Banker's Hours

Viewing movie trailers in the course of a workday is unprofessional, obviously, even if they're trailers for the first new Star Wars movie in 10 years. If you watch it forty times in the course of the same workday though, now when IT comes to you and asks you about the professional relevance of your bandwidth usage, it is now feasible to claim some kind of compulsive disorder, for which any kind of reprisal would constitute at best an insensitivity and at worst a systematic persecution of the mentally ill. There aren't many things in the modern professional work environment that aren't an implicit threat to sue anymore. It's what we have now instead of meaningful organized labor.

So yes, I watched the thing, all two and a half minutes of it. And NO, I didn't cry, unlike some. The cross-association of Star Wars and childhood, unlike lots of other movies we might have seen when we were more elastic, more formable, surrounds us, it penetrates us, binds us together, something a modern audience could only come to expect from an E.L. James novel.*

It's the same way I feel when I watch 9 to 5. That movie was on SO MUCH in the early days of cable. And I grew up at the level of poor where you're no longer thought of as "working class regular folk" but so broke, your very existence is enough to make economic conservatives really angry. So I'd have to rely on being at the home of someone who had the wonton economic audacity to pay for television, where I'd insist on watching whatever they were showing, for as long as I was allowed. During summers with a single parent, sometimes this period of time consisted of days, even weeks of being sent off to stay at someone else's house. Early HBO had the rights to, like, four movies, which they played on nonstop loop, two of which were Xanadu and 9 to 5. Even then, however, I found the pro-pagan-Greek evangelizing of Xanadu to be shallow and pandering and ultimately theologically insincere** and gravitated more toward the Marxian parable of alienated workers rising up to seize the means of production and then shackling it to a garage-door opener motor in case it tries to escape. Of course in this case the "means of production" was played by Dabney Coleman.

They used to say watching TV all day would rot your brain, but hey, its 2015 and I'm the world's strongest advocate of equal pay for women.*** Because of that film. Probably.

I like Star Wars fine, but there's no such renewed gratification out there for us 9-to-5ers. No conventions, no sequels, no whole universe of popular culture consumables to satiate our deep affection and curiosity to know what else happened in a vivid universe brought to life, outside the confines of the one film. Star Wars has movies, books, films, comics, video games... 9 to 5 has nothing. Well, except for the TV series, the second TV series, the Broadway musical and now the new Netflix series pairing Lily Tomlin with Jane Fonda again, AT LONG LONG LONG LAST, and which I have decided to accept as a sequel of sorts despite the tiny differences in plot, characters, creative team, setting and overall concept.

You know how you felt at the end of the Star Wars trailer when Han Solo said some damned thing to Chewbacca, for the first time on screen since 1983? Yeah, well, that's exactly how I'll feel when I see Jane and Lily on screen together again, just like the old days of my childhood, when they were last together playing those two characters whose names I forget.

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*Fine, groan, but there was no way I was going to say "binds" and "penetrates" and not hit a 50 Shades joke. I regret it, sure, but at this point it's a cultural inevitability.

**Roller skating muses and adult contemporary 1980 pop music? That's not how you sell a belief system. This is how you sell a belief system.

***Not physically. I think that's still Lou Ferrigno.