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. 

Straight Outta Compton: N.W.A and the Authority Against the Unauthorized

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON AUGUST. 18, 2015

Fuck tha police

Comin straight from the underground

Young nigga got it bad cuz I’m brown

And not the other color so police think

They have the authority to kill a minority

Fuck that shit, cuz I ain’t tha one

For a punk muthafucka with a badge and a gun

To be beatin on, and throwin in jail

We could go toe to toe in the middle of a cell

Fuckin with me cuz I’m a teenager

With a little bit of gold and a pager

Searchin my car, lookin for the product

Thinkin every nigga is sellin narcotics.

‘Fuck Tha Police’ - Ice Cube, N.W.A

Straight Outta Compton was an exciting biopic about an American gangsta rap, West Coast hip hop group called N.W.A (Niggaz Wit Attitudes) and their rise to fame while surviving the police in Compton, California.  The group was founded by Eazy-E and along with the DJ talents of Dr. Dre, N.W.A was born in 1986.  Soon Ice Cube, DJ Yella and MC Ren would join the group and they would release their debut album Straight Outta Compton in 1988.

Compton, California, certainly at the time when N.W.A came to be, was a crime ridden city in southern Los Angeles County. Black and Hispanic Gangs like the Bloods and the Cribs ruled over the various neighborhoods as the Los Angeles Police Department, often without cause, would randomly and violently harass and arrest young black men.  To be far, the rule of law in these neighborhoods was out of control.  Drugs and various other crimes were committed by many of Compton’s residents.   

The problem here, which Straight Outta Compton dealt brilliantly with was the racial profiling side of the violence of Compton.  The LAPD seemed so out matched that their officers patrolling the streets of Compton became cynical and ultimately apathetic to the city’s residents.  Many young black men, who were not committing any crimes were often treated like criminals by the police.  This, quite understandably, divided the people of Compton from the very police assigned to their city to protect them from actual criminals.

The hypocrisy of this dynamic was often present in this revealing film.  These urban youth felt that they needed to survive the gang ridden criminality and the police on a daily basis while trying to go to school or even walk down the street on their way to the store.  The attitudes that subsequently had to develop were tough and that could appear to the police as ‘gangsta’ when all these youths were trying to do was what was needed to survive and live another day.

There was a scene early in the film when a school bus was pulled over by a couple of gang members because teenagers in the bus were yelling out the window at them.  Ice Cube was writing song lyrics when one of these gang members pulled a gun and threatened them all, advising them to not fuck with him.  This was daily life in Compton which N.W.A would later try to reveal to the world. 

Most people in the first world, along with this very writer, have really no idea what it must have been like to live in a place where the ‘good-guys’ and the ‘bad-guys’ both existed in gray areas, and where were both equal threats.  One’s ability to trust other people would be in turmoil.  No wonder the youth would stick to tight groups and fight for each other to the death if need be.  ‘War-zone’ might be an exaggeration but to a young person with no other environment to compare it to, this could easily feel like soldiers in the trenches being abandon by the very people they were brought up to believe would be there for them. 

Straight Outta Compton was about a group of talented young black men that expressed themselves, through embellished lyrics and heavy bass-driven thumps, conveying their desire not only to survive the trenches of their neighborhoods but also the nationally little known hypocrisy that made up their daily lives.

There’s also this Stockholm Syndrome of Compton that is present in this film where these young men love where they’re from.  Their identity is balled up in what they hate and what they love about where they’re from.  They want Compton on the map, for it to be known to the world but yet are consumed by its oppression, its instability, its racism, and its violence.  Psychologically this must be forever damaging.  These young men and women were brought up in a place where shots were fired hourly and where their protectors hate them for reasons neither side understand, but its home.

Home is a funny place because in spite of its bad memories, its decay, it’s still home, which is all we know, until we leave, if we do, and discover possibly better parts of the world.  For most people though, home is still home, no matter what bad memories existed there.  Home is where a person first connects to the tribe and that connection is often a lifelong one for most.

N.W.A expressed their love and their hate for their home in every song they jackhammer their audience with.  We shouldn’t forget though that most of these boys were teenagers, singing about these violent but ultimately expressive ideas.  Most of us were barely dealing with pimples and girls let alone dealing with the idea of being actually shot at for whatever reason.

“FUCK THA POLICE” I’m taking your black ass to jail.

N.W.A had a problem with the police and ultimately authority which in the street, the police represented.  As much as we want to apply the ‘law’ to the reasons as to why the police justified themselves, it’s hard to think about liberalism and freedom of expression and find a problem with what these artists were explicitly expressing themselves.

That said, these young men were not without their faults.  They carried guns and threated the lives of other people, they stood up to people and were willing to kill but yet didn’t.  Some of these boys went to jail and some didn’t but the ‘hood’ either way was breed in them all.  They made a record that expressed their ground, their plight, their war, which was received well in the community and across the nation but not by everyone.  Some decided to steamroll over many of their albums.

Straight Outta Compton showed these boys gained fame but also dealt with White America and the problem with the reality of their lyrics.  In Detroit they got arrested because they were ordered to not sing ‘Fuck Tha Police’ but they did anyway.  The FBI investigated them because of their decent.  This band was not popular among many groups, religious and minority, across the country.

What was really being rebelled against here?  White America, as they believe today, oppressed black people for reasons, without logic, that most people in the states still can’t explain for fear of sounding publically racist.  Black people are not equal, the problem is sadly our culture still perpetuates this.  Why?

Why?

There isn’t anything biologically that qualifies this line of thinking, so what is it?  Tradition.  Our ancestors believed in something ludicrous, just as they did with religion, and many to this day, stupid people, follow this line of non-thinking.  We do what our dad did and avoid going beyond him, mind and spirit.  Racist, simplistic thought are what the world has in common and what it needs to get rid of (ideally).

Straight Outta Compton dealt with the Rodney King beating and trial, which resulted in an acquittal for the police officers involved in the beating.   The LA riots occurred as these young men from Compton revaluated their own reality.  The question here is; what are they doing?  Are they causing problems in society or are they waking it up, and are these two questions mutually elusive?

With Ferguson and many other examples of police brutality against black people, to this very day unfortunately, conveys a reality that N.W.A rapped about over two decades ago.  White America still can’t equally accept black people into the American Dream.  The reality is; is black people are seen as black people and not people.  As much as this writer wished that this wasn’t the case, all one has to do is watch the news.  Objectively black people are simply people with dark skin, which we all started from back in Kenya before global migration happened.

Police brutality has become this license to beat down minorities and ultimately fuel the very cause as to why certain minority groups are not allowed to participate in the white man’s version of the happiness.  Straight Outta Compton represents these very minorities that artistically fought through the white man’s dream to stamp their claim to freedom.

N.W.A ended up going their separate ways after Ice Cube moved on and went solo. Eazy-E stuck with Dre for a bit before Dre went off and created Death Row. Eazy-E got sick and was diagnosed with AIDS, he died in 1995.

In the end, the film was about expression in the face of incredible odds.  Tupac, Eminem, 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg and many others, where not only influenced by N.W.A but were financed and produced by Dr. Dre himself.  

  

Avatar and How We Consume or Fail to Consume a Movie

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JULY 09, 2015

Avatar was a visual spectacle that captured the hearts and minds of millions of people and then just went away.  Why?  Avatar was about a paraplegic former marine who was brought into negotiate the relocation of an alien species.  His twin brother died so he was asked to replace him as a Na’vi human hybrid called an “Avatar” in order to explore a forested habitable moon orbiting a massive planet composed mainly of gas.

It’s the year 2154 and Jake Sully is assigned to learn from the indigenous alien species, the Na’vi, learning their customs and beliefs about their world and their place in that world.  He is also covertly studying their infrastructure for a potential military attack on them.  Underneath their village exists a valuable mineral called Unobtanium that a militarized company called The Resources Development Administration, which Sully works for, wants badly. 

The Na’vi are these 10 feet tall, blue-skinned, sapient humanoids who live is this tranquil harmony, co-existing perfectly with their natural surroundings while worshipping a mother goddess they call Eywa.  The Avatar Program was set up to explore and adapt to Pandora’s biosphere.  Sully integrates himself as one of these Na’vi and falls for the female Na’vi, Neytiri that is assigned to initiate him to their society.  Sully falls in love with her and her people’s naturalistic way of life.

While Sully learns all these wonderful customs, the military plot an attack against them to get that mineral.  A war breaks out and Sully takes the side of nature and fights for the trees, the land and the people living there in harmony with it. 

Avatar is a cautionary tale about how we are killing our planet as we steam roll over ‘lesser people’ to get what resource we feel we want.  It’s about how the little man can fight back and win.  It’s an age-old story about good versus evil and for the most part has all but been forgotten.

Avatar is the most successful movie ever made but yet it never became a pop culture phenomena.  It grossed almost double than The Avengers, which is stapled firmly into the collective conscious of the pop culture population.  Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and the Hulk are everywhere.  They are on t-shirts, bumper stickers, tattoos, Coke bottles and are discussed in internet debates.  

Star Wars was the explosion that started most of what we identify as pop culture these days.  It might be from a galaxy far far away but here on earth, in the first world, we have anthropomorphized these aliens (yes Luke Skywalker and Han Solo would be classified as aliens) to exist with us in our 3 dimensional space.  We’ve made them tangible, we’ve reversed-engineered the virtual nature of their genesis, the movie screen.  We’ve invented Jedi religions and cosplayed them to death at comic-cons.  We so desperately wanted them to be real because what is real to us isn’t as exciting.

We 3-dimensionalized the Terminator, the Back to the Future series, Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings but Avatar has been left with little to no cultural significance.  Unlike Avatar these other movies have become these everlasting cultural memes that have weaved themselves into the very fabric of modern first world society.

Avatar became a cultural sound bite of sorts.  It visually stunned people and captured their imagination like in a scene in the movie where a ship flies past floating mountains, but yet it was forgettable.  It can be blamed on all the 3D movies we are all subjected to today but what else has it done.  How can something be so enormously successful, more than anything else, and yet be all but forgotten?

Avatar wasn’t a horrible movie, it entertained and even had an environmental message, which was likely its gift but also its curse.  Environmental issues never happen in the Marvel universe, the Harry Potter universe, the Back to the Future universe, or the Lord of the Rings universe.  Our actual environmental plight on this planet is very real and is sadly being fought by very little.  Avatar attempted to juxtapose American environmentally unfriendly intervention on various nations around the world.  Most movie-goers lost that sentiment because they have been systematically trained to not process metaphor.  For them the crisis is fictional and sadly disposable after they leave the theater.

Philosophically the movie mildly explored the body and mind issue, Sully suffered from out of body fatigue.  He was loving being in the avatar and using his legs but was also losing parts of himself while in the avatar.  Falling in love and exploring this incredible world certainly didn’t help him reconcile with his virtual experience.  

In the end James Cameron, the movie’s director, achieved what he wanted.  His technology is now out in the world, his movie grossed just under 3 billion dollars worldwide, he’s the ‘king of the world’ again, but what of this legacy?  The question here is should we value something solely based on its pop culture significance and longevity?  Was Avatar a movie to be seen as a lesson to learn from or simply a bumper sticker throw-away meme?  Possibly more time will tell as all the sequels are released but for now the big question is 'do we really need anymore of these environmental lessons'?  I would think we absolutely do.