Why Darth Darth Binks is Wrong — Probably

Fan theories are like conspiracy theories — most of them are little more than wishful, agenda-driven nonsense, but there are always the rare few that are compelling, amusing, or otherwise informative. Some of them even turn out to be true, and that’s at least part of the reason behind why we entertain them. Governments and corporations get up to all sorts of shady business, and writers often hide significant details in their plots––as long as that keeps happening, these theories aren’t going to go away.

A recent fan theory has it that Jar Jar Binks, the comic relief character of the Star Wars prequels, is actually the Big Bad of the entire series. By hiding in plain sight, and acting the dunce, he is able to operate in the background, secretly manipulating events according to his dark and evil purpose.

As far as fan theories go, I like it quite a lot. Redditor Lumpawarroo manages to amass an impressive amount of circumstantial evidence in its favour, while holding the theory to testable predictions regarding the upcoming Star Wars films. Namely, that if Jar Jar Binks really is evil, then we will see the character reappear in The Force Awakens as Supreme Leader Snoke.

I don’t actually buy into the theory, though, and for the same two reasons that I don’t buy into most fan or conspiracy theories. Firstly, it relies far too much on speculative conclusions arrived at based on ambiguous details. Take, for example, Jar Jar’s comically-absurd ability to safely fumble his way through deadly scenarios. Lumpawarroo cites this as evidence that Jar Jar is a force-user, even though we often see non-force-sensitive characters perform similar feats — in the original trilogy, for example, R2-D2 and C-3PO frequently waltz their way through blaster crossfire, only to emerge at the other end unscathed. This is taken further in the prequels, with C-3PO’s unlikely navigation of the droid factory in Attack of the Clones and R2-D2’s shenanigans aboard Grievous’s flagship in Revenge of the Sith.

(Yes, Obi Wan warns us that there is no such thing as luck, but I take that to mean that the force sometimes gives events a helping hand, and that just because we see the force assist a character does not mean they are themselves a force user.)

The second reason I often don’t buy into these theories is that they assume an uncanny degree of competency on behalf of the conspirators. It’s true that some directors will closely scrutinise each and every element that makes its way into their film, and that we can therefore sometimes read meaningful intent behind the choice of a particular prop, camera angle, line of dialogue, location, etc. But directors are also capable of making mistakes, or of failing to realise the implications of a particular directorial choice. This is particularly true of choices that are only made in service of an aesthetics. This video, for example, makes fun of how unthreatening the climatic lightsaber fight in The Phantom Menace can seem if you subject it to close scrutiny. But it doesn’t prove that Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi were secretly in league with Darth Maul. Just that, sometimes, scenes that are shot to look impressive on the cinema screen aren’t always that convincing to the critical eye.

Likewise, Lumpawarroo makes a big deal of Jar Jar’s apparent martial arts skills, but seems to ignore the possibility that his drunken-fist movements were simply the result of a behind-the-scenes aesthetic choice. That, like Qui-Gons’ showy yet ineffective sabre-fighting, Jar Jar’s Zui Quan-inspired movements are not meant to hint at any secret narrative shenanigans: they’re just meant to look cool, and in-keeping with the general silliness of the character. (As an aside, though, this does raise the interesting possibility that Wushu aficionado Ray Park was the actual reference-actor for many of Jar Jar’s scenes.)

These examples all regard aesthetic choices, though. We can also find inconsistencies where directors have simply made mistakes––or run against the limitations of their budget, deadline, or some other impassive obstacle––rather than made an informed directorial choice. It is not always easy to tell which is the case, though: here, for example, George R.R. Martin discusses the existence of both accidental and deliberate inconsistencies in the Song of Ice and Fire books, which make it more difficult for readers to tell which mistakes are hints and which are simply mistakes. It’s not about whether or not George Lucas is an auteur––he certainly is––it’s just that even auteurs can accidentally fuck things up.

This all brings me to what I think is the most significant piece of evidence for the Darth Darth Binks theory as laid out with respect to an actual unambiguous detail from the films. Lumpawarroo lays it all out below, but you can also check out this video which lays the argument out verbatim. (If you’re not going to watch the video, make sure you follow the link to the gif.)

In [The Phantom Menance], when Jar Jar and the Jedi ambush the droids and rescue the queen and her entourage, Jar Jar “accidentally” botches his leap from the balcony. A few frames later, he is seen dropping from the opposite side of the balcony, which would seem to be quite be impossible without a force assisted jump and/or force sprint of some kind. . . . Easy to dismiss as a continuity or framing error, I suppose… except that one of the droids continues to fire on Jar Jar’s initial position, even as we see him drop elsewhere! Here it is in slow motion. . . . This means that the animators knew very well where Jar Jar was supposed to be––dangling from the balcony over Qui-Gon’s left shoulder––and purposefully animate the droids tracking his inexplicably fast movement elsewhere.

This is strong evidence of something weird going on––not a mistake that went unnoticed into the final release, but something animators would have spent precious work-hours diligently sequencing out. To work out what was going on, I decided to go back to the original film. My instinct was that, between filming the jump from the bridge and the lightsaber fight, Ahmed Best had been given the wrong mark to stand on. Therefore, an incongruity was established which needed to be fixed in post-production — in this case, by having a droid track the inexplicable trajectory of Jar Jar’s fall. I expected to find Jar Jar standing in the ‘wrong’ position, where the battledroid saw him land, in his next scene. I figured I would be wrong if we didn’t see him in any subsequent scene at all — no Jar Jar left standing after the fall, no incongruity to painstakingly fix. What I found was even weirder.

It’s not very exciting. Jar Jar recovers from his landing and turns to walk up a flight of stairs. But note his position. It’s hard to tell what it shows, but I grabbed a couple of stills from the Star Wars Screencaps and super-imposed them over one another for comparison. Here is what I ended up with:

It’s not possible to make a perfect super-imposition, here. You can see the staircase doesn’t align neatly, even though the eaves of the building in the upper right-hand corner, which I used as my primary guide, are perfect. Regardless, direct your attention to the hazy blur which I’ve marked with a light-blue line. This is where Jar Jar falls in front of the screen, and you can see from the advancing Qui-Gon that it aligns with where Qui-Gon probably landed. The pink line, however, marks where we see Jar Jar recovering from his fall just seconds afterwards––somewhere to the left of Qui-Gon, which is consistent with the earlier bridge scene.

From the perspective of the above still, Jar Jar was originally on the left of Qui-Gon while he was on the bridge, is seen falling somewhat to the right of that position––not exactly the far right, as Lumpawarroo claims, but somewhere corresponding to the middle of the bridge––and then finds himself to the left again for no reason at all. Short of another offscreen, force-assisted sideways somersault, how do we explain this second relocation which leaves Jar Jar on his ‘correct’ mark?

We get two hints in the Phantom Menace making-of documentary. The first is that animating Jar Jar Binks pushed to the very limits what was considered possible in computer animation at the time, and finalising his animation before the film went to print would have come down to the line. The second is that Lucas was happy to manipulate scenes in post-production to an unprecedented degree, taking maximum advantage of then-recent developments in film-editing technology to bring actors out of sync with one another in order to make what was normally an unusable shot usable.

What I think happened here is that after principle photography it was realised that having Jar Jar on his original mark would require a lot of animation for an inconsequential result. To capture the scene properly would involve animating both his landing as well as his reaction to the scene as it played-out. But in shifting Jar Jar’s landing position closer to the foreground, and a little to the right, it was possible to have him fall beneath the frame, thus cutting-down on the animators’ workload. The tracking movement of the droid were simply inserted for the benefit of the eagle-eyed, but the purpose was not to hint at Jar Jar’s Sith powers so much as to disguise a problem in post-production. This is the film, after all, which tested the limits of what could be achieved in post. It is hardly a stretch to imagine that sometimes those ambitions painted the film-makers into a difficult corner.

I have focused on this scene because it is the only piece of evidence for Darth Darth Binks that can’t be explained away as coincidental or speculative. But I am still prepared to be proved wrong, although unlike Lumpawarroo I doubt that The Force Awakens will cinch the argument either way. I agree that the film-makers of the next trilogy won’t entirely abandon the prequels, but that doesn’t mean they’re beholden to ideas that the prequels didn’t commit to. Especially given that, if those ideas were realised in the new movies, they would risk tarnishing the new films with the same difficult reputation that the prequels struggled to shrug off. Having said that, however, I am very interested in any future revelations from George Lucas on what he originally had in mind for Jar Jar Binks — the character was a failure in its implementation, but there’s no inherent reason that the character couldn’t have become as loveable as Chewbacca or Yoda if he had been done right from the start. Based on the evidence at hand, though, I sincerely doubt that he was ever intended to be a Sith Lord.

Hence, I stand by the title of the title of this post. Darth Darth Binks is wrong — probably. There is still the possibility that he was meant to be the titular character of The Phantom Menace, but in the absence of any concrete evidence in favour of this theory we’re still in ‘Dumbledore is not Dead’ territory. The Darth Darth Binks theory is possible, and even plausible, but still unlikely to be correct.