Great post! It's like we're caught in a doom loop: they get more shrill and preachy about "the patriarchy," so we dismiss them as clowns and stop going to see their movies; they see our reaction and conclude we're misogynists who need more shrill preaching about the patriarchy, so they double down; we tune them out even more, or just talk to them like they're crazy (which they are); they take this as evidence of our misogyny and escalate the shrill preaching even more, etc. It's like we're locked in a battle of wills with a bunch of shrieking two-year-olds having tantrums, but because they run HR and much of the legal profession and so forth, we have to take their hysterics seriously. What an insane state of affairs!
Very well stated. The question for me is, for those of us males who have been exiled from Institutions and Hollywood, and who are not interested in "pretty men in elegant flowing robes, who wear eye-liner and eye-shadow, cry, and beat the crap out of their enemies,"
A good question. East Asians also do contemporary dramas. No long hair, eyeliner or eye shadow on the men, or flowing robes. I have no list of recommendations for them. Though I find the ratings on https://mydramalist.com/ pretty reliable.
the original lone ranger was a low budget cowboy flick. There is still Yellowstone. the most popular show going. do not let them take away your faith in yourself. i would rather watch old dukes of hazzard or walker texas ranger that put trash like that, mental junk food, in my psyche.
My friends and I used to have Walker parties back in the 90s. Haven’t watched the show in decades. Now that you mention it, I’ll have to revisit it. I think we could all benefit from more Chuck Norris in our lives and in society generally. What a badass.
My friend and i used to have george carlin fests, zepplin fests, ren and stimpy.....i came late to walker looking for things for my son....fit to watch. actively, that means stopping and discussing it as you go. what make a person bad or good, when does empathy get turned off....
Good post. A couple of things i would like to point out regarding the percentages of women professionals. First, not all of those 52% of women professional managers will be card carrying members of the Sisterhood - not all women swallowed the DEI nonsense, and some do try to push back. Second, and I believe you've pointed to this in an earlier post, women's nature (gasp!) tends to draw them toward people centered positions, so having an HR chock full of gals isn't that surprising. Allowing the Sisterhood to dominate that culture though, should not happen. HR and Legal run most large companies these days, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Clear headed women usually dislike these women just as much (more?) as the men. Speaking as one, I won’t spend another minute with such than I have to.
Yes, but it’s very lonely for me as a professional unless there are lots of women pretending. Most of my female colleagues give me a wide berth. And often the males are so afraid of being labeled “cishet” that they bend over backwards to SJ even if you suspect they don’t believe it.
Yes, I find myself scrolling through Youtube for old film classics (from anywhere) and eschewing modern fare, which is not only banal but predictable (for all the reason mentioned by Oz, and more).
Yes, surely there is sexism and racism in some old classics, although is modern-day "progressive" bigotry any better?
Side note: A while back I was watching b/w 1950s films from Malaysia (maybe Indonesia). What I remember is a huffy daughter, in modern dress, telling her father that women have careers nowadays and she is going to college.
In Muslim Malaysia, that film would not be made today.
PS Those are spooky stats on political leaning by profession. I imagine little harm done if most miners are right-wing. The rocks don't care. But is that "diversity" in media-academia?
The narrowness of acceptable opinion in the “knowledge” industries is a serious problem. That such opinion is based around Theory that builds mountains of bullshit out of molehills of truth and that explicitly seeks to increase social dysfunction is even worse.
“Mountains of bullshit out of molehills of truth.” Perfect. The theory of intersectionalism can be a minor tool among many others to help us continue to try to understand complexity. When it becomes the overarching theory that explains everything, it devolves into an all-consuming monster.
In this regard, Hanania is right in that the illegalness of non-woke opinions of account of civil rights law has made things much worse. But overturning it alone will only help so much given how many true believers in equitist philosophy there are today.
Came to this one late but Thank you Lorenzo for this deep dive into how Non-binary but "preachy & lazy" Big Brother is entertaining us these days (if we are so foolish as to go see the show). This as you perhaps know is a theme close to my own heart.
https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/non-binary-sibling-is-entertaining "Tv schedules across the Western world are awash with drama serials of this kind, conforming to a formulaic scriptwriter’s tick-box: Non white person traduced but eventually revealed to be a surprisingly decent sort – Tick....Middle class white person eventually revealed to have a sinister dark side – Tick...Gay Couple included – Tick.... More recently it has become an integral part of the story that ‘lgbt’ people are abundant and everywhere. They are bound to be nice as well. Curiously though there is another box to be ticked: there needs to be some graphic depiction of violence especially towards attractive young women (by white men of course)."
Not to promote myself but I did an article about why everyone should watch Naruto. This article just reinforces that people in the East are creating better stories with such profound lessons and even dealing with things like grief and loss. How the lessons learned helps those characters grow. When my nephews ask me for something to watch I never suggest anything that's been produced in the last 10 years in the West.
It's DragonBall Z, Naruto and the cartoons I used to love like the original Thundercats or the 90's Spider-man and X-Man cartoons.
i remember the fun of star wars too, but i think there is another layer here to uncover. The same thing was done to art. but why? sublime classical beauty was replaced with... something that did not compete with the propaganda of marketing. I'll tell you something else, it is a way of storing value/money laundering for the rich. No one can stand to look at most of it. that is Not what it's for. Movies? it is perfectly well known how to make timeless classical stories on film, but, they don't. On purpose. It is partly social engineering , with money laundering mixed in. It is a business, but not an up and up one. also, tax write off. personally i like ballywood....and the last few godzillas were ok. Casa Blanca was low budget made in 6 months. they are doing it to undermine our faith in humanity. that is the social engineering key, learn to trust AI better, or davos people. Not the common men. Same with the political theater. undermining our faith in humanity. My recommendation? do not put garbage like that in your mind or your kids mind. it is slow, but effective.
I disagree. There are more convenient methods of cleaning money than films. I think the movies actually reflect how they think and see the world.
The world view of the elite class is distorted. All their schemes fail because of us, because we don't live up to their exalted ambitions.
Those ambitions are seen on screen. Women being just like men, even in physical combat. Men can be pushed aside and women, immigrants from failed states and presumably the mentally compromised can create, design and build the next generation of innovation. They can run the first world that white men created, despite all evidence to the contrary,
They can decree changes in the law as well as human behaviour to trigger great social improvements. The wisdom from the past can be safely discarded. All it takes is the will to do it.
What we see on screen in Star Wars, Star Trek, Sex and the City - this is how they view the world. A world they can change on a whim. Except none of it works.
This. What the writer points out for Star Wars has happened in all films to a degree after 2000 and in an avalanche since 2020. Really hard to find a film or tv series that I want to see. Very very sad and hopeless-making. Diabolical really.
What Disney did to Star Wars for me is unforgivable. How you are handed the biggest film franchise in film history and reduce it to a smouldering pile of banal wokeness is beyond me. It feels personal because it was. You only have to look at the “Force is Female” T-shirts to know that. They never intended to make a great Star Wars movie. That would only be an accidental side effect after shoehorning the various SJ narratives into a series that was grounded in ancient myth and legends from all of human history (George Lucas studied anthropology before getting into film). Now I look upon the corpse of this once great franchise like Don Corleone standing over the bullet riddled corpse of Sonny, crying out in anguish “My boy, look how they massacred my boy!”.
Can we raise enough money by crowdfunding with fans to collectively buy the franchise back from Disney? That seems like the only hope at this point, our Obi-Wan Kenobi if you will.
I was also disturbed in the new star wars films when they digitally exhumed and re-animated the beloved Peter Cushing; it struck me as some form of necromancy or raising a zombie as a puppet to be jerked around on strings. It's probably not wise to fool around with a practice associated with black magic and voodoo since forever, especially when motivated by for profit through fan recognition and nostalgia. Incidentally somewhat ironic perhaps given Cushing's great horror career.
I see the role of HR a little differently, through the lens of the narcissistic family system. Elites are narcissists regardless of sector re-enacting a dysfunctional authority/parent dynamic, requiring the family ally (ie female spouse) to preserve its positive reputation within society. HR professionals in pro-woke cultures (because the organisation is incentivised/pressured to subscribe to its ways) are just doing what’s required to please their masters. I think they’re the tools of feminising work culture rather than the masters. That so many women are attracted to HR roles says more to me about their conditioning to continually and unquestionably please a narcissistic authority.
HR does enable quick addition of female staff to score staff-profile brownie points. It also attracts activist types. Though not as blatantly as DEI does.
This essay reminded me of listening to grown men angrily arguing about whether Princess Leia could have used the Force to travel through space without a spacesuit.
On a positive note, the effects of the sisterhood on Hollywood are very visible, which can only help. Their effects on the corporate world haven't been any better, despite the propaganda, but are much easier to hide.
But destroying something as popular as Star Wars has really brought wide attention to this. Camille Paglia has been hammering women for their lack of creative ability for years.
You will be despondent to note the director of the next Star Wars film is a woman and her first press release stated she intends to "make men feel uncomfortable." This can only hasten a return to normality. Women are "underrepresented" in creative pursuits for a reason. Schopenhauer certainly had the measure of them.
I didn't know that. Solo actually wasn't that bad. I thought the casting was good. It could have worked. Although as the prequels showed us back stories work best as back story. Exploring every character from Solo to Kenobi just kills the excitement.
Prequels --can-- work. Better Call Saul is strong enough demonstration of that. But Lucas was sadly more concerned about making a film that'd take back his box-office record from Titanic than making a solid, sensible narrative on the backstory of Darth Vader.
It didn't get him his record back, but much as it's easy to dog on Lucas, he did probably make more money with the Prequel Trilogy than he would've had he made something more narratively thoughtful, as BCS was noticeably less successful relative to BB than the PT was to the OT. But short-, even medium-term success is not as important as lasting legacy, especially when the creative is already set for life financially. I'm sure BCS will be remembered in fifty years with the same reverence we now give such '70s classics as Exile on Main St. and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which were also not nearly as sucessful on their initial releases as they've become in the long term.
I've heard this from the RLM guys, too. I can't speak from personal experience, as I gave up on new Star Wars media after TLJ, but I have no trouble believing you and they are right, and that Solo was a much better film.
That said, a flop is not always the fault of the individual work's quality. In many cases, it's the result of backlash from a prior, more successful work that really put off fans. TJL being an obvious example, but there's case to be made for many other works: Metallica's entire post-St. Anger career, for instance. Or the WWF/E's post-Austin-heel-turn and post-InVasion ratings and buyrates.
Great post! It's like we're caught in a doom loop: they get more shrill and preachy about "the patriarchy," so we dismiss them as clowns and stop going to see their movies; they see our reaction and conclude we're misogynists who need more shrill preaching about the patriarchy, so they double down; we tune them out even more, or just talk to them like they're crazy (which they are); they take this as evidence of our misogyny and escalate the shrill preaching even more, etc. It's like we're locked in a battle of wills with a bunch of shrieking two-year-olds having tantrums, but because they run HR and much of the legal profession and so forth, we have to take their hysterics seriously. What an insane state of affairs!
Very well stated. The question for me is, for those of us males who have been exiled from Institutions and Hollywood, and who are not interested in "pretty men in elegant flowing robes, who wear eye-liner and eye-shadow, cry, and beat the crap out of their enemies,"
- what is our destiny?
A good question. East Asians also do contemporary dramas. No long hair, eyeliner or eye shadow on the men, or flowing robes. I have no list of recommendations for them. Though I find the ratings on https://mydramalist.com/ pretty reliable.
the original lone ranger was a low budget cowboy flick. There is still Yellowstone. the most popular show going. do not let them take away your faith in yourself. i would rather watch old dukes of hazzard or walker texas ranger that put trash like that, mental junk food, in my psyche.
My friends and I used to have Walker parties back in the 90s. Haven’t watched the show in decades. Now that you mention it, I’ll have to revisit it. I think we could all benefit from more Chuck Norris in our lives and in society generally. What a badass.
http://macromarketmusings.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-chuck-norris-and-jean-claude-van.html
My friend and i used to have george carlin fests, zepplin fests, ren and stimpy.....i came late to walker looking for things for my son....fit to watch. actively, that means stopping and discussing it as you go. what make a person bad or good, when does empathy get turned off....
do you know , "ol chuck is a decent writer himself these days? " Love leaves a memory that death cannot steal."...
Good post. A couple of things i would like to point out regarding the percentages of women professionals. First, not all of those 52% of women professional managers will be card carrying members of the Sisterhood - not all women swallowed the DEI nonsense, and some do try to push back. Second, and I believe you've pointed to this in an earlier post, women's nature (gasp!) tends to draw them toward people centered positions, so having an HR chock full of gals isn't that surprising. Allowing the Sisterhood to dominate that culture though, should not happen. HR and Legal run most large companies these days, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
True. There are some very anti-woke women, and very pro-woke men. But there are also clear tendencies.
Clear headed women usually dislike these women just as much (more?) as the men. Speaking as one, I won’t spend another minute with such than I have to.
You are so right sister! They actually make me nauseous.
Yes, but it’s very lonely for me as a professional unless there are lots of women pretending. Most of my female colleagues give me a wide berth. And often the males are so afraid of being labeled “cishet” that they bend over backwards to SJ even if you suspect they don’t believe it.
Good series, Lorenzo! A lot of thought provoking content to consider - much appreciated.
Egads, but brutal truth-telling from Oz.
Yes, I find myself scrolling through Youtube for old film classics (from anywhere) and eschewing modern fare, which is not only banal but predictable (for all the reason mentioned by Oz, and more).
Yes, surely there is sexism and racism in some old classics, although is modern-day "progressive" bigotry any better?
Side note: A while back I was watching b/w 1950s films from Malaysia (maybe Indonesia). What I remember is a huffy daughter, in modern dress, telling her father that women have careers nowadays and she is going to college.
In Muslim Malaysia, that film would not be made today.
PS Those are spooky stats on political leaning by profession. I imagine little harm done if most miners are right-wing. The rocks don't care. But is that "diversity" in media-academia?
The narrowness of acceptable opinion in the “knowledge” industries is a serious problem. That such opinion is based around Theory that builds mountains of bullshit out of molehills of truth and that explicitly seeks to increase social dysfunction is even worse.
“Mountains of bullshit out of molehills of truth.” Perfect. The theory of intersectionalism can be a minor tool among many others to help us continue to try to understand complexity. When it becomes the overarching theory that explains everything, it devolves into an all-consuming monster.
In this regard, Hanania is right in that the illegalness of non-woke opinions of account of civil rights law has made things much worse. But overturning it alone will only help so much given how many true believers in equitist philosophy there are today.
Came to this one late but Thank you Lorenzo for this deep dive into how Non-binary but "preachy & lazy" Big Brother is entertaining us these days (if we are so foolish as to go see the show). This as you perhaps know is a theme close to my own heart.
https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/non-binary-sibling-is-entertaining "Tv schedules across the Western world are awash with drama serials of this kind, conforming to a formulaic scriptwriter’s tick-box: Non white person traduced but eventually revealed to be a surprisingly decent sort – Tick....Middle class white person eventually revealed to have a sinister dark side – Tick...Gay Couple included – Tick.... More recently it has become an integral part of the story that ‘lgbt’ people are abundant and everywhere. They are bound to be nice as well. Curiously though there is another box to be ticked: there needs to be some graphic depiction of violence especially towards attractive young women (by white men of course)."
Not to promote myself but I did an article about why everyone should watch Naruto. This article just reinforces that people in the East are creating better stories with such profound lessons and even dealing with things like grief and loss. How the lessons learned helps those characters grow. When my nephews ask me for something to watch I never suggest anything that's been produced in the last 10 years in the West.
It's DragonBall Z, Naruto and the cartoons I used to love like the original Thundercats or the 90's Spider-man and X-Man cartoons.
I’m going to try it!
You’ll love it Karen. The Pain arc in Naruto Shippuden is “chefs kiss”
i remember the fun of star wars too, but i think there is another layer here to uncover. The same thing was done to art. but why? sublime classical beauty was replaced with... something that did not compete with the propaganda of marketing. I'll tell you something else, it is a way of storing value/money laundering for the rich. No one can stand to look at most of it. that is Not what it's for. Movies? it is perfectly well known how to make timeless classical stories on film, but, they don't. On purpose. It is partly social engineering , with money laundering mixed in. It is a business, but not an up and up one. also, tax write off. personally i like ballywood....and the last few godzillas were ok. Casa Blanca was low budget made in 6 months. they are doing it to undermine our faith in humanity. that is the social engineering key, learn to trust AI better, or davos people. Not the common men. Same with the political theater. undermining our faith in humanity. My recommendation? do not put garbage like that in your mind or your kids mind. it is slow, but effective.
I disagree. There are more convenient methods of cleaning money than films. I think the movies actually reflect how they think and see the world.
The world view of the elite class is distorted. All their schemes fail because of us, because we don't live up to their exalted ambitions.
Those ambitions are seen on screen. Women being just like men, even in physical combat. Men can be pushed aside and women, immigrants from failed states and presumably the mentally compromised can create, design and build the next generation of innovation. They can run the first world that white men created, despite all evidence to the contrary,
They can decree changes in the law as well as human behaviour to trigger great social improvements. The wisdom from the past can be safely discarded. All it takes is the will to do it.
What we see on screen in Star Wars, Star Trek, Sex and the City - this is how they view the world. A world they can change on a whim. Except none of it works.
This. What the writer points out for Star Wars has happened in all films to a degree after 2000 and in an avalanche since 2020. Really hard to find a film or tv series that I want to see. Very very sad and hopeless-making. Diabolical really.
Hence my shift to C-dramas. Friends of mine wear by the Korean equivalents.
The “War on Fun” is destroying the entertainment industry.
They’re the new Puritans, so quite.
What Disney did to Star Wars for me is unforgivable. How you are handed the biggest film franchise in film history and reduce it to a smouldering pile of banal wokeness is beyond me. It feels personal because it was. You only have to look at the “Force is Female” T-shirts to know that. They never intended to make a great Star Wars movie. That would only be an accidental side effect after shoehorning the various SJ narratives into a series that was grounded in ancient myth and legends from all of human history (George Lucas studied anthropology before getting into film). Now I look upon the corpse of this once great franchise like Don Corleone standing over the bullet riddled corpse of Sonny, crying out in anguish “My boy, look how they massacred my boy!”.
Can we raise enough money by crowdfunding with fans to collectively buy the franchise back from Disney? That seems like the only hope at this point, our Obi-Wan Kenobi if you will.
I was also disturbed in the new star wars films when they digitally exhumed and re-animated the beloved Peter Cushing; it struck me as some form of necromancy or raising a zombie as a puppet to be jerked around on strings. It's probably not wise to fool around with a practice associated with black magic and voodoo since forever, especially when motivated by for profit through fan recognition and nostalgia. Incidentally somewhat ironic perhaps given Cushing's great horror career.
It was a touch creepy, and not in a good way.
I remember him having a dead-eyed look and his face slightly twitching about.
Political correctness is destroying pop culture. It's the "War on Fun" no one's talking about!
Excellent analysis and take down as always.
I see the role of HR a little differently, through the lens of the narcissistic family system. Elites are narcissists regardless of sector re-enacting a dysfunctional authority/parent dynamic, requiring the family ally (ie female spouse) to preserve its positive reputation within society. HR professionals in pro-woke cultures (because the organisation is incentivised/pressured to subscribe to its ways) are just doing what’s required to please their masters. I think they’re the tools of feminising work culture rather than the masters. That so many women are attracted to HR roles says more to me about their conditioning to continually and unquestionably please a narcissistic authority.
HR does enable quick addition of female staff to score staff-profile brownie points. It also attracts activist types. Though not as blatantly as DEI does.
This essay reminded me of listening to grown men angrily arguing about whether Princess Leia could have used the Force to travel through space without a spacesuit.
Which I guess is an argument about her degree of awesomeness …
On a positive note, the effects of the sisterhood on Hollywood are very visible, which can only help. Their effects on the corporate world haven't been any better, despite the propaganda, but are much easier to hide.
But destroying something as popular as Star Wars has really brought wide attention to this. Camille Paglia has been hammering women for their lack of creative ability for years.
You will be despondent to note the director of the next Star Wars film is a woman and her first press release stated she intends to "make men feel uncomfortable." This can only hasten a return to normality. Women are "underrepresented" in creative pursuits for a reason. Schopenhauer certainly had the measure of them.
It's good to know Disney is committed to ensuring Solo will no longer be the lowest-grossing Star Wars film in the history of the box office!
I didn't know that. Solo actually wasn't that bad. I thought the casting was good. It could have worked. Although as the prequels showed us back stories work best as back story. Exploring every character from Solo to Kenobi just kills the excitement.
Prequels --can-- work. Better Call Saul is strong enough demonstration of that. But Lucas was sadly more concerned about making a film that'd take back his box-office record from Titanic than making a solid, sensible narrative on the backstory of Darth Vader.
It didn't get him his record back, but much as it's easy to dog on Lucas, he did probably make more money with the Prequel Trilogy than he would've had he made something more narratively thoughtful, as BCS was noticeably less successful relative to BB than the PT was to the OT. But short-, even medium-term success is not as important as lasting legacy, especially when the creative is already set for life financially. I'm sure BCS will be remembered in fifty years with the same reverence we now give such '70s classics as Exile on Main St. and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which were also not nearly as sucessful on their initial releases as they've become in the long term.
I've heard this from the RLM guys, too. I can't speak from personal experience, as I gave up on new Star Wars media after TLJ, but I have no trouble believing you and they are right, and that Solo was a much better film.
That said, a flop is not always the fault of the individual work's quality. In many cases, it's the result of backlash from a prior, more successful work that really put off fans. TJL being an obvious example, but there's case to be made for many other works: Metallica's entire post-St. Anger career, for instance. Or the WWF/E's post-Austin-heel-turn and post-InVasion ratings and buyrates.