The Truth About "The Truth About Star Wars: The Force Awakens"

hello there so okay I know I said I was burnt out on stefan molyneux but the other day I happened to watch Star Wars The Force awakens again and I couldn't resist going to take another look at Stefan's video about it in my first video about Stefan I included a clip of him talking about Star Wars and what he sees as its anti family anti mail message now the purpose of that clip was to demonstrate what I see a Stefan's anti-woman ideology affecting his approach to art as well as to a certain degree everything else and so the purpose of this video is in part to expand on that point now the idea that one's particular worldview colors one's understanding of art is certainly not specific to Stefan it happens to everyone you know I have my own biases and leanings that I bring with me when I watch a movie or read a book or whatever so I'm not criticizing Stefan just for having opinions and I'm generally a fan of what we'll call unconventional interpretations of art and at the least I think they're usually fun to think about I've seen it argued for instance that Hamlet is a gay character and the certain things in the play one can point to that could be interpreted as supporting this his rejection of Ophelia his affection for Horatio and so on and as well as certain lines of dialogue here in there however one needs to be careful with these sorts of interpretations it's easy to cross over from speculations to declarations there's a line between speculating that Hamlet could be gay and declaring Hamlet to be gay and there's a much bigger line between speculating that Hamlet could be gay and declaring Hamlet to be gay based on the scene where he has sex with Horatio which doesn't happen you know you've started misconstruing the text at that point and you've entered into the realm of just being objectively wrong about things and I mention this now because Stephan makes a few claims about the characters and events of the force awakens that I think go beyond individual interpret and end up just being directly contradicted by the movie so that's my aim with this video I'm going to highlight the times I fix Stefan is incorrect and present a counter interpretation of the material but before we talk about the force awakens directly we'll start with a few thoughts on the fantasy genre in most epic stories parents are conveniently removed from the home allowing the young hero to easily slide under the tutelage of a warrior master and learn the ways of obedience and drama and war in the original Star Wars family life was portrayed as mundane and humiliating as a young Luke Skywalker was expected to work productively on his uncle's farm historically epics tend to be fantasies that feed the murder lust of the young who were needed by the aristocracy to wage war on their behalf the word adventure basically means learn the dehumanizing joy of murdering for your masters in these stories boring parents are replaced by wise hypnotic elders who teach young men and now young women the excitement and joys of war this conveniently allows the authority of the state to displace the authority of parents transitioning young men from pimply-faced teens to hardened warriors serving their economic and political masters hey who wants to work for a banker when you can kill for a banker so Stefan starts out with something that I agree with here he is correct that the fantasy genre usually takes two protagonists parents out of the picture either before the story or during the opening act but he claims this is down to some anti family and/or pro violence message you know freed from their family constraints the protagonist can now go off killing people under the guidance of an older warrior and I can't really agree with that interpretation I think the real reason is mainly just narrative in nature you know removing the parents is often a necessary step to force the protagonist into acts if Luke for instance had stayed on the farm and not followed obi-wan he wouldn't have a story nobody wants to watch Luke work a boring farm job for two hours regardless I think Star Wars is the wrong series to make this point about to be honest neither of Luke's masters obi-wan or Yoda teach Luke to attack anyone in fact they seem to prefer nonviolent means of resolving conflicts you can't win but there are alternatives to fighting a Jedi uses the force for knowledge and defense never attack obi-wan sneaks his way past stormtroopers that he could kill and even allows himself to be killed and the culmination of Luke's story has him defeating the Emperor by explicitly refusing to fight this seems more of an anti violence message to me rarely rather than a pro violence one in the new film we meet Finn now Finn is a storm trooper who was cloned raised without parents and trained to be a mindless obedient killing robot pretty much from birth as an adult he has a strong conscience he is engaging charming funny enthusiastic and for obvious reasons mindlessly horny in other words despite being raised in conditions that your average African child soldier would find utterly horrifying he is a perfectly well-adjusted mentally healthy courageous he's a good team player he's socially poised warm and funny this mirrors the fantasy of Harry Potter who was also endlessly abused as a child and shares most of this eerie steroid mental health characteristics that finn has this denial of the effects of childhood drama is the fundamental reason for the consistent re-emergence of intergalactic evil not just in Star Wars but in all these stories and in the world as well intergalactic evil yikes what the Stefan know that we don't so a few minor points about Finn here firstly Stefan says that he's a clone but he isn't I'm a strong trooper I call of him I was taken from a family I'll never know um secondly when is Finn mindlessly horny the force awakens is rather sexless to be honest the only thing I can think of here is when Finn asks Rey if she has a boyfriend but that's about as far as the movie takes that romance to be honest he's hardly mindlessly horny so anyway the effects of childhood trauma why don't fantasy films with orphaned or abused protagonists show the negative effects of such neglect and/or abuse well for a start sometimes they do you know I'd argue that the force awakens doors even but we'll get to that later for now let's carry on and answer the question anyway for funsies so I'd argue that instead of not showing these effects fantasy stories like Star Wars and Harry Potter generally do have them just at a reduced level you know it's there but it's not generally enough to prevent the protagonist from progressing through the story and the reason why is in the name really fantasy these works are escapist fiction you know they show at first average protagonists with mundane lives who are suddenly frost into some grand adventure you know you thought you were just some kid with a horrible family and a boring life well no it turns out you're actually rich and famous and you've got magical powers and yes it's unrealistic well it's a fantasy it's meant to be unrealistic nobody wants to watch Harry Potter and the crippling anxiety where we read about a non-magical Harry Potter who tries to work through his abandonment issues actually I'm lying I would totally read that but anyway fantasy presents an escape from an often boring and upsetting reality and I don't think it's a negative escape at all we need fantasies or we'd all go insane now much has been made of the casting of a woman as Rey the new Luke it is somehow considered to be a break from convention while her I don't know let's just say character is in fact perfectly boring and predictable a hyper empowered Purdy feminist robot of implausibly infinite abilities ray is what by now has become a yawning Li cliched stock character the all competent ingenue or the ACI now the ACI starts off as a low status character whose endless and escalating waves of superlative competence quickly wash away any and all hints of reality or limitations a super woman fetish of automatic and unearned abilities who ends up as little more than a delusional mangina him to bottomless female vanity ray this films ACI turns out to be fantastic at hand-to-hand combat flying various spaceships sword fighting using the force cgi cliff climbing to name just a few so then ray as an all competent aunjanue or to use a less annoying term ray as a MarySue character now I've seen this criticism of the force awakens affair a few times and not just from Stefan so is Ray Ameri su character a Mary Sue here meaning a sort of hyper competence seemingly perfect character who has extensive and unrealistic skills well to answer that we first need to answer another question what's the line that separates a Mary Sue character and just any protagonist of escapist fantasy fiction you know for instance is Luke Skywalker a Mary Sue so let's think about this further by running down the list of things that's the fan says ray is fantastica firstly hand-to-hand combat ray also regularly fights grown men trained from birth in the ways of combat and wins easily she weighs maybe a little over a buck 10 and regularly takes down multiple 200-pound jacked-up monster warriors but when there's only one time ray fights hand-to-hand in the mood other than the concluding lightsaber duel and that's when she fights these two dudes in the junkyard and if I were being nitpicky here I'd say it's technically not really hand-to-hand combat because she's armed with a big metal staff she never fights unarmed in the movie she's always got a blaster a staff or a lightsaber and have you seen videos of Daisy Ridley's workouts now I have purely for research purposes you understand and she's hardly a weak person I mean I'm over 200 pounds and I wouldn't want her hitting me in the head with a big metal pole and let's think about these guys like who are these guys they're wearing hoods and masks we don't even know what species they are we don't even know if they're men actually they could be anything under there for all we know and they're unarmed and I think Stefon missed this but this scene is played as a joke Finn sees ray under attack and runs over to help and halfway there he realizes he doesn't have to now this scene is giving some information to the audience you know ray knows how to fight with the staff but there's also some comedy in Finn's unnecessary - to help and Finn's surprised that he doesn't need to help out only works as a joke if the audience has an understanding that it is a rare thing for women to be able to defend themselves in the way that ray can anyway next up ray is fantastic at flying spaceships and fixing the falcon ray on the other hand has spent her youth picking up garbage Wally style but is able to pull off the most ridiculous aerial maneuvers on an unfamiliar spaceship out flying professional pilots trained from childhood so Reyes apparently fantastic at flying various spaceships now the only spaceship that ray flies on screen if we don't count this little speeder thing is the Falcon now first off Stefan says that Ray has never flown a spaceship before so you see boys trained from birth to fight or terrible at fighting but girls who've never flown a spaceship are immediate experts who can outfly relentlessly trained pilot but this is directly contradicted by a line of dialogue in the movie now shoot a fly Thanks did you do that I don't know how much free ships but I'm never so ray has flown ships before and Stefan says that the Millennium Falcon is an unfamiliar spaceship for write that but I don't know why because she seems to know a lot about it Donna position is down there the ship hasn't run in years who hurt her okay I stole it from unkar plutt he stole it from the irving boys who stole it from ducain some move milker put a compressor on the ignition line unkar plutt did I thought it was a mistake to put too much stress on a hyperdrive you see ray works for this guy who she was left with as a child and he owns the Millennium Falcon and that's how she knows about it now Stephan goes on to be annoyed about how ray knows how to fix a problem with the Falcon when Han didn't when standing with Han Solo at the controls of the Millennium Falcon ray fixes a problem that Han Solo cannot even identify she also goes below deck to repair its malfunctioning innards I mean come on Han Solo flew and maintained the Millennium Falcon for decades knew it inside and out then this vapid ACI wanders in with no knowledge of the complex spacecraft and knows exactly what to do to fix problems but I have a couple of explanations for this first off Rey is a scavenger who pokes around inside spaceships and strips them for parts so I guess I give you some knowledge about the mechanics of how spaceships work secondly the problem with the Falcon is to do with a modification that happened after Han had lost the Falcon you see this guy Ray's boss made some of his own modifications so since Rey was there when whatever it was was modified it stands to reason she'd know more about it than Han and know how to undo it additionally here I remember it being played for a joke in Empire that Han is not exactly a complete authority on how to fix the Falcon I believe sir it says that the power coupling on the negative axis has been polarized I'm afraid we have to replace it of course I'll have to replace it here Chewie hmm I think we better replace the negative power coupling also is very fantastic at flying the Falcon you know the first thing she does when she takes off his crash it into the ground and then all of this stuff and she can't get the shields up and then the TIE fighters at landing shots on the Falcon you see this scene is the scene where the heroes learn to work together and they barely scrape by I think the movies pretty good at showing that rey and finn are not that good at flying the Falcon actually this is not how a fantastic pilot flies a ship why didn't Stefan see any of this I guess all the feminism got in the way and there's a comparison to Luke to be made here Luke is a farmer why does he know how to fly an x-wing and he seems to know all the controls and can identify problems with the ship r2 that stabilizers broken loose again see if you can lock it down you know why is Stefan seemingly more willing to accept Luke as a skilled pilot and not Rey there's a similar amount of evidence for each early on we see them looking into the distance dreaming of bigger things they play with something that lets the audience know they want to be a pilot there's a line of dialogue that lets the audience know they can fly we need a pilot you bet I could I'm not such a bad pilot myself of the city and that's about it does even a disbelieving line from Han about their piloting abilities but who's gonna fly it kid you where's the pilot I'm the product you Luke and Ray are very similar in this regard if we accept Luke as a pilot we have to accept Ray as well next up sword fighting it is nowhere explained how ray gains her miraculous abilities to take on a master swordsman sword fighting is a pretty difficult and dangerous skill to acquire as I remember from playing Macbeth ray simply has the skill and credibly engages in combat against a master swordsman this is beyond ridiculous and it is not a message I want my daughter to see so sword fighting ray shouldn't be a match for kylo Ren who is a stronger force user and trained with the lightsaber and here's the thing she isn't really a match for him the odds have to be evened first in order to give her a shot now Stefan doesn't mention it here but kylo Ren has just killed his father so he's emotionally all messed up and he's been shot in the gut with a weapon that the movie has went out of its way to make seem extremely powerful Kyla was bleeding out and he's punching himself in his wound and he just fought another lightsaber fight during which he was hit with a lightsaber also he's not trying to kill ray either he just wants to turn her to the dark side you need a teacher I could show you the ways of the force and despite all of these disadvantages kylo is still the dominant fighter throughout the duel Rey is running away from him for most of it and I think this fight is great here actually there's some excellent acting throughout it both Finn and Rey look genuinely scared of being hit by a lightsaber and it's clear just from the fight choreography who the superior fighter is Rey only wins because she remembers to use the Force in the end which mirrors Luke using the force at the end of a new hope so ray isn't a fantastic sword fighter really she only barely squeaks out a win over and emotionally distraught opponent who's bleeding out with multiple injuries but let's talk about her force abilities compare this effortless estrogen excellence to Luke Skywalker's slow grind to mastery Luke had to work for three long films to even begin mastering the force apprentice in at the gnarled feet of Yoda for months at a time Rey on the other hand she's a woman see she merely has to frown for 5 or 10 seconds in order to master the force now Stefan's problem here is that he's comparing Rey's character arc over one film to Luke's character arc over free films you know the new trilogy is only 1/3 complete remember and given that Rey meets Luke at the end of the force awakens I'm guessing she's gonna be training with him in the next film like Luke trained with Yoda in Empire Stefan should really be making comparisons to Luke's story in a new hope Luke had no extensive training in that film he just got shot by a little shootie ball thing for a while and he successfully uses the force in that movie to make the killing shot on the Death Star and I'd like to make a point here actually what does Rey actually accomplish during the end of the force awakens you know Luke Skywalker starts the movie as a farm boy and ends it by almost single-handedly destroying the Death Star and saving the entire rebellion Rey has no effect on the destruction of Starkiller base that's all Han Chewie in potin all she does is defeats kylo Ren but the planets already collapsing at that point so it doesn't really affect much really luke's untrained use of the force is much more impactful and raises also the force is a magical power one can't really make declarations about whether or not a character would be able to use magic as proficiently as they do in a work of fiction because it's inherently unrealistic we can only judge by the movie universes internal rules so have any other characters and star wars being seen to use the force without extensive training well for starters anakin in Episode one he has special powers yes he can see things before they happen that's why he appears to have such quick reflexes it's a Jedi trait now someone might argue that this is because Anakin is exceptionally strong with the force by birth because of some prophecy or whatever but this raises a point we don't know who Ray is yet we don't know who her parents are you know maybe she was hidden on jakku because of her incredible force potential or something we don't know we'll have to wait until the other movies come out to learn more there's another important point given the endless hyper competence of modern women and movie and video game combat how could women ever be the victims of physical violence in real life two strong soldiers get their asses kicked by Rey in the movies salt Angelina Jolie regularly throws 495 pounds stick figure combat moves a giant neck bearded men beating them handily since this is all accepted as valid and empowering how could there possibly be any such thing as rape culture or a patriarchy for that matter if women are victims they must be weaker but if they are weaker they obviously can't take on men twice their size and weight which is it ladies if your victims you cannot be fighters if your fighters then you cannot be victims and isn't it dangerous to endlessly encourage women to fight men twice their size why do women ever even bother calling the cops well because it's just a movie Stefan you see the problem is you are only seeing gray as a woman and taking her to be representative of all women instead of a character in her own right you know you're only seeing her gender just because a female movie character has a special skill doesn't mean that movie makers are saying all women have those skills this is honestly a very silly argument that I think is below Stefan's usual standard because it can so easily be reversed you know I don't see Stefan complaining about male characters ability to fight so why do men ever call the police why would men ever need help since we can all apparently fight like Arnie or rocky and the movies you know silly argument now little has been made of an even more hardcore female hypocrisy in the movie Finn terrified of the monstrous intergalactic death cult that raised him to pretty much kill anyone not wearing a Teflon mask wants to run away and hide on distant planets ray roundly condemned Finn for his cowardice making that scornful world war one lemon white feather face that indicates a complete denial of egg accessibility however shortly afterwards Ray has an unpleasant vision and runs away saying she wants to have nothing to do with fighting on the war or anything in other words Ray has nothing but contempt for Finn's fear of those who destroyed his childhood and have the power to destroy entire planets while her fear of a bad dream is portrayed as perfectly legitimate hmm okay if I said you had a choice to go to war or have a bad dream which would you take it is only the modern Western cult of women are wonderful that blinds us to this bottomless hypocrisy so let's talk about Finn and Ray's attempts to run away now Stefan seems to think that the movie presents Finn's desire to run away as cowardly and Ray's desire to run away is completely rational but I've no idea where he's getting that from be honest the movie presents both cases fairly neutral I think it shows two characters running away though one is determined and considered and the other is panicked and overwhelmed and the other characters all have opinions about that but that's all the movie itself makes no moral declarations about who's right or wrong rages panics and runs away and there's no judgment of that action it's just what she does Stefan is doing a special kind of expectant projecting here he's not projecting his own opinions onto the movie he's projecting an opinion he disagrees with onto the movie in order to disagree with it I think the movie siding with the woman / the man how awful I'm gonna disagree with that anti male bias you know it's absurd anyway remember earlier when Stefan said that the movie showed no negative effects of childhood trauma well here it is Stefan Rey is so fixated on a past and returning to jakku that when Mars tells her what she already knows that her family are never coming back for her she panics and flees she's paralyzed by her past and she can't move forward and accept the future she can't let go of her childhood trauma of being abandoned and we can say the same thing about Finn wanting to flee he's been so traumatized by the first order that he wants to run away rather than face them again and what about kylo Ren you know his whole thing is being emotionally traumatized this stefan is exactly what you were asking for earlier but you missed it because you were fixated on an imagined anti male bias women are not wonderful they are people anything else is sexism excessive praise arises from the same bigotry matrix as excessive criticism yes pay attention black people now I don't really have much to say about this I include it here only to ask what it means you know at what point was Stefan making there I genuinely can't figure it out and answers in the comments please and let us Institute a cast of movie masculinity called the ball crush test which goes like this do men and women die in equal proportions if not it is this not very anti male sexism are there equal numbers of male and female villains I'm guessing not ah if there are female villains is there villainy explained in a sympathetic backstory by Maleficent do male villains get the same sympathetic backstories when male villains are killed is their death more brutal than female villains if male villains target women are they depicted as more evil than the male villains who target men do women sacrifice themselves to save men at least to the degree that men sacrifice themselves to save women if these standards are not met you're not watching a movie you are watching anti-male war propaganda because it dehumanizes and objectifies men let us deploy the ancient saying that the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names this is not art this is worn ography and that's my favorite part of every Stefon video right there the last five seconds where he stares right at you with the intensity of a man trying to make your head explode using only his mind so I want to address one part specifically here from Stephan so-called ball crush test and it's when he asks if male villains get sympathetic back stories like for instance Maleficent and again this movie is entirely the wrong movie to make that point about since yes here kylo Ren is presented sympathetically kylo is my favorite character in the movie honestly I think it's incredibly clever to make him angsty and unstable Vader fanboy you know he's a Vader copycat obviously but it's justified by his character and I really appreciate that but yet kylo is not a mustache twirling villain he's an interesting guy really and he's got a surprising amount of depth and complexity relative to the usual level of depth in Star Wars villains anyway so I'd like to wrap up here with perhaps Stefan's weirdest point and I didn't really understand this one I don't think so have a listen the resentments against men harbored by abandoned boys and their bitter clinging single mothers showed up in the all-male evil of the Empire and the endless phallic symbols scattered throughout the movie from Darth Vader's helmet to light sabers to the insemination sequence of navigating a dangerous trench to drop a tiny sperm into a giant Death Star egg in which birth is destruction the modern semi socialist state made necessary by the collapse of Western families the welfare state is in reality the single mother state is shown by the giant Death Star egg which has the capacity to destroy entire civilizations as unleashed and state-subsidized female hypergamy has repeatedly done throughout human history now this is kind of a weird take and I don't really know what to make of it you know the Death Star as the well first date it seems like a contradiction of what Stefan says prior to that about the all-male empire representing a hatred of men so the Empire are all male because abandoned boys and single mothers Harbor resentments against men so men have to be the bad guys ever the evil men built the welfare state the deaf star and they're using its power of Unleashed female hypergamy to destroy civilizations did I get that right I honestly have no idea either way and I'm sorry to say I really am but this comparison is really just very silly you know to look at the Deaf star and say yeah well that thing is clearly bad and evil so it therefore must represent things that I don't like in real life such as the well first date and women it's such a it's a laughably direct comparison to draw you see that that the bad thing is blowing up the planet well that's bad and if you think about it that's basically what women do isn't it you know it's kind of like what women do that is with the welfare state they blow up the planet with their hypergamy nonsense thanks a lot for watching sorry to go back to the well with Stefan so quickly especially with so many other channels to get to but I couldn't stop thinking about him to be honest in its those eyes I get lost in them and remember to like and subscribe well if you liked it anyway and there's a donation link on the YouTube banner there so maybe click it for a complete laughs you absolute madman you and stay tuned for more rubbish

Channel: undefined

Views: 467,704

Rating: 4.8529148 out of 5

Keywords: stefan molyneux, the force awakens, shaun jen

Id: 4iqN68PejEc

Length: 33min 20sec (2000 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 24 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/bigbiff121]

God I just love Shaun so much. Thanks for reminding me of this :)