Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (81 page)

• You may have a dim memory of a very
probing
(hint, hint) medical exam conducted against your will.

• You may also have memories of having your head placed in some kind of restraining device as long needles are inserted into your nostrils or ears, or something drills into your skull. These sensations may be accompanied by a burning smell. Human medical examiners who look you over after the fact find no signs that such procedures have taken place.

• There may be evidence that the scene of your abduction has
have been “staged” to look as if nothing has happened, but a few incorrect details might be noticeable. For example, if you went to bed wearing pajamas, you may wake up nude or dressed only in underwear, with the pajamas folded neatly and placed at the foot of the bed. You may even wake up in the wrong room of the house. If you were abducted from your car, you may find that items in the car or in the trunk have been moved around.

• Your ability to remember things suddenly becomes stronger, and you may even develop psychic powers that enable you to see events in the future.

• You suddenly get a sense of mission or the feeling that you have been chosen (by the aliens) for an important purpose, but you don’t know what it is. This often replaces feelings of low self-esteem that you had before the alien encounter.

• Electronic appliances behave strangely when you pass by. Computers crash, clocks lose time, radio and TV reception is distorted, and streetlights go dark as you walk under them.

• You develop a new phobia of some kind. Did you suddenly become afraid of spiders? Heights? Enclosed spaces? Crowds? The aliens may be to blame.

• You become obsessive-compulsive or develop addictions that you didn’t have before.

• You become less trusting of other people, especially doctors, police, and other authority figures, than you were before.

• You have an uncontrollable urge to take vitamins.

• You develop an interest in UFOs, astronomy, or physics. Or, conversely, an aversion to being around other people when they are discussing these subjects.

If this topic has unsettled you, fear not! The St. Lawrence Agency of Altamonte Springs, Florida, sells a UFO abduction insurance policy that pays out $10 million, with a double-indemnity payment of $20 million “if the aliens insist on conjugal visits.” Cost: $19.95 plus $3.00 for same-day shipping. The policy pays out $1 per year for 10 million years or until the death of the policy holder, whichever comes first.

He could’ve gone down in movie history as
more than just another character in the
Star Wars
saga, because he really was a pioneer in digital filmmaking.
In the end, Jar Jar did become a cultural phenomenon, though
for all the wrong reasons. Here’s his fascinating—and tragic—story.

May 19, 1999, was a pop culture milestone:
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
, the first
Star Wars
movie in 16 years, opened in the United States. It set a single-day box-office record, bringing in $28 million. More than two million people took the day off of work to see it. And what did those fans get after all of the hype? A movie that drew mixed reviews at best.

And as the summer rolled on, one name kept popping up in news reports and on Internet message boards: Jar Jar Binks. While there was some disagreement as to whether the rest of the film worked, the alien sidekick character was almost universally reviled. A typical review came from the
Village Voice
: “Jar Jar sucks the oxygen out of every scene he’s in.” So what went wrong?

While outlining
The Phantom Menace
in the mid-1990s,
Star Wars
creator George Lucas wanted a character that served the same purpose as R2-D2 and C-3PO had in the original trilogy—someone who had no special abilities but could comment on the proceedings, provide comic relief, and even help out in the end.

So he created Jar Jar Binks, member a race of amphibian-like creatures called Gungans who live on the planet Naboo. In the movie, we learn that Jar Jar’s people banished him from their underwater city because he’s clumsy. While living on the surface, Jar Jar meets two Jedi knights who are on a mission to warn the planet’s human population of an imminent invasion. Jar Jar joins forces with the good guys, gets in all sorts of trouble, makes a lot
of wisecracks, provides plot exposition for younger viewers, and ends up an unwitting hero in the final battle.

Lucas had another goal for Jar Jar: to make him the first 100 percent computer-generated character who interacts with live actors. So Jar Jar couldn’t be a puppet (like Yoda) or a man in a suit (like Chewbacca). Instead, his exaggerated movements, floppy ears, and long snout were created by Industrial Light & Magic. Helping bring the character to life was a dancer named Ahmed Best, who provided Jar Jar’s voice and big, loping movements. “I wore what’s called a motion capture suit, which is like a tight scuba suit with a bunch of light sensors on it,” he recalled. “They had infrared cameras that caught the light-sensor data and input that into a computer.” Then digital animators “painted” Binks over the infrared images of Best. The process took nearly two years and resulted in the first completely digitized principle character in movie history. But that wasn’t what people were talking about.

The first thing that annoyed viewers was Jar Jar’s squeaky voice and fractured grammar: “Mesa day startin’ pretty okee-day with a brisky morning munchy, then BOOM! Gettin’ very scared and grabbin’ that Jedi and POW! Mesa here!”

People didn’t merely dislike Jar Jar Binks—they
hated
him. Several organizations sprang up calling for the alien’s head, such as the “Society for the Extermination of Jar Jar Binks” and “Jar Jar Binks Must Die! ”—which was also the title of a song by the rap group Damn Nation. Sample lyrics: “He’s got big freakin’ ears, and eyes like a bug / Every time I eat a taco I see his ugly mug.” (People were also upset by the rampant use of the character in TV commercials.) One
Star Wars
fan, Mike Nichols, was so disappointed by
Episode I
that he recut the film on his home computer—removing most of Jar Jar’s scenes and dialogue—and released it online as
The Phantom Edit
…to rave reviews.

And then there were the accusations of racism. To some critics, Jar Jar’s dialect, combined with his long “dreadlocks-style” ears, were reminiscent of drugged-out Jamaicans. To Brent Staples of the
New York Times
, “Jar Jar lopes along in a combination shuffle and pimp walk. Binks is by far the stupidest person in the film.
His simple-minded devotion to his (white) Jedi masters has reminded people of Hollywood’s most offensive racial stereotypes.”

Suddenly, instead of celebrating the achievement of the first digital character, Lucas was defending him. He wasn’t caught completely off guard, though—many older filmgoers didn’t like the “cute” Ewoks from 1983’s
Return of the Jedi
, either. His standard defense: “The movies are for children but the older fans don’t want to admit that. They want the films to be tough like
The Terminator
.” Lucas maintained that he didn’t model the alien after African Americans or Jamaicans. Jar Jar, he said, was a combination of Charlie Chaplin, Jimmy Stewart, and Danny Kaye. And his exaggerated walk wasn’t a “pimp walk,” it was an effect of his amphibious nature—Jar Jar walks as if he’s swimming. Concerning the alien’s voice, Lucas charged that those critiques were made by people “who’ve obviously never met a Jamaican, because it’s definitely not Jamaican and if you were to say those lines in Jamaican they wouldn’t be anything like that.” Best, an African American, also denied the voicework was racist, explaining that he and the filmmakers wanted it to sound “fun.”

Jar Jar’s role was greatly reduced in 2002’s
Episode II: Attack of the Clones
. He appears only in a few scenes, though one is crucial to the greater story arc: He’s been appointed representative of Naboo, and is unwittingly duped into making a motion in the Galactic Senate that will grant absolute power to Supreme Chancellor Palpatine. Without realizing it, Jar Jar is instrumental in turning Palpatine into the evil emperor, the saga’s true villain.

In
Episode III
, Jar Jar makes only one cameo appearance. Though Lucas maintains he’d always planned to cut back on the part, movie insiders insist that it was actually done in response to the massively negative reaction.

Adding insult to injury, all of the technical accolades Lucas was expecting for Jar Jar never happened. Instead, they were bestowed upon the similarly rendered character of Gollum in 2002’s
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
. Gollum’s creators, not Jar Jar’s, won the Academy Award. (Jar Jar supporters are quick to point out that
among all of the problems people have with him, most viewers take his presence on the screen for granted, at least proving the filmmakers got that part right.)

Today, Jar Jar is still disliked, having been named in several polls “the most annoying character in movie history.” But he does have his supporters. In 2009 filmmaker and Huffington Post columnist Bryan Young wrote a passionate defense of the character:

Here’s another view: In 2009
New Yorker
columnist Amy Davidson used Jar Jar in a political commentary. Contrary to the popular opinion that former President George W. Bush was the Darth Vader to Vice President Dick Cheney’s Emperor, she wrote, Bush was more akin to “Jar Jar Binks, who, after a buffoonish youth, improbably rises to a prominent political position and obliviously fronts for the soon-to-be emperor in getting the
Star Wars
equivalent of the PATRIOT Act passed.”

So Jar Jar Binks has become as well known as any other
Star Wars
character. But will audiences ever warm up to him? For many older viewers, scorn for Jar Jar runs deep. If there is any hope for the much-maligned alien, it’s with children, who can now view the entire saga from beginning to end without all of the pop culture hullabaloo that surrounded it. They can just enjoy the story for what it is: a space fantasy full of corny dialogue, neat ships, cool battles, bizarre planets, and strange creatures. And to George Lucas—who modeled
Star Wars
after the 1950s
Flash Gordon
serials he enjoyed from his own childhood—that’s all he was going for in the first place.

Rockefeller dynasty began with Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937), who amassed a $1.5 billion fortune in his lifetime. By the time he died, America’s first billionaire had managed to spin his image from ruthlessly ambitious businessman into philanthropist by giving away more than $500 million to charities. John D. Rockefeller Jr. followed in his father’s footsteps, both building upon what remained of the family fortune and also spending an enormous amount of time furthering “the well-being of mankind.” He expected his five sons—John D. III, Nelson, Laurance, Winthrop, and David, known collectively as the Rockefeller Brothers—to do the same; they were, by their own description, inheritors not just of huge wealth, but also of the responsibilities that come with it.

All five were active in the family businesses and philanthropies—the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and others. But while it is impossible for a Rockefeller
not
to be defined by money, the brothers were defined by more than that. Each had his own areas of expertise and special interest. “The road to happiness,” said John D. III, “lies in two simple principles: Find what it is that interests you and that you can do well, and when you find it put your whole soul into it—every bit of energy and ambition and natural ability that you have.”

• John III won high honors in economics at Princeton and then began working for his father in 1929. He was groomed to take the
lead in the family, but his brothers objected strenuously, and his own lack of confidence made it hard for him to stand up to them.

• He joined the Navy in WWII and worked on a task force planning postwar policy for Japan. Japan “became a second home” to him and his wife, Blanchette. He was a trusted advisor to several Asian governments as well as a supporter of the Asia Society (founded in 1956 to promote better understanding between the people of Asia and the U.S.), the Japan Society, the Asian Cultural Program, and the Institute of Pacific Relations.

• Amassed a major collection of Asian ceramics, metalwork, sculpture, and painting that was later donated to the San Francisco Fine Art Museum and the Asia Society. He was deeply committed to shaping public policy toward philanthropy and lobbied Congress to enact tax laws that would encourage private giving.