentional. They're shown to be short-sighted, stagnant, and the source of many of the problems they're trying to solve. I think sometimes that doesn't come across well because jedi are weird and mythical to most characters in Star Wars, so most of what gets said about them comes from Jedi themselves.
The prequels show them getting easily tricked into being military leaders for Palpatine to consolidate power, and then they're rapidly liquidated once they're no longer useful.
I've always thought Sanders brazenly adopted it because his opponents were going to label him that way anyway. A lot of progressives of the past have had to either spend a lot of time side-stepping labels of socialism, or have to confront it constantly. Conservatives called Obama a socialist for 8 years, remember? And here comes Sanders with a noticeably more progressive platform, a history of connection to leftist figures like Parenti, and he's on camera praising Cuba. He had already been calling himself a socialist as mayor of Vermont for decades too.
Also I don't believe Sanders was running in 2016 expecting to win or even do well. He had the advantage then of running against notoriously unpopular Hillary Clinton and complete unknowns Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee.
Before 2016 all I knew about him was that one weird Senator from that tiny New England state that shouldn't be a state anyway, listed as (I) whenever it was voting time. But he voted with the Dems anyway. On the rare occasion he came up, it was stated he was a socialist, and I chalked it up to a lily-white state's liberals just being what they are.
I first heard about Sanders from this 1986 Murray Bookchin essay. I think I read it around 2009? Bookchin is really harsh and calls Sanders a Reaganite of all things.
really just confused the already furrow browed American public even more.
I think it's always more useful to talk about what you want to get done, how you want to get it done, when you want to get it done, and why you want to get it done. Goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound, and part of a bigger project. If it's more expedient to eschew labels altogether in order to gain allies to what is fundamentally a cause that you share while disagreeing about what to call it, then do so. Loyalty to a signifier can only get you so far.
Much of politics is vague, unmeasurable goals and evading responsibility for not achieving them. Look at Trump, he promised to build the wall, didn't do it, and people still scream at his campaign rallies like they're European techno music festivals.
He had a past as an open and proud Trot and he had to try to launder it to be even remotely feasible as a candidate.
I liked episode 3 execept for the Yoda fight. It could have been a great opportunity to show a force master fighting in a way totally and tonally distinct from typical jedi shit, but nah, he just screw attacks.
The opening ship battle is really cool though.
i remember some of the novels show some jedi/sith battles taking place completely in the astral plane and that was always cool
Imagine how many haters would be blown away if he stuck to that and saw it through.
Don't worry, he'll show up in Mando season 4 as the one commissioning the Palpatine clones.
Lucas also once said he was jealous of Soviet filmmakers for their freedom. He considered any level of government censorship they had less restrictive than making movies for the Hollywood studios.
Who, really? Jesus. Do you have a link for that? I'd like to share it.
Andor is in many ways the exact opposite to Lucas in filmaking (didactic, tightly focused, dialogue driven, characterisation over worldbuilding.) and yet somehow also the closest to his own work in getting his intended themes across.
All the wars in Star Wars are caused by capitalists and/or fascists.
The prequels are about a Liberal Republic that can't prevent a corporation from conquering an entire sovereign planet, escalating to a secession movement orchestrated entirely by private corporations.
There is no Left Wing in Star Wars politics, so the Old/New Republics are always doomed to be devoured by capitalist automaters and fascist cape-wearing incels.
futhermore even the jedi, which claim to be completely neutral peacekeepers, are shown to be an easily manipulated tool for fascists. They're used as a tool in peacetime as a silly little enclave of monks, and in war they're used for fascist conquest. Once their mission was completed, one of their own was turned to a Sith and used to eliminate the remainder.
Also their commitment to pacifism and neutrality means Qui-Gon Jinn, upon encountering a literal child slave, rigs up an elaborate plan to win a podrace to purchase the child. Instead of simply killing the slave owner on the spot as he could have easily done.
The only things I'd call leftist in star wars are the original trilogy rebels (modeled after the NVA) and the tatooine tusken raiders. The tuskens correctly view the off-world colonists as invaders polluting their land and stealing their water.
Building on your last point: I would argue there is a third leftist thing in Star Wars.
The planet of Ithor was completely ruined by capitalists wrecking the environment and the species adopted a radical environmentalist ethos.
They built herd ships and only return to the surface for sacred reasons or to continue the work of restoring as much of its natural state as possible (these overlap sometimes).
I know environmentalism isn’t exclusively leftist, but it’s adjacent if nothing else.
https://mobunited.wordpress.com/2017/12/15/the-dark-side-of-capital-economics-ideology-and-palpatines-empire/
Problem is that they don't really work as kids films either. There are some parts that appeal to children, but then the other half is dry political stuff.
Critical support for George. He's kinda fucked up but he has some interesting takes
The rebels were the Vietnamese and the Empire the United Snakes in the movies confirmed.
If you want to read anything he said without seeing red, don't look up how he and Spielberg wanted to write the Marian character in Raiders of the Lost Ark (spoiler: even worse
)yeah, everyone on the internet knows that. You got anything new?
George Lucas compares Disney to 'white slavers' at the end of this Charlie Rose interview.
The prequels on plot alone are great, but their execution was terrible. The sequels were generally executed better but their plot is awful.
Star Wars has always been a leftist story because it is cast in a revolutionary mold. A key problem is that the rights of the franchise are in the hands of liberals who don't understand anything other than the status quo. Sure, some of their TV shows have been good but otherwise Disney has their hands on a property they fundamentally don't know how to write. They are going to continue to write the most lib-ass stories and wonder why they flop.
I had a colleague who was a huge Star Wars fan and kept Star Wars toys around his workplace. He was completely taken by surprise when I told him how the rebels were based on Viet Minh. He had never heard about that ever. Or about the Viet Minh for that sake. The guy has an engineering degree.
Liberal nerds will absolutely consume the slop for years and years without applying a single brain cell to any sort of analysis of the story. Instead they'll memorize boring pointless statistics about the plumbing on the death star or the insignia on the space Nazis' uniforms.
