The force is female now. In Hollywood terms, that means feminism has taken over the Star Wars franchise, and that's become pretty apparent. This means that certain male-centric themes are out, and female-focused storylines are in. Apparently, this also means that eye candy for men is out because it's sexist, but a nearly nude scene featuring a well-built man is still good to go.
As reported by Bounding Into Comics, "The Acolyte," Disney's latest serving of over-produced, under-developed abuse of a once-great franchise, features a scene where the main antagonist disrobes and wades into a pool of water. The camera makes sure to hover on the toned musculature of the man's body, being careful not to sink too low but still revealing enough to be overtly attention-grabbing to women. The scene goes on for a couple of minutes before the protagonist, a woman, sneaks over to pick up his lightsaber. Once she has it in her hand, the villain, knowing she's there, says, "Feels good, doesn't it?"
The show's head writer, Leslye Headland, a woman who was once the right-hand of shamed producer Harvey Weinstein, justified the scene in the show by saying that it was necessary for the plot:
Pressed during a post-Episode 6 interview with Collider’s Maggie Lovitt as to how far she was “allowed to push things with how much skin was shown”, Headland explained, “Lucasfilm really believed in my vision. From a narrative perspective, it had to happen. It had to.”
“He did, like, a Steven Seagal neck snap in the [previous] episode,” said the showrunner. “How do you, at all, get from that to humanity? The only way to do that is to show him in such a wildly vulnerable position, and it has to be visual. I can’t think of something more vulnerable than someone holding a lightsaber on someone who’s that exposed. I just don’t. I felt like he was so merciless in the previous episode that he had to stand in front of her and say, ‘You absolutely can kill me.’ Essentially, ‘I’m at your mercy.’ It couldn’t feel like a put-on. It had to feel like he genuinely was like, ‘Totally. You can do this. There’s nobody around.’
“‘No one’s gonna judge you for it, so what’s up?'” Headland continued. “And again, it feeds in narratively to her decisions of still upholding this. He says, ‘You’re wondering if it’s honorable to kill me like this. You’re still hanging on to the rules. You’re still hanging on to this code.’ Listen, part of it is just decency, and she’s a good person, but I think he’s also starting to teach her. He’s also starting to go, ‘I deserve this.'”
Headland isn't a very good writer, as there are a myriad of ways this scene could have been done without the antagonist needing to be nude. Throughout the course of this show's existence, Headland has demonstrated her lack of writing talent, and the reviews show it. As of right now, the audience review score is a meager 14 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
The franchise has been abused under the reign of Kathleen Kennedy, who took the Star Wars brand into the dirt and continues forcing it further into the ground with politicization, bad writing, and hypocritical moments just like this one.
To be sure, it's not that Star Wars revealed skin that's the issue. One of the most famous outfits in movie history involved Carrie Fisher in her "Slave Leia" outfit from the original trilogy, and it was pretty risqué.
The issue is that if this was a scene involving a nude woman having enough of her body being revealed and for a long enough time to fully soak it in, there would have been no end to the complaints of sexism and anger about feeding into the "male gaze." Among those screaming the loudest about it would have been the Disney/Lucasfilm staff.
Indeed, Disney seems to be full of hypocrisies. It bills itself as an inclusive company, yet recently, James O'Keefe's undercover agents got one of its executives to openly divulge that Disney does not promote or hire white men, alleging that the company is very racist with its staffing policies.
And now we have this: a company that believes a sexy female on screen isn't proper, but a nude man apparently is.
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