In 2012, Kathleen Kennedy rose from co-chairman to chairwoman, president of LucasFilm,
and LucasFilm forever transformed from his films to her films. Her stories. Kathleen’s Heroes.
Here is how one bright woman brought incredible
success to Disney and changed the entertainment manscape forever.
The prequel trilogy was not poetry, it was a syllabus for a course on white male privilege.
The Phantom Menace opens with a scroll no one remembers and
a woman captain. Progression… not really.
Within seconds, she takes orders from two hooded figures.
As it turns out, the privileged phallic protagonists.
The galaxy may be a long time ago and far,
far away, but it is just as white and just as male as the Milky Way.
All the action, all the plot, is all about Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon.
An old white male jedi master and his young white male apprentice. When they
run into another one, the chosen one, is it her?
How about him? Could it be…?
No… then let’s wonder who it is…
Of course! A white boy wonder!
The Phantom Menace is not a menace, but a misogynist, and the phantom, really is white.
Where was the diversity in 1999? It was here.
The girl in Leon as Queen Amidala; at least this time a queen, not a princess,
but still dressed up like a sci-fi blow up doll.
Why does she have ears longer than Scooby Doo’s?
To show her role is not to speak, but to listen… and make babies.
Is this the sound of representation?
Yes, if by representation, Jar Jar Binks represents nails on a chalkboard.
The accent is as triggering as the hyenas in the Lion King and
his character as deeply offending as Robert Downey Jnr’s in Tropic Thunder.
The Gungan Mr Bean is obscene and every scene he’s in is an affront to humanity.
Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, whatever title boy George put on it, all the same.
Padme…
bed me.
Anakin woos her like Romeo
and then she kills herself like Juliet.
Only this time, Romeo gets to live…
as a badass burnt-ass robot who conquers the galaxy.
Jar Jar Binks, blink and you’ll miss him…
and you’ll be happy you did.
Mace Windu: Mace Window.
The diverse clones? More diverse cannon fodder.
The prequel trilogy, like the original trilogy,
only had one winner. The white man. Women were wombs and minorities were miniscule or ridiculed.
Enter President Kennedy. The woman to finally bring justice
to the Lucas-verse. [Force Awakens premiere clip]
She had one mission statement [“bring in strong females”] and the way to do that,
[“bring in Daisy Ridley”] Rey was the way and [“diversity really important to us”]
The Force Awakens is The Forced Agenda: [“cast look like audience today”]
Six Star Wars movies, six deadly sins, Queen Kathleen would not allow a seventh.
2015 marked a new dawn, a new day, a new cast
of characters to take the franchise into the light and do what’s right.
Han, Luke and Leia… meet Rey, Finn and Poe.
Star Wars: The Next Generation is next level and the level is Rainbow Road.
The shining star is no longer a boy with a dream on Tatooine, but a woman scavenging junk on Jakku.
The overpowered orphan deserts the desert and becomes a leader,
fighter, pilot and fearsome force user.
The star of Star Wars is finally a strong, independent woman like Kathleen.
Ever wondered what is under a Stormtrooper’s bonnet?
The answer is Finn, a stormtrooper reject now routinely rejected by Rey.
He tags along like Scrappy-Doo before ending the movie in a coma.
No one gets in the way of Rey.
Han stand-in Poe, Joe Bloggs, ace fighter pilot, he’s not quite Han,
he’s half-Cuban, half-Guatemalan, but he is…
still a man.
The origiquels, the prequels,
whiter than a ski trip to Aspen and more male than an NCAA championship.
The newquels: forced diversity awakens.
Fear not, straight white males, for Kathleen’s galaxy does feature
a classic character from the patriarchal canon.
Han Solo.
Chewbacca in toe, his role is to assist Rey on
her hero journey and get chopped in half by his son. The villain.
A white male villain, for in the era of enlightenment,
the bad guy must still be a guy and preferably a white guy.
Kylo Ren fits the bill as an incel Darth Vader wannabe who,
despite his years of training in the ways of the force, can find no way past Rey,
who hasn’t even trained for a day.
No man, no matter his plan, his power or his parent, is a match for the power of woman.
Who is the Supreme Leader? The new dark overlord pulling the strings?
Another white male villain whiter than Vanilla Ice.
The Force Awakens was not just a new New Hope,
but a new blueprint, a rainbow print, for the future of cinema.
Diverse heroes led by strong women and white male villains led by old white men.
Star Wars: Episode 7 hit the jackpot. 2 billion dollars
at the box office and 93% on the Rotten Tomatometer. The success was incredible.
Rogue One soon follows: a prequel to A New Hope,
it tells the story of a band of brothers led by a sister, Jyn Urso.
Unlike Rey, she’s not the best at everything,
she’s not the best at anything, she’s just a damn fine woman martyring for a worthy cause.
Stealing the death star plans to thwart the empire.
Some may say Rogue One was a misstep: Jyn was a woman with weakness, but Kathleen knew better;
she was an heroic leader of men and the catalyst for the downfall of tyranny.
A woman built in Kathleen’s own image. Another incredible success for President Kennedy.
In 2017, all eyes were on The Last Jedi. How could
Episode 8 possibly follow up a movie as awakening as The Force Awakens?
The answer was more of the same:
kill off more white male heroes. Han was chop suey, now Luke is a loopy old man.
The lightsaber that befell an empire falls off
a cliff. The new hope is a miserable old misogynist who refuses to train a woman.
When he does, he is bedazzled by her forceful
beauty and goes on a solo mission against Ben Solo…
only to become stardust.
Sorry Luke, your time in the Sun is over; it’s time to shine a ray of light on women like Rey.
Admiral Holdo says no to the Poe show and inflicts
a devastating blow on the First Order with the lethal Holdo maneuver.
General Leia is back and she comes back from
the dead in a move that shows women are out of the fridge.
Rose is a mean mechanic and superhero starfighter who saves Finn from finishing…
and is the one to move in for the kiss.
Snoke, the old white bloke, cut in half by a Kylo Ren who’s questioning his identity.
“Wait, we are the baddies?”
The heel turns face, tag teams with Rey,
then makes another turn back to baddy.
A storyline straight out of the Vince Russo playbook.
The last moments of The Last Jedi eerily familiar:
Rey divine, everyone else diverse, dead or dreaming of a different galaxy.
Like Snoke, Episode 8’s box office was cut in half. Almost 1 billion
dollars less at the box office, but the response from critics was phenomenal.
91% on the Tomatometer. David Gonzalez in The Cinematic Reel opined, “Star Wars:
The Last Jedi was everything I hoped for and more.”
Another incredible success for the Queen of the Star Wars scene.
The Mando with no name, no face and… no future.
Season one was a revelation, but Kathleen’s ultimate plan was unveiled.
A strong woman played by an actual strong woman, MMA fighter-turned-actress Gina Carano.
The character of Cara Dune was charismatic,
courageous and fully believable, but Gina committed an unforgivable sin.
She listed her Twitter pronouns as beep, bop, boop and cited Godwin’s law on Instagram.
Saint Kathleen was left with no choice.
Gina was too strong and too independent.
All was not lost for women. Season 2 heralded the arrival of a new queen. A new Kathleen.
The big boss Bo-Katan. After womanhandling Mando and calling him a tin man zealot,
she supports him in his quest and then her own conquest.
Season 3… ‘who is he?’
Mando doesn’t take a backseat, he’s in the trunk. Bo-Katan has the keys to the Mandalorian,
and the once star of the show has nowhere to go.
Yet more incredible success for the George successor.
Before The Rise of Skywalker, Star Wars faced questions. Does Rey have a weakness?
Ah. The traditional Hero’s Journey had an arc:
before resolution, transformation. A lesson learned and weakness overcome.
Character development. Rey, no way. Her arc is as flat as a Darth Vader pancake:
nothing to learn, nothing to prove; she’s perfection incarnate.
In the Kennedy-verse, women don’t face a test, they are the test.
In the final film, Emperor Palpatine is somehow
wheeled out of Sith retirement to wage war once more on the galaxy.
If he thought he stood a chance against Luke, one suspects he may now have cataracts in both eyes,
for he surely should have seen no way through Ray.
She gives Kylo a whipping, a kissing, then turns her attention to destroying the insidious Darth.
In a shocking twist, Rey is revealed to be none other than Palpatine’s granddaughter.
Considering her divine power and strength,
it would be no surprise if her parents were also Zeus and Hera.
The old white Palpatine stands no chance against a young white woman and the Emperor evaporates.
Rey’s unquestionable power reigns over the galaxy. Star Wars, it turns out,
was not about him or even him, it was all about her.
The last chapter scored an impressive 86% on Rotten Tomatoes and took home one billion dollars.
The lowest of the new trilogy,
but Kathleen Kennedy’s incredible success had brought justice to an unjust universe.
In 2022, she brought justice to the past,
by bringing back Obi-Wan Kebobi as a middle-aged white male hunted down by the ravenous Reva.
In a move that bucked Kennedy convention, Reva was the villain,
working with the Grand Inquisitor to kill any remaining jedi.
Obi-Wan has forgotten how to use the force and, by the end, Reva forgets she is a villain. One
can hardly wait for season 2: the rise of Reva and the relegation of Kenobi.
After burying Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and neutering the Mandalorian and Obi-Wan,
there was just one last straight white male standing.
Dr Indiana Jones, the most iconic adventurer in the history of the movie business.
A cross between James Bond and David Attenborough, the high-octane archaeologist
was adored by beautiful women, hated by evil men and dynamite at the box office.
Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas were in charge of the first four
films with Kathleen as an associate and producer.
Now, with Stephen and George out of the way, she would have the final say on Indy.
In the Dial of Destiny, the archaic adventurer is 80 years
old and, following the Kennedy blueprint, he’s a miserable old…
who has lost everything.
His marriage: broken down. His son:
six feet under. All his students hate him and his globe-trotting days long gone.
The perfect foil for the perfect woman, Phoebe Waller Bridge.
She swoops in to steal his thunder, steal his MacGuffin and steal his movie.
A genius archaeologist and fearless adventurer,
Helena Shaw has no weakness and no journey; she is Indiana Jones’ answer to Rey.
This time, Kathleen doesn’t kill Indy,
she simply takes away all the qualities that made him so iconic and gives them to Phoebe.
The fifth and final Indiana Jones was hailed by progressive critics and loved by Rotten audiences.
As of July 3, 2023, it has taken home 142 million dollars at the box office.
A weak opening, but an incredible success and
wonderful triumph for social justice and Kathleen Kennedy.
After more than a decade at the helm of Lucasfilm,
President Kennedy has left an indelible mark on Star Wars and Indiana Jones.
Disney will never be the same again. White male heroes:
history. Perfect progressive protagonists: hello there.
The hero’s journey is now a straight line to the top. 2012 was not the end of the world,
but the beginning of a new one.
Future generations will look back and say,
‘Queen Kathleen, it was your reign and Rey that brought about real change.
You killed our heroes, but you gave birth to modernity. Thank you.’