Luke Skywalker Can't Read (2 page)

And I suspect that day is right now, because you might know “right now” by its other name. The
future.

W
alking in on your parents having sex is one thing, but walking in on a couple of dinosaurs is something else. It's not necessarily worse, just a little unexpected, particularly if you are not a dinosaur. When we're kids, figuring out the whole deal with sex is not a mystery we're all trying to solve; it's just something that never occurs to us. It's like asking, “How come Superman gets away with just putting on the glasses?” You don't ask questions apropos of nothing until later, when you're confronted with them, almost by accident. And my accidental “birds and bees” talk was precipitated by seeing some dinos get it on.

Shocking no one, this sex act wasn't in real time, nor was it shaky-cam footage of real dinosaurs. I'm sad to say I don't have any good intel on secretly living prehistoric creatures, though I do know people with Bigfoot fetishes. This dino-sex-act came from a magazine, an old issue of the science/science fiction magazine
Omni
, dated October 1988, which would have
made me seven years old. Along with
Playboy
and
Penthouse
, my father also subscribed to
Omni
, which I loved because it always had my favorite stuff in it: spaceships, aliens, and dinosaurs. But in this issue, the dinosaurs were doing something I'd never seen dinosaurs do before: they were getting on top of each other in what looked like a sort of weird, horizontal piggyback ride. All my favorites, too: apatosauruses (brontosauruses), tyrannosauruses, triceratops. Were they smiling? This was before we all knew about raptors, so all dinosaurs to a kid in the '80s were really huge. Wouldn't that hurt to have one on top of you? Even if you were another dinosaur?

The illustrations were done by an artist named Ron Embleton and the article itself was written by Sandy Fritz and was titled “Tyrannosaurus Sex: A Love Tail.” My child brain processed the basics of the illustrations—one dinosaur on top of another dinosaur—and I could read the words, but none of it was making any sense. It was like learning Santa Claus isn't a real person or
Godzilla
isn't actually a documentary. I needed it explained to me. And my father was happy to oblige.

“Dinosaurs were just like people,” he said. “When they really loved another dinosaur, they would diddle them, and make more dinosaurs.” My dad wasn't embarrassed about talking about sex one bit, and looking back, it seems like he was dying for an excuse to faux-innocently broach the topic and use the word “diddle.”

“So, dinosaurs had to love each other to make other dinosaurs?” I said.

“Well . . .” my dad said.

“So did they all die because they stopped loving each
other?” My dad considered this for a second, gently stroking his period-appropriate Tom Selleck mustache.

“Maybe the love part wasn't the important thing,” he said, “but what they
did
because of it.”

In my childhood and adolescence, science-y stuff and science fiction in particular always seemed to be a weird portal into knowledge about sexuality and adulthood, my wardrobe leading into a naked and deranged Narnia. My parents were strange sociopolitical hybrids from another dimension, totally godless Republicans (we
never
went to church) who maintained strict bedtimes and rigorous chore schedules, but let my sister and me absorb all sorts of racy media, just as long as it wasn't too violent. My father didn't exactly leave the
Playboy
s and
Penthouse
s lying around all the time, but it was known to happen. He was a photographer, so I think he and my mother tried to cultivate a half-assed “The Human Body Is Beautiful” philosophy, which they implemented as well as their We-Used-To-Be-Hippies-But-Now-We-Love-Reagan sensibilities allowed. This is to say that my mom was still a mom and my dad was still a dad, meaning when my dad would try to get away with some bullshit, my mom would call him on it. Which is where
Barbarella
comes in.

Barbarella
. 1968. Jane Fonda, who plays the titular character, is in space boots, and little else, brandishing a ray-gun and looking like a sci-fi soft-core porn supernova. If you're unfamiliar, I'm not sure you necessarily
need
to see it, but it is, kind of, a science fiction classic. This isn't to say that it's good—like at all—it's just that when it comes to “important” science fiction and fantasy, the larger pop canon of science fiction and fantasy
tends to include all sorts of great stuff alongside some total shit that is really memorable, and also, well,
good
in a different way.
Lost in Space
, for example, is objectively terrible, and yet, it had that great robot and a family who lived on a flying saucer, so it becomes “important.”
Lost in Space
next to an episode of the classic
Star Trek
is exactly like the fact that box wine is sold in the same store as some delicious Barolo. I just know when I'm slumming it. And sometimes, you might just want to grab the box wine because it's easier.

This, I think, more than anything, is what has historically turned off a lot of people from sci-fi and fantasy: the inability to see the value in the crappier examples while simultaneously being unable to distinguish it from the supposed “good stuff.” As I mentioned, those
Playboy
s were sometimes lying around my house growing up, but because of my dad's photographer status so was a black-and-white instructional manual called
Nude Photography: The French Way
. When I hit puberty, I actually preferred the ladies in
Nude Photography: The French Way
to those in an issue of
Playboy
. Can this distinction really be the difference between “good” sci-fi/fantasy and “trash”? Kind of. And what's worse is that it's made even more confusing when you consider that truly trailblazing genre authors like Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin were (and still are!) published in
Playboy
. The mix of lowbrow “trash” with high-concept “brilliance” is the undeniable heritage of science fiction and fantasy, and it's totally connected with a young person's notions of growing up. Which—duh—is connected to sex.

The idea that those of us who end up loving science fiction and/or fantasy are obsessed with the low-hanging fruit when we're young is tricky, because all kids are obsessed with low-hanging fruit. They're kids! And if you're still into that stuff—robots, aliens, and dinos—as an adult it can come across as a bit like you haven't really grown up. As a grown-up, I'm lucky to have a lot of friends who are totally into the whole cosplay scene: they dress up as characters from their favorite fiction. One couple I know tends to do couples costumes, and my favorite one was when they dressed as Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, partly because this couple is a couple of girls. Other times, they'll dress up as something more highbrow: maybe characters from the book versions of
Dune
. The kind of geek you are depends on the day, and your mood. Box wine or Barolo.

So where the hell does
Barbarella
fit in? At a glance,
Barbarella
is an on-purpose crappy movie with the pornographic trappings of embarrassingly old-school testosterone-fueled science fiction. And yet, somehow, for me anyway, it's accidentally a progressive work of sci-fi genius.
Barbarella
—the film—is like an idiot savant, maybe not aware it's good (and often bad in many places) and maybe not even actually good, but infinitely redeemable. A Rosetta stone for explaining how we think about pop fiction. Barbarella—the person—is essentially a female James Bond, somebody who is fucking people to get what she wants and definitely not with the intention of making little Barbarellas. From her first moments in a zero-gravity striptease, nine-year-old me started to connect the dots between sex as a sometimes reproductive act and sex as
recreation. The dinosaurs-doing-it-for-fun comment my dad had made a few years earlier started to make a little more sense. Just because you get your birds-and-bees (and brontosauruses) talk doesn't mean you instantly understand sex, the universe, and everything, overnight. In 1990, I was a tiny bit worldlier than when I'd stumbled on “Tyrannosaurus Sex,” but still at not quite ten years old, I still hadn't figured out my body, or science fiction. To be fair, at thirty-three, there's a very real chance that I still haven't done either.

Barbarella
had a profound effect on me. There's something fairly guiltless about enjoying this movie, because it's so obviously about sex. And yet, in being exposed to it so young, I was getting the good stuff about the movie without any of the horny and misogynistic baggage. Sure, I was starting to feel certain stirrings by watching this movie, but little kids have so much weird sexual energy, that was inevitable. The profound thing about
Barbarella
was that I was tricked into renting it by my father.

When we went to the video store with one parent or the other, either my sister or I was allowed to pick out “our own” movie, while whichever parent was with us got something else. For a solid five years, this probably meant I lurked in the sci-fi/fantasy/horror section of a non-franchised hole-in-the-wall called the Movie SuperStore. Mostly I stuck with certified classic monster movies—
Frankenstein
,
Creature from the Black Lagoon
,
The Wolf-Man—
which my parents supported because these films were usually bloodless. You could call this policy “boobs not blood,” but prior to
Barbarella
, it was mostly just blood. The day this happened, though—sometime in December 1990, I think—I had my little paws on something that was probably
Godzilla vs. the Cosmic Monster
or some similar fare, which I had certainly already seen. (Side note: isn't it funny how little kids cling desperately to the familiar? Next to the very elderly, they've got to be the most set in their ways of any age group.) But my dad was like, no
Godzilla
, what about
Barbarella
?

“You'll like this!” he said. “It's got all your favorite stuff in it.”

“Dinosaurs?” I said.

“No, but spaceships and ray-guns and, look, this guy can fly!” I had to admit, Barbarella's ray-gun did look awesome, and everything else about the movie seemed appealing. When we got home my mother rolled her eyes really hard when she saw what I had selected as “my movie.”

“Ryan picked this out, huh?” she snorted. “All on his own?”

“What?!” my dad said. “He's gonna love it.”

“I bet he's not the only one,” my mom said.

In that moment,
Barbarella
became my first guilty pleasure. I did like it a lot, though I never really let on to my mom that I did. And in my heart, I knew I really didn't understand it, but that it was
changing
me. When Jane Fonda has an orgasm so strong that she breaks the “Excessive Machine,” I had no idea what was going on. Did I understand the lesbian tendencies between her and the Black Queen of Sogo? Nope. Was the joke of the name Dildano lost on me? Yep. And was I, like many of you, thoroughly confused about the search for someone named Duran Duran?
*
Yes, the band got its name from this
movie; the movie was not searching for the band, even though, philosophically, it kind of was.

Somehow, because Barbarella was a girl, and seemed to sort of be
in charge of the movie
, and won through less-than-conventional means, I think it made me start to think differently about what to expect from these kinds of stories. And maybe other stuff, too. Ironically, because I was sort of still figuring out some of the sex-stuff in the movie, I could draw my own conclusions from it that my father, the supposed
Barbarella
fan, was totally incapable of. I don't think this was the result he had hoped for. I think his goal was to turn me into a sort of man's man, kind of like him. This didn't really work, because what I took away from the movie ended up having little to do with what my father loved about it. He created a monster, totally by accident.