The Hollywood Reporter (via Daily Wire) reports that the Star Wars franchise under Disney’s stewardship has gotten to the point where sexual violence is openly alluded to, in the latest season of Andor, which is even laced with leftist political metaphors:
Disney+’s acclaimed Andor has stretched the creative boundaries of Star Wars in countless ways, bringing a grown-up sensibility to a galaxy far, far away.
Yet even by Andor standards, a scene from the second season is leaving fans shocked: An Imperial officer tries to violently rape a Rebel fugitive, Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona), who is hiding out in a farming settlement while Imperial troops are rounding up “undocumented” citizens (read some sample reactions below).
The sequence plays out over the course of the show’s third episode (the first three episodes were released all at once on Tuesday) with the officer’s flirtation with Bix turning growing increasingly persistent and eventually cumulating with a brutal life-and-death struggle. Bix eventually gets the upper hand and the officer is killed. But Andor boldly leaves zero ambiguity as to what viewers just witnessed as Bix screams, “He tried to rape me!”
Star Wars is a franchise that has never — in film form — shown even consensual sex. During its first season, Andor pushed the envelope with scenes that suggested sex was about to take place, or just had (much like old Hollywood films during the Hays Code censorship era).
When asked about the Bix scene, Andor creator Tony Gilroy explained to The Hollywood Reporter that when telling a story about a war, shying away from sexual assault didn’t feel truthful.
“I get one shot to tell everything I know — or can discover, or that I’ve learned — about revolution, about battles, with as many incidents and as many colors as I can get in there, without having [the story] tip over,” says Gilroy. “I mean, let’s be honest, man: The history of civilization, there’s a huge arterial component of it that’s rape. All of us who are here — we are all the product of rape. I mean armies and power throughout history [have committed rape]. So to not touch on it, in some way … It just was organic and it felt right, coming about as a power trip for this guy. I was really trying to make a path for Bix that would ultimately lead to clarity — but a difficult path to get back to clarity.”
Asked about Disney’s reaction to the scene, Gilroy says he didn’t get any studio pushback.
“No one ever ever said anything about it, ever,” Gilroy said. “But I mean, we have limits on what we can do. We are very aware of what we can do sexually and violence wise. Those limits are made very clear.”
Bix has had a particularly brutal journey on the show so far, having already been captured and tortured by the Imperial Security Bureau during season one, an experience which has left her traumatized.
I’m sorry, but this is too much. And all this was approved by a studio that in the past decade stopped selling merchandise based on princess Leia Organa’s throttling of Jabba the Hut in the Return of the Jedi, fighting back agains the alien overlord who chained her, using his own metal against his neck. Funny how scenes that don’t involve any overt sexual violence are considered expendable compared to those that do.
The Star Wars franchise has certainly jumped the shark this time. What also makes it additionally troubling is what Variety reveals, which sounds, again, political, and casts doubt on the notion this has a “grown-up” sensibility:
Bix is certainly going through it on the show. In the Season 1 finale, written by creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy, she’s rescued by Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) after suffering through debilitating torture at the hands of the Empire. When the Season 2 premiere picks up a year later, she’s living on the agrarian planet Mina-Rau as an engineer who is often referred to, quite pointedly, as “undocumented.”
While Arjona notes that she shot the Mina-Rau episodes a year and a half ago, the (unintended) relevance to the Trump administration’s relentless war on so-called illegals is not lost on her. “It’s just mirroring that we keep stumbling on the same rock,” she says. “It’s one of my favorite parts about the show. It’s relevant now, and it’s going to be relevant in five years and 10 and 20 and 50 years, because we keep doing the same thing.”
There is, perhaps, no clearer demonstration of that concept than the sequence in Episode 3, also written by Gilroy, when an Imperial officer, Lt. Krole (Alex Waldmann), shows up unannounced at Bix’s home when she’s alone and announces that he knows her immigration status — underlining the power he holds over her future.
[…] In the days Arjona worked with director Ariel Kleinman on Bix’s brawl with Krole, she says the “only thing that I really fought for” was Bix first breaking free by backhanding him. “There was something about backslapping somebody that is exactly what I wish my reaction would be if I were ever in that moment,” she says. “It just felt really liberating to be able to do that. I had a lot of women in my heart at that time. For any woman, for anyone, when you have a stranger, a male stranger, in your own space, everything becomes survival.”
Somehow, after all the time they spent pandering to LGBT ideology, I don’t think this means they recognize why it’s dangerous to allow men to enter a women’s bathroom simply because they say they’re a woman too. All they seem to care about is the conservative movement’s opposition to illegal immigrants who’ve committed alarming sexual assaults in the past few years. And then, to show what contempt they have for the real victims, they make law enforcement look like the offenders. There was recently an episode of Law & Order on TV that did the same thing. As a result, one can reasonably wonder if these plots are all deliberately passed about in Hollywood for everyone to copy-and-paste. Maybe that’s what the cast and staff of Andor mean when talk about the “same thing”.
If you want to write up a sci-fi tale involving sexual violence, that’s one thing. But why it has to be forced upon an existing franchise that was expected to be family friendly is insulting to the intellect. It practically compounds the perception that in today’s Hollywood, and even before, sex as we know it should only be depicted negatively. And you wonder why birthrates have been plummeting so badly, because sex is made to look that ugly. This can surely provide a lesson in how art can influence reality (or how life imitates art). And again, weird how Leia’s scene fighting back against Jabba with the chains his goons put on her is considered bad for selling art based on, but a sexually violent scene that’s built on grounds even remotely anti-conservative is considered acceptable in the years following.
It’s pretty clear the SW franchise has gone beyond the pale, is no longer worth watching, and it’s time to start staying at home and not going to theaters, and turning off the TV set simultaneously. I hesitate to think where the comics will go next. The franchise itself really has become heavy-handed leftist propaganda.
Originally published unannotated here.
English (US) · 