Saturday, December 30, 2017
Everything That's Wrong with 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi'
There's too much going on in
the new Star Wars movie. That sucks.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi is
in theaters, and you all have to go see it or it might not make the $800
million it needs to break even. Presumably, most of the movie’s profits will be
made over the holiday vacation from families who need a break from each other.
I saw it last night since I don’t have a family.
The Last Jedi is a long,
bewildering movie with too many characters and an overall message that’s either
unclear or just stupid. It’s also funny, visually pretty, and surprisingly
weird—but the plot is too cluttered, feeling like the product of dozens of very
talented people disagreeing with each other and making bad compromises.
I don’t know if the movie can
be described as having a plot, but here’s what happens: General Leia—once
Princess Leia—is evacuating her troops from their secret base as the bad guys
close in. (Her sideways promotion from Princess to General is the kind of fake
promotion that people give instead of giving raises. Leia was always a boss.)
Poe Dameron prank-calls the bad guys to distract them, and proceeds to blow up
some evil spaceship turrets. It looks great, like the dog fight at the end
of Star Wars: a New Hope.
Then, Poe disobeys orders to
return to base and calls in a squadron of bomber ships, which fly in and
explode like a domino effect. This sequence pulled me out of the movie: The
Rebels have been at war for many decades and they haven’t learned to fly far
enough apart so they wouldn’t blow each other up? It might seem like
nitpicking, but The Last Jedi is full of moments where things don’t
make sense and supposedly smart characters make dumb choices.
Meanwhile, Finn
unceremoniously awakens from the coma he was in at the end of The Force
Awakens and runs around in a see-through plastic suit, squirting liquid in
all directions. At this point, it was the strangest thing I’d seen in a Star
Wars movie (wait until later), which was pretty cool. He asks where Rey is, and
we cut to her on that Irish island holding out Luke’s old lightsaber to the man
himself. After a long pause, he takes it and throws it over his shoulder, which
caused the audience to laugh and released some tension.
For some reason, Luke now acts
like a jaded, pessimistic dick who wants to forget about all the Jedi stuff.
Mark Hamill has publicly said that he thinks his character was written badly, and I agree, but he’s
still a lot of fun to watch. Rey bugs him to train her, he curmudgeonly
refuses, but eventually gives in.
The main villain is still Kylo
Ren, and when we first see him he’s talking to his evil boss Snoke. In The
Force Awakens, we only saw Snoke projected on a giant scale, and a popular fan
theory arose that he was actually teeny; in The Last Jedi, though, we find
out that he’s just a normal-sized, bad-CGI-looking video-game guy who hangs out
in a beautiful throne room.
As Rey continues to follow
Luke around the island, we see a giant creature standing upright with what
appear to be very large testicles but are actually bosoms (or udders).This is
the strangest thing I’ve seen in a Star Wars movie, as Luke milks the giant
beast and messily quaffs the beast’s milk. The island is also home to these
very cute, Furby-like creatures called Porgs; later, we see Chewbacca roasting
one over a fire, while other Porgs watch on and cry over the loss of their
friend. That was also really weird. There’s another giant space battle in which
General Leia gets blown out into space; it seems like she’s dead, but then she
regains consciousness and floats back into a spaceship, which is also really
weird.
Her job’s taken over by
Admiral Holdo, who’s portrayed by Laura Dern. (Carrie Fisher completed filming
before her passing last year, but it does seem like Dern’s role fills in for shots
they couldn’t get to.) Holdo (and Leia) repeatedly tell Dameron that running
away and surviving is better than fighting and sacrificing human lives, which
is the big message of The Last Jedi—a message that comes across as murky
and possibly dishonest. After all, the franchise isn’t called Star Peace.
After the second giant space
battle, the good guys use hyperspace to escape the bad guys —but the bad guys
immediately follow them, and the good guys can’t use hyperspace again because
they’re running low on fuel and will be stranded if they do. How and where do
you fuel up a colossal spaceship? I always imagined that these giant space
ships had some sort of giant nuclear reactor powering them. Maybe that sounds
like a nerdy complaint, but imagine someone saying that they couldn’t drive
their submarine because it had a boot on it. Did they drive the Death Star to a
giant gas station?
Finn—in the middle of the
second Star Wars movie he appears in, possessing almost no defining traits
besides cowardice—tries to run away from the good guys’ ship and is arrested
for desertion by an annoying character named Rose. They discover that they need
to go to a casino-like planet to find a codebreaker so that they can avoid
being tracked by the bad guys, which kicks off The Last Jedi’s most
unnecessary plotline.
The planet they go to has big
band music and rich space people playing sci-fi slot machines. They meet
Benicio Del Toro—sorry, DJ—who helps them in jail and betrays them soon
afterwards. Arguably, The Last Jedi would be a lot better without
this entire plotline and all the characters involved, which is pretty shitty
because the plotline also contains the only three actors of color in the film.
Anyway: there’s a cool part
where Rey goes into a hole in the ground and sees awesome psychedelic stuff, as
well as a beautiful ground battle that happens on a salt-covered red planet.
But the rest of The Last Jedi is bland mélange of explosions and
disappointment. The bad guys keep using weapons that take a long time to power
up before firing, Luke seems to die unceremoniously by disappearing into the
air without warning, some other bullshit happens, the movie’s dedicated to
Carrie Fisher, and that’s the end.
It’s easy to imagine the Star
Wars franchise as a vast playground of infinite possibilities, but everything
that’s happened in these largely weak and forgettable films since Return
of the Jedi has revealed how limited Star Wars’s scope actually is.
Capturing the feeling and tone of the original three films has stymied a lot of
highly paid pros. The original Star Wars movies were simple stories with simple
characters exploring richly designed locales. The protagonist of this new
trilogy is supposed to be Rey,but we still haven’t learned enough about her,
as The Last Jedi dedicates more time to other characters who don’t
seem as important.
The reason George Lucas decided to kill the character of Ben Kenobi midway
through A New Hope was because after the characters escaped the Death
Star he had nothing left to do. The Last Jedi is supposed to be
analogous to The Empire Strikes Back, but it actually has more in common
with Return of the Jedi, which most Star Wars fans consider the weakest
film of the original trilogy. IfRotJ had focused on the freeing of Han
from Jabba’s Palace and Luke’s confrontation of Vader, it would’ve been a better
movie—but instead, it dedicates too much time to the forest planet of Endor,
where a teddy bear army unconvincingly conquers a giant armada of well-armed
space soldiers.
Similarly, The Last Jedi could
have used less characters and less shit happening. Poe, Finn, Rose, DJ and
Holdo were all unnecessary characters with pointless plotlines that added
nothing but took away a lot. So far, the only character with any depth is Kylo
Ren. Will Rey get a personality in the next movie? I guess we’ll find out.
Why ‘The Last Jedi’ Is The Worst Star Wars Movie Ever
‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ is
an egregiously bad movie: Poorly written, badly directed, lazily acted, and
bombastically grating in both sound and image.
This review contains almost
all possible spoilers to “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.”
“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” is
a bad movie. It is not a bad Star Wars movie, but objectively speaking, as a
film, it’s a bad movie. Not only that, it is an egregiously bad movie: Poorly
written, badly directed, lazily acted, and bombastically grating in both sound
and image. It is, put bluntly, the worst Star Wars film since George Lucas’ own
unfortunate prequels.
To be fair, to hold this
opinion places a person in something like a minority of one. The critics have
been, by and large, rapturous, with Peter Travers of Rolling
Stoneexemplifying the critical consensus by saying the film is “simply
stupendous, a volcano of creative ideas in full eruption.”
There are, of course, two
possible explanations for this: The critics are stupid or have been paid off by
Walt Disney’s dark lords. These appear to be the only solutions to the problem,
because “The Last Jedi” is not simply bad, it is incompetent on the most basic
level.
Another Star Wars Second Act
The film, of course, follows
its characters through the standard Star Wars second act epitomized by the
beloved “Empire Strikes Back”: Everything goes to hell and the ragtag fleet of
good guys desperately tries to escape from all but certain destruction while,
elsewhere, a young would-be apprentice struggles with the nature of his or her
nascent powers.
To give a cursory overview of
the needlessly convoluted plot: Princess (now general) Leia Organa leads the
aforementioned ragtag Resistance fleet in a desperate escape from the evil
First Order. Ace pilot and Han Solo stand-in Poe Dameron favors an aggressive
approach to the situation. Leia and a hapless Laura Dern with purple hair
attempt to dissuade him, somewhat unsuccessfully.
Poe rebels, and persuades
former stormtrooper Finn and his love interest Rose to undertake a dangerous
and needlessly complicated mission that ultimately goes nowhere. All this
culminates in a series of climactic confrontations, each one louder and more
CGI-laden than the last.
Meanwhile, the desperate Rey
(played by Daisy Ridley in one of the few competent performances) attempts to
persuade the self-exiled Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill, in the other competent
performance) to return to the fight. Despite coming off as a grizzled, surly,
vaguely suicidal old man, Skywalker finally (apparently on the advice of a
disappointing cameo from Yoda) sees the light and (sort of) hurls himself into
a frenzied light saber duel with his wayward apprentice Kylo Ren that he (sort
of) wins and then (sort of) dies.
There is also, to further
unnecessarily complicate matters, some form of psychic connection or astral
projection between Rey and Kylo Ren that ultimately leads her to conclude (for
reasons never quite explained) that there is the proverbial “still good in him,”
sending her off to the lair of the evil Supreme Leader Snoke (a poor
replacement for the emperor) in a bid to save Kylo’s soul. That also leads to
an anti-climactic nowhere after Kylo, for reasons left unknown, kills Snoke and
installs himself as supreme leader.
If You Thought the Story Was
Bad, Check the Execution
Even a cursory reading of the
above reveals a plot so convoluted and bloated as to exhaust the potential
viewer. (It is also the reason for the film’s impossibly inflated running time
of an excruciating two and a half hours.) But the story is further laid low by
the stunning incompetence of its execution.
To name a few of its many
flaws: The script is laden with clichéd dialogue that is, at times, simply
excruciating. Finn and Rose go on a mad pursuit to find a codebreaker and their
entire quest ultimately leads nowhere, leaving the plot thread dangling before
the perplexed viewer and wasting almost a half-hour of screen time. Luke’s
angry alienation is reinforced at every point before he inexplicably has a
change of heart and shows up to save the day.
Snoke is displayed as
massively powerful and capable of effortlessly reading minds, but is dispatched
with a simple ruse from Kylo Ren, who appears to kill his revered mentor for no
particular reason. The entire story is based around a slow-speed pursuit
between ships capable of light speed. All of this is semi-explained through
remarkably long monologues that fail to move the story forward but continue ad
nauseum.
The plot is further degraded
by its pointed failure to follow up on the various story points set up by its
predecessor, the wonderful “Force Awakens.” One of the best was the mystery of
Rey’s parentage, which seemed to promise an exploration of the Jedi’s typically
convoluted bloodlines. We discover, however, in a belated revelation, that her
parents were “nobodies” completely unconnected to anything remotely
interesting.
Second is the nature and
origin of Snoke, who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, shrouding the
grotesque monster in mystery. “The Last Jedi” reveals that he did appear out of
nowhere by providing no solution to the mystery. Last was the nature of Kylo
Ren’s rebellion against his mentor Skywalker and the founding of the “knights
of Kylo Ren.”
This plot point is dispensed
through a single flashback in which Skywalker, completely out of character,
tries to kill Kylo, inciting Kylo’s understandable resentment. His presumably
slow descent into the Dark Side, turn to the First Order, and the knights of
Ren themselves are left to the imagination. Considering the quality of the
film, this may be for the best.
Campy Humor to Best the
Originals
Perhaps the most egregious
misstep, however, is the film’s ridiculously campy humor, which debases and
degrades the proceedings to a remarkable degree. The picture is filled with
childish attempts at “Guardians of the Galaxy”-style jokes, like a bad prank
phone call between Poe and a First Order ultra-fascist, Luke tossing a light
saber indifferently over his shoulder, and an exposition-laden conversation
with a tangential character that takes place, for some reason, in the midst of
laser-gun duel.
The Ewoks also appear in
spirit in the form of the Porgs, a bizarre cross between owls and penguins
whose only purpose is being cute and silly and selling merchandise. The problem
with this is not merely that the jokes are bad (which they are) but that they
make the entire film seem to be a self-referential spoof akin to “Spaceballs”
(if less successfully humorous).
The Star Wars films always had
funny moments, but they rarely descended into outright camp. “The Last Jedi”
seems to be enjoying undermining itself, as if telling the audience “Look at
all this silly space opera, and look how silly you are for paying to watch it.”
The result is an insult to the intelligence that would be more grating if the
rest of the film were not equally so.
None of this, however, seems
to have dissuaded audiences. “The Last Jedi” looks set to be a massive hit,
which should only confirm the omnipotent Disney in its further plans. J.J.
Abrams’ return to the franchise for the third installment may promise a
resurgence, and previous attempts such as “The Force Awakens” and “Rogue One”
were at least competent and at best highly enjoyable.
Can Disney Keep This Up
Without Exhausting Us?
Nonetheless, “The Last Jedi”
seems to promise a dark future for Star Wars, especially as director Rian
Johnson has been tapped to develop a further trilogy. Indeed, the question
arises as to whether Disney can, as it plans, release a Star Wars film a year
without exhausting both audiences and the franchise itself. With billions of
dollars already invested, they may be forced into the attempt, but it seems
likely that further incompetent exercises in infantilizing the audience are
likely to become more common than attempts to marry quality to blockbuster
trappings.
Yet there is a deeper and more
depressing phenomenon at work in “The Last Jedi.” Paul Schrader, the legendary
writer of “Taxi Driver,” once dated the decline of American cinema to the
release of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” The beloved film, he said, is simply a
bad movie.
Indeed, the case be made that
it is merely a series of action sequences strung together on a thin storyline
before ending with a literal deus ex machina. Much the same is the case in “The
Last Jedi,” and now, it seems, the series that effectively founded Hollywood’s
current blockbuster obsession is not immune to becoming one of its victims.
6 Reasons The Jedi Would Be The Villain In Any Sane Movie
6 Reasons The Jedi Would Be
The Villain In Any Sane Movie
Luke Skywalker, Yoda, Kit
Fisto -- they were our heroes growing up. With their lightsabers and Force
pushes, the Jedi battled evil and made the galaxy a better place. But did they
really? Here are six things about the Jedi that ... look, we're really sorry
about this, but we're about to ruin your image of Kit Fisto.
6 The Jedi Mind Trick Is Fucking Terrifying
Early in the first movie (and
this counts for both "firsts"), we're introduced to a Jedi mind trick
-- a way for Jedi to manipulate others. It's explained to viewers that The
Force gives "power over the weak-minded." Apparently, being stupid in
the Star Wars universe is a serious enough crime that your free will
can be taken from you by some dick wizard.
The thing is, there's no real
indicator of what the Jedi mean by "weak-minded." It's not just
stormtroopers who pulled Tatooine checkpoint duty. Powerful monarchs are
apparently susceptible, while mob bosses and junk salesmen are immune. When you
think about it, the "good guy" Jedi ability to control minds really
seems to work only on the exact minds it shouldn't.
When you think about it more,
you realize those incompetent stormtroopers that let Obi-Wan drive through the
droid checkpoint were almost certainly killed later by their supervisor. We
doubt Darth Vader would have taken, "Some old guy vouched for those
robots," as an excuse. And while on the subject, would they even remember?
A Jedi mind trick is probably like getting blackout drunk. Later that day,
those two stormtroopers were being pulled into the air by their throats and
shitting into their plastic armor with absolutely no idea why it was happening.
It might have been nicer to just run them over with the landspeeder, Obi-Wan.
And that's the thing -- it's
never made clear the limits of this power, either in its scope or where it's
appropriate to use. In Episode II, Obi-Wan runs into a sleazebag named
Elan Sleazebaggano (no, really, Elan Sleazebaggano). Elan tries to sell him a drug
called "death sticks," which would have the stupidest name ever put
on a page of a screenplay if it wasn't sitting there next to the words
"Elan Sleazebaggano." Obi-Wan uses his Jedi mind trick to tell him to
go home and rethink his life.
But wait ... if that works, it
raises a question: Why not do that all day? Wouldn't that eventually cut
galactic crime by around all? Couldn't you save billions more
lives a second if you had a TV show where you mind-tricked viewers into being
good rather than cutting a bad guy in half every few weeks? But that just
brings up the larger point ...
5 The Jedi Have No Official Policies,
Regulation, Or Accountability
If you sat down and watched
all six Star Wars movies, you might have some vague notion of a Jedi
Code. It seems like they should have one, right? They certainly wouldn't train
people and Muppets to control minds and crush throats without giving them
strict guidelines on when it's OK to do those things, would they?
If there is some kind of Jedi
Code, it seems to be a loose suggestion at best. In the prequels, Qui-Gon Jinn
doesn't follow the code, and the only consequence is not being allowed on the
Council. Is that even a punishment? The Jedi Council looks like Sam Jackson and
a room of radiation-poisoned dildos, and they seem to have all the political
power of a U.N. ambassador's wife's book club.
Is there a system in place for
when a Jedi starts doing whatever the hell he wants? For instance, if one of
them were to mind-trick his way through a police checkpoint to get to a bar
where he cut your arm off during an argument ... is there someone you can call?
In Episode II, after Obi-Wan casually flings himself into space traffic,
it's up to Anakin to steal a car and save him. Is that the Jedi Code? Grand
theft speeder? He doesn't flash any kind of Jedi badge -- the owner of that car
can simply suck it, courtesy of The Force.
In Episode III, Anakin
seems to go against the Code pretty hard when he mutilates and murders Count
Dooku. He even mentions several times that dismembering and decapitating people
in cold blood isn't the Jedi way. And then what? There's no investigation ...
no paperwork. Anakin doesn't have to turn in a report, but you know the
Jedi Council heard about it. Even if they weren't clairvoyant wizards, the
galaxy's worst forensics investigator would have figured out the murder weapon
was a lightsaber and given them a call.
Compare this to our world,
where you
have to go through months of applications just to sell tacos out of a
street cart. But, we guess the system works for them. After all, when in these
movies do you ever see a Jedi go rogue and start causing problems for
everyone?
4 The Jedi Don't Care About The Republic Or
Democracy In General
If you sat through the
prequels, congratulations! Suffering builds character! Well, during those
character-building hours, you may have noticed the Jedi were fighting for the
Republic. So they're on the side of space democracy, right?
Not exactly. The first image
we see in the Star Wars timeline is them going to negotiate the trade
route. Why are these unelected, erratic sorcerer cops who are barely even
accountable to their own Jedi Council in charge of this? Why wasn't a
representative of the Senate with them? Sending two armed men with no economic
or diplomatic training to a trade negotiation seems like something a gang would
do, not a democracy.
So they aren't big fans of
democratic procedures, but what do the Jedi think about the Senate itself?
Let's look at a quote from the end of the prequels, when Mace Windu and Yoda
discuss the growing threat of Palpatine.
Ki-Adi-Mundi told them,
"If [Palpatine] does not give up his emergency powers after the
destruction of Grievous, then he should be removed from office." That
seems reasonable. And then Mace Windu goes, "The Jedi Council would
have to take control of the Senate in order to ensure a peaceful
transition."
Yeah, these champions of
galactic democracy decided to stage a military coup to ensure a
"peaceful" transition. And it wasn't their last, desperate choice.
Taking over the government with lightsabers was their very first idea. So
maybe it wasn't a heat-of-the moment mistake when Obi-Wan took Ponda Baba's arm
off in Mos Eisley. Because it seems like cutting off arms and telling everyone
in the room to screw themselves is a Jedi's go-to move under any circumstance.
It's possible the Jedi were so
far up their own asses with their ideals they really thought they could
peacefully take over the Senate. Fine. But when they found out Palpatine was a
Sith Lord, by cleverly noticing that he's so obviously a Sith Lord, they
decided not to tell anyone. Instead, Mace Windu said, "He's too dangerous
to be left alive!" and they went in swords lasing.
They didn't get a warrant,
Senate approval, or verification of any facts. They went in to assassinate a
man with as much care and oversight as a punk band firing their drummer. Jedi
Council, you spent half the movie complaining about your powers not working and
your vision being clouded. And suddenly now, when it has to do with murdering
the leader of your government, you're certain you have it all figured out? Are
you even listening to yourselves, Jedi?
But that just brings up
another point ...
3 Jedi Have No Non-Lethal Options
It's clear Jedi are quick to
murder. But even if they wanted to peacefully deal with someone, Jedi don't
carry handcuffs. Or tasers. Or pepper spray. We know stun guns exist in this
galaxy, so why not carry one? If a 6-year-old can build a C-3P0, someone should
be able to rig up some kind of net gun or sleep Frisbee. Maybe a lightsaber
that simply hurts rather than eviscerates?
The closest thing we see to a
non-lethal move from a Jedi is about 20 minutes into The Phantom Menace when
Qui-Gon Jinn puts his hand on Jar Jar Binks' shoulder and makes him pass out.
Let's ignore the damage this does to the compartmentalization of nerd brains by
introducing the Vulcan nerve pinch to the Star Wars universe. What it
means is that Jedi have the means to poke a guy to sleep even when they have
goofy-ass never-before-seen alien physiology. They simply never use it as a
method of conflict resolution; it's only something they use to shut up their
annoying friends.
In Attack Of The Clones,
Obi-Wan uses himself as bait to catch the bounty hunter Zam Wesell. His plan,
in its entirety, is to stand by the bar, wait for her to stick a gun in his
back, then chop her hand in half. We're not saying he was wrong, exactly.
We're simply saying there were maybe a few ways to bring in the suspect without
hacking off a part of her. It's very telling that while her fingers were still
flying through the air, Anakin says to the bartender, "Jedi
business."
What's really weird is that
the Jedi don't feel bad about any of this. Not only because they live in a
universe where you can replace Jedi-removed limbs with robot parts, but because
...
2 Jedi Are Trained To Feel No Remorse Or Pity
Throughout the movies, we are
constantly hit with how the Dark Side is about anger, hate, fear, insecurity,
dry mouth, diarrhea, VCR repair -- it's bad, and obviously so. So when we see
any of the Sith fight, it's either cruel like Dooku, lustful like Maul, or
sadistically cheerful like the Emperor. The Jedi, however, fight with nobility.
They never seem to be having much fun during their sword fights. Yoda's
fighting style is 80 percent front flips, and he still manages to look bored.
But, then again, how often do
you see the Jedi show regret for those they fricassee? We never saw Luke wonder
about the widows of the Death Star. We know those robots mowed down in the
prequels were sentient. They joked, laughed, made sarcastic quips ... they even
feared death. Did any Jedi so much as blink as they cut them down? Or any enemy
for that matter?
These are supposed to be
enlightened peacekeepers. How enlightened can these people be if they can sleep
at night as easily as they cut people in half? There isn't a single line of
dialogue in these movies dedicated to the guilt a Jedi might feel for killing
thousands, maybe millions of people.
Furthermore, the Jedi don't
seem to care about collateral damage. In Return Of The Jedi, Luke blew up
a "pleasure barge." Some of the passengers were probably just nice
Tatooine couples on their honeymoon. A lot of the employees were slaves. Max
Rebo and the Max Rebo Band were probably on that boat! That's like killing the
Ace Of Base of space, Luke!
The detachment isn't just our
imagination -- it seems to be an important part of the Jedi doctrine. Yoda
routinely speaks to Anakin about removing connections with people, accepting
death as a part of life, and basically separating oneself from any emotional
links. Keep in mind Yoda says these things when he's talking about Anakin's
girlfriend and his mother, who they left on Tatooine to be a slave. And if he
can get that detached from his family and girlfriend, imagine how little he
cares when he's murdering his enemies and the innocent people standing near
them.
Speaking of innocent people
destroyed by the Jedi ...
The Jedi Abduct Children
The Star Wars universe
doesn't have very many children in it. In fact, the first one we meet grows up
to cut all the other ones we meet into pieces. The only thing we really know
about Star Wars kids is that, if you're born with Force powers, the
Republic takes you away from your family. In The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon
Jinn tells Anakin's mother that if he had been born in the Republic, they would
have taken him early for Jedi training. How early isn't made clear, but
in Attack Of The Clones we see a room full of blindfolded toddlers
practicing with lightsabers.
So these children are taken
from their homes, or in Anakin's case purchased, and given deadly weapons
before they know how to read. It seems ... irresponsible. And to support that
point, we're going to pick on Qui-Gon Jinn again. This man threw a boy in a
dangerous pod race in some kind of ridiculous spaceship repair scheme even
George Lucas didn't seem to understand. After he miraculously survives that,
Qui-Gon drops him in a war zone with only the advice, "Watch me and be
mindful."
That's not a helpful tip for a
9-year-old going into his first gun fight. That's something you say when you're
teaching him how to eat an artichoke or convince his mother you need a bigger
TV. And if you've seen the movie, you know Anakin's "mindful" move is
to hide in the cockpit of a working starfighter and immediately bumble into the
war. Which seems like a great time to remind you: If you ate a pound of
shredded newspaper, your shit would write a better movie than The Phantom
Menace.
So that's their system, in a
nutshell: They take children who are too young to have developed any empathy,
moral reasoning, or critical-thinking skills, and raise them in the way of the
Jedi. This involves disconnecting from the rest of society, developing
supernatural abilities, and declaring themselves to be above any and all laws.
We're wondering if, every once in a while, a Jedi wakes up in the middle of the
night and says, "Wait, am I in a cult?"
Thursday, December 28, 2017
Žižek at the 'European Angst' conference Goethe Institute
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd6NZ05_QDQ
Sign a contract before sex? Political correctness could destroy passion
In the West, at least, everyone has become massively aware
of the extent of coercion and exploitation in sexual relations.
However, we should bear in mind also the (no less
significant) fact that millions of people on a daily basis flirt and play the
game of seduction, with the clear aim of finding a partner for making love. The
result of the modern Western culture is that both sexes are expected to play an
active role in this game.
When women dress provocatively to attract the male gaze or
when they “objectify” themselves to seduce them, they don’t do it
offering themselves as passive objects: instead they are the active agents of
their own “objectification,” manipulating men, playing ambiguous games, including
reserving the full right to step out of the game at any moment even if, to the
male gaze, this appears in contradiction with previous “signals.”
This freedom women enjoy bothers all kinds of
fundamentalists, from Muslims who recently prohibited women touching and
playing with bananas and other fruit which resembles the penis to our own
ordinary male chauvinist who explodes in violence against a woman who
first “provokes” him and then rejects his advances.
Female sexual liberation is not just a puritan withdrawal
from being “objectivized” (as a sexual object for men) but the right
to actively play with self-objectivization, offering herself and withdrawing at
will. But will it be still possible to proclaim these simple facts, or will the
politically-correct pressure compel us to accompany all these games with some
formal-legal proclamation (of consensuality, etc.)?
New thinking
A recent, politically-correct idea is the so-called “Consent
Conscious Kit,” currently on sale in the US: a small bag with a condom, a
pen, some breath mints, and a simple contract stating that both participants
freely consent to a shared sexual act. The suggestion is that a couple ready to
have sex either takes a photo holding in their hands the contract, or that they
both date and sign it.
Yet, although the “Consent Conscious Kit” addresses
a very real problem, it does it in a way which is not only silly but directly
counter-productive – and why is that?
The underlying idea is how a sex act, if it to be cleansed
of any suspicion of coercion, has to be declared, in advance, as a freely-made
conscious decision of both participants – to put it in Lacanian terms, it has
to be registered by the big Other, and inscribed into the symbolic order.
As such, the “Consent Conscious Kit” is just an
extreme expression of an attitude that grows all around the US – for example,
the state of California passed a law requiring all colleges that accept state
funding to adopt policies requiring their students to obtain affirmative
consent — which it defines as “affirmative, conscious, and voluntary
agreement to engage in sexual activity” that is “ongoing” and
not given when too drunk, before engaging in sexual activity, or else risk
punishment for sexual assault.
Bigger picture
“Affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement” – by
whom? The first thing to do here is to mobilize the Freudian triad of Ego,
Superego, and Id (in a simplified version: my conscious self-awareness, the
agency of moral responsibility enforcing norms on me, and my deepest
half-disavowed passions).
What if there is a conflict between the three? If, under
the pressure of the Superego, my Ego say NO, but my Id resists and clings to
the denied desire? Or (a much more interesting case) the opposite: I say YES to
the sexual invitation, surrendering to my Id passion, but in the midst of
performing the act, my Superego triggers an unbearable guilt feeling?
Thus, to bring things to the absurd, should the contract be
signed by the Ego, Superego, and Id of each party, so that it is valid only if
all three say YES? Plus, what if the male partner also uses his contractual
right to step back and cancel the agreement at any moment in the sexual
activity? Imagine that, after obtaining the woman’s consent, when the
prospective lovers find themselves naked in bed, some tiny bodily detail (an
unpleasant sound like a vulgar belching) dispels the erotic charm and makes the
man withdraw? Is this not in itself an extreme humiliation for the woman?
The ideology that sustains this promotion of “sexual
respect” deserves a closer look. The basic formula is: “Yes means
yes!” – it has to be an explicit yes, not just the absence of a no. “No
no” does not automatically amount to a “yes”: because if a woman who is
being seduced does not actively resist it, this still leaves the space open for
different forms of coercion.
Mood killer
Here, however, problems multiply: what if a woman
passionately desires it but is too embarrassed to openly declare it? What if,
for both partners, ironically playing coercion is part of the erotic game? And
a yes to what, precisely, to what types of sexual activity, is a declared yes?
Should then the contract form be more detailed, so that the principal consent
is specified: a yes to vaginal but not anal intercourse, a yes to fellatio but not
swallowing the sperm, a yes to light spanking but not harsh blows, etc.etc.
One can easily imagine a long bureaucratic negotiation,
which can kill all desire for the act, but it can also get libidinally invested
on its own. These problems are far from secondary, they concern the very core
of erotic interplay from which one cannot withdraw into a neutral position and
declare one's readiness (or unreadiness) to do it: every such act is part of
the interplay and either de-eroticizes the situation or gets eroticized on its
own.
The “yes means yes’ sexual rule is an exemplary
case of the narcissistic notion of subjectivity that predominates today. A
subject is experienced as something vulnerable, something that has to be
protected by a complex set of rules, warned in advance about all possible
intrusions that may disturb him/her.
Remember how, upon its release, ET was prohibited in
Sweden, Norway, and Denmark: because it’s non-sympathetic portrayal of adults
was considered dangerous for relations between children and their parents. (An
ingenious detail confirms this accusation: in the first 10 minutes of the film,
all adults are seen only below their belts, like the adults in cartoons who
threaten Tom and Jerry…)
From today’s perspective, we can see this prohibition as an
early sign of the politically-correct obsession with protecting individuals
from any experience that may hurt them in any way. And the list can go on
indefinitely – recall the proposal to digitally delete smoking from Hollywood
classics…
Yes, sex is traversed by power games, violent obscenities,
etc., but the difficult thing to admit is that it’s inherent to it. Some
perspicuous observers have already noticed how the only form of sexual relation
that fully meets the politically correct criteria would have been a contract
drawn between sadomasochist partners.
Thus, the rise of Political Correctness and the rise of
violence are two sides of the same coin: insofar as the basic premise of
Political Correctness is the reduction of sexuality to contractual mutual
consent. And the French linguist Jean-Claude Milner was right to point out how
the anti-harassment movement unavoidably reaches its climax in contracts which
stipulate extreme forms of sadomasochist sex (treating a person like a dog on a
collar, slave trading, torture, up to consented killing).
In such forms of consensual slavery, the market freedom of
the contract negates itself: and slave trade becomes the ultimate assertion of
freedom. It is as if Jacques Lacan’s motif “Kant with Sade” (Marquis
de Sade’s brutal hedonism as the truth of Kant’s rigorous ethics) becomes
reality in an unexpected way. But, before we dismiss this motif as just a
provocative paradox, we should reflect upon how this paradox is at work in our
social reality itself.
Slavoj Žižek is a cultural philosopher. He’s a senior
researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of
Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and
international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the
University of London.
Wednesday, December 20, 2017
Saturday, December 2, 2017
Friday, December 1, 2017
Instant preplay of the Amazon bidding war
Some of the city officials who
have been most shameless in their spending on stadiums are now groveling to
attract Amazon, writes TheNation.com columnist Dave Zirin.
November 30, 2017
Comment: Dave Zirin
November 30, 2017
THE TERRIFIC podcast Citations
Needed, hosted by Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson, call it
"lotteryism"--the grotesque process where local and state governments
bid for Fortune 500 companies by offering billions of dollars in tax breaks in
the hopes that they will relocate to their cities. The most high-profile
example of this right now is, of course, Amazon. Politicians across the country
are offering absurd packages to attract the new "Amazon HQ2"
headquarters. These enticements will gut services for those who depend on
public schools, hospitals, public transportation and basic infrastructure. This
is not to say that Amazon won't bring jobs to these cities. It is making
promises of thousands of permanent hires. But the pound of flesh being offered
for these jobs is frightening.
Chicago has said Amazon could
keep local income taxes levied on the company's employees, a
total estimated at $1.32 billion, according to the Seattle publication The
Stranger. New Jersey has offered a
staggering $7 billion in tax breaks. Boston has offered to have city
employees be privatized workers when doing work under the auspices of Jeff
Bezos' empire: his own army of the underclass. Southern California is offering
$100 million in free land. Fresno
is offering to "place 85 percent of every tax dollar generated by
Amazon into a so-called 'Amazon Community Fund.'"
This would give Amazon control
over where our taxes flow, which undoubtedly would be in the direction of its
own well-compensated employees--think parks, bike lanes, condo development--creating
a new model of gentrification, directly subsidized by traffic tickets, parking
meters and regressive taxation of the poor.
Fresno's economic development
director Larry Westerlund told
the Los Angeles Times, "Rather than the money disappearing into a
civic black hole, Amazon would have a say on where it will go. Not for the fire
department on the fringe of town, but to enhance their own investment in
Fresno." Sure would suck to have your home on fire if you live on the
"fringe of town."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
THIS IS little more than
corporate theft, in collusion with often Democratic Party-led governments. And
publicly funded sports stadium scams and Olympic bidding wars laid the
groundwork for it. They have normalized the idea that our tax dollars exist to
fund the projects of the wealthy, with benefits trickling down in ways that
only produce more thirst.
Chris Heller wrote
a terrifically detailed report for the Pacific Standard about stadium
funding in which he estimated, "Over the past 15 years, more than $12
billion in public money has been spent on privately owned stadiums. Between
1991 and 2010, 101
new stadiums were opened across the country; nearly all those projects were
funded by taxpayers."
As Neil DeMause, author of Field
of Schemes said to me, "More recent corporate leaders have no doubt looked
to the billions of dollars lavished on sports teams and decided to up their
ante."
You can see this in the cities
that have offered the most gobsmacking giveaways to Amazon. Chicago is
still paying off renovations to the White Sox Cellular Field, more than 25
years after it opened, as well as the Chicago Bears' home of Soldier Field.
According to the Chicago Tribune, "Nearly $430 million in debt related to
renovations at the ballpark and a major overhaul of Soldier Field, including
$36 million in payments owed this year."
Then there is Southern
California, where San Diego voters rejected pouring over a billion dollars into
a new NFL stadium for the Chargers. Los Angeles then took the team and is
paying $60 million to pay for roads and "infrastructure" for a
new facility that was supposed to be privately funded. Los Angeles has also
pledged $5.3 billion to host the 2028 Olympics, a number, to judge by past
Olympics, that will balloon. It is doing so despite having the
highest number of chronically homeless people in the U.S. and, according to
the U.S. Census, more people living in poverty than any other major U.S. city.
It is also telling that Sacramento, the state capital, is where $272
million is being paid in taxes for the NBA Sacramento Kings' new facility.
If the Kings leave before the 35-year lease is up, that debt will still need to
be paid, just as the people of Oakland will be paying for the Raiders' stadium
for years after the team moves to Las Vegas.
Then there is Boston, which
tried to ram through its own multibillion-dollar bid for the Olympic Games.
Even though its bid was beaten back by activists, the heavy-handed efforts by
politicians to sell this to the public has normalized the playing field upon
which cities compete against one another. They don't compete to see who has the
lowest poverty rate or the fewest people behind bars. They compete for businesses
and the affection of 21st-century plutocrats, who promise prosperity yet
deliver it only for themselves, newly arriving executives, and whatever
politicians might be greased in the process. Our love of sports laid the
groundwork for the madness of "lotteryism." We're the frog in the
slowly boiling water. And they are not content merely to cook us. We're also
their dinner.
First published at TheNation.com.