Star Wars and Ghostbusters: Political Red Flags

Wait, what?  What the heck does this have to do with politics?

We are sorry, the author is a nerd.  A VERY, VERY, big nerd.  And, a Gen-X nerd.

Gen-X being the group that brought cynical pragmatism to politics, to the left in specific, and the group that is now getting attacked for it.

And, Nerd+Gen-X=

Now, people my age were going to hate Episode VII no matter what....

NO MATTER WHAT!!!!

We were dealing with absolutes here and absolutely unless Disney delivered the Citizen Kane of the Star Wars franchise, Generation-X would have despised it.

Let's be honest, even a Citizen Kane worthy episode would never have met our expectations...even after the prequels.

Even after our hopes were shattered with I-III, there would have been expectations that were too high, something that we would have hated just as much as...

And in the Force Awakens they did give us something to hate just as much.  They gave us this:

And words were thrown around here, mainly the word "Mary" coupled with the word "Sue."

We can argue if she was a Mary Sue or not...but that is not the point, the point is that there were a lot of people that saw her as one and a lot of people that took that in an entirely opposite direction.

For the sake of argument, we are going to summarize--briefly--why people didn't like Rey.

And in the minds of Star Wars fans, there was justification for that.

Mainly that she was 19, new, and never needed saving.  Luke needed saving a few times in Episode IV.

Once against the Sandmen by Obi, once in the bar, again by Obi.

He's made mistakes,  He was in a position of vulnerability more than a few times, and he had a lot of help from a lot of people.

Rey, on the other hand, is perfect from the start.  She does the saving for everyone.  In fact, the only real time she needed help was when Chewie picked her up at the very end before Death Star 2.5 blew up...and that was a legit.  

She was a master Jedi by the end of the movie.  A Jedi Master.  She was the ultimate Jedi that bests everyone and...

And everyone seems to instantly love her right away.  They all trust her completely.

And she did all of this without the established backstory that would explain how she is already better than everyone and trusted by everyone.

It all fits into the definition of "Mary Sue" in the minds of the pro-Mary Sue crowd.

And, besting Han at the Falcon...very, VERY, insulting to Solo fans.

...where is the room for growth?  How do you develop a character that is already perfect?

 And to be honest, it can be understood.  It is Star Wars, a Mary Sue is a fanfiction thing and, when given the opportunity to write a Star Wars movie, it would be near impossible to NOT be writing fanfiction.  Look at Ewan McGregor, they had to edit out the lightsaber noises he constantly made when using one on set.  It's hard not to be a little kid fan even if you are a paid professional, at least when Star Wars is involved.

But with Mary Sue came a political issue, a very real one.

The political issue is that, not liking Rey got people an instant political label:

And it was done to really silence any objection to a character that feminists liked because, well, she was a super strong female character in a franchise that really only had three or four women in the entire galaxy.

Which leaves people to wonder how there are enough people to even have an intergalactic war, let alone a bar brawl, with only around a dozen women...only two of which were lead characters.

So, politically, you are NOT ALLOWED TO HATE A FEMALE CHARACTER, even one that is a Mary Sue.

And that horrible misogynist label is still frequently applied in nerd arguments, even though most of the same people that hate Rey love Jyn.

We could go on about Jyn, but let's leave it at: 

She's an awesome character, she has flaws that make her a believable character and she is a female lead.

Because of that, most of the same people that hated Rey loved Jyn. The exceptions, largely being, the people that came to the films with a feminist political agenda and an anti-feminist political agenda.

So clearly a lot of the anti-Rey fans aren't objecting to a strong female lead...given that the ONLY people that seem to hate Jyn are the Rey fans that argue "You're a misogynist" for not liking her...

...or the Anti-Rogue One fans that, let's face it, really are objecting to one thing in the movie.  

Lack of a lightsaber battle.

And for those of you that are hating on Rogue One because of the lack of a lightsaber battle, I feel you, I don't agree with you, but this isn't the place to argue that...

...This is a political blog.

The fact is, we are seeing something else going on here.

And that something else breaks down to one word: Misogynist.

The word is being used to censor disagreement, and done so for a political goal, in this case to force a feminist idea onto people that really aren't objecting to a character--largely--because of political reasons.

It is bringing politics into the arts to start an argument, a one sided one do to the language.

Calling someone a "misogynist" is like calling someone a "racist," even though their actions or beliefs did not carry said sentiment, but rather because they didn't agree with something said.  In either case it is done to shame them.  In these cases, it is done to shame them into silence.

It is a word used in an attempt to silence opposition argument:

It is an attempt at censorship over, of all things, a movie.

That is right, a political movement is attempting to silence people for not liking a character in a movie...to shame them into silencing them.

And it wouldn't be that big of a deal if it was an isolated occurrence.  However it happened again for almost the same reasons...kind of.

Now to be fair to Ghostbusters, there was a misogynistic backlash against the film.

But, to be fair to the misogynistic backlash, SOME of it was in response to being called a "misogynist" for objecting to Rey in Star Wars.  Not all of it, but there was a lot of "You are trying to force an agenda down our throats."

Honestly, that may be the case.

Honestly, it may not be the case as well.

From the get-go, there were people like me that were going to buy a ticket to see the movie, even though we suspected we would instantly hate it because by and large remakes and reboots stink.

I've been complaining about them for years and years.  I started complaining about them with Lost in Space and I really hit my high notes with Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street where, in the latter, they reduced Freddie into a pedophile psycho-killer and because of the pedo thing, they couldn't honestly make him the lovable wise-cracking psycho-killer...

...because you really do NOT want to make a lovable pedophile do you?  No, a lovable child killer, fine--kind of--which is why they dropped the pedo thing in the originals.  It's crossing the line of bad taste little too much.

Honestly, though, you remake Freddie into someone without a sense of humor and you kill the franchise.

And when it came to Ghostbusters, well, it was a remake, it was a reboot and there are a lot of people, usually in Generation-X, that HATE remakes.

But yet again, the hatred for remake was totally ignored and, well, even if the argument was based on hating remakes, the people that didn't say they loved the movie were labeled as...

Even the director himself said that:

"If you don't like the movie you are a misogynist."

Which people like me look at as egotistical.   

It's like saying:

 "I've made a movie so great, so brilliant, so beautiful, that you shouldn't find a single flaw in it unless you, yourself, are a seriously flawed individual."

What does this mean?

Why is this important?

It's important because art and propaganda are mixed.  They always have been.  

Now there can be art for the sake of art.  But there can never really be propaganda without art.  Literature,  paintings, photographs, graphic designs, and even movies...they all can be made for reasons of propaganda.

And maybe Star Wars and Ghostbusters and Wonderwoman--which had the same effect when people didn't like it and even if those people were anti-DC--had an agenda.  

Well, to be fair, we all know that Star Wars HAS an agenda, but we never really cared about it to begin with.  

Well, to be fair, the Star Wars agenda was always anti-Empire and not pro-feminist.

So, the point?

The point is that, to a political people, these movies are seen as a kind of propaganda, even if they were not made to be and, in all honesty, they probably were not.  They were most likely made for one singular reason...to make money.

So the likelihood that they were made with a serious political agenda is pretty small.

But a group has taken to them as if they were political, as if they were propaganda...

And, when that propaganda isn't totally accepted, they are trying to shame the people that do not accept it into silence.

And we are seeing this across the political board.

This is something that should worry you.  Not because of the feminist or anti-feminist agendas, but because people are attacking people for not totally accepting propaganda.  They are silencing speech, and that applies to adopted propaganda as much as it does created propaganda.  

That is a red flag.

Be afraid.