Dissent not tolerated at the Prequel Appreciation Society

Quite sensible, actuallyHaving recently discovered this blog's nemesis, I occasionally wander over to have a look. Ha ha, no I don't. But it came up on my Google news feed so I decided to make another visit.

The Star Wars Prequel Appreciation Society blog was already a little funny, with its elaborate limitation of liability and uninfectious enthusiasm ("If you can’t imagine Star Wars without Padmé and her handmaidens, Coruscant, padawans, clonetroopers, butt-kicking Yoda, Darth Maul, the Jedi Council, podraces, Qui-Gon Jinn, Count Dooku, Watto, Naboo, General Grievous, Ahsoka Tano, or even good ol’ Jar Jar, then this site is your Club Med. Celebrate all that rocks about Episodes I-III and The Clone Wars!!"). 

The SWPAS has just got a bit stranger with the addition of "RULES OF THE HOUSE". It appears that the Society's webmaster is cracking down on dissenting opinions about the merits of The Phantom Menace and whatever the other two are called. From the Rules:

This site is about one thing and it’s about celebrating the Star Wars prequels and the saga as a whole. In order to accomplish this goal, please keep these rules–created by endless Senate committees–in mind:

1. No bashing or excessive criticism of the films.

This includes but is not limited to the quality of performances, writing, direction, story, etc.. If you don’t like the movies or want to use this as a soapbox for your gripes, this site is NOT for you. Gripe away on your own site or where they allow it; don’t do it here. No insults directed at the cast either.

2. No bashing or excessive criticism of George Lucas and his family.

This includes but is not limited to referring to him as “greedy,” “a hack,” “a lousy director,” etc. or cutting comments on his appearance, his family, or anything personal.

3. Commenters must be polite and civil.

There is to be no flaming, trolling, baiting, insults, excessive nitpicking, contrarianism, and all-around smarta–ery directed at other commenters or the webmiss. Save it for Sheldon and the Comic Book Guy.

The origin of these new rules is explained in a post by the moderator from late February:

I started SWPAS because I wanted to help the Star Wars prequels. I wanted to do that because I’ve always been about helping the saga overall. I wanted a place for likeminded people to gather and have it be something different from the cauldron of ugly I’ve found just about everywhere Star Wars is discussed. There’s a reason why I no longer associate with fan groups in real life; I’m sick of being on the defensive even among other “fans.” Especially among other fans.

So please understand I don’t want to be on the defensive about the prequels, the people associated with them, or Star Wars itself here.

Things got a little heated in an exchange with a commenter last night and let me just say, I did not mean to hurt anyone’s feelings and I apologize if I did. Sometimes, after a long stressful day I don’t handle things the best way.

That said, I think that in order to keep things low maintenance, I’m going to have to draw up some explicit rules for posting here, posting on the Facebook page, and for submissions so that we’re all on the same page and everyone understands what the expectations are for this site. I’ll let you know when they’re done.

My first reaction on reading all this was to laugh. A lot. My second reaction was about the same. The third time round, however, I started feeling a little sorry for the poor blogger whose Society is under siege by trolls--right-thinking trolls but trolls all the same. 

I then found myself warming up to the unnamed SWPAS blogger even more upon reading his (her?) post about Simon Pegg taking a role on the Clone Wars cartoon. The post, dramatically entitled Betrayal, is actually not far from my own reaction on learning that Mr. Pegg, the noted prequel-hater, had signed on to voice Dengar on the cartoon. I wouldn't go so far as to say, as the blogger does, "It’s obvious Pegg himself has no integrity", but it is a bit incongruous to say the least. And I couldn't help but laugh in agreement when I read, "What’s next, Clone Wars crew? Bringing in fellow prequel hater Patton Oswalt for another episode? How about inviting the Red Letter Media guy to guest direct?" 

Ah, the Star Wars Prequel Appreciation Society. It's good to have a nemesis.

The Star Wars Prequel Appreciation Society

Hmm, what movies are opening this weekend?

Let's see (courtesy of Rotten Tomatoes): 

Rampart

75%

Woody Harrelson, Sigourney Weaver, Robin Wright, Ned Beatty

Los Angeles, 1999 - Officer Dave Brown (Harrelson) is a Vietnam vet and a Rampart Precinct cop, dedicated to doing "the people's dirty work" and asserting his own code of justice, often blurring the lines between right and wrong to maintain his… More

In Darkness

88%

Robert Wieckiewicz, Benno Fürmann, Agnieszka Grochowska, Maria Schrader

From acclaimed director Agnieszka Holland, In Darkness is based on a true story. Leopold Socha, a sewer worker and petty thief in Lvov, a Nazi occupied city in Poland, one day encounters a group of Jews trying to escape the liquidation of the ghetto.… More

Chico & Rita

95%

Limara Meneses, Eman Xor Oña, Mario Guerra, Lenny Mandel

Cuba, 1948. Chico is a young piano player with big dreams. Rita is a beautiful singer with an extraordinary voice. Music and desire unite them as they chase their dreams and each other from Havana to New York to Paris, Hollywood and Las Vegas. With… More

The Turin Horse

84%

János Derzsi, Erika Bók, Mihály Kormos, Ricsi

On January 3, 1889 in Turin, Italy, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the doorway of number six, Via Carlo Albert. Not far from him, a cab driver is having trouble with a stubborn horse. The horse refuses to move, whereupon the driver loses his… More

Kung Fu Joe

--

Zak Van Winkle, Jeremy Parrish, David Neevel, Victoria Maurette

The legend of Kung FU Joe explodes onto the screen as a mysterious Mad Scientist tries to take over the world with the help of an army of hunchbacks! When Shaft is not available then the local neighborhood must to turn to another legend - the Brother… More

Lots of great choices! I'm not missing anything important, am I?

Raise your children right with This Sort Of Thing t-shirts and onesies

This Sort Of Thing is taking the plunge into the dubious world of online t-shirt sales. First up are designs aimed straight at your infant children. Get them off to a good start with clothing that tells the world you remember a time when Star Wars movies were not crap.

Daddy says the prequels suck

Daddy knows best. Start your child off right with this unambiguous message of hope and peace.

Pew pew

Any Star Wars fan old enough to have both children and a job will remember his "pew pew" days with fondness. Relive your childhood through your children--isn't that why you had them?

So go buy dozens of these insightful and artistic creations right away. At $2 profit a pop I'll have paid off my student loans in no time.

Zazzle: This Sort Of Thing shop

The enfeeblement of Darth Vader

Former US vice-president, torture afficianado and rotten hunter Dick Cheney has recently said (not for the first time) that he likes, and is even honoured by, the nickname "Darth Cheney" given to him by some opponents. 

This is, of course, just a bit of politicking by a politician. But it illustrates a phenomenon that is starting to drive me nuts. Ever since the prequels, or at least since the last of them, Darth Vader has been moving in the popular imagination from what he really was--a genocidal maniac who experienced a rather unconvincing last-minute change of heart--into some sort of hero.

I doubt whether comparisons to Darth Vader would have been so readily embraced by a politician in 1977, 1980, 1983 or even 1999. In the course of the original three films we see Darth Vader torture a princess, participate (at least as an accessory) in the complete destruction of an entire planet, murder an old man (although Kenobi admittedly let him do it), sufficate several underlings (usually to death), torture a man without even asking him any questions, cut off his own son's hand, cavort around the galaxy in transports bearing names like "Death Star" and "Star Destroyer", and repeatedly do things he consciously knows to be wrong in the name of "the power of the Dark Side of the Force". He is about as bad as a movie villain gets in a film that can legally be shown to a six-year-old.

How, then, has Darth Vader now become an acceptable, and even adorable, way for Germans (of all people) to sell Volkswagens to the world?

The answer cannot lie in the last fifteen minutes of Return of the Jedi alone. It is all very nice that Luke finally got to see his father's pale and scary face before he died. But what would have happened had he not died? What would Luke have done with him after dragging him onto that imperial shuttle? He could hardly take him to Endor for the Ewok barbeque. "Hey everyone, this is my dad. He's been blowing up planets and trying to kill you for years, but it's cool, he's good now. Could someone get him a beer?" If the rebels were saints, they would arrest him and put him on trial for genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against just about every other species in the galaxy. More likely the film would end rather like it did--with Vader's body burning, but alive.

Vader's death-bed confession was the least convincing part of the original trilogy. (A close second was Obi-Wan's explanation to Luke that he had not really lied about his father, he had in fact told him the truth "from a certain point of view". Dicky-Wan Kenobi might be as appropriate a nickname for the former vice-president and his WMD-imagining pals in the Bush Jr White House.) Had Joseph Stalin shown affection for a long-lost child in the last 30 minutes of his life, he would still have fully deserved to go down in history as a murderous thug. But at least Lucas did not dwell on this implausible bit of happyendingism: the final scene between Luke and Vader, which is admittedly dramatic and even somewhat touching, ends quickly enough not to give the viewer time to start questioning whether it makes any sense.

Then come the prequels. Now Lucas tells us the entire concept of Star Wars from the very begining was that it would tell the tale of Darth Vader's fall and redemption. Of all the many mistakes one can find in the prequel trilogy, this is pre-eminent. The prequels should not have revolved around Anakin Skywalker. The tragic hero of the prequels ought to have been Obi-Wan Kenobi--an immensely talented but arrogant young man who allows his ambition and self-confidence to delude him into taking on as a pupil a younger man (not a five-year-old, not a teenager) whom he was incapable of properly preparing for the demands of life as a jedi. Kenobi's vanity not only ruins the life of Anakin Skywalker--whose flawed training from Kenobi proves wholly inadequate to the task of controlling his immense innate powers--but leads directly to the fall of the entire republic and the coming of the Galactic Empire.

I did not invent that storyline. George Lucas did. It is what he told us happened between Obi-Wan and Anakin in the original trilogy. But then he decided he wanted Liam Neeson.

The rest of the story is too drearily familiar to state in any detail. The prequels are awful and Vader is recast as an object of pity. Nobody capable of tying his own shoes is persuaded by this, but there are enough children and morons in the world to make it almost true. And Lucas is more than happy to encourage woolly thinking about Darth Vader, partly in a desperate bid to depict the prequels as having actually had some sort of satisfactory plot, but mostly because Asian electronic companies will pay him large licensing fees to use Vader's likeness on telephones and Vader's voice on GPS navigation systems.

In short, the Dark Side is looking sunnier, and more banal, all the time. Dick Cheney is right: Darth has become a compliment. 

Fox Nation: Cheney: Honored to be Compared to Darth Vader

Cheney: Being Darth Vader not so bad