The Social Justice Repulsion Effect Takes Hold Of The Star Wars Franchise

SJW politics naturally destroys any cultural institution that it infects.  SJW ideology is quite literally a cultural cancer; a fact that is easily demonstrated.

We’ve seen that truth expressed in the lowest rated televised Oscars in history.  We’ve seen it in the waning sales of Marvel Comics, and the subsequent replacement of Marvel’s SJW Editor in Chief as a result.  We’ve seen it in the slide of NFL viewership, and the MLB replacing the NFL as America’s most popular sport.  We’ve seen it in the decline of Sports Illustrated subscriptions.  We’ve seen it in the declining ratings of ESPN, which had to fire 100 employees as a result.  We’ve seen it in the plummeting ratings of Late Night talk shows which have taken to lecturing their audience rather than entertaining or enlightening them.  We’ve seen it in declining Box Office at the cinema which has also increasingly chosen to lecture its audience with deeply ignorant SJW politics.  Anyone who doubts that people in the American entertainment industry are political activists rather than artists, can read about how Hollywood screenwriters are now coaching progressive political candidates.  We’ve seen it in SJW controlled universities and colleges which are experiencing big drops in enrollment.  We’ve seen it in East Berliners risking their lives to cross the infamous Berlin Wall in an attempt to escape East Berlin.  We’ve seen it in the SJW controlled city of Detroit, from which so many people have fled that their downtown skyscrapers are abandoned.  We’ve seen it in the blue state of California, from which the middle class is fleeing.  We’ve seen it in nations like Venezuela where thousands of formerly well-to-do people are fleeing the disastrous effects of the nation’s newly formed leftist SJW government.

Wherever SJW politics are imposed, normal people will understandably flee.  It’s a universal constant both in the micro and in the macro.

And this isn’t just anecdotal hyperbole.  Matt Philbin from NewsBusters.org reports:

According to new data from a McLaughlin & Associates/Media Research Center national poll of 1,000 likely voters:

75% agree with the statement, “When I watch live sports or entertainment shows on television I am trying to get away from politics and do not want to be bombarded with partisan political messages.”

Given that normal people also sought to escape the same kinds of worthless cultural re-education in Soviet gulags, this should come as no surprise.

Since the SJW contagion has now metastasized within Lucasfilm, we can fully expect to see what I call the Social Justice Repulsion Effect happen with the Star Wars franchise as well.  In fact, it has already begun.

Normal people just aren’t interested.

Martin Daubney of The Telegraph writes in an editorial entitled, Liberal identity politics has ruined Star Wars for the fanboys:

Has the peculiarly Earthling curse of liberal identity politics infected even galaxies far, far away? It would appear so, if a growing fanboy backlash to Star Wars: The Last Jedi is to be believed.

Since its release at the weekend, a remarkable gulf has emerged between professional critics and the general viewing public’s scoring of the movie – as illustrated by that modern barometer of movies, Rotten Tomatoes. On the review aggregation site, the professionals give the movie an impressive average score of 93pc; while fans score it a more Luke-warm 55pc.

What’s going on? It appears this huge discrepancy can be attributed not to its plot – described as “having more holes than a Swiss cheese that shared a wedding bed with a porcupine” – but a claim the movie is no more than “social justice warrior propaganda”.

In media land, one critic gushed The Last Jedi is “the most triumphantly feminist Star Wars movie yet,” concluding it a masterpiece that possesses a “celebratory inclusiveness that seems entirely in the Jedi spirit”.

The Last Jedi has also been heralded as the first Star Wars movie that passes the Bechdel Test, a rule of thumb that asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man.

This type of analysis isn’t new. Entire books have been written on the identity politics of Star Wars, pointing out that creator George Lucas once spoke of his duty to wield a “moral megaphone” in his filmmaking. “Somebody has to tell young people what we think is a good person,” he said.

However, some feel that, since Disney bought the rights to the Star Wars franchise, this moral megaphone has become deafening.

Analysis of user comments on Rotten Tomatoes is telling. While most lasers are locked on the flick’s “terrible plot holes”, its “un forgivable” treatment of Luke Skywalker, and it being “little more than a very long Disney advert vehicle to sell merchandise,” a large voice of dissent decries its use of identity politics as a serious Force of disgruntlement.

The comments are littered with one-star reviews that read, “Politically correct to the point of boredom”; “SJW propaganda” and “I’m frustrated that feminism and diversity have made their way into this film. This has ruined Star Wars for me as well as my kids. Keep liberalism out of it and stop ruining once good things”.

Certainly, watching the movie can feel like you’re playing identity politics bingo.

Perhaps these fanboys ought to get over themselves. It’s just a movie, after all.

But the truth is that identity politics is the kryptonite that saps the joy out of all it touches. How long before Harrison Ford comes out as Trans Solo? What price a zero-emissions Millennium Falcon? Will Jabba The Hutt be called out for “fat shaming” the obese?

Will any of this make the slightest difference one of the highest-grossing movie franchise of all time? Only time will tell, but for now a social media war is raging between critics and diehard fans, an increasing number of whom seem to be saying “dead to me, the franchise is”.

The truly amusing part of this whole biofeedback machine, is that the SJWs currently staffed within Lucasfilm will see the backlash as a great success.  SJWs will delude themselves into thinking that they’re pissing off all the right people.  Who are all the right people?  I have compiled the unabridged SJW gripe list and provide it here for your convenience:

“Deplorable rich intolerant bitter clinging hate-mongering war-mongering fear-mongering privileged middle-class micro-aggressing triggering patriarchal straight sexist misogynist cisgendered hetero-normative transphobic homophobic homogeneous hegemonic racist xenophobic jingoistic nativist tea-bagging redneck hillbilly reptilian-brained binary-thinking white supremacist euro-centric male Zionist Evangelical Christian Far-Right Extreme-Right Uber-Right Ultra-Right Alt-Right NeoCon so-called conservative Republican bourgeoisie capitalist colonialist imperialist fascists.”

Of course, none of that makes any kind of coherent sense, but that’s the inherent nature of the uneducated SJW mentality that normal people have to cope with.  They’re pre-programmed to involuntarily squawk these words in response to various stimuli without regard to what the words actually mean.  In any case, the above list represents how the SJW employees at Lucasfilm view every backlasher who writes a letter, posts a blog, or uploads a video in protest to their content.  Just ask them.  They’ll tell you, if they can bear to acknowledge your existence at all.  So they’re almost guaranteed to double down on social justice messaging.

Jack Kenrick from squawker.org also identifies this phenomenon in an article entitled, Star Wars Fans Seem To Hate The Last Jedi And SJW’s Couldn’t Be Happier About It.  In it he writes:

What’s been interesting to watch in the hours since its release, is that the general public seems to be finding this the most divisive Star Wars film yet. While almost universally lauded by professional pop culture and film critics alike. The Last Jedi is seemingly not doing quite as well with the average American moviegoer. A fact many Progressive types somehow seem to be actively celebrating as proof of their own moral superiority.

Case in point this article written for Wired magazine entitled, “The Last Jedi Will Bother Some People. Good.” In which writer Angela Watercutter not so subtly informs us all that “The movie isn’t here to Make the Galaxy Great Again.” We are are told that those who don’t like “diversity” should not see the film. Of course as is now standard practice for today’s modern liberals, by diversity they don’t mean a variety of thought but rather simply superficial differences in skin color. None of this is too surprising however when you consider the original title of the now modified story was actually, “The Last Jedi Will Be To Inclusive for Some People. Good.”

It would seem that the average moviegoer doesn’t appreciate an obviously politicized half hours worth of pointless subplot. Which is frustratingly what the film provides, as almost the entirety of the genuinely forced “Progressive” parts of the movie take place in an oddly out of place subplot, that ultimately feels like it lacks any real purpose beyond simply pleasing SJW types. 

UPDATE:

Immediately upon publishing this blog post, I discovered that SC Reviews was discussing another article that echoes many of the same things I’ve been writing about on this blog.  Paul Cheung writes an article at fee.org entitled, “The Last Jedi” and the Politicization of Storytelling.  In it, he writes:

Has identity politics created a dilemma for the Disney Empire?

There’s been a disturbance in the franchise: Ambivalence, rather than anticipation, has characterized the online response to Disney’s announcement of the deluge of new Star Wars projects we are to be saturated with over the next several years. And while the trailer for Solo: A Star Wars Story (scheduled for May) was expected to be received with some misgiving, many fans are actively rooting for it to flop.

There’s already an over-abundance of online rants analyzing The Last Jedi’s shortcomings as a piece of entertainment. But it is in the realm of the ideas where the division between critics and audiences is most stark. Dozens of articles praise the film’s perceived socio-political commentary while countless viewers decry it for the very same reason.

One reason is that archetypes and the mythic storytelling form never lose relevance. They are timeless and universal. By contrast, loading a film with political messaging for 2018, using it as a vessel to comment on current events, makes its relevance transient. Ironically, Johnson’s attempt to “update” the saga is precisely what caused his entry to feel dated at an accelerated pace.

And it isn’t just the film’s detractors who observe the current American political climate’s bearing on the way it was written. GQ UK gleefully claims “The Last Jedi takes on Trump”. Other articles, such as these in The Independent, The Guardian, and Wired, insinuate that anyone not on board is an “alt-right” hater of diversity.

While the controversy may appear to be an inordinate fuss over “light entertainment,” Star Wars (whether by chance or intention) has come to represent something far more significant than that.

Throughout history, stories have functioned as one of the most effective societal-shaping tools. The themes, ideals, and values communicated in stories have simultaneously reflected and molded the cultures which produced them. This is what Victor Hugo was alluding to when he wrote, “England has two books: the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare, but the Bible made England.”

Descriptions of Star Wars as “generation-defining” are also allusions to the power of stories to shape who we are. And therein lies the problem: Johnson’s work, while managing to imitate the aesthetic of Star Wars (stormtroopers, lightsabers, etc.) is a hollow husk bearing only surface similarity to its parent material. Its shallow identity politics reflect a cultural hegemony adrift from deeper moorings.

Such an incoherent set of half-baked ideas wouldn’t matter if not for the fact that they are being propagated on an industrial scale, becoming almost ubiquitous in U.S. and UK entertainment.

In a scene in The Last Jedi which practically invites the type of historical parallelism above, there’s an attempted book-burning (ignited by Yoda, no less) broadcasting the film’s overarching theme of abandoning the past.

“Let the past die. Kill it if you have to,” Kylo urges Rey, even as Johnson urges the audience to “let the past die” so that we can embrace his Star Wars and, at a broader cultural level, the ideas his film promulgates.

With the backlash to The Last Jedi, the values in the background of Johnson’s film have been inadvertently thrust into the spotlight, exposing greater popular discomfort with them than anyone anticipated.

“Never before have the young men had so good a right to clean up the debris of the past.”

UPDATE:

SC Reviews offers his own perspective on the Telegraph article: