What Did You Think of The Phantom Menace?
I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by trivia, frothing,
hysterical, fannish, dragging themselves through Forbidden Planet at lunchtime,
looking for an angry trading card, bleary eyed fanboys searching for the
ancient connection to their fourteenth birthday. They sat on blue chip desks at
4AM, with South Park figurines alongside double-ended lightsabres and Wolverine
mouse-mats; they went to late night manga showings and argued about the rules
of Dungeons & Dragons; they mistook Tolkien for literature and Anne
Mcaffery for writing.
And it's not only George Lucas's fault, either, it's mighty Tharg and Stan
bloody Lee; what has happened to me when I spend a week going into Virgin every
lunchtime in the hope that The Complete Clangers vol 2 has finally come out. I
despise myself, really, I do: I despise the way in which I wasted my teen and
adolescent years and got so little in return. Star Wars and 2000AD and
Spiderman; is that all there is? Is that all there is? I pick up books about
Lewis and Tolkien, and find them taking it as read that the average thirteen
year old is going to be neglecting his Latin prep in order to read Swinburne
and Shelley under the covers. "I'm not at all sure", says Lewis,
"that if you want to make a boy love the English poets, you shouldn't forbid
him from reading them and then make sure he has lots of opportunity to disobey
you." A nice notion, that. Robin Williams could probably base a film on
it. Naturally, neither Lewis nor I nor nobody knows what to do if you want to
make girls love the English poets, bless their little hearts. Do you know what
records I was listening to in my nice little adolescent middle class home; the
Wombles, that's what, while punk was happening outside my door. I would have
hated punk, but it probably wasn't too late to be a hippy. Mind you, I suppose
I narrowly avoided the Bay City Rollers. I'm trying to think of a literary
experience which I had between Winnie the Pooh and Lord of the Rings which
would be worth going back to, and the best I can manage is that episode of the
Fantastic Four where Galactus exiles the Surfer to New York. That was 'poetry',
that was 'literature', that was 'imagination'. How much of my thirteenth summer
was spent watching repeats of Wacky Races? I suppose it is the school teachers
we blame, and above that the minister for education. They had the fascistic
idea of making 'poetry' a school subject, of banning first hand experiences and
making aesthetic enjoyment an impossible thing, almost a bad thing. We were
specifically told not to go and see works of Shakespeare in production because
the teacher was afraid that 'production ideas' might confuse us and get in the
way of the text so that we wouldn't pass our exams. It was A level results week
this week, and being has how there wasn't any other news to report, apart from
a lot of dead foreigners, the BBC showed lots of footage of dopey eyed
teenagers, the sorts of people who probably went to see The Mummy or would have
done if their revision had left them any spare time, opening their sick little
envelopes with their sick little A level results on them and screaming tears of
joy when they found out that oh god they got the two Cs and a D necessary for
them to go and study floor colouring studies at Milton Keynes University. Who
are these people? Why do the BBC only show the ones jumping for joy about their
good results, why not show the ones who got bad results? Why not the ones who
go home and stick their heads in gas ovens; there was a boy in my school who
jumped in front of the 11AM London to York service because he was so worried
about his mocks, it happens every year, but we don't care; killing a few
children is a pretty small price to pay for good exam results, for a highly
trained workforce which can compete in the new global market whatever the hell
that means. So instead of seeing Othello in production, we took an exam about
it, we read it line by line and did 'character studies' of Roderigo, a
character who exists for no other reason than for the villain to have someone
to explain his masterplan to. And the churches have replaced mythology and the
numinous and the sense of wonder with coffee mornings and pious lectures about
the need for fresh water in the third world. Spirituality has been exorcised;
literature is castrated and taboo, and if we are imaginative, then we wander
into a cinema; and rather than reading real mythology or literature, or finding
out real religions we see Luke Skywalker and Battlestar Gallatica (twelve
spaceships in search of their lost home planet, subtle allegory), and it’s the
first authentic aesthetic experience we ever had, and we spend our lives trying
to re-capture it. Give me back my childhood! I want to have spent my fourteenth
summer reading the Faerie Queene and Les Miserables—not memorising quotes from
Star Wars!
I saw Phantom Menace on the midnight performance, opening night. Leaving the
cinema, I heard two fans, tee-shirts, badges, Darth Maul satchels, reviewing
the film, which they evidently hadn't liked.
'I piss on the evil of that film,' said one 'They've stolen my childhood'.
'They' being, in this case, George Lucas, the man who made Star Wars.
You don't know how right you are.
Loser.
Yes, but what
did you think of The Phantom
Menace, actually?