Luke Skywalker Can't Read (3 page)

In watching
Barbarella
as an adult, and science fiction critic, I've realized that my thinking about sci-fi/fantasy started right here. For little kid me, this wasn't a movie that I'd wanted. It didn't reinforce anything that I really had enjoyed about these types of stories at that time—male main character, outer space morals, people who were clothed—which is exactly why it changed me. By throwing sex in the viewer's face and having a woman seemingly not be the victim of it, the movie tried to convey (a little naive) '60s progressivism, which was actually lost on someone like my father, who was of that generation. In 1990, as a sort of armchair Larry Flynt conservative, my father just saw the movie as an excuse to watch soft-core porn at dinnertime. For my father,
Barbarella
was wish fulfillment, getting away with something, reinforcing his own interpretation
of what the movie was about. But for me, it was a sea change, something that was in the category of stuff I liked, but totally different. Because it was so imperfect and so odd and full of stuff I didn't understand, it was more of a challenge, and it required me to pay better attention, and think about life in ways I never had before. A
woman
could run the show, a
blind man
could fly, and maybe the astronaut you're trying to rescue will turn out to be an asshole. I know feminists are divided on this movie, but count me among the feminists who think the good outweighs the bad for this particularly confusing mess of pop culture. And that's because
Barbarella
is exactly like a short story by Margaret Atwood appearing in an issue of
Playboy
, a mixed message that requires the individual to parse out the good from the bad, the low-hanging fruit from the potential for intellectual and emotional growth.

Soon after this epic viewing, my father (who passed away in 2012) offered me his definition of what science fiction supposedly “really was.” He'd repeat this notion well into my adulthood.

“You've got to have three things,” he said, “spaceships, robots, and babes. Otherwise, it's not science fiction
I
want to watch.” It goes without saying that my dad liked Robert Palmer music videos.

Luckily, I didn't really listen. I had those blameless, non-eroticized dinosaurs as my first introduction to sex way before he told me this particular brand of dad-malarkey. And by the time he did say it, I'd already started to make up my mind differently about
Barbarella
anyway. Liking that movie taught me what I've found profound about science fiction and fantasy:
just because someone else defines “it” for you, doesn't mean you can't redefine it for yourself.

My father had a limited, totally backward, and incorrect view of science fiction, but he still managed to introduce me to great stuff, even if by accident. Loving the good with the bad is part of what it means to love sci-fi and fantasy, and just like realizing dinosaurs could love to diddle, I was starting to figure out there was a whole lot more to robots, sex, and life itself than what my dad or even Jane Fonda and her ray-gun could teach me.

S
cience fiction became rock and roll for me when I was seventeen, in the summer of 1999. Just before heading into my senior year of high school, I was pulling shifts at a big-box bookstore in Phoenix, Arizona, where I'd close the place four nights a week with my manager and personal hero at the time, Captain Space Pirate.

Outrageously handsome, thirtyish, with a dark mop of hair and a beard, and always dressed all in black, Captain Space Pirate was basketball-player tall, but hunched over in the way he'd probably done since burying his nose in books in grade school. This gave his handsomeness an Ichabod Crane resemblance. I didn't know about Space Pirate Captain
Harlock
—the anime character—at the time, but that visage plus a beard isn't far off. He drove a motorcycle to work and wore a black leather jacket, which, when taken off, revealed his black button-up and black skinny tie. He was a superhero mash-up of the Hamburg leather-wearing Beatles you see in those really old photos and
the clean-cut Beatles on
Ed Sullivan
. And because he was the only person back then who knew more about Star Trek and Star Wars than I did, Captain Space Pirate was about as rock and roll as it got.

This might not be exactly proof that he was cool, but my mom totally had a crush on him. Though I usually drove myself to work in my 1987 Gold Dodge Ram 50 pickup truck—complete with an X-Wing fighter window decal, unironically affixed above a sticker for the band Oasis—one day I was forced to carpool with my mom so she could take my truck on some other errand after dropping me off. On that day, she went out of her way to go into the bookstore and give my boss, Captain Space Pirate, a hug. “It's the smile,” she'd say when talking about him later. “He smiles like Indiana Jones.”

Captain Space Pirate told me he'd long ago dated one of the actresses from
Buffy the Vampire
Slayer
before she was famous, but wouldn't tell me which one. He told me he'd seen eleven different cuts of
Blade Runner
the year it was released. He told me that the novel version of
Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker
, by George Lucas, was really written by a guy named Alan Dean Foster, even though Lucas's screenplay came first. Captain Space Pirate's girlfriend was only a little bit older than I was and I thought their age gap was terribly odd, but I internalized it all as part of what made my manager great. At that point, his girlfriend knew more about vampires than anyone I'd known.

He also gave me a break. Technically, Captain Space Pirate shouldn't have hired me at this bookstore at all, because it was against the larger company policy to take on anyone under
eighteen. But he'd given me a job because I'd consistently attended the geeky gaming nights and Star Wars book club stuff since the age of fourteen. When I got the job, I couldn't believe my luck: I was getting paid to read books and talk about Star Wars all day long. I was beginning my rock-and-roll fantasy of living in the protected world of geeky stuff I loved, surrounded only by people who “got it.” And, prepare to be shocked: plenty of my co-workers claimed that they did in fact “get it.”

The year 1999 was a very good one for hot-blooded geeks getting their ire up about all the things they hated to love and all the things they loved to hate. If you've seen
High Fidelity
, then you're familiar with a certain amount of overly informed pseudo-intellectual banter that pervades a place where people are way more into the things than the people they're selling them to. Jack Black's character, Barry, epitomizes this in
High Fidelity
: someone who is such a snob that he won't sell a certain record to a patron because the patron doesn't like it the “right” way. At my bookstore, we had four sci-fi Barrys on any given shift, all quick to cut me down to size about my severely underdeveloped opinions on everything from
Star Trek
to
Babylon 5
to the death of Superman to whether or not the
Dune
series is inherently ruined by virtue of the fact that it's read at all. Back then (and occasionally, shamefully, now) I was sometimes that guy, too, the snob accidentally lecturing someone about the “real” Buck Rogers or why a certain interpretation of Batman or Sherlock Holmes “sucks.”

Captain Space Pirate, however, was too soft, too sweet, to correct me the way some of the other angry clones would. He
wasn't bitter or jaded, but instead steady and tolerant of my nerd-rage outbursts. If I wanted to pretend to know everything about the history of werewolf films, Captain Space Pirate would simply allow me to embarrass myself on my own, letting me stick my own monster-clawed foot into my ignorant young mouth.

Notably, for complicated hormonal, contrarian reasons, I'd decided to come out as an iconoclast and pretend like I totally hated the at-the-time-brand-new movie
The Matrix
, even though, objectively speaking, it was awesome. In case you forgot:
The Matrix
is a 1999 movie in which Keanu Reeves lives an ordinary, boring life, only to learn his real life is fake and everyone in the world is actually strapped into a big old computer program being controlled by aliens. And the jam is, once Keanu is in the good part of “the Matrix” he can do all sorts of crazy kung fu stuff and essentially turn into a rapid-punch video game character while listening to songs from Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson, or—wait for it—Rage Against the Machine. And very lazily, I hated it. I told myself that this whole Matrix thing was messy and filled with bad angsty music, which made it all way too close to home.
The Matrix
was science fiction, but because I personally couldn't actually escape into it, I decided it didn't do science fiction “the right way” and overreacted by telling all my fellow Barrys that it was “crap.” The easiest way to do this was to make claims leaning on a fake sense of superiority and imagined sci-fi education I affected that I already possessed. I'd say things like “it's not original” and then sort of just imply that everyone knew there must be some sort of crusty old sci-fi text from which
The
Matrix
ripped off all its good ideas. To be clear: I wasn't
actually
sure this was true, but chose to act like I was right anyway. It's backward science: here's my hypothesis, don't bother checking my research, and now, let me get mad that you don't agree! I guess I figured everyone else was totally full of shit, too, and since no one was really keeping track of this stuff, it probably didn't matter if I was right or wrong about
The Matrix
. The thing to do was to have an opinion, and if you were a true geek, the default opinion was probably always going to be negative. This, more than anything, explains the painful popularity of the character of Comic Book Guy on
The Simpsons
, who is always dismissively declaring everything the WORST THING EVER!

I imagine I made life very difficult for Captain Space Pirate with all of my bullshit back then. Probably one of the reasons Luke Skywalker is such a compelling character is because Mark Hamill plays him so specifically without irony in the first
Star Wars
film. Luke alternates between eager to please one minute and whiny and questioning the next. It might seem like an inconsistency in his character, but it's beautifully accurate to what it's like to be young and a “rebel without a cause.” Even before the Imperial Stormtroopers murder Luke's family,
*
he's a frustrated, angry person. Once his aunt and uncle are reduced
to smoking skeletons, he's got an excuse, but most of us don't have that. We're just pissed-off adolescents. Maybe you were, but I was, definitely. There's a great Louis C.K. joke about how guys on first dates try on “all kinds of other guys,” while attempting to figure themselves out, and I think that's what Luke Skywalker is doing in his first outing, and I think that's what a lot of us do as teenagers. Regurgitating half-baked opinions from things we've read, while trying to piece together what kind of person we might be. Luke had Obi-Wan Kenobi to steer him in the right direction, and I had Captain Space Pirate.

As far as actual work-in-the-bookstore stuff went, Captain Space Pirate didn't run a tight ship at all, and I often got the impression that he was under a lot of pressure from his corporate superiors to get his merry band of disaffected nerds to actually shelve the books properly. You'd think the Star Wars books would be organized. And because I was generously assigned to organize the science fiction and fantasy book section, you'd think that I would have made sure everything there was tops. Instead, it was a
mess
. An unruly joke factory, a bookseller's nightmare combined with the kind of disorganization necessitating hypnosis for librarians to repress.

I'll never know if Captain Space Pirate sabotaged his motorcycle that one night, or whether it genuinely wouldn't start, but the net result was that I had to give him a ride home, and we had to load his motorcycle into the back of my pickup truck. Captain Space Pirate lived forty-five minutes away
in a housing community where he was that guy on the urban- planning board who would wonder aloud why they wouldn't let him paint his house all black. We talked about this a little on the drive, but also about work. This is when he asked me why my section wasn't really as organized as it could be.

“So what's the deal with the Star Wars books?” he said, and my memory has added that he's holding a cigarette, even though he really didn't smoke.

“What do you mean?” I said, merging onto the U.S. 60 while turning down “One Headlight,” by the Wallflowers, on the radio.

“It's a fucking mess, man.”

“Is it?”

“Yeah,” he said. “And you know, I don't really care, but I thought you'd at least try a little harder when it came to the things you're actually interested in. I mean, of all the people that work there, you're the most qualified to make that section look better.”

“But nobody cares, man,” I said, feeling guilty, and doing what all teenagers do when they're guilty: fight back.

“Well, I care.”

When Captain Space Pirate threw a Luke Skywalker quote back in my face, I knew something needed to change. I realized something right then that would inform how I viewed not just my own adult life, but science fiction and fantasy specifically. The angry nerds we worked with at the bookstore might not care if the Star Wars books were organized properly, and the
average customer might not give a damn either, but Captain Space Pirate
noticed
and I should, too. Just because something is silly, or is involved with dubious standards of legitimacy—like science fiction and fantasy—doesn't mean you don't take it seriously. Which is exactly like real rock and roll.

Living a rock-and-roll lifestyle sometimes means sex, drugs, and being irresponsible, but people have to take their music seriously to actually exist, to matter. You know, to be rock stars. Being angry or contrarian about sci-fi and fantasy wasn't enough. My friend and mentor was holding me to a higher standard, one that meant I wouldn't devolve into being someone who just started arguments by declaring something was or was not “the worst thing
ever
.” Being rock and roll means a little more than just breaking guitars on a stage, since you've got to know how to play that guitar in the first place. And thanks to Captain Space Pirate, I realized a lot of our buddies were just breaking guitars without knowing what to do with them. Science fiction and fantasy was our rock and roll and it was up to us to do it right.