DISNEY TURNED STAR WARS FROM HERO’S JOURNEY INTO MAOIST HACKERY:

Disney’s new Star Wars series, “The Acolyte” is further evidence that Kathleen Kennedy and her acolytes (for life imitates art), are not just creating entertainment but are actively engaged in the cultural revolution.

This latest installment — referred to as the “gayest Star Wars” — and the dismal sequel trilogy before it, serve as tools in a broader agenda to dismantle traditional cultural norms. Kennedy, acting as a political commissar, curates Star Wars content to align with the woke revolution’s mission, adopting the Maoist tactics of eradicating the Four Olds: old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits.

Kennedy has recently become a meme for this movement, thanks to her on-the-nose lampooning by “South Park.” The predictable corporate response has been canned articles with titles like, “Star Wars Boss Kathleen Kennedy Is Not a ‘Woke Warrior’ at Disney (Report)” which, as anyone who’s paying attention knows, is like printing, “COVID was absolutely NOT the result of a lab leak!” in March of 2020. For “Acolyte,” Kennedy brought in Leslye Headland, a woke lesbian with an axe to grind against her religious upbringing who admits that she rooted for the evil witch Ursula in “The Little Mermaid” and spent four years as Harvey Winstein’s assistant.

The transformation of iconic characters and narratives from the original saga into vessels for neo-Marxist propaganda underscores this strategic shift. In the original saga, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo epitomized the hero’s journey, representing the values of traditional culture. One as the farm boy with the secret lineage who heeds the call to adventure to avenge his dead father and reclaim his role in the world, the other as the redeemable bad boy or the beast to be tamed by the princess. Obi-Wan served as the sage archetype or Jungian wise old man common in such retellings of the eternal story, while Leia was both damsel in distress and leadership material. But that must be forgotten, as the world was obviously an oppressive patriarchy until five minutes ago, 1979’s Ellen Ripley be damned.

You can make the case that the original Star Wars was “Maoist Hackery” as well – Lucas wanted to write a parable about the Vietnam War, with Palpatine as Nixon and eventually, the Ewoks as the Vietcong. (No, really.), but was smart enough to bury that theme deep into its subtext. And he knew how to tell a story, blending and borrowing disparate elements from Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials to Dune to Akira Kurosawa’s samurai movies to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Face. Lucas had a vision and a goal that transcended his cookie-cutter Bay Area far left politics:

There was no shortage of sci-fi in Hollywood at the time. But most were dark, dystopian tales like Rollerball, Logan’s Run, or THX 1138 (Lucas’s 1971 feature-film debut). Lucas was determined to make a different kind of sci-fi movie—something fun that was aimed at 14- and 15-year-olds.

“The reason I’m making Star Wars is that I want to give young people some sort of faraway exotic environment for their imaginations to run around in,” he said in an interview. “I have a strong feeling about interesting kids in space exploration. I want them to want it. I want them to get beyond the basic stupidities of the moment and think about colonizing Venus and Mars. And the only way it’s going to happen is to have some dumb kid fantasize about it — to get his ray gun, jump in his ship and run off with this wookie into outer space. It’s our only hope in a way.”

And despite all of the “Force is Female” boosterism of Kathleen Kennedy et al, Lucas was saved in the editing bay, way back in 1977, by his then-wife: Five Ways Marcia Lucas Gave Star Wars Its Heart.

UPDATE: I much prefer the Critical Drinker’s solo rants than his online chats with fellow pop culture critics, but in the most recent example of the latter format, he brings up another negative aspect to the Acolyte, which might be dubbed Michael Burnham Syndrome:

There’s a pattern here, right? Whether it’s Doctor Who, whether it’s Star Trek, whether it’s Star Wars, of taking something that used to be a unique to one specific male character, whether it’s Captain Kirk, he was the first character that we had that was venturing out into space. Or [Doctor Who,] the very first one, was played by William Hartnell, a white guy. To going back, reconning the history of these franchise, so that actually a Strong Diverse Woman actually did it before them, and we just didn’t know about it at the time. Star Trek’s done it with Michael Burnham. Doctor Who’s done it with the Timeless Children. And now we’ve got it here with Star Wars with  with episode three of the Acolyte. I just think it’s such a consistent pattern, there has got to be intent behind this. They think they’re so smart by doing it, but like I don’t know, man, like I’m starting to notice this pattern occurring.

Later in the chat, the Drinker adds:

I could draw a lot of parallels between where Star Wars is at now, and where Doctor Who is at as a franchise. It’s that feeling of the game is almost up, we’re running out of time, running out of money, and it’s just like, we’re into pure “f*** you mode” now. We know you don’t like what we’re making, and we just say f*** you, we’re just going to put everything in that we want to put in: All the sociopolitical messaging, all of our own personal hang-ups, all of our own personal politics, all of it. It’s just going to get rammed down your throat, because we know we’re in The Last Chance Saloon right now, so why not? Why not just throw all the s*** up a wall and see what sticks, and Doctor Who’s exactly the same way.

I’m sure the producers and writers think that their work on the Acolyte and similar product from Kathleen Kennedy is simply their first or latest step in what they hope is a lengthy career in Hollywood, but based on “Streaming and Screaming,” Rob Long’s latest column at Commentary, they might want to think twice:

The limitations that kept the television business small and nasty and profitable—only so many hours in a day, only so many networks in business—began to loosen as basic cable stations emerged and produced original programming of their own. But it wasn’t until the introduction of streaming services that the business broke loose. With unlimited bandwidth to deliver hours and hours of content, unlimited storewidth to amass an endless library, and unlimited money coming in from Wall Street, the streaming services could make as many TV shows as they wanted. They hired writers and produced TV shows with money-drunk abandon, and the greatest thing about those go-go years was, you didn’t need to wait for someone else’s show to get cancelled. Nobody had to die and get out of the way. They just kept adding shows. How many shows? Put it this way: In 2019, the Writers Guild of America had about 11,000 members. Today, five years later, it has around 20,000.

Five years from now, unfortunately, it will probably have a lot less. Show business is going through a painful contraction. In 2023, American television production declined by 15 percent. In the first quarter of 2024, it’s down another 7 percent. Studio space, for the first time in 10 years, is operating at 70 percent capacity. It doesn’t matter how many shows you make, it turns out, if there are still the same number of hours in the day to watch them. So some of those 20,000 members of the WGA are not going to last long enough in the business to get old and in the way. Some of them are going to have to find another line of work now, while they’re still young.

“I’m outta here,” a former writer colleague of mine posted on a group text we share. “Heading to Missouri. Done with this crap.” He has spent the past two years writing and rewriting a project for a big streaming service, weathering the budget cutbacks and two major strikes, only to be told last month that his project is dead. Without the prospect of a show in production, and facing another year or two of unemployment, he and his wife had a complicated and fraught conversation about money (the most complicated and fraught topic there is), and they decided it was better to sell their house and move than stick around and struggle and, eventually, have him shuffle around the Brentwood Country Mart shouting at young people.

I’ve heard the same calculation from writers, directors, even people in talent management: cutbacks, tight belts, more people fighting over fewer opportunities, all signals to get out of the business while there’s still some money in the bank to start over, in some other place, in some other business.

Matthew Weiner should be a cautionary tale for those who produce streaming entertainment — ten to 15 years ago, at the height of Mad Men’s popularity among hyper-online critics, he was the subject of glowing interview after interview, and his name was mentioned in most of the cover stories and profiles of the show’s cast. The amount of ink and pixels spilled over the show was in direct proportion to its actual popularity among television viewers (hey, remember them?), as TV critic Richard Rushfield wrote in 2011:

Mad Men at its height was watched by 2.9 million viewers. In contrast, CBS’ military police procedural drama NCIS last week was seen by 19.7 million viewers. As far as I can tell, NCIS has never been featured on the cover of any major American magazine apart from TV Guide and one issue of Inland Empire, the magazine of California’s suburban Riverside and San Bernadino counties.

Then came #MeToo in 2017, and Weiner’s Hollywood career seems effectively over. One way or another, Kathleen Kennedy’s acolytes (pun intended) will have people gunning for their jobs as well, particularly if streaming viewership continues to contract.