John Mason, Jar Jar Binks and the Joker: Testing Three Popular Fan Theories

Jar Jar Binks was secretly a Sith Lord, John Mason from The Rock was actually James Bond, and the Joker from The Dark Knight is ex military, having served in either Iraq or Afghanistan. At least, that's what the internet would have you believe, so I wanted to find out whether any of these three fan theories are actually true.

Some of these theories are surprisingly convincing. They take a few throwaway lines and background details you've never thought twice about, connect the dots, and then have you wondering whether the filmmakers intended this stuff all along. So let's see if we can debunk some of cinema's craziest fan theories.

John Mason in The Rock Isn't Canonically James Bond, but Sean Connery Played Him Like He Was

One of the most popular fan theories of all time is that John Mason from The Rock is actually James Bond, and to be fair, there's a decent amount of evidence supporting it. In the movie, Sean Connery plays John Mason, a former British intelligence operative who has spent decades locked away by the US government without trial. We're told he was originally imprisoned on Alcatraz in 1962, escaped the following year, and was later recaptured after the death of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in 1972. That puts his initial imprisonment around the events of Dr. No, with him escaping to go on to have the adventures of the subsequent Bond films before being recaptured after the events of Diamonds Are Forever.

So if he is James Bond, why isn't he just called James Bond? Obviously there are some rights issues there, but the film does mention that when the FBI searches for him in all known records, they discover that John Mason doesn't exist. According to the fan theory, there's a very good reason for this: John Mason isn't his real name. It's an alias, and if you've seen a Bond film before, you know the character often uses them on his missions.

As a massive Bond fan myself, I'd love nothing more than for this theory to be true, but there are some holes in it. First, for it to work, we'd have to pretend all of the Bond films from Live and Let Die to Die Another Day never happened, since Mason would have been in prison that entire time. For years, fans have theorized that James Bond is actually a code name passed down from one MI6 agent to another, which would conveniently explain why Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan are so different. But it's pretty clear in all of the films, until the character was rebooted with Daniel Craig, that they exist in the same continuity.

That's because of Bond's wife, Tracy. In On Her Majesty's Secret Service, George Lazenby's Bond marries Tracy before Blofeld murders her immediately after their wedding. If James Bond were simply a code name, that tragedy should belong exclusively to Lazenby's version of the character, except it doesn't. Roger Moore's Bond visits Tracy's grave in one of his own Bond films. Then eight years later, Timothy Dalton's Bond attends Felix Leiter's wedding in Licence to Kill and becomes visibly uncomfortable when marriage is brought up. After he leaves, Felix explains that Bond was married once, a long time ago. So unless MI6 gives every new James Bond the same name, the same number and the exact same dead wife, these aren't different men inheriting an identity. They're different actors playing the same character.

Not only that, in The Rock, when Mason meets General Hummel, played by Ed Harris, Hummel calls him Sailor, assuming he's a Navy SEAL, and asks for his name and rank. Mason immediately corrects him, "It's your army, actually," before identifying himself as Captain John Patrick Mason of Her Majesty's SAS. Except James Bond wasn't in the army or the SAS. Bond is a commander in the Royal Navy, something the Connery movies themselves make very clear, including the naval funeral staged for him in You Only Live Twice. So either Mason is lying to Hummel about his entire military background, or he's simply not James Bond. But maybe he is lying, and being SAS is part of his alias as John Mason.

Enough speculation, though. Let's go to the man himself. When Sean Connery was sent the script, he wasn't happy with Mason's characterization. So he brought in British writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, the same writers who had previously punched up dialogue in Connery's Never Say Never Again, to make Mason more British and humorous, deliberately pushing the character closer to the tone of James Bond.

The real smoking gun is this. According to director Michael Bay, during filming one day, Connery went up to him and whispered, asking whether Bay knew what he was doing: "I'm getting to be James Bond. I'll be called James Bond." He added that it was kind of fun to be an action hero again. Does that mean The Rock was secretly written as an official James Bond sequel? No. When producer Jerry Bruckheimer was directly asked about the theory years later, he said it was never discussed or even thought about. So canonically, John Mason is not James Bond. But Connery clearly knew exactly what audiences were going to see when they looked at Mason: an older, angrier version of 007 getting one last chance at action. Mason may not officially be James Bond, but Connery was playing him like he was, and honestly, that's good enough for me.

I Think the Darth Jar Jar Theory Is Debunked by George Lucas's Own Intent

When The Phantom Menace hit theaters in 1999, Jar Jar Binks immediately became the most hated character in movie history. While he was meant as comic relief, fans instead found him to be an annoying, clumsy, babbling idiot, and the backlash was so great that George Lucas reduced his role in the following two films. However, a few years ago, a fan theory emerged that completely reframed the character. What if Jar Jar wasn't actually a bumbling idiot after all? What if it was all an act, and he was secretly a Sith Lord in league with Palpatine, pulling the strings of the entire prequel trilogy?

It sounds completely ridiculous, but you have to remember that George Lucas loves his twists, and there are some surprisingly compelling pieces of evidence. Throughout The Phantom Menace, Jar Jar is portrayed as almost impossibly clumsy, but whenever the movie requires him to be athletic, that clumsiness suddenly disappears. When he takes Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan underwater to the Gungan city, he effortlessly executes a perfect, Olympic level series of twisting flips before diving into the water. The only other characters we see in the prequels able to move like that are Yoda and Count Dooku. Then, during the final battle, while he may look hopelessly in over his head, he also accidentally destroys every battle droid that gets near him and even manages to take out a couple of tanks.

None of this is coincidence. Ahmed Best is on record saying that when he created Jar Jar's physicality, he was heavily influenced by Jackie Chan in Drunken Master, where a fighter appears sloppy and out of control while actually being incredibly skilled. In other words, Jar Jar's ability to stumble around like an idiot while somehow being surprisingly athletic was intentional.

Then there are the Jedi mind tricks. Whenever Jar Jar tries to sway an opinion in the prequels, he waves his hands exactly like the Jedi do. He does it to convince Qui-Gon to free him from the Gungans, he does it when he convinces Queen Amidala to go to war, and most importantly, he does it to the entire Senate when he proposes giving emergency powers to Chancellor Palpatine, literally handing the galaxy over to the Sith.

Probably the most famous piece of evidence is George Lucas himself. Behind the scenes on The Phantom Menace, Lucas famously tells his team, "Jar Jar is the key to all of this." While most fans took that to mean Jar Jar was central to the plot of the prequels, Lucas was actually talking about whether audiences would buy him as a fully CGI character. If Jar Jar worked, the movie worked, and while most people hated him, in that sense the character did work. When Lucas was told the fan reaction was overwhelmingly negative, he saw it as a good thing, because people were criticizing Jar Jar as a character rather than criticizing the CGI used to create him.

Lucas's intent was always to show Jar Jar as an innocent character meant for comic relief, basically the prequels' version of R2-D2 and C-3PO, before showing how that innocence could be exploited by someone like Palpatine. There's even a deleted scene in Episode III where Palpatine essentially thanks Jar Jar for helping to put him in power, reinforcing the idea that Jar Jar wasn't secretly manipulating everyone else. He was the one being manipulated. Darth Jar Jar would show up in Lego Star Wars years later, but that was really just Lucasfilm having fun with a fan theory. If Lucas had genuinely intended Jar Jar to be a Sith Lord, that reveal almost certainly would have happened in the prequels themselves. So as far as the Darth Jar Jar theory goes, I think we can all say it's debunked.

The Joker's Past in The Dark Knight, Soldier or Spy, Is Unknowable by Christopher Nolan's Design

One of the most popular theories surrounding Heath Ledger's Joker is that before he started terrorizing Gotham, he was a soldier who served in Iraq or Afghanistan. That's because despite describing himself as an agent of chaos, the Joker is incredibly well trained. He knows how to use everything from knives, handguns and automatic weapons to rocket launchers and explosives. While talking to Harvey Dent, he points out that nobody panics if a truckload of soldiers gets blown up, because people accept that it's part of the plan, possibly suggesting he's talking about something he experienced himself. Perhaps that's even where he got his scars: shrapnel from an IED explosion.

There's one enormous problem with using the scars to figure out the Joker's past: he lies about how he got them every single time. When the police finally capture him, they can't figure out who he is. Gordon says there are no matches on his fingerprints, DNA or dental records. His clothes don't have any labels, and there's seemingly nothing connecting him to an existing identity. If he were just a former American soldier, you would think there would be something linking him to his previous life.

There's another version of this theory that I actually think makes a lot more sense. What if the Joker wasn't a soldier, but worked for an intelligence agency like the CIA and specialized in destabilizing governments? When you look at what he does throughout The Dark Knight, his greatest skill isn't shooting guns or building bombs. It's figuring out how a system works, finding its weakest point, and getting the people inside that system to destroy it themselves. He arrives in Gotham and immediately manipulates the mob into working for him. He corrupts cops inside Gordon's own unit. He disguises himself as a police officer and infiltrates an honor guard standing feet away from the mayor. He deliberately gets arrested because being inside the major crimes unit is part of his plan.

He manipulates Batman into rescuing the wrong hostage. He takes Harvey Dent, the symbol of everything Gotham is trying to become, and turns him into a murderer. Finally, he puts hundreds of ordinary people on two ferries and tries to convince them to kill each other. The Joker constantly talks about chaos, but there's very little chaotic about the way he operates. He understands propaganda, psychological manipulation, infiltration, interrogation, and how to turn existing divisions inside an institution against itself. Even during Batman's interrogation, the Joker is the one who controls the conversation, calmly figuring out exactly which emotional button to push while Batman beats him. This theory would even help explain why he's so difficult to identify: if he had been involved in highly classified intelligence work, perhaps his identity would have been erased by the government.

But there's still one problem with all of this. Christopher Nolan deliberately never gave the Joker an origin story. While making The Dark Knight, Nolan specifically compared him to the shark in Jaws, explaining that knowing absolutely nothing about him is part of what makes him so terrifying. He's simply a force of nature, and that might be why there are so many theories about him in the first place. The Joker gives us just enough information to make us think we can figure out who he is, while lying about his past every time we get close to an answer. Basically, we're as lost as the characters in the film. He could have been a soldier, an intelligence operative, or just some random psychopath. The whole point is that we don't know. The Joker simply is.

Ultimately, most fan theories fall apart the second you start pulling at the threads. But every once in a while, you find one that fits just well enough to make you wonder whether it was intentional all along.

Which of these three fan theories do you find the most convincing?