So what does that mean? Maybe nothing. But maybe this: Conscious attempts at reality don’t work. The character of Angela on ABC’s short-lived drama My So-Called Life was byzantine and unpredictable and emotionally complex, and all that well-crafted nuance made her seem like an individual. But Angela was so much an individual that she wasn’t like anyone but herself; she didn’t reflect any archetypes. She was real enough to be interesting, but too real to be important. Kelly Kapowski was never real, so she ended up being a little like everybody (or at least like someone everybody used to know). The Tori Paradox was a lazy way for NBC to avoid thinking, but nobody watching at home blinked; it was openly ridiculous, but latently plausible. That’s why the Tori Paradox made sense, and why it illustrated a greater paradox that matters even more: Saved by the Bell wasn’t real, but neither is most of reality.
(50–50 interlude)
Life is chock-full of lies, but the biggest lie is math. That’s particularly clear in the discipline of probability, a field of study that’s completely and wholly fake. When push comes to shove—when you truly get down to the core essence of existence—there is only one mathematical possibility: Everything is 50-50. Either something will happen, or something will not.
When you flip a coin, what are the odds of it coming up heads? 50-50. Either it will be heads, or it will not. When you roll a six-sided die, what are the odds that you’ll roll a three? 50-50. You’ll either get a three, or you won’t. That’s reality. Don’t fall into the childish “it’s one-in six” logic trap. That is precisely what all your adolescent authority figures want you to believe. That’s how they enslave you. That’s how they stole your conviction, and that’s why you will never be happy. Either you will roll a three, or you will not; there are no other alternatives. The future has no memory. Certain things can be impossible, and certain things can be guaranteed—but there is no sliding scale for maybe. Maybe something will happen, or maybe it won’t. That’s all there is. What are the chances that your sister will die from ovarian cancer next summer? 50-50 (either she’ll die from ovarian cancer or she won’t). What are the chances that your sister will become America’s most respected underwater welding specialist? 50-50. It will happen, or it won’t. There are two possibilities, and both are plausible and unknown. The odds are 2:1. These facts are irrefutable.
Quasi-intellectuals like to claim that math is spiritual. They are lying. Math is not religion. Math is the antireligion, because it splinters the gravity of life’s only imperative equation: Either something is true, or it isn’t. Do or do not; there is no try.
12 Sulking with Lisa Loeb on the Ice Planet Hoth 1:41
It’s become cool to like Star Wars, which actually means it’s totally uncool to like Star Wars. I think you know what I mean by this: There was a time in our very recent history when it was “interestin g” to be a Star Wars fan. It was sort of like admitting you masturbate twice a day, or that your favorite band was They Might Be Giants. Star Wars was something everyone of a certain age secretly loved but never openly recognized; I don’t recall anyone talking about Star Wars in 1990, except for that select class of über geeks who consciously embraced their sublime nerdiness four years before the advent of Weezer (you may recall that these were also the first people who told you about the Internet). But that era has passed; suddenly it seems like everyone born between 1963 and 1975 will gleefully tell you how mind-blowingly important the Star Wars trilogy was to their youth, and it’s slowly become acceptable to make Wookie jokes without the fear of alienation. This is probably Kevin Smith’s fault.
What’s interesting about this evolution is that the value of a movie like Star Wars was vastly underrated at the time of its release and is now vastly overrated in retrospect. In 1977, few people realized this film would completely change the culture of filmmaking, inasmuch as this was the genesis of all those blockbuster movies that everyone gets tricked into seeing summer after summer after summer. Star Wars changed the social perception of what a movie was supposed to be; George Lucas, along with Steven Spielberg, managed to kill the best era of American filmmaking in less than five years. Yet—over time—Star Wars has become one of the most overrated films of all time, inasmuch as it’s pretty fucking terrible when you actually try to watch it. Star Wars’s greatest asset is that it’s inevitably compared to 1983’s Return of the Jedi, quite possibly the least-watchable major film of the last twenty-five years. I once knew a girl who claimed to have a recurring dream about a polar bear that mauled Ewoks; it made me love her.
However, the middle film in the Star Wars trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back, remains a legitimately great picture—but not for any cinematic reason. It’s great for thematic, social reasons. It’s now completely obvious that The Empire Strikes Back was the seminal foundation for what became “Generation X.”[52] In a roundabout way, Boba Fett created Pearl Jam. While movies like Easy Rider and Saturday Night Fever painted living portraits for generations they represented in the present tense, The Empire Strikes Back might be the only example of a movie that set the social aesthetic for a generation coming in the future. The narrative extension to The Empire Strikes Back was not the Endor-saturated stupidity of Return of the Jedi; it was Reality Bites.
I concede that part of my bias toward Empire probably comes from the fact that it was the first movie I ever saw in a theater. This is a seminal experience for anyone, and I suppose it unconsciously shapes the way a person looks at cinema (I initially assumed all theatrical releases were prefaced by an expository text block that was virtually incomprehensible). The film was set in three static locations: The ice planet Hoth (which looked like North Dakota), the jungle system Dagobah (which was sort of like the final twenty minutes of Apocalypse Now), and the mining community of Cloud City (apparently a cross between Las Vegas and Birmingham, Alabama). It’s often noted by critics that this is the only Star Wars film that ends on a stridently depressing note: Han Solo is frozen in carbonite and torn away from Princess Leia, Luke gets his paw hacked off, and Darth Vader has the universe by the jugular. The Empire Strikes Back is the only blockbuster of the modern era to celebrate the abysmal failure of its protagonists. This is important; this is why The Empire Strikes Back set the philosophical template for all the slackers who would come of age ten years later. George Lucas built the army of clones that would eventually be led by Richard Linklater.
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1. I know nobody uses the term