Feel like this is an oversimplification. It’s not about the lack of politics, but the lack of immediately relatable politics.
Plus if you have certain view points I can imagine you don’t like seeing them being presented as an obvious antagonist. It probably makes certain groups of people rather uncomfortable.
It probably makes certain groups of people rather uncomfortable.
Good. The sorts of people that get unconfortable with the progressive messages of Star Trek, or even Star Wars, deserve to be permanently unconfortable until they start behaving humanely.
I legitimately see more people complain about people who complain about politics in Star Trek than actual people complaining about politics in Star Trek.
The conversation was yikes but Herbert wasn’t being intolerant.
Duncan was being a little bitch but Leto put him back in his place, it’s just that he did that with an incredibly wild take for why homosexuality is natural. However for an old straight man of the time period I think Herbert gets a pass.
There’s also the whole thing with the Baron Harkonnen being a literal pederast but that was like peak Haye’s Code era so I can get over it personally.
George Lucas introduced evil guys wearing SS uniforms who conduct genocide before the viewers’ eyes and somehow people still pretend that Star Wars is apolitical.
The best political statement from Star Wars is that the raging liberal that is George Lucas created a galactic society with a robotic slave labor race and apparently unlimited resources but could not imagine a world where the good guys did anything but fight to restore the status quo of poor people being not quite so oppressed.
That said, Star Wars 10 should be the Droid Revolution.
To be fair to Star Wars, the entire premise of the overall universe is that the Galaxy is stuck on cycle between fascism and neo-liberalism because the latter will always pave the way to the former.
Also because the only beings who could break the cycle (the Jedi/Sith) are more interested in wiping the opposite faction than fixing the galaxy. Pre-Disney, Anakin/Luke begin the important transition from the cyclic system into a state of perfect balance.
It unironically does… Otherwise, why stop at droids - using a hammer to drive a nail would also be slavery. We’d have countless slaves working for humanity right now, in the form of industrial robots.
That’s precisely why the default protocol in Star Wars (that nobody remotely related to the main cast seems to follow) is to periodically wipe droids, to prevent them from developing sentience and personality.
They especially won’t, since 2024 generative-AI panic will make everyone root against the droids.
I’m not saying there aren’t valid concerns, but people act as if ChatGPT’s existence suddenly made the Terminator movies into a fucking documentary.
Motherfuckers remind me of the weirdos hunting down robots to kill in that redneck carnival, in the second act of Steven Spielberg’s A.I. : Artificial Intelligence.
Are you seriously criticizing the use of droids in a galaxy where slavery and clone armies are a thing? Also, in-universe, the use of droids isn’t quite as bad as it seems - we get confirmation from multiple sources that Droids do not develop a personality and sense of self unless they’re left on for too long. That’s why I’d consider C3PO, R2-D2 and most B1 battle droids to be sentient individuals, but most Droidekas to be no more than tools/weapons.
Then you read the next book, and it’s about space being a Libertarian utopia. And then the next one is about a free love cult.
He might not be writing satire, but if he wasn’t, then I don’t know how to make anything coherent out of his writing. The only commonality is a very obvious self insert mouthpiece character.
And maybe it’s true? He definitely became more libertarian over time – but he was a professional writer, so his output is bound to be a combination of what he believed and what he thought would sell. Personally, I have no idea what the mix is. Would be nice if the people who enjoyed his stories didn’t also feel obligated to puff up his moral bone fides though. So much bending over backwards isn’t really good for a person.
I’m a big proponent of the “death of the author”. Even if the author is still around to give their reasons for writing something the way they did, it doesn’t really matter. All that matters is what the audience sees in the work.
Every interpretation is equally valid as long as they’re sincere. The drapes were blue. The drapes represent depression. The drapes represent Democrats. The only invalid deconstruction is one delivered in bad faith.
I hate death of the author because it destroys art as a form of communication. You end up with Orwellian art: Whoever controls the present narative, controls the past.
I can imagine a fascist future where Guernica is taught as a pro-Nazi work of art.
Death of the Author enables the most absolute shittakes to be valid. John Carpenter felt the need to make a public statement decrying the neo-nazis who were promoting the idea that They Live was a critic of Jews.
I don’t think it destroys art as a form of communication any more than the possibility of being misunderstood over texting or even in person destroys those media.
The chance for miscommunication exists in every form of communication, it’s the consequence of letting an idea out of your own head and into the world. And art is inherently less clear a method for communication than something more straightforward would be.
If you create a work that nazis can see a bit of their worldview in, congratulations! They see their worldview in the world, so you’ve created a decently accurate facsimile of reality. Shitty people seeing their own shitty ideas in your art doesn’t say anything about you, y says something about them. The same “death of the author” that lets them have that take insulated the author from that take.
But the reason I like it is that it also allows decent people to come to decent conclusions about art made by shitty people. Even if I didn’t like it, I know it exists. Art can speak to someone about experiences the author didn’t imagine, and that can be powerful and significant and beautiful, even if it can also be shitty.
The fact that you used the word misunderstood means you understand that an interpretation can be wrong.
Death of the author means there is never misunderstanding. If you send a text and I misread it, you are wrong, not me. I can ignore any attempts that you might use to correct the misunderstanding because my interpretation is just as valid.
The fact that you used the word misunderstood means you understand that an interpretation can be wrong.
If you are attempting to use art to communicate, then that can be understood as you intended or understood differently, i.e. misunderstood.
If you send me a text that says “Take the frogs over to the bank” and I take some amphibians to the river, that isn’t a wrong reading of that sentence even if you wanted me to take some roads over to the money storage location (a valid, if unusual, way to parse that sentence). I misunderstood you, but my reading is not any less valid than yours.
I misunderstood you, but my reading is not any less valid than yours.
The difference is that I couldn’t correct the misunderstanding because you believe your interpretation is valid no matter what the author says. What I intended is irrelevant to you.
The interpretation is valid. But that doesn’t mean communication hasn’t broken down. In the case of a text message, the “true purpose” isn’t to entertain or to elucidate deep truths about the world (usually), it’s to convey a message.
Art with the goal of covering a single message is, in a word, propaganda. Propaganda that succeeds at being art may or may not succeed at being propaganda, but as art, the message intended by the author is not as important as the interpretation of the audience. Tolkien said he hated allegory, but it doesn’t make Lord of the rings not allegorical, it only makes it not deliberately allegorical.
Guernica is propaganda? If you remove the “misleading” part of the definition of propaganda then all communication is propaganda. A Maths textbook is propaganda.
but as art, the message intended by the author is not as important as the interpretation of the audience.
You state that as a fact when this is the problem being discussed!
The author is trying to tell you something and you are saying, “I don’t care if you try to correct me. You actually meant amphibians go to the river and your attempts to correct me are wrong.”
(as a neutral word, dated) Agitation, publicity, public communication aimed at influencing an audience and furthering an agenda.
(derogatory) Such communication specifically when it is biased, misinformative, and/or provoking mainly emotional responses.
I’m using sense 1, here, and yes, Picasso’s Guernica is propaganda. It was commissioned explicitly to raise awareness and funds for a war. It is also, and separately, art.
I don’t think all communication is propaganda, but I also don’t think all communication is art. If you’re choosing to create something and call it “art” while also trying to push a particular message, it is (at least almost) certain that you are also intending to convey an emotional and influential message. Perhaps there need not be an agenda, except your own desire to send the message you hope to.
I can imagine a fascist future where Guernica is taught as a pro-Nazi work of art.
And even more importantly is that people are gonna “teach” the making of art how they teach it regardless, but the teacher experiencing it one way doesn’t make any of the other readings invalid.
The beauty of the book is that you’re basically reading a future soldier’s diary. Heinlein is letting the story speak for itself, the reader has to decide what to think of such a life, such a future without being nudged into any direction whatsoever. I love it.
I think Heinlein did that a lot. I think stranger and a strange land is him looking at the hippie culture and taking it to a sci-fi extreme. I don’t think he was trying to advocate for anything. In particular, a lot of his books was about trying to protect the future and see how that would affect people.
Not mad at you but I literally cannot fucking abide with critics’ read of Starship Troopers that it’s somehow pro-fascist. Not only have I read some of his other books that are about peaceful, optimistic space exploration, but the book itself is so clearly a satire it astounds me. I could really write a whole wall of text right now.
Anyway, it’s concept is “what if facism was normal to everyone and it was centuries of that normalization and they decided to conquer the galaxy because… Fascism” And then it goes into the mind of a literal average soldier who starts to think too much and is really horny because he’s barely ever laid eyes on a girl." It’s anti fascist, but in a clever way. That’s what makes it so good.
I personally think the book is an exploration of what a militaristic society would look like if faced by a external threat, and that it should be taken at face value, but there are plenty of critics who have read more books than I have with much less favourable interpretations.
Episode 1 was about a trade dispute on the surface and a plot to take over the Republic and turn it into a dictatorship just below the surface (where “the surface” is about what the characters in the movie see, the audience sees it all if they’ve watched the OT before). Episode 2 is about expanding that into a war, episode 3 is about creating a moment to perform a coup.
The action is secondary to the politics with the exception of the death of Darth Maul, the escape of Obi Wan and Yoda, Obi Wan defeating Anakin, the destruction of the first Death Star, the Ewoks joining the battle of Endor, and Anakin turning on Sideous. Everything else was part of Sideous’ plan to take political power.
There are also strong messages about trauma and how being cloistered can lead people to become the very evil their isolation was intended to prevent. Luke is a walking billboard saying “even evil people can realise the gravity of their mistakes”, as well.
“No,” said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, “nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people.”
“Odd,” said Arthur, “I thought you said it was a democracy.”
“I did,” said Ford. “It is.”
“So,” said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, “why don’t people get rid of the lizards?”
“It honestly doesn’t occur to them,” said Ford. “They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.”
“You mean they actually vote for the lizards?”
“Oh yes,” said Ford with a shrug, “of course.”
“But,” said Arthur, going for the big one again, “why?”
“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?”
“What?”
“I said,” said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, “have you got any gin?”
“I’ll look. Tell me about the lizards.”
Ford shrugged again. “Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happenned to them,” he said. “They’re completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone’s got to say it.”
“But that’s terrible,” said Arthur.
“Listen, bud,” said Ford, “if I had one Altairian dollar for every time I heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the Universe and say ‘That’s terrible’ I wouldn’t be sitting here like a lemon looking for a gin.”
Arguably, Star Trek is less political. Picard never violently overthrows the Federation. Q never massacres entire planets. Janeway doesn’t practice literal mind control. The equivalent of all of those is done in both Star Wars and Dune, often by the protagonists.
Edit: Chill out guys. I wasn’t claiming Trek isn’t political. Obviously it is. Sometimes it very much is. My thinking was just that (usually, not always) the show is usually self contained episodically, and deals with everything from natural phenomenon, science, philosophy, exploration, law, and, of course at times, politics. Star Wars and Dune are just often more directly dealing with massive scale political conflicts. Not that Trek doesn’t sometimes too, it’s just not its main thing.
Well, the main characters don't. But the topics are there. The Federation is technically overthrown or almost a couple of times. Powerful space dude does annihilate an entire species with a single thought. Protagonists are brainwashed or mind-controlled themselves. And Sisko CAN live with it.
If you listen to trek pod, I urge you to check out greatest gen. The 2 guys who run it both worked in film, and then they sort of fell into having a successful trek podcast that involves both incisive takes and dick and fart jokes. The character who kills an entire species in that TNG episode gets a lot of air time on the pod as both hosts do imitations of what they think he’d say in a variety of situations.
And he never helps establish android human rights assists in Klingon transfers of power or aids space indians. Sisko certainly never leads a war against an evil Federation or bring cold adversaries into that war. And Archer never creates a united Federation of species that mostly hate each other. Oh wait a second, yes they all do
I would argue with the implication that the degree to which a story is political is gauged by how violent (in the broad sense) the political actions are. Something can be extremely pacifistic or extremely democratic for example. In star trek you have a tremendous numer of stories where non-violent political actions like diplomacy, legislation, or legal argument are the main focus of the story and hugely consequential, for an entire people, an entire species, or the entire galaxy.
Add comment