The internet is all abuzz at the moment with the proud news that a men’s rights activist (MRA) has produced a woman-free version of Star Wars’ The Last Jedi, based on a low-fi cam recording from a cinema somewhere in Asia. The stated reason is to (amongst other things) cut out all the scenes which involve women “commanding people around/having ideas” and to get rid of the “girlz powah and other silly stuff”. This dude’s problems with The Last Jedi seem to be the same as some of the douchier commenters on my (much-read!) review of The Last Jedi, which primarily seem to be that “diversity ruined the movie” and “there were too many women in charge.” These complaints are always associated with some kind of whine about how this insistence on diversity has ruined the original series. For example a random reviewer at Rotten Tomatoes says:
With the clear intention of moving away from the Lucas Legacy, this Director has consumated the machiavellian Disney’s plan of turning SW saga in one size fits all current tendencies: ultra-feminism, anti male, ultra-diversification, pro-millennial ranks…
Suggesting, very strongly, that the original movie did not have a political stance or pro-diversity ideal, and that to do so must ruin the original movie. There’s also no evidence that the bigger plot and consistency problems identified by so many commenters on my blog are of great interest to these MRAs – they don’t complain about the acting, only the fact that the actor is a woman, and (for example) the execrable hyperspace weapon is still in the MRA cut. So it certainly appears that their sole and only concern is that the movie features a) too many non-white male actors and b) too many chicks in charge.
Which gets me wondering – exactly what version of the original series did these dudes see, and what exactly did they like about it? For example, A New Hope has a core cast of five people – Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Obi Wan Kenobi, Princess Leia and Darth Vader. Of those one is a woman who is introduced as a leader in the rebellion, and another is black and a leader of the Empire. Now, you might dispute that Darth Vader is actually black since in the middle of The Empire Strikes Back we see a brief shot of his white head (as we do at the end of the Return of the Jedi), but when you and I went to see A New Hope as callow youths in 1978 or whenever it was, having not yet seen The Empire Strikes Back, we watched a character dressed entirely in black, with a black face mask, voiced by a black man, and we loved him. How is this character not black at the time we saw the movies? We might have imagined he was white under the mask but in doing so we were explicitly disavowing everything the movie itself was telling us. To all intents and purposes Darth Vader was black. But even putting aside that little note of controversy, we still have 20% of the cast being a woman, and she’s in charge – when Luke is going down the death star canyon to stick a photon torpedo up Vader’s arse, he is being directed by Leia from the command center of the rebel base, because she’s in charge. The same rule applies in The Empire Strikes Back, where our cast is further diversified by the inclusion of Lando Calrissian, and in Return of the Jedi we are introduced to Mon Mothma, a middle-aged woman with short hair who is the leader of the rebel alliance (and there are female fighter pilots in the briefing room, to boot).
Then of course there is the small issue that C3PO is super camp, and would be interpreted as a gay stereotype if he weren’t a robot. I’ll forgive MRAs for missing this, since they’re mostly NFL fans which probably means they think high camp is super macho, and misinterpreted C3PO as a football player or something. Also in the original movie we are meant to identify most with Skywalker, which means we’re meant to want to fuck Leia as he does, but in Empire he gets friend-zoned, which is a move that MRAs hate more than almost anything else on earth.
So what about the original movies gets a pass? They’re just as diverse as the Last Jedi, with just as many women in charge, and the key heroes in both sequences are firmly under the control of the chicks: under Leia’s command (Wookiepedia lists her as the leader of the battle of Yavin, for example) and then Mon Mothma’s, while in the Last Jedi they’re under Leia’s command and then Holdo’s. The hero is generally and universally admitted to be a snivelling idiot in the first movie, outshone by Han Solo – who, we are regularly reminded, is a rake and a criminal – and in the subsequent movies he gets friend-zoned and becomes your classic beta cuck, doing all the serious hard work while the rakish fuckboi runs off with the girl we’re all supposed to want.
What exactly in the legacy of the original movies does the Last Jedi betray by having a woman in charge or a black dude in a key role, and how does its pursuit of diversity make it different from the originals in any way?
This matters to me for two reasons: 1) that MRAs suck and I hate that I might be on the same side of them in any debate, regardless of whether our reasons are 100% different; and 2) it’s affecting critical reaction to the backlash against the movie. While 1) might be just a petty personal foible, I think 2) is important. The critics were all wrong about this movie, which was shit, but it wasn’t shit for the reasons that the stupid MRA idiots are ranting about. But the very public, sexist and gross response of MRA manbabies to this movie means that the critics who were so terribly wrong about it can dismiss the backlash against their terrible performance as the disaffected whining of a bunch of MRAs, rather than a genuine critical disagreement. Consider this response to the MRA cut from the website Junkee, which usually does quite entertaining discussion of internet phenomena, in which they say that
a vocal minority of manbabies detested it, mostly because it’s full of women.
A great example of this is the targeted attack on the film’s rating on the review site Rotten Tomatoes, which led to a 40% discrepancy between the critic and audience reviews, and which was later claimed by the “alt-right” as a manufactured backlash
This makes it seem like the continuing decline in the movie’s ratings on Rotten Tomatoes[1], and all the critical backlash against it, are driven by a small number of MRAs, and manages to escape any kind of serious discussion of what was wrong with this movie. This kind of thing was also visible in other responses (e.g. Vox’s) which dismissed it as due to a sense of entitlement among fans, or grown men being uncomfortable with the diversity of the movie. Given that the movie is no more diverse than the originals, and given that there are serious major problems with the rest of the movie (the casting being the least of them, I would have thought), this means that the critics avoid responsibility by pinning the whole thing on MRAs, and Rian Johnson – and the Disney crew generally – can avoid putting any thought into what they’ve done wrong, and what they need to do right to fix their mistakes in episode 9. Given the response of critics and the director himself to criticisms of the movie, I think we can rest assured there’s no point in expecting episode 9 to be anything less than a shithole. And to the extent that this is because the whining and posturing of MRAs created a false narrative of increased diversity, and saturated debate with their stupid whining about chicks in charge rather than genuine complaints about this woeful movie, then I’m comfortable with blaming MRAs for the death of star wars.
Get back in your basements, you grommits. But before you go I have two questions I’d like you to answer in comments here: 1) how on earth did you ever enjoy the originals when there was a woman in charge and 2) how do you enjoy science fiction at all given that movies like Terminator, Aliens, Mad Max, Ghost in the Shell etc. are full of strong female characters, often in positions of authority? Why do you bother going to science fiction movies at all? Also 2a), how do you watch porn?
Answers in the comments, please! And try not to use pointless MRA jargon like SJW, blue pill, or cuck!
fn1: it’s down to 49% now, from 56% at the time I wrote my review. Well done Rian Johnson!
Compromise and Conceit 
January 20, 2018 at 5:50 pm
I fear that if you wish to engage MRAs in debate, you will have to post a link on 4chan.
January 30, 2018 at 9:48 pm
Whao, now I know what 4chan is. It’s my belief, based on the interviews I’ve watched of this Richard Spencer character, that the dedicated ‘alt-right’ group is actually quite small (even though there’s a lot of casual support for neo-masculine sentiments) and the public have an inflated sense of it’s size because of internet memes (“We memed alt-right into existence”). It’s a bit like shoving a sock down your shorts to inflate things. I don’t believe it would be possible for them to swamp a site as big as Rotten Tomatoes regarding a film that people love to talk about (as opposed to watching). So while I’m sure they’ve had some effect, the mainstream movie reviewers that have got their articles about TLJ so horribly wrong are trying to shift the blame for the backlash onto an easy target who won’t reply to them.
The basic problem with the new Star Wars Trilogy in terms of the business model, seems to be that there is a lot of unjustifiable good will towards it from the press because it’s regarded as a series of daft kids movies rather than science fiction that happens to have cross-appeal. They are reviewing it the same way they would review a Harry Potter sequel or a Toy-Story rip-off – ‘Oh well, it’s shit, but hey, the kids like it in the holidays, so stop being so grumpy guys’. They talk about it like it’s some sort of educational tool – ‘we sit the kids in front of a Star Wars and they learn about how to control their emotions’. It reminds me of the glowing reviews of Pixar’s ‘Inside Out’. It’s a manipulative and cynical movie dressed in a nostalgic costume.
The major problem with movie reviews now is not that they’re pushing some feminist agenda, whatever that would be (as Weinstein does his dressing-gown up), but rather that they’ve lost their sense of what is SHIT. There is no quality compass any longer. Everything is apparently relative and dependent on the target audience. It’s a marketing and advertising philosophy of film-making rather than a ‘let’s make a story people care about for a long time’ philosophy, or a ‘let’s looks at art history and try to create beautiful images’ philosophy.
There is an easy response to the gender-race attacks on Star Wars – simply stating that there is nothing LESS feminist or black-power than token characters. Token characters were invented as a form of racism and sexism in early cinema. Women are all sluts or children and black men all doff their cap and fetch the master’s errands. So in the new Star Wars films we have a non-character, a personality vacuum, called ‘Rey’ (of light) who exists entirely to serve a plot about Luke being her dad. She doesn’t develope or earn skills and respect, she just has them because she’s a little disney princess, and if she doesn’t get what she wants (fifty shades of grey with her half-brother) then she’ll cry and cry and cry. What is feminist about that?
You’ve got a black guy who starts off as a SLAVE, who literally runs away like he’s on the underground railway, then blossoms into a bizarre man-child that explains the plot for us every ten minutes and runs to hug his aristocratic white English massa-lady every time he gets lost and fucks something else up. Not exactly Malcolm fucking X, is it? And as a little aside, his old boss is a female military commander who treats him like an abusive mother and he lobs her head off with a light saber while making a wise crack. So he’s a sociopathic former-slave who can’t do a single fucking thing right and repeats everything that people say like he has a learning difficulty. I’m sure the Southern Poverty Law Center is delighted to have him on board.
The link between anti-male propaganda, if such a thing exists in any really significant form, and Star Wars is a common approach used in the advertising industry. Star Wars is now one long toy advert with a target audience of girls and boys aged 7-16 roughly. So if you watch closely, all of the main characters develope relationships with their surroundings that are very child like. Poe is the naughty boy who gets a spank off Mummy1 and Mummy2 when he flies his toy around without their permission – literally containing the line “Permission to blow stuff up mam?” – “Permission granted”.
Rose and Finn are like awkward siblings trying to find their way home. Luke is doesn’t want to do what mummy wants because he’s shy. Kylo is the angry teenage kid that listens to the Murderdolls in his poster-clad, crusty sock infested bedroom as he punches the wall because he hates dad and has weird feelings about his step-sister, as he’s befriended by a paedophile called Snoke who literally looks like an old man’s testes. And Laura Dern walks around with Carrie Fischer making knowing gestures, smiling upon their misbehaving children. Don’t worry about the entire fleet that just died, “I like him too.” Good kid. Gender is kind of irrelevant here other than it’s use as a token to appeal to the right demographics.
You can see the same sort of stuff happening in the advertising world. So you’ll see a glossy ‘domestic goddess’ advert about a cleaning product that makes a joke at men’s expense. On another channel you’ll see a deodorant advert about how if you use our brand, women with big round tits will smile at you. A McDonald’s advert for a new type of southern-fried burger placed in the middle of a Kevin Hart comedy etc.etc. You don’t have to be a genius to work out what they’re attempting to do and it’s not to elect the first trans-sexual president of the United States.