In the vast cyberspace cosmos created by Star Wars fans and fanatics, Boba Fett has emerged as a cult figure who challenges Darth Vader, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and other marquee characters the marketers carefully groomed for stardom. So powerful is his grip that writers and fans brought him back to life and gave him hero status in the alternate universe of novels and short stories that surrounds the film.
Today a rare Boba Fett toy can set you back hundreds of dollars, if you can find one. A life-sized fully equipped figure costs $5,000. And Boba Fett is a big player in the Internet culture that constantly reinvents and expands the mythic Star Wars universe. A website poll recently found Fett was the number two all-time favorite Star Wars character. When I punched "Boba Fett" into my search engine, it listed more than 17,000 websites.
Helmet full of secrets
Even the man who created Boba Fett can’t explain his grip on the imagination. "I’m mystified by it," George Lucas told a TV interviewer. "He’s a mysterious character. He’s a provocative character." Lucas says Boba Fett will now have a prominent part in Episode II, filming this summer in Australia and Tunisia.
One rainy Saturday Annie got out her plastic Star Wars action figures, fitted them into their space ships and ran them through elaborate adventures. After she finished, I borrowed Boba Fett and put him on my desk. He’s still there, a grim little character bristling with weapons and trophies, keeping his secrets.
I backed into a strange quest to understand the phenomenon of Boba Fett when Annie wanted to read Star Wars adult spinoff stories about bounty hunters. I decided I’d better read them first for content.
Soon Annie couldn’t get her books out of my hands. At her age, after all, I was going to be an astronomer who wrote science fiction for fun. As I read, I caught myself flipping ahead to see if the mysterious Boba Fett would take over the next scene.
Boba Fett is not my kind of guy. I live a quiet rural life; friends see me as a feminist and a pacifist. True, in researching my novels on terrorism and the dark ages, I’ve met men and women who frightened me; mostly I avoid scary people.
So who is this fictional character that demands his human creator give him a larger role? Finding out took me to places I’d never imagined: funky shops specializing in Star Wars collectibles, scores of imaginative websites and reams of unusual reading.
I discovered you can download Boba Fett screensavers, icons, voice clips, cartoons, movie stills, art, fan fiction and design specs for his fast, deadly spaceship Slave I. You can order Boba Fett toys, dolls, books, comics or artworks. You can find instructions for making your own costume, join a chat room or read the latest news and rumors. These sites hum with high-tension zeal.
The polarizing neutral
Fans love Boba Fett, I learned, or loathe him. This obsession with a faceless, silent minor figure got me thinking about the nature of heroes and antiheroes.
Now we know the Star Wars trilogy heroes. The Jedi knight Luke Skywalker, his sister Princess Leia, Han Solo and their friends save the galaxy from the wicked Emperor Palpatine, his henchman Darth Vader and countless villains in Nazi-knockoff uniforms. Boba Fett isn’t a hero, he isn’t even on the heroes’ side. So whose side is he on?
I made popcorn and sat down to watch the Star Wars trilogy again.
We first really meet Boba Fett as a bounty hunter called in by Darth Vader to capture Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back. Later Boba Fett mouths off the lethal Vader, who amazingly capitulates; this guy intimidates even the Lord of the Sith.
I watched closely, trying to suss out this character. Fett moves slowly but thinks quickly. He’s coolheaded, resourceful, honorable on his own terms, a daring pilot. His fees are high and payable now -- what’s he doing with all those credits, buying a planet? He’s minimalist in violence, effort and words; he’s not on anyone’s side but his own.
In Return of the Jedi, after romancing Jabba the Hutt’s dancing girls and guarding the gangster from his well-deserved enemies, Fett watches the planned execution of Solo and Skywalker. Solo accidentally ignites Fett’s jet pack, sending him to an inglorious death by slow digestion in the Sarlacc monster’s belly.
Exit Boba Fett, screaming. That’s what you get, Lucas demonstrates, when you trust your hardware and not your software.
Mysterious resurrection
But then -- in a bold move worthy of Boba Fett -- novelists, comic-book writers and fans stage a mutiny. They enter George Lucas’s dreamtime, rescue their man and bring him back where he’s needed. Boba Fett isn’t dead, they claim, he was just busy blasting his way out of the tentacle-lashing Sarlacc. Someone finds him blown half-dead out of the monster and nurses him back to strength.
Witness the dazzling power of mythic transformation. Boba Fett lives.
The writers develop Fett’s rescue in short stories, comics and novels -- immediately making him more human, humorous, even compassionate -- and fans post their own fiction and art on websites. They gleefully conspire to hijack the story.
This delights me. First, obviously, Boba Fett is too outrageous a character to throw away. Second, it does my heart good to see even one proton escape from the acid-soaked, tentacle-lined, gnashing maw of film predictability. Third, I don’t often get to watch a myth unpack itself like zipped software, then start to grow and change right before my eyes. Boba Fett looks to me like a case of spontaneous combustion, a DIY folk hero, a self-replicating legend.
In the folk tradition one person may create an original story, but others soon make it their own. Since his recovery Boba Fett has been busy piloting Slave I through stories, art, trading cards, websites and even Bounty Trail, a spoofy 13-minute Australian film in which he captures a beautiful Jedi woman -- you get the picture. Boba Fett is alive and well in an alternate universe.
Take a walk on the gray side
In George Lucas’s Star Wars, "long ago in a galaxy far, far away," the Force that surrounds and connects all life has a light side and a dark side. Good guys on the light side, bad guys on the dark side. Neat.
Boba Fett ambiguously occupies a zone between the light and dark sides. The gray side, as other writers have called it, offers an untidy haven for smugglers, bounty hunters, fugitives, spies, all kinds of scum and villainy.
The gray side and Boba Fett entangle me more than either the light or dark sides, where destiny takes care of everything and characters face fewer ethical conflicts. The gray side demands more of its found-ins: every decision requires a wide-open, primal choice. In our galaxy everything’s a choice, too, even whether to let the joker in the sports ute cut me off or run him into the ditch. As Boba Fett reflects in The Bounty Hunter Wars Trilogy by K.W. Jeter: "Whoever angers you, owns you."
George Lucas draws on several cultures to shape his myth; the do of Zen Buddhism and the tao and te of Taoism seem to be his most important models for the Force.
The Zen nature of the Japanese samurai warrior has been described by D.T. Suzuki: "The fighter is to be always single-minded with one object in mind: to fight, looking neither backward nor sidewise. . . . He is therefore not to be encumbered, in any possible way, be it physical, emotional, or intellectual."
Japanese fans, naturally, see Boba Fett as a samurai.
Can no one tame this stranger?
Our heroes and antiheroes, even those from an alternate universe, give us what we need most. Small kids think Boba Fett is cool for the same reasons dinosaurs are cool: he’s armor-plated, frightening and bigger than them, maybe even big enough to scare their parents. Big kids obsess about the gadgets and weapons in that dented and scratched armor and the speed and armament of the galaxy’s toughest-looking spaceship, Slave I. Dudes with backwards baseball hats take in Fett’s mirror shades and polar chill. Men admire Fett’s icy competence. Women think he’s a hunk, judging by the fan fiction; this is a sizeable leap of faith since no one knows what’s inside that armor.
But Boba Fett still had me stumped: a samurai, a heartless predator, or as Han Solo calls him, a twerp? Where does he fit into George Lucas’s other-galaxy myth? Finally I decided he’s a reminder that we pay for our wrongdoing -- and he’s here to collect. Only the truly innocent are safe. He’s a miscreant’s nightmare come to sinister life, all three Furies rolled into one swift and terrible retribution. Boba Fett tells us it’s payback time.
The lawn grew longer, and neighbors shook their heads. Annie had her birthday and got a toy Slave I as a present. I slogged through books and websites and played with Slave I when no one was looking. My husband started making Boba Fett jokes.
Scary guys have their merits, it turns out. I feel safe now that Boba Fett guards my desk, not because four inches of plastic is going to save me from anything, but because his gray-side virtues stand up in any galaxy. They remind me to disavow fear and anger and to ice the other demons stalking my personal labyrinth. A powerful mythic figure like Boba Fett is supposed to do exactly this, help us rescue ourselves.
The other day Annie listened intently as I described the alternate universe theory: everything that ever happened or could possibly happen, in this galaxy or any other galaxy, might simultaneously be happening right now.
Next day at school she and her friends made up a game. Fleeing from the dark side, Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon slipped through from that other galaxy and crash-landed on their soccer field with Slave I close behind. There they were, Han and Luke and Leia and Boba Fett, all fighting on the same side for once, desperately needing help. The kids’ rescue occupied a whole lunch break. Ask them about the power of myth.
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