John Sutherland
George Lucas’s Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, which was released in South Africa this week, generated so much hype worldwide there was bound to be a backlash. One character, Jar Jar Binks, a computer-birthed frogboy, has been indicted of that most heinous culture crime: racist stereotyping.
Jar Jar (created on screen by “animatics”) has a long, sea-horse snout and large hush- puppy ears. The official souvenir programme says he (it?) is “a member of the indigenous Gungan species, which inhabits Naboo’s underwater city, Otohoh Gunga, and is separate and distrustful of the `outlanders’ above”. Naboo is a swamp, for which you should read galactic ghetto.
Jar Jar’s voice (done by African American actor Ahmed Best) is a kind of Caribbean pidgin crossed with Hawaiian. He was meant to be endearing, like the robots, R2D2 and C- 3PO. Jar Jar is a ja-baas servant to the heroic Liam Neeson character, Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn. He says things like, “Messa no like this,” and, in one hilarious scene, steps in digital doo doo.
The reaction has been fierce and immediate, most dramatically on the Internet. The official Star Wars website () has tried to tough it out (although it’s noticeable that they dropped all reference to Jar Jar). But unofficial websites such as have mobilised protest.
Reaction has spread to other characters. The evil officials of the “Trade Federation”, for example, have unmistakable Japanese accents. Nute Gunary, the Federation’s sinister viceroy, comes straight out of the Yellow Peril propaganda of World War II. Watto, the slave owner, has offended Arab American sensitivities.
No one has so far pointed out as Mel Brooks did in his hilarious spoof, Space Balls, that Yoda is a stereotypical Jewish rabbi. But anti-Semitism is the only charge missing from the sheet.
Lucasfilms’s representative Lynne Hale denies the charges. It’s “absurd”, she says. “There is nothing in Star Wars that is racially motivated. Star Wars is a fantasy set in a galaxy far away.”
It could be that the problem comes down, as always with Lucasfilms, to technology. In the previous two episodes, all three species were played by actors in costume.
The problem is that Jar Jar does not fit any of these categories because he’s created by the new digital system of animatics. He is neither a robot nor a character; he’s miscegenated. New technologies allow Lucas a divine power. He can “create” species. What, at a level beneath subtext, disturbs the thoughtful observer of Phantom Menace most is not the “racism” in the representation of Jar Jar, but the fact that he can’t be categorised. When the fuss dies down, and audiences come to terms with that, Jar Jar may well be seen as the first postmodern black face.