PT The Phantom Menace - Is It Racist?

People who complain about TPM being racist obviously have nothing better to do and seriously need to get a life.


Apology accepted Captain Needa...

 

I think people bring to it what they want to.

Are the Trade Federation Japanese or Chinese or Translyvanian or what? Apparently some people thing Watto is Jewish but his voice is totally wrong for that. I mean wouldn't Jewish be more like something out of Fiddler on the Roof cinematically? To me Watto is like something out of Arabian Nights accent-wise and the peddlers of the markets. He certainly doesn't have the stereotypical "Jewish" voice.

As for the Gungans to relate them to Jamaican like some people do is just as absurd. Go back to the movie Sergeant York which is an all-white cast who speak "funny" because they are from Tennessee. No doubt if the Gungans had tha accent it's be racist against them like having deep south accents would if those were used and black people used them.

That's one of the reasons why movies tend to use very vanilla accents so as not to give any appearance to offend those who are looking to be offended. They really want to be offended.

 

"They happened" is a matter of perception. Also, actors rarely use their own accents, but often exaggerate or alter their prosody to fit the part. There is a fairly obvious distinction, for example, between Ewan McGregor's "Obi-Wan" voice in the prequels -- which differs in each film -- to his accent in real-life.

Seeing racism, or not seeing it, entirely depends upon the lens, or lenses, one adopts. It is curious, though, I think, that people fret over racism in a specific movie, when the basic visual coding (and casting) of the entire series could be considered racist -- or, at the least, exclusionary (virtually the same thing).

The lead actors are all white. They all speak English. They're lean and attractive. They have no obvious physical deformities or mental handicaps. Before getting their parts, none of them were on the poverty line, let alone scrimping for fresh drinking water every day. In other words, these handful of individuals, who have indelibly imprinted on our consciousnesses, barely reflect the sum total of human life experiences on Earth. On the contrary, they're essentially an elite class, easily immortalized on film and deified by our archetypal brains, with the side-effect of blunting our awareness of and concern for pandemic human suffering. They have the same barcode, the same phenotype -- the narrative of western imperialism is therefore concretized through mass-consumption films such as these.

And as has been pointed out, the original movie is something of a whites-only club when it comes to the rebels, and the films seem to only grudgingly let non-whites into the party as they move along (Lando just has to traitor the white heroes before repenting, doesn't he?). Arguably, the movies seem to display some self-awareness of this, and characters like Chewbacca and Yoda could charitably be read as attempts at diffusion. Too bad that they're also portrayed by whites. It's even worse when you consider Darth Vader and his deep baritone. Finally, we DO have a non-white actor, but playing the villain. Voiced by a Black Indian American, in what could actually be viewed as the best tradition of Star Wars -- that exciting melding of ethnicity, culture, and identity -- Vader nonetheless comes across, at least initially, as "other": an exoticness in contrast to the pedestrian, "safe", and homely whites. Indeed, Vader is the slayer of whites: we're led to believe that he mortally betrayed the ingenue's father, we see him physically terminate the life of a white-faced, earth-toned rebel officer, and he later kills the ingenue's elder "father" figure and spiritual mentor.

That and the Star Wars movies generally treat infirmity and deformity with a similar sophistication to a 19th Century freak show. When all your leads are lean and good-looking, it could be construed as a problem that a "vile gangster" -- the series' own wording -- isn't just vile because he's a gangster. No, the films have to go one better and portray him as a corpulent, slimy, worm-like creep. Even "good guy" Dexter Jettster is portrayed as somewhat clumsy and unkempt and played for laughs (his physical awkwardness is all the more emphasized, juxtaposed, as it is, with Obi-Wan's immaculate Jedi robes and boyish good looks). The decrepitude and physical odium of the Emperor is something to be either laughed at or feared. As the arch villain, he is something of a barometer for the series' basic attitude to physical repugnance -- and via ROTS, we learn that both Vader and the Emperor are both "deformed", through the depredations of their own villainy. Again, however, the series does try and offset this stark encoding, somewhat, with Yoda in 1980 and Jar Jar in 1999, and the important theme of not judging by appearances and first impressions. Does that absolve the saga of its sins?

Perhaps it was inevitable that this was all going to come to a head in TPM -- a film with a rather improbable, Hydra-like construction and narrative texture. TPM seems to be having some fun with its alien sidekicks and villains. It WANTS you to laugh; or, at the very least, smirk. The political incorrectness of the entire series is exploded out here with an assortment of down-on-their-luck characters, sneaks, scumbags, bigoted tribal leaders who speak baby-English and fling spit everywhere, and the like. The film has a slightly masochistic quality, as if baiting people to throw stones at it. It even seems to be lampooning its excesses with lines like, "This is getting out of hand -- now there are two of them", its rhyme-twin, "Always two there are", and Qui-Gon's homily, "Your focus determines your reality". TPM also seems to be aware that it is slightly "alien" to the other installments: an "outlander", an "outlier" (is it racist to itself?). It is not terribly surprising, in my view, to find that it employs a slightly more absurd, Dickensian register; at least, for its non-human characters. In fact, the brash clashing of the two (dour humans, lively aliens) is perhaps too fractious for people to resolve, unless they posit that one half of that equation (while ignoring the implications of the other) is racist. Personally, I don't think the criticism is really warranted, but I think I see where it comes from.

It is a bit ironic, in my opinion, that people would accuse TPM of racism, given the themes of the movie, and also the rich blending of east and west in Star Wars generally (all the more pronounced in TPM, actually). Lucas basically cribbed the plot of the original movie from "The Hidden Fortress", and it is very clear that Akira Kurosawa has been a huge inspiration throughout Lucas' film-making career. Facts may occasionally be irritating, but they are rather important things, so it's worth noting that Lucas, along with his other mentor, Francis Ford Coppola, actually helped fund produce and fund one of Kurosawa's films in 1980 -- a resurrection project which lifted the ailing film-maker out of a deep depression ("Kagemusha"). And both Lucas and Spielberg were there to present Kurosawa with a Lifetime Achievement Oscar at the 1990 Academy Awards. One critical aspect of Lucas' life, not usually acknowledged, is that he basically made San Francisco, one of the world's most socially progressive and integrated landscapes, his home and his entire base of operations, building Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, and living within San Francisco for much of his adult life. Of course, there is a financial dimension to this -- some proof of that lying in the fact that Lucas recently snubbed San Francisco for Chicago, for the site of his new art museum. But San Francisco should be pretty low on the list for any died-in-the-wool xenophobe (including homophobe when it comes to that).

I cite San Francisco, as above, as a means of primarily deflecting -- and, I hope, countering -- accusations of conscious racism toward people of Asian ethnicity. But Lucas has an equally strong record when it comes to black people and African Americans. Symbolically, he seems always to have understood the underlying ridiculousness of pigment-based hegemony, carefully building such a critique into his first feature, "THX 1138". In an eerie allusion of sorts to Jar Jar, that earlier film's "hologram" character happens to be dark-skinned, which stands in marked contrast to the other characters with talking roles. Of course, Jar Jar himself isn't especially "dark-skinned" (at least, not in the way one means it when talking about human beings), but he is kind of "masked up" and hologram-esque (a digital ghost -- a colourful spectre), and he was of course both physically portrayed on set and voiced by another young black actor. Perhaps somewhat sneakily, Jar Jar even knocks down a battle droid at the end, in a close-up shot, whose backpack reads "THX 1138" in a coincident Star Wars script ("script" here meaning literally "writing" -- I'm not referring to a screenplay; this detail is literally in the film; the markings are very legible as "THX 1138"; though the "8" is represented more abstractly as two vertically-aligned dots). Other details include Lucas basing one of his first "tone poem" films (student shorts) around the music of a black musician (Herbie Hancock: the short is called "Herbie"), Lucas donating $1 million for a Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial in Washington, D.C., which opened to the public in 2011, Lucas producing and financing a film of his own creation with all-black heroes ("Red Tails"), and Lucas marrying a black woman.

I guess I almost forgot (well, I did -- this is an edit) the anti-Semitism charge. Oh, boy. Aside from Lucas having close Jewish friends, like Steven Spielberg, and casting Liam Neeson, the complex "hero" figure at the centre of Spielberg's then-very-recent "Schindler's List", right in the main adult part in TPM, and having him interact several times with what is meant to be the anti-Jewish emblem to end all anti-Jewish emblems or something (go to the Middle East), and making the other hero of the movie be Queen Amidala, played by Natalie Portman, an actress with strong Jewish ancestry, and all those horribly anti-racist themes embedded in the series (despite simplifications discussed above), I guess Lucas must be some horrible bigot, who immediately pounced on digital technology to make the world even more dark and stupid. It couldn't be that Qui-Gon is in any way racist to Watto, though, I guess, or that the Emperor constructs an entire government that entirely excludes non-whites (and non-humans; and non-male humans) from office. The Order 66 sequence and the follow-on "senate speech" scene in ROTS, in borrowing liberally from massacre montages, some of which occur, again, in "Schindler's List", are absolutely not making any point about racism or politically-engineered prejudice whatsoever, either, I suppose.

Now, could racist caricatures be in TPM, but "accidentally"? Well, yeah, but I don't like that line of argumentation. It implies that Lucas is blind or ignorant, or old-fashioned, or obtuse, or just couldn't help himself. I don't hold any of those things to be true. Second, it opens the door to a soft fascism: a disturbing permutation of "for your own good"-style thinking, where the artist himself may be blameless, but we need to knuckle down and make sure, as blameless or as hapless as the artist may be, that he/she -- and, here's the important part, no-one else -- ever thinks of ever doing anything like this ever again. We've just ushered in a new form of censorship (one forever trying to take root): polite tyranny. Censoring popular art in this manner is also, in my view, plainly idiotic, at least as long as most (all?) blockbuster films display an easy way with violence, unhelpful black-hat-/white-hat melodramatics, and basically exploit pretty faces (especially women) for profit. I'd also like to see people calling out films for animal abuse and the use of animal-derived products. What about the food served in film canteens? What about all that leather used in film costumes, for props, set dressing, etc.? What about animals suffering direct abuse in the making of a film? These are really issues to get animated about. It really depends, per my opening remarks, what lenses one chooses to wear. Personally, I see the racism issue as a red herring -- for reasons I've hopefully explained.

tl;dr version: see my first post.

 

If Lucas is a bigot, he's sure lousy at being one, given the diversity of his casts and of his friends/loved ones. One of his own children is half-black.

Oh wait, let me guess: he married a black woman to "make up" for the "obvious racism" in the prequels, according to the bashers.

People can't seem to decide which ethnicity Watto is allegedly a stereotype of: Jewish, Italian or Arab. That they assume he's a stereotype at all says quite a bit more about their own prejudices than about Lucas's.

I might add that in addition to Natalie Portman in the prequels, Lucas cast Carrie Fisher, who is half-Jewish, as his heroine in the OT, as well as Harrison Ford as one of the heroes, and Ford is of partly Jewish extraction as well.

 

@ Lucas being a bigot-

...I've no words. The man's got flaws, but he's not a bigot toward any race, ethnicities or religion. I'm shocked this is even being discussed at all.

Y'all realize the world's got bigger problems that needs to be discussed, right? Problems that are real? This topic is a prime example of making an issue out of something that never existed in the first place. It's...wow. What's next, that the films preach homophobia because we don't have a gay character? Or that Lucas hates handicapped people because we didn't see a disabled character other than Vader (who is the villain)?

These folks need to get a life. Not every creative outlet known to man harbor secret bigoted agendas behind the characters and plots. At the end of the day, the creator has a story to tell regardless of who or what his/her characters are.

 

Casting is diverse overall -- but if you break it down to a more basic lead-actor paradigm, it's white-centric. The same, however, could be said for a lot of English-language films.

And yeah, if Lucas is trying to live the life of an incurable racist, he's sure going about it in an odd way.

LOL! That would be interesting.

Or maybe he did it to prove he's still attracted to humans, and not computer silicon, or something.

Yes. If Watto resolves to anything, he'd probably have to be Italian, since he seems to be a mafioso-type, wanna-be tough-guy: a small-time gangster who acts like he's seen it all.

This would also be consistent with an anti-gangster theme in Star Wars, of which Jabba is merely the most cartoon-like manifestation. I think it's obvious that Lucas sees politicians and studio executives as pretty gangster-ish, and the saga has a spoofy, angry take on greed and power.

Watto being somewhat Arabic would also be a nod to Arabic mythology (it is Tatooine, and he does barter with Qui-Gon Jinn, after all), as well as Sheik Ilderim in the classic "Ben-Hur", who is a bit too similar in disposition and narrative function to ignore ->> http://www.moongadget.com/origins/benhur.html

The Jewish connection is virtually groundless, in my view, aside from the fact that the animators did look to Dickens' Fagin for inspiration, and Fagin, in his original conception, does unfortunately evoke the dreaded spectre of anti-Semitism (Dickens later revised "Oliver Twist" and toned him down) ->> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagin

So, Star Wars can be a bit crass about things (I believe I tried outlining this in my former post), but I also think there's enough of a twist on stereotyping to redeem it and lend it some panache. Again, then, the series isn't racist for me, but it could be called problematic. Though I also regard it as a bit stupid to single it out while other entertainments get off relatively free. Lenses 'n' all that.

Yep. Incidentally, I've read some bizarre attacks on Lucas before, over Leia and Padme. There was someone who used to post extensively on IMDb (and I believe has even had accounts here) who claimed that Leia was Lucas' shallow sense of wish-fulfillment, and Han his terrible jock-like screen persona who gets to harass and defile her. In ROTJ, Lucas was meant to be "punishing" his wayward wife (this was the time Lucas' first marriage fell apart) when Leia is chained up by Jabba: "ruining" Star Wars for the sake of petty sadomasochistic debasement. That guy was quite something.

Again, lenses, I guess.

 

Basically, people saw some correspondences between Jar Jar and minstrel characters, and so they decided he was a racist caricature. The problem was, those people never took the time or effort to examine what Lucas was actually doing with those correspondences. They mocked Jar Jar, and therefore concluded that he was created to be mocked, when in fact quite the opposite was the case.

 

I don't think it's always people don't *look* rather that they misinterpret intentions or disregard them outright. Some don't even have frames of reference to even consider some of the things people nitpick here about.

BTW, Link, as a challenged person it would be nice if people would quit acting like wanting to see such acknowledged in SW is a bad thing it's just as valid as other so called 'diversity' issues.

 

There is no such thing as an American accent. I am an American and I have a strong Long Island accent. There are also southern accents, northern accents, mid west accents and so on. Which all are just here in America. So out of all the ones I listed, which one is the definitive American accent?

 

I'm a disabled person myself, Cushy, but I'm also a writer. I've learned long ago to not shoe-horn things in for the sake of diversity. It's the plot that matters, not what the characters look like. Would it have been cool if we had a Jedi who was blind, paralyzed, missing legs, or deformed yet they still kicked ass? Sure, sure, but not including them doesn't mean Lucas is saying he hates handicapped people.

I know some might respond with, "But would it have killed the budget to include them anyhow?" Here's my response, "If it's important to the plot or character development, then include it. If not, then don't." My other response is that creators of fiction get to do whatever they wish with their own stories, it doesn't mean they harbor some bigoted agenda against an entire group of people.

Besides, dear Cushy, it's not like we can't just write a story of our own with badass heroes who kick all kinds of ass despite whatever handicap they might have.

 

Yeah anakinfansince1983, the mid west I would also consider "the American accent" as well. But even there are specific accents to there as well like the Chicago accent and the Minnesota/Wisconsin accent like the one in the movie Fargo. America has so many different accents it's so hard to keep up with them! lol.

 

Exactly. Although I'm a woman, and a feminist, I generally don't care for "chick flicks," or entertainment where the woman is omnipotent and omniscient and the man an emasculated doofus. I'll take an action movie with a couple of interesting women -- not faux feminist "kick butt" girls who are unpleasant and grating but held above reproach because they're "strong women" (*cough* Mara in Legends *cough*), but interesting women, who may kick butt but only when appropriate. Or they may not kick butt at all, but be strong in other ways.

Leia was an example of an interesting female character. Padmé was until ROTS, and even in ROTS she had a couple of good moments. Shmi in TPM was a strong woman who didn't kick butt.

I've been told by New Yorkers and Southerners that I have a California accent.

 

Not too shabby.

 

maychild California accent! Totally narly dude!

 

*snerk*

 

There's a g in gnarly.

 

Thanks. I thought it was missing something.

 

I do think there were some poor choices made in TPM in regards to insensitivity towards potential stereotypes. I think claiming that ppl who may have noted such things and/or were offended by them were simply "looking for racism" isn't a fair statement to make. Sure many pt-bashers may cynically jump on this bandwagon, and yes there is milieu of ppl who look for stuff like this to be offended by -- but watching some of you guys (some who I otherwise quite respect) jumping through mental hoops to try to blame the 'offended' parties is kind of missing the point of such things. The fact is many people (including ppl that enjoyed the film) interpreted characters as playing on specific real-life stereotypes "without looking for it"... including myself.

That said, I don't think TPM is racist, and it certainly isn't intentionally racist. In the worst case scenario, the 'offending' crimes are superficial in that they arent substantive to the story, ideology or theme of TPM or the saga (the problem is form rather than substance).

One strength the SW universe does have over it's other scifi and fantasy counterparts in this regard, is that it tends to eventually show members of the various species in a variety of roles and socio-economic positions. Even if not based on a distinctly recognizable real-life stereotypes, most scifi and fantasy universes tend to base entire species around 1 or 2 broad characteristics - a trend that is not so much offensive as it is uninteresting. (A Klingon is warlike, even the ones that aren't warriors.. but a Rodian is a bounty hunter, a senator, a Jedi etc..)

 

I don't know if I'm included in the above commentary, but it wasn't my intention to diminish the perspectives of others.

Well, maybe it was (we should continually suspect our own motives), but I hope I at least left some room open for the possibility that other opinions are valid, and that much of this comes down to personal bias.

I suppose, though, what I was also saying is that accusing the film of being racist -- somewhat, in fact, like accusing a person of being racist -- is a bit of a red herring, and seems like a failure to engage with a bigger equation: taking a complex mass of data and focusing inordinately on a small subset of that data.

That, and, to put it another way, "the map is not the territory".

Yes, I quite agree with you on that front, and I find what you just said very well-put.

Excellent observation there.

I might add that I think it's also the case, generally, that people turn to these films for a bit of sustenance, and like to get lost in the fantastic, diverse worlds offered up -- characters and environments.

I might also contend that imaginative films like the Star Wars movies, combined with their rich roving through history and mythology, are an excellent tool for training and broadening the imagination. And if anything defeats racism and oppression, and reduces suffering and hardship, it is surely the power of the imagination.

 

I've always thought that the Trade Federation sounded Japanese and the 90s and the suspicion that it tied in to longstanding American fears about Japan's economic success whilst the US's manufacturing base continued to slump was hard to avoid. Star Wars is based on easily identifiable archetypes and I'd presume that Lucas was just trying to make them distinctive and their role as very successful big business simultaneously easily identifiable to a broad public. Of course archetypes and stereotypes can all too often be the same thing and in this case it was a questionable and unflattering stereotype. I've always thought it was more a case of being poorly chosen without enough thought to the consequences rather than being a malicious slur.

The other one that I remember being a big issue for many viewers was Watto. The anti semitism thing was a common accusation. I never got it myself. I've never thought that Watto sounded like any Jewish stereotype that I've ever heard. If anything I thought he sounded a bit Italian although I can understand some thinking it more Arabic -ish. The big hooked nose and being a very money oriented merchant are of course what really drive this accusation. I don't really believe that it was intended to be anti-semitic in any way and suspect it says more about cinema-goers prejudices and assumptions than it does about Lucas.

 

Wait, what?

 

George Lucas is the most racist person ever


Alright being serious now, this is an old and tired argument, no offense OP, but it's pretty much universally agreed that the "racism" angle in Star Wars is baseless slander. People can make and back up many arguments in regards to the prequels. This, however, is not one of them.

 

Supreme Chancellor wrote:

Sorry, are you questioning the comment or my dismal grammar in the post?