STAR WARS: The Force Awakens, Greatness and the Sad State of the Online Spoiler Phenomenon

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER.18, 2015

There aren't any spoilers in this article.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens was an action packed, delightful entertaining film to watch.  It was all the things we wanted from a return-to-form after the disasters that was the prequels.  This film was fun, not just as a Star Wars film but as a film standing on its own, it was a blast to watch.  The trailers let us know that we were in for a fun film and we weren’t let down.

The performances in this film were great, the action sequences that director J.J Abrams created were spectacular, and the John Williams score was goose-bump worthy throughout the film.  The practical effects were a welcomed addition to the CGI over-saturation of the prequels.  The film wasn’t only a fun film but it was incredibly funny, where all the funny moments were honest and deserving of their respective moments.

J.J Abrams got it.  As a Star Wars fan himself, he got not only what George did wrong with the prequels but what George did right with the original trilogy.  He painted his canvas with the original paint that George started with but also added his own colors and his own vision to this world from this galaxy far far away.  He was able to please the older fans while simultaneously welcoming a new generation of fans.  The brilliance of what he and his colossal team of actors, set designers, special effects creators and all other collaborators have done, was to introduce this world to the little boys and little girls who haven’t seen Star Wars before, while giving their parents who saw and loved the originals the same kind of delightful enjoyment.

The Force Awakens was a viscerally emotional film from an obvious nostalgic point of view but also an even more poignant contemporary point of view.  Rey, the main character of the film is its spine, she is its heart and she journeys to find the soul that we all loved from the originals.  She bridges the old with the new in a very Homer-esque way.  Joseph Campbell certainly grounded the mythology that was allegorized for thousands of years from our own history, which heavily influenced George Lucas to do a somewhat explainable mythology he created for his Flash Gordon inspired story that become Star Wars.

The character Finn who was a Stormtrooper turned defector, for all the right reasons, was an absolute delight in the film.  As we saw from the trailers, he was no longer willing to go along with the ‘First Order’, a new evil regime after the fall of the Empire.  BB-8, the main droid in the film was adorable but not enough to be annoying.  This little spinning droid had character and soul behind that one dark shaded lense of an eye.  The Millennium Falcon is still the best hunk of junk in the galaxy.  It was great to see Han Solo back in the seat and also to see Harrison Ford enjoying playing Han Solo again.  The Dark Side’s new front overlord Kylo Ren was multilayered, he was menacing, and he was a great advisory to the heroes of the film.  Walking in the footsteps of Darth Vader’s enormous legacy, Kylo Ren didn’t disappoint.  Also they didn’t overuse characters where a lesser filmmaker would have been more tempted to do so.    

The problem with the Star Wars: The Force Awakens isn’t even in the film, it’s in the culture we all live in, this social media saturation that we all call ‘progress’.  The big reveal in The Empire Strikes Back, when Luke is told by Darth Vader that he is his father would likely have never stayed tightly sealed as it did in 1980.  Today we live in a spoiler savvy culture where nothing is sacred, were almost everything is aired on the internet.  

Why is this?  Covert introversion?  The weak hide behind the safety of their computer screens and poke digital prods at faceless people that will never see who actually poked them.  We live in a culture of passive warfare that slithers in the darkness of social streaming.  We live in a culture where we no longer have to qualify anything we have an ‘opinion’ about.  We live in a culture where we have a long reaching voice, a voice that has never been as reaching.  Some of us post pictures of cats and silly things that dogs do, some of us post opinions about political matters that many of us really are not qualified to write about, but sadly a lot of us post things that overtly are written to spoil another person’s experience.

Many movie websites discussing Star Wars: The Force Awakens have been quite vigilant about deleting comments that spoil various plot points in the film.  So now we are getting these losers commenting on topics that are not Star Wars related about Star Wars plot points just to spoil the film for people who haven’t seen it yet.  These are people sitting and saying to themselves that they know this particular plot point or exciting reveal in the film and then desire to beat the film to the punch, so to speak.  Sort of like Santa sitting around the Christmas tree and shouting out to a kid what the actual present he is about to open, but yet in this case it’s detached and removed from confrontation and accountability.

Lots of people slip up by saying that Bruce Willis is a ghost throughout The Sixth Sense, (sorry to those who haven’t seen the film but it’s been 16 years for the love of god).  Then you get those people that aren’t slipping up, they want to spoil it for the rest of us.  They want to attach their fantasy of reality to what they think reality actually is.  We live in a culture now where the fantasy world of fiction is being pulled desperately by many to our world, allowing the ignorant individual to camouflage him or herself from the actual reality of the world, the reality of the political and religious dogmatism of their country, the reality of their town or city they live in, the reality of their friends, the reality of their family and most importantly the reality of their own mind.  We live in the most distorted time for a group of people that should by all accounts be the most enlightened, given all the access we have to knowledge not only of the present but of the past.

What’s so interesting about The Force Awakens is it’s here in a time of actual global despair.  The first Star Wars film was released in 1977 during a time of despair. Both films are about the dark and the light, they are about awakening, they are about the future and saving it.  Sadly the lessons from the first films didn’t brush off as well as maybe they should have.  We are taking anonymity to the same level as we do when we play computer games.  What we destroy will reappear when we start over.  Through a McLuhan / Baudrillard Simulacra, we are hurting the world with real people in it, mistaking it for some form of delusional hyper-reality.

The question outside of the evolution of computers and postmodernism is, psychologically what are we doing when we do this, not to make light of real global issues?  We are compensating for a form of loneliness that we were born into, we are possessing our fantasies and forcing ourselves into their reality and out of our own actual reality, which is itself paradoxically its own fantasy.  

By doing this we are tethering ourselves to these fictional worlds, in this case Star Wars.  To use a fake spoiler as an example, the Terminator shows up in The Force Awakens, he is there to kill Rey because the First Order is worried about a new messianic-type leader to overthrow their plans.  This isn’t actually what happens in the film but if we wanted it to become part of the fantasy, the idea is to tell people before the film does, so that very knowledge would connect them with the film itself, via the soon-to-be memories that the moviegoer will experience.

The synergy surrounding Star Wars: The Force Awakens is monumental without a doubt, but our ability to keep these secrets to ourselves in our mass-surveilled society, with the temptation of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter’s ever flowing stream and the celebrity-driven desire for attention, in a First World plagued with over saturating posts and texts and likes and tweets and ‘how am I going to be seen in all of this glitter, how am I going to be something in this river of nonstop infotainment?’  This is what results in passive-aggressive tendencies of illuminating a sort of Bat signal on to the world of social media, for good or for bad.

Sadly the film will try to teach us a lesson that most of us will not hear through the distracted techno-linguistic vernacular of our minds.  The lesson is to be in the world, to not always dream of what we want but to actualize it.  Rey chooses to ‘be’ in the world, she decides to fight, not electronically via the safety of her place, but to get outside of her head and be in the world, where other people are.

Star Wars is a fantasy, it’s a place that we are suppose to drift away to and forget about our daily problems.  The problem here is that George Lucas never intended this franchise to be just that.  He created a philosophy, not as idealistic as Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek but one more grounded in reality, in a way Joseph Campbell would appreciate.  Star Wars isn’t about action, it’s about thinking.  The force is thought itself, sure in the films a Jedi could move objects with his mind.  The Dark Side allowed forcing strangulation, but the point here is, and what most of us should take from The Force Awakens and the originals is that (thought) + (action) results in something like Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity or (thought) + (action) may result in Hitler’s own holocaust.

George Lucas was aware of these forces in the world and likely within himself.  He would have glimpsed at his Jungian Shadow every now and then like the most of us.  The Force Awakens continues with this metaphorical battle of the minds within our very own mind.  It entertains its audience while allowing them to subtly confront their own battle, as Plato put it, while recognizing that they aren’t the only ones fighting it.  

       

Krampus and the Dark Reality of Christmas

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER. 07, 2015

A Christmas warning, please don’t unwrap this wretched gift until you’ve seen the movie first.  Spoilers under the tree.

Krampus was fun in spite of all the cardboard cut-out uses of some of its stereotypical supporting characters, such as the fat kid or the angst-ridden teenage girl, who are among a dysfunctional family that are at the core of this twisted holiday tale.  Krampus was also horrifyingly disturbing as its main ghoulish demon character arrives, or is rather accidentally summoned, to teach this, and every other family in their neighborhood the consequences of not celebrating the true spirit of Christmas.

The ludicrously psychotic romp of a Christmas-themed movie centers around a disillusioned young boy named Max who gives up his festive spirit of Christmas.  This unleashes the wrath of Krampus who, along with his Gremlin-esque band of ghouls and goblins, lay waste to all the dispirited family members.  Max’s mother, father and sister along with their idiotic, gun-toting uncle and his aunt and their depressingly moronic, zombie-like children.  Also Max’s mother’s drunken hardnosed aunt and his quiet German grandmother who is holding a secret about this ancient evil who comes to punish all the non-believers.

The historical origin of Krampus, a hairy chain carrying creature with cloven hooves and horns of a goat, is not known but is believed to have come from pre-Christian times.  This anthropomorphized creature is said to have come from Germanic paganism and was later assimilated into Christian folklore becoming a sort of devil.  Saint Nicholas become widely known in the eleventh century in Germany where he and his elves would reward children with gifts if they were good all year.  Conversely, as all these religious traditions need their binary opposites, Krampus became the threat to all the misbehaved children that would be punished for being bad.

There is something incredibly morbid about the existence of this factious incarnation of the devil.  To be called a ‘good person’ is to say that one is living within the outlined parameters of what’s expected of them based on any given societies rule book.  To be ‘bad’ is to step outside of those parameters, which is to say any form of growth that doesn’t correlate with family and cultural tradition is deemed bad and as a consequence is punished.

The problem here is this isn’t always a bad idea.  Civilization as a human project was founded on making rules for people to follow in order to maintain a level of command.  Here is where the crossroads can cause a problem because some people aspire to grow, to think outside the box that their parents, their teachers, their employers, their religious leaders and their governments have built so tightly around them to keep them controlled.

This movie is about control and beliefs because we are manufactured by powerful men and thus communicated through a form of mythology, where naïve humans need such beliefs to allow themselves to surreptitiously be confused by the beneficiaries of the very creators, who made all this up in the first place.  Krampus explores this absurdity throughout as seemingly innocent people are being ripped to pieces because they lost the meaning to a holiday that was artificial in the first place, to get to as much money from them as possible.

Christmas is a holiday packaged as this joyful time, yet many people maintain a high level of stress throughout.  These neurotic people wish to be seen as followers, they want friends and family to experience the best time for reasons they probably will never know themselves.  We are all playing along while corporations are fucking cleaning up.  We have to participate because if we don’t we are ‘misbehaving’, we are ‘bad’, we are not following the flow which itself is leading us all to bankruptcy.  Do the corporations, the banks, the governments that hover over us all care?  No, because they are amoral, they are indifferent to our emotional plight.  They want the money to feed their stockholders, that’s it.  Christmas has become a product and we are all part of the packaging, we have been scammed because the house already won.  

Merry Christmas!!!

In the opening moments Krampus shows us who we are with a big fat mirror.  It shows that we are a lost and drifting society, desperately searching for meaning that we no longer have the rights to.  Corporations now own the rights to our very lives, they along with their religious institutions and government sponsors control our every purchase, our every social media update and now sadly our every thought because now we all only think in test messaging and facebook and twitter updates, assigning our very being to these corporate techno-farming camps.  

Krampus ended with this boy Max along with his family, who were all murdered by the Krampus itself or its goblins, to exist in the happiness of Christmas morning but yet trapped in the bubble of a snow globe.  The meaning here is that we can’t handle the so-called darkness of reality itself.  The Krampus within the film and its Alpine folklore ended being an unreality adjuster, where its purpose is to keep the people in the dream state and not thinking about the realities of the very world they exist in.  This movie is about how fucked up we all are as we wake up and go to work for whoever only to go home and fall asleep, only to wake up and do it all over again.  It’s about being good in the eyes of what’s expected and if you fail at this task you are excommunicated, removed from possibly influencing others to think for themselves.