George Lucas (5:54)

And where does God fit into this.

Matthew (5:57)

Concept of the universe? In this cosmos that you've created? Is the Force God?

George Lucas (6:02)

I put the Force into the movies in order to try to awaken a certain kind of spirituality in young people. More a belief in God than a belief in any particular, you know, religious system. I mean, the real question is to ask the question, because if you, if you haven't enough interest in the Mysteries of life to ask the questions as, is there a God or is there not a God? That's, that's, for me, the worst thing that can happen. You know, if you ask a young person, is there a God? And they say, I don't know, you know, I think you should have an opinion about that.

Matthew (6:43)

So I personally don't think that that is the worst thing that can happen compared to fascist oppression. And I also never really thought that the Force told me much about the heart of human struggles. And if anything, the Jedi order proved itself over and over again to be a toxic masculine wizard cult, handing down equal measures of magic and intergenerational trauma. And that's a side of things that the Joseph Campbell discourse really doesn't usually explore. But then, years later, Lucas offered a different perspective in an interview with James Cameron.

George Lucas (7:20)

We did something very interesting with Star Wars. If you think about it, the good guys are the rebels. They're using asymmetric warfare against a highly organized empire. I think we call those guys terrorists today. We call them mujahedin. We call them Al Qaeda. When I did it, they were Viet Cong. Exactly. So were you thinking of that at the time? So it was a very anti authoritarian, very kind of 60s against the man kind of thing nested deep inside of a fantasy or a colonial. You know, we're fighting the largest empire in the world, right. And we're just a bunch of hayseeds in coonskin hats, don't know nothing. That's right. And it was the same thing with the Vietnamese. The irony of that one is in, in both of those, the little, the little guys won. Right. And the big, highly technical empire, the English Empire. The English Empire, the American Empire, lost. Yeah, that was the whole point.

Matthew (8:19)

So that sounds a little more relevant and pragmatic to me. And as it turns out, it was also closer to the bone for Lucas. Now my assumption in looking into this was that Lucas was just through and through a spiritualist. And then he sort of threw in this layer of anti colonial concern maybe for narrative impact. But the story is more complicated than that because from 1969, Lucas had worked on early scripts for Apocalypse now. And, and he was slated to direct it for a while under Francis Ford Coppola, but then it was delayed for lack of funding and Lucas also stepped up his concentration on Star wars. So that didn't happen. But in that same period, or slightly before, Lucas also wrote and directed a film called THX 1138, which is this very dystopian sci fi set in an Underground authoritarian city where the citizens are compelled to suppress their emotions and their sexuality with drugs. So the heroes are factory workers assembling police androids, and they figure out how to wean each other off the drugs, fall in love. They also pay the price for it all. But in the meantime, they catch fleeting glimpses of freedom and the sunshine above ground. So this is straight up Orwellian. There's nothing romantic or spiritual about it. He didn't contract John Williams to compose the soaring score. Now Brian J. Jones reports Lucas's saying, quote, I was working on basically negative movies. Apocalypse now and thx, both very angry. And I realized after THX that people don't care how the country's being ruined. All that movie did was to make people more pessimistic, more depressed, and less willing to get involved in trying to make the world better. He decided, we've got to regenerate optimism. So I find it strange and also moving that Lucas wasn't just going with his heart on Star wars to give a platform to Meditations on the Force. He was reading the Room in a way that gives me another perspective on the kind of sour view that I tend to have on the 1970s. I've been very influenced by Sam Binkley's brilliant 2007 book, Getting Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s, in which he describes the long road that popular culture took towards postmodern ennui and depoliticization. Binkley argues that in the 1970s, we saw a period of getting loose in relation to the body, work, expectations, family relations, religious commitments and political allegiances. And it happened while, and because the great moral and political questions of the 1960s kind of deflated without resolution, even if they enshrined looser social mores around sex or finding meaningful work. Because the hippies couldn't end the war after all, the cultural yearning for structural change found a new home in the project of the self. So in other words, the new age exploded when otherwise progressive people gave up on revolution. So I think the internal conflict within which I have held Star wars, even as I started to introduce the canon and the legends to my kids, was exactly this. I really put it in that category of middle class political abdication. You know, this is a film that came from hippies who took up a course in miracles. But now I can see there's actually another layer there specifically related to the creator class. What do you do in the mid-1970s if you get the sense that your darkest perceptions and warnings about imperialism or the future of technology will only depress the viewership. What do you do if you know that the impact of your work will only increase cynicism? And I think this is a much more pressing question for the filmmaker than for a writer like myself, which is perhaps why I didn't really consider it. The stakes are high when you're playing in that movie budget big leagues and you can influence an entire culture so profoundly in one fell swoop. Chapter 2 Star wars culture wars so if we Fast forward to 2012, we've gone past the original trilogy and the three prequel film. Lucas is 68 years old. He's got his eyes set on retiring, as you would, but he also wants to avoid the coming chaos of the streaming age in terms of organization and economy. So he closes this chapter out by selling Lucasfilm and other properties to Disney for $4 billion. And then the mega studio under the leadership of executive producer Kathleen Kennedy, starts churning ahead with Star wars based script that Lucas sort of has a role in, but not really. And as the sequel movies roll out, a huge sector of the fandom veers into backlash. A lot of people are upset. Not just out of loyalty or nostalgia for the Lucas days, not just because the three sequel movies feel overly produced or they founder in terms of narrative arc or they have plot holes. The main backlash was about the culture war because Kennedy presided over an expansion of the diversity of the series in terms of casting and themes. She scrubbed away at its misogyny. She decentered the wholesome Kansas style farm boy Luke Lucas, called him a hayseed. If you remember, there was no more leering Lando Calrissian or Hansi Han Solo. And then very importantly, to be a female hero in this new world, you didn't have to walk the Princess Leia line between sassy and proud, but ultimately seducible and literal sex slave in a metal bikini chained by the neck to a mobster slug. But as it turned out, there were a lot of reactionary sexist Gen Xers who didn't want any other type of female hero. So the Disney years put powerful women, spiritual warriors from many different species into the foreground. Rey Ahsoka Tano and then in the Acolyte series, Vernestra Rowe and Jacky Lon. But by the time we get to andor, the principal women don't even need magic fueling their heroism because they have pure anti fascist realism. Now in the pre andor series Rogue One, Gilroy and Kennedy give us the orphaned non force warrior leader Jyn Erso. And then in the series, they give us the most Queer coded and racially diverse cast, yet with crucial female characters like Vel Cinta, Clea Byx and Mon Mothma.

George Lucas (15:53)

And.

Matthew (15:54)

And as if to stick a thumb in the eye of the right wing, there's even a Mothma subplot that shows how she explicitly rejects the trad cath gender traditions of her own birth culture on the planet Chandrila. And then all of these shifts are also reflected out in the wild among the super nerds who make content about this stuff and who show up in cosplay at the fandom events my kids bring me to. The queer and non binary contingents in these spaces are really prominent, super creative, super imaginative. Our older kid was only 11 when he told me about Star wars fan fiction and that there was a whole genre called shipping where fans speculate on and then they also yearn for confirmation that their favorite characters are in love. And the shipping fiction he first came upon was was the fantasy of Finn's romance with Poe Dameron. Now the peak of the first wave of manosphere backlash centered on two main anti woke grievances. So the foregrounding of Finn, as I just mentioned, he's the black First Order stormtrooper who deserts with Poe Dameron after he refuses to fire his weapon during a massacre of villagers on Jakku. So he escapes a kind of slavery within the First Order to join the rebellion. And then they were also really bothered by Rey, the orphan scavenger who's so force sensitive she's basically a Jedi Master before she trains at all. Now in right wing forums, Finn is called a token character and Rey is written to be unrealistically perfect and lacking flaws. And she's somehow sprung whole cloth from some feminist fantasy. So the slur term they use for her is. Is Mary Sue. I'm not sure where that comes from, but they call her Mary Sue. Now another wave of backlash hits when the black actor Amandla Stenberg is cast in the acolyte as the twins Osha and May Anacea, who are raised by mother Anisea and mother Coral, who are a same sex couple at the center of a matriarchal all female coven on Brindock. Now, a year ago Stenberg, who identifies as non binary, gave an interview to the Wrap alongside showrunner Leslie Headland, who's gay.

Leslie Headland (18:25)

I want to ask you both because this is, I would say, arguably the gayest Star Wars, I think by a considerable margin. And are you excited about that? Are you racing yourself?

Matthew (18:35)

Not gay G Star Wars.

Leslie Headland (18:36)

Not that it's pretty gay let's be honest, Leslie, are you. How do you feel?

Matthew (18:42)

Am I gay?

Leslie Headland (18:43)

Well, no, I know you are gay, but I'm asking, are you excited about putting this. You know, this is gonna be a talking point.

Kristen (18:49)

Is it gonna be a talking point?

Leslie Headland (18:50)

I'm sure so.

Kristen (18:51)

Because nerds are gay.

Leslie Headland (18:53)

Well, some nerds are very not gay and are very threatened by gay stuff.

Kristen (18:56)

Well, that's true. But in my world, nerds are gay.

Leslie Headland (19:01)

Was this the fun element of.

Matthew (19:02)

No, I don't think so. And yet people have told me that it's the gayest Star wars. And I frankly, you're bendish into it.

Kristen (19:13)

I think that Star wars is so gay already.

Leslie Headland (19:15)

Okay.

Kristen (19:16)

I mean, have you seen the fits? We'd be like, look how gay this is. And then send each other a reference photo.

Matthew (19:21)

And are you telling me with a straight face that C3PO is straight?

Leslie Headland (19:25)

They're a couple. That's what I think. But this is more outward.

Matthew (19:29)

I think it's canon that R2D2 is a lesbian.

Kristen (19:32)

Oh, interesting.

Matthew (19:34)

As you might imagine, that provoked a deluge of reactionary bile under the wraps Twitter post of the clip with comments like, if you care more about sexuality than storytelling, you should be making porn, not Star Wars. Or even a comment like, how long before they push full blown pedo content? Throwing a little bit of Disney Qanon in there. And then finally a comment like, shockingly, it's getting terrible reviews and no one is going to watch it. It will be an UT failure, as are all the other DEI projects these studios keep crapping out. Turns out Americans aren't into rainbow propaganda being shoved down their throats non stop. Happy Pride Month. So around that same time, the same Crowd unearthed a 2018 interview that Stenberg did with Trevor Noah about her breakout film called the Hate U Give. This is a Black Lives Matter era coming of age story about police brutality. This is the clip they made viral. When people watch the Hate U Give, what do you want them to walk away with? Because I know everyone has a slightly different feeling.

Kristen (20:40)

Well, I mean, white people crying actually was the goal.

Matthew (20:50)

But what they left out was what she actually said just minutes before. And by the way, stenberg is only 17 years old here, but it's supposed.

Kristen (20:58)

To be a tool of empathy. So oftentimes we see these events portrayed on the news and in media, but usually they're misconstrued or they're at least postulated, so they don't fully humanize the people of color who are killed and affected by these events. And so that's what this is supposed to be a tool to do. It's supposed to ground it in a personal narrative. And hopefully people will have a sense of empathy because of that. And so far it's been really successful. We have a lot of white people crying, which is great. I've never seen so many white people crying before. Like, it's amazing.

Matthew (21:31)

That's what I was like. That should be the new Rotten Tomatoes. It's like a little thing. White people crying.

Kristen (21:35)

Score. Exactly.

Matthew (21:37)

So put it all together and we finally get Ben Shapiro saying shit like this.

Ben Shapiro (21:43)

I'm not sure anyone has ever ruined Classic IP more than Kathleen Kennedy ruined the Star wars ip. It's truly incredible. And it's all because she decided to infuse her trash left wing values into the Star wars universe. She decided that the Force was created by lesbian space witches. She decided that Luke Skywalker was actually a loser who hated the Force and drank, like, green cow milk. The disaster area that is her tenure at Lucasfilm is unparalleled in modern film history. Because you're talking about literally the greatest IP in the history of American film completely wrecked for 13 years. When we say that wokeness poisons all it touches, I mean, you know how hard you have to work to destroy the Star wars ip. You have to work so hard.

Matthew (22:28)

Now, first off, if Shapiro is talking about money, he's just wrong. Because the single Star wars financial flop presided over by Kennedy was 2018's solo movie about the space cowboy's traumatized orphan past on the mining planet of Corellia. But otherwise, she's helped steer Disney into volatile streaming headwinds and racked up over $6 billion in value for the company through. Through the Star wars franchise alone. So maybe lesbian space witches, or at least the creative milieu in which they're allowed to emerge, actually do make money on the open market. But what also makes money is something called character development. Luke doesn't finish out his days as a pauper on Temple island on the planet Ahch to because he's a loser, as Shapiro says, but because he is overwhelmed by regret and shame and a sense of failure. He had tried to rebuild the Jedi Order after the massacre at Geonosis and after Anakin's slaughter of the younglings, but that ended in disaster, with his own nephew, Ben Solo, turning to the dark side as Kylo Ren. So he believes that his own grandiosity led to the rise of another dark side wave. And now he thinks that after millennia of failure, the Jedi Order should just die out. And so I think that when Shapiro pings Luke in his list of ways in which Kennedy ruined the Star wars ip, his real problem is that there's nothing the baby fascist hates more than contemplating hubris, failure, vulnerability or disillusionment, or living in poverty and contemplation. Now, one inclusivity marker that I think is really important and that Shapiro and the anti woke goobers haven't caught on to, is just how neurodiverse Lucas's universe is and how much of a neurodiverse fandom it has. So, for instance, C3PO and the conical droid do are these shuffling and rolling representations of triad traits, of social puzzlement, communication challenges, sensory sensitivities. They are obsessive to the point of brilliant focus. They also have outsider status, and consistently they are underestimated or not trusted. But the caveat in these discussions online is that autism advocates are very aware that it is dangerous to compare autistic people to unfeeling robots. And so, luckily, the inclusiveness doesn't stop with the machines. There's a series called the Bad Batch, which is about a squad of oddball clone troopers who either overcome or reprogram the chip implants that get triggered by Chancellor Palpatine's Order 66. And this is what flips the Republican army into an Imperial Death Force. Now, one of these characters is named Tec, and he's pretty clearly autism coded. He's been identified as such by the community for a long time because he has a tendency to info dump. He finds it a little bit awkward to understand or express emotions in expected ways, and his focus is really on logic and facts over social cues. And so there's a famous episode in this series where after a series of tragedies, Tech is sitting with the heroine clone girl Omega, and she is asking him. What? Why he is the way he is. Why doesn't he seem to feel as upset as she does? Why is it so hard for him to show what he's feeling?

Kristen (26:10)

Everything is changing and you don't even care.

Ben Shapiro (26:14)

I am not sure how I should care about change. It is a fundamental part of life.

Kristen (26:23)

Echo lift. Why doesn't that bother you?

Ben Shapiro (26:31)

I am aware that you miss him, but we have to adapt and move on. That is what soldiers do.

Kristen (26:40)

We are more than that. We are a family, aren't we?

Ben Shapiro (26:46)

Well, I. Yes. Yes, of course we are.

Kristen (26:52)

Then why don't you act like it?

Ben Shapiro (27:06)

Echo chose a different path, as did Crosshair. I have to respect their decision.

Matthew (27:15)

Even though.

Ben Shapiro (27:15)

Even though it can be difficult to Understand, we must carry on. I may process moments and thoughts differently, but it does not mean that I.

Matthew (27:27)

Feel any less than you in the big picture. I think there's something at the heart of what really fries Shapiro's brain, which is that the progressive and neuroqueer Star wars fandom have found empowerment through these stories and have turned all of the various issues I've discussed into litmus tests for friendship and love. So I'm going to link to a hilarious thread that starts with the with the account prompting, quote, what's a Star wars stance a man can have that a girl Star wars fan would find to be a red flag. Now, first of all, dozens of people called out the sexism of using man versus girl. But for those who played along and gave answers, there were some real bangers. So one person wrote that, you know, if the potential boyfriend or partner said that the Rebel alliance are right wing, that should be a red flag for everybody. If the potential partner said that a very specific Leia costume is the one that should be iconic red flag. If the potential boyfriend was trying to sort of say that the diversity stuff wasn't needed because, quote, we already have Lando and Mace Windu red flag. If they said that he hated Jyn Erso red flag. There was one where the person said my ex was a Star wars super nerd and told me that Star wars was not and never had been a political movie. And that told me he had zero critical thinking skills. So what this fandom is saying is that if you have reactionary or shitty takes on Star wars, you're not worth being a friend and you're not going to get laid at Comic Con. So no wonder Shapiro and the rest are triggered. The Disney turn has given the marginalized something to rally behind. Some of the storylines have queered the standard narrative of order and nobility and justice. So for every complaint people might have about the Disneyfication of Lucas World, this is one of the directions that the megacorporation was able to take it in. And the question that andor answered was whether Disney could or would take it any farther. Chapter 3 A post fragmentary Left There's a pretty common story in leftist political circles that acknowledges the criticisms of the anti woke backlash, but of course comes to very different conclusions. Now, that story is that the demoralized internal turn of post 60s liberation movements was a symptom of but it was also accelerated by neoliberal individualism, and that whatever liberatory impulses survived were diverted into distorted and defanged forms of identity politics where People could fight each other for space on the ladder of oppression instead of maintaining a shared class consciousness. And part of that story is that the theory of intersectionality lost the revolutionary import articulated in 1989 by civil rights lawyer Kimberle Crenshaw, who described how differing identities and experiences of vulnerability and oppression might overlap or intersect to intensify their impacts, but also their earned wisdom. So this was the identity politics she was detailing. And it wasn't about Instagram clicktivism. It was developed in the late 1970s by black feminist thinkers who realized that the social movements of their day, like Black power or feminism or communism, often weren't responsive to the unique conditions and contributions of their different members. And so therefore, within these same groups, traditional hierarchies often asserted themselves in ways that betrayed the goals of freedom and fairness. So Black power, for instance, was. Was dominated by black men, while feminism generally was dominated by white women. So these early intersectionalists asserted the democratic and experiential value of being black, female and or queer all at the same time. And this is a layered argument. And what happens when people miss it or it gets distorted for them is that their politics devolves into confessional expressions of personal psychology and trauma. Catherine Liu is really good on this point. From a solid leftist point of view, she shows how contemporary progressives will prioritize identity over class, indulge in identity based virtue signaling and tokenism. They'll forget all about class analysis. They'll set up circular firing squads to cancel people who don't pass the highest levels of political awareness. Now, if you read or listen to Enough Kathryn Liu, there's two recent episodes on Doomscroll podcast that will give you the picture. They're really good. You'll get pretty depressed about the prospects of reinvigorating class struggle in which people are able to graduate beyond this corrupted version of identity politics and fight together. But then we have fiction, and maybe that's its most precious role. If you immerse yourself in Gilroy's andor that graduation has already happened, probably a long time ago, and unfortunately in a galaxy far, far away. But in that place, the rebellion is led by women and people of color, first nations people. And it's also supported Popular Front style by powerful white leaders in the Imperial Core. And so it's not even a question whether the rebels have transcended their species, ethnic and cultural differences to create a polyglot syncretist movement. And it's not pedantic and idealistic like Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek Utopia in which all earthly conflicts have somehow been resolved. The Rebel alliance in Star wars is chaotic to manage, but it's also laser focused on the outcome that really matters, which is beating the fascists. In Gilroy's world, the rebels know that if you've shown up to fight, you have been through some kind of hell. We don't really need the details. You've moved on to the only real conflicts worth conflicts not over spiritual truth or identity, but over strategies for justice. And so the pressing question is, what should we do today, now that we're here together and we know what the problem is, now that we've all accepted each other in this particular intention, how do we win? And so as I'm watching this, I can get a glimmer of a post fragmented left in which the lessons of inclusion have been learned and digested so that solidarity can be strengthened. And that's a precious vision for the present day in that category of you just have to imagine it before you can make it happen. So while Disney facilitated these very important side quests into the politics of inclusion, everyone with a brain still understands that aesthetically and organizationally, the empire is straight up Third Reich. And so with andor revolution can become the exclusive focus of showrunner Tony Gilroy, as he tells Jeffrey Jones of the Peabody Awards. We learned in our research that you.

Kristen (35:01)

Are a student of the Russian Revolution.

Matthew (35:03)

And the Haitian Revolution. What did those moments of mass resistance and overthrow teach you about humans existing under oppressive regimes or human desire for.

Kristen (35:14)

Change through violent resistance?

Tony Gilroy (35:17)

Man. If you go on Wikipedia, they have a list of every revolution and rebellion there's ever been. And it's one of the most endless Wikipedia entries I've ever seen. I mean, it starts from the very beginning of time, the Roman Revolution and the Greek Revolution. Charles I. I mean, there isn't a year, there isn't a moment that goes by where someone isn't ruining everything for enough people that they don't want to deal with it anymore. And so the French Revolution, I've probably done an autodidactic deep dive on that. I don't know, half a dozen times in my life. The Russian Revolution has been fascinating for my whole life, and, and the House on the Embankment and all those books and the show trials and all that stuff. If there's any kind of past life, I must have been there because I feel very plugged into that.

Matthew (36:03)

So this is important to me. And it merges with the themes that we've studied for years because it represents something we almost never see, which is the radicalization of a cultural product on a mass scale against the prevailing tides. With andor the Star wars juggernaut completes an unlikely transition from liberal, spiritual, but not religious aspirational thinking in the 70s and 80s to a form of political hardball that meets a very precise moment. And it does it. Despite significant challenges, increasing economic pressures across entertainment sectors, the fact that Lucas started out as a boomer creator selling content to Gen X, and how often does that pattern track to the left and then the sell off of his IP to Disney? So this is a cultural package that has basically grown up and become more realistic, even as so much of the world has gotten stupider. When Marianne Williamson graduates from A Course in Miracles workshops and books to venture out on her various presidential campaigns, she only goes halfway towards material gravitas. What she really wants to be is the Jedi in the White House, probably with a green lightsaber. What we never get from Williamson and people like her is that beating the empire requires impossible material material commitment, courage and compromise. As the bodies pile up in colonial outposts like Ferex and Gorman and in our world Gaza, everyone we come to love in the Andor series has to do something profound and contradictory. In the absence of magic, lightsabers and wishful thinking. They have to feel themselves as a family, bound in love. But they also have to be willing to leave that family at a moment's notice if the fight demands maximal trust and attachment and maximal sacrifice to the whole people acting to their absolute limits for the good of each other, in the full awareness that they might lose because they lose so often, and in the full awareness that they may never see the outcome. And to me that sounds like a solid and generative model for the dilemma of families and parenting in an age of fascism. So that's the main thing that I'll turn to on Monday. We'll see you then. Thanks for listening. Trip Planner by Expedia, you were made to have strong opinions about sand. We were made to help you and your friends find a place on the beach with a pool and a marina and a waterfall and a soaking tub. Expedia made to travel.