Not
longer after the new Star Wars movie was released, there was
talk of racial stereotyping. To wit:
The Neimoidians--Stock
Asian villains, using Hollywood Oriental accents, one of whom
dresses in garb suspiciously like that of a Catholic bishop.
Watto, the
fat winged junk dealer--A crooked Middle Eastern merchant, Jew
or Arab, take your pick.
Jar Jar
Binks, the dumb, scaredy-cat computer-generated figure--Described
as a cross between Butterfly McQueen and Stepin Fetchit.
There are
more, but you get the picture.
Of course,
if you examine any movie, or any piece of literature, for that
matter, you can always find a stereotype or infer one. So what?
As is almost
always the case, any attempt to explain human behavior by looking
for a complicated sinister motive will be wrong. There is a
simpler explanation: Lack of creativity, and laziness.
What, you
say? Lack of creativity by the great George Lucas? I'm afraid
so. Let's be honest. The original Star Wars (1977) was nothing
more than Flash Gordon with a large budget and modern special
effects. It could have died at the box office, but coming as
it did at the end of one of the worst winters of the century
(as did "Roots"), with a public unusually hungry for entertainment,
it scored big time.
Here's what
Vincent Canby of the New York Times said at the time:
"The story
of Star Wars could be written on the head of a pin and still
leave room for the Bible. It is, rather, a breathless succession
of escapes, pursuits, dangerous missions, unexpected encounters,
with each one ending in some kind of defeat until the final
one."
In Hollywood,
nothing succeeds like success. That's why "Silence of the Lambs"
(1991), which was really a grade Z slasher pic with a big budget
and name cast, won Oscars for best actor, best actress, best
director, best picture, and best writing (screenplay based on
material from another medium).
If you're
George Lucas, 22 years later after the Star Wars series has
begun, knowing that whatever you turn out will be a gigantic
money maker, why should you care? You were having too much fun
playing with all the special effects.
There was
much more wrong with "The Phantom Menace" than the phony spectre
of crypto-racism, as perceived by a bunch of inane victicrats.
If Anakin
Skywalker was the chosen one, why didn't the Jedi leadership
accept him? Was it better to turn him away because he was "too
old" so that he could instead become Darth Vader with the Dark
Side of the Force?
And what
is this "Dark Side" anyway? The most likely analogy would be
in contrasting the Church with Satanism, a revolutionary movement
against the Church. Today, as in the twelfth century when it
began, Satanists hold to a so-called Manichaean view of the
universe. That is, there are ultimately two creative principals
in the universe, one good and the other evil.
In practice,
Manichaeism denies human responsibility for the evil that one
does, on the premise that it is not due to one's free will,
but to the dominance of Satan's power in one's life.
Aha!! So,
if you do evil, it's not your fault. You're a victim of Satan...
which brings us back to the poor targets victimized by the stereotypes
in the movie.
It wasn't
Lucas' fault. The Devil made him do it.