[Editorial] Boba Who?

Guest author: Tim Ho
Orig­i­nally pub­lished: 2002

You visit this site every day. You prob­a­bly see the words Boba Fett 50 times per page. And you prob­a­bly don’t know what the heck those two words mean. You know who he is. But just what do those two words trans­late into?

Well, there are two respec­tive def­i­n­i­tions of Boba Fett. The first:

In Pol­ish, Boba means “trap­per”. Fett is a vari­a­tion of the Eng­lish word “fet­ter”, which means to restrict or con­fine. This com­bi­na­tion seems to describe Boba Fett quite well — his per­son­al­ity and oth­er­wise. He is a bounty hunter that traps peo­ple, after all, and his emo­tions are noth­ing but restricted and con­fined — to himself.

Now, the sec­ond mean­ing is more com­i­cal. Boba is the Span­ish word for “stu­pid”, while in Ger­man, Fett means “greasy, oily, and fat”. Is Boba Fett stu­pid, fat, oily, and greasy? Hardly.

The for­mer def­i­n­i­tion seems to more accu­rately depict our infa­mous bounty hunter, whether or not Lucas meant for this to trans­late so pre­cisely, or whether it was just a coin­ci­dence, I have no clue.

It’s kind of scary when you take a look at the colos­sal amount of atten­tion Fett is receiv­ing, mainly because of the com­par­i­son between his pop­u­lar­ity and his screen time. Now don’t get me wrong — I’m not imply­ing that the key to build­ing a pop­u­lar char­ac­ter is to give him/her less screen time. The lack of screen time is merely a fac­tor that con­tributes to Lucas’ unique over­all con­struc­tion of this par­tic­u­lar character.

Want me to put that in Laymen’s terms? Ok, let me explain char­ac­ter con­struc­tion a bit more clearly. There are five types of char­ac­ters, which I will explain using the slope of a line — the descend­ing line, the ascend­ing line, the straight line, the jagged line, and the dot.

The descend­ing line speaks of a char­ac­ter with a sig­nif­i­cant role at the begin­ning of a movie, but who slowly fades away near the end. An exam­ple of this would be Grand Moff Tarkin, who goes from being an arro­gant bas­tard to being space dust.

The straight line is a sta­ble char­ac­ter who main­tains a fair amount of impor­tance through­out the whole movie. R2D2 is an exam­ple — this cute, resource­ful, and effi­cient lit­tle machine does not advance too much as far as char­ac­ter­i­za­tion goes, but main­tains an impor­tant pres­ence through­out the trilogy.

The jagged line is a char­ac­ter that is built to have an unpre­dictable and some­times wild effect on the sto­ry­line — in sim­pler terms, an indi­vid­ual that is use­ful at times, and use­less at other times. Chew­bacca is an exam­ple of the jagged line char­ac­ter. He’s either help­ing Han shoot up mynocks, or doing his Wookie barks and being a pain in the arse.

The dot refers to the use­less char­ac­ters that are stuck in the sto­ry­line to con­nect more impor­tant lines together. After they serve that pur­pose, they are deleted. So in A New Hope, Luke’s Uncle Owen plays the role of a “dot” char­ac­ter. He links C3PO, R2D2, and Luke together, then he becomes a flam­ing heap of flesh. Yup.

Finally, the ascend­ing line. Luke Sky­walker is a clas­sic exam­ple of the ascend­ing line — we know noth­ing about this farm boy at the start of the movie, but he grad­u­ally devel­ops as a char­ac­ter, and ends up being a Jedi and the son of a Sith Lord. Oops, hope I didn’t spoil that for you. Heh.

Fett is a strange com­bi­na­tion of lines — we know lit­tle to noth­ing about him through­out the entire tril­ogy, even though his role increases with each pass­ing movie. If we tried to draw Boba Fett in a line, we’d prob­a­bly end up with some­thing that looked like a tor­nado. That’s the type of char­ac­ter Lucas meant for Fett to be, and he built Fett accord­ingly. So what is Fett’s char­ac­ter com­posed of?

He doesn’t give any first impres­sion — just one, cold gaze at the cam­era in A New Hope. He wears the hard­core armor, with dents and scrapes that tell so many sto­ries — sto­ries that are not even hinted at in the movies. He defies the Dark Lord of the Sith in The Empire Strikes Back. He doesn’t say cheesy one lin­ers — he says very sim­ple one lin­ers. But he says them with a mys­te­ri­ous qual­ity in his voice — just by lis­ten­ing to him speak through his dis­torted hel­met fil­ter, we can tell how cold, emo­tion­less, and cal­cu­lat­ing he is. It’s not just any mech­a­nized voice, how­ever — not men­ac­ing like Vader’s, or prissy like C3PO’s. It’s the voice of some­one who no longer has a pur­pose, but has a mis­sion. His voice is the grim voice of some­one who has felt Death’s gen­tle touch.

Lucas care­fully builds Fett so that he’s not just a back­ground char­ac­ter like Greedo, but not a main char­ac­ter like Luke. The cam­era always focuses on Fett when he’s there. When he’s there. Lucas implies so much about Fett, yet shows so lit­tle. He uses Fett almost as a tool to bring attract the inter­est of fans out­side the movies. Which brings us to sites such as this one, to find out more about what Lucas never told us, but wanted us to know about.

I always won­dered about Fett’s death. That scream seemed so out of place. Because it sounded so…well, human. There was emo­tion in that scream, and emo­tion and Fett are like Pinky and the Brain — they’re always there together, but one just doesn’t belong.

Lucas used the scream to show that there was, in fact, more to learn about Fett — no, he was not just some emo­tion­less freak that went around killing peo­ple, there was some­one behind that mask. And it was up to us fans to fig­ure out who.

Fett’s death also left the option for us fans to just for­get about him. It was all part of the exper­i­ment — after all, George didn’t want to leave a mess if the exper­i­ment failed. And since you’re read­ing this arti­cle, I think the exper­i­ment was a com­plete suc­cess. So suc­cess­ful, in fact, that the next Star Wars movie will have quite a large focus on Fett. Will this ruin Fett’s mys­te­ri­ous qual­i­ties? Will a large dose of Fett on the wide screen become a turn off? It’s a pos­si­bil­ity, but highly doubt­ful — I’m just ask­ing these ques­tions cause it’s the media’s job to try to ask point­less ques­tions to make peo­ple worry.

Another fre­quently asked ques­tion of me is who’s side Boba Fett is on. Well, let’s take a look. Is he a hero? It’s highly doubt­ful, since through­out the movie he is seen work­ing against our heros, by cap­tur­ing Solo and guard­ing Jabba. So does that make him a bad guy? That seems to be the gen­eral con­sen­sus of peo­ple who do not know Fett too well. I was read­ing through a Has­bro Star Wars col­lectibles mag­a­zine, and I couldn’t help but smirk when I saw Fett on the villain’s list. That’s not quite right, because its clear that he’s just being hired — he jumps from work­ing for Jabba to work­ing for the Empire. And yes, he is the only per­son to defy Vader and have his throat in one piece, other than Luke him­self. In The Empire Strikes Back, after Boba directly objects against Solo being car­bonite frozen, Vader actu­ally lis­tens to Fett and reas­sures him that he will be “com­pen­sated by the Empire” if any­thing hap­pened to his bounty.

Now, if you are a true Fett fan, you should have already formed the same con­clu­sion that I have formed. Fett is not a good guy, nor is he an antag­o­nist. He is who he is. He is the dead­liest bounty hunter in the Star Wars uni­verse. He is Boba Fett.

“I bow to no one and serve only for cause.“
– Boba Fett, The Last One Standing