Exploring The Alleged White Savior Trope in 'The Book of Boba Fett'
Photo by Crawford Jolly on Unsplash
The first season of the Disney+ show The Book of Boba Fett has come and gone. The Space Opera-meets-Western about a bounty hunter named Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison) running a crime family in the desert city of Mos Espa, Tatooine, brought with it plenty of nuggets to deconstruct. We saw impressive set pieces, incredible fights scenes, and cool CGI droids that looked like Droidekas (They're called Scorpenek Annihilator's, by the way). I personally loved the character Fennec Shand (Ming-Na Wen), who can assassinate me any day.
However, along with these fun elements came a heated conversation about white saviorism and how Boba Fett did or did not embody it. The Book Of Boba Fett Is Not A White Saviour Story, went the title of an article in The Gamer that was released before the series had even finished airing. "Did anyone else find that the latest Boba Fett episode has white savior vibes?" complained one post on Reddit.
When examining these claims, it becomes apparent that critics might have stumbled onto something worthing deconstructing, even if the "white savior" trope might not be the best label to describe it (I am still conflicted personally). The Book of Boba Fett does replicate some harmful tropes that warrant scrutiny — something that hits a lot of raw nerves over media representation and whose voices matter in the Star Wars universe.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty, we should probably define what we mean when using the term "white savior." This phrase is used to describe stories of both real-life and fictional white people, who make the suffering of an oppressed group about that white character's desire to help. As Fariha Roisin writes in Teen Vogue:
“Hollywood has a trend when it comes to these films in general. It’s most commonly seen in Oscar-bait movies; the white savior complex is a constant leitmotif. Hollywood supposedly inserts these roles for complexity, for drama. But what ends up happening is that they perpetuate an idea that is essentially a historical banner of colonialism: People of color need white people to save them.”
In media, this perspective translates into films where the white person "goes native" (an offensive term where a colonizer assimilates into a non-dominant culture), leading oppressed people to victory against their oppressors. It's a narrative that focuses on the otherness of the colonizer protagonist at the expense of the people they are "saving." A quintessential example of this is the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia. This work fictionalizes the life of the real T. E. Lawrence, making the story all about how this one man led the Arab people against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War.
In a more fantastic example, James Cameron's 2009 Avatar is about a former marine named Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), going to the world of Pandora to help Earth mine the planet for natural resources. Through his interactions with the native Na'vi people, Jake eventually grows to disagree with Earth's colonial extraction of Pandora's resources. He learns and masters the ways of the Na'vi people and unites their disparate tribes against their Terran oppressors.
White savior films are problematic for several reasons. For one, they usually suck up all the oxygen in the room in focusing on their colonizer protagonist. White audiences are pretty familiar with T. E. Lawrence, but they do not know Prince Faisal nearly as much, despite him having an essential role both in the traditional "T.E. Lawrence" story as well as King of Iraq in the postwar period. There are important areas of history that, for a long time, we chose not to focus on because the white savior arc was deemed more attractive.
They also simplify history so that the colonizer can be the hero at all, when that alleged saving may have never have happened. When the war ended, much of the Arabian peninsula was divided up as imperial holdings by France and the United Kingdom. T. E. Lawrence was against this action but ultimately failed to lobby for Arabian independence. Bitter and defeated, he changed his legal name and, according to Smithsonian Magazine, told a friend he "never wanted to be in a position of responsibility again." He then reenlisted in lowly military positions over the next 14 years on bases in Britain, suffering from what would now be classified as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
The reason people have made this claim of white saviorism for The Book of Boba Fett is because the main character has an arc that involves Tusken Raiders or sand people. Those "primitive" seeming aliens who attacked Luke in the first movie over four decades ago, and since then, have been mainly depicted as xenophobic monsters for defending their ancestral land. Boba Fett gets captured by the Tusken Raiders but slowly earns their trust. He is given a gaffi stick and then teaches them how to use technology like speeder bikes (something the writers would have us believe they have not figured out how to ride in their thousands of years of occupation). He then builds them up into a force that can challenge groups like the Pyke Syndicate, who are moving Spice through the sand people's territory.
Now even though this doesn't go well for the sand people in the show (sort of like how British victory didn't bode well with for Arabian people in real life), you can see from afar how this general outline maps onto the white savior trope. You have a man teaching the sand people how to assert themselves, albeit failing fantastically in the end. The narrative then focuses on that man's struggle and pain when he loses his newfound "tribe" once the Pykes wipe them out.
It can be argued that the sand people in The Book of Bobba Fett aren't so much fully formed characters as objects to be "fridged" (i.e., killed off) for Boba Fett's character development. We don't even know the names of a single sand person by the time they die in episode three. In fact, if you look up the two major sand people characters on IMDB, they are referred to as Tusken Warrior (Joanna Bennett) and Tusken Chief (Xavier Jimenez), which complicates this whole narrative. In-universe Tusken is a colonizer name for the sand people after they raided Fort Tusken in 19 BBY (i.e., Before the Battle of Yavin).
Would using the word Tusken here (which in-universe is the oppressor's framing) be a creative decision that would happen if the show's writers cared about respectfully elaborating on this fictional culture?
At the very least, you would think we would learn essential details like the name of the tribe or the names of these two characters who allegedly had such a profound impact on Boba Fett's development. Hell, even subtitling the Tusken language like they do other alien races on the show would go a long way in fleshing these characters out. Why give this alien race the same treatment the Star Wars universe does for droids?
Now proponents of the show have been quick to point out that although this might seem like a white savior trope, it's not because both the main character and the show do not qualify as white. As Stacey Henley writes in that aforementioned The Gamer article: "Boba Fett is played by Temuera Morrison, a New Zealander of Māori descent. He's a person of colour, just as the Mandalorian played by Pedro Pascal is. This already reduces the White Saviour trope…." One Navajo Star Wars fan says this more bluntly in an article for the Inverse: "It's playing with that white savior trope, but it's supposed to undermine it by having a Native man in that place. And therefore it can be changed and is useful."
Your acceptance of this argument will depend heavily on whether you think Temuera Morrison's heritage of Māori, Scottish, and Irish descent "decolonizes" this role. This argument brings us into a complicated conversation about colorism and white-passing privilege that I don't think is relevant here—deciding how white an actor has to be before a role becomes a colonizer work shields the company making that work from criticism. We should be focusing on how Disney is a colonizer company. They tried to trademark the phrase Dia de Los Muertos to sell Coco swag, and their appropriative nature has continued to the present day. This series was created and written by white showrunner Jon Favreau. Disney is not a champion of indigenous representation in this or any work.
In the same vein, in the context of the Star Wars universe, Boba Fett is a colonizer, no matter who plays him. While Star Wars may operate under white supremacy on a metatextual level (its creators and owners are primarily white colonizers, after all) on a textual level, whiteness is not the central divide. The main tensions between people in the Star Wars galaxy have nothing to do with whiteness and fall more along lines between the rich vs. the poor; the core worlds vs. the outer rim; humans vs. aliens (though it should be noted that no one gives a f@ck about droids). These are where the lines between oppressor and oppressed are in Star Wars, and Boba Fett was a slaver, bounty hunter serving a xenophobic, fascist empire when we last see him in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. He then turns around in The Book of Bobba Fett to save the groups he would have slaughtered and enslaved several years earlier.
Again, this is a narrative where the colonizer is the focus in our interactions with this indigenous group (something that rings some Lawrence of Arabia-sized alarm bells). Your acceptance of this trope's usage here will depend heavily on how respectful you think Boba Fett's interactions are with this sand people tribe. Is this rehashing an old trope or subverting it? Is he offering the sand people aid or salvation? Considering the tribe is fridged by the third episode to focus on the protagonist's pain, does it even matter? This sand people tribe could have benefited from more character development before they were genocided because that decision isn't helping Disney's case here.
It's also important to note that Bobba Fett doesn't do this "saviorism" just for the Tusken Raiders, but nearly every divide we are talking about here. He's helping the poor mod kids of the worker district by giving them a job (note — they look more like models than street urchins). Boba Fett is tolerant of alien species ranging from the Wookie Black Krrsantan (Carey Jones) to the Rancor given to him by the Hutts. He helps unify the more rural Free Town with the residents of Mos Espa. The show paints Boba Fett pretty explicitly as a champion of the downtrodden.
Yet his politics aren't liberatory but self-centered. He's not trying to free these people from the systems that oppress them but to create a crime Family of his own. As Boba Fett says in episode four: "I'm tired of working for idiots who are gonna get me killed." His analysis of past problems boils down to him not being the one on top, claiming his leadership will be fairer for the people below him. That's paternalistic as f@ck, and precisely the type of narrative I would imagine an out-of-touch screenwriter would think of when imagining a folk hero (stares at Jon Favreau).
Furthermore, his politics are also very conservative, which is a core component of white saviorism or "colonizer saviorism" if you find that term more fitting. It simplifies systemic problems into something our colonizer protagonist can overcome through force of will. When the mod "kids" complain about a lack of economic opportunities in the worker district, Boba Fett doesn't bother to understand why this is the case. He gives these individuals jobs and stops thinking about improving the economic circumstances for the people of Mos Espa — the ones he's allegedly governing. He turns the problem into something he can personally solve rather than a complex system that will require structural reform.
When he grabbles with an increase in a drug named Spice, the narrative implies that the solution boils down to removing the drug traffickers from the planet, essentially replicating the dynamics of The War on Drugs. The causes for drug usage in real life are far more complicated than simply attacking the big bad drug dealers. They involve dealing with cultural and socio-economic factors — none of which Boba Fett seems particularly interested in or even capable of dealing with. Instead, the narrative gives us a reality where Boba Fett can solve this issue, leading the charge on top of a Rancor, which, although looking incredible, is not a recommendable solution for solving your community's local drug problem.
The narrative goes out of its way to make sure all of these complex, systemic issues can be solved individually by this former slaver, who is finding himself through helping others. To me, that doesn't sound like the progressive narrative on "found family" that many fans are touting it as, but one that uses the aesthetic of progressive politics to sell a conservative story.
Now I love Star Wars. I personally found it awesome when Boba Fett rode that Rancor into battle. I geeked out when Cad Bane entered the scene in his cowboy getup, and I have loved the chance to see all sorts of classic aliens in the CGI flesh.
And I know there will be a particular type of person out there triggered by me "coming" for their beloved Star Wars. "It's just a show," they will say. "Stop being so serious." I could give the classic spiel about how criticizing media is not the same thing as attacking it, but I think that would be sidestepping the issue at hand. This criticism I'm making is sort of an attack — it's an attack against the idea that certain types of people, or really anyone, get to be the savior.
When I look at the last couple of decades of nerd culture, I think it's fair to say that white saviorism is rather prominent. From Commander Shepard (a pretty on-the-nose Jesus allegory) in the Mass Effect trilogy saving the galaxy from the Reapers, to Tony Stark snapping his fingers to right all the wrongs of the last five years, we have these narratives that deify our heroes and that's not healthy. I want protagonists to help others, definitely, and sometimes be the hero, but I do think it's unhealthy for them to be our saviors.
I want to push back against the paternalistic narrative that one person can stroll into town and solve all of its problems. It takes a lot of coordinated effort between a broad coalition of people to solve the sorts of issues that The Book of Boba Fett does, and often that work isn't sexy. This show makes overtures to that idea (see the poorly developed "city and Freetown folk coming together" plotline). Still, they fall flat, as all the large problems are dealt with by the Mandoralians guns, Boba Fett's Rancor, or Fennec Shand's impressive moves (seriously, I will die on the hill believing that Ming-Na Wen deserves her own show).
If Disney wants to make a show about these liberatory politics — something it's in no way required to do (this could have just been The Sopranos of Tatooine, and it would have been fine) — then it needs to do better in showing it. The narrative needs to be less about Boba Fett and his feelings and more about him assisting the people of Tatooine in their struggle: the Sand people reclaiming their ancestral land; the worker's district gaining economic and political autonomy; there being genuine democracy in Mos Espa.
Because at the end of the day, the season one story in The Book of Boba Fett is about one former slaver's rise to power, and I fail to see how we walk away with anything more than a friendly dictator with cool armor.