Franchise Fatigue (4)

Books are not dreams which you hold in your hands. Stories are not magical gateways into other worlds. You have not visited India from the comfort of your armchair because you once read the Jungle Book. Every cloud has a silver lining: perhaps the fall of Neil Gaiman means that the absurd fetishisation of STORIES that he perpetrated will wither away of itself. 

But he was kind of right. The real gods, the significant mythic figures, were never Ophelia and Lady McBeth, nor even Robin Hood and Little John, or Jupiter and Prometheus. And except in some very narrow sub-cultures, no-child ever really loved Jesus and Mary to anything like the extent they loved Father Christmas. For centuries we have all really worshiped at the shrines of Mickey Mouse and King Kong and Charlie Chaplin and Dick Barton and Dan Archer. 

If you want to kick a ball between two posts, then by all means kick a ball between two posts. Even if you aren’t very good at kicking balls and usually miss. Ball-kicking doubtless has positive side effects—you make friends and take exercise and develop stronger feet. But the reason you kick balls is that you like kicking balls. For some reason.  

I would be skeptical of a PE teacher who said “It doesn’t matter if the ball never goes between the posts: kicking it is what counts.” I would be equally skeptical of one who said “Ball kicking will help you get a job at the department of trade and industry, or, failing that, Tescos.” And of course I am glad the ones who used to say “If the ball doesn’t go between the posts then I shall make you kick it in your underwear” are mostly retired or in prison. I don’t have that much time for people who write concerned essays in the broadsheets about the decline of ball kicking and what it means for the future of western civilisation, either. “If you put your weight back there and turn your toes out like this, it’s more likely to go straight” seems the correct way to go. 

I think that it is silly to fetishise ball-kicking. But those of us who have never voluntarily kicked a ball and would certainly never pay money to watch someone else doing so are a bit over inclined to fetishise reading. Before JK Rowling turned out to be — what JK Rowling turned out to be — people used to say that even if the Harry Potter books were rubbish (and I reserve judgement on whether or not the Harry Potter books were rubbish) it was better for children to be reading something than for them to be reading nothing.

I am not sure if this is true. 

I suppose if someone were a very extreme anorexic—if someone were refusing to eat at all and damaging their health—then it would be sensible to say “Well, I would rather you eat something than eat nothing at all.” But if I found that kids were spending their lunch money exclusively at Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, I don’t think I would say “Well, at least they are eating something.” 

Is this snobbish? [Several Hon. Members: “Yes”.] Is it wrong for those of us who really like books to be worried about what kinds of books young people read?

Maybe it is honestly better to hang around with your mates in a tarmac quad idly having a kick-about. Maybe the fun goes away when a PE teacher (one of the nice ones) walks past and says “Good job! Some of you should try out for the team!” That would have been my mum’s attitude, I think. Can’t you just be allowed to enjoy whistling, or doodling? What right do these people have to tell you you should whistle in tune or learn perspective? Why does everything have to be turned into a job? Maybe Kick-About was spoiled when some kids from a posh-school wrote down the rules of Association Kick-About, and when it was possible to make a lot of money by being good at the Beautiful Kick-About.

I just can’t help thinking that maybe possibly if books are good then maybe possibly it is better to read, you know, good books?  

The only good book I can positively remember my parents reading to me is Winnie the Pooh, and that is certainly a very good book indeed. They certainly did read Millie Mollie Sodding Mandy and My Aggravating Little Sister to my younger sibling, so maybe my memory is defective. Maybe Pooh is such a good book that I have forgotten all the others; maybe I liked it so much I demanded that it be read over and over again. Or maybe I was a bit precocious and learned to read for myself and thought bedtime stories were a bit babyish. With all due respect to Alan Bennet and Bernard Cribbins, I would like to put it on record that my Daddy is the only person to ever have nailed Eyeore’s voice. Kanga does not sound Australian: she sounds like Mary Poppins. Obviously. 

I certainly can remember watching TV with my parents: The Woodentops and Andy Pandy and the Trumpton trilogy; and Bizzy Lizzy which now exists only in my memory. (She had an Eskimo.) And this was the Golden Age of Children’s TV, when every morn brought forth a noble Clanger and every evening brought on something new to make out of sticky backed plastic. 

But obviously, the really big story, the story which deconstructed my imaginative life and reassembled it, the single imaginative moment which I have never really moved on from, was Spider-Man. 

If you probe my unconscious and look for the great stories, the ones which really matter— what you will find is popular fiction: Winnie the Pooh, Doctor Who, Spider-Man and Star Wars. And yes, as I got older, there was Mr Tolkien; and a thing that consisted of Roger Lancelyn Green and T.H White but which grew to include John Boorman and your actual Thomas Malory; and rattling in at a very poor third, Mr Shakespeare and Herr Wagner. But I only ever loved King Arthur and Siegfried because they reminded me of Luke Skywalker.

I have an image of myself in a quite different part of the multiverse, sitting in a wood panelled room, surrounded by withered brown copies of the Three Musketeers and Beowulf and the Iliad, and I suppose visited from time to time by newly scrubbed ex-public school boys who want to hear my profound insights. But on this timeline, I have an excellent collection of 1970s comic books, am re-reading the complete works of Steve Gerber, and have accepted that I will never read Sense and Sensibility. 

Neither Mr Chips nor CS Lewis exist on my timeline. I would be no good at departmental meetings, grant applications, or SATS assessments.

Captain America is more than just a story. I care what happens to it. I probably shouldn't, but I do.

I don't really understand nationalism. “But how would you feel if white people were the minority in England?" they ask me "How would you feel if there were no white people left at all?” I literally wouldn’t care, and can't imagine how anyone else could possibly care, any more than I can really imagine how anyone could care about kicking a ball between two posts.

But I’m actually quite patriotic. In the sense of having an affection for my home. I’m English because I grew up in England; doubtless if I had grown up in France I’d be French. If I think of Sunday afternoon I think of people playing cricket, not on a village green but in front of the slightly smelly changing rooms in the rather muddy municipal park. Not that I like cricket: I think it’s the most boring and pointless sport ever invented, apart from all the others. If I think of politics and government and leaders I think of Big Ben and the houses of parliament. I think of the late Queen and the Silver Jubilee, but that sets me off thinking about sweary people with spiky hair who were really cross about her and they are kind of my home too. My country, yes, but with a small affectionate lower case C not a big threatening capital one. 

By the same token, I have a "patriotic" affection for some stories; not a nationalistic wish to defend them nor a fascistic desire to freeze them in a particular form.

I don’t deal with moral quandaries by asking What Would Peter Parker Do, although that might not be a bad idea. I don’t pray to Captain America, although I believe some people do. (Use him as a symbol in pathworkings and vision quests, at any rate.) But when I think of heroism and integrity I think of Steve Rogers or Clark Kent. When I think of a scientist, I think of  Jon Pertwee. If I try to envisage home and safety then I think of a rabbit pouring out condensed milk and a bear getting stuck in the doorway…

CS Lewis said that when he tried to describe his spiritual life, it made him sound more holy and pious than he could possibly be; that there were not any words in English small enough to describe the sense he sometimes had of God’s presence in a rainy sky.

I guess I read a comic book most days and I watch a comic-book inspired movie most weeks and my flat is full of iconic posters. I don’t know if there is an internal dynamic that makes stories created within the Star Wars milieu resonate with me more than other stories, of if something structural kicks off a Pavlovian response; or if collecting Star Wars canon is a habit like collecting greek statues and a jigsaws; or if the movies are somehow connected to a deep Freudian well of Platonic forms; or if I just kinda like them.

But here is the thing. 

The great stories, the ones which really matter: Winnie the Pooh, Doctor Who, Spider-Man, Captain America, Star Wars. They have one thing in common.

They are all owned by Walt Disney. And Walt Disney is one of the companies that has pre-emptively complied with Donald Trumps’ anti-diversity, anti-equality and anti-inclusivity legislation. 

So I could foresee a time when I could not, in good conscience, read them any more. 

And I don’t know quite how I would cope with that. 

This is the final part of a long-form article that was published in full on my Pateon.
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