As a writing exercise, I've chosen the ten books, albums, movies, and games that were most important in defining me as a person, and challenged myself to explain why.
Some of these set my artistic tone or left huge imprints on my personality, others changed the course of my life or career. With each item I can say, "if not for this, I would be someone else right now." But why? It's a surprisingly hard question to answer. A strong feeling would compel me to put something on the list, and then I'd realize I had no clue how to unpack that feeling.
My Dad was one of the early adopters of satellite-based television. He arranged for a monstrous steel radar dish to be installed on our property, and if you hand-cranked it to the right spot on the sky, you could intercept the same signals that television studios used to beam their content down to cable companies. So, for a fixed up-front price, you could have permanent access to all the premium stuff that other people paid 40 or 60 bucks a month to get. The satellite we spent most of our time locked onto was G1. If memory serves, it had two different versions of The Disney Channel, and a copy of each version with a three-hour delay. Same for HBO.
By coincidence, just after we got the receiver up and running, HBO and Showtime got the rights to broadcast "Grease 2", since the theatrical run was finished. With four copies of every provider all over the sky, that meant us kids could watch "Grease 2", commercial free ... over and over ... all day long ... for weeks.
SO WE DID.
We once tried to count how many times we'd each seen it. My own total was around 40.
To adults, the plot and the music was a dull rehash of the original "Grease" and other movies. But not to us kids. All the movie tropes were brand-new. The musical format itself was new. "Grease 2" had a chrome-and-gasoline 50's aesthetic that was like an alien world, plus easy-to-follow rock'n'roll music, a kid-friendly plot, and flashy dancing. It also had strutting peacock Nogerelli and brassy self-possessed Paulette and her gang, making a kind of status-quo for gender roles that the more introverted main characters - Stephanie and Michael - cautiously navigated. It would be a stretch to say we found ourselves in the characters, but we did get a whole lot of material to work with, packed into one 90-minute lesson, repeated dozens of times.
If I had to distill what I got from that movie, 30+ years later, I'd say it was a sense of Americana. In the world of "Grease 2", being American meant being bold and loud and persistent, and being willing to fight but reluctant to actually hurt anyone ... and being ready to sing and dance if you felt like it.
Many years later I saw the original "Grease", and found it boring as heck.
When I was a little kid, I had no taste for horror movies. My imagination was far too intense. If I saw something disturbing on a movie screen it would instantly appear in my mind and start smashing furniture and dishes, and would not leave for days, or weeks, or in the case of "The Re-animator" ... for years.
I was invited to a friend's house for a sleepover. My friend and his Dad were into cheesy horror movies, and decided to rent this one. They both laughed uproariously at the rubber puppets and the fake blood, but I hadn't learned to see it that way. There's a scene in the movie where the mad scientist throws a cat against a wall, killing it and mangling it badly, then gathers the bloody corpse up and puts it on his table. Then he injects it with a sinister greenish fluid, and it begins to writhe in undead agony, making pitiful mewling sounds.
I loved cats. I had two fuzzy cats at home that I was very close to. That image went straight to the bottom of my imagination and anchored itself there. I was so upset I wanted to go home. I cried until they called my parents, who came to pick me up. Everyone was very understanding - it was a scary movie, and I hadn't been ready for it, and it was an honest mistake between parents. I was free to hang out again with my friend any time, but I was so embarrassed by my own reaction that I couldn't face him. I had been a total wimp. Everyone else could move on, but I couldn't.
We lived in a two-story house. Everyone slept upstairs in a couple of bedrooms except for me, down on the first floor in my own room. After that night I would very often wake up, at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, with the image of a cat writhing in pain echoing in my head, or of myself as the cat. I would stumble out of bed in the dark and creep into the downstairs living room. Sometimes a cat would be there - Fred or Sasha - and I would pet it and try to reassure myself that it was safe, and I was safe. Sometimes I would imagine an insane man rising up from behind the furniture, or stepping out from the shadows. His eyes were wide and he was grinning like a skeleton, and he had a glowing green syringe raised in one hand, ready to stab me.
The living room was a big space with only a few shadows and corners, so I felt less nervous there, but what I really wanted was to be closer to my parents, so I lingered at the doorway for a while to build up my courage, then ran stiffly across the open floor to the foot of the stairs. As soon as I took off, the fear would begin rising up my spine. When I made it across I would spin around and sit in the corner on the first step, with my back flat on the wall, and look everywhere in the room at once, until I was certain again that the mad scientist hadn't emerged to stalk me.
Then I had to repeat that process on the stairs. I knew that if I started to run, I would freak out too much and not be able to calm myself when I got to the top. Plus there was a chance I would wake everyone else up with my stomping. So I crept slowly upward a few steps at a time, breathing shallowly, straining my ears for any sign of pursuit during the seconds that I had to turn my back to find the next step. The image of the madman was constant in my mind, and so intense I was almost hallucinating him standing at the foot of the stairs, glaring up at me, ready to lunge forward if I turned my back for a little too long.
In my mind, getting from my bedroom to the top of the stairs took all night. In reality it was probably five minutes or less.
When I made it to the top of the stairs, there was an open patch of carpet with a wall heater, and my parents' door nearby. Close enough to my parents to hear my Dad snoring, I could relax a little. I didn't want to wake them up because they would just order me back downstairs. I fetched my sleeping bag from a cabinet down the hall and unrolled it in front of the heater, and that's where my parents would find me in the morning. This didn't just happen once or twice. It happened a lot.
I began to imagine the mad scientist in many places. In closets; in the forest out on the road; sneaking around the hallways at school. I realized that I could easily drive myself crazy with this. So I made the conscious decision to make the mad scientist "live" in one place. If he was always there, then he couldn't be hiding anywhere else. But to get this idea to stick, I knew I had to choose a place that he would "prefer" to live -- or I wouldn't believe he was there.
I had the most trouble with the stairs in my house. The stairs was a confined space that you couldn't navigate while looking behind you, or you would trip and fall. So I decided that the mad scientist lived at the foot of the stairs. I began to relax. He wasn't in this closet, or in these woods - he was at home, on the stairs, waiting. I was safe. That is, ... I was safe everywhere but the stairs.
And that is why, for the rest of my life up to now, I tend to run up stairs, or at least take them two at a time. I cannot wait to be done with stairs.
Another thing this incident taught me, was how to stubbornly countermand my own fear response. If I collapsed into a gibbering heap, there was no way I'd make it to the safety of my parents' door. I became quite skilled at letting the chemicals of fear wash into me, build up like a wave, then wash back out again leaving me unmoved. It was my own personal "litany against fear" training. It has altered my life in ways I'm sure I can't unravel.
In my late teens my taste for horror films changed dramatically and I started to find them fascinating ... even hilarious. Now I look forward eagerly to the two or three "good" horror movies that come out each year.
I was eight years old when this movie came out. I already loved all things Halloween, and a mashup of ghosts with sci-fi contraptions and nerdy jokes was perfect for me. The visual effects were great too, and it set the template for what I thought ghosts should be like: Gassy neon light shows, drifting around doing their own thing. If you got in their way they would attack at you. Then if you didn't run away, something awful and mysterious would happen and you'd never be seen again. So basically, ghosts were like elephants. Except they were more colorful, and made less noise going through a wall.
Also, scientists were fun, and could act like total weirdos as long as they got their work done. That weirdness got injected into my own life as pile of catchphrases, like, "Dogs and cats, living together; mass hysteria!" and "There is no [insert random thing here], only Zuul!" and "I love this plan! I'm excited to be a part of it! LET'S DO IT!" and of course, "Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say YES." And so many others. My friends and I swapped these around endlessly until they were part of our grammar. There were also quotes that I didn't get until much later. I was in my 30's before I really understood, "You've never been out of college. You don't know what it's like out there. I worked in the private sector. They expect results!" And now I find it hilarious that Louis invited all his work clients to a party and called it a "promotional expense."
The music was fantastic too. I bought the soundtrack on cassette and played it on the living room stereo, and danced and rolled around on the carpet. My favorites were the "Ghostbusters Main Theme", and then "Dana's Theme" which immediately followed it.
Ah yes, and Sigourney Weaver was in this movie, and I immediately liked her. Not because her character got possessed by a demon and acted all vampy - which I found incomprehensible as an eight-year-old - but because she projected a sort of comfortable maturity. Looking back, I have to say that if she knew what she was doing as an actor - which she probably did - it was very smart to take what was really a "damsel in distress" and "love interest" role and rearrange it to say "I'm perfectly fine on my own and I have my shit together, but circumstances made me reach out to these Ghostbuster guys, and Peter is a goofball but I am allowing myself to be charmed by him because he is being a gentleman at the same time." Some other actress could have taken her scenes and lines, and been flirty and jumpy and clingy, and then just swooned into Peter's arms at the end of the film, but Sigourney chose to deliver something else, and it managed to show how her character might honestly be attracted to someone like Peter in the first place, and vice-versa.
So, take that over to me, the preteen goofball in the audience: Here's a classy lady who might actually want to be your girlfriend some day. Wow!
My crush on her got a huge boost, of course, when I saw Aliens two years later.
So why was this movie so influential to me, aside from the endless quoting? Why is Ghostbusters on this list, when Return Of The Jedi (which came out just the year before) didn't make it? Mostly because of a statement it makes with its characters.
This movie came out in 1984, the same year that "Revenge Of The Nerds" was in theaters. It's hard to understand now, but back in 1984 "nerds" were actually seen as a minority group that needed some kind of "revenge." How the times have changed! Ghostbusters made a different statement to nerds: It's not you versus "jocks". It's not you versus anyone. If you don't feel like you "fit in", don't worry about it. Stick with your friends, feed your obsessions, and try to have fun -- because you can be aggressively weird and still command respect when your weirdness makes you very good at your job.
That was the key idea. Even if I wasn't going to save New York City from an apocalypse, I could still find some way to make my weirder nature useful, whether that took the form of being a hardcore scientist like Egon, an excited collaborator like Ray, a steady hand like Winston, or a goofball like Peter. Like the Ghostbusters, my friends were an ensemble of nerds, and perhaps the future could be bright for us... Or at least better than the confusion and sense of rejection we felt from most other kids our age. This movie whispered to me that perhaps our "revenge" for suffering as nerdy kids could be to thrive as nerdy adults.
Also, when someone asks you, if you're a god, you say YES !!!
Quite a few times I pondered just dropping this movie from the list, because I knew it would be hard to write about with both honesty and class. But the challenge is the point of this writing exercise, isn't it? Be warned; if discussions of pornography or masturbation disturb you, you should probably browse somewhere else.
Bear with me; this is going to take a lot of unpacking.
I only saw this film when I did because of two coincidences. The first coincidence was the satellite dish our family purchased some time in the 1980's.
At the time, television broadcast companies were sending content to cable providers by passing it up to satellites and beaming it back down without any sort of encryption, so if a private citizen got ahold of a satellite dish they could get the full spectrum of expensive cable programming for free. My Dad thought this was a cool idea, so he paid a crew to drive to our property and plant a dish at the top of our hill. It was five feet across, weighed 200 pounds at least, and you oriented it by turning a steel crank.
We enjoyed that for a few years until the broadcast companies got wise, and "scrambled" their signals so that home receivers couldn't process them directly. My Dad tried to get ahold of a "pirate" descrambler chip he could stick into our receiver, but couldn't find one. Then the cable company ran real cable to our neighborhood and we gave up on the dish.
The second coincidence was a black-and-white television.
My grandmother gave me one as a gift, so I could play Nintendo games without hogging the downstairs TV. (In retrospect I find it terribly American that we had four television displays in a five person household, counting the one with the computer...) The black-and-white TV was a cute thing, about the size of a cinderblock and almost as heavy, with a carrying handle on the back and a broken-off antenna.
It didn't have a digital tuner, so I couldn't hook it to our cable feed. But I knew the old satellite receiver would display stuff on "channel 3" so I commandeered it, hoping to have my own personal cable selection. It was underwhelming. The only stuff that wasn't scrambled was boring government stuff, weather reports, and scrolling "tv guide" channels. But I kept messing around, and eventually I discovered that if you put a scrambled signal on "channel 3", then set the TV to halfway between channels 3 and 4, and futzed with the fine tuning knob, the image would straighten out and de-invert itself. Suddenly I could watch scrambled television!
It was still underwhelming. Most of the time the audio was missing, so movies were incomprehensible. But I was inspired by this new freedom, and one weekend I dragged the television up to the dish at the top of the hill, along with the receiver and an extension cord, and began slowly turning the dish across the sky, marking what I found by etching lines onto the adjustment arms of the dish. The "tv guide" channels gave an inventory for each satellite, which I wrote on graph paper. I found HBO, Cinemax, the Disney channel, et cetera. Lots of diagnostic channels and random stuff I couldn't identify. I kept at it.
After a few hours my Dad saw the extension cord and followed it up to the dish, and asked what I was doing. "Wow, did you actually get that thing to work?" he said.
"Sort of. All the satellites have moved around, so I'm making a new map."
He watched as I turned the crank until another picture resolved from the snow, then as I flipped up through the channels to find the diagnostic channel that would tell me what satellite I'd found. For a second, an image appeared of a woman. Her shirt was bunched up around her neck and a man had one of her breasts in his mouth. I still remember it even now because of how weird it was: The woman was leaned back on a fence, and holding a parasol over one shoulder, and looking down with arched eyebrows as if to say "oh my!", like her old-timey garden picnic had just gone very rogue indeed.
"What the heck was that?" my Dad said.
"I have no idea," I said.
A moment later I found the diagnostic channel. This was satellite S-1. I scratched a mark on the dish, wrote the name in my notes, and started turning the crank again.
Dad watched as I located three or four more satellites this way, then he went back to his yardwork. A few days later I went through my map and cranked the dish down to S-1 again, and found the channel where I'd seen that very sexy picnic. It was an all-pornography channel. I now had a 24-hour feed of fuzzy black-and-white silent pornography set up in my room. (This may sound unremarkable to teenagers today, but back then it was quite scandalous. You can read about the channel I found and its pathetic legal history if you want.)
It was fascinating. I'd discovered masturbation years earlier, and was already good at using my imagination, but my imagination was still fuzzy. I didn't actually know what sexual intercourse looked like in motion. I'd seen pictures in magazines before, and knew I liked looking at naked women, but seeing them move was way more interesting. I began watching the TV at night before bed. It was a parade of silent sexual encounters, with boring bits in between that I ignored by reading or writing or messing with electronics. Only a couple of nights went by like this before I stumbled across "Bodacious Ta-Tas".
I never watched for the titles on the black-and-white TV, and there was no schedule I could refer to, so I only know the name because of some online research I did years later. (In case you're wondering, the title is inspired from a line in Officer and a Gentleman, from 1982.) The movie stuck in my head because of a scene about 20 minutes in where the actress Kitten Natividad does a strip-tease. In the scene she has an enthusiastic grin and ridiculously large breasts and does an energetic dance to show them off, and I thought it was the best thing ever. The other dancers were going for laconic and sultry, but Kitten went for aggressive and (literally) in-your-face. I immediately wanted to see it again.
But I couldn't rewind the broadcast, and I couldn't use the VCR to record the scrambled signal because it wouldn't play back. My only choice was to keep watching the channel and hope they repeated the movie. And that gave me even more incentive to watch the TV late at night, or to turn it on and glance at it while I was doing other things, just in case that movie appeared. This went on for months, with decreasing frequency, and I caught plenty of other movies - or parts of them - along the way. For a kid, a few months can be a long time, and during that time, lots of interesting things happened:
First, I saw a whole lot of women having sex in black-and-white. It's impossible to be sure, but I think I this is how I got a preference for women with very pale skin, even though my own skin tans easily.
Second, the only time I had any privacy to watch the porn channel was at night. I was already a night-owl from burning my sleep hours to keep messing with the computer, and this made the desire to stay awake even stronger. For my entire adult life it's been way too easy to delay sleep, and this channel is partly responsible. (My usual bedtime is somewhere around 1:30am.)
Third, since this was porn from the late 80's, women did not shave their genitalia down to bald lumps, like what became inexplicably popular a decade later. So, I got used to the hairy look and have always preferred it. At the same time, the hair made it difficult to see things, so I still couldn't tell what was going on when, say, a woman received oral sex. What the porn did teach me was that oral sex was very normal, and also such a common part of foreplay that it was practically mandatory to give it to a woman before you did anything more serious.
No, really. Go watch a bunch of 80's porn. That's the pattern. Sure it was usually badly performed oral sex and not nearly long enough, but there it was.
I was convinced that if I ever actually had sex, I should be ready to give oral sex too. Textbooks were vague on things like technique, and porn was a poor teacher, but it was the attitude that mattered later on when I had the chance to learn.
Fourth, porn movies from the 80's often had at least one "lesbian" scene in it, and I was interested in seeing women, not men, so I paid more attention to the TV when these scenes appeared. I liked them because they were more patient, more exploratory, and focused as much on the actors reacting to each other than the mechanics of what they were doing. And I really liked breasts. The women together usually paid attention to them, whereas the men sometimes ignored them completely which I thought was stupid.
I enjoyed these scenes even more when I imagined I was one of the women participating. I don't think that exercise got me in touch with something like a "feminine side" to myself, but it did cause me to think about gender in a more fluid sense, about dominant and submissive behavior, and about how bodies felt from the inside as well as the outside. It also formed a connection between my own sense of pleasure and seeing a woman express pleasure outwardly. For the rest of my life, across all my real sexual encounters, half my satisfaction has come from seeing my partner have a good time, and knowing that we are sharing that feeling. I don't credit porn with this - that would be ridiculous - but I think the mental exercise of placing myself in a woman's body encouraged something that was already there.
And finally, I learned that sex was not just something that men did to women. Even in the liberal Bay Area, there was still a framework of social conservatism around me, whispering in my ear that women considered sex a beastly, traumatic thing they would rather avoid, and men were tainted sickos for wanting it or even thinking about it. Porn said otherwise. Porn reassured me that women not only genuinely enjoyed sex, but that they sometimes even initiated it. This counterbalanced the confusing behavior I saw in women my own age, who seemed to be obsessed with making themselves sexually appealing, but fiercely denied any interest in the act itself. (Of course, the real truth is that all teenagers - male, female, whatever - are completely insane, and have no idea what they want or what they're really doing until years later. If that. But I digress.)
Porn said: Sex is such a regular part of adult behavior that we've made an endless supply of movies just to cater to it. This was an echo of the sexual revolution, beaming down from space, with Kitten Natividad swinging her artificial boobs at the head of the parade, insisting that sex wasn't just a chore for making babies, and needed no penance, nor was it some secret off-camera spiritual apotheosis like swooning romantic films implied. (The man and the lady fall in love, then they kiss and he yanks her onto the couch, and the camera fades out, and presumably they "Do It," and in the next scene they're deliriously happy, smiling rainbows at their co-workers and walking in the park with big stupid grins. What the hell happened on that couch??) Instead, sex could be something else, something down-to-earth and understandable: A thing that people did to have fun together. Still a delicate terrain because sexual feelings are strong things, but a terrain that could be explored, without permanent damage or damnation.
This list of things is not what people expect a teenager to learn when they are exposed to a limitless, on-demand source of pornography. What made all the difference for me is that I was raised in a respectful household, and I did not use porn to learn about dating, or talking to women, or to set my expectations for anything social. I just used it to explore my instinctive fascination with female bodies. It was a sensory indulgence, very much like listening to music. I remember being in Davis years later trying to complete a boring work assignment in my room, and calling up a video clip of a woman masturbating on the computer screen just to give the bored part of my mind something to chew on. I don't remember the specifics of the video but I'm sure it was a few minutes long and set to loop indefinitely, so the woman had 30 orgasms or so in the periphery of my vision while I stamped out computer code. Just a distraction, without a trace of anything personal. And that brings me right up to the most fraught aspect of pornography, which I have to address: Objectification.
Over and over again, as I grew into an adult and for years afterwards, I've had to sort through an appalling quantity of baggage, dumped on top of the basic act of being a man deriving pleasure from images of naked women. I've wrestled with concerns of being "anti-woman", of being violent, of being sexually perverted, of reenforcing evil standards about appearance -- as if specific details about which women I find sexually interesting are not just my own personal business, but a matter of social justice, - like, oh my god, if I find light skin more sexually attractive, I must be racist - and so forth. Plus, there's the accusations of self-harm. What if I'm condemning myself to a narrow range of "idealized" or "unrealistic" bodies that inspire me, ruining my chances of being happy? What if I'm too focused on the way women look, and fail to appreciate the way they feel or smell? What if masturbation gets me too used to my hand and I fail to enjoy a good ol' vagina?
Actually, the range of bodies I've found attractive has grown organically over time, and has not been confined by porn, but reshaped my consumption of it. There was an era of my life where I was upset at myself for not having a broader range than I did, and I tried to force myself to find things attractive that I didn't. That turned out to be a huge mistake. Was it porn that set me up for failure in that effort? I doubt it. Before then, and after then, I found no shortage of women I was very attracted to, who were also very attracted to me. To lament my own "range" in that sense would be selfish. The only tragedy came from trying to make something work that wasn't going to, and hurting other people as well as myself in the process. And no, porn did not stop me from appreciating the way some women smell, either, or the way they felt. Looking back, that concern was especially ridiculous. What if adults marched around telling women that they'd better stay away from vibrators, lest they fail to appreciate good ol' dick? How would that play with women today?
All the more political worries, about whether I was being a good person by watching porn, turned out to be an even bigger waste of time. Yes, the porn industry can be terribly exploitative, and I've seen plenty of porn, but I haven't given a dime to the "industry." (Well actually I think the porn industry got about $20 from me over my lifetime, from renting a couple of erotic videos in college, but close enough.) The internet is full of anonymized "amateur" video websites and it's trivial to download from them or bookmark your favorites. A nicely shot video of a bright-eyed bushy-tailed man and/or woman is only about 30 seconds away on any of a billion devices these days, most of which conveniently require just one hand to operate; har har. And all you need to pay is the data fee. If you're nervous about who gets the advertising money for the ad next to your video, you can always go a step further and give your money to one of the modern pornography sites that is sex-positive and non-exploitative. The times have changed. Here's a good one that's been around for 17 years.
(By the way. The generation that engineered the internet and then the smartphone into existence is still largely ignorant of the almost incomprehensibly enormous change in access to pornography that these dual inventions have wrought. I suspect most people of that generation will go all the way to their graves with their ignorance intact, due to their own discomfort with what they might learn. But I digress, again.)
Objectification, that's the sticky wicket; the difficult patch that conversations about porn always spiral into. That concept lingers when you brush away all the political noise, and all the health worries. Porn objectifies women, and that's bad, case closed.
Porn did not turn women into objects for me. You know how I know? Because there was a part of my mind that was already adept at taking women apart into components - legs, skin, musculature, hair, coordination, sound, smell - long before I got access to porn. I remember a journal entry I wrote in the 7th grade, marveling at how obsessive this deconstruction had already become:
"Girls wear different clothes and makeup and change their hair. They try to decorate themselves just right. None of it matters. Boys are really good at removing it all in our minds. We see the shape underneath and how it moves. We do it without trying. We can't turn it off. We have learn how to pretend it's not happening."
The 7th grade, so ... I was 12 years old when I wrote that. Obviously, for me the "objectification" came built in with being a young man. When porn arrived it hooked into a way of perceiving that was already there. For me, the argument that porn "encouraged" me to see women as objects is suspiciously like the argument that distributing condoms to teenagers "encourages" them to have premarital sex, or the argument that abortion clinics should be shut down because the availability of abortions "encourages" women to have unwanted pregnancies. There's a bit of confusion between the metaphorical horse and cart going on. Yes, boys need to remember that girls are more than just mobile collections of body parts. But before we panic, we should also remember that boys are more than just mobile-body-parts-detectors. We can enjoy looking at parts - in private, where it doesn't threaten anyone - and still greatly value connecting with our lover.
That said, there is definitely a downside to the convenience of porn, and I was exposed to it by "Bodacious Ta-Tas" and all the other movies on that black-and-white TV.
Porn satisfies that hunger for women (or men) as objects, without forcing you to put in the effort to connect to a live human being. Porn won't help you socialize yourself, or give you any tools to talk to people and learn about their lives and minds, or help you build a bridge between that realm of objects and the realm of emotional connection so romance can appear. It's a pressure-release valve to keep the engine from overheating, but it won't teach you how to drive. As a teenager, it kept me keenly interested in sex and somewhat sane, through a long delay of about eight years, until I was finally old enough to have meaningful conversations with girls during my first year of college. At that point a whole new universe of learning and connection opened up to me. Am I glad I delayed? Yes, because I had too much going on in my own mind to meaningfully discuss with girls in high school anyway. But porn only helped the time to pass; it didn't teach me to converse, and I had to catch up in a hurry.
Later on, dating as an adult, you enter a world of plausible deniability, where women truly appreciate it when you're very into sex with them, but require you to hold that desire in check when you're getting acquainted, because you need to prove that you are in control of your urges, and see them as human beings. Porn and masturbation kept me balanced in that world. If I'd had to rely exclusively on intercourse with women to find sexual release, my dating history would probably read like a string of dirty limericks, ending in a late-teenage pregnancy and a shotgun wedding. Thank you, big steel satellite dish, and thank you, Kitten Natividad and your aggressive dance routine. You helped me come to terms with a part of male sexuality that no one wanted to talk about, and almost no one could talk about rationally.
I saw Akira when I was 15 years old. If a 15-year-old saw it today, assuming they could tolerate the violence, they would probably find it clichéd and uninspiring, and wonder how it could be on a "Top 10" list. That's unfortunate, but it's also a testament to how ahead of its time Akira was in 1988. After 30 years pop culture has finally managed to catch up with it.
Over two generations, the DNA of Akira has been scattered into a whole menagerie of big ticket productions; from Avatar: The Last Airbender, to The Matrix, to the X-Men franchise, to the latest version of Superman, and beyond. Practically every depiction of telekinetic ability you've seen in a Hollywood film this century owes a debt to Akira. Every future dystopian saga revolving around a troubled teenager with special abilities - including the latest Star Wars film - leans a little or a lot on Akira's legacy. No doubt if it had been produced three years ago instead of 30, it would have two sequels and a spin-off TV series by now.
But that's all about the film's impact in general. How did it impact me?
It was 1991, late in the summer. The yearly camping trip was done and there was nothing to do for the remaining few weeks of freedom before I started high school except play with my friends, wander in the woods, and bother my parents. My mother took my sisters and I to the little shopping complex near our house, and while she bought groceries she sent us kids into the murky video store to pick out one video each, for the evening's entertainment. I blundered across Akira in the animation section and the box art promised explosions and technology so I took it home. By the time my movie was up for watching, everyone else was tired and ready for bed, so I stayed up to watch it by myself, sitting in the empty living room right up next to the TV. That was fine, because it turned out to be bloody and a bit disturbing in a way my parents would not have enjoyed.
I was fascinated by the vibrant, blocky color palette, the non-cartoony character design, the noir lighting, the sophisticated direction, and the cacophonous, semi-electronic, weirdly ritualistic musical score. And that giant demon teddy-bear sequence - holy crap! But I was most fascinated by the uniquely tai-chi inspired take on what it might be like to use telekinetic powers. Star Wars in the 70's and 80'd had only a glimmer of this approach - Luke reaching for a dropped light saber and pulling it into his hand - but Akira took it and developed it into something much cooler and more effective. You could sling destructive force with your hands, push it outwards from yourself, bend light and impacts around you with shielding motions, lift your whole body up... The force seemed to center on your head, specifically the location of the occult third eye in your forehead, as though you were the god Shiva.
It made poetic sense, and for the rest of my teenage years I would imagine having those powers -- destroying the landscape or fighting other people, amusing myself as I stared out the window on long car trips or drifted away from a boring classroom lecture. It helped with feeling stifled and impotent and angry. It even snuck into my dreams, and has remained there.
But the real lasting power of Akira, to me and to my friends, came from the atrociously bad English dub that was slapped over it for the videocassette release in the United States.
The media company responsible for this cultural miscarriage must have decided that since Akira was animated, it must be for children, and so they hired voice actors from the American cartoon industry to fill out the cast. That's how we got a bike punk with the voice of a Ninja Turtle, with that gnarly surf's-up attitude and pitched-forward sarcastic inflection for every single line. It's not "someone's killed the manager", it's "SOMEone's killed the MANager!!"
In modern terms this would be the equivalent of hiring the voice actor who plays Daisy in Mickey Mouse's Clubhouse to overdub the role of Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad. It's a disaster for sure, but it's a weirdly compelling one.
Now that I think about it, maybe those studio executives knew what they were doing, because practically every exchange of whacked-out dialogue in Akira spawned two or three catchphrases among my friends, and we pitched them back and forth at each other endlessly for years and years, long after that awful VHS dub was erased from public consciousness by a much more conventional and respectful dub with a better translation of the script, on DVD and then on Blu-ray. 30 years later and I still think it's hilarious to scream "KANEDAAA!!!" out a car window, or tease one of my friends when they're looking grumpy by saying "oh what do we have here, huh? Are you the FUNERAL DIRECTOR?" Or reply to some confusing explanation with a sarcastic "Ya lost me, coach!!" Or just say anything, really, in that unique punk-ass Kaneda voice. It marks me as an adult from a certain time and place, because that voice has been dubbed out of existence, and newer generations will never know it was there.
Akira snagged my imagination. It got me into anime, pushing my media consumption sideways, leading me to cyberpunk and dystopian sci-fi as well. But an equally lasting effect came from how it was butchered during its journey to my local video store, and for that I am actually grateful.
"Aaaa... it's my braaain... WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?"
(For some reason a complete Spanish dub is on YouTube ... not for long I expect. I've started this embed at my favorite scene.)