Dylan Marron

Dylan Marron spent five years making the podcast Conversations with People Who Hate Me and later wrote a book of the same name about what he learned in those five years. He recently joined the third season of Ted Lasso as a writer. He’s here to discuss his latest podcast, The Redemption of Jar Jar Binks. Follow him on Twitter here, IG here.

Describe The Redemption of Jar Jar Binks in 10 words or less.
A deep dive about the internet’s first main character.

Your work feels mission driven. What’s your mission?
I think I care most about finding humanity in spaces where people are easily dehumanized. My very first big digital project was a video series called Every Single Word. It’s basically a supercut series in which I edited down popular movies to only the words spoken by people of color. That project asked: what do we lose when we consistently marginalize people of color in popular storytelling? The same is true for my interview series Sitting in Bathrooms with Trans People. How do anti-trans bathroom bills dehumanize the people at the center of the issue? Conversations with People Who Hate Me was a social experiment that proposed a model of digital restorative justice for online hate. Can we actually address the problem of online discourse by humanizing both the “hater” and the “hated”? The Redemption of Jar Jar Binks is no exception. If I’ve done my job right, by the end of the show’s six episodes I hope my listener is asking themselves this: who is it acceptable to make fun of today? Jar Jar Binks was cool to not like. It was funny to dunk on him. And now, in hindsight, we see how disastrous that was for Ahmed Best, the actor who played him. Who are we treating like that today? Who is it acceptable to hate?

What are you most proud of?
In life?! Oh dear. Gotta get back to you on that one. In this podcast? Hm. There was a particularly tricky part of this story to tell. Jar Jar Binks was not only hated by a group of disgruntled fans. Jar Jar also drew a completely different type of backlash from a different group of people: scholars, activists, and film critics who criticized the character for evoking racial stereotypes. This is the part of the criticism that hurt Ahmed the most because it often came from other Black people, his own community. It would have been an egregious omission on my part to not include this in the story, and yet I wanted to tread incredibly carefully so as not not to bruise old wounds. Or to take a side. I’m glad we didn’t compromise our integrity as storytellers—or humans—in presenting this side of the story.

How did making Conversations with People Who Hate Me prepare you for hosting The Redemption of Jar Jar Binks?
Conversations with People Who Hate Me is all about fostering empathy for people we’re encouraged to not empathize with in spaces where empathy isn’t easy to foster. The tagline of the show is “remember, there’s a human on the other side of the screen.” Jar Jar Binks is, to me, the ultimate example of the human on the other side of the screen.

Who is this podcast for?
It’s for people who have never seen a Star Wars movie, but are interested in the intersection of pop culture and internet culture. It’s also for die-hard Star Wars fans who want to hear a story they don’t know well about a character they probably know quite well. And everyone in between.

What’s your own relationship with Star Wars, and how did making this podcast change how you feel about it?
Honestly, I’ve seen every Star Wars movie multiple times. But more out of duty to cultural awareness than true fandom. I really enjoy them, don’t get me wrong, but I have true Star Wars fans in my life. The kind of people who can name every single character in the periphery of every scene. I am not that deep in it. Making this podcast gave me a crash course in the Star Wars Universe, and the wonderful people who helped build it.

How did you approach Ahmed Best about this idea? Did he like it right away?
I had actually been trying to get in touch with him for quite a while! First through an email I don’t even think is active anymore. Then I tried the good ol’ fashioned follow approach, where I followed him and waited for him to follow me back. (It didn’t work!) Once I brought TED on board to produce the show, they helped me connect with him. I had a whole email ready to send that I had labored over, but it was really our first zoom call when I had to really pitch this conceptually. Or rather, I had to pitch myself. Why was I the person to help tell his story? I guess it worked!

How do you get people to open up about uncomfortable things? (Like when you’re approaching someone who has spewed hate on the internet?)
Earn their trust, keep their trust, and make them feel as safe as possible. I’m hesitant to make generalizations about “all people” but I can say with certainty that every single person wants to feel safe when they tell their story. Even people who rail against safe spaces. They want to feel safe, too. They just might call it something else.

Self-care ritual: Watching cars be cleaned on YouTube.

Thanks, Dylan!