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George Lucas is a racist

Yes, this post is about The Phantom Menace, and about five years to late, but in my defense, there was no diogenesclub.net five years ago.

A lot of people have made off-handed remarks that this or that character is a racist stereotype, mostly Jar Jar Binks, but to my knowledge, no one has ever looked at the movie as a whole to notice, pigeon English aside, how racist the movie actually is.

The original Star Wars had a message. It didn't hit you over the head with it, but it was there. The point of Star Wars (or at least one of them) was that the human spirit triumphs over technology. The point of The Phantom Menace was that racism is wrong. I know this because I was hit over the head with it. Obi-Wan kindly dumbs it down for us and Boss Nass to understand:

OBI-WAN: You and the Naboo form a symbiont circle. What happens to one of
you will affect the other.

The much maligned midi-chlorians were introduced to hit the point home:

QUI-GON: We are symbionts with the midi-chlorians.
ANAKIN: Symbionts?
QUI-GON: Life forms living together for mutual advantage. Without the
midi-chlorians, life could not exist, and we would have no knowledge of the
Force.

Get it? He used that big word 'symbiont' both times so we wouldn't miss out on the wisdom being proffered. To refresh your memory, The Phantom Menace involves a conflict between the amphibious Gungans and the humanoid Naboo. They can't get along, and while they share their planet peacefully, they are entirely segregated from one another.

It's not hard to map these two races onto our own world, the Naboo are the white majority and the Gungans are, well, whatever oppressed minority you like, blacks, hispanics, native americans, you name it. So, over the course of the movie, the two races put aside their differences and defeat the moderately evil Trade Federation. And everybody learns a lesson.

Here's the thing: The Gungans are idiots and the Naboo aren't. At no point do the Naboo ever say anything bad about the Gungans. But the Gungans will bring it up at the drop of a hat. The Gungans are paranoid and unjustified in their dislike for the Naboo, while the Naboo just want to be friends. The Naboo are a bunch of upper class white people sitting in a cocktail lounge saying, "Of course I would have black friends, but I just don't know any blacks," while the Gungans are sitting around in the separate-but-equal underwater homes, blaming everything on whitey.

The Naboo we meet in the movie are beautiful, peaceful, smart, and dignified. Here are the four Gungans with speaking parts:

Jar Jar Binks
Aside from noting that he's arguably the most hated fictional character of all time, with Barney at a distant second, I don't think I need to say much about the big Double-J.
Boss Nass
By far the most paranoid and bigoted Gungan in the movie. He sends every Gungan into battle (except himself) simply because the Queen of the Naboo vaguely implies that she doesn't think she's smarter than the Gungans. But not before he spits all over himself.
Also note that he is given the title Boss, not a dignified royal title like humanoid characters get. (Lucas tries to have his cake and eat it too by making Amidala an elected(!) queen.)
Captain Tarpals
He comes close to being a old, respectable Gungan warrior, except that he says doo-doo not once, but twice.
The one who says "Theysa comin!"
Sadly, the Gungan who has only one line seems to be the smartest Gungan by default.

So basically, Lucas is saying in own his roundabout way, that minorities should stop being so stupid and paranoid and help us kindly white folk in our ivory tower whenever we ask. This wouldn't bother me so much, except that Lucas has gone out of his way to teach us a trite lesson of tolerance and equality, going so far as introducing something as lame as midi-chlorians, and he's in fact supporting the exact opposite view! Maybe Lucas has made some sort of genius Starship Troopers-esque meditation on the hypocrisy of the civil rights movement, but I sincerely doubt it.

Oh yeah, and that movie sucks besides.