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Star Wars the last Jedi has been very divisive with fans and has garnered both immense praise and serious Criticism at the same time while some see it as the best of the series others rather seeing it Political agendas being played out in story form I’ve described my own experience of watching the movie as being similar to eating a soup you really like But then finding a hair in every spoonful To tell you the truth I hadn’t intended to make a video on the last Jedi But it’s really the barrage of messages. I got asking for it which prompted me to do this I Enjoyed certain aspects of the movie very much the visuals were Astounding and some of the threads were very interesting But I found the solicit the social and political messages to constantly get in the way of being convinced That it had a coherent symbolic world Hopefully I can give some insight into what brought about such an experience This is Jonathan Peugeot welcome to the symbolic world I Have expressed my difficulty with Star Wars symbolism before you’ll find a link in the description to where I discussed this To me there is a basic confusion with how the imagery of the Force is set up and This problem perpetuates itself in the latest movie The Force has a light and a dark side light is related to discipline Self-mastery self-knowledge for all intents and purposes. It’s the good side of the Force The dark side of the Force is related to anger to passions to revenge and resentment You know of a letting go of your discipline self mastery and control in general It’s seen as the bad side of the Force now, maybe except for you know that simple Morality all of this makes sense in terms of symbolism But the problem in the Star Wars movies is that the dark side in its political sphere? ends up being related to excessive order excessive purity a huge Galactic Empire with pristine Clean white stormtroopers triangle shaped ships, you know a giant Planet-sized base with a laser beam for shooting planets it screams too much order too much light and so There are these strange Contradictory scenes in the movies where Luke for example is told to give into his rage to kill his father fulfill your destiny And take your father’s place at my side But Then this should somehow bring about Him becoming a leader in the most sophisticated techno bureaucratic military state you know ever imagined It’s difficult to see how that works out The light side of the Force ends up being related to some dusty rebellion clandestine smugglers furtive infiltration operations stealing plans and all kinds of chaotic guerrilla tactics of well rebels trying to overthrow order and Within that there’s a weird aristocracy being set up Princess Leia and Luke discovering that they are in fact part of a very special lineage where the force is strong and by virtue of their family and their intense training they could become Jedi masters and So here is a form of aristocracy defending rebellion and democratic ideals Of course part of the problem is seeing light as only good and dark as only bad because you know there is such a thing as an excess of light There is such a thing as an excess of order just as there is sometimes a need to be Crafty like a serpent to use furtive and dark means to tackle corrupted authorities characters like Batman’s or our Vigilantes in general could be seen as an example of a character that works outside the system outside the order Uses the dark side of the force we could say in order to break up corruption In the end the only way I could make sense of this of the whole Star Wars Symbolism is to think that episodes 4 through 6 what we’re dealing with is the end of a world You know where the world is upside down possibly an image of our own world somewhat like in the story of Elijah where the prophets of God hide in a cave while a strange harlot You know has married the king bringing about an inverted tyranny of foreign gods We could see it in the manner that we can Experience a tyranny of our own passions our own desires how we can become a slave to those desires But this is always to our own destruction so then in Star Wars this inevitable untenable upside down World let’s say this extreme world would inevitably lead to a cataclysm a double inversion An inversion of the inversion as I’ve discussed in other videos that is Anakin the chosen one You were the chosen one Having gone to the dark side bringing about this upside down world where the dark side can enact Strangely this excessive order now would return to the light side and establish a new balance in the force All right, that was the only way I could make sense of this Now I think that this symbolic problem that I’ve described this inversion Rather than being solved in the latest movie is Actually, what is being played out and maybe even? radicalized in the last Jedi So how does this appear? For example there’s been much talk about how the character of Rey is a Mary Sue But the question is why she’s a Mary Sue. What does it mean? You see a Mary Sue is the name given to a type of character which began popping up with the development of fanfiction This type of character is a young prodigy who has unprecedented and inexplicable skills in all of the domains of The movie and can be seen as besting the traditional characters at whatever you know makes them unique so and they can do this without any training or Explicable reason as to why the character is so amazing So the reason why Rey is considered a Mary Sue is that although she comes out of nowhere She’s this amazing fighter the best pilot she fixes Hans ship better. You know then he can What’d you do I bypassed the compressor She beats Kylo Ren the first time she fights with a lightsaber she beats Luke even in the latest movie and She does this without any explanation whatsoever as to how it is she can do all these things I Mean herself having grown up as a as a scavenger on some forsaken desert world In the original trilogy Luke had to train And he was even berated for not finishing his training The the Jedi had to join the Jedi Order and they they lived a life of austere monastic discipline in order to master the force but Rey she can do it all without any training whatsoever and When she does train with Luke in the last Jedi We discover rapidly that she’s already bested Luke in all the ways that matter Even before he really attempts to train her The fact that this type of character this Mary Sue character was born in fanfiction is not Surprising and maybe this is a good lesson in symbolism Fanfiction is itself a form of inversion of order Where it is those who are on the receiving end of a story the part of the story Those who are on the receiving end of a story the public the fans who now turn around and attempt to produce content Within the story frame that they became fans of in that sense fanfiction is a form of revolution Of course it is a benign revolution But pondering this can help us understand what a revolution is what a rise of chaos Can look like how it can often appear as an unreasonable wish fulfillment Like a group of peasants who imagine that they could take over their Lord’s castle Like a group of factory workers who imagine they could take over a factory even though they have no idea how to run it Though in their imagination, of course, they would do it better than the current leaders ever could We all have these type of Self-indulgent fantasies we find ourselves playing over and over in our mind imagining ourselves as you know The new lead singer of a band we like fantasizing about winning the basketball championship with or with or against our favorite player These types of fantasies can run over and over in our mind with only the very slight modification And I think that type of self-indulgence is what the force awakens was trying to be a kind of fetishism on a new hope that movie that had drawn a whole generation into a sometimes obsessive relationship with Star Wars a Revolutionary mindset is based on the notion that there is no hierarchy of competence that there are never reasons Never reasons which accord with how the world exists, you know For why the world is ordered in a certain way And though I’m talking about social revolution. There is another more intimate angle to this We’ve recently heard much on Let’s call it the Liberty side of the current political battle about social justice and the snowflake generation This social presupposition that each person is special and has unlimited potential each person can be whatever they want and If they can’t it’s not about them, but rather because of a system that’s unfair or Rigged against them or how their parents or some authority figure crushed their natural creativity It’s all obi-wan’s fault And so in this vision a person does not need to be trained does not need discipline Does not even need a character arc at all, but only needs to be let loose so to unleash the the special person they are on the world and For people who have accepted this worldview there is no problem with a character like Ray She fits perfectly in their frame of the world Ray is the millennial hero par excellence No doubt about it Now Star Wars was from from the beginning was of course post-world war two Propaganda obviously and that’s fine to a certain extent the Empire, you know was a techno bureaucratic military state Which makes everything regular and uniform using overt Nazi symbolism They were the axis and the rebellion was the last breath of a republic which functioned as a collegial governing body Amongst a large diversity of peoples and cultures basically the Allies but mostly really the United States and its ideal of democracy my allegiance is to the Republic to democracy and all of this using far-west cowboy symbolism of the Individual hero against the tyrannical system basically Martin Luther standing up to the corrupt Catholic Church So the ideal was freedom and in general I would say it was pretty effective But as I said earlier because of the big mash-up because of the strange Idea of the the Jedi Order and the light side of the force being on the side of rebellion and the Republic Finding this Republic being devent defended by a highly hierarchical religious order of samurai like monks, maybe the propaganda wasn’t so Transparent as it has become in the latest movie Now one of the things that makes the propaganda in the latest Star Wars movie more obvious is the change of ideals The ideal is no longer freedom. It seems but safety from oppression That’s not the same thing It’s no longer about heroism in the face of tyranny as it is about a new ideal of social justice So if in the first trilogy it was by heroism especially Individual heroism that freedom could be found in the latest movie heroism, but not really just heroism, but specifically masculine heroism is criticized relentlessly When Poe is degraded by Leia the movie itself makes the link to masculinity clear because Leia tells Poe to Get his head out of his cockpit There are countless examples, but we see this strange attack on masculine heroism At its strongest point when Rose prevents Finn from destroying the cannon by sacrificing himself Finn who has Constantly shown himself to be a coward From the Force Awakens constantly there to take the backseat to his female To take the backseat to his female counterpart in every possible situation Now finally having the courage to sacrifice himself in an act that would have been the mere reflection of what Admiral Holdo did just before and For which you know she’s meant to be admired, but here Rose stops him calls him a dummy and Gives him one more nagging lesson That it is not by fighting those we hate but by saving those we love that we will beat them Which is very disturbing because obviously he was going to destroy the cannon to protect those he loves So the change of ideals Seems to be putting the odd Aspects of Star Wars in place the notion that the Jedi order was a positive good was never congruent with the ideals of rebellion and so now the only order is the first order and That order is shown in even Stranger caricatural guises that it that it than it ever was led by an irrational tantrum prone Kylo Ren and the weasley Unconvincing general Hux and the fact that all these incompetent leaders are shown constantly squabbling and publicly berating each other Shows us Again this belief that order is accidental it has nothing to do with competence only with raw power I mean we wonder why any soldier would ever follow orders given by someone like General Hux So in order for things to fit properly The Jedi order has to be eliminated It’s time for the Jedi To end The notion of a sacred tradition passed down a human chain connecting us to a Immemorial past is portrayed as somewhat useless and silly Yoda burns down the sacred place and just you know Just to teach Luke one more lesson and all notions of aristocracy lineage in terms of family or or religious tradition Competence as acquired through effort and discipline You know and by connecting oneself to a lineage of masters all of this is eliminated in order to make way for the force as accidental and somewhat democratic a truly we could call it New Age Virgin of the force and a and a truly social justice version of politics Where the purpose is more to preserve the safety of the oppressed rather than to be freed from tyranny and It’s important to understand this freed from tyranny, but not only not mostly from the outside But in the earlier movies being freed from tyranny was being freed from the tyranny of our own passions Never I’ll never turn to the dark side That’s what was positive about about the first Star Wars movies and also what is gone here We have to remember that when Luke went down into the cave during his training he encountered Vader and Kills him only to discover that in fighting out of anger. He’s encountering his own dark side Which is his true enemy? But now when Ray goes down into the cave, it’s all good. She has no conflict she’s already completely integrated and and if Luke is seen to discover his nemesis as himself Ray is made to discover that she is her own origin when she asks to see her parents she sees herself and when she discovers her causality She’s in line with herself that is the very Revolution the very break with order that the whole movie exhibits and that order is arbitrary and Must be inverted and inverted is truly the word to use here because alongside the whole discourse about Freeing animals destruction of lineage and tradition this new democratic force. There is a whole thread in the movie Represented by Poe and his relationship with Leia first, you know and second to the purple-haired Admiral Holdo that is Fall in line buddy Don’t question orders know your place check your privilege in our resistance to the first order so in the end although Like I said at the beginning. I really wanted to enjoy the movie it was a struggle to and If I could I would order a bit less hair in my Star Wars suit for next time If you enjoyed this content and our exploration of symbolism get involved I love to read your insights and questions in the comments section You can also share this video on social media to your friends and if you can Please consider supporting us financially through patreon or PayPal You’ll find those links in the description below