OCCULT HOLIDAY INVERSIONS: Disney & Dinosaurs & Denigrated, Diminished Dads
'Lightyear' flops & 'Obi-Wan' Kneels in Hollywood's 'Dominion' of the Dad-less
“You walk into the room, With your pencil in your hand / You see somebody naked, and you say, ‘Who is that man?’ / You try so hard, yet you just don't understand… / Because something is happening here, but you don't know what it is — do you, Mister Jones?” - Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man”
“Something’s happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear…” - Stephen Stills, “For What It’s Worth”
“What the hell happened here? And why does my ass hurt?” - Matthew Perry, The Whole Ten Yards
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Demonic Disney’s diabolical deception is dwindling in dollar dominance, though the corporate media flacks and hacks will be among the last to admit why.
“What the hell happened here?” asks a deliberately & deceptively bemused Deadline, the Hollywood trade industry stalwart, as Disney’s latest Pixar Pride propaganda push, poorly disguised as family entertainment in the form of Buzz Lightyear’s origin story, crashed & burned at the box office this weekend. Lightyear is the summer’s first big bad bomb at the post-pandemic multiplex marketplace after Top Gun 2 and Jurassic Whatever 6 hit the jackpot, with disappointed Deadline scribes now lamenting “Lightyear will be lucky to hit $50M,” which the publication defines as a “mindboggling” low gross failure for the film.
Months ago, optimistic opening weekend predictions stood at $120 million for Lightyear, the meta-deconstructionist prequel/spin-off from the most commercial character in Pixar’s blockbuster Toy Story franchise. It seemed a smart bet to spin out the blustery but beloved Buzz, a modern heroic yet comedic animated icon from a worldwide popular mainstream film series where each entry made more money than the last, climaxing with the lesser quality but still entertaining Oscar-winning Toy Story 4, which grossed over a billion bucks worldwide.
About two months before Lightyear debuted, estimates dropped to a predicted $100 million opening weekend. In the past week they fell to $70-80 million. In reality, Lightyear catastrophically opened to roughly fifty million, it sounds like, a full one-third below expectations. That means the $200 million budgeted film (before marketing, so you can add another $80-100 million) will almost surely end up a money-loser for downward-spiraling Disney, which continues to buck and thrash defiantly at its fans with all the bizarre, self-centered, self-destructive behaviors of a spoiled middle-school teen girl.
So “What the hell happened?” I’ll tell you what Deadline and the other entertainment industry establishment trade rags steadfastly ignore, the red elephant in the room, which you probably know already if you’ve been paying any attention at all. I say this not as a puritan scold or judgmental Solomon Kane death penalty type, but as a former marketing executive on Madison Avenue with a pretty solid track record:
The Disney brand has inverted itself whilst attempting to invert the world, and they’ve foolishly created a significant minority of parents who now see the Disney brand as toxic, and actively avoid it like soul cancer upon their family. Worse for Disney, the number of disgruntled parents is growing as awareness of Disney’s primary objectives are made more clear.
Toxic Disney! Who’d’a thunk it? Well, actually, quite a few people have been trying to warn you about Disney for quite a few years. But as their recent and repeated rodent paw print evidence keeps showing, everything they swallow up turns to shit, you gotta admit.
As I’ve typed before, I subscribe to the Rule of Three, and thus must note: Disney has consumed three of the most beloved family entertainment icons of the past half century: Pixar Studios, Marvel Comics and Star Wars/Lucasfilm. It has driven all three of them right into the ground via the insertion of divisive ideology and fringe-focused identity politics. None of these formerly populist properties have been improved by the rat kingdom’s influence, nor are they currently as financially successful as they had been in the past. Why?
What does the evidence show? Hard Truth is that Hollywood’s controlling powers hate you and they don’t even want your money all that much. Nor do they let any opportunity to signal how much they hate you go to waste. Father’s Day marks a big chance for these freaks to headline how much they loathe families, men, fathers, “the patriarchy”; it’s a big tent for this inverted ritualistic/religious revival show remade for dark low-vibration occultists of middling talent during our mass market digital age.
Disney offered up a double-whammy of Father’s Day insults this week: On the holiday weekend, we got the Woke Lightyear, where two women have a baby together and don’t need no man to do so, and the film’s titular hero’s key moment is rooted in failure and time travel and destroying himself in the future and other inverted psychological subtexts no kid should be seeing or thinking about.
With the dispiriting Lightyear, Disney transforms what could have been and should have been a good-time animated escapist adventure flick into an existentialist soul-deadening drag. It’s hilarious that the movie-inside-a-movie premise of this unnecessary product is how Lightyear is the movie that inspired the Buzz Lightyear toy craze in the Toy Story movies, cuz no kid would want to hang out with dull, monotone Buzz Lightyear IRL. If this movie is bombing at the box office in our reality, it would then follow that the toys surrounding it would likewise go unsold. Thus, the existence of Lightyear as another Disney dud threatens to negate the foundation of the fictional universe created through the Toy Story franchise’s internal logic.
People are bitching about no Tim Allen as Buzz Lightyear, but this is not the same Buzz Lightyear; Chris Evans personifies a completely different character. And he’s a stoic, monotoned meh. Again: No kids would want a toy made from Chris Evans’ stolid bleh Buzz.
Result: Families and filmgoers are skipping this latest shit show from demonic Disney, which has plainly polluted poor Pixar with pedantic plot points to push. Lightyear ends up as another notch on the Woke gunslinger’s holster, as the public’s quiet rebellion against Hollywood sinks their sinister narrative—even as it simultaneously proves The Town’s inherent insanity, every time it paradoxically and stubbornly defies its most popular definition.
So Pixar’s pathetic Lightyear is bad and bad for you, especially on Father’s Day weekend, but the other Disney offering this week was an equally aggressive attack upon “the patriarchy”: The fifth episode of Disney+’s disappointing failure Obi-Wan Kenobi, or, as the funny guys at Film Threat aptly rebranded it: “The Adventures of Young Leia (featuring Ben Kenobi).”
So yeah. Like in Lightyear, women overshadow the men and drive the plot in Obi-Wan Kenobi, in which the titular White guy protagonist is mostly reactive not proactive to events that go on around him, events driven by a tween know-it-all princess and an insufferable Jedi-hunting block of wood. The same inverted male protagonist bait’n’(s)witch occurs in Doctor Strange 2, and a bunch of Disney+ streaming titles, but I’ve already written about that. Lightyear and The Adventures of Young Leia are just the latest examples, buttressing my assertion that these bad plots and predictable flat characters are ruling class diktats executed by sell-out hacks.
Marketplace Freedom of Choice! Let’s say you manage to avoid both of diabolical demonic Disney’s Father Day insults, one on TV and one at the multiplex. You can gravitate to the latest Jurassic World movie, Dominion, which features a teen heroine created in utero without male fertilization by her genius scientist mother, who didn’t need no man to be the modern Mary for what’s subtextually supposed to be the Second Coming of something or another, a test-tube Ms. Messiah for our GMO-friendly corporatist world of godless science triumphant.
Hollywood wants to push dads out of the picture—how many recent “family” movies is the dad dead, divorced, distant, deviant or weak, worthless and wimpy? It would follow logically that a special Hallmark Card-created Sabbath like Father’s Day’s would be a target of Hollywood midwit nihilistic deconstructionalists. As other smart people have pointed out before me, for some gross inverted reason Father’s Day entertainment is often mined with anti-dad messaging. Time-traveling backwards from today:
One of the most popular video games of all time is the original “The Last of Us,” about a teen girl and her dad in a dystopian future. “The Last of Us 2” came out the Friday before Father’s Day 2020 and features the father figure being brutally beaten to death with a golf club, before the young heroine gets romantically involved with a woman. It was such an industry failure that the video game’s maker, Naughty Dog, has never released final sales figures. Happy Father’s Day!
On Father’s Day weekend 2018, The Incredibles 2 opened on June 15th. In that movie, Mr. Incredible is basically emasculated and turned into a frustrated stay-at-home dad, defeated and needing to be saved by his elastic, can-do wife.
Also on Father’s Day 2018, over on HBO’s Westworld, there was a climactic moment in the series’ second season when Ed Harris’s “Man In Black” shot and killed his daughter in cold blood. (I only watched the first season, was underwhelmed; more empathy for robots than people).
On Father’s Day weekend 2017, Pixar’s Cars 3 opened, in which an aging Lightning McQueen trains his female replacement, who wins the big race when McQueen surrenders his leading spot for her to take over. That same 2017 Father’s Day weekend saw Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow’s abominable Book of Henry released, a film that needs to be seen to be believed except nobody should see it, but is relevant for our purposes here because a key plot twist hinges on the tale’s teen boy hero discovering his beautiful young neighbor is being sexually abused by her father who is also the small town’s untouchable chief of police. Happy Father’s Day!
On Father’s Day weekend 2016, the big release was Pixar’s Finding Dory, which substituted the precious father-son dynamic of the original Finding Nemo with a lesbian fish protagonist suffering from a debilitating mental illness rooted in trauma.
On HBO’s Game of Thrones, Father’s Day, June 15, 2014, tiny Tyrian Lannister killed his father with a crossbow, shot and speared while squeezing out a shit on the royal toilet.
Zack Snyder’s mostly dreary Superman spin-out Man of Steel came out Father’s Day weekend 2013, and featured a dispirited dud of a dad played by Kevin Costner, who advises his super-son to keep his greatness secret and try to live like a normal nobody, to the point where dad lets himself die instead of permitting his son save him. Later, Superman betrays the moral code his dad distilled in him by breaking the neck of the evil Kryptonian villain and murdering him. Happy Father’s Day!
That’s just off top of my head, combined with stealing from a couple sources, but I’m sure if we dug around we could find a bunch of others. Maybe you saw some anti-dad examples on Netflix or Amazon or Apple+ in the past week: Red Notice, Bosch and Ted Lasso’s all got ‘em, I’m sure that’s just for starters.
There’s no denying that the bad/sad/mad dad has become one of the cancerous current corporatist cultural zeitgeist creations: Hollywood hates fathers, despises dads, “death to the patriarchy,” all that societally degenerating garbage that has a 40+ year track record that mirrors America’s national decline.
But the jarring (to some) rejection of Lightyear at the box office suggests the agitprop and indoctrination apparatus of the Hidden Hand is becoming less adept as it increasingly reveals its place as propaganda puppet-master. The presumption of our “betters” is that we are mostly mindless cattle, easily led, an intellectual desert of common consumers, simple as sand.
But of all entities, supernatural or not, one would presume the Hidden Hand would know this better than any: the more you squeeze a fistful of sand, the more sand slips through your fingers.
Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” of capitalism could’ve told the Hidden Hand that. Left-handed path or Right-handed path? Which is which? Which vvitch is which? Wish I knew, because perhaps that’s the real spiritual war behind the scenes? Beats me. “I Know Nothing.” Say your prayers!
