May 18, 2026
No Play Violence - Violence for Real
Timothy Birdnow
Scrolling through the Bongino report I noticed two stories which dovetail with each-other (and I don't think that was intentional from the editor) and those stories make a fundamental point about the human condition - particularly about the male human condition - and the evolution of our society.
First, actress Juliane Moore has decided she will not be in movies with violence and explosions any longer.
"I don’t like someone being murdered. I don’t like explosions and guns. I don’t like histrionics. I don’t like things that raise the stakes without real feeling underneath," she said. "I mean, that actually bothers me because that’s like noise. I don’t know how to play it. I don’t want to watch it."
Her choice of course and that is fine if she doesn't want to play in such films. I respect that. She has every right. But I think she is rather naive, or at least doesn't understand the role such movies play in society and why they are important.
Which brings us to the second article which is about the Star Wars franchise and why the Kathleen Kennedy sequals are losing so many fans.
The upshot of this essay is Kennedy rejected the male-oriented space opera approach to the genre' in favor of a more feminine style with more emphasis on the mysticism of the Force and stressing characters and more complexity.
But that isn't what Star Wars was and it is not why the movies succeeded in the first place. Star Wars was a throwback to an earlier time in filmmaking, where the good guys were easily identified, the bad guys were bad, there was right and wrong, good and evil, and the two fought. Young boys watched enthralled as the rebels resisted the evil Empire, fighting with bombs and ray guns and cool spaceships. Han Solo was beloved because he was a crazed fighter who turned to attack against overwhelming odds. The hero stood firm and proud and got the girl in the end.
Granted George Lucas had weakened that a bit with his turning of Darth Vader into the hero in the end, but the original three, and even their prequals, still kept the basic thread.
My point? Movies with violence, with shooting and action, have a special appeal to young boys and men more than to women, but they appeal to many women as well and that for a good reason. In life you can't go shooting up people. Boys in particular have their aggressions, their natural biologically based need to fight against other cave men and saber-toothed tigers and Mastadons, are suppessed by civilization. Theatrical violence is cathartic to them; it gives them an outlet that lets them blow off the steam from the suppression of their base urges.
Girls need this far less than do boys, but they need it too.
The problem is the Leftist view of human nature. They believe it is malleable, easily changed through social conditioning. If they rid the imagery that shows things they do not like they think the public's view will follow. To liberals everything is about social conditioning; if they can control the narrative, control the images seen by people, they can simply eliminate things they do not like - like aggression or anger or social grouping, or anything else.
That is what Kennedy did to Star Wars; she turned it from a morality play about virtue and strength and the warrior ethos into a different kind of morality play, one that emphasized virtues, certainly, but not ones that appeal to boys, who need an outlet for the things they are forced to suppress.
Play of any kind serves that purpose, as well as training for adult life. Little boys will make their fingers into guns if they have no toy guns and we are always hearing about crazy liberal school marms calling in the police because a kid pointed his finger and said "bang~" They want the boys playing with dolls and tea cups. But Nature and Nature's God didn't make them want to play with such things; the role of the male is protection and supplying food - both skills that require strength and a warrior ethos.
Those tendencies need to be guided into healthy outlets, not suppressed. Action movies supply those very outlets.
So Moore and Kennedy are suffering from the same misguided view, that violence on t.v. and in movies automatically leads to violence in real life. Research on video gaming shows this isn't true. On the contrary, it almost certainly leads to LESS violence as kids are able to get it out of their systems.
At any rate our society has turned far to pacifistic and we are already paying for that. School violence is way up despite "no tolerance" rules imposed by idiot school administrators and busy-body teachers. When kids could watch cowboy and Indian movies, or movie about gangsters, or other things with faux violence there was less violence in the real world. Now we ban play-act violence and then are horrified violence is breaking out all over.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
12:57 PM
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Girls need it too, or they need to know they can find reliable boys (men) to do it for them, not because the girls will trade something for it, but because it's the right thing to do. And that's something that is, or should be, baked into a proper Western, which Star Wars pretty much was, and which Kennedy had absolutely no knowledge of.
Lucas was, after all, no John Ford.
Lucas was, after all, no John Ford.
Posted by: Dana Mathewson at May 18, 2026 07:40 PM (+oLFx)
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Well said Dana. Yeah; it was indeed a Western and Westerns have key elements that make them work. Kennedy certainly has no clue about that.
Speaking of Westerns, they were as extinct as the T-Rex back in the Seventies when Star Wars was made. What revived them was the mini-series Lonesome Dove. Suzanne de Passe made that series and the only reason was because she wasn't an American filmmaker but was from Montserrat and didn't have the baked in prejudices against Westerns. She also wasn't a filmmaker at all - she was a Motown record producer (she discovered the Jackson Five). She took the option on Lonesome Dove and everybody laughed at her; it had been around as a script for years and nobody wanted it. But Larry McMurtry decided to turn it into a novel and it went to number one and that made the network decide to make it into a miniseries and when Robert Duvall signed on everybody wanted it. That and the movie Silverado brought the Western back from extinction.
I know all this because I have an anniversary edition with interviews with de Passe (who was a very humble person and seemed like a sweet lady.)
Speaking of Westerns, they were as extinct as the T-Rex back in the Seventies when Star Wars was made. What revived them was the mini-series Lonesome Dove. Suzanne de Passe made that series and the only reason was because she wasn't an American filmmaker but was from Montserrat and didn't have the baked in prejudices against Westerns. She also wasn't a filmmaker at all - she was a Motown record producer (she discovered the Jackson Five). She took the option on Lonesome Dove and everybody laughed at her; it had been around as a script for years and nobody wanted it. But Larry McMurtry decided to turn it into a novel and it went to number one and that made the network decide to make it into a miniseries and when Robert Duvall signed on everybody wanted it. That and the movie Silverado brought the Western back from extinction.
I know all this because I have an anniversary edition with interviews with de Passe (who was a very humble person and seemed like a sweet lady.)
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at May 19, 2026 07:47 AM (oflqW)
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