The Disappointment Artist by Jonathan Lethem Page A

Wars
character was the tweaking English robot, C-3PO.
    I did and do find C-3PO sexy. It’s as if a strand of DNA from Fritz Lang’s fetishized girl robot in
Metropolis
has carried forward to the bland world of
Star Wars
. Also, whereas Carrie Fisher’s robes went to her ankles, C-3PO is obviously naked, and ashamed of it.
    Alissa thought the movie was okay (my overstated claims generally cued a compensating shrug in others) and that was our last date, if it was a date. We’re friends now.
    I don’t know how much of an effort it was for my mother to travel by subway to a movie theater in Manhattan by the summer of ’77, but I do know it was unusual, and that she was certainly doing it to oblige me. It might have been one of our last ventures out together, before it was impossible for her. I remember fussing over rituals inside the theater, showing her my favorite seat, and straining not to watch her watch it throughout, not to hang on her every reaction. Afterward she too found the movie just okay. It wasn’t her kind of thing, but she could understand why I liked it so much. Those were pretty close to her exact words. Maybe with her characteristic Queens hard-boiled tone:
I see why
you like it, kiddo.
Then, in a turn I find painful to relate, she left me there to watch it a second time, and took the subway home alone. What a heartbreaking rehearsal! I was saying, in effect:
Come and see my future,
post-mom self. Enact with me your parting from it. Here’s the world of cinema and stories and obsessive identification I’m using to survive your
going—now go.
How generous of her to play in this masquerade, if she knew.
    I spent a certain amount of time that year trying hopelessly to distract my grandmother from the coming loss of her only child—it would mostly wreck her—by pushing my new enthusiasms at her. For instance she and I had a recurrent argument about rock and roll, one which it now strikes me was probably a faint echo, for her, of struggles over my mother’s dropping out of Queens College in favor of a Greenwich Village beatnik-folk lifestyle. I worked to find a hit song she couldn’t quibble with, and thought I’d found one in Wings’ “Mull of Kintyre,” which is really just a strummy faux–Irish folk song. I played it for her at top volume and she grimaced, her displeasure not at the music but at the apparent trump card I’d played. Then, on the fade, Paul McCartney gave out a kind
of whoop-whoop
holler and my grandmother seized on this, with relish: “You hear that? He had to go and scream. It wasn’t good enough just to sing, he had to scream like an animal!” Her will was too much for me. So when she resisted being dragged to
Star Wars
I probably didn’t mind, being uninterested in having her trample on my secret sand castle. She and I were ultimately in a kind of argument about whether or not our family was a site of tragedy, and I probably sensed I was on the losing end of that one.
    My father lived in a commune for part of that summer, though my mother’s illness sometimes drew him back into the house. There was a man in the commune—call him George Lucas—whose married life, which included two young children, was coming apart. George Lucas was the person I knew who’d seen
Star Wars
the most times, apart from me, and we had a ritualized bond over it. He’d ask me how many times I’d seen the film and I’d report, like an emissary with good news from the front. George Lucas had a copy of the soundtrack and we’d sit in the commune’s living room and play it on the stereo, which I seem to remember being somewhat unpopular with the commune’s larger membership. George Lucas, who played piano and had some classical training, would always proclaim that the score was
really pretty good symphonic
composition
—he’d also play me Gustav Holst’s
Planets Suite
as a kind of primer, and to show me how the Death Star theme came from Holst’s Jupiter—and I would dutifully parrot