ERICK-WOODS ERICKSON
Look, this is not a post for most of you, if any of you. I’m in Louisiana this week. I’ve been helping my parents and visiting them. I’m in a cabin in the woods in rural Louisiana. I’ve done my show every day. I’ve tried to tune out at night and just watch something. And that gets me to this. Again, probably not for most of you, but I’m a bit tired of all the politics this week anyway. Unfortunately, you can’t avoid it when you try to escape to a galaxy far, far away anymore.
I am led to believe by people close to him that Bob Iger actually understands the problems with wokeness at Disney and the boundary pushing. But he also is constrained in how to proceed. He is not, contrary to perception, a dictator and has a bunch of wokes around him. He also has to nurture talent, etc. without alienating the people Bob Chapek alienated.
That’s not excuse making. It is reality. I hear stories of CEOs all the time who say they can’t immediately fire the Chief Diversity Officer because she/they will label the CEO a racist. The board will fire the CEO and he will be unemployable. The Chief Diversity Officer will get a Harvard Chair.
In any event, Bob Iger needs to do something.
Star Wars is a multi-billion dollar investment that the wokes have grabbed hold of and are intent on ruining.
Jon Favreau was a genius and Star Wars fan and did a brilliant job with The Mandalorian. Andor is amazing. I didn’t mind Ahsoka, even if it was weak. But Kathleen Kennedy, who is in charge of Star Wars for Disney, has made some awful hiring decisions seemingly in the name of diversity, not fidelity to the intellectual property Disney purchased.
The latest failure is Acolyte, which has an 85% score among critics on Rotten Tomatoes and a 10% score among the actual watching audience. Notably, the infamous Star Wars: Holiday Special gets a 20% audience score.
Forget all the stuff you heard about it being woke.
Here’s what you need to know.
The acting is terrible. The dialogue is unimaginative and awful. The execution is ridiculous. In the first episode, a fire broke out in the vacuum of space. In the most recent episode, a cave burned down. Yes, the cave was stone. But it burned down. Perhaps it identified as wood.
The dialogue and inconsistency are ridiculous too.
A character declared of The Force that “some call it a force and claim to use it. But we know the thread is not a power you wield.” The same character, a short time later, declared of the Force and Jedi, “This isn’t about good or bad. This is about power and who is allowed to use it.”
So it is not a power to be wielded, but a power to be used. Okay. I thought it was a thread that binds things.
That last bit, however, gets into the woke problems.
The line was uttered by an intersectional lesbian witch who used the Force to conceive a child. Never mind that this deeply violates Star Wars mythology, it’s two lesbians getting pregnant by using the Force.
The Jedi are now colonizing white people. The lesbian intersectional witch coven is just misunderstood. It’s all alienating to fans without bringing in enough new people to embrace the rejections of the existing mythology. It’s bad for business.
But the actors are gay, lesbian, and nonbinary. One is married to the lesbian director. And I really don’t care about that stuff, but it gets to a larger point.
The intersectional cast of wokes is like China. They don’t create their own works. They appropriate other people’s work and reimagine it and then force it down our throats. It is very Marxist. They have taken a property where there is good and bad and decided it really is all about the acquisition of power.
It is typical of how woke storytelling proceeds.
David and Nathan, in scripture, cannot have a real and meaningful relationship. They must actually be secretly gay. Men cannot have deep relationships anymore unless they are gay relationships. Any man beloved by many is reimagined to be gay. Mark Anthony and Caesar were gay. Abraham Lincoln was gay. On and on it goes.
The gay characters must also be pure and virtuous unless they are white gay men. White gay men can be the bad guys among the intersectionalists and conform to various stereotypes. But the black lesbian witch has to be the most virtuous character because otherwise it speaks poorly of the intersectional cycle of virtue where the non-white, non-heterosexual has the most virtue and truth to speak.
That then makes the characters boring and lame and actually very conventional. The plotting is plodding. Intersectionalism cannot construct worlds, but only deconstruct worlds. That substitutes ingenuity with dullness.
It leads to stone caves catching fire, contradictions in basic logic, and stiff dialogue afraid to offend anyone except the dominant classes.
I really don’t care that the director, actors, and plotting are gay, straight, transgender, or asexual. What I do care about is that they care so very much that I am suppose to care about those things and, at the same time, mock the very intellectual property a billion or so people enjoyed so they can fetishize it for a million or two. I want a good and interesting story. They want acceptance by offering the dullest possible tale to bore us into their agenda.
Bob Iger really needs to do something. They’ll never get their money back on their Star Wars investment.