Boy Wonders

by Cathal Kelly

  The first part of this memory is muddy. I recall the sense of pant-wetting anticipation. I remember seeing the poster pinned up alongside the doorway—the first tangible evidence that this was really happening. Mostly, I was disoriented by expectation. I felt sure this experience was going to change my life for the better. I was going to get some answers to important questions.

  Then the van appeared. I remember the van quite specifically. It was brown, an old American beater, windowless with a sliding panel on the right side. It was moving very slowly down the lineup, eastward along Bloor. The panel was open and someone—a man, maybe a teenager—was leaning out the door dangerously. He was yelling something at everyone.

  The line stretched along the street for hundreds of feet, and we were standing up near the front. As the van finally crept within shouting distance, the guy leaning out the door screamed, “Darth Vader is Luke’s father! Darth Vader is Luke’s father!”

  Then the van peeled off on its way back to hell.

  For a thoughtful moment, no one said anything. Most of the people in line were grown-ups. They were quietly weighing the evidence for and against.

  Then a whole bunch of people groaned at once. Not normal groaning. The bad, painful sort. Soon, people were hopping up and down on the sidewalk. Like, actually hopping. Punching the air. People were freaking out.

  In what may have been the most cinematic moment of my life, I asked my mother, “Is it true? Is Darth Vader Luke’s father?”

  My mother was at Star Wars on sufferance. She shrugged. I began to suspect that she had no idea who Darth Vader was. Everything was darkening.

  A few minutes later, sitting in the theatre, this movie should have been changing everything for me, frame by frame. I had not seen any of these people—people I felt like I knew—for years. But I couldn’t appreciate it in the moment. Not even the Tauntauns. I sat there waiting to find out if Van Man was telling us the truth.

  We got to the climax. Darth Vader is knocking the crap out of Luke in the bowels of Cloud City. He gets him out onto a parapet—“You are beaten. It is useless to resist.” He chops off Luke’s hand.

  In this moment, I thought, “Good. He lied.”

  And then, after a bit of to and fro, Darth Vader says, “No, I am your father.”

  Jesus Christ, the disappointment. His father? What a goddamned cheat.

  I left the joint in a rage. My mother was also in foul humour, but only because she’d been forced to watch a bunch of dimwittery about spaceships and men in capes for two hours.

  The author Colin Wilson describes real pleasure as existing in two states simultaneously. While you’re being warmed in your chair by the fire, a part of you is standing in the snowstorm outside. It’s the combination that gives you true satisfaction.

  I wouldn’t read Wilson for years, but when I did, I recognized the theory. I’ve lived it many times in reverse. While unable to enjoy what should have been the most world-altering news of my life, I could still picture how incredible it would have felt had I not known it was coming. In the moment, there was an unbearable sense of having been cheated.

  My life, the way I thought about it and quite possibly the way I chose to live it, turned slightly after the van passed by. Through no real fault of its own, Star Wars had turned me into a cynic at seven years old.

  I assume everyone of a certain age has their own reasons for, and their own way of, being consumed by Star Wars. What gave it real potency was that the entire exercise was, by necessity, imaginative. This wasn’t a book or a piece of music that could be pored over again and again. As art, Star Wars was more of a happening—you went to the theatre, saw it once and then did not see it again. Nobody in my family was going to get dragged back to watch the same movie twice. My father wouldn’t even stoop to seeing it once.

  There were written materials as reference points, but none that I had access to. I spent my allowance on comic books down the block at Mike’s Convenience. Mike made very little effort to stay on the cutting edge of popular culture. If it wasn’t at Mike’s, it didn’t exist for me.

  And so soon after I’d seen it for the first time, Star Wars quickly bled away as a coherent narrative, becoming the mere suggestion of one. You could put together the building blocks of how it went—unhappy teenager; evil Empire; old hermit; magic; spaceships; Rebel Alliance; crushed in a trash compactor; escape the trash compactor!; swordfight; things look bad; one last chance; unhappy teenager blows up ersatz planet through inexplicable design flaw; everyone gets a medal, except the ape.

  But the details were fuzzy. Remember when Ben scared off the Sand People? What did the Sand People look like exactly? Unless you had the action figure, you weren’t sure. This made it imperative to get that action figure.

  Before the wretched prequels came out in the late nineties, George Lucas had already made billions for himself licensing Star Wars toys. That’s because, for most children, the only way to see the movie again was to restage it in their home. Lucas’s greatest achievement is that he forced an entire generation to become pipsqueak auteurs.

  Re-enactments required a critical mass of figures that, given logistical and financial impediments particular to childhood, was impossible to achieve.

  My mother couldn’t understand why one storm trooper action figure wasn’t enough.

  But you needed multiple storm troopers to do the thing properly. I begged for them. Begged. No dice.

  There were almighty rows on the subject of action figures, on how they might be procured and in what quantities. I considered stealing the money I needed, but it’s not like I could swan into a department store on my own and buy them. My mother would have to take me. And had I then sashayed up to the till and produced a wad of bills from my pocket, it would have prompted uncomfortable questions.

  So I dragooned in other figures to act as undercover/traitorous/triple-agent storm troopers. It was a first effort at post-modernism. It didn’t hang together very well.

  Eventually, I gave up trying to recreate Lucas’s vision. Instead, I built my own.

  A great deal has been written about why Star Wars is so effective (most of which I’ve taken pains to avoid). Its point of access is Shakespearean—the film appeals everywhere to everyone. In creating the movies, Lucas researched the structure of various world mythologies. He used the commonalities as a road map when writing Star Wars. That’s one explanation.

  I think there’s another as well—that Star Wars presented an alternate, irresistible idea of family.

  At the outset, every one of the main characters is terrifyingly isolated. Princess Leia is captured and her planet destroyed. We never see any of her people again. Luke’s family is murdered. The droids—only one of whom can speak—are forgotten trash. Obi-Wan Kenobi lives by himself in a cave. Fleeing assassins, all Han Solo has is a talking pet. Every major new character—the good guys, at least—lives this way. Lando is miserably trying to convince himself he’s not wasting his life on a floating gas mine. Yoda has a whole planet to spread out on, and he lives in a mud igloo the size of a horizontal hall closet. None of these people have friends, or any that we’re shown. They are adrift in the universe until they find each other.

  Underneath the Western tropes, every major scene in the films emphasizes this bond between misfits. All of Lucas’s best dialogue—and there isn’t much of it—revolves around the gentle (or ungentle) teasing we can only inflict on people we love.

  Once they find each other, everything is possible. They can even blow up metal Pluto through an airshaft.

  Lightsabers and hyperspace are not Star Wars’s most affecting fantasy. This is. That no matter how out of place or set upon you feel in the world, there is somewhere you belong and people you belong with.

  Star Wars isn’t really sci-fi or action or a hybrid of the two. It’s a love story. Entirely platonic, though in the true sense of that word—something quite passionate, only lacking an element of the sensual. Something deep and abiding. You don’t think of
it this way as a child, but the message is powerful enough to seep through. That this is what love is meant to look and sound like.

  Eventually, I constructed a Star Wars that revolved entirely around me. I was the main character. Obi-Wan was my teacher. Han Solo was my older brother. I had a vivid running daydream of learning to speak Wookiee. I didn’t care for Luke because he was breathing my air. I didn’t want to be him. Luke was the feckless, needy child—just like me. I wanted to eliminate him and take his place. I never owned a Luke Skywalker action figure.

  The effect of this was heightened by the emotional precariousness of my life in that moment. After the divorce, my mother was forced to move in with her brother. We occupied the upper floor of his house. She’d fled the marriage, leaving us with no cash reserves. Suddenly, she was working all hours, often late into the night.

  We were all very aware of the imposition on my uncle and his family. Beyond making no trouble, we tried to be invisible.

  I brought Brendan, then three years old, home from the babysitter’s. I made us dinner. I put us both to bed. My mother would arrive after we were already asleep.

  My brother was an unusually quiet and contemplative child. Almost eerily so. You’d ask Brendan a question and he’d turn to look at you for a long time. Then he’d arch his eyebrows and turn away again without replying.

  His babysitter, Mrs. Spiteri, was Maltese. She and her family—an enormously warm and tightknit group, essentially our complete opposites—were the sort of immigrants who’d created a simulacrum of the old country in their home. They raised rabbits; cooked the traditional foods; did the traditional things; and spoke nothing but their native language. Brendan spent so much time in their company, and so little in ours, that he didn’t fully understand English. In order to summon him, my mother learned to say “Ejja l’hawn”—Maltese for “Come here.” I imagine he thought the Spiteris were his real family, and my mother and I the people with whom he inexplicably had to spend the evenings. He often got this look when I showed up to collect him, an “Oh Jesus, not this guy again” sort of expression. But he was an agreeable kid and he always came without a fuss.

  With Brendan functionally incommunicado and my mother gone, I was left with many hours alone inside my own head. The majority of them were devoted to the construction of Star Wars—based narratives. I don’t recall being lonely, as such. There were always people around. I just didn’t bother speaking to any of them. What I did feel was unsettled. Those Star Wars fantasies bulwarked a vital sense that everything would turn out okay. They convinced me that “right now” didn’t matter.

  How many years had Obi-Wan spent in the cave, or Han Solo on the run? When you’re seven or nine or eleven, what’s a year? It’s forever. At that age, time has no meaning. Star Wars gave me hope that at some indeterminate future point it would all turn out fine. I would eventually find that strange family that understood me. I would have company and people to talk to and perhaps to even care about me.

  None of this would have worked if I’d had full access to the films or the supporting canon. Had I been able to refer back to exactly how it had gone down or, worse yet, read books that went beyond the universe of the films, my fantasy would have collapsed under the imposition of order. I needed it fluid, organic and responsive to what was happening in my life. As I changed, Star Wars changed to suit me.

  I suspect that like a lot of kids born in the sixties and seventies, I used the half-forgotten memory of those films—the first two in particular—as a blunt, therapeutic tool.

  After the disappointment of Empire, Darth Vader worked his way to the front of my bedroom recreations. In Star Wars, he is a cartoon. In Empire, he’s a tragic hero.

  He’s also a murderous sociopath, but Vader was the one character who showed you how much he cared. Obi-Wan was too stiff, Han too glib, Leia too haughty. Presumably like their creator, all of Lucas’s projections were afraid of their feelings.

  Vader was all feeling (which Lucas and his proxies priggishly presented as a flaw). He’d lost his son, and he wanted him back. He wanted that so badly he’d eventually allow himself to be killed to make it happen.

  If every son spends his life wanting to be seen—really seen—by his father, and vice versa, Vader was the exemplar of that urge. Is there any line more plaintive or searching in the trilogy than Vader’s desperate “If you only knew the power of the Dark Side”—and especially the way James Earl Jones draws out the crucial word? That moment was the closest Star Wars got to a cathedral ceiling.

  I began to focus exclusively on that scene, which I’d hated on first viewing. In the months after Empire was released, it was everywhere. “I am your father” became a catchphrase and then a joke. It was the one part of the movies you could watch again. There was something unspeakably powerful about that outstretched hand, and the way Vader balled his fist as he said, “Join me, and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son.”

  That line of dialogue coloured all of my interactions with my father. Now that he was alone, he was slipping further into an alcoholic haze. My ur-image of him at that time is of a man planted on a couch in the living room of his new house, a rum and Diet Coke in one hand and a butt in the other. He’d spend whole days like that. Eventually, I began to bring him food. When I would return a week later, none of it would have been eaten. Once, he took me out for pie. As we left the diner, he threw up on the sidewalk while I stood there, embarrassed and repulsed. It was the first thing he’d had to eat in days and his stomach rejected its richness. I don’t know how he lived as long as he did. This was not someone who could rule the galaxy with you.

  In the movie, Luke (foolishly) declines the offer.

  In my dreams, I always said “Yes.”

  I’d play out all the ways we’d take over the galaxy—who would get it first, what we’d wear and how he’d make it up to me for cutting off my hand (which, magnanimously, I wouldn’t make a big deal about). I didn’t fear evil, because I had no idea what that looked like. But I was afraid of being alone and unwanted. Vader was the cure for that. We had many long, important conversations in my head.

  Vader was the most important fictional character in my life, and I knew him better than some real people who should have been him for me.

  Eventually, working in tandem, Lucas and I would ruin all of this. Lucas pooched it in Return of the Jedi. The allegory of family was now being presented in maudlin, indiscriminate fashion. They’d let anyone in, including the goddamned Ewoks. Vader dies. Luke eats his cake and has it too, winning the war and reuniting with the old man. The core failure of Jedi is that there is no sacrifice by the victors. This was the world reduced to gauzy holograms and an absence of complications. Star Wars no longer seemed anything like messy, real life.

  I ruined it for myself by getting older and buying the movies on VHS cassette.

  Freed to watch them whenever I wanted, I did so compulsively. They became a comforting talisman or an emotional crutch, depending on how you want to look at it.

  Have a bad day? Go down to the basement and watch Star Wars. Watch all three in a row. Memorize the dialogue. Get totally lost in it, but without any sort of rigour or inventiveness. Become a receptacle instead of whatever fills it. I lost hold of my version of the Star Wars world and replaced it with Lucas’s. I no longer remember most of the games I used to play or the alternative storylines I made up. I’d stopped being the creator.

  Years later, Lucas released the first of the prequels. On Day 1, I was back in line again, up at the front.

  Star Wars made me cynical, but apparently not cynical enough. Even Lucas’s need to fiddle with the epic world he’d made through tedious expansion can’t spoil Star Wars. For those of us lucky enough to be young at the beginning, it’s already threaded through our imaginations. What Greek myths were to generations, Star Wars is to just one. Resenting what it’s become is like raging at the religion you were raised in—you may fundamentally disagree with it, but it’s another thing to sepa
rate yourself from the shelter of that framework.

  In line for the first prequel, I retold the story of the van to the people I was with. I’ve dined out on it for ages. It’s lost all of its sad, thwarted edge. It’s just funny now.

  One of the inevitable processes of growing older is that all of your disappointments are compounded geologically, compressed one on top of another into an indiscriminate layer cake of experience. They hurt less individually and mean less as a whole. Eventually, you realize this isn’t a good or bad thing. It just is. Star Wars taught me that, too.

  PORNO

  MY FIRST DIVE INTO PORNOGRAPHY was a pleasant accident. During one of my comic book runs—The Amazing Spider-Man; Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu; Conan the Barbarian—I dropped a copy of Heavy Metal on the pile. The cover featured a guy in a loincloth killing a giant snake. Oversized reptiles were a bigger deal in the eighties—plainly a Reagan metaphor.

  I was a particular admirer of Conan. In one of his crossovers with mainstream Marvel characters, he’s dropped into modern times with no clue of how to get along. He takes to robbing people. He rolls a pizza delivery guy (one panel showed him eating pizza with one hand while holding the poor schmuck up by the lapels with the other). Instead of keeping the bills, Conan tosses them, preferring the heft of coins. This struck me as a blinding insight into the under-considered aspects of barbarian time travel.

  It was its similarity to Conan that drew me to Heavy Metal—which is a mélange of sword-and-sorcerer fantasy, space opera and soft porn.

  The first nude woman I came across in its pages didn’t quite register. The second one did. All the women in Heavy Metal are—this is meta—cartoons of cartoons. Insanely proportioned, always unclothed and uniformly lascivious.

  I was about seven years old. A rolling ticker began to scroll in my mind: “THIS IS SEX…SEX…SEX…MORE TO COME AS DETAILS EMERGE.”