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The Tao of Boba Fett

By Susan Mayse

When the latest Star Wars epic came out on video this spring, I discovered my 10-year-old daughter camped in front of the VCR.

Scene by scene, Annie was freeze-framing her way through Episode I: The Phantom Menace to check rumors (false) of a walk-on by the minor character who improbably emerged as a hot star in the highest-grossing film series in history.

Remember the sinister bounty hunter in the closed helmet from the Star Wars trilogy? He wears body armor and packs more firepower than a Death Star stormtrooper squad. He speaks a grand total of four lines in three movies and dies ignominiously.

Boba Fett is the unknowable Star Wars character -- we learn nothing about his past, we never see his face, he spends minutes on screen, his voice and bearing are as cold and abrasive as the underside of a glacier -- yet he delivers mythic presence.

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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Boba Fett: Lord of the (Bounty) Hunt

By Susan Mayse

Star Wars always seemed to me much more than a kids' often-humorous adventure movie set in a distant galaxy, just as the Odyssey is more than fireside entertainment; it's also tragedy, allegory and evolving myth. And when George Lucas, within the great sweep of his film cycle, created this perplexing minor character Boba Fett, he turned loose a great mythic figure.

Star Wars embodies our ancient tradition of the hero's journey and the eternal struggle between good and evil, the light side and the dark side. In shaping characters like Boba Fett and other bounty hunters and smugglers, Lucas also created a shadowland for those uncommitted to either light or dark: the gray side of the Star Wars universe.

Writers starting with the late Joseph Campbell have identified Star Wars themes in Greek, Eastern and other myths and traditions. Since I tend to view the worlds through the Celtic tradition, it seems natural to discover Boba Fett in the focal point of that lens.

The Celtic universe

Our curvilinear Hyperborean sensibilities have never seen eye to eye with rectilinear imperial power. In Roman thinking, if you walk around four sides of a rectangle, you return to your starting place. In Celtic thinking, if you walk around a circle, you can just as easily turn up in the center of the next century, the next world or the next story.

I contemplated the multispecies, patched-together, idealistic Rebel Alliance of Star Wars as an uneasy Celtic-style confederation pitted against a spit-and-polish, glossy, controlling and cruel Roman-style Empire, with ambivalent figures like Boba Fett on shifting ground between. In truth it's never that simple in any galaxy. Compassion and hatred, light and dark -- and gray complexity in particular -- spill unchecked across all borders.

Yet Star Wars makes complete sense as a Celtic hero journey in search of a powerful otherworld object. In some stories this is a sacred spring, a cup, a grail or a crock of gold. In Star Wars it's a cauldron, in fact three cauldrons.

The cauldron of inspiration is well known in Celtic myth. Drink one drop from it and you acquire the spiritual gifts of poetry, prophecy and insight. In our galaxy, one word for this breath of perception is awen or poetic inspiration. In the Star Wars galaxy, I'd call it part of the Force, and the Star Wars cycle largely deals with the loss and recovery of the Force's spiritual power.

The Star Wars heroes must overcome bitter hardships in their quest for peace and freedom in their galaxy. When they succeed, the jubilant celebrations that end Episode VI: Return of the Jedi sparkle and gleam like a metaphorical cauldron of plenty, inexhaustibly overflowing.

But it's the dark cauldron of rebirth that may hold the secrets of the shadowy Mandalorians and the man we know as Boba Fett. I'll get back to this in a moment.

Lord of the (Bounty) Hunt

Years ago I was startled by the Celtic names and traits of the Star Wars characters. Golden-haired Luke fits perfectly as the heroic sun god -- he even walks the sky -- called Lleu ("light") in Welsh and Lugh in Irish. Leia means "lesser" in Welsh; in her pristine white gown and silver belt, like Arianrhod she makes a fine moon goddess.

Less etymologically, Han Solo is easy to cast as the sorcerer Gwydion: tricking opponents when he can, fighting them if he must, ultimately coming to the rescue of his young charge Lleu. And so on.

Boba Fett's counterpart in this Celtic pantheon is equally clear, and always gives me a chill: Cernunnos, lord of the otherworld.

As lord of wild creatures, he wears stag's antlers and a neck torc and holds a serpent. In a detailed portrait on the silver Gundestrup cauldron, he sits crosslegged among his beasts between Apollo and Mercury, two classical gods associated with light and dark. Neither light nor dark, he rules his own shadow realm. But Cernunnos, later called Herne, is most famous and most feared as lord of the Wild Hunt.

In dire need -- a war, an invasion, perhaps a great disturbance in the Force -- the Wild Hunt awakens, and the Huntsman gathers his terrible hunters. After Cernunnos takes his human quarry, and he always does, the wrongdoer is also doomed to hunt or be hunted forever. You wouldn't want to be Cernunnos's acquisition.

In his own galaxy, of course, Boba Fett wears a dark red belt of power knotted around his waist instead of a torc around his neck; he sports braided trophies instead of a serpent; the antlers on his exotic headgear are reduced to a single powerful antenna. His astronomical bounty fees sit in a credit account instead of a cauldron. In the Star Wars galaxy, Boba Fett rules the hunt as the supreme bounty hunter, silently waiting for his prey at the top of the gray-side food chain.

How Boba Fett came to the gray side we don't know; George Lucas won't tell us until Episode II. Maybe in Fett's past lies some excessive pride or dereliction that brought him down. Yet beyond his cold arrogance we glimpse justice -- in his view at least -- integrity and restraint. If Star Wars were a Welsh poetry cycle or classical Greek drama, Darth Vader, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Boba Fett would be its tragic protagonists.

Black cauldron to clone war

The cauldron of rebirth has unusual power in Celtic myth. A dead warrior thrown into it returns to life the next day speechless, perhaps by implication soulless. Sometimes instead the cauldron bestows eternal youth. In other-galaxy terms, this sounds like a compact early-model cloning facility with optional rejuv treatment.

Boba Fett may be the most obscure element in Star Wars, but second place goes to the Mandalorians and Fett's unknown link with those vanished super-commandos. Were these mercenaries, Imperial troops or soulless products of the cloning vats? One story says the Jedi knights and Mandalorian forces virtually destroyed each other in the Clone Wars.

The original trilogy never mentioned Mandalorians; spinoff writers started the story of Fett's Mandalorian battle armor. Recently we've heard that Episode II will feature the Clone Wars and Boba Fett.

Traha or excessive arrogance, a Welsh equivalent of Greek hubris, traditionally precedes a fall from power and grace. It's an occupational hazard for smart heroes and antiheroes who combine gray matter with grayscale ethics: crafty Odysseus, for instance, or the devious Boba Fett.

Fett's arrogance also leads him to define justice in his own way and summarily carry it out as enforcer, judge and sometimes -- if we believe Darth Vader -- executioner. His downfall plunges him straight into a Sarlacc monster's jaws.

In Celtic tradition, those who fall from pride are doomed to exile and endless wandering. Homeless wanderers who survive their grievous wrongdoing may find refuge and solace in the end, but only after long painful expiation. It's easy to see the solitary, silent Boba Fett in this role as survivor of his own self-wrought devastation.

Not the typical role model

Boba Fett looks like a thug, bears himself like an avenging spirit, shows no emotion, carries the scars of an unknown past -- but even his sparse trilogy scenes include a few contradictory moments.

When Vader has Han Solo tortured, Fett tries to intervene in the only credible way at his disposal, by telling Vader that he'll lose his fee if Solo dies; Vader promises not to damage him permanently.

When guards load Solo's carbonite slab onto Slave I (shaped, in true Cernunnos fashion, like a goat's horned head), Fett gives his acquisition the honorific of "captain."

A moment of film edited out of the trilogy special edition shows Fett's glare at Jabba when the gangster feeds the dancer Oola to his pet rancor. In the Irish Táin Bó Cuailnge, the Welsh Mabinogi and Gododdin and other hero cycles, we find the same kind of steely deadpan overlaying a deeper humanity.

This character is the antithesis of many things I believe, but since I started writing about Boba Fett I've had to think harder about the complex choices we make every day here on the gray side.

"The gods are constantly tempting. Everybody and everything," George Lucas told Time magazine, adding that "accepting self-responsibility for the things you do, having good manners, caring about other people -- these are heroic acts. Everybody has the choice of being a hero or not being a hero every day of their lives."
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