The Banished Gungan
In The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi encounter the Gungan Jar-Jar Binks, who guides them to the underwater city of Otoh Gunga. When they reach the city, it turns out that Jar-Jar is an outcast, banished by the other Gungans for his clumsy offensiveness. Jar-Jar’s social status is symbolically suggestive of the psychological concept of repression, the process whereby desires that offend a person’s ethical or aesthetic standards are rejected by the conscious mind and banished to the unconscious.
In his Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, the psychologist Sigmund Freud compares a repressed desire to a heckler who, because of his disruptive behavior, is taken outside of an auditorium, where he continues to bang on the doors, demanding to be let back in. In this metaphor, the auditorium is the conscious mind, and the outside is the unconscious. For Freud, repression is not an ideal outcome because the unwanted desire, while denied and exiled, continues to exist; it has not been truly dealt with, but will continue to cause problems. Jar-Jar, like Freud’s heckler, has been banished from Otoh Gunga because he creates unwanted, embarrassing disruptions. However, just as repressed desires often reveal something important which must be consciously addressed for the sake of psychological wholeness, Jar-Jar must ultimately be brought back into the Gungan city to play a key role in resolving its crisis.
Jar-Jar’s exile from Otoh Gunga reflects a larger theme in The Phantom Menace. Just as Jar-Jar is cut off from the other Gungans, who scorn him for being clumsy, the hidden underwater city is cut off from the surface-dwelling Naboo, who scorn its inhabitants for being primitive. Naboo, in turn, is in danger of being cut off from the rest of the galaxy by the Trade Federation’s blockade. The role of the Jedi is to undo these divisions – to remind the parties involved that they are not separate but deeply connected. As Obi-Wan tells the Gungan leader Boss Nass, “You and the Naboo form a symbiont circle. What happens to one of you will affect the other. You must understand this.” It is fitting that Qui-Gon begins this process of reunification and reintegration by linking up with Jar-Jar and bringing him back into the Gungan city.
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Characters: Jar-Jar Binks
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Concepts: cities / exile / repression / unity and division / water
Influences: Freud
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