Dean Buckley Film

Notes on The Last Jedi

This article is part of the Notes on Failure series, which discusses interesting cinematic failures. Previously, Bully.

I feel like I need to clear the air a little before I start. I knew I’d want to write about The Last Jedi for this series pretty much immediately after watching it. It had parts I found breathtakingly beautiful, among the best things in the entire Star Wars franchise. It also had parts so bad I sincerely entertained the notion my screening was shown a joke version of the film for a prank show (the Yoda scene, mostly). I don’t know what an interesting cinematic failure is if it isn’t The Last Jedi. In accordance with our ethos of cold takes, I waited to start writing until (1) I’d given myself adequate time to sit with my thoughts, move beyond my initial impressions and hopefully deepen my analysis, and (2) there was no ongoing cultural discourse of significant scope or fervour around the film. I didn’t want my take on the film to be hot in either the sense it came too quickly after I watched the film or the sense it was too pegged to any particularly heated discussion unfolding when I wrote it. The former to ensure I developed my ideas well and the latter to ensure I wasn’t overly invested in responding to specific takes on the film that might be personally infuriating, but weren’t actually that interesting or relevant. So I waited.

It took the most devastating global pandemic since the Spanish flu to get people to shut up about this movie for five minutes.

The Last Jedi might not be the most controversial film of all time, but I can’t think of another that has continuously generated such a consistently high volume of discussion and debate for so long. People may have committed acts of terrorism over The Last Temptation of Christ, but they didn’t keep doing it for three years after release. The film came out, people saw it, the controversy abated, the world moved on. Not so with The Last Jedi. Obviously, a major part of that is the existence of social media as a permanent global forum with no space limits. Even with a 24-hour news cycle, only so much can fit in a newspaper or in a broadcast at a given time. News websites don’t have space limits, but they have the practical constraints of a human workforce that can’t pump out endless coverage of infinite topics (at time of writing). Social media knows no such limits. If thousands of people decide to spend their time arguing about whether a film is good or not, the only limit is their own patience.

But the changing nature of how we communicate only explains how The Last Jedi discourse lasted so long, not why. The 2016 remake of Ghostbusters also generated lots of controversy and discussion, months of it, but it was a dead topic within a year of its release. Not The Last Jedi. Until just a couple of months ago, it was still an active battlefield of culture war nonsense. Tens of thousands of words in op-eds and essays, thousands of hours of video on YouTube, and that’s not even touching on the tweets. People have written books about it. And I guess I needed to give all this context just so I could be clear about one thing before I dive into my own thoughts on the film.

I do not care about any of this.

Continue reading “Notes on The Last Jedi” →

Dean Buckley Television

Leave It on the Canvas

(Author’s Note: In May 2020, former partners of wrestler David Starr publicly accused him of rape and abuse, kicking off a wave of similar exposures and a nascent movement to combat sexual violence in the wrestling industry called Speaking Out.

David Starr was the top champion in Dublin’s OTT Wrestling, the largest promotion in Ireland, whose shows I’d been going to since 2017. Starr wasn’t the only person on the OTT roster so accused in the following weeks. Despite promises of new safeguarding policies, it is clear to me a year later that OTT have no intention of changing anything. They would rather workers quit and fans walk away than introduce basic measures to ensure their safety. I am happy to oblige. They can go fuck themselves.

I have not edited this piece to reflect my changing opinions on Starr, or any other wrestlers, or OTT, or any other company. It would be petty and dishonest to hide my past enjoyment of them. However, as this is intended to be a sort of primer on wrestling for people curious about trying it out, I wanted to clarify that I no longer think OTT is a good promotion and I do not want anything positive I said about them in this article to be understood as a recommendation you attend or stream their shows or otherwise give them any of your money. Whether you do is your own business, of course. I’d just rather not be why.)

You don’t really find out about professional wrestling anymore, the way you might find out about a sport you’ve never heard of, like jai alai, or a niche art movement, like glitch art. You just grow up knowing what it is.

It’s been around for over a hundred years, and it’s enjoyed the world over, but wrestling broke out in the 1980s in the United States as a television product. Several wrestling companies launched TV shows – mostly regional, though a few aired nationally – and professional wrestlers reaching a bigger and bigger audience soon became bona fide pop culture icons: André the Giant, Jake “The Snake” Roberts, “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, “Macho Man” Randy Savage, “Nature Boy” Ric Flair and, of course, Hulk Hogan.

By the end of the eighties and throughout most of the nineties, wrestling came to be dominated by two companies, Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling (WCW) and Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation (WWF). Eventually, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, the WWF won the war, bought out WCW and now has such a stranglehold on the industry that the WWE (as it’s now known) is practically a synonym for professional wrestling as a whole. Even though most of the names in that list of wrestling legends came up in companies other than the WWE – Ric Flair didn’t work there until he was in his forties – most people couldn’t name a promotion other than the WWF/WWE. But they all know the WWF/WWE. I’ve never had to explain to someone, of any age, what I mean when I say I like wrestling. I just say “you know, like the WWE” and they get it immediately. Sometimes, when it comes to people in their sixties or seventies, I’ve had to clarify that the WWE is the same thing as the WWF, but, other than that, everyone gets it. Or, at least, they think they do.

I didn’t watch a lot of wrestling growing up, if I’m honest. I watched it with my cousins sometimes, I saw it on the TV flicking through when we got cable in my teens, I played WWE/WWF video games. But I wasn’t a wrestling fan. I knew about it, because it was everywhere. I knew the Undertaker, and Kane, and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, and Triple H, and the Rock. I could sing Randy Orton’s theme music probably ten years before I ever saw a full Randy Orton match. But I didn’t watch wrestling growing up and I didn’t get into it properly until a few years ago, mainly because it felt alienatingly dense. It’s similar to why I’ve never read a lot of superhero comics. It comes burdened with this history of characters and conflicts, relationships and storylines, styles and trends, and so on, until the idea of getting into superhero comics just sounds like homework. But, in the end, I did become a wrestling fan, and the twist is that it’s not like superhero comics at all. I tried to follow just one mainstream superhero comic, Ms. Marvel, and it became a huge chore almost immediately. But wrestling hooked me.

Because, despite its name recognition, WWE is not all that wrestling is. It certainly aspires to be the only game in town, but there’s a whole world of wrestling beyond the grip of Vince McMahon. Last year, I decided to stop the flirting and commit to wrestling as one of my interests. I watched a lot of wrestling and spent a lot of money and even spent four months as an editor on a women’s wrestling website.

Here’s what I learned.

Continue reading “Leave It on the Canvas” →

Dillon O'Hara Music

Performing Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift’s ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ received widespread backlash, much of it less to do with music and more to do with a sense that she’s done something morally wrong.  “She claims to have gotten harder, but only comes off as brittle; she says that defeat made her smarter, but sounds as if she’s endlessly smarting,” Frank Guan wrote for Vulture. Maura Johnston, for The Guardian said: “it’s not clear whether she’s playing a role or being herself.” Everything seems to come back, at least implicitly, to Swift herself and her perceived pettiness.

But why are people so mad? I find most of Reputation to be fun and catchy. Assertions, however energetic, that the album is a trash fire haven’t convinced me. What’s more, I’ve been struck by how so many seem mad at Taylor Swift. Not just disappointed in an album they think is sub-par; they’re angry.

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