Comment by mschuster91
2 days ago
I'd add Star Wars to the mix, to be honest - at least the early movies. There's nothing I know of implicating George Lucas to be a sex pest like the other examples you mentioned... but Leia's slave costume is something giving off pretty bad vibes from today's viewpoint.
The outfit she's forced into by Jabba? And then she kills him?
I've never understood why Jabba, a male Hutt, would enjoy seeing a female of a completely different species in a revealing outfit.
You're going to struggle with humans shaving and prostituting orangutans, having sex with horses and dogs, etc. then.
As do the majority of people. Still, it happens :/
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The real answer is because it's a pulp sci-fi movie and Jabba is a gross evil slug monster and him having Leia chained up like that just shows how depraved and dangerous he is. Also Carrie Fisher looks really hot in that outfit and most of the audience is likely to be adolescent boys and men.
The funny answer is.and in a universe in which it's common for alien species to intermingle, and where humans (being the Imperial species) are particularly common, being a "humanophile" might be a kink, the galactic equivalent to being a furry or "monster fucker" in our world.
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Jabba doesn't exist. The writers and directors exist.
>but Leia's slave costume is something giving off pretty bad vibes from today's viewpoint.
It's less revealing than a bikini. It was tame enough for the 1970s and from today's viewpoint it's practically stodgy.
Nitpick: it was tame enough for the 1980s. Return of the Jedi came out in 1983.
George Lucas does *not* have a reputation as an amazing or fantastic director (like Roman Polanski etc.). In fact, quite the opposite: his Star Wars prequels have some of the worst direction I've ever seen. His first three SW movies were great, but they were very much team efforts, and in the first one, his wife heavily edited it to make it come out so well. The other two weren't even directed by George. George is (was?) a brilliant ideas person: he had a great vision for his movies, and picked some great people to work with (esp. in FX), but he sucked at actual execution and working with actors and script-writing and all that stuff. His best legacy, aside from the first Star Wars, is really his FX company, Industrial Light & Magic, not his work as director.
Leia's slave costume was nothing awful, was perfectly acceptable in 1983, and shows much less skin than a bikini, and was forced on her by an evil and ruthless gang boss who liked to eat his slaves at times, or feed them to his monsters.
> but Leia's slave costume is something giving off pretty bad vibes from today's viewpoint.
No, it doesn't give bad vibes. It was a sexy actress wearing a skimpy outfit for a couple of scenes in the whole goddamn trilogy! And she kicked butt.
Repeat after me: sexy scenes in movies are ok. And young Carrie Fisher was hot, and that was also ok. I was half in love with her when I first watched Star Wars.
Now, you can ask why Mark Hamill or Harrison Ford weren't put in skimpy outfits and whether it was more often women who got those scenes, and that'd be pertinent. But this doesn't give slave Leia a bad vibe.
It's OK if those scenes had sexy vibes. Sexy vibes aren't bad. This didn't define Leia either, she was mostly competent and kicked imperial butt.