Jimpy has a pretty good point about Watto. He was a slave owner, a gambler and he was not a very nice guy overall, but he really wasn’t dishonest. Actually, Qui-gon took care of the dishonest part trying to manipulate Watto with mind control, then lying to him about the pod race, and cheating with the chance cube. It was mostly just his expressions an body language that makes you think this guy is really shady.
I challenge you to name one specific phrase spoken by Jar Jar that is characteristic of either of those things. Which words were Jamaican slang, and which ones were Stepin Fetchit?
Why, because he had a deep voice? Kingfish was depicted as lazy, shiftless, always trying to avoid work and make a quick (usually dishonest) buck. Boss Nass is depicted as tough, prideful, in charge of a huge Army, and ready to step up to a challenge which could mean death for his race. I think you may very possibly be insane for making such a comparison.
In any case, Lucas left the characterization of Jar Jar’s voice almost completely up to Ahmed Best, so if you want to blame anyone, blame best. Who, as mentioned, is black, so was obviously out to perpetrate a cruel trick on people of his skin color.
Have any of you people ever actually heard an actual Jamaican person speak, or instead heard only comedic sterotypes of such?
Sub-human? Uh, don’t you mean “non-human”? Nice value judgement there. Perhaps you, like most people, are projecting your own racism onto the screen.
Hmm. Did you notice the two actual black-skinned humans in positions of power and importance? Meanwhile, none of the characters you mentioned were human, and certainly none were black.
Inept? Perhaps. Clumsy? Yep. Dumb? Doubtful.
Except for attempting to renege in the agreement to free Anakin, please explain at specifically what points Watto acts dishonestly.
Otherwise known as “villains.”
Pldennison said
“Perhaps you, like most people, are projecting your own racism onto the screen.”
Now now, pl, let’s not let it come to this just yet. Discussion about race often degenerates into one camp accusing the other of racism, but I’d like to put that off as long as possible.
I think Jimpy raised a lot of important points. I’ll concede that so far as the human characters go, I have no complaints. Some may say Lando was a racial stereotype, but I’m not convinced. It only starts to concern me when there seems to be a pattern, where there is a consistent connection between sub-human characters and non-white races, or between lazy, dishonest, or inept characters, and certain racial profiles.
By sub-human, I mean having some characteristics of humans, and some characteristics of lesser life forms. Jabba was a big humanoid slug, the Neimodians were tall humanoid frogs, etc. It’s subjective. I don’t know what Watto is. He kinda looks like a fat, shaved Gonzo with wings. Sorta.
Anyway, the question is, is there a consistent pattern in Star Wars I between stereotypes of racial accents, and either sub-human forms, or personality flaws present in the same racial stereotypes?
I thought there was, but other people didn’t think so.
What Jimpy said about Watto really got me thinking. Watto wasn’t really dishonest. It was Qui-gon who cheated in the die roll, and who tried to use mind control to bolster his negotiating power. But the audience was obviously supposed to root for Qui-gon, not Watto. Why? Yes, Watto was a slave-owner. But Qui-gon wasn’t an emancipator, by his own admision. And Qui-Gon even lied to Anakin about why he collected his blood sample.
Similarly, what made Darth Maul evil? He attacked Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan, but besides that, what did he do? In IV, V, and VI, Darth Vader killed his own men, blew up a planet, and ruled through fear. You knew he was evil.
I submit the theory that in IV, V, and VI, the good guys were basically virtuous, and they acted virtuously, and their flaws were shown as flaws to be overcome. And the bad-guys were evil, and they did evil things constantly. But in I, the good guys were just labeled “good”, and the bad guys were labeled “bad”, and we were expected to accept that with few convincing “good things” done by good guys, or “bad things” done by bad guys. And that’s why I feel Lucas relied on stereotypes to label his characters. He wasn’t using sensical character development anymore.
Please excuse the spelling throughout.
Not yet in the pit,
Quadell
Quadell, I can at least see the reasoning behind your last paragraph, even if I don’t fully agree. (Dragging up the philosophical question of whether it is OK to lie/cheat/etc. to serve a greater good.)
I still think there is too much value judgement implied in the use of “sub-human,” which is why I think “non-human” is more sensible; and to that degree, I still maintain that SW has never used “representational” alien forms that are intended to stand for human skin colors.
Ah, Phil. I can always depend on you to pull out the flamethrower in sensitive topics.
All of this talk about how different Star Wars I is from IV, V, and VI has got me thinking. How involved was Spielberg in this movie anyway? You don’t see this type of discussion about any other Spielberg movies that I can think of. Are we all sure that ol’ Steve actually exerted much creative control over this movie? As evidence (admittedly very weak), various cartoons with Spielberg’s name attached, like Tiny Toons and Animaniacs, have made jokes to the effect that S.S. does very little nowadays except attach his name to things. Any thoughts?
“I had a feeling that in Hell there would be mushrooms.” -The Secret of Monkey Island
Why would you imagine Steven Spielberg had anything to do with George Lucas’ Star Wars series?
I had no idea this topic would recieve so many responses!!! I’m not sure if George Lucas intended any racism in his characters, but I do think he was sloppy in what he allowed. JarJar Binks had a definate Jamaican/African American way of speech, the king of JarJar’s people was like a characature of an African tribesman, and the Trade Federation guys were done like offensive Asian stereotypes. Make any excuse you like, George Lucas messed up.
“Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true” -Albert Einstein
Why is it no one has a problem with the racial stereotype of all the Imperial officers being British?
After all, I can’t think of one of them that didn’t speak with a British accent.
Well, Obi-wan was British and so was Qui-gon, so your statement is weak IMHO.
The person who suggested that Watto was a Jewish American was Jewish himself, so I also disagree with the comment that “anyone who thinks Watto is Jewish obviously hasn’t been around a lot of Jews.”
My own feelings on the issue is that Lucas never intended to make racial stereotypes: people just recognized the accents and tried to find patterns between the accents and the characters. As the dragon in John Gardner’s Grendel explained to the eponymous hero, “They’d map out roads through Hell with their crackpot theories!”
“[He] beat his fist down upon the table and hurt his hand and became so
further enraged… that he beat his fist down upon the table even harder and
hurt his hand some more.” – Joseph Heller’s Catch-22
To completely avoid the minefield of racial stereotypes, the thing that really got my knickers in a twist about JarJar is that his dialogue was clearly written for a human 5-year-old who has been lobotomized. No complication in the character at all, no clearly consistent alien-culture thing (for instance, the Gungan leader does that big shake-my-cheeks-and-make-a-raspberry-noise gesture twice, for two totally separate reasons. The first time, I could sorta take it, it might have been an anger-response in his species. THen he does it at the end, for no reason but to up the slapstick-count!) I feel that there were many CGI characters with far more depth, complexity, and realness-feeling to them (as in, they felt like PEOPLE and not like comic relief) than either Jar Jar or Boss ness. The Gungan with the tendrils by his mouth was one of them. He felt real, evne though he had few lines. He acted like a person (not a human person, but a consistent personality nonetheless). The trade feds were another. So was Watto. Even the slimy other podracer (… starts with an S, has five hands?) felt more like a real somebody than Jar Jar did. So I felt it a copout. Of course, 90% of why I watch/read SF is because I like consistent, real, alien aliens :-> I’m an anthropology geek, and a rather critical one.
To sum up, I don’t care what accent an alien has, as long as it’s not obviously made a congenital idiot simply for comic relief. Jar Jar could have had the exact same influence on the plot if they’d actually given him an IQ-equivalent of 80 or higher.
(admittedly, I have a VERY LOW slapstick tolerance)
This assumes that the Jedi and the Old Republic are the “good guys”. It seems that neither side is flowing with virtue. We all know that the Old Republic is overthrown and replaced by the Empire. I doubt that this would happin without some support from local populations. Who will say that Obi-Wan was not fighting with anger in is heart at the end…doesn’t that path lead to the dark side? Soon there won’t be many Jedi left will there? It seems that the only characters that had any virtue were Queen Amidala, Jar Jar Binks, and Anikin Skywalker (who we all know becomes Darth Vader)
You know, just because everyone sees a phallus in a Rorschack (sp?) inkblot doesn’t mean it’s really there.
It seems like this movie was a collaboration by a lot of people, each with their own contributions - especially the nonhumans, one guy is voice, one guy designs the body, another guy does any computer animation. I see three possibilities:
1)The characters fell together in the form of stereotypical charicatures (why can’t I spell today?) because the people who created them were all from the same culture and had similar mental templates of what features “go together”. So any tall, goofy, comic-relief character with bad grammar comes out looking like a Stepin Fetchit “type”. (My own take was that he was a rip-off of Disney’s Goofy). He was, at any rate an annoying character aimed too squarely at the kids; much like the Ewoks, who were equally annoying and obviously a stereotype of the short-statured Picts, right down to the blue paint 
When they sat down to create Watto, they said “Now what is Watto?” Watto is a disreputable small merchant in the armpit of the galaxy, who can’t be out-haggled even by a Jedi using the Force. So naturally he came out having Middle-Eastern, Semitic features (which to an American, means Jewish, usually. I would have placed him in a Cairo bazaar, myself). I’m not saying this is right or wrong (yet), just that it is what may have happened.
Posiibility #
2) The rest of us are matching our own psychic templates to what we see on the screen. I saw the movie before I heard anything about ostensible racial stereotypes, and I must admit I didn’t see anything at the time - I wasn’t LOOKING for it. But a lot of people are forced to deal with these stereotypes a lot more prominently in their lives than I am, and so they saw something they are on the lookout for. This possibility seems to be summed up best in the notion expressed by some that Lucas shouldn’t have “allowed” the stereotypical characters to happen, as opposed to those who decry that he went and “made” them that way. There is certainly something to this view.
Posibility#
3) A combination of both processes is at work.
Number three gets my vote.
Incidentally, I’m under the impression that a lot of this movie’s production came out of England. Am I wrong? That may help explain why so many human actors have British accents.
Phil: Oops. Momentary lapse of reason. I blame the fact that I was just playing Sam & Max Hit the Road.
“I had a feeling that in Hell there would be mushrooms.” -The Secret of Monkey Island
Lord help us. It really wouldn’t matter one way or the other in what perceived accent any of the characters spoke, someone would undoubtedly cry foul. They are aliens, for crying out loud. Jar Jar is Jamaican? I’ve been to Jamaica. He’s no Jamaican. Watto is Jewish or Italian? He’s fucking blue and he has wings. What was E.T., Irish? He was short and drank beer, right? Perhaps Mr. Lucas should simply have aliens intonate blaring trumpets and provide subtitles. Oh, wait. Then the blind would be upset.
Keep in mind also, folks, that the character of Jar Jar was designed long before any voice was assigned for him. Assuming for a moment that the designers put even a modicum of thought into it (as designers usually do, observing animal anatomy and motion when creating creatures):
Jar Jar has a long, thick, muscular neck, and what appears to be a rather heavy head. Being amphibious, he also has knees which are very close to his hips, and long lower legs with thick feet for swimming. This results in a loping sort of walk with a low center of gravity, with the head bobbing back and forth. Result? A bunch of people with their own racial hangups scream “Pimp walk!”
Now, actor Ahmed Best was hired to provide a body reference while rehearsing takes. It was still Lucas’ intention to have someone else dub the voice. When they heard the voice Best used, they thought it was great and kept it. Result? People with their own racial hangups scream “Butterfly McQueen!”
I agree with ABP: To a lot of people, Jar Jar doesn’t act silly and talk funny because he’s “black”; he’s “black” because he acts silly and talks funny, which is a product of people’s own internal characterizations.
Dice: I love Sam & Max Hit the Road! Great game!
Again, most of the people making these comments say nothing about the black human characters, which strikes me as odd.
Well, because the black human characters were treated with the same respect as the white human characters. There’s nothing to really argue about.
Okay, I’ve looked over all the posts, and I saw the movie again. And as a whole, okay, I don’t really think Jar-Jar’s based on a racist stereotype. Or Watto, for that matter. It’s fun to make theories on socio-psychological meanings in pop culture, (see the beginning of “Chasing Amy” for one of the better ones), but most of them are just exercises in the creativity of the critic.
But it’s still a bad movie with no character development, and Jar-Jar was still the dumbest character in the saga, and the Neimodians (sp?) are still 100% Asian. Just tall and green. 
-Quadell
I think there have been some really valid points raised on this thread. The characters in TPM reinforce some current racial stereotypes, intentional or not who knows. I think the important point is why it is offensive. It is because he is attributing these stereotypical characteristics to alien characters. Somehow I think a movie where the trade federation guys were greedy Asian businessmen speaking heavily dialected English would be less offensive than the current version. This is because the Aliens, because we have problems identifying them as individuals, come to symbolise the entire race we associate them with. Dont know if this makes sense. Imagine a short film with three characters a beige cube a pink cube and a brown cube. The beige cube sounds like the average american white male. The pink cube sounds and acts like the stereotypical dumb blond woman. The brown cube talks like a african american male street punk. Here’s the plot the beige cube and pink cube wake up and have breakfast and the beige cube goes off to work the pink cube cleans the house. Meanwhile the brown cube is in an alley smoking crack. The pink cube goes to the grocery store and her car breaks down. She cries hysterically, The brown cube sees her pulls her into the alley and rapes and kills her. Have I not just created the most offensive short film ever. Why its about three characters, but apparently its about much more. Sorry this is so long. Sorry if I offended everyone.
-fraggle
To go totally off topic…
“Darth Vader killed his own men”
Admittedly, “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi” aren’t fresh in my mind. But I saw “Star Wars” (the first movie, now called Episode IV), and Vader tried to kill only one of his own people in that movie. In an early scene, Vader and various Imperial officers were in a meeting on the Death Star, and one officer made a rather snide comment about Vader’s belief in the Force being obsolete. That’s when Vader did a “mind strangle” on him, until some general or admiral told him to stop.
You can certainly understand someone being, um, somewhat miffed (understatement!) when he’s in a meeting and someone makes an uncalled-for sarcastic comment about his religion. (^:
Empire Strikes Back. Admiral Ozzle came out of light-speed too close to the system. He was as clumsy as he was stupid.
“I had a feeling that in Hell there would be mushrooms.” -The Secret of Monkey Island