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I was listening to a video about the new Star Wars stuff that came out, and it brought back up something I keep on tripping over every time the discussions come up: Blazing Saddles.

Blazing Saddles is a comedy Movie produced by Mel Brooks in 1974. The main character is a black man in 1874 who is working on the railroad. He gets himself in trouble, and eventually finds himself the sheriff of a town who hates him because he's black. He goes through a typical western plot of the scheming senator trying to destroy the town to make himself rich, but the twist is that part of the way he was going to do that was by making a black guy the sheriff. Instead, the new sheriff comes up with a plan to save the town by building a fake town nearby and slowing down the bandits by building a toll booth. The fake town is booby-trapped with explosives. The rest of the movie descends into a fourth wall breaking gong show. All throughout, the movie constantly made jokes dragging the racism of 1874 into the limelight as an object of ridicule.

I saw it for the first time a few years ago, and it was absolutely hilarious. It was massively successful at the box office, making 119 million dollars on a 2.6 million dollar budget.

What does Blazing Saddles have to do with the new Star Wars?

Two things:

First, the movie was as I understand it pretty cutting edge for the day, but it was a decade where many cutting edge movies were being put out. It had a black lead, it directly addressed racism as a core plot point, and as I recall it had more n-bombs than the freeside of the fediverse.

Second, 1974 was (sorry, my Gen-X mutuals) 50 years ago. A child born the day that movie came out (sorry! sorry!) are starting to look at retirement, and anyone who saw it in theatres is likely already well past retirement age (sorry Boomers!). The key point here is that it's a movie that's been around for a long time.

Really, there are things we can criticize the boomers as a bloc for, but it's historical revisionism to look at this movie and say "they didn't have black people in movies, they didn't discuss racism, and if they had black people in those movies white people wouldn't watch them" -- obviously all of that is wrong.

Star Wars was released in 1977, and it did a lot of things too -- Everyone knows Princess Leia was one of the early girlboss characters, but besides that the assault on the death star had a lady named Mon Mothra in charge, and in the movie it wasn't a big deal, everyone was focused on the mission.

The Empire Strikes back introduced a black character, Lando Calrissian (If I get the Star Wars names wrong here, I'm not even sorry) who was the black leader of an entire city and a really cool character to boot. Everyone remembers Lando.

In Return of the Jedi in 1983, it explicitly reveals Leia was Luke's sister and also strong in the Force, so if Luke fails, she would be the galaxy's last hope, not directly showing a female jedi because that's not what the story was about, but making it clear girls could be jedis.

The Prequel trilogy introduced Motherfuckin Samuel L. Jackson playing a Motherfuckin black motherfuckin jedi. Everyone was made of planks of wood in that movie, but apparently other media helped flesh out his character as incredibly interesting.

I'm enumerating all these things to show that Star Wars already hit all these notes before many of the actresses rambling on about diversity were even born. They're acting like they're doing something really amazing that will change the world, but the world already changed, and it was the Baby Boomers that changed it. These people are walking into the middle of Washington DC and pretending they founded America.

In short, it's literally not progress. Considering how poorly done these diversity roles are done and how poorly the media is taken because they focus first on pretending to be groundbreaking and then maybe sometime after with making something people actually want to see, it's worse than nothing because we already have had competent people make good works people look back on fondly. When a bad piece of media carries your message, it hurts the cause as much as a good piece of media carrying your message helps your cause.

The marketing juggernaut has taken stuff that just kind of "Was" and changed it into a bullet point for the marketing blurb. "Star wars 4: we no longer murder women and minorities, and we're also no asbestos free!"

I also feel like it lets people who aren't nearly as competent as their parents generation pretend they're doing something important when in reality they're just failing to live up to the standards of those who came before. "Well even if our movie sucks you need to watch it because we have black people!" -- Nobody cares. If you take Star Wars as a whole continuity, there isn't really any sort of real minority that isn't somehow represented. What they're doing isn't important, which is a deathblow because it also isn't competently produced or entertaining.

Some might call the problem tokenism, I think that's wrong -- the problem isn't necessarily tokenism, it's worse: With tokenism, you include a black character to meet a quota. That can mean the black character is a token addition but otherwise inoffensive (and in fact can end up as a great character in their own right under a good writer). This is an active, religious thespiannic diversity. It's shouting from the streetcorner so everyone can see you being ever so pious. And as part of the performative aspect it stops being inoffensive and starts actively trying to be offensive. You see it in the interviews around the modern movies -- nobody's seen the movie yet, but they're railing against fans who hate the movie, especially "STRAIGHT WHITE MEN" because they hope that muckraking will cause controversy and attacking the core demographic of the film was a good way of doing that. Thankfully, people are getting wise to the grift, and so instead of getting outraged when these people say stupid things, they just ignore them, and now that the money is running out we're seeing the trickling of a sea change. It goes beyond merely performative, and into the thespiannic -- like a stage actor screaming their lines so everyone in the back row can hear.

"Oh, this movie [that was just announced and nobody knows about yet] there's so many people attacking me, I got death threats!" uh huh? On the Internet, even? Sounds scary. And they were just lurking, waiting to jump on you, they didn't even wait for the film to be announced! Horrifying.

If you're actually breaking barriers, you don't get full backing of the Hollywood hype machine. The suits aren't going to want to support you because you're trying something new and dangerous. In that sense, Gina Carano's actions are more cutting edge than any of the management approved controversy being drummed up, and they fired her and blacklisted her.

This concept of "Safe edgy" is interesting to think about, but it isn't new. TV in the 90s was filled with TV shows or advertisements pretending they were pushing the edge when in reality they were doing exactly what the execs wanted them to be doing. Once you know what you're looking at (Don't you DARE spell "Extreme" with an E at the beginning because we're XTREME here! "No way!" WAAAAAYYYY!) the verisimilitude (appearance of being real) breaks down and you realize you're looking at a square pretending to be edgy and cool. And to be clear on something, there was a lot of fake edgy back then, but there was also a lot of real edgy and those guys were constantly one quip from having their show canceled by the networks. A lot of them didn't make it, but they left behind great works.

The veneer of fake edgy hid milquetoast products back in the day, and often you'd get your XTREME LEMONADE and find that it was competent lemonade, not great but not horrible, just boring. I think part of the problem today is that fake edgy often is a mask over a mask; You're obviously being fake and so under that mask is something, but the boring underneath the fake edgy mask is the actual mask over what is often the absolutely horrible people inhabiting Hollywood and other media industries.

But we found that in the following decades that a lot of our heroes in Media were terrible. You'd have some actress up on the big stage and she would make a point to heartfeltedly thank Harvey Weinstein who that actress probably needed to do something unspeakable to in order to get the part, right before they paid lip service to whatever social cause is trendy this week. We didn't know, but they did and they were complicit. And anyone who thinks that that was an isolated incident and that everything is fine now is in denial. For all the "we just love women and minorities!", it's a paper thin facade intended to cover up the window through which you can see Jeffrey Epsteins private island.

I know, that's a lot to think about from just a bunch of idiotic hollywood actors pretending they're saving the world by selling you a shitty movie, but it isn't like I'm interested in the movies themselves anymore.