Hollywood Reporter: ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ Negative Buzz Amplified by Russian Trolls, Study Finds
Did Star Wars: The Last Jedi destroy the franchise and permanently rupture the fandom as its critics (melodramatically) have accused it of doing? According to a new academic paper by researcher Morten Bay, the answer is clearly no.
The paper, titled Weaponizing The Haters: The Last Jedi and the strategic politicization of pop culture through social media manipulation, examines the online response to 2017’s Last Jedi, a movie that has come to be considered controversial amongst the larger fanbase of the franchise.
Bay suggests that reputation may not be earned, and instead “finds evidence of deliberate, organized political influence measures disguised as fan arguments,” as he writes in the paper’s abstract. He continues, “The likely objective of these measures is increasing media coverage of the fandom conflict, thereby adding to and further propagating a narrative of widespread discord and dysfunction in American society. Persuading voters of this narrative remains a strategic goal for the U.S. alt-right movement, as well as the Russian Federation.”
It obviously has nothing at all to do with any issues hinted at by the discrepancy between its 4.5/10 user rating and 8.5/10 critic rating on Metacritic.
Would it not be easier to dissolve the Russian Nazi trolls and elect a more pliable audience of soyboys and blue-haired SJWs?
LOL.
Well, as a Russian troll, I say good riddance. Never liked Star Wars anyways, and it was never a force for good.
I first saw it at a Hungarian leftist site. Almost all commenters mentioned that if it was the Russians, they wasted their money, since Disney is way more effective at destroying the Star Wars brand, and the movies were shit. Inserting very PC (but otherwise uninteresting) female characters (and often destroying interesting characters to make room for them) was among the more specific complaints. And this was a usually anti-Russian leftist crowd.
I wonder if such stupid propaganda is making any headway in Western Europe or the US.
Just wait until they discover the giant machines that brainwash people through electromagnetic waves hidden in Irkutsk…
Disney is a company with some idiotic people as administrators – above all, for how they fired direction James Gunn from third Guardians of the Galaxy .
Unlike Star Wars, the Guardians series is good even for adults, largely as a result of the humour of the director and writers. And yet now they fired the director because of he has a more morbid sense of humour writing on Twitter.
OT
Dmitry, you wrote me recommendations of Russian classical music. I can’t locate it now and I’m clueless where to look. Uhmm… can I ask you do a big favor for me..?
Considering how often people get fired for Twitter-talk, it surprises me that people still say controversial things under their own name.
Of course, we were hijacking Karlin’s blog about cliodynamics, post 172… If you guys are on your vacation time now – as I guess, It’s also recommend downloading full albums, instead of just some random compositions I added.
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/cognitive-cliodynamics/#comment-2404347
They have the toxic mixture of extreme crudeness and mawkish sentimentality that seems to be the current zeitgeist (also found in the Deadpool film which received very good reviews) and is probably Hollywood’s logical endpoint.
Thanks, I saved it.
Reviewers versus critics:
Rotten Tomatoes top critics’ films of all time:
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/top#best_all_time
IMDB top audience’s films of all time:
https://m.imdb.com/chart/top/
Things I’ve noted: the critics’ list still defers a bit to plain sophistication; however that is an artefact of old reviews. The appearance of “The Third Man” is not because of reviews in the last 5 years!
If we only count films from the last 5 years in the critics’ top 20 we get a ludicrous list. Some of the films are pretty good but all owe their extraordinarily high ratings to playing to specific SJW catechisms.
Get Out (blackness/white racism)
Mad Max 4 (feminism)
Moonlight (black and gay)
Inside Out (feminism)
Wonder Women (feminism)
Spotlight (journalists righteously beating up the Church)
The Big Sick (yay Pakistani Muslim lead)
A perfectly reviewed movie would therefore feature a gay Pakistani Muslim lead journalist teaming up with a special forces group of mostly black women to attack an evil white racist group in the Catholic Church that is secretly plotting to rape women en masse as part of a Satanic ritual.
The audience list is a bit male dominated due to men liking lists of stuff probably but otherwise it is high quality entertaining unpretentious fare and without a hint of SJWism.
Why are reviewers almost uniformly SJW?
Also, Black Panther (boring Lion King/superficial Hamlet) would be up there were it not for a black reviewer at the WSJ calling it as he saw it.
This site is excellent for film lists.
http://www.theyshootpictures.com/21stcentury.htm
Top films of the 21st century;
Clear tendency towards exoticism, and not very good choices in my opinion, but for the most part not too pozzed.
And for 2017;
From Guardians, you leave the cinema in better mood, after relaxing in good humour for an hour and a half.
This is better than 95% of Hollywood films.
In the last few years, Hollywood films have started to improve, as they became less serious, and becoming more generally surrealistic.
The worst epoch for American films is 2000s – worst Oscar awarded film: Crash (2006).
Stars Wars was so transparent that pretty much any Eastern European, such as a bunch of anti-Russian Polish people I know, saw it for what it was.
I’m not sure Inside Out was particularly feministic, it just had a female lead. There was a Christ-like figure in a central role. It was a great movie.
Otherwise agree with your post.
Younger ones emerge from the Humanities and these are indoctrination centers.
Although I grew up with Star Wars and liked it well enough, I was always of the opinion that Planet of the Apes was a better movie: darker, grittier, more realistic. PoA is very much about what was/is happening to America: racial displacement of the ‘humans’ (i.e., whites). The original book that inspired it (written by Pierre Boulle, an engineer who worked in the French colonial service in SE Asia) was even more explicit than the movie on that point. The film writers had to tone it down a bit to get it past the (((Hollywood censors))).
Star Wars, in contrast, was basically always just a fairy tale set in outer space. Joseph Campbell, of all people, pointed out its heavy reliance on archetypal–that is, traditional–story telling and imagery. And George Lucas once even confessed that he’d cribbed much of the plot from the old black-and-white Akira Kurosawa film The Hidden Fortress, which was set in feudal Japan. Try watching it some time, and you will easily see which of Kurosawa’s characters inspired which of Lucas’ characters–even with the subtitles turned off!
Anyway, Star Wars was always a fair tale. But that’s precisely why injecting political correctness into it will kill it: the whole point of PC is to destroy Jungian-style archetypal psychology and promote ‘gender-fluidity’ and tabula rasa non-sense instead. Even without he benefit of modern science, our ancestors knew better than that.
This (SJW themes) is also the way to create vast free advertising in the media.
If film has SJW rating, then it will allow creation of hundreds of more articles of SJW, flooding the internet (even university students, and blogs, writing many more articles).
At the same time, conservatives will also write articles, criticizing the articles supporting the film.
All of this is cycle of SJW in America, and then criticism of SJW, and criticism of the criticism of the SWJ, functioning as free advertising for the film.
–
If you compare two recent films in the same genre:
Black Panther vs Doctor Strange.
Doctor Strange was better than Black Panther in itself as simple comic film (Black Panther quite incoherent story, while Doctor Strange generally with a smooth story).
In addition, Doctor Strange more interesting visual scenes, and a few philosophical questions.
Yet only advantage Black Panther was politically impact of African actors, which applied to American self-obsessions, resulted in thousands of articles giving film free advertising (including articles from New York Times, and then responsive articles criticizing those New York Times articles from people like Sailer).
The result:
Black Panther = $1.3 billion ticket sales.
Doctor Stranger = $677 million ticket sales
Does he produce any real evidence of this? Or is it like the claims of Russian interference in US elections, argument by assertion. I suspect the latter.
I think it’s possible to make a better (and darker) Star Wars, similar to how it was possible to make a better and darker Batman with The Dark Knight trilogy. They just chose to make a stupid SJW stuff.
But they could make SJW stuff which is still, at least, logically coherent and somewhat interesting. For example Frank Herbert’s Dune contains female warriors (more powerful than males!) and powerful organizations consisting solely of females, as well as lots of highly influential female politicians. Things which don’t exist and cannot really exist, but which must feel good for feminist SJWs. But Herbert’s books are well thought out, and within those limitations, they are pretty good, so much so that they didn’t even much disturb me while I was reading them. But the creators of the feminist Star Wars just lazily threw in some women, made them infallible (or near infallible), and that was it. The result was shitty.
Maybe they want to kill it.
Old people view ‘Star Wars’ through a huge lens of unrealistic nostalgia, but younger generations will probably laugh at us for it.
My son watched ‘Star Wars’ and was thoroughly unimpressed. (He liked some of the robot banter but that was about it.)
In contrast, he has watched Kung Fu Panda 1&2 probably a hundred times.
In a generation or two ‘Star Wars’ will be as lame and dumb as Charlie Chaplin was to ours.
Writing by committee is very inclusive!
And extremely dumb. It’s easily one of the greatest weakness of SJW projects.
Yes even SJW theme film could be good, if they are made with care and effort, instead of lazy and inadequate
“Zootropolis” – has very SJW (even communist) themes. At the same time, it was a good film (in sense it was made with care and effort).
In answer to AP, I don’t know the situation in Poland, but of course in Russia Zootropolis was a wildly popular film even with adults.
Likewise, “Spider-Man: Homecoming”, is very SJW with the multiracial American high-school. Yet Homecoming is the most entertaining Spider-Man film (easier to watch than Sam Raimi ones).
The saddest thing about Star Wars film, is that since 1983 – how lazily and badly made.
I’m not sure how much value the conservative side of that dichotomy adds. After all, explicitly conservative films don’t benefit from this. The hype is always on the SJW side.
I’ve been hoping for the SJWs to introduce explicit ratings for feminism and diversity and so on; then I’d know what to avoid.
On the other hand, I’ve given up on finding an anti-SJW entertainment review site. Audience scores are a decent proxy but they take time to be useful.
Seems kind of pretentious to me. Also, after I left the cinema showing of White Ribbon in disgust at Hanneke’s incredibly misanthropic portrayal of German society, I am suspicious of anyone who likes his movies. It was beautifully shot though!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZc6cr6G2E4
The more scary thing about “Star-Wars: Last Jedi” – how it was “reviewed by committee”.
It is complied (very extensively) from polls of film critics and lists given by directors
That’s very likely. I enjoyed some Star wars-themed video games in the late 1990s/early 2000s (which are in some ways actually better than the movies imo), but I’ve never understood the quasi-religious devotion many Americans of a certain age (those old enough to have watched the original movies as children) feel for Star wars. It has always been a pretty dumb universe with little depth tbh.
The prequels, for all their faults, at least tried to do something interesting though with their tragic story of a republic being subverted and changed into an empire. The new movies (haven’t seen them) seem to be total garbage.
It adds a lot, because then supporters of the film can write even more articles criticizing people who criticize the film.
All this noisy is just free advertising – which is to say, free donation of money to the film-makers.
Sailer for example, has written many articles related to Black Panther, but no articles about Doctor Strange.
As a result of his blog, probably dozens of old people who read his blog, have bought tickets to see Black Panther, who would not otherwise.
Repeat this process thousands and thousands of times, and you understand how they could double the ticket sales compared to Doctor Strange.
–
The weird thing – was that Black Panther, although a badly made film, has very conservative and nationalist political message. The hero, is Black Panther – an African, native to his soil, who is a “noble” king, ruling strictly hierarchical feudal paradise.
On the other side, there is the villain character – an African who has been born outside his homeland (as African American), who alienated from his soil and filled with American SJW ideology.
The villain character of “Black Panther” is an SJW, who becomes an evil and a corrupting influence when he returns to the homeland.
I don’t think it’s likely many of Sailer’s commenters would pay money to see that silly Afrocentric movie.
Most older people probably aren’t interested in movies about comic book superheroes anyway.
But it created a stupid conspiracy theory (Darth Sidious creating a rebellion as well as centralizing the Republic to crush the same rebellion) instead of a more realistic story of the political leadership of an inefficient Republic slowly centralizing and creating a dictatorship as a response to a civil war. What was missing from the prequels was that Darth Sidious was shown to be absolutely completely evil with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. According to the story, no normal human being would choose to live in the Empire based on fear over the much freer Republic – it just seems like a more pleasant place to live, while the Empire itself is a horrible crime-ridden place anyway.
There was now another wasted opportunity to enter some realism into the story. Instead of the Sith being absolutely irredeemably evil, it could be shown why some people think it’s at least a lesser evil (or even positively better) than the Republic. Like 20 years after the destruction of the Empire, the leadership of the Republic could be taken over by incompetent and corrupt “freedom fighters” like the smuggler Han Solo (who instead of reverting to being a smuggler should’ve become a corrupt general or minister – he was promoted to a general already in the original trilogy, so if he stayed cynical, he should’ve become a corrupt general). That way you could show how the good guys could become the bad guys (or at least more ambiguous) and the bad guys could be seen somewhat rationally as the good (or at least the less bad) guys, so that we’d understand better the motivations of both sides as fallible humans.
As for the dumb masses, they come to see the nice CGI action scenes anyway.
The expanded universe was interesting, as well as some games(Jedi Outcast comes to mind) but the movies have always been reasonably meh. Great premise, clumsy execution.
The conservatives will use their hidden White Privilege powers and pirate the flicks.
Zootopia? The movie whose message is that minorities are predators by nature and in order to live in civilization must learn to control their bestial insticts?
The most racist movie since The Birth of Nation, and Russians love it? No surprise;-)
substitute African with “Ukrainian” or Banderatard and we have the exact same with Ukraine now, Dmitry
A lack of African-American philanthropy to Africa has been a constant. Same thing with Ukraine , except with the African American is has been nothing….which is alot better than nutjob idiocy that the American-Banderatards give to Ukraine
Interestingly enough in any standard Hollywood film featuring a Russian, and particularly a Russian bad guy….then a typically Ukrainian name is almost always given…The Equalizer is one film that springs to mind but literally there are many films/tv.
Same thing if there is some generic name to be given to a Russian Ice hockey player…it will be a Ukrainian. That’s a small but important example of how Ukrainians and Russians are viewed as the same people…because they are the same people and the “Ukrainians” were full contributors to the USSR….then add in the tonne of “Ukrainians” either directly calling themselves Russian or not minding at all in they are referred to as that in the west…and the picture is complete
Maybe OT: US threatens to destroy Russian nuclear weapons?
https://twitter.com/KyleWOrton/status/1047104805276213253
The usual bullshit and empty bravado, or is the apocalypse finally coming?
My experience is that almost all most artists are going to tilt toward at least slightly liberal perspectives – even Tolkien is too liberal for some commentators here, if they knew of his letters. So a lot of fiction will incorporate liberal, even SJW themes. The issues is when the process of creation itself gets compromised by the most ridiculous aspects of SJW ideology: forcing writers to diverge from their original plans, requiring the presence of undiluted angelic pokemon points, absolute dismissal of merit or even experience as a point of value.
At some point, its just as useless as any other government or politically dictated tract outsourced to “creatives” who are going to making something that fits the needs of their commissars and not of the audience.
Without doubt Americans and the rest of the world had been brainwashed by Hollywood into accepting an African -American President( I believe in accepting anyone to high position in a country based on merit….but Obama’s CV was abysmal) through years of propaganda , now it’s going to constantly be a woman playing the President….fortunately the next logical step[ ( the queer) should be impossible because , despite their best efforts, it would be financially unviable to have movies with a queer as some sort of heroic President…unless it was a comedy of sorts.
But it’d be a preventive strike, not a preemptive one.
Because he was opposed to Nazi racial laws (and probably to some extent to anti-black policies in South Africa as well)?
I agree, Star wars’ totally black and white morality has always been silly. But at its core it’s a fairy tale for children and adoloscents. It’s just strange when adults take it seriously.
Well, many (most?) artists differ from both. Like contrary to many accusations, Wagner was not really a Nazi, nor even a real conservative or whatever, but his views certainly could never fit a “liberal” or “leftist” viewpoint, however defined. I think what’s mistaken for “liberalism” is often just a disregard for all rules.
The best poets of the 20th century, T.S. Eliot, Pound and Yeats, were all right-wing.
The extended universe was different, I’m told.
Anyway I was always fascinated with the universe, but I never liked the black and white morality of it. Which is why the prequels and now especially the sequels are so horrible disappointments. I imagined it was a chance to improve on them both.
Can’t judge that, I’ve never read any of those novels (most are supposedly trash anyway, as one would expect)…and that expanded universe has now been almost completely invalidated by Disney.
The universe as shown in the movies is of course very superficial, with almost no depth to it, never really becomes clear how the empire is supposed to work (and some things like Vader killing his subordinates for trivial reasons, just to establish how evil he is, are really stupid).
He genuinely despised Nazis as far as I could tell, including a ramble about how he would be a better soldier for WW2 because of his disgust for “ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler.” He also wrote positively of Jews several times.
His exchanges with Ludwig II were very, very gay.
If I recall reading in that post, dozens of them had seen the film. And this is mostly elderly bourgeois Americans who write under the blog – so probably not pirating.
Black Panther film was a bad film (lazy storyline and editing).
From a marketing perspective though, exploited the SJW debates within America to a level of genius, and even cleverly by packaging in “black skin” a conservative nationalist message, which probably satisfies what the SJW audience unconsciously feels a lack of.
So extremely lame and gay
You do know that he was a conservative Catholic?
Anyway, the world in the 1930s was fundamentally different, it has little relevance for our present problems imo.
iirc he wrote that the dwarves in the Middle Earth universe were kind of like Jews, as a diaspora people.
Since they were also obsessed with treasures, wealth etc., I guess that would be seen as antisemitic today.
Lol, for Russia, it feels quite traditional this genre (cartoons with animals and politics).
Message of the film is about class and national differences. Animals have to overcome their instinctive, national and race, differences, in order to live together as this communist utopia.
In the beginning of the film, it’s even like 1920s (in Russia), and she is a peasant girl moving into city, into some kind of collective apartments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVbJ7RmVtwE
(The scene with sloths is also some pure satire of government workers).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCDQRy1od30
Probably just another example of crony hiring in USG.
The US could probably get some of them, but a direct attack on Russian soil that will almost certainly kill Russian military will require a forceful response. I don’t know if the Kinzhal can kill a US aircraft carrier at this stage – hopefully it does. Because the old method – ICBM splattering nuclear warheads in a grid pattern around its general location – will certainly still work.
So was Hilaire Beloc, and he didn’t have that pathetic attitude towards Jews
Oh yeah, he would be incapable of writing anything today because nuance is impossible. Also he is an evil tobbaco-pipe smoker, rather than a virtuous pot-smoker.
The fashionable beliefs are always in flux.
The headline is more extreme than the article if you read it. I think the woman was talking about what they’d do if a shooting war broke out. Yet another reason for Europeans to grow a spine and kick out the yanks though, not that this will ever happen.
Rogue One wasn’t bad. Sailer called it a World War II movie with spaceships.
OTOH, the differences are real and taken for granted, which is not in tune with blank slate ideology.
In high culture, where artist needs a significant degree of freedom – this indeed, a very unsuitable environment.
However, in low culture, it is less of a problem. Most Soviet animation has some conformist, ideological, political message subtly underneath it – even when they are just based in traditional fairy tales.
At the same time, many still good cartoons despite it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kay_Bailey_Hutchison
You think it was her own idea? Since when are ambassadors authorized to threaten nuclear attack on their own initiative? Since when is violation of arms control treaty a casus belli?
The exceptional nation.
There’s gotta be no way that the US is that retarded. Russia is not Iran.
I would wonder if they found a much healthier way of just finding artists who were also loyalists, and much more minimally intervening with them. Wasn’t output fairly slow?
Speaking of Warhammer 40k, the new Helsreach audio-movie drama is very good, but there are moments when I feel like they are intentionally introducing pozzing elements into it – such as the ever increasing number of female characters. So it seems that the Eye of Soros will find a way to corrupt anything, just give it time.
Zootropolis seems more like a “late”, utopian/communist ideology, where it requires constant work of state, and citizens’ goodwill, to maintain the societal balance – and while for citizens the whole project of living together (different classes, genders, nationalities), is imperfect.
Although it was made for American audiences, it matches more clearly, ideological situation of the epoch of the final years of Soviet Union, up to and including the current situation.
Or there is some more banal explanation of its popularity? 6th most popular film in Russian history in ticket sales, despite little promotion for it and fact it was just a cartoon ostensibly for children, and in a year when due to the economic recession overall ticket sales for films had vastly fallen compared to previous years.
It annoyed some members of the Party enough that a Chinese PLA officer wrote a polemic against it.
We are learning that rationality is hard to sustain. People always slide into self-serving idiocy, it is easier, the reward systems are set up to promote it. Why worry about making a bad movie? Or making moronic statements about half the population? It can all be explained by ‘subversion‘.
I suspect that when an angry group of neolithic hunters came home empty-handed, or their goats died, they screamed and shouted about how the enemy tribe’s witchcraft, treason and whatever caused it. And any local stupid enough to doubt it was clobbered to death. Irrationality is a response when one cannot accept failure or bad luck. Now, what happens when failing irrational people get hold of nukes?
No way. Zootopia is normal Western capitalist democracy, with all flaws (corruption, organized crime etc… ). No utopianism here.
If shooting war starts, everything will be targeted, not only these specific missiles.
If Russia really broke the arms control treaty, diplomatic solution would be to repudiate the treaty, not start shooting.
To me, it sounds exactly as threat of attack, and I am not alone who sees it as disturbing.
https://twitter.com/ArmsControlWonk/status/1047181128958787585
Russia claims that NATO broke the treaty first by withdrawing from the ABM treaty and deploying launchers for ‘defensive missiles’ on Russia’s border (Poland, Romania).
I don’t think it is productive to get into an argument over how a ‘defensive‘ missile is different from an ‘offensive‘ one. That touches upon a bizarre Western psychological issues. What is more relevant is that literally none of the arms control treaties are viable after NATO’s repudiation of the ABM treaty. Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was a prerequisite for all arms control, so all these treaties are at this point useless. We are in an all-out arms race with few constraints. Hutchinson is just being more blunt about it than diplomats usually are – and Russia’s response basically says that.
This will get really hot over the next few years, there are no rules and the major players are both more desperate and less statesman-like than in the original Cold War.
Thank you for your work, Russian Nazi trolls. We salute you.
Another great-looking fan work: Astartes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-MteECxZUY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfGPMJ8A0QY
You know the tagline of /tg – “We get sh*t done.”
Its really looking good so far.
Rogue One will remain the last SW I paid to watch.
Solo seems to be the last SW movie I am going to watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lN77Isb4MV0
I just wish they’d make a decent sequel for DoW
Diversity’ means no White Countries
Diversity’ means no White Cities
Diversity’ means no White Neighborhoods
Open borders is imposed on Whites only
Open borders is the real White ‘privilege’
Its Anti White
“Most Soviet animation has some conformist, ideological, political message subtly underneath it”
“Most” might be true statistically, but the really famous ones can be subversive. Cheburashka, for example, is some strange creature “unknown to science” who is rejected by normal society and who together with Krokodil Gena forms a club to socialize with other misfits and to engage in other unauthorized community projects like building a playground with stolen (?) materials. Even the villain Shapoklyak and her rat come off as more sympathetic characters than the Pioneers.
Out of curiousity, do you know why GW doesn’t seem to be slagging on them for licensing concerns like they used to? If I was going to speculate, after Lord Inquisitor hashed things out with them, they now have all of the legal setup that they wanted to protect their IP? The high quality also makes it seem like that GW is getting to veto now on low-quality projects which used to happen a lot.
An interesting question. I imagine it’s because if you’re a film reviewer and you’re not an SJW you’re going to be harassed and abused and threatened until you either give up or submit.
Even if you look at something like movie and book blogs you’ll find that there are very very few that dare to take a non-SJW stance.
With some luck some semi-trained pogue tard accidentally drops a nuke out of the hold over Big City which then goes off — this will allow for some time of reflection.
In fact, its almost impossible in the contemporary art world not to keep speeding left. Basically its in a state of permanent cultural revolution at the moment, if you slow down then you get destroyed by one of the many self-appointed commissars – most who don’t contribute, but are well capable of bringing the mob.
The safest thing to do is to be MORE woke than the next one. Its not even enough to be a SJW, you need to out-SJW everyone else.
Nominally against missiles from “Iran”. On Dec 13, 2001.
The thing still doesn’t work as far as we know, and is easily saturated in any case.
But the only logical response in the end for Russia will be to be on hair-trigger alert as some politician is wont to get overconfident and order a first strike because of a late-age female hysteria attack.
SWJs tend to believe that everything is socially constructed ie. set by some committee or authority. To them there’s no such thing as an objectively good or bad movie, it’s just a matter of someone deciding the list of good movies.
A position like movie critic is very attractive to people who think like this. These people consider the power to manipulate rankings by their political standards so valuable that they’re willing to write about movies for very little pay which means that they can monopolize a field like that easily as politically neutral people are turned away by the low pay of the entry level positions (actually no pay pretty often in these fields). Conversely, people in the few decent jobs in the field have huge pressure to keep up with SJW trends because there are a lot of SJWs who want their job and they have the outrage machine to take down people.
The incentives are selecting a set of critics who have no taste in their supposed subject. If you’re genuinely bad at telling the difference between good plots and bad plots, good characters and bad characters etc, then you’re more likely to believe that movies have previously been ranked by convention or secret white male patriarchal cabals and you’ll get into movie criticism with the genuine belief that you can rewrite the list of good movies according to your political beliefs.
The people that make movies also tend to be leftists but they have the test of audiences and when the full social constructionists are given a chance to make movies they crash burn like these new Star Wars people. Criticism doesn’t have any such check so it out-SJWs the writers and producers.
The big problem with Disney Star Wars isn’t the SJWism, which is bad but not much worse than average for Hollywood. It’s the unexplained resurrection of the Empire (as Space Nazis) under a new name, which renders all the struggles and eventual victory in the original trilogy meaningless. In TFA, Disney/JJ Abrams decided that since people liked the original trilogy setup of plucky underdog rebels vs. evil empire, they would just do that again, even though continuity-wise it makes absolutely no sense. At the end of ROTJ the rebels won the war and became the new galactic government, so how can they now be “The Resistance”? This removes the stakes from the new films as well, because even after they presumably defeat the First Order in the next film, who is to say it too won’t just be magically resurrected again?
It’s not a coincidence that the best Disney Star Wars film- Rogue One- was set during the original trilogy era, when the conflict the protagonists were involved in made sense, and their sacrifice actually mattered.
It was purposely designed to have black and white morality. Lucas wrote it as a children’s movie which were pretty thin on the ground when the 70s trend was for gritty adult dramas. I like the originals and the prequels, rather amazed at all the outraged man-children who have made schlocky sci fantasy an object of religious veneration.
This is just days after Interior Secretary Zinke suggested the USA might impose a naval blockade on Russia to block its energy exports.
Joe McCarthy was an amateur.
Btw, Dugin’s new book.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrafXfDL2CA
How does that affect the list’s pretentiousness quota?
The 10 Most Acclaimed Films of the 21st Century
1. IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE Wong Kar-wai (not seen – should probably watch)
2. MULHOLLAND DR. David Lynch (favourite film when I was 15…you can guess why)
3. YI YI Edward Yang (not seen)
4. THERE WILL BE BLOOD Paul Thomas Anderson (quite boring)
5. ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND Michel Gondry (fun)
6. CACHÉ Michael Haneke (director hates people)
7. THE TREE OF LIFE Terrence Malick (interesting)
8. SPIRITED AWAY Hayao Miyazaki (wonderful children’s movie)
9. TROPICAL MALADY Apichatpong Weerasethakul (sounds like Thai Brokeback Mountain)
10. BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN Ang Lee (deadly dull)
Yeah, the issue is that those children grew up and so it’d be possible to expand it into a movie for grown-ups. Besides, do children care that much for the story? They could be lured in by the cool-looking spaceships and CGI battles. There’s a Franco-Hungarian animated science-fiction film called Les Maîtres du temps (Az idő urai, literally The Masters of Time) which I liked as a child for the cool spaceship and the mystical atmosphere, despite understanding very little of the story itself. I rewatched it as an adult, and I still like the atmosphere and the cool spaceship, but the story is simple and stupid. Anyway, I don’t think you need to make a stupid and simplistic storyline to lure in children: they might not even care for the story that much.
In Star Wars I always liked the cool spaceships and space battles and the light sabers and the mystique of the Force, but already at age 12 I found the storyline too simplistic. There’s a reason why The Empire Strikes Back is the most popular among hardcore fans: at least the Empire wins there, and even some of the good guys are ambiguous, like Lando betraying Solo.
Yes, as I wrote, it’d be possible to write a good Star Wars despite the SJWism. They just didn’t do that, and chose to write the most stupid story possible.
I was agreeing with you, the pretentiousness is only what you would expect.
I so hate Star Wars now that if you paid me I would not watch that shit.
Can some of the older commenters fill me in on what the appeal of Star Wars is supposed to be?
A lot of it must be due to people who saw the original movies as children or teenagers and therefore associate them with lost innocence, wonder at the world, youth etc.
e.g. just read that piece by the horrible Rod Dreher of American Conservative:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/what-was-star-wars-like-in-1977/
Sounds almost like a quasi-religious experience.
Not sure if it has the same appeal for younger people (apart from nerds), imo the original movies already looked dated by the 1990s when I first saw them.
“Most Soviet animation has some conformist, ideological, political message subtly underneath it – even when they are just based in traditional fairy tales. ”
Sorry, I don’t see it. Insofar as they were generally expected to also show children things like manners and a good attitude rather than simply entertain them by whatever means possible as in the US, sure. But it’s quite a stretch to call that an “ideological, political message”. Though it’s true that some of them fulfilled that directive really crudely like the “Leopold the Cat” series (which got roundly mocked by children). And what exactly is the “ideological message” of Hitruk’s wonderful “Winnie the Pooh” shorts, Tatarskiy’s “Plasticine Crow” or Kovalevskaya’s “Bremen Musicians”, anyway?
I think animation was actually one of the most censor-free arts in Soviet culture; only cursory attention got paid to it, as it was considered “for children”. There are quite a few hidden gems among them that not many people know about. For example, Karayev’s “The Lodgers of an Old House” (no dialogue, so no subtitles are needed):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYvjziEPNVo
There’s even some stuff that was downright politically subversive and could not in any interpretation be conceived as pro-party… like Sivokon’s 1979 cartoon “Laziness” (this one DOES need subtitles; they can be turned on in video settings):
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xkbda3
I first saw them around the late 1980s (though this was the time Western culture in general flooded into Hungary, many of my classmates had already seen those movies way earlier as small children, they were already shown in the early 1980s), and the appeal was
1) cool spaceships and space battles (before CGI the only spaceship comparably cool was the Starship Enterprise, but Star Wars had many such spaceships – the Millennium Falcon with its asymmetric design, the Imperial Class and the flagship Super Star Destroyers, or the rebels’ frigates, the Death Star, etc.)
2) mystical Jedi/Sith religion with the Force – basically fantasy mixed into a tech space opera; this is enhanced by the use of the light sabers, which are a cool mixture of magical swords used in fantasy films (and books) and hi tech devices used in space operas
3) the super cool villains, especially Darth Vader, who turns out to have been the father of the protagonist farm boy
4) the films are set in some kind of rural environment, where everything is rusty – we’re not constantly shown the hi-tech future (or long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…), instead, at least for half the movies, we’re shown how the backwards rural backwaters of this hi-tech future (or galaxy far, far away) will look like (or looked like), where spaceships constantly break down and then fixed using welders and hammers, where most super hi tech things work, but just barely; this makes it more relatable than most sci-fi or space opera
I never dressed as Darth Vader or an imperial stormtrooper, I’m not into this kind of thing.
But I’m not much into movies at all, so even my somewhat stronger than moderate enthusiasm for it is like super-enthusiasm would be for anyone else. But I readily admit that the story of the original trilogy was pretty simplistic and shitty, and that I expected something better after 2015. (Same reason why the prequels felt so shitty – there was an enormous wasted opportunity to create something better than the original trilogy, with the same cool spaceships and mystical fantasy elements, but with a story for grown-ups.)
Some of us so those movies as children (Empire Strikes Back may have been my first movie seen in the theater). They were ground-breaking in terms of special effects and the story was very compelling for little boys. I may be wrong, but they may have been the first movies to ever feature massive space wars with spaceships and such (Star Trek was about exploration, and not as kid-friendly). So Star Wars was like a late 20th century Iliad geared for kids.
I thought the prequels were lame but I wasn’t a kid when they came out, and by then it was nothing new anyways.
Don’t they mock priests in the last one? But you are generally correct.
Exactly. I’m not much into movies, are there similarly cool movies with massive space wars and the likes? To be honest, I’m not even sure if such movies exist today, let alone the 1970s and early 80s.
Star Trek had one cool spaceship, the Starship Enterprise, but I only occasionally saw it on Austrian TV (which was possible to watch in Hungary in the mid-1980s), and didn’t understand a word of it. I only liked spaceships, and the Enterprise looked really cool. But otherwise the story was not really compelling, with mostly people in plastic clothes talking to each other in front of plastic walls, not spaceships constantly chasing each other and space battles etc. Maybe I’m wrong, I never really watched Star Trek, but that was my impression, so I never felt the need to watch it. The aliens were also kinda lame, with all aliens being a few facial features away from humanity. (To be honest, it wasn’t perfect with Star Wars, but at least somewhat better.)
I cared a lot more about the games as a child, in particular KotOR and a version of AoE II, than the films
Kids love that cat series. I loved it as a small child, both of my sons did too.
I wouldn’t call it crude, there’s a lot of subtle (and, frankly, weird) subtext in those cartoons.
The cat is some sort of incel betamale who wears purple bow ties and slippers outside, and yet is rich enough to have lots of disposable income and all the latest (by 1970’s standards) gadgets. The mice have obvious ‘alpha’ characteristics. They’re way more charismatic and likeable and yet get humiliated by the cat all the time.
Not sure what to make of the whole construction. Also strange that nobody picked up on that in our age where everyone is obsessed with alphas/SMV/game/etc.
“Star Wars” is a good example of how the overwhelming dominance of US media is becoming self-defeating – it’s too pozzed.
the way to defeat it is through making non-pozzed media.
The most recent Star Trek series (Discovery) supposedly is very “pozzed” as well, with strong focus on people of color and homos.
Even the original Star Trek series (which I still kind of like) from the 1960s was of course quite liberal, in the classical Cold war form, but it had Captain Kirk (played by a Jewish actor, but the character was meant to be a farm boy from Iowa), a character who would be unthinkable in today’s climate.
If so, that would just make Tolkien yet another white person who sanctimoniously opines on how to deal with Africans, while living in an almost all-white place.
It has less to do with the appeal and more to do with the fact how the jews are changing absolutely every movie, book and even past historical facts to push their anti white ideology. You don’t have to be a James Bond fan to not like a black Bond or a Homer fan to not like the idea of a black Achilles.
He spent some of his childhood in South Africa, and iirc one of his sons was also in Africa for flight training during WW2, so he did have some personal experience.
We have to remember how totally different the world was back then, I don’t think Tolkien could have foreseen what would become of England.
I played with TIE Fighter, and I liked it a lot. But by the time I started playing with it, I already liked Star Wars very much. Anyway I found the game enjoyable, but I wasn’t much of a gamer, like this was the only similar game I ever played with. I never played with many games, I played with Warcraft II (before WoW, no network), Dune II (I recently played it as an adult, I still like the cool aesthetics, the intro and the music), Civilization (mostly Civ I), Heroes of Might and Magic III, and a few other games. I never really played anything after, say, the year 2001. (Except Dune II sometime around 2010.)
Well then he was a fool, if he was an intelligent man then he should have been able to see the end result of embracing the ideology of universal equality.
There are some pretty good Star wars video games from the late 1990s/early 2000s, especially the Jedi knight series and the Knights of the old republic games (which imo are deficient as role-playing games, but catch the Star wars atmosphere perfectly).
Of course those are still pretty dumb (and fundamentally video games are of course a waste of time), but imo they were better than the movies in some ways and provided more of a backstory and depth to the universe, by showing ancient Sith temples, alluding to past history etc. The movies (which are of course inherently limited in what they can do by their medium) feel quite flat and superficial in comparison.
While I am not too pleased about the agitation in the new versions, I remember watching a Star Wars film in DVD when I was 8/9-ish at the behest of a friend who loved the series, I zoned out after a short period of time.
Tie Fighter was a great game, almost as good as Their Finest Hour. Both Lucas Film, up there with Sid Meier on quality and game play.
I still remember watching Star Wars for the first time, blew my tiny infantile mind, like nothing I had ever seen. Got misled in to seeing the JJ Abrams film by the positive reviews, despite my reservations, it was awful and I will not watch another Disney production. Made the prequels look good.
This si another proof that for many Russians is just a euphemism for white people.
He did pretty much exactly that in the end of ‘The Lord of the Rings”. (Read the book, don’t watch the movies.)
That nicely describes the 105-120 IQ trap that most of them suffer from: they are smarter than average to rise up in a process-driven meritocracy, obedient and conformist to be hired, but lacking in critical thinking and understanding of context. One sees them everywhere in all mature, stable societies. Over time they ruin societies, suppress humour and open discussion, and eventually have no problem to establish a mental autocracy with ‘merit’ deciding everything. They know the truth, because they did the homework, so end of discussion.
In the past brute force or some crisis, usually a war, used to keep them in their places. They lived out their useless lives as assistant school principals, customs officials, or re-arranging jams in their husband’s cupboard, but today they have been unleashed to share their humorless enthusiasm on the society. They will not stop easily, this might take a war or something.
I read the book, I know it has “racist” elements in it (the good humans being pretty much Northwest Europeans, fighting against the hordes of Easterlings and Southerners – who aren’t completely beyond redemption though and treated with some sympathy -, the men of Numenor mixing with lesser lineages etc.).
And of course the book ends on a depressing note since it’s clear that for elves, dwarves and hobbits there won’t be much of a future. I suppose though that’s more a metaphor for consumerist mass society destroying traditional rural lifestyles (Tolkien clearly disliked “machine civilization”, as seen in his description of Isengard) than anything about immigration.
The ‘against Iran‘ narrative has always been beyond amusing, e.g. politicians in Poland openly talked how it is against Russia. Maybe Washington forgot to tell them.
Saturation works well against defensive missiles, but that’s not what Russia fears. What they fear is that the so called ‘defensive‘ missiles can easily become ‘offensive‘ and be used for a disarming first strike from extremely short distance (less than 5-10 minutes flying time). There has be no logical answer from NATO, other than ‘trust us, we mean well‘. I think Russia at this point doesn’t trust anyone, so any accidental event could trigger a sh..tstorm with Poland as an epicenter. Poles have always enjoyed the attention, it moves them to tears and they write poems about it. (Maybe not this time.)
My money would be on that, it would nicely converge Western pathologies into a superb display of fireworks. Too bad, the Clinton lady had to go, she would be perfect for the role, a central casting dream.
If I remember Tolkein was mainly writing about the destruction of rural life by industrialisation. The ring was a metaphor for central banks, oddly enough, suppose a bit like The Wizard of Oz.
http://www.spearhead.co.uk/0208-sg.html
Cartoons have particular psychological attention, particularly the ones like fairy tales have strong ideological message. Watch ones of Ivanov-Vano for example.
And of course, animation was heavily censored, for even bizarrely sensitive reasons – for example, one animation censored when a lone character displays negative attitudes to bees (bees being a social animal).
To answer- “The Big Red Scary”. We can see now that Uspensky (inventor of Crocodile Gena and Cheburashka stories), is part of the liberal, anti-Putin, opposition. So perhaps you have found something.
However, these stories, are socializing children in some Vygotsky style concepts of team work.
the only people who can be trusted with promotion in late stage pozzification are sociopaths or retards
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_q2RJG6StQ
Yes, and the disappearance of the elves was a reflection of the end of aristocracy.
Correct. Isengard also seems to have represented Nazi Germany, the fallen Western nation. Rohan may have represented Poland, trapped between Saruman and Sauron (ancient evil manifested as Bolshevism). IIRC in an interview Tolkien denied such direct parallels but I suspect that unconsciously he couldn’t have helped himself.
The most famous moment of the books/films, the charge of the Riders of Rohan, is also based on the famous defence of European/Christian civilisation at the Siege of Vienna.
Pertinent to the Tolkein discussion is also the fact that he was a long term subscriber for the last years of his life to the National Front’s magazine, Candour
Wow, I didn’t know that. So another artist who turns out to be not very liberal or left-wing.
Jews who bitch about antisemitism are pushing Anti-Slavicism to scapegoat Russia for all their problems and failures. Really disgusting.
I don’t know, as you write yourself Tolkien always denied such interpretations, though they are of course quite common (I once read an article where the name of the ring wraiths, the Nazgul, was interpreted as being a combination of “Nazi” and “Gulag”…).
But maybe he did feel some special sympathy for Poland, given how Catholic he was. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything though that he had much interest in the Slavic world (whereas he was quite interested in the Finnish national epic iirc).
He was an ardent Catholic and a Luddite – definitely not “left wing.” But left to many in the board, I meant. I’ve known people who even think CS Lewis is pozzed because there are good Calormen.
There are just too many parallels. Though I read LOTRT in early high school (and watched the movies when they came out many years later) I wasted some time a couple of years ago to confirm.
Sauron/Mordor = Bolshevism/Russia. As an Anglo, Tolkien might have had a Russophobia that preceded Bolshevism (Anglos feared all that pan-Slavism and autocracy). Sauron, like Bolsheviks, wielded Third Worlders against the West. End of the Age of Men was the end of the Age of the West.
Saruman/Isengard, the most powerful of the “good” forces that upon contact/conflict with Sauron turned evil, biomechanized. Germany, most powerful Western nation, upon conflict/contact with Bolshevism turned evil, bio-racistic, mechanistic. Rather than regular orcs that would populate the world if Sauron won, Saruman would have a superior new breed of orcs.
Polish cavalry, Rohan riders, stuck between the two sides, feeling betrayed by the West but ultimately coming to the aid of the West.
I even found Balts/Ukrainians in there. though this may be more of a stretch than the other similarities. These were depicted by Tolkien as primitive mountain-dwelling humans whose lands were taken over by Rohan and who joined forces with Isengard and its uber-orcs against Rohan, as revenge. They were forgiven in the end:
http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Dunlendings
There are so may parallels between LOTR and a conservative Anglo view of the 20th century that I doubt it was a complete coincidence.
Simply more of the “no dialog” effort from the left, an effort to avoid answering embarrassing challenges to their beliefs and actions by claiming all those challenges come from, in effect, war enemies. “How will you pay for program x?” “YOU’RE A NAZI TRYING TO TRICK PEOPLE!” The salient point here is that it is a tactic of war. That’s what we’re in. It’s the way you treat war enemies. The display just put on by Democratic Senators, reeking of totalitarianism, has even some collaborationist Republicans tuned in to that reality.
I always interpreted those primitive people as a reference to what Tolkien imagined the pre-Indoeuropean inhabitants of Europe to have been like…a remnant of a lost world (iirc they’re also described as swarthy or at least dark-haired, not at all like Balts or Ukrainians).
As for the Rohirrim, I don’t know if there’s really anything Polish about them, apart maybe from the scene DFH mentioned when they come to the rescue of Gondor, which is indeed somewhat reminiscent of the siege of Vienna. iirc their names are mostly Anglo-Saxon (and of course Tolkien’s entire work is pervaded by Englishness, with the Shire an idealized version of rural England). But the real Anglo-Saxons mostly fought on foot, not as cavalry…which would have been more appropriate for one of the East Germanic peoples from the steppe during the age of migrations (e.g. the Ostrogoths whose history Tolkien regarded as very tragic).
I agree though that Saruman’s Isengard with its advanced machine technology and especially its Orc-breeding programme and biological experiments could be seen as a reference to Nazi Germany. So even if Tolkien denied it, maybe he was indeed influenced by the contemporary events of the 1940s.
On second thought, I think I confused the Dunlendings (who may have been Celts to the Anglo-Saxon Rohirrim) with the Druedain:
http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Dr%C3%BAedain
This quote doesn’t fill me with confidence in his judgment. But really, you have to read Bay’s entire article to make a judgment. And life is short.
Moreover, he suggests, complaints about Lucasfilm’s reported politicization of the franchise by many of the disaffected fans says more about the fans than it does Disney or Lucasfilm’s treatment of it. “[S]ince the political and ethical positions presented in the new films are consistent with older films, it is more likely that the polarization of the Trump era has politicized the fans,” Bay argues. “The divisive political discourse of the study period and the months leading up to it, has likely primed these fans with a particular type of political messaging that is in direct conflict with the values presented in The Last Jedi.”
“intelligent”s vs gopniks
Well, I didn’t expect my somewhat throwaway comment to explode into this. Since there’s quite a bit of interest in Tolkien, I think its worth expanding a bit on his views on race, religion and equality.
Tolkien obviously did not believe in equality. All of the races and people are different in his work; the Númenóreans and Eldar are obviously greater in form and power than others. But this supremacy is of very little importance because all things are minor before the Plan of Ilúvatar, God Himself, and in many ways greatness is a curse because it is a temptation to pride: the most deadly of the seven sins.
It is pride that does in Melkor, greatest of the Vala in all things of power and knowledge, to rebel against Eru and become the setting’s Satan. Yet Eru does not stop him from introducing discord into Arda and seemingly sabotaging the Song that makes the world, for it in the end it even his effort to disrupt introduces the waves of the ocean, furnaces of lava beneath the hills and chill lands of ice beyond. It is all part of Eru’s mysterious and his invincible plan.
It is pride the leads the Númenóreans, already blessed most greatly by Eru, to fear the Gift of Death and fall to the lies of Sauron. In their power and greatness they are foolish enough to challenge even Eru and invade Aman; Eru destroys them in a flash and then shatters the very continent they live upon, a reminder that for all their might, they are less than dust before God. A remanant population of the Black Númenóreans, though pure of blood and greater in ability than other Men, would remain only to trouble the world as sorcerors and generals of evil forces.
The Witch-King himself is almost certainly a Black Númenórean(their lords were men of Númenor who had fallen into dark wickedness; to them the Enemy had given rings of power, and he had devoured them: living ghosts they were become, terrible and evil), and all his greatness serves only evil, magnified by magic and riding upon an ancient fell beast. And in the end, it avails him little when he is slain by a woman and a hobbit the size of a child, with a blade destined to be his end. So is the fate of all who would seek to pit their strength against the Will of Eru.
Another principle to consider is theodicy. Eru, who is all mighty and all seeing, surely would not create evil and all Men, even the Easterlings and Southrons, were part of His plan. They may be more foolish or wicked, of lesser stature or valor, to be misled or tricked into the service of Sauron but they were all made by Him and therefore cannot be intrinsically evil. Evil cannot create life, it can only corrupt what is pure. God can create, and God will not create evil.
The only intrinsically evil beings, therefore, are: those beings twisted and corrupted from elves and men such as orcs who had been robbed of their free will(another important Catholic concept); a host of evil spirits who had joined Melkor’s rebellion such as dragons(fire spirits wearing flesh machines); and strange creatures of primordial chaos such as Ungoliant.
I think the discussion is often confused because modernity has a way of seeping into things that distorts how we understand past figures. Religion provides a fairly extensive canon of comprehension completely separate from materialistic evolution.
I have heard of that rumour before. Only source of it appears to be from various National Front-type magazines. Would have been odd for him to have been a subscriber given his past comments on Jews and apartheid.
Selected Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, Tolkien to Rütten & Loening Verlag, 25 July 1938
Selected Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien
“Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford (1959) in J.R.R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller: Essays in Memoriam
It wouldn’t surprise me. He was a reactionary, after all. Modernity has changed the meaning of a lot of things, but he definitely had an affection for the past and there’s nothing to suggest that he would want mass immigration. From a purely religious perspective, its not like they are all Catholics, are they?
He’s clearly not a proponent of equality.
It is like the Karate Kid , they made the hero a minority, then girl, and then it flipped into complete reversal to make the original hero a prig.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCwwxNbtK6Y
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn write about Soviet female pilots who were sent for the Gulag for failing to complete their mission (they dumped the bombs) . It is not fair to women to put them into combat, you cannot expect them to stand up. Killing is men’s work. So they must be young, but they have to be men .
You’re reading too deep into it.
The Black Speech is an agglutinative language, and Mordor has a strong geographic resemblance to Turkey. You might with equal validity argue that Mordor represented Turkey.
Rohan is quite clearly an early feudal Frankish polity, not Poland or anything of the sort.
If there is an “evil Russia” entity it is the northern waste of Angmar, domain of the Witch-King, which was destroyed a thousand years before LOTR.
I had trouble downloading the pdf. Thanks for confirming that it’s a tissue of bullshit.
I take Tolkien at his word:
“The orcs are not Russians any more than the Russians are orcs.”
Well no, he was not. His conservatism was more of a style of Russell Kirk’s though in that he was most opposed to industrial commercial culture and militarism. He would have opposed mass immigration, joining the EU etc. (he’d have been happy for England to be an independent country) but I don’t see him as a supporter of the British far-right. Too declasse and obsessed with Jews.
Tolkien was asked where Gondor would be if it was on Earth. He said the Balkans. Therefore the Minas Tirith is Constantinople and Mordor is Anatolia. Sauron employs black Southrons and Elephants, as the Ottomans did with Sudanese in the 19th wars ( even in Greece) I’ll find the source but am in the pub at the moment.
He would approve.
Mordor looks closer to Spain, not oblong enough for Turkey.
http://shadowofwar.wikia.com/wiki/File:Mordor_Map.png
Well, Mordor is obviously Bulgaria then.
You deeply underestimate how much of a Luddite he was. He was against almost all modern technology; only craftmanship by hand where the product still bore the soul of the maker. He admired a simple life of mostly stationary people who knew their place in relation to each other and were happy with it.
“I am in fact a Hobbit in all but size. I like gardens, trees, and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humor (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much.”
As Tolkien and others made plain, the Riders of Roman were basically Anglo-Saxons on horseback. NOT Franks!
Nil points ( French pronunciation) M. Anatoly
Yes, but the question was whether Tolkien was an adherent of National Front style racial ideology, and that indeed seems unlikely imo.
Tolkien was very keen on maps and supplied one for the trilogy. Mordor is directly East of Gondor. Minas Tirith is the easternmost part of Gondor.
Mr Chieh, I think both you and I would have found him very good company if we were 30 years older and ever met him in a pub. We would have to bin the mobile phones though.
Plenty of people were against non-white immigration to Britain without having supported ‘Racialism’ or Fascism in the 1930s (Churchill, most obviously).
He denied it himself, fwiw.
https://lotrscrapbook.bookloaf.net/ref/rohanletters.html
I’ll need to find that source. It was written during Tolkien’s lifetime. Will be back in touch tomorrow, with a clearer mind.
I’ve only read the trilogy, but one thing I can say is that one of the ‘horrific’ aspect about Orcs, in that they were actually corrupted Elves (men according to other explanations) who forgot all about their origins, became deformed, evil and turned against their former race and other ‘good’ creatures…well that always strongly resonated with me, seeing how most of the Turks are actually former Greek-speaking, christian populations brainwashed to perpetuate the deeds of their conquerors against their very brethern, expanding their realm and essentially becoming confused with the alien element. Think of the Jenissary, in particular. Same goes for middle eastern christians, greek descended or others as the Arab ethnic element is also low in muslim populations of formerly christian lands. In practice these populations are effectively brainwashed about their origins, holding various delirious beliefs about them (Turks emphasising central asian racist themes, Syrian or Egyptian muslims often thinking of themselves as hailing from peninsular Arab deserts, while at the same time holding real xenophobic attitudes towards the non-converted indigenous locals who preceded them).
So if this horrific aspect was probably ‘meh’ for readers of various backgounds it made a strong impression on me back then, reason why I’m biased towards believing that’s actually what Tolkien wanted to convey.
Minas Tirith = White City = Nandorfehervar = Beograd
Minas Morgul could be Constantinople perhaps, or Osgiliath would take that role?
The most important Hungarian and Serbian fortress against Turks.
The victory at Siege of Belgrade in 1456 led to the churches ringing bells at noon at Papal insistence, a practice that continues to this day.
Nandor were a type of Elves in Middle Earth, and it means Bulgar in Old Magyar.
A further clue to Gondor identity would be the names themselves. Suffix -mir is Slavic entirely, from Kazimir of Poland to Trpimir, Zvonimir of Croatia and Vlastimir, Vladimir of Serbs.
Rohirrim are refugees fleeing from Easterling destruction of Rhovanion, and have odd names.
Thanks for that.
There is a reason Ottoman Turks could fight essentially combined might of most of Christian Europe from 1370 to 1600/1683.
They were a better organised, more efficient statesmen and administrators and often leading the military technology and tactics.
Employing both professional Sultan’s infantry and cavalry as well as feudal and regional levies, mercenaries combined with early adoption of gunpowder and artillery meant that Christian armies simply had no chance before they too reorganised themselves and adapted.
Tercios of Europe and Swiss and Landsknecht pikemen of Italian wars would be savaged by more flexible and mobile Ottoman armies.
Ottoman Empire was initially very open and tolerant compared to Western, Feudal Europe.
Armenians were early Sipahis, often Christian at first, and Greek pronoiars simply continued in service of new liege.
Religion/Christianity was left to Greeks entirely, commerce to Jews, and craftsmanship to Armenians.
Islamic converts of local nobility in Balkans were left to manage their lands, and there was quite a pronounced meritocracy streak: look up the number of foreign descended, like Albanian and Serb officials of Vizier and Grand Vizier rank. The blood tax they collected in form of strongest snd brightest Christian boys that made the Janissary Corps initially produced superior troops and officers.
The decline of Ottomans started with weakening of both economical (due to European colonial routes and trade) and technological advantage. Janissary rank became inheritable, posts were sold, there was widespread corruption, and the decreased tolerance of non-Turks led to more rebellions and internal tensions.
Good point. OTOH the parallels between Isengard and Germany lead one to suspect Mordor as the Soviets (who also used Central Asians). He did not deliberately model Mordor (or Isengard) on anyone; it was a massive and terrifying Eastern power with both Soviet and Ottoman characteristics.
What would Rhun be, then? Remember, he even had Variags/Varyags of Khand.
Isengard is pronounced the same as Eisengard, but the half-orc, goblin-men of Saruman in addition to Uruk-hai (different from Mordor ones) doesn’t point to Nazism and some genetical purity obsession.
The important issue of Arnor breaking up and the successor kingdoms falling due to Angmar has no parallel in real world.
Yep. You’re dealing with people who genuinely think that the only purpose of any book or movie (or painting or whatever) is to deliver a political message. They’re incapable of comprehending that any other purpose could exist.
The Dunlendings are indeed the Celtic equivalent in LOTR-world, being a dark-haired highland people who suffered ethnic cleansing by the Anglo-Germanic newcomers (the Rohirrim).
The Druedain were the semi-human forest natives in book three, the equivalent to Neanderthals or other proto-human survivors.
Tolkien didn’t base any culture on Slavs, as far as I know. From the pdf of Tolkien’s collected letters, he does say that he tried to teach himself Russian and Serbian, but only learned the basics and never got to intermediate level. His favorite languages were Old English, Gothic, and Finnish.
I really don’t think Tolkien intended to base the Orcs on the Turks, Russians, Ukrainians, or any other human culture. In fact, he was so troubled by the monolithic evilness of the Orcs that he couldn’t make up his mind what their origins were, being a Catholic who didn’t believe that a whole species could be born evil.
Now that I’m going through what I have of Tolkien’s clutter and fanmail answers, it seems that he disliked all open allegories but did make a few vague ones.
In one bit, Tolkien writes that Denethor was a bad guy and would’ve subjected the defeated Easterlings to colonization and genocide. He then contrasts Denethor’s harshness with Aragorn’s generosity to defeated enemies. So it actually seems like Denethor, not Sauron, was the “Nazi” equivalent in Middle-Earth.
Winnie the Pooh was a fairly faithful adaptation of the original stories. Adaptations were not required to have any ideological content beyond what was in the original source material.
Plasticine Crow was ideology free, it’s true. Which is why Soviet censors wanted to ban it for being “ideological nonsense.”
And Musicians of Bremen was actually chock-full of Commie propaganda, albeit subtle. The reason you don’t see it is because you agree with it.
Yes, he hated Hitler and Nazis with a passion, and for quite a personal reason:
Tolkien considered himself a member of a persecuted minority, English Catholics.
You are vastly over-interpreting the florid speech of a professional writer in the WWII era (when florid pseudo-nationalist speech was in its heyday, encouraged by endless State propaganda in support of an early anti-German stance and later war effort).
The cultural climate of Great Britain has long been anti-German for historical and economic reasons, WWI being exceedingly fresh in the mind of everyone at that time. However, you could trace the conflict back at least two thousand years.
That doesn’t imply a pro-minority, anti-White, or even an anti-Fascist stance on the part of Tolkien, by today’s standards.
Neither would those things be implied for the vast majority of men who signed up to fight for the USA military.
In the USA at that time, it was simply assumed that Republican style frontier democracy and liberalism worked toward a constant raising of the living standard for the White man, but that the White man was in power and there was simply no future in which that would change much: least of all through defeat of the Germans.
In Britain at the time, I doubt it took much propaganda to work the populace up into a so called “anti fascist” frenzy given the terrible cost of WWI and the rest of the history.
Tolkien was merely parroting the type of pseudo-nationalist propaganda that most Western men of the day were exposed and vulnerable to given the recent past war trauma. Repeating it was wholly cultural, and in the milieu of a very White culture that was assumed to be under no serious threat.
However, tell them what 2018 was going to be like and I guarantee their collective values would have had them both siding with the Germans, in spirit if not physically, and likely purging their nations of communists, Jews, and other minorities.
At least that would have been the majority’s action (Germanics, Celts, and Celt-Germanics). Tell them in 1938 about the resulting desegregation, open LBGT degeneracy, the spread of drugs, the decline of Christian and family life, and the persecution of White males and you don’t have a good-enough army in 1939. You wouldn’t have had officers in 1939 unless you were recruiting only Jews, Blacks, and homosexuals.
There were plenty who sounded the alarm. However, the Jewish press was much more efficient at isolating and even causing their persecution then, due to lack of competing communication channels.
In fact, I have long thought that this recent anti-nationalist Russia conspiracy propaganda push on the part of the Jewish MSM and Deep State apparatus looked a lot like, in form, what propaganda must have looked like in the WWII era.
I thought that it looked plenty antiquated in technique because its invention was so transparent to modern minds, and it was widely and effectively countered with that accusation. At least at the grassroots level.
Tolkien’s stories are utterly filled with Saxon nationalist religious themes that are buried in Anglo-Saxon myths. If you aren’t familiar with the subject matter, they are hidden. Tolkien was a sensitive artist, and spoke as such. However, he was no communist or anti-nationalist. Just the opposite, as with most men of that day. At worst, he was an anti-German propagandist an had a culturally fatal “large” heart and belief that all ships can rise with the White man (a common affliction for the Western European populace).
And another good one: Hellsreach
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUplioG2DC4
If pretentiousness irritates you, you should not watch this film. If you want to see a good WKW film, watch CHUNGKING EXPRESS.
Is actually quite good, if a bit slow, and not very pretentious.
But the black and white simplicity was one of the strengths of Star Wars. At is core it was a space pulp fable. No place and time for moral ambiguities in such stories, like for example there is no place for feminism on our planet. When Star Wars movies keep in those limits they were successful – i.e. it was fun to watch and later to discuss with friends the possible applications of lightsabers as bottle openers.
But when creators tried to introduce realism we’ve got such gems of as disillusioned former hero Luke „The Mopey” Skywalker, deadbeat dad and small time crook Han Solo and divorced career woman Leia „General” Organa.
Heroes can be burned out too, kids, remember this lesson.
Those who have Facebook should follow The Daily Gondor page. It’s a parody site about multiculturalism in Middle Earth. Orc Lives Matter! Thousands of Orcs feared dead in Orcophobic attack in Helm’s Deep. There is a tired racist myth that all Orcs regularly eat manflesh. It has long been debunked: studies have shown that only one in three Orcs regularly eat manflesh. The rest only do that occasionally. So why are Elves and Men still so prejudiced about it?
https://i.imgur.com/a/OatGLz2
(I don’t know how to embed an imgur image, I’m not sure if it’s possible from a cellphone.)
Tolkien was against apartheid.
I haven’t seen the new trilogy, but General Solo reverting to being a small time smuggler was anything but realistic.
Fairy tales are for little children, in our civilization stories for adults were always more complicated than that.
Even fairy tales: most medieval fairy tales for children make no sense for us, and are often very cruel even when they do. Medieval or ancient tales would have nothing to do with the simplistic story of the good defeating the bad. Ancient gods (including the God of the Old Testament) were cruel, as were the stories. Achilles was cruel to Hector, not some spotless hero. Even Kings David and Solomon were flawed humans. God killed the older brother of Solomon to punish David for the evil that he committed. Etc.
I’m referring to the Scouring of the Shire. Tolkien explicitly mentioned swarthy ‘refugees’ and their propaganda arm turning everything to shit.
Agree with that, his stories are based on Anglo-Saxon and Nordic mythology, modern day parallels are most likely circumstantial, see the number of random ones extrapolated here.
Tolkien was also deeply affected by his WWI experiences, in which almost all his friends were killed. It gave him a sympathy for the rural working class and a dislike of industrial warfare.
Not only would that process terrify people into silence in the short run, it’d select for both people gullible enough and good liars (and even some gullible liars, a subspecies I’m sadly familiar with). You’re a genius.
I believe it is from Clyde Kilby ” Tolkien and the Silmarillion ” (1971 )
Kilby helped Tolkien with the Silmarillion and had numerous interviews and contacts with him.
I say believe because I lost my copy of Prof Kilby’s work a number of years ago.
Then the new movies are a good thing – they cured you of appreciation for the old shit.
Good for you. I’ve seen only the merely very bad The Force Awakens and luckily avoided watching the execrableThe Last Jedi.
Not to mention that it destroyed his character arc and likeability. And if someone has read some books of the old Expanded Universe (guilty) the difference is jarring.
Disagree. Fairy tales are for everybody, especially for adults. Also fairy tales can be quite dark and not for children (at least not for children as we today understand them, in the past standards were different).
Since Middle Ages fables were gradually made more tame and child-friendly, so it wasn’t Lucas idea.
Yes. During the original trilogy there was a character development: he went from being a deeply cynical selfish smuggler to a selfless hero of the Rebellion. He grew up to the occasion when he saw the threat of the evil Empire.
However, I’d find it psychologically possible that once the civil war was won, General Solo would find it difficult to resist temptation. He might turn into a corrupt general, or even retire from the military, and as a war hero, become a politician, like a government minister, where he’d have ample opportunities for embezzlement. I have seen a number of anti-communist dissidents in Hungary who turned corrupt once getting into power. I think many of them felt that since they spent a decade or so (some of them more, some less) in the 1980s (and sometimes earlier) harassed by the communist police, lost their jobs, etc., they were entitled to some perks after communism had fallen. Such a psychology could’ve been shown with Han Solo: the deeply cynical personality, who nearly sacrificed his life fighting against the oppressive Empire, feeling entitled to some perks after having won the civil war, and becoming a corrupt politician. Perhaps his lack of political experience might be used by others, shady people who’d push his career in exchange for him helping these people to government contracts or positions of power. He could become someone like President Grant.
Occasionally, yes. But I think there’s little need to create sequels to fairy tales: they are usually simple, so the original SW trilogy would suffice. If you create a sequel for the now much older audience, you should definitely make it darker (and possibly more realistic).
True, but it doesn’t mean that there’s no place for darker and more complex (and perhaps more realistic) tales. I’d think there is, and I know most adult fans were waiting for something like that.
Corrupted elves becoming evil orcs — catholic clergy? Nah, not back then, at least in tolkien’s Viewpoint and knowledge.
You really think that Tolkien was that dumb? Come on.
This attempt to retroactively refit historical figures into allies is silly. The fact that you could go through an purported analysis of him without mentioning the importance of Catholicism to him is pretty amazing. He personally did missionary work to his friends, especially against atheism.
Also, living standard? Does an anti-industrialist strike you as someone who is concerned intimately with that?
Never said he was. But he wouldn’t have cared for atheism on the right any more than atheism on the left; he only ever admitted to one allegory from his work, and that was the Ring was the Machine. It makes gollums of us: sickly, unnaturally long-lived, insane and pathetically obsessed with what he saw as trivialities.
I am assured that I’ve read more Tolkien than you have, and you miss his entire purpose. He did indeed think he stated capture the “northern spirit”(just look at post 161). But he specifically related that to “large heartedness” and especially Christianity. I could easily pull tons of examples of that from his work, but its really rather self-evident to anyone who reads his canon.
There is a good argument for it in the strong linguistic parallels but Tolkien always denied any real-world connection himself; explicitly in terms of the Rohan. He thought it was sophomoric – or at least suggested unoriginality on his part, so he would have even more reason to protest.
Its impossible to rule out crypto-inspiration, though.
http://quotespictures.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/some-day-you-will-be-old-enough-to-start-reading-fairy-tales-again-cs-lewis.png
It could happen. But could such movie be called Star Wars? Such dark science fiction tale about disillusioned or fallen space general could be interesting, I would certainly watch it, but it goes against what Star Wars were – space fable about heroes and triumph of good above evil.
Kathleen Kennedy and her lackey forgot about that and in result they wasted the best known IP on the planet and their corporate master lost at least few hundred million dollars.
Yes, and we got such tale – Rogue One. Which as independent SF movie would be merely OK. It is the fact that it is a part of Star Wars universe that makes it more interesting by contrast. The heart of the imagined universe is still fairy tale but you can have fun with shadows on the edge. But I think if you replace the heart with moral ambiguities and psychological realism you will kill the franchise.
The only new era SW I saw. Yeah, it was good.
The Dark Knight vs. other Batman stories. So, I disagree, but we won’t know.
We got an idiotic and simplistic “Star Wars” story which nevertheless makes zero sense, and killed off the magic of the franchise anyway. But contains a bunch of perfect spotless female (including Hijabi Muslim!) protagonists with superhero powers. (This largely includes even Rogue One, though that one had at least some other redeeming qualities.)
OK, I should be more precise – you kill Star Wars franchise. Batman had potential for darkness inbuilt from the start what with parent killing. It was simply a matter of adjusting knob labelled “darkness”. Star Wars is different kind of a story: noble heroes against evil. Do not expect something different and you will have good fun.
Disagree.
Star Wars story is neither idiotic nor simplistic. It is simple and functional and does well what it was supposed to do. Of course it has certain limitations as to in what kind of arts it functions well. Visual arts are good, but writers for Expanded Universe had to struggle to make it work.
As for the role of women in latest in latest installments of Star Wars – let’s say I think you are very mild in your opinions…
“What is more relevant is that literally none of the arms control treaties are viable after NATO’s repudiation of the ABM treaty.”
Bush’s repudiation. He was a retard.
Also, didn’t Putin/Trump talk about some kind of new nuclear treaty before the democrat media blew it up by attacking everyone involved as traitors? Maybe this is some kind of classic Trump fear mongering to justify having actual talks on the subject? Otherwise, the democrats would once again just attack him. In other words, he has to escalate situations in order to justify things like negotiations. He is a vain man. Perhaps he is mad that the democrats scuttled his political efforts on the subject.
The original Star Wars had this quality of adding layers and complexity with each movie. The original movie was pretty simple. The second movie established Darth Vader as Luke’s father and a formerly good man, a former Jedi, a fallen angel like Lucifer. It also hinted at his love of his son. He proposes the Emperor to “turn” Luke to the Dark Side, even though both he and the Emperor understand that there can only be two Sith Lords. The third movie established that Darth Vader was still not lost beyond redemption.
Please note that the second movie, which added the most complexity, is also the most popular among hardcore fans. I fail to see how adding more complexity and layers to the story would kill it. We already have the biggest ambiguity of all: the most evil character of the original movie turned out to be still fundamentally good. In the last prequel we also learn the depth of his evil, having personally murdered the children at the Jedi school. (It’s somehow more psychopathic than simply destroying a planet with the Death Star, something like the difference between the nuclear bombs and the gas chambers.)
Anyway, I don’t think we’ll convince each other. We also cannot change the franchise anyway. We’ll keep getting incredibly stupid movies with a lot of SJW content.
Adding more complicated layers