Rise of Something-or-other.
I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists’ ideas as well as the critics’ thinking. With fiction I can never forget that none of it really happened, that it’s all just made up by the author.
So in other news of the-criticism-of-things-I-have-no-intention-of-seeing-myself, the Laverys went to see the new Star Wars and then had a conversation about it, and why would I subject myself to almost three hours of G-mergate capitulation when instead I could enjoy a frothy interplay of ideas that careens from Grace, taking up the question Lili Loofbourow asked, back when the first (the seventh) first came out—
The thing that has stunned me about Star Wars, for decades, has been the franchise’s extreme casualness about mass death. In The Rise of Skywalker, someone destroys a planet as a kind of flirtatious joke—“This’ll light a fire under their asses!”—and the effects of that catastrophe disappear from the screen within a couple of seconds.
—to Daniel’s reaction to (the lack of) the queering of (the lack of) Finn and Poe—
All I can think of with that “two men refusing to kiss? That’s a story” is the old “headless body found in topless bar” bit about what makes for really good headlines. I picture Sedgwick in full JJ Jameson drag, complete with cigar, yelling over the phone: “Two men refusing to kiss? Get me the photographs!”
—so anyway. Go; read.
