We wonder where what went wrong…

Some writer who is likely both handsome and charming wrote this under the Mad Men banner for Humour over at The Peak.

The dry spell: an unfortunate state for any virile young Mad Man to live in. Maybe serial macking has fished your local pond to nookie extinction, or perhaps you’re momentarily sidelined by a bowl-cut or problems of a crustacean sort.

Mad Men is here for you.

Together, we are going to beat this curse of forced celibacy with candor, compassion, and copious self-love. We’re all in this together, just as long as we don’t have to, you know . . . talk about it. Don’t be weird, bro. Just follow this easy four-step program to and we’ll have you eating like a king again in no time.

Step One: Assess the situation

Loneliness status: “I like me”

This isn’t so bad, is it? A little introspection and self-analysis never hurt anyone. You’ll likely be strapped with a woman for most of your adult life, so maybe a little alone time is valuable. You could start your novel, read War & Peace, even take up hot yoga. Without clam, the world is your oyster. You’ll likely have more money, too. Spend it on yourself! Buy a nice shirt, perhaps something Ed Hardy or Members Only. Take care of you. Just don’t Nair anything below your belly button.

Step Two: Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it

Loneliness status: “I should call an ex and have sexual intercourse today”

That was a harrowing half-hour, now wasn’t it? Now that you are good and in tune with your inner man, it’s time to bust out your giant black book and awaken some latent feelings! Call up a few ex-girlfriends. Start with “I’ve been thinking a lot lately,” and improvise from there. It’s not lying if you performed Step One. If this works out for you, good job, you’re done. Pass Go and collect $200. Hopefully you don’t have to spend it on the morning-after pill.

Step Three: Know your surroundings

Loneliness status: “I wonder if they still make those Tamagotchi things”

If you didn’t sow the seeds for a regretful little tryst in the past, it just takes a little MacGyver-inspired ingenuity to grant sexual independence. Have a few bananas? Enjoy the fruit, and then enjoy the skin. Evolution (or other, perhaps?) successfully made nature’s Fleshlight. Try using the microwave to improve the sensation, but have the burn unit on standby. A little moisturizer and a Ziploc freezer bag with your living-room couch can make a handy companion as well, and you’ll never look at a chesterfield the same way again. That little micro-suede minx.

Step Four: Go get laid

Loneliness status: “I wish my dog would stop giving me those bedroom eyes”

Like any affliction, the easiest way out is a cure. The desert-like dry spell has only one cure: a little moisture! This provides the perfect environment to try out some new approaches. Use less starch in your collar. Head-butt fewer boyfriends. Shower a few times a week. Take steps to make yourself irresistible, like becoming a T.A. or head of state. An old standby is to hang out around art schools with law textbooks open in front of you. The pond becomes a barrel, and it will be brimming with copic markers, Warhol prints, and the finest salmon. Time to take out your Deagle, you animal.

With these easy steps, you can be sure that your love muscle never atrophies. Be sure to archive them in case you end up married.

The following is the third part of a seven part column I am doing for The Peak at SFU. You can read the other ones by clicking the title tag at the left of this post. It’s about Star Wars and how important it is to the world. Why yes I am in university, thank you for asking. Yes, I have kissed a girl before, too.

I feel a little like Milton, trying to justify the ways of Lucas and instead portraying some sort of bumbling God in denim button-ups. Which is to say in trying to portray sombody I like quite a bit, it comes off like he has wronged me in some way. This is not totally the case. While Lucas may have found himself at odds with the standards of his audience and good filmmaking, his mastery of contradictory human nature is, at it’s worst, better than most. This is excellently illustrated with his attitudes towards war and conflict, and is brilliant in the near omission of it’s significance.

In the history of film and television, the most memorable depictions of war are often the ones that run counter to traditional perceptions of military conflict as a glorious and honorable act. Post-Vietnam, these diminutive portrayals became the norm, with Stanley Kubrick nearly creating a career out of taking the piss out of hawks. Now, in an age of guerilla warfare and military excursions with all the popular support of tuberculosis, war has an all too uncomfortable way of getting put to the back burner, forgotten until it boils over. Star Wars raises stakes by not being contrary at all, and instead slapping us with the wet noodle of reality.

Released just eight months later, The Deer Hunter brought the terror of Vietnam to the home front while Star Wars gave the casualties of war all the gravity of a trip to Wal-Mart in heavy traffic. That is to say distressing, but in no way impossible to ignore. Star Wars is almost prophetic in how it’s characters react to prolonged military struggles with marked indifference, ahead of it’s time in describing the numbing of society to matters of foreign war that would define the rest of the Cold War and beyond.

Luke Skywalker’s Aunt and Uncle get killed? He shrugs it off and gets to work bringing down the Empire. Darth Vader blows Alderaan into a million pieces? Ben Kenobi puts his fingers to his temple and Leia is a little upset. She gets over it. Millions killed when the Death Star is blown up not once but twice? No tears for dead Imperials. The death of serial Force-choker Darth Vader is met with the most emotion (and little at that) in a prosaic relationship climax that evokes one of the most horrifying hypocrisies within human capacity; war becomes statistical and distant one moment, tragic and personal when convenient. We could write this off as bad acting, but the consistency of the chilled reaction to mortality forces us to consider it a directorial mandate.

In this the canon is not nearly reconciled. The Star Wars universe waxes between having the foot soldiers of the Empire nee Republic and Rebellion act as foreign policy meatsacks just a little more often than it creates fictions around distinguished veterans. The Jedi are exceptional, the ruling class, so we care about them. The average soldier is less than a volunteer, a clone built for the express purpose of being an expendable unit of a shrewd Machiavel who can shoot lightning out of his fingers. Making the average Stormtrooper a clone of Jango Fett and not a draftee of unjust regime was an embarrassingly fit metaphor for our attitudes towards military personnel.

The primary films disregard Stormtroopers, Republic troops and Ewoks as little more than bullet sponges. Genndy Tartakovsky’s outstanding Clone Wars vignettes straddle the line between the extremes, the clones taking on varying degrees of expertise, but ultimately being the silent, soulless vessels the series more than demands. Recently, as the series takes pains to gain the Sesame Street crowd, they’ve softened this stance to include fairly generous concern for the lives of the average trooper from the Jedi leadership, but at this point it seems token.

Star Wars puts a mirror up to our collective unconscious considering matters military, and the reflection is less than favorable. The nameless, faceless Ewoks and Stormtroopers fight battles a long long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, far away enough that to ignore it is a matter of turning off the (space) television. When it does view war through a compassionate lens, the moments are sparse enough to be arresting, and rarely involve central characters.

Consider this: the single most evocative explication of military loss in the entire series is seven seconds long. Through the frenetic cuts of the final battle on Endor, between Han Solo being suave and R2-D2 being mutely hilarious, Lucas cuts to a lone Ewok running to the front. In the grass is the body of a fallen comrade, a motionless ball of fur on the ground. He stops in his tracks and falls to his knees, cradling his head in his hand with grief. The war is screaming in his brain and there isn’t a title actor around to hear it.

Sometimes Star Wars hits a little close to home. Sometimes we need it to.

New comic! From Mr. Polancec himself! Get excited!

Click to embiggen.

The following is the second of a series of columns for The Peak. This week deals with how love is stupid, and how Phantom Menace is stupid, and how when combined they are kind of awesome.

A bunch of years after George Lucas got his rocks off letting the global movie-going populace innocently root for incest, he decided to revisit the franchise that made him grotesquely wealthy. He made a few prequels. You may have heard of them. They were kind of a thing.

The wholesale rape of a series aside, George Lucas did a funny thing: recognizing that love was second only to war (as in, Star Wars) in the landscape of literary devices, he decided to rewrite the entire context of his continuity. I think his goiter told him to do it.

Instead of the epic quest of a band of rebels with the intention of bringing down an empire, Phantom Menace made it the story of a headstrong young Jedi who would enslave a galaxy because he had a dream that his wife might die. Maybe.

This ruffled a few feathers.

And why wouldn’t it? The move made their beloved series of jock sci-fi into the nerd equivalent of The English Patient, with such swagger as to inspire calls for the Lucas himself to be buggered with a Jar-Jar Binks doll. The subsequent, weepy version of the baddest badass to ever rock a cape and emphysema had casual and hardcore fans alike introducing their palms to their faces.

But don’t be deceived; the wooden acting and staid dialogue characterizing the romance between Anakin Skywalker and Padme Amidala is merely the poor technical execution of the most powerful idea Lucas ever committed to film.

It’s awkward from the word go. Our savant slave boy meets the incognito Queen Amidala through a nearly impossible series of coincidences (blame the Force, not the writing), and, throwing reasonable notions of statutory rape to the wind, proceeds to try and woo the 14-year-old monarch as best as his nine-year-old prowess allows (which is to say he showed her his space Lego). Lacking biceps or a wicked automobile, he resorts to clumsiest attempt at flattery in cinematic history, asking her if she was “an angel.” In the best possible distillation of every romantic encounter I have ever had, she looks at him dead in the face, cocks her head to the side and says “What?”

This is the best part of the film, and possibly the best of all three prequels.

Whether intentionally or by accident, Lucas captured one of the greatest and most realistic love stories in Hollywood history, and what makes it so profound is that it almost wallows in its ridiculousness. It recognizes that love is hardly ever the measured, dramatic perfection like we see with Han and Leia in the later episodes, and throws the stupid things we do to the opposite sex at us like a fistful of sand in the eyes.

When Anakin is a kid, all he sees is a goddess, an object of desire. His romantic schooling only goes as far as his mother telling him he was immaculately conceived, likely winking and nudging him the whole time. As he goes through the dogmatically celibate Jedi training, he swims in an ocean of testosterone and midi-chlorians and dreams about her.

Though he has the ability to detect emotions, Yoda and Co. decide it would be a great idea to send a teenager who can crush steel with his mind to spend some alone time with a girl over whom he has Gacy levels of obsession.

Given this opportunity, he awkwardly and directly confesses total dedication to this woman he has spent virtually no time with, and luckily she’s a sucker for a guy with a big lightsaber. In between strained confessions of affection, (and probable explorations of the coital implications of a robotic arm,) they do things like run through a field of wildflowers without a hint of irony.

She gets knocked up, has some twins (who would later totally make out), and, as in every good love story, Anakin goes on to kill millions and set up a cruel dictatorship. What you are feeling right now is the squirming of a million nerds suddenly silenced by the realization that they relate entirely.

Phantom Menace and the love arc of Padme and Anakin was George Lucas’ attempt to take his stories to an operatic level. While the result is more “kill the wabbit” than Barber of Seville, it shows us exactly what our courtship looks like: obsessive, stupid, humiliating, amazing, and utterly central to the life of every person who has ever lived.

Making that primal need for companionship the core of his narrative is just another way Star Wars shows us how we are all exactly the same.

Which is to say, pretty damn goofy.

The following originally appeared in The Peak. It is an exploration on why Star Wars to this day makes me squeal with girlish joy. It is part one of a seven part run.

It all begins with a flash.

The way to properly shoot a lightsaber battle is not exactly the most creative aspect of Star Wars. You take two stalwart opponents or, say, sparring partners, and have them fling brightly coloured phalluses at each other in a vaguely acrobatic neo-fencing duel and pocket the billions thrown at you by young male virgins.

Visually, you add a few frames of pure white every time one of those phalluses touch, and you get that brilliant effect that has dazzled audiences for the better part of four decades. Like a photographer’s flash, it fills the room and leaves you feeling physically dazed, which is an important dismissal of defenses when presenting audiences with the supernatural.

George Lucas was using this technique to brain-slap crowds years before Pokemon up and decided to give epileptics the finger.

I know a lot about lightsabers. I know how to make one (both where to get the amplifying crystals and how to build the housing) and I know their most revered users (Yoda, Mace Windu, and Shak Ti, to name a few).

Not only do I know the name of the technique Obi-Wan Kenobi used to make Darth Vader into a multiple amputee (“mou kei”), I know this is a predominantly Sith move, which is why that nerd to your left gasped when it happened while you were watching Revenge of the Sith (even though he knew for years what had occurred).

I also know that it’s unlikely The Holy Trilogy would have had the same global impact it did without them.

This information serves no real purpose. It won’t help me seduce a woman, provide for a family, or find gainful employment. But lightsabers are probably one of the most important parts of my life and of the lives of millions around the planet.

A long, long time ago, Robin Williams grabbed his nuts and said poets were way more important than lawyers and doctors. Though he had a lusty preoccupation with Langston Hughes and likely meant that the works of the Western canon were a touch more steeped in value than the Millennium Falcon, the Dead Poet founder was making an excellent point on the value of (dare I say it: pop) culture in a societal landscape that expects such things to be abandoned when entering adulthood.

Though I doubt he expected his students to jump up on a desk and yell “O Captain my Captain many Bothans died to bring us this information,” the sentiment applies.

It’s a worldwide flash. A single relative frame against the exorbitantly long reel of time that everyone can see, filling the room and dazzling them in a language of light and sound. Star Wars is an international handshake and an embodiment of our collective thoughts about morality, relationships, and war.

It’s as accessible to those who have no idea what a Holocron is, as it is to those who have read their share of sapphic Force erotica. If civilization collapsed tomorrow it would still be relevant: its archetypes and lessons are as universal as any Bible, plus Ewoks.

In fact, everything worth knowing, you can learn from Star Wars. And over the coming semester, I aim to prove it.