Andrew Clavin contrasts Star Wars’ moral clarity—where battles are joyful fights for truth and love demands commitment—with modern storytelling that reduces conflict to PTSD or relativism, like Obama’s "evil"-avoiding foreign policy. He praises Trump’s combative style but critiques the prequel trilogy’s moral ambiguity, arguing its decline mirrors cultural hesitation to embrace decisive good vs. evil. Clavin’s defense of plot over subtext and his nostalgia for shared cinematic experiences reveal a clash between Star Wars’ enduring ideals and today’s fragmented, morally cautious media landscape. [Automatically generated summary]
There will be absolutely no Star Wars spoilers on this episode of The Andrew Clavin Show.
But those of you who have noticed that Hillary Clinton and the villainous Kylo Wren are never seen together at the same place at the same time, let me just say, all is explained.
All right, I'm not giving anything away, but all is explained.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin show.
All right, it's Christmas week.
Hooray!
And today is the shortest day of the year.
So thank you for listening, and we'll be back again next time.
Oh, maybe that's not what that means.
I'm sorry.
I'm absolutely serious.
I am going to talk about Star Wars, but there will not be a single spoiler on the show.
And I won't even say, I'm not even going to say whether I liked it or didn't like it, loved it or hated it, because even that can get in your head and kind of ruin your enjoyment of the show.
And, you know, when I was younger coming up in the literary world, there used to be this idea that critics would, New York Times critics specifically, but a lot of critics would give away the ends of movies.
And when they were chastised for it, they would say, oh, well, the plot of a movie doesn't matter.
It's the artistic ideas and the subtext and the things that I'm talking about that are really important, you know?
And it used to just drive me crazy because there are important artists who believe this.
I mean, Anthony Trollope, one of my favorite novelists, if you don't know Anthony Trollope, if you like Charles Dickens and you're listening to this show, you will love Anthony Trollope because Anthony Trollope is the conservative Charles Dickens.
I mean, he's not the great genius of, you know, he hasn't got the prose style that Dickens has.
And Dickens, there is no greater literary genius than Charles Dickens.
But Trollope is a really wonderful writer and a genius.
And also, they used to call him the adult Charles Dickens because he was not a sentimentalist and he was not a liberal, basically.
But he used to claim that the plot of the story doesn't matter.
And his plots are not that brilliant and he just didn't care.
He thought it was just an extraneous thing to get to character.
To me, that's crazy.
I mean, if part of the joy of watching a movie or reading a book is not being surprised and worrying about whether someone's going to die and finding out whether that person dies, whether someone's going to escape, it may not be the only joy.
It may not be the deepest joy, but it's certainly a lot more important than some critics' opinion.
Because the basic idea behind that idea, the idea that the plot doesn't matter so I can give it away, is that my ideas, my take on the movie is more important than whether you're delighted and surprised.
And that's just absolutely ridiculous.
So I'm not going to say a single thing about it.
I will be giving away the original Star Wars, which I assume that every person on earth has seen.
Like, I don't think anybody is going to be like, you know, wait, wait, Darth Vader is whose father?
You know, it's like, I just don't think that's going to happen.
So, and I will be playing some clips from those original movies, which brings me to the point, you can't watch the clips if you're not subscribing.
If you're not subscribing, you can only listen.
So it's like being blind.
It's like having, losing a sense.
And also, you can't see them, but this room, this studio is filled with starving little children who we pay about a penny an hour to run the show and run the cameras and all that stuff.
And we can't give them that penny if you don't subscribe to this show.
So it's Christmas.
You're letting these people, you're letting these children starve as we abuse them.
And it's just, it's just not, it's just not right, all right?
So subscribe, and you'll help us run the show, and you'll also get to watch, which is just a fascinating experience.
So here's the thing that Star Wars brought home to me.
First, I have to say that it was really touching.
And again, there will be no spoilers on this, but it is really touching to sit in a movie theater once again with everyone united in responding to a cultural icon that they knew and loved.
So people cheer spaceships that they remember from the old thing.
They cheer actors and characters and all this stuff.
It was very touching because our cultural, our pop culture has definitely fragmented, has definitely broken into niches, and I'm watching one thing and you're watching another thing.
And even when something catches on, like breaking bad or something, it really is only catching up with a very small number of people.
And a great rating, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but a great rating for a TV show used to be like a third of the audience, which meant that a third of the people in America were watching your show.
Now, a great rating is something closer to like 10% or something like that.
That's a real big hit because there's so many channels, so many people watching different things, and the internet leads us to basically this self-referential world that just keeps feeding us back on this loop the things that we like.
So it was really, really touching to be in a room full of people who had all gathered together to see the same thing and they knew what the product was and they wanted it and they were really excited about it.
And it set me to thinking, you know, obviously, what is it about Star Wars that we're all responding to?
And I thought it's not really that hard.
I mean, if you are above a certain age, say 17, it has begun to occur to you that a lot of things in life are anti-instinctual.
Unless you're a college student, then you don't know anything.
But if you are a certain age and you're paying attention, you start to realize that things are not what people tell you they are and they're not what they look like.
And sometimes your deepest feelings of what things are supposed to be are not really a good guide to what they are.
And a lot of that, some of that, has to do with the fact, let me back up, some of it has to do with a natural human tendency to replace the appearance of things with the reality.
I mean, I live in a town where if you are a fireman and you run into a building and save children's lives, you get paid maybe, I don't know what, $60,000, $70,000 a year.
If you are an actor and pretend to be a fireman who runs into a building and saves people's lives, you get paid $60,000 an episode, okay, a week.
You're getting paid a lot more.
So we confuse the value of things, the ways things look at.
And part of that, too, as I was about to say, is living in a visual culture.
Visual cultures are just naturally more stupid than literary cultures.
I mean, the last real visual culture was the Middle Ages.
And we live in that culture, again, with the movies.
And in the movies, they use shortcuts.
They have to show you things.
They can't tell you things.
So, for instance, if they want to show you that two people have fallen in love, nine times out of ten, they will show them having sex.
And they'll have sex in slow motion, and there'll be music, and the girl will fall back in slow motion on a bed.
Do not try that at home.
And her hair will spread out, and the guy will fall on top of her, also in slow motion.
Do not try that at home either.
A lot of suffering, I'm sure, comes out of these.
And you know, it's valid.
I mean, it's a valid thing.
It shows you their passion.
It shows you that they have tenderness for each other.
They're touching each other.
You can see it.
If you ever actually have the opportunity to fall in love, you will find that it is actually nothing like that.
Unless you hire the orchestra, maybe.
I don't know.
It's like, no, but it really isn't.
It really has much more to do with your commitment to a person, with the decisions that you make about a person, with the way you force yourself to treat a person.
I mean, I've always thought that the words, you know, I love her, I love him, are the most abused words in the English language because people do terrible things to each other and say, but I love her, you know, so I punched her, but I love her, you know, and it's like, no, you actually don't.
You know, yeah, I love my children, so I left their mother, you know, for my secretary, but I love the, you know, no, you don't.
I mean, love is a series of decisions that you make about the way that you treat people.
At least it's partly that.
And has nothing to do with falling back in slow motion on a bed.
Literally nothing to do with that.
So that image, a valid image, replaces the reality, and that just keeps happening.
So the thing that is probably, I mean, love is probably the thing that is the least like what we think it is.
And it's Christmas time.
I mean, if you think of the picture of love, it's, you know, Mary with her babe asleep, you know, like the mother with a child in her arms, and it's a very tender thing.
We all respond to that.
It's probably the greatest love in human experience is probably a mother for her baby.
And we all look at that, but you never think to yourself, well, what would happen if somebody came up to Mary and tried to hurt that child?
What would Mary do then?
Well, she'd probably rip your eyes out with her fingertips, you know, and that, and you would recognize immediately, you would recognize that also is love.
So when I send out a Christmas card, that's what they have on them.
They just have Mary ripping people's eyes.
No, I'm just making that up.
But that is also love.
Love has an aspect of ferocity to it.
It has an aspect of complete commitment, even to the point of violence.
And so one of the things that love looks like, and it's really hard to get this in your head, but one of the things is sometimes love looks like battle.
You know, love looks like fighting.
I mean, if you think about a woman defending her child, it could be a very ugly scene, but that's love.
Luke's Final Stand00:07:26
So there's an article today in the New York Times about the fact that this new Star Wars film is just like killing the box office.
I mean, the box office records that are dropping are insane.
I think Avatar is now considered the highest-grossing film of all time.
It opened at something like 80, 83 million.
This is like $500 million.
I mean, it's just this massive, massive thing.
So the New York Times writes about this as a way for the movie business to strike back at the dominance of television and to strike back against this fragmented culture, which favors television over the movies.
If you think about it, you have to get up and go to the movies, but you can watch whatever TV show you want in your home, and you can dial in that one channel that has a six-person audience and lives off those six subscriptions.
You can have that in each culture, but to go to the movies, you need a more unified culture for movies to survive.
So this is kind of the revenge of the movie business, and they're talking about it.
And it says, Hollywood, this article says, Hollywood has repeatedly missed the mark with mindless remakes and sequels, but Star Wars, The Force Awakens, represents an effort to improve the quality of mass audience films.
And it says they're going to go on and try and take advantage of this by making films that rely a great deal on nostalgia and established franchises and characters that we all know and love.
This is typical of the movie business.
They are getting at exactly the wrong thing.
When I started out, I had a job at Columbia Pictures as a reader.
And one of the things that readers do, they call them story analysts, but they're readers.
One of the things the readers do is they read all this material that comes in and they write a synopsis so that the bosses can pretend that they've read it when they turn it down.
I mean, that's basically it.
So you write a book that you pour your heart and soul into.
Some drone like me sitting in a room reads it, writes a report about it, says this will never make a movie.
And then the boss gets to say, oh, yeah, I read it and it'll never make a movie.
He gets to pretend that he read it by reading the coverage.
When I came in, I said to them, you know, what do you want?
What are you looking for?
And they said, well, we just had a big hit with Kramer v. Kramer, a picture about divorce, Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep getting divorced.
We just had a big hit with Kramer v. Kramer, so we're looking for movies like that.
So I said, so you mean small character-based dramas?
And they said, no, movies about divorce.
I thought, I think you may be missing the point.
I don't think there's going to be a big spate of divorce movies that run the table.
And the same thing is here.
They're missing the point.
There's something about Star Wars that Star Wars captures that we have lost in our society and that we saw lost in the second, that awful second trilogy of Star Wars.
I'm just going to go back for a minute to the climax of the first Star Wars.
The plot, for those of you who have forgotten, I can't believe there are that many people who have forgotten, but for those of you who have forgotten, they're going in to destroy the Death Star.
Darth Vader is chasing Luke Skywalker.
And Hans Solo, the smuggler, has retreated from the fight because he doesn't care.
He sticks his neck out for no one, like Rick and Casablanca.
You know, he just wants to make a profit.
And suddenly, Hans Solo shows up and rescues Luke, blows Darth Vader off his trail so that Luke can go and blow up the Death Star.
Go ahead and play.
Have you not?
Look out!
Now I'm warming.
Go home.
Great shot, kid.
That was one in a million.
Remember, Folks will be with you always.
The great Alleghenys the Fools will be with you always.
So this is a triumphant scene, right?
How many people died in that scene?
I have no idea, but it must be millions, right?
That the Death Star was like a planet, right?
It's going to have to be millions of people just died in that scene.
And yet that's a scene about joy.
It's a scene about the joy of battle.
Hans Solo renounces his corrupt indifference and joins the fight.
The evil Darth Vader, I've got you now.
You know, the evil Darth Vader is foiled, and Luke finds the force and he goes in and blows up this immense weapon.
And there's a lot of woo-hooing and hooray, and yes, we did it, and all this stuff.
It's the joy of battle.
And people don't talk, you know, nowadays we love to depict, or I should say the left loves to depict soldiers as victims.
Oh, they have PTSD and they're this.
It's such a terrible thing.
But one of the things they don't talk about with PTSD, and I've never been in battle, I want to make sure I make that clear.
I'm not talking from experience, but I have talked to people and read about PTSD.
And one of the things is not just based on the trauma of battle, which is the way it's always depicted in movies.
Oh, I did horrible things and I'm morally compromised by the fact that I have to kill people.
A lot of it has to do with the fact that war brings meaning into people's lives that they don't find afterwards.
And all these soldiers talk about this.
They come back and when they were out in the battlefield, they had camaraderie.
They had this band of brothers.
They knew what they were doing.
It had meaning for them.
And suddenly they get back and they have to make the rent and they have to find a job.
And it doesn't have the same intensity of meaning.
Battle, obviously, war is not something we look for.
It's not something we want.
But once war is joined, once war is joined, it can be done cheerfully.
It is allowable to do it cheerfully once it has to be joined.
C.S. Lewis wrote about this a lot, and he wrote a speech where he said why he's not a pacifist.
And he says, it is certain that a whole nation cannot be prevented from taking what it wants except by war.
It is almost equally certain that the absorption of certain societies by certain other societies is a great evil.
The doctrine that war is always a greater evil seems to imply a materialist ethic, a belief that death and pain are the greatest evils, but I do not think they are.
I think, listen to this.
I think the suppression of a higher religion by a lower, or even a higher secular culture by a lower, a much greater evil.
Nor am I greatly moved by the fact that many of the individuals we strike down in war are innocent.
That seems in a way to make war not worse, but better.
All men die, and most men miserably.
That two soldiers on opposite sides, each believing his own country to be in the right, each at the moment when his selfishness is most in abeyance and his will to sacrifice in the ascendant should kill each other in plain battle, seems to be by no means one of the most terrible things in this very terrible world.
That is captured in Star Wars.
The idea that sacrifice, that death, there's a lot of, in those original Star Wars, there's a lot of death, a lot of characters you loved who were in danger and some died.
And yet they capture this joy of battle.
Joy Of Battle00:12:30
One of the things I think that is so appealing about Donald Trump to people, people keep saying about, and I've said repeatedly, I don't like Donald Trump.
I don't like him because I don't think he's honest.
I don't think he says what he means.
I don't think he will do what he says.
I don't think he is a conservative.
I don't think he respects the Constitution.
All those reasons I dislike him.
But the one thing I have to agree with, when people say he fights, he fights, that's not really what they're saying.
It's that he fights with gusto.
He goes into the battle and he really fights.
Remember Mitt Romney talking about what a great guy Obama was?
I don't think Obama's a great guy, but whether he's a great guy or not, if you're going to take him on, take him on full flight.
Take a look at this cut of Trump on, I think he's on Meet the Press, right?
He's talking about this completely absurd, completely uncheckable statement that Hillary Clinton made during the secret debate.
You know, they have these debates, they hold these Democrat debates on Saturday, so no one will see in case she makes a mistake.
They can erase it.
They can dump it down the memory hole.
But Hillary Clinton made this completely idiotic statement about Donald Trump, and Trump responds.
Listen to this.
I want to play one particular quote that Hillary Clinton said last night and get you to respond to it.
Here it is.
He is becoming ISIS's best recruiter.
They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.
Now, I know what you're about to say.
No fact checker has been able to back up her claim on that.
That's exactly correct.
I was going to say that.
Exactly correct.
Right.
Nobody has been able to back that up.
It's nonsense.
It's just another Hillary lie.
She lies like crazy about everything, whether it's trips where she was being gunned down in a helicopter or an aeroplane.
She's a liar, and everybody knows that.
I mean, but she just made this up in thin air.
I love it.
First of all, I love the fact that he asked him to respond to it as if it were true, which only Democrats get to say this complete nonsense that we have to talk answers if it's true.
But listen to the joy that he gets out of taking her apart.
And what he says is absolutely true.
She lies at the drop of a hat.
She lies all the time.
It's all true.
And, you know, I wish just because he has joy in battle doesn't mean he would make a good president, but it does teach the other candidates what this stuff looks like.
And by the way, if, like me, you can't stand the sound of Trump's voice and his roughness, listen to this.
One of my favorite things off the internet last weekend.
Here's Trump redubbed.
I think I'll win the Hispanics.
I employ thousands of Hispanics.
They love me.
I love them.
And I think I'm going to do great with women.
And one of the reasons I'm going to do great with women is that I'm a leader.
I'm not like Hillary Clinton.
She's got no strength.
She's got no stamina.
Everything she does is like theatrical.
Donald Trump said this.
Actually, it's sort of interesting.
She said, I watched her last night.
Donald Trump?
Looks like she practices in front of a mirror for two hours.
Donald Trump said, I think he's dangerous.
I'm dangerous.
She's the one that caused all this problem with her stupid policies.
You look at what she did with Libya, what she did with Syria.
Look at Egypt.
What happened with Egypt?
A total mess.
They don't back, we don't back any of our allies.
You look, she was truly, if not the, one of the worst Secretary of States in the history of the country.
That is genius.
It really is genius.
It reminds me of my fair lady.
It doesn't matter what you say, it's how you say it.
Exactly.
That's the president of the United States.
He's stupid.
She's stupid.
Anyway, it's brilliant.
But it is this joy of battle.
Now, remember that Star Wars, that original Star Wars trilogy, made back in the 70s, still back in the old American culture of right and wrong.
Okay, and one of the things we've been talking about is the death of a bad idea, the death of the idea of moral relativism, that one culture is just as good as another.
Things are right to you, things are wrong to me.
You know, what's the deal?
Who can say?
Take a look.
I have spliced together through the miracle of technology.
This is the second, that horrible second trilogy, that horrible second Star Wars trilogy.
In the climactic fight, I noticed this the minute it happened.
It was a terrible movie.
The acting was bad, the writing was bad, the directing was bad, the whole thing was bad.
But it was made during George W. Bush's administration.
And the thing about George W. Bush is he was from that old culture.
He would say these Islamists are evildoers.
And everybody says, oh, he used evil.
Articles after article after article was written about, oh, he used evil.
I'm uncomfortable with the idea of evil.
You know, this absolute.
And he said, if you're not with us, you're against us.
Remember that?
Well, in this second Star Wars trilogy, Lucas grafted that on to the guy who would become Darth Vader, Anakin, the guy who was going to become Darth Vader.
In the final battle, there's this tremendous battle, there's two confrontations between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi, and they're fighting it out.
And the first one starts with Darth Vader quoting George W. Bush and this horrified response from Obi-Wan.
Then there's this huge battle where everything goes up in smoke and fire is all around and it's just the whole spaceship is just falling apart.
And then they have another exchange.
Listen to these two exchanges spliced together.
If you're not with me, then you're my enemy.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes.
I have failed you, Anakin.
I have failed you.
I should have known the Jedi were plotting to take over.
Anakin, Chancellor Palpatine is evil.
From my point of view, the Jedi are evil.
Well, then you are lost.
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
I love that because it gets at exactly what's wrong with this philosophy.
At first, he says only a Sith, an evildoer, essentially, only an evil Sith would deal in absolutes.
Only an evil.
And then he says the same guy 10 minutes later in the same fight says, Chancellor Palpatine is evil.
Well, what happened?
Wait a minute.
I thought only a Sith dealt in absolutes.
Isn't evil and absolute?
And then it's Darth who turns around, Darth Vader who turns around and uses this moral relevance.
Well, you say it's evil to you, says Darth Vader, but it's not evil to me.
And he says, if you believe that, you are truly lost.
And that is exactly right.
Let me show you a man who essentially went into office believing that.
Here's Barack Obama, I think this is 2009, maybe, he's talking about victory in Afghanistan.
Listen to it.
Wait, wait, just a minute before I say that.
Yes, yeah, take a look at that.
Guy, I'm always worried about using the word victory because it evokes this notion of Emperor Irohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur.
We're not dealing with nation states at this point.
We're concerned with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, Al-Qaeda's allies.
So when you have a non-state actor, a shadowy operation like Al-Qaeda, our goal is to make sure they can't attack the United States.
Now, I think that's going to require constant vigilance.
Now, that's a comical cut, of course, because Emperor Hirohito never did surrender.
That whole thing just exists in his imagination.
And that does speak to Obama's sense that he knows more than he does.
You know, that Obama thinks that he knows things.
The problem with Obama is not that he doesn't know anything, it's that a lot of what he knows is wrong.
And so he says these things, he says things like that about Emperor Hirohito.
But let's put it aside.
Let's forget about it for a minute.
Let's just talk for a minute about the moral blindness of that.
You know, this idea that victory is beneath him somehow, that when you're fighting an evildoer, as C.S. Lewis said, a lower religion trying to take over a higher religion, and that is what we're fighting.
There's just no question about it.
C.S. Lewis is describing it perfectly.
Victory is what you're after.
And once you're in that battle, and listen, I am no lover of war.
I am no jingoist.
I don't believe, I believe you should go to war as the last, ultimately asked possible thing.
It means somebody's kid is going to get killed.
Some American's kid is going to get killed.
That's what war means.
You should never go into it lightly.
But once you're in it, you fight it to win it, and you can fight it with glee.
You know, you can fight it with the pleasure of battle, the joy of battle.
I mean, every soldier who's ever talked about this talks about the joy of battle.
You can fight with the joy of battle.
Now Obama has failed.
Now Obama is surrounded by his failure, and it's really pitiful.
I mean, he has given these self-pitying interviews to NPR, to the New York Times.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, and shame on them, edited a story to make him sound better.
I mean, he came out and he said he had this meeting with columnists, and in the Times, they said, in his meeting with columnists, Mr. Obama indicated that he did not see enough cable television to fully appreciate the anxiety after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, and made clear that he plans to step up his public arguments, the old Obama idea that it's not his policies that are bad, he's just not selling them right.
And the reason he's not selling them right is he hasn't come down from on high to discuss this with the people watching cable television.
If only he was watching that trash on cable television where they're selling fear, he would be able to explain it.
And the thing that he tells the New York Times, and what's amazing is the New York Times edited that out.
They sent it down the memory hole without explaining it.
They just got rid of it, rewrote the headline to make him sound better.
Just a terrible - I mean, if they were still a newspaper, it would have been a terrible act of journalistic malfeasance, but since they're now just the college leftist throwaway, I guess it's fine.
But Obama goes on and he says, you know, he says repeatedly, ISIS is not an existential threat.
He says, this is a serious challenge, but it's not an existential threat.
It's important for us to keep things in perspective.
If you've been watching television for the last month, all you have been seeing, all you have been hearing about is these guys with masks or black flags who are potentially coming to get you.
And so I understand why people are concerned about it.
You know, there is legitimate criticism of what I've been doing, our administration has been doing, in the sense that we haven't, you know, on a regular basis, I think, described all the work that we've been doing for more than a year now to defeat ISIL.
Still can't call it by its name, still can't call it ISIS.
It's just this right side of history that he lives on.
Obama's not a stupid guy.
You know, I used to think he was.
I mean, because he doesn't know how things work.
He doesn't know that when you pull lever A of the economy, switch B is going to fall down.
He does not understand that.
But he's like a lot of smart people I know.
He's more in love with his own ideas than he is in love with the people.
And he's more, he does not, you know, the funny thing about people is you can't understand them if you don't love them.
I know that sounds ridiculous, but it's true.
Love, I've often talked about the fact that leftism is Christianity without Christ, which makes no sense.
And one of the things about Jesus is he's the prince of peace.
He says, love your enemy.
He's not that nice a guy.
You know, when you read the actual gospel, if you keep Christ in your mind, he's constantly calling people names.
He's very sarcastic.
He calls people whited sepulchres, meaning a tomb that is painted on the outside to look nice, but is filled with corruption and death inside.
He says that of the Pharisees, the teachers of the law.
You know, it's not nice.
You know, love is not nice.
Love includes this aspect of fighting for what's right, fighting for what's good, fighting for the good of people, loving them enough to fight for people.
This is why, you know, St. Paul, if I speak with the tongues of men and of angels but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging symbol.
If I have the gift of prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains but do not have love, I am nothing.
Barack Obama has failed because he doesn't love this country and he doesn't love the people.
And when I say, I don't say that lightly, if you love something, you don't want to fundamentally transform it.
If you love something, you don't go to a church where they say god damn it every day.
If you love something, you don't hang out with the people who want to blow it up, you know, the terrorists who want to blow it up.
And if you love something, when the time comes, you fight for it and you fight for it joyously, you know, and you fight for it to win.
You fight for victory.
Please, God, Let It Be Closed00:03:30
And that's what Star Wars captures.
It's interesting that this most popular of all popular films has war in the title.
It's not shy about what it's about.
It's about Star Wars.
It's about fighting for the things that are right, among which are the Republic, the idea that people can rule themselves.
And I think that that, you know, is what people go for.
The nostalgia is not for the characters.
It's not for the spaceships.
It's really for an ethos that is so certain of the good that it's willing to stand up for it and fight for it and fight for the things that you love.
That's all I have to say about Star Wars, not a single spoiler, except for the Hillary Clinton thing, but all right.
Christmas stuff I like.
All right, this one I'm recommending with caution, all right?
This is this thing on Netflix.
I wanted to recommend at least one thing that's contemporary, and this thing on the show on Netflix, a very Murray Christmas with Bill Murray.
Now, a lot of people who watched it thought it was boring.
A lot of people thought it was bad.
I thought it was minor league genius.
I mean, it's not a major work of genius, but it's a minor work of genius.
It's a story about Bill Murray.
It's a meta-story about Bill Murray is putting on a special, but it's snows.
There's a blizzard, so no one can get through it.
Play the trailer.
Let him sing it.
Dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh.
O'er the fields we go laughing all the way.
This is a nightmare.
I can't do this.
I'm sorry.
Merry Christmas.
Get it?
Has anyone shown up for this thing?
What are you doing up here?
Come on, let's do the show.
The airports are closed.
The trains are closed.
The buses and bridges and tunnels are not working.
The entire city of New York is shut down.
Is it clunies?
Is it clunies?
Is it cloonies?
George, on the phone.
Please, God, let it be closed.
We got food, we got booze, we got attractive people.
All right, we're gonna need someone to sing a Christmas carol.
We're gonna need a volunteer, and that person is gonna be you right over here.
On the first day of Christmas.
Okay, you're not a singer, and we don't have time to find out if you're a dancer.
Tonight will go down as the greatest nights in history.
Magic, thy night, girls, and come because he are we.
Come on, it's for me on the court.
Sad excuse for a Christmas special.
Starting to seem to me more like a Christmas as what a mess.
We have George Cole.
And ask my case.
You saw Monuments, Man.
I was in it.
You were so good enough.
The show is about the sadness of life and the sadness of real people and how show business for a moment in this cheesy way takes you into your dreams and makes Christmas what it's supposed to be instead of what we make it.
And it's just a really smart, ironic, sad little take.
If you want to see Miley Cyrus with her tattoos on display singing Silent Night, it's at once hilarious but also weirdly moving, you know.
And it's not for kids, by the way.
There's language in it and all this stuff, but it's really worth seeing.
And if you do see it, watch the end credits because there's a little bit at the end that sort of says the whole thing.
That's it.
We'll be back tomorrow, right up until Christmas Eve.