Imaginary Worlds - Slave Leia

Episode Date: December 2, 2015

The gold metal bikini that Princess Leia wears in Return of the Jedi has become the dominant image of her from action figures to Cosplay. But the context of that costume -- being a sex slave for a giant slug monster -- has sparked a debate as to whether the "Slave Leia" meme is highly offensive, harmless cheesecake or a feminist icon. With Donna Dickens of HitFIx, Annalee Newitz of Ars Technica, Alyssa Rosenberg of The Washington Post and comedian Adam Buxton. This is part III of a V part series on Star Wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Return of the Jedi, coming to a selected theater in your galaxy. Return of the Jedi came out. I was a young teenager. This is Adam Buxton. He's a comedian and a writer in the UK and a big Star Wars fan. We were all raving about it. But my dad was saying, I must say, I found the whole beginning part with her dressed up as a slave extremely sinister. And I said, what do you mean sinister? And he wouldn't really explain because obviously what he meant was that it was sexually disturbing and inappropriate in a way. He felt that it wasn't, he was embarrassed taking his children along to see this film where suddenly one of the principal actresses was dressed up like a slutty woman for a big slug man. I gotta get you out of here. You're a big slug man.

I gotta get you out of here. Just to do a quick recap, Princess Leia is caught trying to rescue Han Solo from Jabba the Hutt, who's this big, lascivious slug. And then when she's captured, she's forced to wear a gold metal bikini with a red sash between her legs. Oh, I can't bear to watch. And when Adam saw those scenes, like a lot of 13-year-old boys, well, you know.

My nether regions were beginning to suddenly come into their own and wake up. And certainly there was stirrings. And I didn't, you know, like, oh, wow, look at her. Yeah. Did you ever see that episode of Friends where Ross has Rachel dress up in that costume? Yes, that's right. Yeah. Oh, Princess Leia in the gold bikini.

Every guy her age loved that. Really? It's huge. Yeah. That's the moment when, you know, she stopped being a princess and she became like, you know, a woman, you know. So jump to the present. Adam is now a father. His five-year-old daughter really wants to watch Return of the Jedi.

And she was saying, oh, please, can I watch it? Please, can I watch it? And we sort of thought, oh, God, it's just too, it's going to cause too much of a hoo-ha if we say, no, you're not old enough yet. And anyway, my memory of it was that it was really quite tame. And, you know, it's got the Ewoks in it. Anyway, my daughter saw the film, aged five, and she became quite besotted by it.

But it wasn't the Ewoks that really transfixed her, although she found them very cute. She really loved the Leia scene with Jabba. And in fact, she got quite hung up on Jabba himself. She said, I'd really love a toy Jabba, Daddy. And I was like, well, I've got an old one from, you know, my old Kenner Jabba. You can have that one. She's like, no, no, no, that's hard. That's all plasticky.

I want one that I can cuddle. And I said, why do you want to cuddle Jabba? He's absolutely horrible. Have you not seen the way he treats his employees? I know Jabba the Hutt is a baddie. Jabba the Hutt? Yes. But he actually chose for Leia to dress up as a slave. He actually chose a really nice dress. Adam records a lot of his life to use as material. So he started recording this conversation. And he turned it into an animated short, which aired on British television.

So imagine squiggly animation of Adam and his daughter and Jabba the Hutt and Princess Leia. But you wouldn't want to be a slave though, right? No, I just would want to escape and just keep wearing that. Because it looks really nice. So your plan, if you were in Jabba the Hutt's palace... I would just be rescued and then I would ask them if I could keep this dress up. You know, I just thought, well, no one's going to get offended by it because, you know, she's five. Which is why he made the mistake of reading the comments on YouTube. Some people saying that I had indoctrinated her.

I don't know if that's true. I hope it's not true. I try to offer up every available opportunity for her not to just play with girly toys and not do things that are traditionally seen as being things that girls would do. But for whatever reason, she just naturally has gravitated towards a lot of those things, you know? A lot of women do. It always amazes me when I see pictures of Comic-Con of dozens of women, born after Return of the Jedi, all dressed as Slave Leia,

posing around a big plaster Jabba the Hutt, who does not look cuddly. And when it got to the point where the website Funny or Die put out this video. Every 30 seconds in this country, a woman shows up to a sci-fi gathering as Slave Leia, only to discover thousands of women dressed exactly the same way. The metal bikini has become the dominant image of Princess Leia, from bobbleheads to thumb drives to aprons to action figures. Not the white robe with the cinnamon hair buns. Not her combat gear from the Battle of Endor.

It's all Slave Leia. And this sparked a backlash from Princess Leia fans, to the point where Disney announced it will no longer sell any Slave Leia merchandise, which prompted a counter-backlash. And yes, Slave Leia is the official trademark name of the gold bikini. Annalee Newitz created the site io9, she's now an editor at Ars Technica, and she takes the whole slave Leia thing with a grain of salt. You know, people are always drawn to the most sexy image you can find, especially of a person who has been portrayed as being in charge and bossy throughout the franchise until that point. Like she was always very proper and she was always very buttoned up. And so the fact that, you know, she got to wear this crazy outfit, I think just really, you know, people liked it. And, you know, does it ruin the fact

that Leia is boss? I don't think so. I mean, people are always going to want to see their favorite characters in a sexy pose, especially if they actually are sexy. So we can't weed that out of our brains. That's just kind of part of being human. The Babe in the Bikini is a trope of the sci-fi fantasy genre, from Barbarella to Red Sonja in Conan the Barbarian to Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It is part of science fiction iconography. It is a nod at that history when you see an image like that. All we need to do is just make sure that we have both men and women,

cheesecake and beefcake, and then we're fine. But Carrie Fisher didn't see it that way. She told Newsweek that the costume is, quote, what supermodels will eventually wear in the seventh ring of hell. At a ceremony honoring George Lucas, she said, But like any abused child wearing a metal bikini changed to a giant slug about to die, I keep coming back for more. And recently, in Interview magazine, she was talking with Daisy Ridley, who's in the new Star Wars movies.

And Fisher told her, you should fight for your outfit. Don't be a slave like I was. Alyssa Rosenberg writes for The Washington Post. And she says this matters because Leia has been an icon for girls since the 70s. And for Alyssa, growing up in the 90s. I did grow up during Disney's sort of second golden age. Belle and Beauty and the Beast forever, obviously. But, you know, to have someone who is just,

princess was a title rather than a state of being, was astonishing. And she was, she was so much fun in the first movie when she gets rescued and is just so impatient with Han and Luke. Stop rescue. We came in here. Did you have a plan for getting out?

Piece of brains, sweetheart. That is such a galvanizing moment, right? I mean, these guys think of themselves as studly heroes. And she just doesn't care, right? I mean, she has to get off the damn station. She has so much work to get done. And they are sort of helpful cogs in the larger machine of her rebellion. That's amazing.

Princess Leia was even a role model for Alyssa in the way that she dealt with men. The thing about her relationship with Han that's always fascinating to me is that she always had work to do, right? And if he wasn't on board for that work, he just wasn't something she could afford, right? There were more important things. And so the story of Han and Leia falling in love and finding a life together is the story of Han's willingness to commit to something larger, right? You can't break apart their relationship and their work. And that is a tremendous thing to see on screen. I mean, that is astonishingly rare in the history of pop culture. That resonated with me hugely then. It resonates with me much more now as an adult, knowing how tricky that is to find in life as well as in popular culture.

knowing how tricky that is to find in life as well as in popular culture. So Alyssa is fine with a gold bikini. She just wishes it wasn't the most popular image of Princess Leia. But Donna Dickens, who writes for the site HitFix, thinks the whole Slave Leia storyline was just a really bad idea. I came to Star Wars pretty late in the game. The first time Donna saw Return of the Jedi, she was in high school. This is when the trilogy was re-released in theaters with new special effects.

She had to lie to her mother so she could sneak off to the theater. I was raised in a neoconservative Christian household where my mother was of the belief that aliens are an abomination against God because God created man in his image. So to mutilate that or mutate that into an alien figure was the devil's work. Donna loved Star Wars until Jabba's Palace. So you have Princess Leia in the first movie who is sassy to Darth Vader and Grand Moff Tarkin. She has no fear. She will make fun of them to their faces. Governor Tarkin, I should have expected to find you holding Vader's leash.

I recognized your foul stench when I was brought on board. Charming to the last. They bring in a torture droid, a literal torture droid with like syringe. And of course we don't see it because it's PG movie, but Darth Vader is unable to break her and he is unable to break her with the force. He can't force trick her, force torture her into telling them anything. This is like James Bond levels of mental fortitude. So for Princess Leia to be in a slave bikini in Jabba the Hutt's palace, completely cowed and silent. Leia has no dialogue when she's chained up.

What are the implications of what had to have happened off screen for her to break like that? Well, part of what I love about Carrie Fisher's acting in the sequences in the movie when she's in that costume is how much contempt she has for the whole affair. Right. I mean, yes, she is in a ridiculous metal and leather bikini. She is being kept as a sex slave, and she is so tough about it. So Alyssa is okay with no dialogue. She strangles the guy who is keeping her as a sex slave with her own chains.

I mean, I don't need dialogue to explain that to me. The really bizarre thing about this subject is that the subtext couldn't be more serious and disturbing, but the context is completely ludicrous and kind of silly. And this didn't really even sink in with me until last year when a friend asked if I thought Jabba the Hutt had sexually assaulted Princess Leia. I guess I sort of naively thought that Jabba was keeping her like a pet, you know, with a chain and a collar. But my friend said, well, if that's the case, why did she choke him with that chain in the end with such rage?

And suddenly I had this freaky R-rated version of Return of the Jedi in my head. Like as if the movie had been directed by David Lynch, who was offered the job, by the way, and turned it down. But none of that was ever lost on Donna. There was never a time when it didn't occur to me that she was just not being molested. That was part of what was happening in the subtext of this uh of this sequence and then of course her killing java the way that she did i think would resonate with anyone

who has ever suffered abuse and hoped to take them out in a moment of rage and opportunity given how strongly donna feels about the subject i asked her if it meant something to her personally the reason it resonated with me is my mother's first husband was very abusive and she made it very clear to me as a child that you know this you don't take this like if something like this happens you know you fight back so to see the only girl in the world other than Mon Mothma be reduced to a sexual object for no real reason. I mean, to be honest, there's no reason for a slug monster to want humanoid shaped women in sexy costumes. It's forcing Jabba to find human women sexually attractive because that's what the audience finds sexually attractive. It's a sexual image that deliberately exploits any attraction you feel to it by putting you on not just the side of evil, but with the most physically grotesque villain in the movies.

Alyssa thinks there is something subversive about that. pesque villain in the movies. Alyssa thinks there is something subversive about that. Part of what's impressive about the first couple Star Wars movies is that, you know, Leia is a romantic object without being objectified, right? I mean, she is presented as, you know, worthy. Both of the male heroes are interested in and attracted to her. She is worthy.

She is formidable. She is smart. She is worthy. She is formidable. She is smart. She is pretty. You know, Lando Calrissian hits on her, and I imagine that guy is spoiled for choice. So when that moment comes, when you actually, I mean, if you want to see Leia naked, if you effectively see that in really uncomfortable circumstances, I mean, I think that's a pretty powerful feminist cinematic moment, whether George Lucas

intended it that way or not. I mean, you get what you want, but it doesn't really turn out to be how you thought it would be like. Donna has found a way to live with the costume. She doesn't call it Slave Leia. She came up with another name. I refer to it as the Hutt Slayer Leia costume because that's what she does at it. She slays Hutts. And she thinks that lobbying by fans like her has made a difference. I think now you see less and less of it. Or if you do see it, like I was at San Diego Comic Con and the only Slave Leias I really saw, I saw like two, I guess, straight slave Leias where they were just in the costume. But most of them were mashups. Like I saw Disney Princess Hutslayer Leias with little tiny, like the Jasmine cosplayer

had a genie hut. The Belle cosplayer had a little beast hut that they had made. You don't really see the huge groups of them anymore. So I think that as more and more women have gotten into the cosplay scene, they've felt more comfortable diversifying. Maybe the reason why this costume has so much staying power is because most of us are exposed to Star Wars for the first time as children, when we're experiencing everything for the first time. Then we have the rest of our lives to sort out those confusing thoughts and feelings.

Okay, here we go. I'm Jabba's prisoner, and you have a really weird look on your face. What is it? Did I get it wrong? Did I get the hair wrong? Did you just picture it differently? What? Well, that's it for this week's show. Thanks for listening.

Special thanks to Elizabeth Rosenberg, Adam Buxton, Donna Dickens, and Annalee Newitz, who was a big Star Wars fan as a kid, but not that into Princess Leia. I really wanted to be R2-D2. I wanted to be a super smart computer that could, like, control a spaceship just by, like, interfacing with it. And I didn't even really think about Leia because it just seemed to me normal that a woman would come into the middle of this film and start ordering everyone around. So what do you think? Let me know at the Imaginary Worlds Facebook page.

I tweet at E. Malinsky. The show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Panoply.