The Most Loving Story (Transcript)

MUSIC IN

AHMED:
You know, this journey. Um, I started the whole Star Wars journey being very sure of myself.

DYLAN:
Hm.

AHMED:
And the backlash made me incredibly unsure, you know. No confidence whatsoever, second guessed everything.

DYLAN:
By late 1999, the backlash had gotten so bad that Ahmed found himself at a breaking point on the Brooklyn Bridge.

He knew he needed a change. A fresh start. So, in October of 2000, he moved out to Los Angeles. Which brought about a whole new set of challenges.

AHMED:
It was really hard because this is not like New York at all. It has its own ways of doing things that I didn't know. And it was the same thing. Like, all I gotta do is be excellent. LA does not give a shit whether you're excellent.

DYLAN:
(laughs)

AHMED:
Right? However, I was like, I'm gonna crack this nut. I'm gonna figure this thing out

DYLAN:
You would think Ahmed would thrive in Hollywood. I mean, he’s part of a huge franchise. And after he moved to LA, he actually signed a contract to do two additional movies of that huge franchise. Surely there would be a slew of other projects lined up for him.

MUSIC OUT

But that wasn’t the case. So, he threw himself into auditioning, where he found himself facing an uphill battle.
AHMED:
I really did the audition grind. There just wasn't a lot of things written for Black actors on film and TV. I really wanted my voice to be heard. I didn't wanna just be another Black actor, which is what, uh, you know, the majority of LA work is. Right? You're not an individual, you are another Black actor.

MUSIC IN

DYLAN:
So, Ahmed was facing a scarcity of opportunities. And for the few roles that he was able to audition for, they didn't seem to want him.

AHMED:
When I walked in the room, I carried this idea that what I did was a racist trope.

DYLAN:
Hm.

AHMED:
And I was, it was a risk for me to be hired.

DYLAN:
Hmm.

AHMED:
Um, from anybody cuz no one wanted to… They, they didn't want to approach the question of, “you hired Ahmed… why… do you know that he was this… dot, dot, dot?” Like, I carried all this baggage with me. So most of the time people were just like, “yeah, I just don't even want to deal with it.”

MUSIC OUT

DYLAN:
And this baggage? It made him feel like a pariah.

MUSIC IN

AHMED:
I was just trying to make people like me.

DYLAN:
Hm.

AHMED:
Right? I wanted to make people happy. I didn't want to have this animosity. And it was in every room I walked into. And every job that I went up for, everyone had to think about the backlash that I bring with it. So, hiring me meant hiring the backlash. Which was really detrimental to my career at the time.

DYLAN:
There’s a common remedy we offer those who find themselves on the receiving end of a backlash: “ignore the haters.”

Now, this is a totally noble sentiment. And it helps distinguish Us, The Good, from Them, The Bad. “How could they say such horrible things?” we ask, clutching our pearls. Or, at least I’m clutching my pearls… I don’t know what luxury items you’re softly stroking.

“Ignore the haters.” Ignore them.

But, what I’ve found through my own work, is that by, in fact, getting to know the quote-unquote “haters,” we can begin to understand how this happened in the first place, and even de-fang the person who we might think of as one of them. The Bad.

MUSIC OUT

So, for months my producers and I tried to find one such person — a person who this story might cast as “the bad guy.” And after months of reaching out to people who fit the bill, no luck. Until one day, when someone reached out to me.

THEME IN

DYLAN:
Can you hear me?

STRANGER:
Yeah, I can hear you. Okay. I just started the recording just to let you know.

DYLAN:
Okay, perfect. Recording is started.

STRANGER:
So, so we're just gonna play it straight here? You don't want me to like play it up as a villain or anything like that?

DYLAN:
So not.

STRANGER:
Okay.

DYLAN:
I think what I'm looking for mostly is just to kind of hear the story from your perspective.

STRANGER:
Sure, sure.

DYLAN:
We’ve identified how the anti-Jar Jar sentiment spread in the macro. How that sentiment went from fan forums to traditional media and then, ultimately, to public consciousness.

Um, so before we begin, would you mind introducing yourself and identifying your relationship to this story?

ADAM:
Um, (clears throat) I'm Adam Gardner and in 1999 when I watched Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, I hated Jar Jar so much that I made The Jar Jar Hate Page.

DYLAN:
Today, it’s time to go micro and get to know why one person started one website, while also hearing how Ahmed re-gained his footing in the years following the backlash.

THEME OUT

Welcome back to The Redemption of Jar Jar Binks. I’m Dylan Marron. Don’t go anywhere.

[AD BREAK]

When I was receiving a swarm of online hate —the very online hate that led me to make my podcast Conversations with People Who Hate Me — there’s this exercise I used to do.

MUSIC IN

A lot of the messages and comments I received were through Facebook. So, I would click on the profile picture of the person who sent me the hate and learn everything about them. Or, almost everything. Enough.

I could see photos they were tagged in. The movies they liked. Memes they’d shared.

And then, I would gather these disparate pieces of biographical data in my mind. And I would use them as the foundation on which to build a backstory for my hater. Painting a rosy fictional narrative into the gaps of theirs.

MUSIC OUT

I called this exercise The Most Loving Story.

SFX: HEAVENLY SOUNDS

It wasn’t to excuse what they’d written. On the contrary, it was for me. It helped me be less scared of a person who terrified me. It helped me reconsider someone who I really just wanted to block.

The deeper I get into Ahmed’s story, the more I find myself doing the same exercise. Imagining the Most Loving Story for the loudest critics of Jar Jar.

Now, I’m not talking about the group of people who read Jar Jar as a racial stereotypr, right? The film critics, professors, and media scholars. ‘Cause that Most Loving Story is pretty easy. They saw racist tropes in a mainstream movie, tropes that I can imagine many of those critics battle in their own lives every day, and they wanted to flag what they saw. So I'm not talking about them.

I’m talking about the true Jar Jar haters. The people who made the websites. The websites that enumerated the many ways Jar Jar ruined The Phantom Menace, the websites that depicted fantasies of killing Jar Jar Binks.

MUSIC IN

I’m talking about Adam. Whose website did, in fact, feature a rendering of Jar Jar’s severed head. Adam, who it turns out, actually started the Jar Jar Hate web ring that Ethan Zuckerman showed us, remember that old method of connecting websites together? Yeah, Adam literally made that!

MUSIC OUT

But before he was Adam, webmaster of a Jar Jar hate website, creator of the Jar Jar Hate web ring, he was Adam: Star Wars superfan.

MUSIC IN

ADAM:
So it's kind of hard to explain how into Star Wars I was back then. Like I'd seen Return of the Jedi when I was five in theaters in ‘83.

DYLAN:
Mm

ADAM:
So I was really excited for episode one. So I spent a week and I made a costume, a Luke Skywalker costume.

DYLAN:
(laughs) Yes.

ADAM:
So it was like my TaeKwonDo outfit upside down.

DYLAN:
Oh my god.

ADAM:
So very excited to see this movie. Couldn't have been more hyped. Right?

DYLAN:
Adam was an early adopter of the internet, so he was picking up on the anti-Jar Jar sentiment that was brewing online.

MUSIC OUT

ADAM:
I was kind of aware that people didn't like this Jar Jar character, but I really tried to go into it with as much of like a, a, an open mind as I could.

DYLAN:
Hm.

Adam told me that he was not gonna just buy into this trend. He had to see the movie for himself.

ADAM:
And my reaction when I saw it was like, “okay, this is fun. I'm enjoying this movie.” And Jar Jar shows up. This guy’s lame. Like he's, you know, he's annoying. He says like, “how rude,” it's like, like from Full House. It's like, it's weird stuff. Right? So I didn't like him at all.

MUSIC IN

ADAM:
But then I understood that there was a bit of a, a movement of sentiment against him. Right? So I said, “I’m gonna make a Jar Jar hate website.”

DYLAN:
On May 20, 1999. One day after _The Phantom Menace’_s release, Adam launched the Jar Jar Hate Page.

ADAM:
You know, I was dreaming of being viral and being an internet star at the time, right?

DYLAN:
Mm-hmm.

ADAM:
Uh, so I set that up and it was, it was very silly, right? Like, here's a picture I made of Jar Jar getting his head chopped off by a light saber and like little things like that. Some people would send pictures of Jar Jar getting his like face stuck in the energy beam and things like that. So I put that all up on my site and it was, it was fun. Uh, well, I thought it was fun, (laughs) obviously not everyone thought it was fun. Uh, I thought it was all kind of silly and I'm making fun of a character and whatever. Uh, I'd love to sit here and say like, you know, I, I a hundred percent reserved my, uh, animosity for the character and separated it from the actor.

DYLAN:
Mm.

ADAM:
Um, but uh, you know, I don't remember at the time I probably made jokes like, Ahmed Best is the worst and things, you know, little silly jokes like that. But, uh, you know, I I had no, no ill feelings towards him.

MUSIC OUT

DYLAN:
When you hear this, I wonder if, I don’t know, maybe you want me to be harder on Adam. Rake him over the coals. Hold his feet to the fire.

But in 1999, and I cannot stress enough, it was cool to dunk on Jar Jar. Even to dunk on Ahmed. It was seen as funny. But more than that: it was totally acceptable.

Think about someone who you could make fun of today without any repercussions. Someone who you’re encouraged to make fun of. Someone who, if your joke about them was funny enough, that joke would go viral. That is what it was like to make these quote-unquote “little silly jokes” about Jar Jar and Ahmed at the time.

Plus, when you fire off these jokes —in 1999 or today— you kind of feel like you’re firing them off into the void.

ADAM:
I probably just expected it to just not, uh, go anywhere. Like, like other websites I'd done, like, I'll put a bunch of work into this thing and no one's gonna go (laughs) like no one's gonna see it.

DYLAN:
Right. Right, right.

ADAM:
That was how the internet was at the time. Right. You'd make a website and you didn't really have, like, you didn't have a platform to, to easily go viral.

MUSIC IN

ADAM:
For a time, you know, I was getting 50, 60,000 hits per month, which at the time was a big deal.

DYLAN:
Yeah, that's big.

ADAM:
You know, in today internet dollars, it's not as much (laughs), but at the time it was–

DYLAN:
But I, I still think a website getting 50, 60,000 hits is big.

ADAM:
Well yeah, cuz these days like yeah, maybe your tweet will get that many views, but individual personal websites generally, they don't get much traffic anymore.

MUSIC IN

DYLAN:
How did it feel to see it go viral?

ADAM:
That's an odd feeling, right? It's like, what do you do when all your dreams come true? Right. Like, I always wanted something to go viral and then it goes viral and it's like, it didn't change my life at all. Right? (laughs)

DYLAN:
Yeah.

ADAM:
It's like, how do you, how do you really feel about it, right? Um, so, you know, I was excited. I was like, oh, this is great. This is a thing that's happened and uh, it doesn't really affect your real life. You know, I'll go, I'll go have dinner (laughs) with my friends or my family or whatever, and they don't care. Right. Like, or may maybe, you know, maybe my Dad's a bit embarrassed about it, but like, generally no one really cares. “Uh, sorry Adam, I'm not impressed by your like little internet thing.” Like whatever. It's silly, right? I guess some people, you know, these days you can monetize and things like that, but that was never, that was never really an option for me and it, I never got to that scale. So, uh, I I…

DYLAN:
Yeah.

ADAM:
Never really felt like an internet celebrity (laughs) in that sense, right?

DYLAN:
But I think it's still the same thing as, like, the dopamine of seeing a tweet go viral. You know, I, I get that you're not necessarily earning money from this, but there is something to be said about seeing something you created, you know, be seen by tens of thousands of people.

ADAM:
Yeah. Abs– absolutely. So, right. So I put the tracker on the website and I'd watch the, I'd watch the stats and I'd be really excited when, when it would do well. Um, yeah, for sure. I went through that cycle and at the time, you know, I was pretty young. I was 21 at the time, I was in university. I rem- I remember going through that and being, uh, and being really excited for it.

A beat.

ADAM:
But then I'm kind of like, “well, what do, what do I do with this?”

MUSIC OUT

DYLAN:
Adam tried to stay on top of the Jar Jar hate wave. Finding articles, keeping up on other anti-Jar Jar websites, he thinks he may have even tried starting a Yahoo group of Jar Jar haters… that didn’t pan out.

But as time went on, the energy behind the anti-Jar Jar movement waned.

ADAM:
It eventually just died down. People didn't care anymore. Right? Like, like Episode II came out and I'm like, “all right, we're ready for round two!” You know, and I put Jar Jar’s head on Jango Fett like, like, they take off his helmet and this is what’s under it! You know? And like, no one cared.

MUSIC IN

DYLAN:
Maybe the momentum waned because of time. Maybe it waned because that’s just how things go: newer, shinier punching bags had presented themselves in the public square, and hating Jar Jar was old news.

Adam’s own energy waned, too.

ADAM:
I wasn't really putting the work in at the time. Like my, my heart wasn't in it by 2002 my heart wasn't in it like in ‘99. Right. You know, like I, you, you ride the wave and the excitement, the dopamine and that moment had passed.

NEW MUSIC IN

DYLAN:
The Most Loving Story we can paint for Adam is this: he was a tech-savvy, Star Wars superfan, hungry for internet fame, who finally found a taste of it in a Jar Jar Hate website. And then, he found out the sad truth about internet fame: that holding onto it is impossible. That the thing that made you famous is a trend, which, like all trends, by definition, will eventually pass.

And over time, the trend did pass. The dopamine drip dried up. It was no longer cool or popular to make Jar Jar jokes. So, he stopped making them.

And it is roughly at this point, in the early-to-mid aughts, that Ahmed’s life started to take a turn. For the better.

MUSIC OUT

He was wrapping up production on the final films of the prequel trilogy—both of which were filmed in Australia. And after one of his trips down under...

SFX: PLANE

He made the choice to take a detour.

MUSIC IN

AHMED:
Instead of coming back to LA I went to Japan for two weeks by myself. And it was very much one of those, like, Lost in Translation trips where I'm like walking around Akihabara looking at all the lights flashing and you know, anime flying.

A beat.

And I was just like, this place is amazing and I just love doing this and I love exploring. So I decided that when I got back, I was going to do LA my way. So, um, at the time I had an agent and I let my agent go. I let all my agents go. And I was like, uh, I'm going to just kind of do my thing.

MUSIC OUT

DYLAN:
Ahmed started over. Quite literally.

MUSIC IN

He returned to martial arts, a practice he first learned from his dad.

AHMED:
I wanted to put on a Martial Arts uniform again. I wanted to tie a belt. There’s something about tying a belt when you’re putting on a uniform that is just very calming. Very centering. I just was like I kinda wanna jump into that again, and tie a belt and be a white belt. Just go back to the beginnings. And because of that, you know because of the martial arts centering, and, um, the ability to physicalize everything that I was feeling, I was able to kind of get control of what I wanted to do. Which was, you know, kind of make my own way and tell my own stories.

DYLAN:
And that’s exactly what he did. He tried his hand at producing and directing. Collaborating with friends on projects that interested him.

It’s worth noting that in this period, the stories he found himself telling were specifically Black stories in all sorts of genres—one about closeted gay Black men hooking up on the down low, another about Black women just living their lives in Los Angeles, and even a sci-fi comedy called The Nebula about a starship with an all Black crew.

SFX: STARSHIP

And in this era, Ahmed experienced two big life events: He got his Black Belt and… his son was born.

Okay, his son being born was obviously a way bigger deal but the Black Belt was a symbolically significant step in a process he had consciously re-begun.

MUSIC OUT

But martial arts wasn’t the only thing he wanted to re-learn.

AHMED:
I wanted to know what I didn’t know.

DYLAN:
Yeah.

AHMED:
So I was like, “Let me go to film school and see what everybody’s talking about?” Cause I had always been very countercultural you know? And I was like let me actually be cultural…

DYLAN:
(laughs)

AHMED:
… and see what everybody’s doing.

DYLAN:
Yeah.

AHMED:
You know, just so I could dip my toe in that world.

DYLAN:
So, he enrolled in film school at AFI, which helped him transition into a new artistic identity. Or better said: solidify the one that he was already building.

MUSIC IN

Slowly but surely, he successfully rebuilt his life.

AHMED:
I had to really, emphatically, and unapologetically be myself.

DYLAN:
Hmm.

AHMED:
In every room that I walked into. And owned all of it. And realize that the backlash was not my problem. It wasn't me. So I can't let that take away from who I am. I can't let it take away from me.

DYLAN:
Stay right there. We’ll be right back.

MUSIC OUT

[AD BREAK]

Ahmed successfully found his stride in the decade following the Jar Jar Binks backlash. He came back into himself. He reconnected with old practices, and he strengthened new ones.

But how did Adam evolve in the same period?

DYLAN:
Looking back now, do you feel differently about all this stuff?

ADAM:
In a way, yes. Um, at the time I did not consider when I'm making fun of Jar Jar, that there is a real person behind that character with real feelings who could, who could, who could be hurt by that. So, uh, I understand that the anti-Jar Jar, uh, movement, uh, went hand in hand with an anti-Ahmed Best movement. You know, maybe regret’s a strong word, but, yeah. In, in some sense I regret it and if I were to like have a time machine and go back in time, I would probably make more of an attempt to separate sort of the, what I considered sort of good natured, uh, criticism of that character, uh, with, you know, inappropriate comments about, about the actor, the person. Uh, have my feelings on Jar Jar changed? A hundred percent.

DYLAN:
Really?

ADAM:
Yeah. Well, I, I, I guess I'm just always a, a very contrarian person. Right. So it's like, I ha-- I hated Jar Jar cuz like, it was like, okay, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm being contrarian by hating Jar Jar.

DYLAN:
Yeah.

ADAM:
And then everyone hates Jar Jar. So I’m like, maybe Jar Jar is pretty cool, you know? (laughs)

DYLAN:
We are such a funny species. We hate something mainstream because we think everyone else loves it. And when we find out everyone seems to hate it—maybe because they followed the same logic we followed—then we want to love it ourselves?

I would judge this conundrum, if I didn’t recognize so much of it in myself.

But, to be fair, Adam’s evolution on Jar Jar Binks didn’t only happen because of the shifting winds of contrarianism.

ADAM:
I have children now, like, I show Jar Jar and my son, he thinks he's hilarious. My son is four years old, thinks Jar Jar's hilarious. Like I get it. I understand now, you know?

DYLAN:
Yeah.

ADAM:
When I see someone get kicked in the nuts in the Madagascar movie.

DYLAN:
Yeah. (laughs) Right.

ADAM:
… And I watch my nephew laugh at it and I'm like, oh, I understand. It's not for me. Not everything's for me. So, so there's, there's an appreciation there.

MUSIC IN

DYLAN:
I'm curious how the Adam of today, 2023 Adam, has changed from 1999 Adam.

ADAM:
Oh boy. A little less hair, a little more wisdom…

DYLAN:
(laughs)

ADAM:
A different sense of humor. Uh, (laughs).

DYLAN:
Perfect, perfect summary.

ADAM:
It's, it's, it's, it's, it's odd. Um, you know, I was chasing internet fame. Well, I'm still doing that. But I have a different expectation for it now, right? So if I do something online and I have success online, I kind of think to myself like, “oh, that's kind of nice, but what does it, what does it do for me?” Like, what does it, “what, how, how does it help me be happy?” So I think I've come to this like wisdom and realization that like internet virality for its own sake doesn't really do anything. Like, it's not the end of your purpose, right? And I think a lot of people, um, back then and still today, they kind of chase that, right? Um, you chase that virality for virality’s sake. And it's like, okay, well what does that do for you? So I just kind of think like, okay, well at the end of the day you can kind of put that aside. Um, and you want to concentrate on, like, what's important and, and sort of living your life. And it's really, to me, what's important is like, you know, my relationship, my, with my children and my interactions I have with my friends and family. Like, these are, these are the things that make me happy in life, right? And they are facilitated, but mostly not related to anything online.

MUSIC OUT / MUSIC IN

DYLAN:
I’m not sharing my conversation with Adam so that he can become the villain of this story, the villain even he thought I wanted him to be. Because I don’t think there’s one single villain in this story.

I’m sharing my conversation with Adam so that to help us see how innocuously hate can start in the micro, simply by following a trend.

I’m sharing my conversation with Adam because I saw myself in his story. I found something so refreshing about how openly he discussed wanting internet virality. Because I think about that every single time I write an Instagram caption or, like, draft a tweet. In the back of my head there’s a little voice going “how can I get as many internet points as possible?” Am I proud to confess that to you? Of course not! It is humiliating! I feel gross! But I’m confessing it because I don’t think I’m alone. And when you combine that instinctive desire for internet points, with a person becoming a target on which we can score those points, the results can be disastrous.

I tried to tell The Most Loving Story for Adam because I think that when we do that we’re leaving some grace for ourselves, too.

The Most Loving Story doesn’t absolve anyone from wrongdoing, but it does help put their wrongdoing in context. Yes, Adam’s website was hateful and it was hurtful. But if there’s a real “villain” in this story, it isn’t Adam. It's the collective. A collective of countless individuals who each took part in quote-unquote “harmless fun” that, compounded together, really hurt someone. Someone who spent years trying to pick up the pieces of a life that that collective had picked apart.

A collective that ultimately disbanded because Jar Jar Binks, like all pop culture punching bags, faded into obscurity.

Or at least for a little while.

MUSIC IN

I took a look at Google Trends, that tool which allows us to see how frequently users search for a term online. Now, from January 1st of 2004, when Google Trends’ data begins, there are some modest bumps here and there for the search term of “Jar Jar Binks,” but for the most part, it’s clear that he’s been relegated to the archives of pop culture.

But I noticed that in late 2015 the search for “Jar Jar Binks” suddenly spiked.

MUSIC OUT

To be fair, there was a highly-anticipated new Star Wars movie coming out on December 18, the day the search for “Jar Jar Binks” hit an all-time high. But Jar Jar wasn’t in that movie. And if you look closely, that search term had actually been ramping up for weeks before. I think the spike was because of something else.

MUSIC IN

On the afternoon of October 30, 2015, a Redditor who goes by the handle Lumpawaroo published a 2,300-word post that soon came to be known as “The Darth Jar Jar Theory.”

And this post basically offered a hyper close analysis of scenes that featured Jar Jar Binks. It’s way too in the weeds to even begin to try to explain to you here, but all you need to know is that it's a reconsideration of the character that suggests that Jar Jar Binks was actually secretly this brilliant, scheming bad guy all along. It reframes all of Jar Jar’s antics, not as bumbling subservience, but as calculated genius.

The Darth Jar Jar Theory was a piece of fan fiction.

SFX: HEAVENLY SOUNDS

And isn’t that, in a way, the same thing as the Most Loving Story?

Fan fiction takes disparate pieces of actual data, weaves a story throughout it, and says “hey, what if we look at it this way?”

MUSIC OUT

And, as Most Loving Stories do so well, it invited people to reconsider a figure they had once written off.

And this theory took off quite quickly.

MUSIC IN

PERSON 1:
This is the best thread of the year, so far as I'm concerned. You just took years of burning hatred and in the span of 20 minutes shifted it all into burning brilliance.

PERSON 2:
My mind is so freaking blown.

PERSON 3:
Thank you for posting this, it's the most enjoyable thing I've read online in months.

PERSON 4:
Part of me really wants this to be true.

PERSON 5:
George Lucas loves these kinds of plot twists.

PERSON 6:
This theory is gold.

MUSIC OUT

DYLAN:
Some people think that this theory was written by George Lucas himself. If you want to know what I think, it doesn’t matter who wrote it. The bigger story here is the fandom’s embrace of it. And how this embrace launched a new trend.

THEME IN

Hating Jar Jar may have been out of style for a while, but, at this point, Reclaiming Jar Jar was now in.

Which, I believe, set the stage for what came next.

AHMED:
I didn't think anybody cared about my story. I think that I was just like, you know, “oh, well that guy. That was something.”

DYLAN:
Hmm.

AHMED:
“Too bad.” You know? Um, but yeah, it was, it was, it was great to see that there was some empathy out there.

DYLAN:
It's like finally that thing that George Lucas said to you of like, “get ready. This is gonna change your life.”

AHMED:
Mm-hmm.

DYLAN:
Is it like now that was finally coming true.

AHMED:
Yeah. It took a while. It took a while.

DYLAN:
The Redemption of Jar Jar Binks is a part of the TED Audio Collective. It’s produced by Amy Gaines McQuade, Jacob Smith, and me, Dylan Marron. Our editors are Banban Cheng and Michelle Quint. Additional editing by Jimmy Gutierrez and Alejandra Salazar. Production support from Roxanne Hai Lash. Mastering by Ben Tolliday, who also made our theme with help from Jason Gambrell. Additional production help from Nisha Venkat. Fact checking by Paul Durbin with Julia Dickerson. Special thanks to Gretta Cohn and Dan O'Donnell.

THEME OUT