Star Wars: "So Calm After The Force" (1999)
Amid the clamour surrounding the imminent release of Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, spare a thought for those of us to whom the film represents irrevocable proof that we are grown-ups at last.
The 1997 re-release of the original trilogy in a rejigged Special Edition was bad enough. You sat there in the darkness, agog not only at the apparition of your childhood fantasies resurrected in sonorous digital stereo, but also at the realisation that sitting not too far from you were people (people your age) with children (their children) almost the same age as they had been (as you had been) when Star Wars itself first appeared. Soon, instead of being intoxicated all over again by the weird alien life forms and exotic locales, you were plunged into a sober reassessment of your own life. Were you ever going to get married and have children? Were you ever going to find a decent job? Were you ever going to get your act together sufficiently to stop sharing flats and buy a house? Had you unknowingly given in to the dark side of the Force? You began to feel a little clammy and your eyes sought the consolation of the word “Exit”.
Being reacquainted with the books and films of your childhood and adolescence inevitably prompts a certain amount of reflection on the person you hoped to be then and the person you are now. But it’s testimony to the power of the myth George Lucas assembled in Star Wars (no longer just the title of a film but a generic term) that its renaissance should prompt so ambivalent a feeling in those of us who first experienced it 22 years ago and are - by some malicious quirk of nature - older now.
Star Wars was the first modern movie. Not because – as critics concerned about the infantilisation of mainstream cinema often lament – of the way it was marketed as a blockbuster “event” movie. Jaws had already been a blockbuster two years before and Star Wars was only an event after it opened. Before it opened it was a resounding non-event: its trailer provoked groans and sniggers from audiences. Star Wars was the first modern movie because of the way it was made.
I first saw it at the age of six - having elected to do so instead of going to a friend’s birthday party - and I knew immediately that I had never seen anything like it before. Previous trips to the cinema had been devoted to the more obscure productions of the Children’s Film Foundation and Disney films so slavishly in thrall to the legacy of Uncle Walt that they appeared to have been embalmed. The cinema was the same as ever: hazy with smoke, the beam of the projector perfectly defined, an amber constellation of cigarette tips winking in the darkness. But this movie was something different. It didn’t just look different, with its motion control camera shots of spacecraft soaring, spinning and tumbling (until then spacecraft had either wobbled, or, in the case of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, glacially progressed). It also sounded different. Light sabres hummed wickedly, their blades sizzling when they clashed. C-Threepio’s joints clicked and whirred with his every movement, no matter how slight. R2D2 beeped and chirruped in an oddly intelligible way. Darth Vader’s hydraulic breathing chilled the blood. Each spacecraft had its own engine note - the larger ones rumbled, the smaller ones whined like hornets. They all sounded fast. John William’s music - a pragmatic mixture of Holst and Wagner though it may have been - saturated and enriched every moment, lending Lucas’s faraway galaxy a human dimension it might not otherwise have possessed. I didn’t want it to end. When it did end I wanted it to start all over again. I emerged into Ayrshire drizzle and the world around me seemed less real than the one I had just witnessed - the unarguable proof of great escapism. Even Robert Burns, immortalised in a statue opposite the entrance to the cinema, looked vaguely insubstantial.
In the approved fashion I saw Star Wars again three more times. The fact that it wasn’t released on to video meant that it retained its grandeur, its pristine specialness, in the imagination. When you couldn’t see the film itself, you played with the toys instead. Tie-in merchandising allowed Star Wars to become a way of life. I remember being given my first Star Wars figure, a Stormtrooper, and feeling that I held a tiny, perfectly rendered fragment of that magical universe in my hand. I also remember my parents’ exasperation when I announced that what I wanted for my birthday was four more Stormtrooper figures. Why, they asked, did I want four more of the same “doll” (as they called it) when I already had one? I told them - in that tone of weary forbearance that children adopt when explaining something blindingly obvious to adults - that I needed more than one Stormtrooper to muster a proper opposing force for my slowly increasing band of Rebels (Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia et al). They relented in the same way as a stone relents under dripping water. But my mother remained understandably exasperated when she had to reach into the Hoover bag yet again to pick out Han Solo’s tiny laser pistol or have the Hoover repaired altogether when, marauding blindly, it ran over Chewbacca and was unable to digest him.
Teaming up with other children, I contributed my figures to a Star Wars game-playing collective that assembled weekly on Troon beach (standing in for the wind-scoured deserts of Tatooine). Inevitably one of the older boys would try to wrest control of the script and it would all end in tears. Few children went home with the same number of toys as they had arrived with and mothers spent the evening phoning one another to secure the return of Obi Wan Kenobi and other hostages, the perpetrator shrilly protesting his innocence in the background. Yet, in spite of recriminations, we all met up again the following week. And, say what you like, those toys encouraged us to use our imaginations. Waving X-Wing fighters around in our sandy paws, we improvised continuing adventures for our heroes. The few short stories I have had published or broadcast bear no similarity at all to Star Wars, but my story-telling abilities, however slender they may be, were developed through exposure to its mythology.
I think most people my age would agree that the release of The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 represented the apotheosis of their Star Wars mania. I was nine when it came out and I remember the excitement beforehand being practically seismic. Empire (as we aficionados refer to it in today’s reductive fashion) represented a gigantic leap forward from a film that was already revolutionary. Everything seemed faster and more agile; every shot was more carefully composed and lit in an almost painterly fashion. The special effects were often beautiful - from the pastel glow of the spaceships’ engines to the burnished, art deco vistas of Cloud City. There was even a rich, Oedipus in space, subtext.
The first time I saw it I cried when it finished, not only because the conclusion was so bleak and John Williams’ score so shamelessly emotional, but because it was over and I had been wrenched back to the real world. I saw Empire six times in the cinema: on its own, as part of a double bill, as part of a triple bill and as a digitally enhanced reissue.
Though George Lucas still had his trilogy to complete, those of us about to enter our teens by 1983, when Return of the Jedi was released, had somehow slipped out from under his spell. During the long haul between instalments, we had developed a taste for the saltier escapades of his womanising archaeologist Indiana Jones and the recognisable suburban fairy tale of ET: The Extra-Terrestrial. The curiously sexless Star Wars universe no longer held quite the same appeal. Watching Jedi, you listened to six and seven year olds whooping with laughter at the toddling antics of the Ewoks - bellicose but implausibly cute teddy bears - and realised that this was a movie designed to be appreciated by children younger than you: children the age you were when Star Wars first appeared in fact. I saw Jedi only once.
But that’s as it should be. To become adult is, as we know, to put away childish things - and that includes Wookie cookie jars and Boba Fett bubble bath. George Lucas’s lavishly engineered remounting of old Flash Gordon serials, complete with vague mystical overtones, was a stroke of entertainment (if not actual creative) genius. For a generation of children - some of them experiencing a childhood that wasn’t much fun at all - the Star Wars films represented an irresistible escape route into a more palatable universe.
And now it’s all about to happen again. Though the return of Star Wars is inevitably poignant to people my age - particularly those of us whose lives have perhaps taken unexpected and not always desirable twists in the interim - I’d be more worried if I felt the same naïve excitement now as I did twenty years ago. After some cool reflection I’ve decided that the scary thing isn’t to greet Episode 1: The Phantom Menace with an involuntary spasm and a cry of “Oh my God, I’m old!” The scary thing is not to.
Originally published in The Scotsman, July 15th 1999
James Bond: "007 & I" (1999)
This November sees the release of the nineteenth official James Bond movie, The World Is Not Enough. Whether or not you think this constitutes an exciting event pretty much depends upon your opinion of the previous eighteen James Bond movies. If you’re not a fan you’ll probably regard it as a pointless clone of something that wasn’t very interesting in the first place. If, on the other hand, your subconscious is littered with confused early memories of giants with steel dentures, gold painted women and bald men with mittel-European accents stroking tranquillised white cats, you’ll treasure its familiarity. But even then you might not realise how remote a prospect the gloss and spectacle of The World Is Not Enough - Pierce Brosnan’s third appearance as 007 - seemed at the beginning of the decade.
One thing is certain: it will adhere to a number of strict principles. First of all there will be a boisterous mini-film which will establish its mise en scène within a few seconds then plunge you into a high speed chase and culminate in a stunt/explosion of such preposterous audacity that certain members of the audience will feel compelled to stand up and cheer. This will segue into a quasi-surreal title sequence in which lissom, silhouetted women will cavort amid tumbling guns and diagonally whizzing bullets against a background of burnished infinitude. The story proper - sometimes tenuously linked to the mini-film - will then unfold. Once again, certain preordained things will happen: Bond will engage in sexual banter with Miss Moneypenny; he will express thinly disguised antagonism towards figures of authority; he will be equipped with a variety of gadgets disguised as expensive accessories, their manufacturers’ names - Omega, Erikson, BMW - prominently displayed. Sometimes he will be given a car, which he will swiftly write off in improbable circumstances.
The whole venture will be informed by an irrepressible - some might say insufferable - air of self-confidence and executed on the sort of scale that only exorbitant expense can achieve. Pierce Brosnan will add further refinements to his cuff-twitching, tie-straightening interpretation of Bond. It will be hard to remember a time when 007 wasn’t the world’s most durable pop culture icon: the man who marched on undaunted after Elvis bloated and the Beatles broke up.
However, as any devoted - though not necessarily uncritical - fan will tell you, it wasn’t always like that. There was a time, not so very long ago, when Bond, incarnated by the increasingly decrepit Roger Moore, then the staunchly humourless Timothy Dalton, looked like an irrelevancy - the epitome of uncool. A fatigued swinger, he seemed unable to adapt himself to the post-AIDs, post-Glastnost world. By the mid-1980s he was being usurped by the sort of muscular, monosyllabic heroes with whom audiences from Iowa to Kuala Lumpur (united by their limited grasp of the English language) could more readily identify. Forced to defend his constituency on inflation-ravaged budgets, he looked doomed. In borrowed clothes (Don Johnson’s from Miami Vice) he made an ill-advised attempt to imitate his usurpers, then sloped off into obscurity.
It was a bad time to be a Bond fan - particularly if you weren’t sure why you were one in the first place. Born in the early seventies, I can’t remember a time when there wasn’t Bond. He was always the virile fantasy figure to which Britain, its global influence withering, had grateful recourse. On a black and white portable in the tiny kitchen of my parents’ Ayrshire flat I watched Sean Connery serenading Ursula Andress with “Underneath The Mango Tree” as she emerged from the Caribbean surf clutching a conch shell in each hand. I understood little of what was going on but John Barry’s music - its texture already familiar from even earlier viewings of Born Free - spoke resonantly of adventure and open spaces. A few years later I lay in front of a larger, colour t.v., drowsy with repletion after Christmas dinner, and watched Connery being made over as a laughably unconvincing Oriental, then storming a hollowed-out volcano with an army of Ninjas. From his armchair, shrouded in cigar smoke, my father chuckled appreciatively.
He was a professional golfer (Scottish champion in 1969) and we lived in a golfing town. I was bookish and unathletic. My manifest lack of interest in golf was a source of disappointment to him, though he refused to admit it. Conscious of this, I withdrew from him and went further into books. One of the few things we could do together with an equal degree of enthusiasm was watch You Only Live Twice or Thunderball. It was a sort of temporary adhesive that was the closest we ever came to bonding.
My father told me that he had taken my mother to see You Only Live Twice when they were engaged. I suspected that he regarded his batchelorhood and early married life in the Sixties (when he had worked in Barbados and travelled to tournaments all over Europe) as a version of a Bond movie - Goldfinger probably, with the golf match eclipsing all the other stuff about Fort Knox and neutron bombs. By the early eighties, when he was mainly a teacher of golf and repairer of clubs, we went to see Never Say Never Again together. Emerging from the cinema, he observed that Connery had lost his edge and I could tell, from the brief and uncharacteristic softening of his expression, that he suspected the same about himself. After he and my mother separated I used to take a Bond movie on video with me when I went back to spend an evening him. He tolerated Roger Moore as an amiable buffoon but thought Timothy Dalton an unspeakable drip. Neither could ever hope to emulate Sean Connery - the Scotsman’s Scotsman - in his prime. The last Bond movie I ever saw with him in the cinema was Licence To Kill in the summer of 1989, by which time he was terminally ill with lung cancer. Struggling with the discomfort of having to occupy a cramped seat for more than two hours, he was dismayed by its dour brutality ¾ this wasn’t the Bond he remembered.
Neither of us realised it at the time, but Licence To Kill marked the beginning of 007’s wilderness years. After its relatively poor box office performance the Italian businessman Giancarlo Peretti bought MGM/UA, the studio which released Bond movies, and the franchise was ensnared in legal wrangles which kept it off the screen for the best part of seven years. During this period, however, 007’s enforced retirement yielded unsuspected benefits. Audiences wearied by almost thirty years of biannual escapades had time to forget about him, grow even wearier of the alternatives, then rediscover him with a fresh perspective. The process was assisted to a great extent by the efflorescence of Britpop and its offshoots in film and fashion. There was also the proliferation of glossy magazines aimed at the kind of new lad likely to include 007 among his formative influences. Suddenly British cinema icons of the Sixties like Terence Stamp, Michael Caine and Connery’s Bond were in favour again. So was easy listening, its erstwhile ambassador, Burt Bacharach, officially anointed by Oasis as the coolest man on the planet. Even John Barry was being discussed by a few brave souls in terms of guarded approbation. I began to sense that we might be re-entering a world in which James Bond could thrive once more, without compromising his basic lack of integrity. Nonetheless, when GoldenEye - tentatively planned as 007’s comeback movie - was first announced, the news was greeted with widespread scepticism.
Even I was worried. The years after my father’s death had not been easy. Having worked abroad for a number of years and been self-employed most of his life, he had no pension to speak of. My mother and I lived on her unemployment benefit and my student grant in a flat we couldn’t afford to heat and, due to the collapse of the property market, couldn’t sell. But any time there was a Bond movie on TV we settled down to watch it, each clutching a hot water bottle, grateful for a couple of hours’ nostalgic escapism.
By the time the new film’s release was imminent, in November 1995, things had been hesitantly getting better for some time. I had got my degree and had a couple of short stories published. Somewhere in that part of the brain where illogical thoughts are free to flourish, unmediated by reason, I felt that a triumphant return for 007 would somehow consolidate the recovery.
When I saw the trailer I knew instantly that I needn’t have worried. To the subdued strains of a familiar theme, disjointed phrases loomed: “It’s A New World…With New Enemies…And New Threats…But You Can Still Rely…On One Man.” Immaculate in a tuxedo, Pierce Brosnan strode across the screen, his heels clicking with measured confidence. He spun round and carved the number 007 out of the phrase “On One Man” with a salvo of bullets. Then he approached the camera and, surveying the audience, coolly enquired, “You were expecting someone else?”
Rarely has a rhetorical question prompted so ecstatic a response. Everyone cheered as we were plunged into a mêlée of explosions, gunplay, sex, duelling sports cars and digital countdowns, punctuated by some choice soundbites, foremost among them the immortal words, “The name’s Bond…James Bond.” It was so comfortingly familiar it made you want to laugh out loud, yet edited without an ounce of fat to spare and propelled with all the oomph of modern technology.
As – when I finally saw it – was the film itself. A 60’s caper for the 90’s, its conventions neatly inverted, GoldenEye was gratifyingly sure of itself, with Pierce Brosnan (no longer the glib lightweight of Remington Steele) its greatest and most surprising asset. Numerous interviews recounted how he had survived an impoverished Irish childhood, reinvented himself as a mid-Atlantic smoothie, missed out on Bond in 1986, overcome the death of his wife and bided his time until the part became available again. In the interim he had acquired the depth and maturity which enabled him to pull off the trick of humanising Bond for a new audience without weakening him.
Unpublished, 1999
Borders: "The New Curiosity Shop" (2000)
(*This one seems positively quaint. From 1998 - 2001 I worked in the Glasgow branch of Borders as a bookseller and occasional barista. In 2000 I smuggled a truncated version of this article into the The Spectator - not my first choice, but the only place that would take it. Now both Borders UK and Borders US are defunct. Tempus fugit.)
In November 1936 George Orwell published an essay - or perhaps jeremiad would be a more accurate description - entitled “Bookshop Memories” in the literary periodical The Fortnightly. It was based on his experience of working in a second-hand bookshop, which, he revealed, “ stood exactly on the frontier between Hampstead and Camden Town. ” The same period would form the basis of his third novel Keep The Aspidistra Flying. Indigence in Paris and London lay behind him, success as a wartime broadcaster and literary editor of Tribune was yet to come.
I work in a markedly different kind of bookshop: one of those modern, multi-storey edifices in which one can simultaneously enjoy live jazz, a vanilla flavoured decaf. latte and a shiatsu head massage. Nonetheless I was amazed, reading Orwell’s essay, at the extent to which his experiences coincided with my own and how little has really changed in the intervening sixty-three years.
I applied for my bookshop job when the mixture of University tutoring, writing and admin work with which I'd supported myself since gaining my PhD suddenly dried up. Bookshops are, as Orwell states, "so easily pictured, if you don't work in one, as a kind of paradise." I pictured mine as a temporary expedient: a relatively civilised stopgap until I found the job I really wanted. Little did I realise that the chain superstores may be selling books but might as well be selling tins of beans – stacked high and aggressively discounted.
In spite of the material with which it provided him, Orwell seemed to regard his book selling days with scant affection. It wasn't the cold, dusty air or the dead bluebottles littering the tops of the books that put him off so much as the fact that his job obliged him to come into daily contact with the book-buying public. "Many of the people who came to us," he writes. "Were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop. For example, the dear old lady… who read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy. Unfortunately she can’t remember the title or the author’s name, or what the book was about, but she does remember that it had a red cover.”
I've had my fair share of irritating and surreal experiences with customers. There was the one who demanded "Are you illiterate or what?" when I asked him to spell a word in the title of a book he wanted. (It’s a common misapprehension, propagated by films such as You’ve Got Mail, that the chain superstores are staffed by assistants who are automatically ignoramuses). There was another who accosted me to complain that she couldn’t find any books in the shop on remote viewing. But I don’t think I ever experienced the remorseless loathing that Orwell conveys with such gusto. "In a town like London," he writes elsewhere. "There are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places you can hang about for a long time without spending any money." All this is tonic and not a little disturbing from the left-wing polemicist of The Road to Wigan Pier. Orwell would doubtless be appalled to learn that modern developments in book selling have increased this trend to an undreamt of extent. When a shop is open - as mine is - from eight in the morning until eleven at night and has a licensed cafe and lots of comfy chairs distributed around every floor, it becomes a practical Mecca for the narcoleptic and the bewildered.
Orwell's clientele ranged from "First edition snobs" to "students haggling over cheap textbooks" to "vague minded women looking for presents for their nephews." The chain bookstore plays host to an equally exotic cross-section of humanity. But it tends most often to attract the devoted Saturday shopper who treats it as if it were just another department store - which, to all intents and purposes, it is - and its staff as rude mechanicals, placed there to indulge their whims and chant the retail mantra ("Next please...thank you... sign there please... you receipt's in the bag...have a nice day").
Not long ago a man asked me if we had any books by James Joyce. He wanted "a hardback one, with a nice cover" for a convalescent friend. I obligingly reeled off the titles of Joyce's most celebrated works. He stared at me, unimpressed, as if I was making his task much more complicated than it need be. "Well, what's his latest one?" he demanded. "Just give me that." To my credit I remained stoic throughout.
On another occasion - Christmas Eve in fact - I was shelving stock when a young woman prodded me in the ribs and asked, "Do you have any of Woody Allen's novels?"
"I'm sorry, he hasn't written any novels," I replied.
She looked affronted.
"Yes he has," she protested. "My friend's Dad's got them."
"I'm afraid not," I said. "He's written three collections of humorous pieces that are now available in one volume but no novels. Perhaps that's what you're thinking of?"
"No, it's his novels I'm after."
"I'm sorry."
She gazed sourly at the maze of shelves that surrounded us.
"So you're telling me you don't have them?"
Already slightly ill disposed towards her after the prod in the ribs, I said, "No, I'm telling you they don't exist."
"But they do!"
"I'm afraid not."
"Yes they do!"
"No they don't!"
We continued in this vein for a while until interrupted by her friend, who, ignoring me, asked, "Do they have them then?"
"No," replied the young woman. "He says there aren't any."
Her friend shot me a disdainful glance then said, "Come on, we'll try Waterstone’s instead."
I later discovered that, on their way up to me, they had already had an identical conversation with two other booksellers and reduced each one to a state of gibbering unreason.
The companies who sell books recruit graduates for their knowledge and the literate image they project, but can get away with paying them school-leaver money (about £4.35 an hour) because there's an infinite supply of other graduates out there desperate for any job at all. Orwell – like Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying – chose a part-time job in a bookshop because it gave him time to write. He described his routine in a letter (dated 16 February 1935) to his friend Brenda Salkeld: " 7a.m. get up, dress etc., cook & eat breakfast. 8.45 go down & open the shop, & I am usually kept there till about 9.45. Then come home, do out my room, light the fire etc. 10.30 a.m. - 1 p.m. I do some writing. 1 p.m. get lunch & eat it. 2 p.m. - 6.30 p.m. I am at the shop. Then I come home, get my supper, do the washing up & after that sometimes do an hour's work." It sounds like a small miracle of domestic productivity: the author rattling up and downstairs between selling books and writing them.
The booksellers in my shop, mostly in their mid-twenties with degrees in English, History, Philosophy, Psychology and modern languages, work there because there's nothing else. Some of them intend to continue in bookselling, which is fair enough – it's a honourable profession. But I can't help feeling that there's something terribly wrong with a society that seems obsessed with cramming more and more youngsters into higher education, the majority of whom - apart from the well-connected or exceptional few - are going to end up working in shops or call centres. To be honest, I think we’re seeing the emergence of a disenfranchised generation: encouraged to indulge in the luxury of a liberal education and assume huge debts to pay for it when, due to qualification inflation, there just aren’t graduate jobs for them to do. It’s this aspect of working in a bookshop - rather than the "rarity of really bookish people" or the incidence of "paranoiac customers" bemoaned by Orwell - that has made the biggest impression upon me.
I also found it hard to share his despair at the literary tastes of the public: "Roughly speaking, what one might call the average novel - the ordinary, good-bad, Galsworthy-and-water stuff which is the norm of the English novel - seems to exist only for women. Men read either novels it is possible to respect or detective stories." Perhaps the way in which the electronic media - particularly television - have so thoroughly eclipsed reading for most people means that the modern bookseller expects to spend a substantial part of the day on his or her knees constructing squat monoliths of novelisations and books by stand-up comedians. In my shop a select group of best sellers shouldered their way to prominence at front of store, the men - Jeffrey Archer, Clive Cussler, Wilbur Smith - by virtue of their muscularity, the women - Danielle Steele, Jackie Collins, Barbara Taylor-Bradford - through the sheer width of their shoulder-pads. Meanwhile, the sensitive winners of obscure literary prizes cowered in small quantities at your feet or in dim corners.
After inveighing against the shallowness of the public, Orwell asks, somewhat redundantly, "Would I like to be a bookseller de métier? On the whole - in spite of my employer's kindness to me, and some happy days I spent in the shop - no." Nor would I. Dealing with the book buying public, especially today's public – made peevish and infantile by the coddling Holy Grail of "customer service" - is a thankless task. It demands cosmic detachment, inexhaustible chirpiness and a fanatical sense of mission about selling books — with a soupçon of masochism for good measure.
"But," confesses Orwell. "The real reason why I should not like to be in the book trade for life is that while I was in it I lost my love of books. A bookseller has to tell lies about books, and that gives him a distaste for them; still worse is the fact that he is constantly dusting them and hauling them to and fro." Being a bookseller does tend to demolish any fond notions you might entertain about books as aesthetically pleasing objects. Instead they become a mere source of manual labour. You regard them with the same dispirited fatigue you would a pile of building bricks or a stack of two-by-four. And the bookshop becomes, instead of a Mecca for lovers of the written word, an artfully lit, softly furnished warehouse – just the place you work in. Someday I’ll miss it, and probably remember with affectionate indulgence that woman who informed me I just was not good enough when I was unable to provide her daughter with the third Harry Potter book in paperback because it had only just been published as a hardback. Someday — but not today.
Originally published in The Spectator, September 23rd 2000