I want to write about artists who have had periods of convalescence, or near death experiences - to see how these forced hardships influenced their work and lives. And also to compare these experiences with my own, and to learn from them. The first person I chose to write about was George Lucas. This essay serves as an introduction to the series.
Escape: George Lucas, Martha Grover and three prisoners from Alcatraz.
“We’re finally getting out of this Turkey Town and now you want to crawl back into your cell!” - American Graffiti
Filmmaker George Lucas’ father owned a stationery store in Modesto ,California. He wanted his only son to take over the family business. George had other plans- he wanted to be a race-car driver and an auto mechanic. I don’t blame him for not wanting to take over his father’s business; when you’re young you value possibility. When adults tell you what to do or what your life is going to be like, you, of course, resist. But besides the idea that your whole future is being planned out for you, taking over the family stationery business, with the benefit of hindsight, might have been even more risky than movie-making; to me, the very idea of a stationery store seems antiquated. It has become a very boutiquey type endeavor in the age of email and telephone. Recently the Post office in Modesto was shut down. Despite a public outcry and the beautiful WPA-era murals inside, the US postal Service is losing money left and right and can’t afford to keep open “under-used” post-offices like the one in Modesto. Hardly anyone writes letters at all anymore. Even less on fancy stationery.
And even the word stationery connotes stagnation. It comes from the English word, stationer: someone who sold book-making supplies in the age before the printing press. Book-making materials were too bulky to be of use to a traveling salesperson and so the stationer was stationary, and sold stationery.
Besides, Young George Lucas was much more interested in movement. Cars, more precisely. He was a poor student - his whole world was cars. Building them and racing them. His senior year he drove an Autobianchini Bianchina, which, to my eye, is a squat ugly thing. A bit like a Jedi White-cloak fighter.
Modesto, and much of America, in those days was much more car centric. Not just as a way to get around but as a way to connect, as a cultural force. There were popular songs about cars. Maybe I’m out of touch but I don’t hear a lot of songs about cars these days. Also popular were “teen tragedy songs.” Sometimes the lover was singing to his dead girlfriend. Sometimes the singer was the dead girlfriend. These got their start around the same time teen idol James Dean crashed his Porsche and died. Some of these songs were very popular, such as “Last Kiss,” “Dead Man’s Curve” and “Teen Angel.” Some of them were sappy, like “Tell Laura I Love Her.” And some were preachy like “Chicken” and “Message from James Dean.” But just the fact that there were so many songs glorifying cars and denigrating unsafe driving shows that it was a major concern- at least for white, middle class parents and their children.
Lucas’ first major film, American Graffiti, is about this car culture among teenagers. Kids cruised the strip in much the same way as kids now cruise Facebook. In Graffiti, teenagers are shown chatting from open car windows as they cruised the strip, joking, insulting, goofing off, swapping passengers and generally behaving the same way teenagers behave today- fairly stupidly. Today you don’t see cruising much anymore. You’re much more likely to see teenagers updating their status on Facebook while driving. (You can’t die cruising Facebook - but you can die Facebooking while driving!) My point is, that cruising is like Facebook (or any social network) because it provided a way for teens to all be in one place at one time - in a casual, fun environment.
The difference was that the car, not the computer, was central to cruising. America was enjoying what is called its “romance with the automobile.” This romance involved the social cruising aspect, but also the far more dangerous racing element and the game of chicken, popularized by James Dean’s movie Rebel without a Cause. And the dangerous pleasure of fast driving was not lost on George; he’d already seen several of his classmates die in a car crash near his parent’s home, and he’d already flipped his own car once and installed a roll bar under the crumpled roof. But neither incident curbed his desire for dangerous speeds.
Then on June 12th, 1962, two days before his high school graduation seventeen year-old George Lucas’ body was ejected from his car. George was headed home on Sylvan Road - one of those long straight, Modesto roads - through California farmland and walnut groves. He was turning left into his family’s driveway when another car hit him going ninety miles an hour. This other car was attempting to pass him on the left and was driven by another teenage boy. George was thrown skyward from his vehicle as it rolled nearly ten times. When he came down his lungs were punctured and his ribs were broken and his souped up Autobianchi Bianchina was totaled.
Everyone said that it was a miracle he survived. Even George, spiritual, even before his invention of the “Force, took this as a sign. “Every day became a gift,” he would later say in interviews. And he meant it literally - every day was a literal gift and he needed to do something with it. In fact, in nearly every in-depth interview he gave as an adult, he would mention this accident and how it changed his life. Before the accident young George had wanted to be a race car driver or an auto mechanic. After the accident he decided to study cultural anthropology and filmmaking. This near-fatal accident changed the course of his life. If we play the what-if game we can suppose that even if George hadn’t worked for his father, even if he had become a racer and a mechanic, he might have become like the John Milner character from American Graffiti, twenty two, still in Modesto, driving around in souped-up cars, hitting on teenage girls. But he didn’t become that guy. His near-death experience, and the time he says he spent in the hospital “meditating,” helped him to escape another kind of death: small town life.
People will do anything to escape when the alternative is unbearable. Luke Skywalker doesn’t want to take over his uncle’s farm. George Lucas didn’t want to take over his father’s stationery store. That same day that George’s soul nearly escaped his body, three men nearly escaped from Alcatraz, off the California coast. I say nearly because they are still missing, assumed dead but with no proof. They dug through the prison’s moisture-damaged cement with metal prison spoons. They crawled through ventilation shafts, used a raft made from a raincoat and plywood paddles to make it to freedom. The official report however states that they drowned, although their bodies were never found. They escaped their cells, and perhaps this life as well.
For my part, when I was young, I wanted nothing more than to escape my small town of Corbett, Oregon after I graduated high school. Then I couldn’t stand Olympia, Washington. After that I couldn’t wait to get out of Gresham, Oregon. Eugene was fun for a while but I moved to Portland a week after graduating from the University of Oregon. I was happy enough in Portland until my friends started moving away. So I applied to grad school, moved to San Francisco and then couldn’t wait to leave there after I graduated. By that time I was very sick with Cushing’s disease and just wanted to be back where I had a support network. So here I am back in Portland, changed by my own near-death experience.
My experience with Cushing’s disease was obviously different in many ways from Lucas’ car crash; my experience was slow. I have been ill for years. George’s experience was fast. His conditions were acute. My illness has been seeming more chronic by the year. I don’t feel as if every day were a gift. That feeling tends to fade in the face of everyday life almost immediately. If what he says is true- George is very lucky to have been able to hold onto that feeling. I don’t doubt that it is true- I just think you have to be a more spiritual person than myself to believe that. You have to think that life is literally a gift - that someone or some thing is giving you that gift and you owe something in return. In George’s case, I guess you owe them Star Wars. Anyway I have always avoided reading into my experiences in that way. I think my approach has kept me sane, albeit slightly less inspired. I tend to see my illness as random. Is that depressing? Sure.
But what it all boils down to is the meaning you make from your suffering. Instead of catapulting me in a radically different direction - away from home- towards the great wide open of possibilities, like George, my brush with death increased the gravity of my home planet: Portland. It made me realize how important friends and family are to me, how important home is. I find my meaning by giving back, through writing. I feel like my teaching and my writing is how I give back to the people in my life who have helped me. Audrey Lorde says in the Cancer Journals, “The first part is surviving, the second part is teaching.” And I think that art is teaching, whether it’s filmmaking or writing.
So what have I learned today from writing about George Lucas and his near fatal car crash?I’ve learned that so much has changed in our world since 1962: Alcatraz in now a tourist attraction. Cruising is obsolete. Star Wars is itself, like American Graffiti’s nostalgia for the early 60’s, merely nostalgia for the early 80’s. Cars are ruining the planet. Modesto now has some of the worst crime and pollution in the country. The cars that were the center of George’s childhood have polluted the city and the car culture there is now drive-bys and drive throughs.
It’s a cliche isn’t it - that you can’t go home - but what about the home that is, in fact, the past? And why is it always the better past? I can’t go home in the way I can’t return to my healthy body of the past. And what other lives and selves might we have had, if our souls had slipped from their seats, had we in fact died, or had these tragedies never happened in the first place? My mind turns even to those three prisoners, in heaven, in hell, or thumbing it even now somewhere out there on the road.
 |
| Lucas' totaled car. |
Posts
