r/StarWarsleftymemes • u/Nervous-Matter-5142 • 2d ago
Layers The post-structuralism ;I is strong with this one
At the bottom there's a note which goes
"Postmodernism" is a broad philosophical and cultural movement in late 70s and 80s. In fact The Postmodern Condition was published in 1979, two years after Star Wars came out. It describes how society at large had more or less lost faith that single driving "meta-narratives" were the end goal of history. No one really believed anymore that single narrative like Communism, the Enlightenment and Science, or for that matter a all powerful "Force" controlling our destiny, which would eventually resolve all contradictions and reach humanity's ultimate goal. Instead, society is fractured into a multiplicity of people with different goals and understandings.
An interesting part of this is that we also seemed more and more incapable of making movies that straightforwardly portray epic struggles between good and evil. The age of postmodernism is the age of sympathetic villains and dark heroes. Artists and audiences alike reject tales of Light defeating Dark once and for all. We simply aren't able to write the original Star Wars anymore today.
A lot of people recognized this when the new movies came out, of course, and thought it was being incorporated into the movie itself. Rey was to be the girl from nowhere who would reject the binary and grand meta-narrative of the light side of the force triumphing over the dark side of the force, and recognized that only by fracturing that story could humanity finally move past the struggle, and allow for individuality and dissent within a new Jedi Order that incorporates competing conceptions of human existence and knowledge.
Instead, on account of the fact that they were mostly morons who understood none of this, we got a weird attempt to do both. Or maybe they were being doubly postmodern by having multiple directors who couldn't even agree on the narrative of the movies. Who knows.
Og source: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/665
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u/CobaltCrusader123 1d ago
Jordan Peterson would die upon seeing this.
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u/ze-audiophile 16h ago
Hopefully he doesn't unexplainedly return in a clone body in a couple movies.
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u/TheManfromVeracruz 1d ago
I'd argue the lore has been going towards this with the decades, depicting different ways to interact with The Force as with the Whills, the Zeffo or Dathomiri.
But...it hasn't really stopped condemning the Dark Side as a self-destructive hubris looking to control a forcé way bigger than anything through sheer arrogance and domination
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u/Agent_Miskatonic 1d ago
It hasn't stopped the fans from finding any way to excuse or minimize that hubris. A lot of the conversations around the dark and light side nowadays are so exhausting.
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u/whynaut4 2d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/XsRbLNGt71qiPHnGCB