Last night the guys at Midnight’s Edge had me on for one of their live shows. I also did a recording for the regular show.
J.J. Abrams
Skippy the Jedi Droid: The Mary Sue/Gary Stu Phenomenon in Today’s Sci-Fantasy
If you haven’t heard of Skippy the Jedi Droid, you’re probably not alone; the concept appeared in a one-off story in 1999’s Star Wars Tales #1 and was written by Peter David. The narrative centers around a Force-sensitive droid named Skippy, and yes, (spoiler alert) it’s the very same R5-unit with the bad motivator that appeared in the original 1977 Star Wars film. Using its powers to Jedi-mind-trick Uncle Owen into buying it from the Jawas, it has a vision of the horrors likely to take place if it and not R2-D2 and C-3PO is purchased, so it blows out its own motivator and uses the last of its fading consciousness to mind-trick 3PO into suggesting R2 as a replacement, thus saving the galaxy.
This makes Skippy quite clearly a Gary Stu, the “male” (if programmed gender identification may be applied to sexless droid constructs) equivalent of a Mary Sue.
Defenders of the Disney Star Wars movies, Paul Feig’s abominable Ghostbusters adaptation, and CBS’ STD like to resort to the straw man tactic of crying sexism whenever the term ‘Mary Sue’ is used to accurately describe the shallow, one-dimensional concepts their creators try to pass off as well developed characters. The failure in this method of defense, of course, is the existence of aforementioned male equivalent personified in Skippy (as well as The 300’s King Leonidas), but let it not be said that whiny shallow thinkers are willing to grow up long enough to acknowledge the absurdity of their accusations when faced with the cold hard facts.
But this is a problem that is plaguing Hollywood these days: Nobody was willing to be the adult in the room and tell the likes of Steven Moffat, Alex Kurtz-Man, Ruin Johnson, Jar Jar Abrams, Paul Fatigue, and others guilty of inflicting chronic Mary-Sue-ism on unwilling audiences, that they aren’t very good and certainly aren’t half as clever as they obviously think they are. Their twelve-year-old’s writing level is all too often condescending, cynical, contemptuous of the source material, and as a result, insulting to the intelligence of the audience. For all someone like Moffat, for example, claims to be a huge fan of properties such as Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who, when you take a closer look at his concepts-in-place-of-characters, his version of Holmes is a classic Gary Stu, so perfect in his genius and social imperfections that he doesn’t need to change, learn, or grow.
By contrast, consider that in Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia, Holmes is truly challenged, both on the case he’s working on and in his perceptions of women’s abilities. He’s forced to confront his prejudices about the so-called weaker sex because he has been outsmarted by a woman, and as a result he is compelled to alter his views, to grow and learn as a person. For Victorian era England, this was a refreshingly ballsy move for Doyle and it paid off, in large part because it portrayed Holmes as a deeply flawed character who when challenged grows intellectually and spiritually, even if only somewhat, and that is what any given audience relates to. We cannot relate to or believe in a flawless, unchanging concept because it’s not based in reality. We reject it because we know that nobody is perfect, and therefore we cannot accept it in a narrative because to do so forces us to suspend too much of our disbelief to be able to get involved in the story.
Likewise, with Ma-Rey Sue, we simply cannot believe she can use the Force like a Jedi Master (Mistress?) without having undergone any real training, to defeat someone with ostensibly many years of experience. We reject it because it’s not based in reality, and any good story and character must have some basis in it. Otherwise we cannot get into the story. That’s why, when Ruin Johnson proved just how much of a rank storytelling amateur he is and always has been with his hack job on Disney’s Episode VIII, audiences reacted so harshly. We reject his and Abrams’ baloney for what it is.
And, of course, there are Feigbusters and STD, both of which rely on Mary Sues as the centerpieces of their respective tales.
The common denominator to all these is that they are so unrealistic that they cannot stand on their own. Audience won’t accept them, and on a certain conscious level, their creators know it. But instead of acknowledging their writing flaws and going back to learn how to write proper characters, the preferred tactic is to try to bolster the shallow one-dimensional concepts by tearing down the original source material. After all, they “reason”, if the original is destroyed, audiences will have no choice but to accept our creations. But the opposite effect has instead occurred: we dig our heels in even deeper in our rejection, because instead of responding to mistakes with acknowledgement and corrective action, we are attacked as sexist, racist, homophobic, and so on.
All of this is borne of contempt, and not only for the source material; too many of today’s writers hold their audiences in contempt as well. Steven Moffat even went to the extreme in one episode of Sherlock by going out of his way to ridicule fans for even trying to speculate about how the hero survived a presumably fatal encounter. But Moffat had set up questions to be answered later in the first place, and has no right to blast anyone for daring to try and come up with answers to questions he himself posed. Likewise, Ruin Johnson’s childish digs at Star Wars fans, both in The Last Jedi and on social media, speak to his sheer disdain for any who have the audacity to speculate on even the ham-handed questions Jar Jar Abrams put forth for viewers to answer on their own in The Force Awakens. And this betrays, too, an even deeper pathology: Why even pose questions at all if they’re not meant to be answered, and if you’re just going to mock people for doing what comes naturally when asked a riddle? In the minds of today’s corporate hack writer-directors, answers are irrelevant, and audiences are childish @$$holes for expecting any or trying to come up with their own. Payoff is for losers, nerds, people too dweebish even for nerds higher up in the social pecking order.
Thankfully, there’s a limit as to how much abuse audiences will take before they vent their frustration by refusing to buy the shi**y product being sold. Although media consolidation increases, diminishing the quality of what’s sold, consumers still have the right not to purchase it. And you can’t force someone to buy something no matter how you might try to enforce it under code of law. That’s largely why Obamacare, modeled as it was on Romneycare in Massachusetts, ultimately failed. Instead of restricting prices or coming up with a public alternative, legislators and executive alike tried to force consumers to buy product that is increasingly un-affordably priced and increasingly defective in providing a necessary service. Small wonder it failed. It did so because you can’t respond to diminishing demand for low quality product by saying, “you HAVE to buy it; you have no choice in the matter.”
At some point Hollywood is going to have to grow up and accept the fundamental truth of economics: people buy product only if it’s good, useful, and reasonably priced. If you only ever produce garbage, don’t expect them to plop down money they realize is better spent elsewhere. Cinema, of course, isn’t going away any time soon. But it may be that, tired of chronic Mary/Gary Sue/Stu-ism, audiences will soon force another Renaissance on the industry. This can be done in part by supporting smaller, lower-budget, well written and executed productions. If those make money at the box office, Hollywood will adapt as it did before and produce more of that level of quality, simply in order to compete.
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The Cynical Exploitation of Identity Politics is Largely Responsible for the Decline of Star Wars
I wasn’t going to write up another blog entry about Star Wars until the rumors over Kathleen Kennedy’s departure from LucasFilm had been officially confirmed or denied by Disney, but the last few discussions I’ve had with others on social media have driven me to explain my thoughts about the use of identity politics in the franchise, the real reason it’s being exploited, and the impact it’s obviously had.
Now, it’s no secret that establishment media have basically attacked Disney in general and LucasFilm in particular for pushing “liberal” values in the new movies produced under Kennedy’s watch as president of the studio: the “liberal elitists” in Hollywood seem to be waging all-out culture war on “centrists” and conservatives by trying to displace traditionally white male characters and archetypes with females and persons of color.
And to be sure, as The Intercept’s Briahna Gray writes, “many Democrats now bristle at the notion that the Democratic Party should reach out to working class whites all. Understandably fearful that “wooing” white voters might require an appeal to bigotry, it’s now commonly argued that the Democratic Party should concentrate its efforts on nonvoters of color instead.” And we certainly seem to be seeing a similar pattern of pandering to demographics that are predominantly non-white and female, with snarky public statements and remarks appearing to confirm what many critics of the new movies believe.
Gray goes on to write:
Nonwhite and/or female candidates are praised for advancing “identity politics” if they win — regardless of how they campaigned. And efforts to include white voters in one’s coalition are blamed for faltering campaigns — regardless of a candidate’s more substantive failures.
But to subscribe to the notion that Kathleen Kennedy and her merry band of suck-ups are pushing so-called “social justice warriorism” on an unwilling fan base is, in my opinion, a misunderstanding of their intentions. Remember that in today’s increasingly corporatized, consolidated media, companies looking to squeeze every last penny out of their product want to sell to as many buyers as possible in order to maximize profits. That means targeting demographics that have been traditionally ignored, or that company executives think have been ignored, so that they can fill as many movie theater seats as they can.
People need to understand that “corporate thinking is short term”: Disney and its subsidiaries are only concerned with making immediate profits. Politics are not immediate; they are long term goals, strategies, tactics, and so on, to be accomplished over a period of years, or even generations. To the extent that corporations and the people who run them have any ideology at all, it’s one of making money. And in that quest to make money, costs have to be cut as much as possible, and product has to be sold to as many consumers as possible.
So you have corporate focus groups trying to figure out how to best pander to various demographic groups, e.g., Millennials. Millennials and later generations are increasingly non-white, and represent many races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and so on. Focus groups try to come up with what they think is the most effective way to play to their wants. “Oh, you don’t think your group was adequately represented in the previous Star Wars trilogies? No problem! Our new, IMPROVED trilogy has something and someone for everybody! We’ve got “strong women”! “Blacks”! “Asians”! “Pansexuals” and “LGBTQ”!
The focus groups decided that the supposedly shrinking white male heterosexual demographic was no longer sufficient to support the Star Wars franchise for Disney, which wants to get a good return on its four billion dollar investment in buying LucasFilm, Ltd. Hence we now have Ma-Rey Sue, Potato Sack Tico, Carrie Poppins, Holdo, Poe, Finn, Pan-do Calrissian, and so on, all created or retooled to have as broad demographic appeal as can be gotten away with.
Of course, it’s a cynical exploitation of identity politics in order to sell toys and movie theater tickets. Why wouldn’t it be? While it is true that politicians, most of whom are either corporate lobbyists or company executives, use corporate talking points to sell themselves on the campaign trail, the reverse is equally as true: corporations exploit politics to their immediate financial gain.
And this, not actually held political beliefs, is what drives the cynical pandering to identity politics. Corporate executives and their stooges are ultimately a nihilistic lot, believing in nothing beyond short term profit. But they are just aware enough to understand that most human beings do have beliefs, and they are not above exploiting those beliefs to sell their product. But the drawback is that people generally know when they’re being pandered to, and they reject it. That’s why Solo: A Star Wars Story has lost money for LucasFilm and Disney. As Gray writes in her article:
Nonwhite and/or female candidates are praised for advancing “identity politics” if they win — regardless of how they campaigned. And efforts to include white voters in one’s coalition are blamed for faltering campaigns — regardless of a candidate’s more substantive failures. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And with a belief that demographics hold the key to unlocking a Democratic victory, Democrats stand poised to ignore the most important lesson of 2016: People turn out for material change.
Thus is explained why Kennedy and her sycophants seem so oblivious to the reasons behind fan reaction to the movies produced under her watch. They don’t want to admit that they screwed up, and so they’re blaming everyone but themselves for having alienated fans to the point that Star Wars has gone from being a property that makes and breaks box office and merchandise sales records, to one that loses money, in just three (really two and a half) short years.
To be sure, the Marvel movies are as guilty of exploiting identity politics to cater to target demographics as much as their sister productions, but not nearly as obviously or as insultingly. And whereas LucasFilm has been either insensitive or outright hostile to the fan base, Marvel understands its own far better and is content to show much more respect, which is why you don’t see much fan anger toward Marvel. It would be one thing if LucasFilm and the people presently running it were properly apologetic and took steps to remedy its mistakes, but instead it is taking the same failed tactic of doubling down on those blunders and them compounding these monumental screw-ups by lashing out, whether directly or through paid media shills (who used to be a lot more reliably honest in critiquing movies).
At the end of the day, LucasFilm needs to publicly acknowledge what it has done, own up to it, apologize, and take corrective measures before it completely destroys Disney’s plans to construct theme parks and hotels based on Star Wars. And maybe Disney will take action where Kennedy will not; after all, over a week has passed since rumors began flying about her impending departure from LucasFilm, and so far there have been no official statements denying them. If she is indeed being pushed out in favor of someone who can handle the franchise far more capably, that is all well and good. But the damage has been done, and if Disney isn’t careful, if it simply replaces one bad egg with another, then Star Wars is pretty much done for at least another generation.
And that would truly be a tragedy.
The Wilk Report – 3 June 2018 – Solo: A Star Wars Catastrophe
This week Larry Bernard and I talk about the train wreck that is Solo: A Star Wars Story, and where Disney might proceed from this point on now that Star Wars is no longer a guaranteed draw.
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Star Wars: The Last Gasp
In 2012 Disney plopped down over four billion U.S. dollars to acquire LucasFilm, Ltd. from owner George Lucas, with the intention of churning out one movie per year as part of a plan to milk as much money out of the Star Wars franchise as it could before audiences grow bored from over-saturation and move on to something else. So in 2015, we were subjected to Jar Jar Abrams’ mediocre rehash of the first movie, the next year saw the release of the equally mediocre Rogue One, a quasi prequel centering on the theft of the Death Star plans leading up to the events of the first film of the original trilogy, and finally, late last year, was the truly abominable The Last Jedi, directed by rank amateur Ruin Johnson, a boy who despises Star Wars and anyone who is a fan thereof so much he felt compelled to utterly destroy it. This year, a movie based on Han Solo’s early years will be released to theaters to compete against the likes of Avengers: Infinity War, another Disney property, in effect forcing it to compete with the parent company’s other franchise. Solo is widely expected to be as much of a box office disappointment as The Last Jedi, if not more so, which alienated fans and failed to pull in the revenue needed for Disney to justify the four billion dollars spent on LucasFilm.
Still with me? Yes? Good.
I probably don’t need to go over all the reasons how and why The Last Jedi is a steaming pile of bantha poodoo. Others such as the people at Midnight’s Edge, World Class Bullshitters, Doomcock, and Mindless Entertainment, among others, have all chimed in with their opinions and I highly recommend you visit their channels to watch the video analyses of the movie. You can also read writer Sean P. Carlin’s excellent discussion about the cinematic refuse that is this movie and its effect on audience expectations.
I will, therefore, give my own (non-comprehensive) list of what’s wrong with the movie and how it insults the audience:
Seriously, there is not even one actual character in this movie. What we are subjected to are concepts, and bad ones at that. They are not fleshed out characters with histories, flaws, sympathetic qualities, or any real motivation beyond getting from one “beat” to the next. Who are these “people” supposed to be? What drives them, that is, why do they do what they do? Are they supposed to learn and grow to become something better? According to Johnson, there is no answer to these and other questions set up by Abrams in the previous movie, and you’re an asshole loser for even expecting answers or trying to come up with any of your own. So even though Abrams implied that Ma-Rey Sue has some mysterious background we’re supposed to ask questions and speculate about, according to Johnson she is “nobody” and calls you stupid for even thinking she is anybody or has anything to do with anything previously established in the Star Wars universe. And it just get worse from there.
Nothing that takes place in this movie makes any freakin’ sense. There’s a scene in which Leia is blown into the vacuum of space, which according to logic means she would be dead within seconds. There is no way to survive being blown into space. None. Yet we’re supposed to believe that she has enough consciousness after being exposed to extreme cold, lack of breathable atmosphere, and lethal doses of unfiltered stellar radiation to use the Force to save herself. What the actual fuck!? I won’t even go into the ludicrously bad decisions made during the space battle by both sides, or the inane side stories that add nothing to the larger narrative.
All the stupidity in this pitiful excuse for a “story” simply breaks suspension of disbelief, that unspoken contract between viewer and storyteller in which the former agrees to set aside incredulity in order to become immersed in the tale being told. For example, in Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie, we set aside our disbelief that a man can fly without aid of technology or wings or anything other than his own apparent will. We set aside that people can’t fire lasers out of their eyes or have breath powerful enough to knock people about or freeze things. But Donner and the screenwriters (including legendary Godfather author Mario Puzo) knew well enough not to take things so far that the audience couldn’t agree to set aside disbelief. They kept things just realistic enough that the audience could immerse itself in the story for those two, two and a half hours.
Not so for The Last Jedi, or for that matter, The Force Awakens, or Jar Jar Abrams’ pathetic attempt to reboot Star Trek, or Paul Feig’s shitty Ghostbusters reboot, or CBS’ STD.
No, we get nothing that allows us, the viewers, to pretend that any of the crap going on in these movies could feasibly happen. Johnson assumes the audience is stupid, then berates the audience for failing to appreciate the insult to our intelligence.
In The Force Awakens, Han Solo dies like a bitch at the hands of his son, Emo Vader. In The Last Jedi, Luke Skywalker is depicted as a burnt out coward who is too scared of facing his former pupil to go in person to confront him, choosing instead to hide away on some distant backwater planet and ultimately fade away like a bitch; this is the guy who, as a young Jedi pupil, faced down the two baddest asses in the galaxy just to redeem his father from the Dark Side, yet here he’s a coward who seriously considered murdering his own nephew rather than let him fall to Snoke’s influence. Leia is depicted as an incompetent leader, a has-been, a relic of a rebellion that supposedly no longer needs her and yet can’t survive without her knowledge and skills. Carrie Fisher’s death in real life in late 2016 makes resolving Lei’s arc impossible now, but I’ve a feeling that the former princess, senator, and rebel leader would have met with an equally humiliating end for the sake of puffing up the hollow concepts Abrams and Johnson have foisted upon the audience. And speaking of how Leia is depicted…
Supposedly Ma-Rey Sue, Admiral Holdo (played by Laura Dern, whose talent was complete wasted on the role), and new concept Rose Tico—this last being the closest thing we get to having an actual character in The Last Jedi—are the best-est evar! We’re supposed to “know” this because we keep being told they are. But we never get to actually see them being good at anything, because every single decision they make, every single action, is about the dumbest thing one can do in even the most poorly-written slasher movie. Criminally reckless behavior is on display in every scene, getting people needlessly killed, yet somehow we’re told that there’s nothing wrong with any of these bone-headed mistakes and you’ll find defenders of these concepts launching into convoluted, nonsensical rationalizations trying to justify them. But there is no justification because the actions in the movies are indefensibly stupid. There’s no thought put into anything that happens. And yet Abrams and Johnson demand that we blindly accept it all as genius and tell us we’re sexist, racist morons who are too stupid to see how brilliant they are.
So for all we’re told how great Abrams’ and Johnson’s female concepts are, what we actually see is that they’re stupid, incompetent, and shallow to the point we don’t care what happens to them. Can you imagine any of these one-dimensional cardboard cutouts holding a candle to Carrie Fisher’s Leia, Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode, Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley, or Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor? I sure as hell can’t. And it’s a fair bet you can’t, either. Abrams’ and Johnson’s concepts are so devoid of substance, sympathetic qualities, and ability, that the only way to puff them up is to debase and destroy the characters we’ve all grown up with and that were presented much better and more competently, because otherwise the audience would never be able to accept the concepts.
Far from having strong female characters, we’re shat upon with lifeless, brainless, incompetent cutouts. How is that even remotely feminist? John Carpenter and Debra Hill, James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd, and Dan O’Bannon, all wrote famous, strong female characters, that were truly feminist in both concept and execution. Yes, the characters are flawed, but in that way they’re just like real people, and because they are flawed we more easily identify with them and want them to prevail. We care what actually happens to them. We grow and learn with them as they evolve on the page and screen. THAT is how you write a strong female character who wins in spite of everything thrown at her. She either has or obtains the skills and abilities needed to fight the monster/villain of the story, in a more realistic manner that, while we may have to suspend our disbelief, doesn’t require us to suspend so much of it that it takes us out of the story.
Everything seen so far in Disney Star Wars is a rehash of movies that have been made before. The Force Awakens is a shameless retread of the original Star Wars. The Last Jedi is an even more shameless retelling of The Empire Strikes Back, but deliberately insulting to audience intelligence, so much so that the Chinese, who typically gobble up Western cinema, actually said as much in explaining why the movie was dropped from 92% of screens in the second week in what is arguably the largest foreign market.
It would be bad enough if this was all part of some plan that failed because of poor decision-making by producer Kathleen Kennedy and her stable of no-talent directors. But Ruin Johnson appears to have tossed out even the half-assed plan concocted by Jar Jar Abrams, thus leaving the Star Wars franchise basically without any overall direction or structure. Given the episodic nature of George Lucas’ seminal creation, this is unacceptable. Small wonder, then, that the new movies are falling short of minimum profit requirements Disney needs in order for its four billion dollar investment to pay off.
The bulk of the blame for this must be laid at the feet of Kennedy, who seems incapable of imposing any order at LucasFilm, or any guidance with regard to where cinema’s biggest and arguably first blockbuster franchise should go from here. It would be laughable if not for the realization that, if she ultimately causes Star Wars to tank, there is little likelihood that it can ever recover enough to be resurrected at any point in the future. With Carrie Fisher dead, Harrison Ford at age seventy-five, and Mark Hamill at age sixty-six, the chances of seeing either of the surviving main cast members reunited once again to do a reset are pretty much nonexistent.
And the saddest part of all this is that it didn’t have to be this way. Disney could have hired someone to helm LucasFilm who actually has a vision and isn’t afraid to lay down the proverbial law with regards to what can and should be done with Star Wars. Instead, the suits behind the Mouse arrogantly thought that the franchise would practically run itself, without any need for vision or legitimate storytelling. They assumed, like CBS, that, because the property they own came with a built-in audience, they could simply churn out product like on an assembly line without regard for quality. The inevitable result of such hubris is that what was once a popular, almost guaranteed money-maker is now no longer that, because fans who grew up with the originals have been so alienated that they’ve turned away, and that means the future of the franchise is in the hands of audiences who’ve never seen the originals and therefore could take the new movies or leave them, and they aren’t enough to sustain the franchise.
At least there’s Marvel…I guess…
The Wilk Report 