Carl Sagan’s Star Wars criticisms
I am a huge Carl Sagan fan, of course, so my Carl Alarm went off when an old clip went viral this week: Carl Sagan chatting with Johnny Carson about Star Wars. The video is just 90-seconds, embedded in a tweet, short and sweet: Carl is impressively and entertainingly progressive in his commentary, framing the whiteness of the characters in a scientific way (of course), and punctuating with a wisecrack about the injustice of Chewbacca not getting a medal. Here’s the whole transcript:
Carl Sagan: ‘Star Wars’ starts out saying it’s in some other galaxy, and then you see there’s people. Starting in scene one there’s a problem because human beings are the result of a unique evolutionary sequence based upon so many individually unlikely random events on the earth. In fact, I think most evolve biologists would agree that if you started the earth out again and just let those random factors operate you might wind up with beings that are as smart as us, and as ethical and artistic and all the rest, but they would not be human beings. That’s for the Earth. So another planet, different environment, very unlikely to have human beings.
Johnny Carson: Are you saying on another galaxy, it’s not possible that there could be…
Sagan: It’s extremely unlikely that there would be creatures as similar to us as the dominant ones in ‘Star Wars.’ And there’s a whole bunch of other things; they’re all white. The skin of all the humans in Star Wars, oddly enough, is sort of like this. And not even the other colours represented on the Earth are present, much less greens and blues and purples and oranges.
Carson: They did have a scene in Star Wars with a a lot of strange characters
Sagan: Yeah, but none of them seem to be in charge of the galaxy. Everyone in charge of the galaxy seemed to look like us. [laughter] I thought there was a large amount of human chauvinism in it. Also, I felt very bad at the end, the Wookie didn’t get a medal also. All the people got medals, and the Wookie who’d been in there fighting all the time, he didn’t get any medal, and I thought that was an example of anti-Wookie discrimination.
A few notes about this:
- @Tipado introduces the video this way: “That time Carl Sagan called out Star Wars for being too white and the audience didn’t know what to do 💀.” Indeed he did, but I don’t know why he thinks the audience “didn’t know what to do.” It’s true, they were quiet as he first introduces the concept, but I’m not sure what audible reaction would have been appropriate. They do laugh when he gets to something resembling a punchline. If they’d laughed before that, I think it would have seemed weirder!
- Although @tipado had only a couple thousand Twitter followers, his tweet went very, very viral (a metaphor with more of an edge that it used to have): 100K likes, 28K retweets, and 1.2K comments after three days. That phenomenon fascinates me. I wish there was a way to see how it happened. There must have been a “super spreader.” Most accounts that size are lucky to get 10 likes on a tweet. (I ought to know, I tweet regularly to three times as many followers.)
- The comments are thoroughly polluted with loathing of Carl’s point, Carl himself, and all the modern liberals who miss him. This is clearly the same group of people who were outraged to see women and non-white characters in the most recent films. Never read the comments is conventional wisdom, but sometimes I get taken by surprise, and this did. I suppose it shouldn’t have.
- There are several legitimate defences of the honour of Star Wars, all angrily trotted out in the toxic comments, but none of them mean that Carl’s perspective was “wrong” or unwelcome.
- Chewbacca’s missing medal is quite an epic saga. IGN tells the whole story.