The naming of Jar Jar Binks simultaneously calls to mind the film "Gunga Din" (based on a line in a poem by Rudyard Kipling; at least, superficially), since Jar Jar is a Gungan, and the whole idea that grating presences in art ("jar" as a verb; "jar jar" being DOUBLY jarring) are often necessary, for one reason or another. Jar Jar even has a line that accords with this. When Qui-Gon is trying to get rid of Jar Jar, Jar Jar refuses to leave, indicating that he owes him a life debt, and that it is highly necessary: "Oh, but it is! Tis demanded by the gods, it is!" The gods, in theatrical parlance (cinema as visual theatre) is a sobriquet for the cheap seats; in short, George Lucas is saying that Jar Jar Binks is, amongst other things, a crowd-pleasing device, designed to appease the cheapest seats/least educated minds. Also, this, in itself, is a statement, by way of contrast, about the film as a whole: Lucas is indicating that the rest of the film must, by design, be significantly less crowd-pleasing (and complex) if he felt he had to parcel out this function to an actual character (a character with considerable screen time and screen presence). Love or loathe him -- and the polarized response to Jar Jar speaks to his manifold sublimity -- Jar Jar is very much an essential component of TPM. It's important to note that the film's own characters find him annoying, with Jar Jar having been banished by his own people, the Jedi (Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan) similarly trying to banish him ("Are you brainless?"/"Get out of here!"), Obi-Wan later characterizing him as a "pathetic lifeform", and even Threepio, the go-to character for annoyingness in the earlier films, deeming him "very odd". Tellingly, the only characters that accept Jar Jar, no strings attached, are the children of the saga: namely, Anakin and Padme. Also, Lucas does a very clever thing when the characters arrive on Coruscant: as Palpatine is talking to Queen Amidala in his office, spinning poison in her ear, Jar Jar and Anakin are framed off to the side, behind the glass doors of his office, at the periphery of the political process, cynically and unapologetically shut out until Palpatine finds a use for them in the solipsism of his ascent to power in the subsequent movies.
I must also dissent from the notion that we only needed one prequel film. Each extant movie is actually telling us something different about human nature, whether one finds the execution admirable or not. Episode I juxtaposes child-like naivete and blindness with catastrophic invasiveness, interceptions and diversions; Episode II contrasts frustrated political idealism with calamity, fear and greed; Episode III looks at the incendiary nature of self-deception and global violence. Each film geometrically feeds into the next, allowing for a dramatic snowball effect in the themes and the telling. For example, what seemed so brusque and whimsical in Episode I -- say, Anakin's non-chalant goodbye to Threepio ("I'll make sure mom doesn't sell you or anything") -- moves from innocuous, unresolved emotional angst to fateful, desperate last-minute decision-making and interpersonal/intergalactic turmoil. While chilly and abstract, the prequels are also a very human set of movies. They're shudderingly honest about the ways in which we commonly think and behave, and they don't flinch from showing these things head-on, even if they take a satirical tract as often, if not much, much more, than they take a pathos-loaded one. In many ways, they are much more epic and engaging than the "original trilogy" that spawned them; the prequels are both mindful of the originals and a unique set of films unto themselves; in this case, I think a bigger input leads to an even bigger output. Perhaps only a mind as subversive as George Lucas' could go and make something so confounding, so odd. All of Star Wars is markedly stranger than people imagine, and the prequels merely advance that legacy, but by a whole order of magnitude. I like 'em. To swing this back round, I won't argue that SW has the stately elegance of TMP -- I don't think it was ever intended to be of the same temperament, if you will -- but depth and beauty take many forms, and I'm glad for both.
