I’m part of the original Star Wars generation. I was nine years old in the summer of 1977, when I sat in the cinema with my dad, and watched those now famous words scroll across the big screen: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….”
Why just with my dad? My mom was invited. I specifically remember that. I also remember that my mom, then barely in her thirties, had no interest in seeing Star Wars. That might be worth noting.
Like many kids in 1977, I became an instant Star Wars fan. I pestered my parents for the comics, the action figures, the Burger Chef posters. All of it.
I watched The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 and Return of the Jedi in 1983. These, too, I saw with my dad. (I do not believe that my mom, in her entire life, ever watched a Star Wars film. And she watched a lot of movies.)
I liked The Empire Strikes Back the best. I was the perfect age for it in 1980 (12). I was also deeply immersed in Star Wars fandom.
I was already on the verge of outgrowing Star Wars, though. By the time Return of the Jedi came out in 1983, I was well into high school, and focused on other matters.
But still, I really enjoyed all three installments of the original 1977-1983 trilogy.
When The Phantom Menace came out in 1999, I was skeptical. So much time had passed since the end of the original trilogy. I feared a lack of continuity.
And sure enough, I was right. The Phantom Menace was a shadow of the original Star Wars trilogy.
Since then, I’ve watched most of the subsequent Star Wars movies, including Rogue One (2016), and the more controversial Sequel Trilogy (2015-2019).
I neither loved nor hated these movies. They struck me as…okay.
But what about the politics?
I noticed, in the 2010s, that there was a conscious effort to create new Star Wars characters who were female, nonwhite, and (more recently) gay. How could I not know, as much as everyone was talking about it?
Now for a brief word to younger readers. Millennials and Zoomers, I’ve observed, often have the conceit that they “discovered” diversity, and that all popular culture prior to the 21st century was a sea of white males grunting at each other.
Far from it. One of the stars of the original Star Wars trilogy was the black Billy Dee Williams, in the role of Lando Calrissian. And what would Star Wars have been without Princess Leia?
The original Battlestar Galactica (1978-9) had numerous characters of color (Colonel Tigh, Boomer). There were “traditional” female characters like Cassiopeia, but also women warriors, like Athena and Sheba.
What is new is a neurotic obsession with diversity box-ticking and virtue-signaling. Filmmakers of yesteryear understood that diversity, like religion, is best practiced and not preached.
It has now been almost half a century since that first Star Wars movie came out in 1977. Star Wars, now only vaguely recognizable as something connected to the original trilogy, has become another battleground in our incessant culture wars.
Disney, an aggressively ideological corporate entity, has owned Lucasfilm since 2012. The Star Wars fanbase has always skewed male, and that fanbase seems to hate each successive Disney-produced Star Wars project with a new level of intensity.
The latest Disney-sponsored Star Wars production, The Acolyte, was directed by a lesbian film director and featured lesbian space witches. The main character was a young woman of color. Instead of simple representation, The Acolyte leaned toward overrepresentation. There was nary a white male to be seen in the cast at all.
The vast majority of Star Wars fans panned The Acolyte, and the $180 million series was canceled after a single season.
This led to the now familiar, now predictable online arguments. Conservatives gleefully tweeted, “Go woke, go broke!” Meanwhile, mainstream media scolds wagged their fingers at all the sexism, racism, and homophobia, their usual obsessions.
Kathleen Kennedy, the Disney-installed president of Lucasfilm, made the brilliant observation that Star Wars fandom is “male-dominated”. Ya think?
I could have told her that in 1977,1980, and 1983, when my mom had no interest in watching any of the movies of the original Star Wars trilogy.
I could have told Kennedy that on my childhood playground in 1978. While the boys were staging imaginary lightsaber battles and fantasizing about being Luke Skywalker, the girls were skipping rope and talking about how dreamy Shaun Cassidy and Scott Baio were. (Yes, Scott Baio, now a conservative Republican, was a teeny-bopper heartthrob in the late 1970s.)
I’m sure there are middle-aged male fans of Taylor Swift. I would also bet that somewhere in America, there is a 12-year-old girl who is obsessed with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s action films from the 1980s.
But such individuals are outliers. Generally speaking, people’s tastes in pop culture follow broad demographic trends.
I’m a 56-year-old male, and I wouldn’t attend a Taylor Swift concert if you gave me free tickets and a backstage pass. Most Gen Xers (myself included) didn’t “get” The Big Chill, a 1983 movie about thirtysomething Baby Boomers. I’d be willing to bet that the typical 17-year-old of 2024 wouldn’t connect with the teen movies I watched in the 1980s.
And as for all that stuff the kids are doing on TikTok nowadays? I don’t get most of that, either.
This all boils down to a very simple—and formerly uncontroversial—concept: target marketing based on demographics and psychographics.
People’s consumer tastes quite often differ by age, income level, place of residence, and yes—gender!
Guess how many men went to watch last summer’s Barbie movie? Not many. According to the market research firm Ipsos, the Barbie cinema audience was 75 percent female.
Should the producers of Barbie 2 (if there is such an abomination) focus on what male viewers want, or on what female viewers want? If they’re smart, they’ll focus on what female viewers want, and what female viewers liked about the first Barbie film: lots of female empowerment messaging with plenty of unsubtle digs at various male stereotypes.
Back to Star Wars. Star Wars fans are often caricatured as racist and sexist. But they’re the same folks who loved Princess Leia, Lando Calrissian, and all the aforementioned diverse characters in the original (1978) Battlestar Galactica. Star Wars fans aren’t looking for an all-white, all-male space opera. Not by a long shot. But lesbian space witches might be a bridge too far.
Just before the release of The Acolyte, Kathleen Kennedy publicly opined that “storytelling does need to be representative of all people”.
Storytelling? Sure. But does every story need to fully represent every person? Does Barbie need to represent me, specifically? What about the next movie targeted at Gen Z twentysomethings? (Again, I’m in my fifties.)
True diversity, on the contrary, means that not every work of art speaks to everyone, or is about everyone. If a particular work of art doesn’t speak to you or about you, you can watch, read, or listen to something else.
The failure of The Acolyte notwithstanding, there does seem to be a market for “woke” science fiction films and movies. Most Star Wars fans hated The Acolyte, but not all of them did.
The solution? Simple. Create a new space opera franchise, in which straight white male characters and tropes are openly downplayed in favor of racial, gender, and sexual identity-based diversity. In other words, have as many lesbian space witches as you want. Knock yourself out.
Just don’t call your movie Star Wars. Call it something else. Make something completely new. Then no one will complain.
Will I pay good money to see the first film in your new space opera franchise about transgender starship pilots hunting lesbian space witches of color?
Show me the movie trailer first, and then ask me.
But you’ll have a lot better odds of getting me to see that, than the inevitable Barbie sequel, or (NO! NO! NO!) anything related to Taylor Swift.
-ET
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