Bela Lugosi
Because my mother does not know or care about the things which I like, she has a habit of conflating particular items, of which she knows next to nothing, with some larger subset on which she feels more qualified to express an opinion. Thus my predilection for the unknown quality that is Chaplin is expanded into the much more knowable blanket-term “slapstick”, on which subject she is able to proclaim with some satisfaction that she doesn’t see what’s so funny about a man putting up a roll of wallpaper and then watching it fall back down again. She is not the only person in my family who takes great care in rendering my interests harmless by reducing them to some inscrutable common denominator; my grandmother used to vaguely convey the information that my first degree was “in English and something else beginning with p”, whilst my uncle’s idea of talking to me on my own level is to compare something to “one of those operas, like Swan Lake or something”. Things have now reached the stage whereby I am on at least 3 occasions out of 10 unable to trace any causal connection between what my relatives think I am and what I actually am; my sister recently presented me with a copy of Dodgeball on the grounds that she “knows I like Adam Sandler” (who is not even IN Dodgeball), and my mother earlier extrapolated from god knows what source the information that I enjoy “all those old Bela Lugosi movies”. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and despite never having given any reason for anyone to believe it, and even having shepherded up every scrap of evidence to that effect, the fact remains that I do, indeed, enjoy all those old Bela Lugosi movies.
I was quite ill over the weekend, and spent most of it in bed watching the documentaries on my Universal Horror Classics DVDs. Watching them, these odd cornucopias of commentators and historians linked only by one thing, a fanatical devotion to The Creature From The Black Lagoon or Bride of Frankenstein or The Mummy, made me realise what I have slowly been coming to suspect over the last few months; that the window of opportunity for respectable geekdom is passing me by with my youth, and I have never really taken advantage of it. I can see it shrinking like the sliver of light under a closing tomb door in an Indiana Jones movie, and with it all my hopes of an isolationist world into which to recoil from the cares and troubles of everyday life; I am gradually being boxed out into the real world, with no handy-dandy retreat remaining into dimensions inhabited by shambling shapeshifters, Cthulhu-like creatures and aliens with weird forehead wrinkles. Gone, GONE FOREVER are the days when I might have rubbed dandruff-speckled shoulders with greasy-haired, pizza-pimpled virgins over a bowl of Cheese Puffs and a game of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (Third Edition), snorting Dr. Pepper through my nose at yet another well-timed jab at the poor, puny fools who were still playing Second Edition! And instead of all those things? Bills to pay, jobs to do, responsibilities to hold, and promises to keep; oh, and self-respect. But what a price!
But I’m not tricked by it, you know. I know fine well that those movie geeks I saw are not silly little men retreating into made-up worlds which shield them from life like Batfink’s bullet-repelling cape; they are wealthy and successful individuals, distinguished enough to appear in documentaries which stumblebums like me must pay for the privilege of watching. They are not entry-level drones stacking shelves and serving customers deep into their thirties and forties, playing out the time left until they die with endless reruns of Deep Space Nine. They are not perpetual undergraduates living in knee-high sludge and rising damp and Games Workshop, if there’s even a difference. They have very probably kissed a girl, and their best friends are most likely not big stupid fat guys with curly hair who kids at their old high school used to call ‘Sadsack’. And yet somehow, despite all this, against all the odds, they like all those old Bela Lugosi movies.