For all that Conservatives grouse that The Radical Left has taken over the entertainment industry and bombards us with Leftist propaganda, I wonder if they realize that they’re accidentally telling us the opposite in some cases? Over the last year I’ve seen three cases where heavily overloaded “Feminist” messages wound up telling the opposite story. How so, you ask? As the title of this post suggests, three shows that appear to be pushing a Leftist/Feminist agenda end up making the opposite argument. So on the eve of the debut of the new Star Wars Han Solo movie, let’s jump right in!
Exhibit A – Supergirl
The CW Network gave us the TV series Supergirl, and season 1 was excellent. Superman’s cousin, Kara is working in a city as an assistant for “Devil Wears Prada-esque” media mogul Cat Grant by day, and is Supergirl by night, or when emergencies arise. If the name Cat sounds familiar, in the 90s “Lois & Clark” series Cat played the woman in the office who liked to sleep around and had an unrequited crush on Clark Kent. While I would have liked to see the original actress, Tracy Scroggins, bought back for this role Flockhart absolutely nails it. The show also pays a few neat homages to L&C, such as having Cara texting her cousin for advice from time to time (and him eventually coming to town for few episodes), and having L&C’s Superman, Dean Cain, playing the role of Cara’s Earth Step-Dad. We get to see some cool DC Supervillains we’ve known over the years, and I liked how the show did a good job of targeting women by making the show more female-oriented than most superhero shows. I’m not being sarcastic in that last line, either – women like superhero shows too, and dialogue between Cara and her stepsister like “Oooh, I hope you get fat!” is the kind of line a guy would never say, much less put in a script. The first season had a few Leftist bones thrown in here & there, but at this point you just come to expect it, and Season 1 was excellent.
Season 2 was anther story. One of its issues was in Jimmy Olsen’s character. The writers felt he needed to be reimagined, and the most notable change is that he’s now black. No, I don’t have a problem with this, as long as the character is consistent with who we’ve known. A good example was in the 00’s Justice League cartoons retiring the white Hal Jordan as Green Lantern and replacing him with the black John Stewart. The bigger problem is that he’s now James Olsen and is no longer the twerp that Jimmy has always been – he and Cara briefly flirt with getting together and Cara’s Sister actually warns her against getting friend-zoned. Cat also leaves the show and instead of being a freelance photographer James is the new boss. He also eventually gets a super suit and become a super hero himself. But that’s only a small part of the problem
Season 2 goes full SJW, not even being subtle about pushing a pro-amnesty agenda via a pro-“alien”, as in from space aliens, agenda. Cara’s step-sister has also come out as a lesbian and Season 2 becomes engulfed in these two plot lines. It got so over the top that even Sister Babe (who leans left of center) got bored with the show and actually gave up on the show a few episodes before I did. I thought that watching Season 2 might make for a good blog post, but I realized it wasn’t worth my time. So what you see here is as much as I can write on the show.
Real Message Sent by Hollywood: Shows focused around females are incredibly uninteresting.
Exhibit B: Fear the Walking Dead
Season 2 opens with Madison Clark’s family crossing back over the US border after fleeing to Mexico when the zombie outbreak hit their hometown of Los Angeles. To skip ahead to the relevant part, they end up heading further north and join a survivalist camp, led by Dayton Callie, who you might remember as the local sheriff from the first few seasons of Sons of Anarchy. Their entire family doesn’t make it all the way to camp though, as a helicopter carrying Madison’s son and husband gets shot at by what we would later learn were local Indians, killing her husband. Madison and her son and daughter get close to Dayton and his sons, and in some bizarre leap up faith they end up being accepted as leaders by a large group of people who one would generally not expect to take orders from a handful of city slickers. The main conflict once they reach camp is with the local Indians, who feel that the survivalists’ land belongs to them. As the season unfolds, Madison continuously urges Dayton to make peace with the Indians, and offers some new concession at every turn. She does this after a number of challenges from the Indians, including:
- The aforementioned attack on their helicopter
- Them murdering everyone on a local form, leaving its elder sitting in a chair on a hill, partially scalped and getting picked at by crows
- The group of survivalists who discover the farm let themselves get surrounded by the Indians and are robbed and sent to march back to their compound
- The Indians sneak up on the compound one night and light bonfires in a ring surrounding them, although the show never explains how survivalists put themselves in such a position and are so careless to let this happen
- The Indians demand that the survivalists abandon the land for them
- After a failed parlay, the Indians try to drive them out by sending up one of Madison’s old friends, under the guise of having beaten her, into camp. Old friend goes on to poison their water.
- Somewhere in here we learn that Dayton is a racist, so it’s totally cool when Madison’s son shoots him, and with Dayton’s other two sons also getting killed under different circumstances, the LA family is now accepted as their leaders
- When some tension breaks out between the two factions, the city slickers decree that the Indians be given control over the compound’s weapons
- When it becomes apparent that they don’t have enough water for both groups, the Indians decree that the survivalists have to leave
- Madison convinces the Indian leader that they might be able to get water from a friend of hers in Mexico
- When that deal falls through, their leader tells Madison that the survivalists still have to leave.
If I was a bit unclear earlier, Madison returns to urging for peace with the Indians after each of these offenses, despite no indication that the Indian have any interest in peace with them. Maybe Madison is Hollywood’s fantasy version of how Israel’s leaders should behave with their neighbors.
Real Message Sent by Hollywood: Women are incredibly naive and incapable as leaders.
Exhibit C: Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi
I could go on for an entire post of its own about problems with Ep. 8, its best feature being that it wasn’t as bad as that lifeless clone of the original Star Wars that was called Episode 7. Both of the new movies underutilize the beloved characters from the original trilogy, instead focusing on a few new uninteresting characters whose names I can barely remember after two movies. So you’ll have to forgive me if instead of taking the two minutes to IMDB their names I’ll just refer to the new characters by how I remember each of them. First, we’ll start with the easy one:
Mary Sue: I’ll only spend a little bit of time on her, as does the author of this excellent takedown of E8. She has a force-enabled cyber romance with the lead villain, Kylo-Stimpy. They also join up for a light saber duel where they kill Stimpy’s mentor, Smoke. To her credit, her biggest sin so far is being completely uninteresting for two movies and doesn’t screw anything up. Unlike the other women in E8…
Captain Brienne: The actress who played Brienne in Game of Thrones is now an imperial officer who wears a shiny Stormtrooper outfit. In Episode 7 she singlehandedly allowed the Rebels to destroy The First Order’s Death Star Planet from the threat of a gun to her head and letting down the weapons’s shields. In Episode 8 she seemingly beats the face-turned Stormtrooper in a fight as he falls off a ledge. Naturally, she doesn’t think to look down to confirm and of course he fell on a rising platform and kills her.
Old Jedi Woman: The only truly interesting new character from Episode 7 was of course undeveloped there (I hear that a number of her scenes fell to the cutting room floor), while in Ep 8 she only appears via a holo-phone call for help, where she offers someone who can help, but can’t say his name because she’s too busy in the middle of a fight. But somehow she manages to spend a lot more time describing the guy they need, as opposed to simply saying his name. That detail might have kept them from screwing up their mission, but somehow I doubt it.
Laura Dern – I’ve liked Laura Dern in other roles, which made her appearance here all the more disappointing. She was brought in for two purposes: 1) To demote Captain Flyboy and sneer at him that she wasn’t going to tell him her plans. When she did that I was almost waiting for her to stick her tongue at him, plug her thumbs in her ears & wiggle her fingers while saying “Nyah Nyah Nyah Nyah NYAH Nyah!” and 2) Display her brilliance as a fleet commander by getting the fleet she’s commanding almost completely destroyed until she finally gets the idea to kamikaze her ship into one of the First Order ships so the few surviving ships can get away. Why she didn’t do that with one of the first ships that was about to run out of fuel never gets explained, nor why she didn’t use a droid or remotely operate the kamikaze ship in its final mission. Perhaps she made her sacrifice so that Star Wars fans wouldn’t have to endure her again in Episode IX – I’m OK with this.
Diversity Hire – Satisfying the underrepresented asian demographic, some asian engineering woman was bought in to also satisfy what’s become a mandatory part of every superhero/sci fi show or movie – include either an interracial or gay couple. And no, I’m not against either – I have friends in both of said relationships but just get annoyed when it becomes a checkbox that you wait to see in almost every show or movie. A good example of this being overdone was how forced it felt in Spiderman: Homecoming, the only flaw in an excellent movie. But I digress.
Oh yeah, while Diversity Hire and Face-Turned Imperial go on their mission for Captain Flyboy they take a side turn to release a bunch of racing animals, unleashing them across a casino floor. Afterward, as it looks like their mission is going to fail, Diversity Hire turns to Imperial and says something to the effect of, “Well, if nothing else, at least we freed those animals.” Yes, those animals that will probably caught within hours, if not minutes. And because you failed in your mission all of your friends are going to die and The Rebellion will be crushed. But the animals!
Princess Leia – I’m nit-picking here, but this goes back to the original trilogy. After Alderaan was destroyed shouldn’t Leia have been promoted to Queen or at least Regent? And when you’re old enough to collect Social Security maybe you shouldn’t be going by “Princess” anymore? I know, the title of General was also used, but shouldn’t the Princess monicker have been buried by now?
More importantly, while Laura Dern got the entire Alliance fleet destroyed to the point where all of them could fit in the Millennium Falcon, Leia put out a call for help to all of the other alliance planets assist. As Jim Geraghty pointed out in one of his podcasts a while back, how competent was The Alliance & how bad was The First Order if she couldn’t muster a single planet to send help? It makes me wonder if those planets weren’t secretly glad she’d be gone if she couldn’t even get so much as a response?
Real Message Sent by Hollywood: Women are incapable of leadership and should not be entrusted with any responsibility. Now go make me a sammich.
Of course, The Radical Left bristled about the pushback on how a bad movie could have been improved by less SJW preaching and more, I don’t know, actual story? And the best rebuttal to the argument I heard to the “You just don’t like powerful women!” shrieking was pointing to Aliens 2. Any movie where a character like Vazquez is only the third baddest female in the film says something about that great movie.
Maybe Hollywood’s negative views of women goes far beyond Harvey Weinstein?
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Cross posted from Brother Bob’s Blog
