Bad intentions by writers, actors, directors, etc don’t necessarily spoil a final product. After all, the rebels in Star Wars were meant to be the Viet Cong and the Empire, the United States. But we’ve long since passed the twilight marker when political agendas can serve as an inspiration without loudly being used to signal their political virtues, and thus, inevitably, spoiling the final product.
Take the Star Wars reboot, these days a linchpin of the Disney evil empire, and, increasingly, a failing product.
In the Art of The Rise of Skywalker, Phil Szostak wrote: Lucasfilm executive creative director Doug Chiang wondered, “Since these three films are a female driven story, where’s Leia in Episodes VIII and IX?”
In the same book, Dave Filoni is quoted as saying: “There’s a potential idea there about the matriarchy coming back and subverting what has always been dominantly patriarchal in male heroes, Zeus, Hercules, and everything else.”
The woke matriarchy of soy boys seems to have done an awesome job of subverting the box office and Disney’s profit margins.
There is something happening culturally. You look at birth, regeneration, the world itself needing healing: All of those things are emblematic of the ‘mother’ character in myth. They are all matriarchal things, Mother Earth itself, global warming is a hot topic.”
Deep thoughts.
Lucas meant to use Star Wars to subvert an American narrative. Instead he underpinned it. (That used to happen a lot back in the seventies when the form of the story ended up eating its message.) But when you’ve subverted the form and function of the story, then the product itself is subversion and the audience consists of the ‘woke’. Which is to say virtue signalers making product for other virtue signalers. And that kind of ‘woke’ economy can run for a bit, but its ultimate creative bankruptcy is inevitable.
Politics is a poor storyteller compared to the mythic origins of fiction. When all you’ve got is a political agenda, the work is going to suck. And its suckiness will inevitably consume its future existence in a world that no longer shares the same shibboleths.
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