by Simon Pegg
The opening titles are a brilliantly concise mission statement for the show, depicting a dizzying montage of action moments, persistently undermined by subtle comic touches and hints of an almost husband-and-wife closeness between the lead pair. It opens on the famous ‘striped Tomato’, a scarlet Ford Torino with a white flash on its wing, careening through the litter-strewn streets of LA. We then see our heroes grab a perp each and roughly bend them over the hood of a car (you can see why a media student might get so excited). Then, as if to dispel any thoughts of rough bum sex, we find them in a strip joint as Ken Hutchinson is hypnotised by a gorgeous exotic dancer, who is pumping her hips at him seductively.
The seemingly nonplussed Starsky blows into his partner’s ear to get his attention, demonstrating emphatically that these guys are into girls but have more important things to do with each other. We then hit the beat and see them doing those all-important things: Hutch eagerly walks alongside the Tomato, gun drawn, as Starsky drives with the door open, suggesting collaboration and partnership; the duo emerge drenched from a swimming pool, partly a pre-Mr Darcy demonstration of soaking wet masculine cool but also evidence that they are prepared to go through shit together as a team. We then see them having a laugh in Captain Dobey’s office, while dressed in undercover costumes. Hutch is a cowboy, Starsky a Travolta-style disco dancer; both outfits are slightly camp but acknowledge the guys’ innate sense of fun.
Next, the pair separate into singles for the build-up to their respective title cards; we oscillate between them running and jumping and shooting and doing all sorts of crazy man stuff, although hinting at their fallibility as they bounce off walls and land arse first on the roof of a car. The dramatis personae then unfolds, introducing not only David and Paul but also Antonio Fargas as Huggy Bear and Bernie Hamilton as Captain Dobey, two supporting but nevertheless principal characters both of whom were black which, despite them being somewhat stereotyped, remained a progressive move. The titles end with a vignette in which Starsky saves a bemused Hutch using a shopping trolley – a traditional signifier of feminine domestication – to break down a door at which moment an explosion blows Starsky into Hutch’s arms, forcing them into a momentary embrace. Brilliant.
I’m not suggesting the programme-makers were as rigorous in their devising of this title sequence as that analysis suggests, but there is no doubt it represents a cleverly constructed semiotic narrative that tells us everything we need to know about the show, most importantly that Starsky and Hutch have a deeply co-dependent relationship.
It was another ten years before John McClane arrived on the scene and truly cemented the vulnerable action hero in the cultural subconscious, starting a process of cultural dominoes that led to audiences accepting ordinary schmoes as heroic protagonists in films such as, well, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. In fact, it could be convincingly argued that Nicholas Angel and Danny Butterman are partly the product of a fictional union between Starsky and Hutch; fictional because men can’t have babies and they wouldn’t have had sex anyway. Although Danny and Nicholas might.
It is also arguable that the last spurt of absurd masculinity represented by the muscle-bound, superhuman and sometimes non-human action heroes of the eighties could be attributed to a knee-jerk response to the slight feminising of the male characters acutely demonstrated in Starsky & Hutch. The show was certainly one of the first examples of what would in the future become known as the ‘bromance’. Sure, we had seen male bonding before in everything from Laurel and Hardy’s bed-sharing to Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier’s handcuffed fugitives in Stanley Kramer’s 1958 prisoners-on-the-run classic The Defiant Ones, but Starsky & Hutch took the notion of male affection into the mainstream. When Starsky is strafed with bullets in a drive-by shooting that leaves Hutch potentially partnerless, we feel for him because he is losing someone he not only cares about but also most probably genuinely loves.
This relationship always appealed to me, perhaps because of the closeness I developed with my father as a result of his departure or just because I am not frightened of expressing love for boys. The relationship I have played out with Nick Frost both on and off screen has been hugely indicative of this. We are dear friends and I have no problem expressing that physically or emotionally. I can look him in the eye and tell him that I love him without feeling weird or fearing him recoiling and shouting ‘Get off me, you bummer’, although he sometimes does, we both do.
Our relationship heavily influenced the relationship between Tim and Mike in Spaced, Shaun and Ed in Shaun of the Dead, Nicholas and Danny in Hot Fuzz and most recently Graeme and Clive in Paul. Tim and Mike, together with Shaun and Ed, have an almost parent/child relationship with each other, Tim/Shaun being the father to the innocent/mischievous Mike/Ed. I am a few years older than Nick and have a more thorough academic history, and although I have learned as much from him as he has from me, at the outset of our friendship, I all but adopted him.
He was entirely complicit in this and came along of his own free will and with a voracious desire to discover new things. I fed him cinema and comedy and provided something of a cultural education, while he opened my eyes to realities my previous existence had kept me cloistered from. At first, I did have something of a paternal relationship with him. I encouraged him to pursue comedy because he impressed me immensely and his success has filled me with nothing but admiration and pride. The relationship between Danny Butterman and Nicholas Angel reflects this symbiosis completely. Angel represents everything Danny aspires to, whereas Danny represents everything Angel needs to understand in order to be a more rounded human being. I’ll talk more about my relationship and work with Nick Frost later, but there is no doubt in my mind that the male closeness I witnessed as a child, watching Starsky & Hutch, informed my attitude towards such relationships in later life. Ken and Dave taught me that man love was not something to fear but rather something to embrace and then pat heavily on the back.
A Princess and a Guy Like Me
T
he arrival of Star Wars didn’t just bring excitement and adventure; it brought romance. There was something so gorgeous about Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia; she was beautiful but also slightly boyish in her tenacious attitude, which made her easy to relate to. When re-enacting scenes from Star Wars in the playground, we found ourselves with a constant dearth of female candidates to take the role of Princess Leia, so the role was almost always taken by Sean Jeffries, who would delight in running away from me and Stuart Clegg (Han Solo), shouting ‘Shoo, shoo’ to fend off our amorous advances. A few years later while being held hostage by the rough boys in the swimming pool changing rooms, I mentally told myself to remember Sean as Princess Leia if they actually went through with their threat of enforcing lewd interaction between us, as it probably would have helped.
Sean wasn’t particularly feminine, he was just tall and happy to double as Leia and Chewbacca whenever we played Star Wars. Despite that tomboy edge, Carrie Fisher was definitely feminine, with her glossy lips and flowing white dress which acquires a little smudge on the breast area during her escape from the Death Star, serving not only to draw attention to the boobs George Lucas tried so hard to downplay, but also demonstrating a willingness to get grubby, which I for one loved. In The Empire Strikes Back, Han Solo even seduces her while rubbing her oil-smudged hands, essentially saying, ‘You LOVE it!’
She was a princess but a princess you could relate to if you were a seven-year-old boy, and I related to her every night before I went to sleep (I really didn’t intend that to sound quite so unseemly). In 1977, I was a full four years shy of taking up that particular favourite of male pastimes, despite being aware that my penis had uses other than doing wee-wees (although I had no clear idea of exactly what they were). The relationship I had with Carrie Fisher was far more innocent and involved placing a nightly kiss on her photographic lips, on the picture of her I had torn from Look-in magazine which was blue-tacked on to the wall next to my bed. I did it with such frequency
that the picture began to deteriorate, and the area around her mouth became whitened as my saliva broke down the paper. It’s not as if I was ‘film-star kissing’ her. I hadn’t done that with anybody since Kyle, and wouldn’t do it for another year when I would find myself on a bed with a girl called Claire at a friend’s party, again surrounded by clapping children.
Claire and I had decided to ‘go out’ with each other because we were the fastest runners in the school and as such represented perhaps the most formidable power couple at Castle Hill Primary. We were the Posh and Becks of the day, which is approximately how long the relationship lasted (one day). I seem to remember kids running in and out of the bedroom turning lights on and off and screeching with laughter as Claire and I sucked face amid the teddy bears. It wasn’t particularly sexual – how could it have been? Those breathless, dizzying encounters of genuine early passion wouldn’t take place until the bacchanalian teen parties of the early eighties. This was more like a cross between the exhibition kissing of my smooches with Kyle and a rehearsal for the more serious facilitative embraces of later life. Whatever it was, it was a lot more than I bestowed upon my precious picture of Carrie. These kisses were far more tender and infused with a sense of longing that was at once exciting and slightly depressing.
It inspired me to fantasise about what I would do if I met her or how her character’s relationship might progress with Luke Skywalker, unaware at this point that they were siblings, which would have utterly soured my fancy, despite being from Gloucester. Although the sensation was slightly heartbreaking, I enjoyed it. There was something pleasurable in the predicament of hopeless love; I found it inspiring and would continue to do so as I grew older. Much of the comedy poetry that formed my early stand-up shows at university was about being in love with the actress Diane Keaton, itself a euphemism for the love I had for Eggy Helen, the girl who inspired me to commit window-wide, an emotional cataclysm I would eventually mine for my romantic contributions to Spaced.
We are never more creative than when we are at odds with the world and there is nothing so artistically destructive as comfort. Princess Leia taught me that. Twenty-seven years after I had to replace the picture of Carrie Fisher with a picture of Lou Ferrigno (not for kissing) due to lip damage, I lined up to meet her at the 2004 San Diego Comic-Con, with all the other Star Wars fans, despite being there to promote my own movie and having just completed an autograph signing of my own. Carrie had no idea who I was. Why should she?
I’m sure she still doesn’t and I have total comprehension of the depth of personal interaction that takes place at these events. It means something to the person that has queued up to meet the signer but it is usually as forgettable and fleeting for the person doing the signing as it is exciting for the signee. Nevertheless, she was there and for the sake of my seven-year-old self I paid my fifteen dollars and got in line. When my turn came I stepped up and confessed everything.
Me: I used to kiss your picture every night before I went to sleep.
Carrie: Do you feel better for telling me that?
Me: Much. Thank you.
As beautiful as ever, she smiled at me and I smiled back. I’d like to think we had a connection, or at least I had amused her with my candour. I’m pretty sure the latter was true because I played it supercool, with all the British dryness I could muster, something the Americans often get a kick out of because they find our repression amusing. The connection, though, was entirely mine. To her I was yet another of the millions of fanboys she has encountered over the years for whom her portrayal of the ass-kicking galactic princess was a formative moment in their sexual awakening.
For me, though, it was the achievement of an ambition I had harboured for many years – to breathe the same air, to look into her eyes and have her look back at me – and it was very nearly everything I had hoped for. I felt lighter than air as I walked in a daze across the convention floor, going nowhere in particular and not needing to wear a mask. I slightly regretted not getting a photograph with her but I was pleased that I hadn’t overstayed my welcome and pushed my luck. I got lucky with Tom Baker in 1978, Carrie might not have been so patient. I did manage to get a picture of me with Lou Ferrigno, so the day wasn’t a complete photographic bust.
I attended a Star Wars panel later that day in one of the large convention halls. Carrie was making an appearance and I was also curious to hear the title of the third prequel announced, despite my agonising disappointment at the other two. She walked out onstage to rapturous applause from the partisan crowd. As the clapping settled into a fading crackle, someone shouted out, ‘I love you!’ She smiled broadly and replied, ‘I love you too.’ ‘I know!’ I shouted, as the crowd swelled into a collective roar of appreciative laughter. She found me amid the throng and smiled, recognising me from our earlier encounter. She gave me an impressed conciliatory nod and winked with genuine affection. I blew her a kiss, which she snatched out of the air and placed into the left cup of her gold-trim bikini which she was wearing that day. Of the thousands of kisses I had bestowed upon her over the years, it was the first she had actually received and something told me it would not be the last. OK so not all of the above story is true. In fact, I went off-piste at the point where she said, ‘I love you too.’ I thought of saying ‘I know’ but stopped myself for some reason. I think it would have got a laugh and I think she would have found it funny but I hesitated and the moment passed.10
Little Things
A
fter three years of waiting, The Empire Strikes Back arrived, heralding a darker, more adult vision of the world I had grown to love. The tone and feel of the movie had an immediate effect on the ten-year-old me, and my writing at school took on a darker edge, with characters not always surviving to the end of stories, or suffering great losses along the way, usually their right hand.
Of course, these stories were still only ever about a page long but their mood changed significantly. I could dive into the sociocultural implications of The Empire Strikes Back and what it meant to America – basically an exercise in self-reflexive revaluation in the wake of the confidence-boosting first installment – but I won’t. It’s a great sequel and widely regarded as the best film in the entire series. Lucas reputedly told publicist Sid Ganis that The Empire Strikes Back was the worst of the Star Wars films,11 which seems odd, particularly as Lucas tried so hard to recreate Empire’s most effective beats in the vastly inferior prequel, Attack of the Clones. He would most likely refer to this as poetic, although it seems more likely an attempt to emulate the success and admiration the original had earned, particularly in light of the critical drubbing received by The Phantom Menace.
Return of the Jedi, released in 1983, was immensely enjoyable, but, on more critical reflection, seems to be a rehash of the first two, with the addition of an army of fighting teddy bears, a wrong step most of us chose to ignore. As a metaphor for America’s involvement in Vietnam, Jedi is perhaps the most blatant and paradoxical in that the audience allegiance is clearly positioned on the side of a group of primitive jungle fighters, attempting to fend off the usurping might of a technologically superior force. Here the Empire is America, being punished for involving itself in a war it could not and did not win.
The Phantom Menace presented us with barely disguised oriental bad guys in the shape of the Trade Federation, although these were more likely manifestations of George Lucas’s business demons, since the whole film is a veiled whine about having to pay taxes. In 1977, Lucas was Luke, a young idealist, obsessed with adventure, excitement and going really fast; in 1999, his concerns are more financial and out of touch, although going really fast still figures. The prequels, though, are ostensibly a justification of evil. An account of how even the best people can go bad if exposed to certain circumstances. The three films work towards us pitying the ‘big bad’ of the first three films, namely Darth Vader. This faceless murderer, whose grip on the galaxy represented the outdated imperialist mentality America wanted to shed, became a
spurned lover and tragic widower, lumbering around the Emperor’s secret laboratory melodramatically shouting the word ‘no’ and expecting us to empathise with his decision to become a homicidal intergalactic despot.
The war in Iraq had been raging for two years by the time Revenge of the Sith was released, a film that told us that sometimes even good people do terrible things. One of the most interesting expansions of this theory is demonstrated in the recent Star Wars video game, The Force Unleashed which takes place between Episodes III and IV (the last and the first film) and deals with the foundation of the rebellion through a morally ambiguous protagonist called Starkiller (Luke Skywalker’s originally intended surname). Starkiller, who seemingly works for Darth Vader, attempts to hunt down the remaining Jedi. However, in so doing, begins to feel sympathy for the opposing team. The game is brilliantly realised and for my money is the most enjoyable incarnation of the saga since Return of the Jedi. As Starkiller (and initially Vader), you travel from planet to planet, laying waste to a variety of ‘enemies’ including Jawas, innocuous little sand scavengers, and Wookiees, the race of bear-like humanoids that gave us one of the most beloved characters in the Star Wars universe, Chewbacca. It feels strange playing this character, basically killing anybody who gets in his way, irrespective of their moral stance. However, these actions are ultimately justifiable as they lead to the formation of the rebellion and the eventual destruction of the Empire. As elsewhere in the world, it was impossible to conceal the huge civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the message of the game is essentially a rallying justification for the reality of actual world events, this being ‘Hey, sometimes you just gotta fuck up a Wookiee.’
