Look, The Last Jedi might not be the best Star Wars movie (upon reflection I don’t think any of them are really good as movies and my favorite is purely conventional, Empire Strikes Back) but the idea that what makes it bad is its diversity is nothing but racism and misogyny.
There is no doubt the sudden and unexpected death of Carrie Fischer has meant huge changes in the arc of the story, the next one was supposed to be her film and with all the big three fictionally or actually dead you’ll see a lot more Poe (reputedly gay), Finn (obviously Black), and Rose (female, Asian, and a maintainance worker).
Now there’s a lot of The Last Jedi that doesn’t work for me (Canto Bight? Couldn’t have shaved a minute or 20 out of that?). I actually like Snoke’s end, it’s like Chekov’s gun (you mean it’s just there? Not material to the plot in any way? If I wanted unscripted and unresolved drama I’d look out the window.) The failure is only in your imagination.
Toxic nerds are making “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” criticism impossible
by Matthew Rozsa, Salon
July 12, 201
I think “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” was a bad movie. That is a personal opinion, one with which other men and women of good will should feel comfortable disagreeing.
I also think the people who have been harassing Kelly Marie Tran, John Boyega, Rian Johnson and other creative individuals who helped make “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” are racist, sexist and all-around deplorable human beings (and I use the term “deplorable” quite deliberately here).
Before I get into the problem of the toxic nerd culture that has caused the harassment of “The Last Jedi” alums like actress Tran, however, I’d like to explain precisely why I think the movie itself was an epic misfire. Appropriately enough, the easiest way to explain my point is to compare “The Last Jedi” to the “Breaking Bad” antepenultimate episode “Ozymandias,” which, like “The Last Jedi,” was directed by Rian Johnson. Without spoiling the story, its purpose was to serve as the climax for all of the major characters viewers had gotten to know throughout the show — the moment when, for everyone from antiheroes Walter White and Jesse Pinkman to their adversary Hank Schrader, the proverbial chickens came home to roost. It was a powerful piece of television filmmaking and — because it was suitably epic while remaining rooted in what viewers had come to know and love (or hate) about the characters — felt like an appropriate culmination of their various story arcs. Frankly, I’d be shocked if it wasn’t instrumental in landing Johnson his “Star Wars” gig.
That said, “Star Wars” is not “Breaking Bad,” and the same narrative tricks that worked for the latter feel jarringly out of place in the former. (Johnson deserves to be commended for his boldness, but audacity is not the same thing as quality.) The problem with “The Last Jedi” is that it doesn’t logically connect everything we saw from the previous movies with what happens in this one. As Mark Hamill himself pointed out, Luke Skywalker’s (Hamill) abandonment of his belief in Jedi teachings directly contradicts his personality and actions from the original trilogy, and the backstory filled in here to explain his sudden turn is delivered in startlingly brief monologues instead of scenes that actually flesh out the character dilemmas they’re meant to reveal. Because the explanation for Luke’s loss of faith is critical to the film’s plot, the perfunctory execution makes everything we’re supposed to believe about his character’s transformation feel unconvincing. While his scenes training Rey (Daisy Ridley) are beautifully done, they can’t make up for the fact that the character performing the training feels less like Luke Skywalker than he does Johnson’s own original creation with the Skywalker name slapped onto him.
The other storyline isn’t much better. In Plot B we see Finn (John Boyega) team up with a maintenance worker named Rose Tico (Tran) to help Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) circumvent the seemingly incompetent leadership of Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo (Laura Dern). There are many problems here. First, Rose and Finn wind up abandoning their plan halfway through its execution for the flimsiest of reasons and, even worse, have all of their work rendered entirely moot by a betrayal from someone who it was blazingly obvious should never have been trusted in the first place. This is a shame, if for no other reason than the chemistry between Finn and Rose makes them easily the most likable and sympathetic characters in the film. Poe and Holdo have their charms as well — Poe is endearingly plucky and adventurous while Holdo has a quiet bravery and wisdom to her — but their conflict is marred by the fact that it winds up being pointless. After all the strategic Sturm und Drang between the two of them has subsided, it’s hard to see how the Resistance didn’t wind up back exactly where it started, despite Poe’s and Holdo’s various moments of character growth and/or sacrifice. It’s much ado that adds up to, if not nothing, at least less than the sum of its parts.
…
This brings us to the problem of toxic nerd culture.It’s one that we’ve seen pop up before. The watershed moment, as Johnson himself observed in a tweet earlier this week, was the Gamergate scandal of 2014. On that occasion, feminist critics of video games and women in the gaming industry in general were singled out for harassment by thousands of gamers who deplored what they felt was an intrusion into their domain by left-wing “social justice warriors.” They were particularly upset about attempts to criticize both games and the gaming industry as sexist, with writer Jenn Frank explaining in The Guardian that “they feel they are at war with a group of left-leaning games writers and developers who they refer to as ‘social justice warriors’ – this is effectively anyone who has ever questioned the patriarchal nature of the games industry or the limited, often objectifying depiction of women.”
Of course, the backlash of pop culture nerd bigotry was hardly limited to Gamergate. When the trailer for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” revealed that one of the protagonists would be played by the African-British actor John Boyega, it led to a cry of outrage by many “Star Wars” fans. In 2016, there was a comparable outcry against the “Ghostbusters” reboot from the nerd community, with internet fans lashing out against a film they hadn’t even seen (or at least hadn’t seen prior to vehemently denouncing it) because it had replaced the traditionally all-male Ghostbusters cast with women. One year later, a so-called Comicsgate occurred that seemed to be sparked by a picture of female comics writers at Marvel going out for milkshakes.
And this is just the short list.
It isn’t difficult to draw a straight line from Gamergate and Comicsgate and the Ghostbusters backlash to the racist and sexist harassment that Tran experienced and which drove her offline altogether. On each of these occasions, a clear pattern of behavior emerged:
1. Some fans felt outraged that pop culture spaces that they believed should be specifically white, straight and male — whether mediums like video games and comic books or specific franchises like “Star Wars” and “Ghostbusters” — had been compromised by the inclusion of people who weren’t.
2. In order to reclaim these spaces for straight white men, they join likeminded people online and attempt to take down these properties by either (a) claiming that their outrage isn’t because of racism, sexism or other forms of prejudice but rather because the developments that just so happen to be associated with minorities are “ruining” their medium/franchise of choice or (b) being explicit in the fact that their motivations are racist and sexist, usually by harassing their targets with slurs and threats. Sometimes they also do (a) and (b) at the same time, never mind the fact that (b) pretty much proves the lie in the premise of (a).
3. They act like the injured party when they are criticized for their behavior. This point is absolutely crucial to understand: They do not perceive of themselves as bullies, or as bigots, but rather they pose as aggrieved parties. In the best case scenarios, it is because they claim that something they’ve loved all of their life has been taken away from them; in the worst case scenarios, it’s because they claim that pop culture is being used to attack them as straight white men (just look at the popularity of Jordan Peterson, who has described “Frozen” as “propaganda” because of its subversion of traditionally feminine narrative themes).It isn’t difficult to draw a straight line from Gamergate and Comicsgate and the Ghostbusters backlash to the racist and sexist harassment that Tran experienced and which drove her offline altogether. On each of these occasions, a clear pattern of behavior emerged:
- Some fans felt outraged that pop culture spaces that they believed should be specifically white, straight and male — whether mediums like video games and comic books or specific franchises like “Star Wars” and “Ghostbusters” — had been compromised by the inclusion of people who weren’t.
- In order to reclaim these spaces for straight white men, they join likeminded people online and attempt to take down these properties by either (a) claiming that their outrage isn’t because of racism, sexism or other forms of prejudice but rather because the developments that just so happen to be associated with minorities are “ruining” their medium/franchise of choice or (b) being explicit in the fact that their motivations are racist and sexist, usually by harassing their targets with slurs and threats. Sometimes they also do (a) and (b) at the same time, never mind the fact that (b) pretty much proves the lie in the premise of (a).
- They act like the injured party when they are criticized for their behavior. This point is absolutely crucial to understand: They do not perceive of themselves as bullies, or as bigots, but rather they pose as aggrieved parties. In the best case scenarios, it is because they claim that something they’ve loved all of their life has been taken away from them; in the worst case scenarios, it’s because they claim that pop culture is being used to attack them as straight white men (just look at the popularity of Jordan Peterson, who has described “Frozen” as “propaganda” because of its subversion of traditionally feminine narrative themes).