Hollywood Rapes Star Wars Fans

Hokey Religions and Ancient Weapons are No Match for a Good Narrative at Your Side, Kid

After an attempted rape scene in Andor, some fans of the franchise are asking how their beloved galaxy far, far away sank to this level.

Just so you know, when I say “Star Wars,” I’m referring to the original trilogy. If I mean to discuss the cinematic sludge that came afterwards, I’ll make that clear.

Star Wars was popular beyond belief when it debuted. Some folks will tell you that Titanic or E.T. was the biggest money-making flick of all time, but I doubt that’s a comparison in inflation-adjusted dollars. The whole world went nuts when A New Hope hit the big screen. It was held over in theaters for over a year in the city nearest where I lived, then. That was fortunate, because that’s about how long it took for my parent to decide to go see it. I read the spoof of it in Mad Magazine before I ever saw the bona fide article. If I had been old enough to have spending money and my own transportation, I would have gone to see it several times.

It wasn’t just a passing sensation—it made life-long fans of the franchise by the millions. That’s why there are still so many people who care about what Disney has done and keeps doing to the I.P.

Definition of Insanity: Continuously paying Disney for content, while expecting a different result.

It came as a shock to me, reading about it decades after the fact, that everybody in Hollywood who knew about George Lucas’ space fantasy movie assumed it was going to be a laughable flop. Another THX-1138 or worse, they figured. His surprise low-budget hit American Graffiti provided him with enough income that he was able to finance Star Wars with no small investment of his own millions, or New Hope might not have turned out the way it did. Or turned out at all.

Back in the Wild West days of the World Wide Web, you could find and download early drafts of screenplays for films that went on to become well known. An adult by then, I was able to find one such early draft of what would become A New Hope.

After trying to slog through the first couple pages, it became clear to me why so many industry insiders underestimated its impending impact. George Lucas can come up with ideas, but he cannot write. This should be obvious from the movies that…cough…benefited from his complete creative control. It was a half-assed sophomoric attempt at convoluted universe-building wrapped around an ethereal excuse for a plot which was simultaneously farfetched and uninteresting.

A cultural scavenger, Lucas had mashed the story together from the Depression-era Flash Gordon serials, from westerns, WWII fighter-jock movies, Samurai films, and pretty much everything else a Boomer had available to him in childhood via television. Fortunately for movie-going audiences, Gloria Katz and Willard Hyuck took a late draft of his script and boiled the concept down to its essence: an interplanetary adventure fable about a princess, a pirate, and a farmboy. Many of Lucas’ influences remained intact in the final draft, but his storytelling ineptitude was shaped into a faux-legendary tale which had nearly universal appeal.

Hollywood gatekeepers were and are notorious for being fickle and persnickedy, so it might be baffling how a seeming outsider with modest talent and an awful script was ever given a chance to direct a movie of any sort. After an embarrassing flop like TXH-1138, incredibly, he was given more money and another chance. The only attribute he had going for him was he subscribed to the correct politics. Remember: the cute, cuddly, heroic Ewoks from Return of the Jedi were his stand-ins for the Viet Cong; and the evil Empire was how he saw America.

Michael Jordan, after making a windfall endorsement deal, was once asked why he wasn’t a political activist. His reply was, “Republicans buy sneakers, too.”

Hollywood has hated America for a long time, but back then still had some business sense, too. Left to his own devices, Lucas would grind his light saber against the political pariah du jour, but more pragmatic heads at the studio prevailed in those days, and his ideology was concealed enough that Star Wars enamored moviegoers on both sides of the aisle. With the original trilogy, at least, both right and left-wing analysts have interpreted that narrative as supportive of their respective worldviews.

Lucas’ early successes eventually led to the full creative control every director dreams of. That led to the prequel trilogy—a lackluster vehicle for Lucas’ diatribe against Dubya and the occupation of Iraq. (UPDATE: I’ve been reminded that two of the prequels occurred before OIF. So that specific observation must have come from watching the third one.) But if you thought the I.P. couldn’t be tarnished any worse…enter Disney.

That aforementioned business sense that once prevailed in the entertainment industry? Long dead and gone. And buried. And cremated. And forgotten. Rather than conceal their agenda from half the fans, all the studio drones today consider it their sacred duty to disgust and insult those fans, as their abysmal output testifies. Homowood, Commiefornia is a pit slithering with rabid cultural Marxists who mirror their spiritual father’s limitations: unable to create anything fresh; only capable of perverting the existing work of a talented creator. These parasites are firmly entrenched, and even losing millions or billions won’t uproot them. Apparently, they can keep losing shiploads of money indefinitely, almost like USAID is laundering enough cash to them that ticket sales and ad revenue don’t even matter—except as a schaedenfreud move to stick it to Americans one more way.

The only surprising aspect of Andor is that the Homowood Hive Mind is only getting around to rape scenes now in this particular I.P. Wise strategists would have led with that, before ramming all the Star Sodomy down the audience’s throat.

By the description of it, the attempted rape scene smells like a tired old cliche: Imperial officer tries to force himself on whatever cookie-cutter Grrrlboss rules this storyline; she puts him in the dirt. Just another reinforcement of the women-are-superior-to-men-in-every-way-yet-still-victims-of-them trope. Put another way: “Men are weak, pathetic and incompetent; yet simultaneously so dangerous that the deck must be stacked against them in every venue.”

May the Pozz be with you.

I’m sure you’ve figured out by now that the Empire is ACKshully…DOM DOM DAHHH!!!…the Patriarchy!

Star Wars was once regarded as all-ages, family-friendly escapism. Some, because of this attempted rape scene, lament the loss of innocence. But when was the last time this franchise was innocent? Was it when Luke and Leia kiss, or when it is revealed they are brother and sister? Maybe it was when Lucas introduced the perverse New Age reimagining of God as “the Force,” via the seemingly innocent medium of a crowd-pleasing space fantasy flick.

Like nearly every single product of the entertainment industry, the evil intent was there all along. As the enemy proves devoid of originality, they also demonstrate excessive arrogance that leads to carelessness, and the mask slips.

When the cancer has spread everywhere, there is no saving the patient. And there are legions of well-paid doctors whose mission in life is to keep the patient sick, anyway.

I don’t know if the Pozz Police can keep good people out of the industry forever, but so far, it looks like they can.

Quit feeding the beast.

Because no Star Wars at all is still better than this shit.