Posted on 01/11/2020 8:05:36 AM PST by EdnaMode
All fantasy worlds draw from reality, and the Star Wars universe is no exception. As fans flock to theaters to see “The Rise of Skywalker” this holiday week, most of their minds will be on the grand visuals, enduring characters and exciting storytelling, and not on how the films reflect our culture — including its prejudices. But if we take a moment to think about it, George Lucas’s galaxy is, and has always been, far, far away from being an original or an inclusive creation.
Star Wars is shot with “Orientalizing” stereotypes — patronizing tropes that represent an imagined East, or the Orient, as inferior to the rational, heroic West. Think, for example, of the uniformed conformity of the evil Empire vs. the scrappy (American) individualism of the rebel heroes, the vague Eastern mysticism of the Force and its Shaolin-cum-Samurai practitioners, and the uncomfortable racial stereotypes embodied in the hookah-smoking Jabba and the miserly Watto.
Even those who have noted these prejudices could be excused for not noticing the presence of such tropes in another key element of every Star Wars film: John Williams’s iconic musical score. Williams’s music associates the “good guys” with the grand orchestral style of the European Romantics (think of the beautifully hummable melodies for Luke, Leia and Rey), while the themes for the “bad guys” are expressed in the vocabulary of Chinese, Indian and Middle Eastern music. AD
This may seem incidental or unimportant. But this music reinforces, even at an unconscious level, the primacy of Western culture against an imagined “other” that reproduces harmful prejudices in pop culture that, given the power of mass media, has larger political consequences.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Is Chen aware that only 50-60% of Ph.D. students complete their degrees? It’s a lot lower than that if he has set a 4 year time limit.
Actually, they really cleaned up the Buck Rogers-Flash Gordon material they started with.
No more Fu Manchu or Ming the Merciless.
Yeah exactly. He must have watched the wrong movies.
Yeah let’s talk about Star Wars where the black guy is a drooling fanboy, a stereotype that the KKK would be proud of.
Plus the black man was drinking dirty pig water in the first moviemail like a slave. It’s funny how a man is made to look pathetic and disgusting in each of these movies.
Political campaign ads have been doing this long before Star Wars hit the screen.
-PJ
The dropout rate might be higher at Stanford.
Meanwhile the Left has no problem imposing their liberal immoral ideology on other cultures, requiring they support the homosexual agenda, and abortion, etc, while fostering the victim-entitlement welfare mentality.
https://profiles.stanford.edu/jeffery-chen
He started Autumn 2018.
https://history.stanford.edu/academics/graduate-programs/phd-requirements/requirements
Stanford has a 6 year limit (a lot of schools have a 10 year limit).
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