Philosophically, Why STAR WARS Degenerated Into Garbage.
11 January 2020 [link youtube]
Star Wars, 1977 | The Fandom Menace | American Gigolo, 1980 | Gone with the Wind, 1939 | "Gone with the Wind 2: The Empire Strikes Back" | Game of Thrones | ASOIAF | Conan the Barbarian, 1982 | Dune, Frank Herbert, 1965 | The Rise of Skywalker
Youtube Automatic Transcription
in the year 2020 millions of people in
the english-speaking world are engaged in reflections on how and why the Star Wars sequence of films degenerated into garbage I think it's a meaningful area of analysis even if you regard the Star Wars films themselves as meaningless I think it leads us to some useful observations about the gap between how investors see cultural production and how artists see cultural production and the gap between artists and the audience because ultimately neither the artist nor the investor nor the loudest voices in the audience really identify what it is that made the work of art special or worthwhile in the first place in the year 1980 there was a movie called American Gigolo I'm about to make it sound way more interesting than it actually was what was it that made this film special in the year 1980 what was it that made it a big deal from the perspective of the investors most likely they were expecting the film to earn money because of its sexual content it discussed sex in a manner that was very provocative and boundary-pushing for the year 1980 it had nudity on screen it had a good-looking cast in states of an undress it was also set in a world of wealth and privilege the costume and wardrobe department featured a lot of designer clothes so on and so forth so in the same way that investors might pay for a soap opera on Mexican television you can imagine that when they were looking at the checklist of factors that made this film likely to earn back the money or turn a profit on the investment those might be the sorts of things they were looking at but the truth is this film was a hit and this film was appreciated and remembered by critics and so on because it was built around a philosophical idea now that philosophical idea is not tremendously deep complex you basically see it on screen right now in this one quotation from dialogue from the film the whole film is built around that one idea okay this guy has a sense of his own exceptionalism of his own super moral purpose of being above the law and then we get to see the consequences of that as the plot plays out now you can imagine if this film had created a series of sequels like the Star Wars movie franchise it would be very easy for investors to say yes yes yes let's have another film with a lot of blunt discussion of human sexuality let's have another film set amidst wealth and privilege with designer clothes let's have first-rate cinematography let's have a lot of nudity let's keep going with American Gigolo two three or four let's do American Gigolo the prequel trilogy let's have American Gigolo co-starring Jar Jar Binks it's going to be great we're going to make millions of dollars all those obvious tangible money-making elements are easy for investors to appreciate and if you lose sight of the fact that you know what this movie had one very simple philosophical idea and the whole script was built around a set of reflections on that one philosophical idea and that's the only thing that made this film memorable otherwise it's just a bunch of naked bodies and designer clothes and who cares I'm gonna say the same thing more or less about the film adaptation of gone with the wind you can imagine investors sitting down and trying to make a franchise out of this try to have gone with the wind to the Empire Strikes Back and thinking you know why this film was a big hit because it had fancy costumes because it had hot chicks and handsome men you know and the simmering sexual tension between them and that would be wrong wrong the film version of Gone with the Wind and I'm willing to accept this is different from the novels in a significant way the film version of Gone with the Wind was built around the philosophical tension created by Rhett Butler there's a contrast introduced right the Binion's film between Rhett Butler and a younger more handsome more idealistic man and in fact they basically both want the same girl and Rhett Butler doesn't believe in nationalism he doesn't believe in any of the romantic nonsense that young people are you know getting excited about at the start of the Civil War and the reason for that is this completely nihilistic economic analysis of where the factories are and whoever has the factories that make the guns is going to win this war etc etc and this idealistic younger man has this kind of nonsense about how a gentleman won't be defeated by a commoner sort of aristocratic medieval way of thinking about honor and nobility and Rhett Butler lets you know he doesn't believe in nobility he doesn't believe in being a gentleman he believes in playing to win fighting to survive he isn't working for the south and he isn't working for America and he isn't working for some ideal about a brighter future hee-hee Rhett Butler is in it for Rhett Butler you see that the Wynette he's working for himself and you get this contrast between the ideals of other characters the ideals of the underlying or surrounding society and Rhett Butler's brutal nihilistic self-interested philosophy and that's what makes a series of scenes at fancy dress parties interesting okay a bunch of hot chicks in expensive dresses is boring okay there would be nothing interesting about those scenes early in the film if it didn't have this kind of philosophical and political tension in part created by or in part illustrated by Rhett Butler Rhett but learn nihilistic atheist self-centered [ __ ] in a world of pious hypocrites this same problem with sequels missing the point not understanding what it was philosophically that made this scenario worth watching in the first place happened within the TV series Game of Thrones right like in earlier seasons they had success ultimately because the show was built around a number of simple but genuinely interesting philosophical and political ideas and then once you got past season four maybe maybe when you got past season five it had degenerated into this investor's perspective of oh oh oh you got hot chicks in fancy dresses you got red-haired girls taking off their clothes and showing you their bodies you got big muscular dudes with swords having sore fights like that's what sells this show that's why this show is a success and that's just not true that is not what made Game of Thrones worth watching at all one of the most dramatic and rapid examples of this kind of degeneration of a film that had one or two good philosophical ideas into complete garbage was the original cinema adaptation of Conan the Barbarian now again sort of parallel to what I just said about American Gigolo if you haven't already seen this movie don't don't watch it it's just not that interesting but the first Conan the Barbarian film was built around a number of philosophical ideas basically from Nietzsche Nietzsche and there's a little bit from the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer but again you could probably just take a few short quotations from this film and show the whole script the whole drama is built around a couple of philosophical ideas that are a little bit provocative a little bit interesting and then what happened with the sequels the sequels degenerated into complete garbage immediately because the people investing in it thought oh big muscles big swords their interpretation of what made this film successful or special or worth watching was 100% wrong philosophically the original 1977 Star Wars very much emerged from the shadow of the novel dune by Frank Herbert came out in 1965 but the philosophical differences from dune are even more important than the similarities dune written in 1965 was fundamentally interested in a future built around Islamic philosophy when people read dude in 1965 most white Western english-speaking people had never heard the word jihad before there was a lot of overtly Muslim ideology and jargon in this book talked about jihad thousands and thousands of years into the future a technologically advanced future were still the brutal simplicity of the Muslim world view seemed to be dominant and politically Frank Herbert has characters saying in the dune series I'm sorry I forget if this in the first novel or not that you know people just prefer to live under tyranny because they would rather have a government they hate rather than democracy so there's something implicitly shocking about the idea that in the future we're going to go back to feudalism alright and Frank Herbert's dune had that shock effect for many people seeing star wars that was part of what was shocking about it what do you mean in the future there's a princess government is about princesses and emperors so in the future we have all this advanced technology but we've gone back to the dark ages politically you know what do you mean but in star wars the script was not built around Muslim concepts the way dune was instead the very first Star Wars movie was built around loosely adapted philosophy from Taoism and Buddhism including by the way the jargon in the same way that doon directly used Arabic terms sometimes changing the spelling slightly in the same way actually George Lucas evidently took a vacation in Thailand and he has pally and Sanskrit terminology from Thai Buddhism misspelled in a manner that reflects the way people in Thailand pronounce Buddhist terms okay that includes the origin of the word Jedi do you want me to break this stuff down for you not worth explaining but yes a lot of the ideas in Star Wars were vaguely inspired by Taoism and Southeast Asian Buddhism but in this breathtakingly brutal feudal future where for no stated reason humanity has forgotten about democracy and has returned to you know slavery outright slavery as well as some kind of political structure from the Dark Ages that's interesting that's provocative when that first film came out there were a whole lot of things that had nothing to do with you know spaceships blowing each other up that was really provocative and interesting and memorable it seemed to raise a lot of really meaningful questions about the future and about our society and where it's going here and now but if you want to know what happened to Star Wars and why it degenerated into garbage I think we can never forget that as good as the first film in 1977 was it was evident that nobody in the creative team understood what was good about it as early as 1978 when they made the Star Wars Holiday Special okay the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special is - the 1977 Star Wars just as brutal and baleful a contrast as the sequels - Conan the Barbarian were to the original Conan the Barbarian good writing is finite bad writing is infinite the difference between the two is stroke of an Editors pen you got three different groups of people who fight over the future of a franchise they're the creative artists including the authors there are the investors and then there are people in the audience but the people in the audience themselves very often fail to apprehend philosophically or politically what it is they're getting excited about what it is they're responding to there can be people in the audience millions of them who just watched the first four seasons of Game of Thrones and say wow great dragons swords muscles nudity so they can be giving that message loud and clear the corporation creating this crap and the corporation gets the message and the investors hear what they want to hear and they move in that direction it's maybe harder to hear the voices from the audience to say hey you know what the reason why this is a hit the reason why this matters and is meaningful in the culture has nothing to do with the boobs and the swords and the Dragons it actually has to do with questions that are being raised philosophically and politically and if you lose that if you lose that spark then you lose the intrigue and interest that made people overlook everything that was wrong with the first movie or everything that was wrong with the first four seasons of came of Thrones everything that motivated the audience to put up with the [ __ ] that let's face it always was there in any of this schwa mediocre mainstream culture
the english-speaking world are engaged in reflections on how and why the Star Wars sequence of films degenerated into garbage I think it's a meaningful area of analysis even if you regard the Star Wars films themselves as meaningless I think it leads us to some useful observations about the gap between how investors see cultural production and how artists see cultural production and the gap between artists and the audience because ultimately neither the artist nor the investor nor the loudest voices in the audience really identify what it is that made the work of art special or worthwhile in the first place in the year 1980 there was a movie called American Gigolo I'm about to make it sound way more interesting than it actually was what was it that made this film special in the year 1980 what was it that made it a big deal from the perspective of the investors most likely they were expecting the film to earn money because of its sexual content it discussed sex in a manner that was very provocative and boundary-pushing for the year 1980 it had nudity on screen it had a good-looking cast in states of an undress it was also set in a world of wealth and privilege the costume and wardrobe department featured a lot of designer clothes so on and so forth so in the same way that investors might pay for a soap opera on Mexican television you can imagine that when they were looking at the checklist of factors that made this film likely to earn back the money or turn a profit on the investment those might be the sorts of things they were looking at but the truth is this film was a hit and this film was appreciated and remembered by critics and so on because it was built around a philosophical idea now that philosophical idea is not tremendously deep complex you basically see it on screen right now in this one quotation from dialogue from the film the whole film is built around that one idea okay this guy has a sense of his own exceptionalism of his own super moral purpose of being above the law and then we get to see the consequences of that as the plot plays out now you can imagine if this film had created a series of sequels like the Star Wars movie franchise it would be very easy for investors to say yes yes yes let's have another film with a lot of blunt discussion of human sexuality let's have another film set amidst wealth and privilege with designer clothes let's have first-rate cinematography let's have a lot of nudity let's keep going with American Gigolo two three or four let's do American Gigolo the prequel trilogy let's have American Gigolo co-starring Jar Jar Binks it's going to be great we're going to make millions of dollars all those obvious tangible money-making elements are easy for investors to appreciate and if you lose sight of the fact that you know what this movie had one very simple philosophical idea and the whole script was built around a set of reflections on that one philosophical idea and that's the only thing that made this film memorable otherwise it's just a bunch of naked bodies and designer clothes and who cares I'm gonna say the same thing more or less about the film adaptation of gone with the wind you can imagine investors sitting down and trying to make a franchise out of this try to have gone with the wind to the Empire Strikes Back and thinking you know why this film was a big hit because it had fancy costumes because it had hot chicks and handsome men you know and the simmering sexual tension between them and that would be wrong wrong the film version of Gone with the Wind and I'm willing to accept this is different from the novels in a significant way the film version of Gone with the Wind was built around the philosophical tension created by Rhett Butler there's a contrast introduced right the Binion's film between Rhett Butler and a younger more handsome more idealistic man and in fact they basically both want the same girl and Rhett Butler doesn't believe in nationalism he doesn't believe in any of the romantic nonsense that young people are you know getting excited about at the start of the Civil War and the reason for that is this completely nihilistic economic analysis of where the factories are and whoever has the factories that make the guns is going to win this war etc etc and this idealistic younger man has this kind of nonsense about how a gentleman won't be defeated by a commoner sort of aristocratic medieval way of thinking about honor and nobility and Rhett Butler lets you know he doesn't believe in nobility he doesn't believe in being a gentleman he believes in playing to win fighting to survive he isn't working for the south and he isn't working for America and he isn't working for some ideal about a brighter future hee-hee Rhett Butler is in it for Rhett Butler you see that the Wynette he's working for himself and you get this contrast between the ideals of other characters the ideals of the underlying or surrounding society and Rhett Butler's brutal nihilistic self-interested philosophy and that's what makes a series of scenes at fancy dress parties interesting okay a bunch of hot chicks in expensive dresses is boring okay there would be nothing interesting about those scenes early in the film if it didn't have this kind of philosophical and political tension in part created by or in part illustrated by Rhett Butler Rhett but learn nihilistic atheist self-centered [ __ ] in a world of pious hypocrites this same problem with sequels missing the point not understanding what it was philosophically that made this scenario worth watching in the first place happened within the TV series Game of Thrones right like in earlier seasons they had success ultimately because the show was built around a number of simple but genuinely interesting philosophical and political ideas and then once you got past season four maybe maybe when you got past season five it had degenerated into this investor's perspective of oh oh oh you got hot chicks in fancy dresses you got red-haired girls taking off their clothes and showing you their bodies you got big muscular dudes with swords having sore fights like that's what sells this show that's why this show is a success and that's just not true that is not what made Game of Thrones worth watching at all one of the most dramatic and rapid examples of this kind of degeneration of a film that had one or two good philosophical ideas into complete garbage was the original cinema adaptation of Conan the Barbarian now again sort of parallel to what I just said about American Gigolo if you haven't already seen this movie don't don't watch it it's just not that interesting but the first Conan the Barbarian film was built around a number of philosophical ideas basically from Nietzsche Nietzsche and there's a little bit from the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer but again you could probably just take a few short quotations from this film and show the whole script the whole drama is built around a couple of philosophical ideas that are a little bit provocative a little bit interesting and then what happened with the sequels the sequels degenerated into complete garbage immediately because the people investing in it thought oh big muscles big swords their interpretation of what made this film successful or special or worth watching was 100% wrong philosophically the original 1977 Star Wars very much emerged from the shadow of the novel dune by Frank Herbert came out in 1965 but the philosophical differences from dune are even more important than the similarities dune written in 1965 was fundamentally interested in a future built around Islamic philosophy when people read dude in 1965 most white Western english-speaking people had never heard the word jihad before there was a lot of overtly Muslim ideology and jargon in this book talked about jihad thousands and thousands of years into the future a technologically advanced future were still the brutal simplicity of the Muslim world view seemed to be dominant and politically Frank Herbert has characters saying in the dune series I'm sorry I forget if this in the first novel or not that you know people just prefer to live under tyranny because they would rather have a government they hate rather than democracy so there's something implicitly shocking about the idea that in the future we're going to go back to feudalism alright and Frank Herbert's dune had that shock effect for many people seeing star wars that was part of what was shocking about it what do you mean in the future there's a princess government is about princesses and emperors so in the future we have all this advanced technology but we've gone back to the dark ages politically you know what do you mean but in star wars the script was not built around Muslim concepts the way dune was instead the very first Star Wars movie was built around loosely adapted philosophy from Taoism and Buddhism including by the way the jargon in the same way that doon directly used Arabic terms sometimes changing the spelling slightly in the same way actually George Lucas evidently took a vacation in Thailand and he has pally and Sanskrit terminology from Thai Buddhism misspelled in a manner that reflects the way people in Thailand pronounce Buddhist terms okay that includes the origin of the word Jedi do you want me to break this stuff down for you not worth explaining but yes a lot of the ideas in Star Wars were vaguely inspired by Taoism and Southeast Asian Buddhism but in this breathtakingly brutal feudal future where for no stated reason humanity has forgotten about democracy and has returned to you know slavery outright slavery as well as some kind of political structure from the Dark Ages that's interesting that's provocative when that first film came out there were a whole lot of things that had nothing to do with you know spaceships blowing each other up that was really provocative and interesting and memorable it seemed to raise a lot of really meaningful questions about the future and about our society and where it's going here and now but if you want to know what happened to Star Wars and why it degenerated into garbage I think we can never forget that as good as the first film in 1977 was it was evident that nobody in the creative team understood what was good about it as early as 1978 when they made the Star Wars Holiday Special okay the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special is - the 1977 Star Wars just as brutal and baleful a contrast as the sequels - Conan the Barbarian were to the original Conan the Barbarian good writing is finite bad writing is infinite the difference between the two is stroke of an Editors pen you got three different groups of people who fight over the future of a franchise they're the creative artists including the authors there are the investors and then there are people in the audience but the people in the audience themselves very often fail to apprehend philosophically or politically what it is they're getting excited about what it is they're responding to there can be people in the audience millions of them who just watched the first four seasons of Game of Thrones and say wow great dragons swords muscles nudity so they can be giving that message loud and clear the corporation creating this crap and the corporation gets the message and the investors hear what they want to hear and they move in that direction it's maybe harder to hear the voices from the audience to say hey you know what the reason why this is a hit the reason why this matters and is meaningful in the culture has nothing to do with the boobs and the swords and the Dragons it actually has to do with questions that are being raised philosophically and politically and if you lose that if you lose that spark then you lose the intrigue and interest that made people overlook everything that was wrong with the first movie or everything that was wrong with the first four seasons of came of Thrones everything that motivated the audience to put up with the [ __ ] that let's face it always was there in any of this schwa mediocre mainstream culture