Darth Jar Jar and the Wisdom of Fans

During what was a relatively slow time for political news last week, up to and including the Ben Carson West Point “controversy,” the nerdier reaches of the political internet (but I repeat myself) spent a lot of time on two “Star Wars”-related conversations. First, the elaborate theory, first spun out by a Reddit user, that the hated Jar Jar Binks was originally supposed to be a Yoda-style Force master, a Dark Side adept cloaking his powers in bungling and clowning, until the backlash against his character persuaded George Lucas to bury the idea. Second, the controversial defenses of the Empire being spun out by Sonny Bunch (standing on the shoulders of Jonathan Last), and contested by Jedi apologists and rebel sympathizers on the left, center and right alike — up to and including one Senator Ted Cruz.

What both of these arguments have in common is that they’re rescue attempts, of different sorts, for the Star Wars story in the wake of the so-awful-I-won’t-tell-my-children-they-exist prequels. The Darth Jar Jar argument supposes (pretty cleverly, with lots of striking visual support) that Lucas actually had a plan for his worst character beyond just entertaining particularly slow-witted four-year-olds; the case for the Empire supposes, in a #trolling sort of way, a level of complexity and nuance and sophistication to the Star Wars saga that the droning, cardboard politics of the prequels never came close to achieving. (My own take on the controversy, for what it’s worth, is close to this old take from Tyler Cowen: Not pro-Empire but anti-Jedi, and sympathetic to both the Rebel Alliance and the Trade Federation in their struggles against the tyranny of Force-users.)

Of course as the Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri wisely points out, even if it were true (and even if Lucas had followed through and had a big Evil Binks reveal) the Darth Jar Jar scenario wouldn’t come anywhere close to redeeming the prequels from their essential awfulness, and the same goes for the case for Palpatine: At best it might provide a hate-watching frisson for anyone foolish enough to actually return to “Attack of the Clones.”

But the fact remains that both fan theories/arguments are more interesting than what Lucas intentionally put up on screen. And therein lies an interesting point. We’re living through an era of pop culture that’s rife with serialized stories — better stories than the “Star Wars” prequels, to be clear — whose creators often seem to know how to build and build but not how to make sense of everything that they’ve thrown into the story, or how to stick the landing in the end. This started with Chris Carter and “The X-Files” (now being revived in a way that will doubtless make its mythology that much more incomprehensible), it’s continued through case studies as various as “Lost” and “True Detective,” and now it hangs over the head of “Game of Thrones,” as George R.R. Martin’s story grows ever-baggier and his timetable for finishing it stretches out beyond the HBO’s adaptation’s schedule. (It’s a particular problem for fantasy sagas, I think, which should be ruled by Tolkien’s wisdom and never go on for longer than three books.)

When things go badly in these stories or productions, when an obsessed fan base is disappointed that their complex theories and endless questions are barely addressed in the finales, there’s a tendency to blame the fans themselves. Oh, you crazy theorists, you didn’t understand that “Lost” was really just about the characters, and who cares where the polar bears or the Dharma Initiative came from! Oh, you silly online obsessives, it didn’t matter who the Yellow King was in “True Detective,” you should have just been happy with the mood and atmosphere! Etc.

As I said after the “True Detective” finale flopped (and long before season two flopped in a more comprehensive way), I don’t think much of these arguments … and one of the reasons I don’t think much of them is that the “crazy” internet theories about what should happen in these shows, or what should have happened in the “Star Wars” prequels, aren’t actually all crazy. I mean, some of them are; it’s a big internet! But the ones that break out of comment threads and message boards and actually get attention are often quite clever, and many of them — Darth Jar Jar very much included — are clearly improvements on what actually ended up on screen. (And this isn’t just true of big honking failures: As phenomenal as “Breaking Bad” was, the re-interpretation of its finale as an “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” dream sequence — hatched independently by Emily NussbaumNorm MacDonald, and my wife — was better than the actual final episode that Vince Gilligan supplied us with.)

Which raises a possibility that occurred to me more than a few times as “Lost” wended its way to its entirely-disappointing end: When pop culture creatives get started on a story or series or saga without knowing exactly how it ends (as was certainly the case with the fantasy sagas I started writing in high school … er, maybe I’ve said too much), when the incentives of storytelling and audience service encourage them to throw a lot of balls in the air without having a clear plan for how to catch them, they might consider swallowing their pride and their auteur-ish theories of themselves and just stealing from the best solutions that their obsessive fans come up with.

This wouldn’t work for a show like the first season of “True Detective,” where shooting was wrapped up by the time the TV audience starting obsessing over the script’s myriad red herrings, and the case for the Empire and Darth Jar Jar both came too late to help George Lucas improve “Attack of the Clones.” But “Lost” could have been saved outright if, in between seasons 2 and 3, Carleton Cuse and Damon Lindelof had just trawled the web for the best theories about what their Island really was and put some of them to use. And as we wait and wait and wait for George R.R. Martin to wrap up his Song of Ice and Fire, I rather like the idea of Martin lurking on A Forum of Ice and Fire, notebook in hand, seizing the most compelling attempts to make sense of his storytelling and turning them to his own purposes. He’s already employed his obsessive fans as collaborators in his world-building project, after all; stealing their best ideas seems like a perfectly reasonable next step.

And I mean this quite sincerely. If you’re a storyteller involved in some sort of world-building project, and you have the good fortune to attract an obsessive internet following, you might have an artistic duty to exploit that following’s hive mind — especially if the alternative is a Lindelofian belly flop, but even if it’s just the sort of mediocre windup that a lot of great stories feature. The online fanbeast has many vices: It’s complicit in trends as various and deplorable as the superhero glut and the slow extinction of high culture. But that’s all the more reason to recognize its virtues, which include its resemblance to a giant writer’s room, capable of churning out better ideas — far better, in some cases — than the actual writers who feed its appetite. They should take advantage.