Nerd Do Well (18 page)

The 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
.

After 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.’

Before I let
Star Wars
go (and it’s unlikely that I ever truly will), it’s worth mentioning how the films affected me emotionally, if only to demonstrate how deeply its influence ran.

It was 2 June 1983 and
Return of the Jedi
had arrived in cinemas in the capital. After much planning, Sean and I were due to travel to London to see it. However, a last-minute change meant that I was unable to make the trip as early as Sean due to my being admitted to Bristol Children’s Hospital to have a birthmark removed from my forehead. The birthmark, an oval of darkly pigmented skin on the right side of my forehead about the size of a ten-pence piece, became troubling to me as I grew into my teens whereas before I had assumed it to be cool. I developed a habit of constantly smoothing my hair down to conceal it in order to avoid hurtful comments from people who hadn’t seen it before, the most common of which was, ‘Why have you got as leaf stuck to your head?’

When my mother realised the birthmark had started to bother me, she took me along to our GP who identified it as a ‘hairy naevus’ and assured me that he could ‘have it off in no time’. I was put on an
NHS
waiting list and in a matter of months I was booked into Bristol Children’s Hospital where the procedure was to take place. On 2 June, as Sean Jeffries was travelling to London to see
Return of the Jedi
before me, I was getting into my pyjamas and climbing into my bed on ward 34 of the
BCH
, being looked after by a number of delightful nurses, all of whom I fell in love with. I watched the original
Star Wars
on the ward’s video cassette player as a consolation for missing the fun in London, and Mum and Richard went into Bristol and bought me a Biker Scout action figure, one of the new
Return of the Jedi
range, released in conjunction with the opening of the film. Even now, I can still feel the thrill of studying the packaging before ripping it open to get inside (would have been worth a fortune today if I’d left it in the box, stupid child). The smell of the fresh plastic and the sophistication and newness of the mould compared to the older, now well-used figures in my collection filled me with a wonder and excitement that completely dispelled my nerves about the operation.