Though he's stepped into the shoes of Mickey Rourke, Hugh Grant and Al Pacino, Joe Queenan found that impersonating Yoda, the crusty muppet of the Star Wars films, was no walk in the park. But that doesn't mean that the Force didn't eventually catch up with him.
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When I was a boy growing up on the mean streets of Philadelphia, I dreamed of only one thing: becoming a Roman Catholic priest. There were three reasons why I settled on this vocation. One, by becoming the man in black, I could get myself off the mean streets of Philadelphia and into some cushy nine-to-three job at the archdiocese. This would definitely beat going to Nam or working at the bubble gum factory. Two, by becoming a priest, I would be able to rain down fire and brimstone on my friends and neighbors, and they wouldn't be able to do anything about it. They wouldn't be able to do anything because they would recognize that I, God's terrestrial emissary, possessed the keys of the kingdom, the gift of tongues and many other supernatural gizmos that could be used to make their lives miserable if they tried jerking me around. Three, by donning the collar I would be officially authorized to spew forth a heap-load of mumbo-jumbo and a torrent of cryptic, grammatically suspect pieces of advice and no one would be able to complain about it, because they would understand that I was speaking the word of God.
Thanks mostly to a disconcerting lack of piety, my dream of entering the priesthood never came to pass. Despite this, I never, ever abandoned my ambition to become someone who would rant and rave against his fellow human beings and unleash baffling admonitions without fear of being challenged. That's the reason I started writing for Movieline. Like the Catholic Church would have, this magazine actually has always let me say anything I wanted about anything I chose, and unlike the Church, it's paid me to do it. One of the best things about my long relationship with this sterling publication is that I have repeatedly been allowed--nay, encouraged--to act out my private fantasies and exorcise my personal demons by impersonating various movie stars and movie characters.
Once, I spent 24 hours rolling around in gutters and abusing women in a daring effort to re-create an average day in the life of Mickey Rourke, Man and Myth. Another time, pretending to be the blind dickhead played by Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman, I cavalierly waded into an onslaught of New York City traffic just to see if I would be run over. (To the dismay of many people in the film industry, I was not.) But it doesn't stop there. For British TV I made a movie about being Hugh Grant. And I have still not entirely given up hope of one day being John Malkovich for a day. (To do so, I would shave off all my hair and speak absolutely phonetically in a voice not unlike Richard Simmons's for 24 hours.)
Despite the pleasure I have derived from my masquerades, there was always one screen presence I wanted to impersonate more than any of the others, and now that the Star Wars prequel is being released, I have the opportunity. I am speaking, of course, of Yoda. This may come as a surprise to readers familiar with my work, most of whom would peg me as more of a Darth Vader kind of guy. They know me less well than they think. True, Darth Vader is cruel, like me; capricious, like me; vindictive, like me; and has a difficult relationship with his son, like me. Moreover, Darth Vader always dresses in black to hold down dry-cleaning costs, like me. But Darth Vader, however perfidious and sadistic, is not especially annoying. Darth Vader is not forever making puzzling comments and snide remarks in pseudo-Confucian snippets bereft of all syntactical logic just to get on peoples nerves; that is the domain of Yoda, a sort of pre-post-nuclear, quasi-amphibian Pat Morita who spends almost all of his screen time in The Empire Strikes Back busting Luke Skywalker's chops and just generally being a garrulous prick. Yoda is the creature I most wanted to impersonate, for the simple reason that he is almost identical to the priest I wanted to become.
To realize my dream of being Yoda, I watched the entire Star Wars trilogy and the two trailers from the prequel, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, jotting down authentic Yoda dialogue and making careful notes about his mannerisms and facial expressions which I then committed to memory. At last I felt ready to spend a day being Yoda: cackling like Yoda, scolding like Yoda, chuckling like Yoda, hectoring like Yoda, getting on everyone's nerves like Yoda. I was sure I was going to have the time of my life.
As it turned out, being Yoda was not the barrel of laughs I expected it to be. For one thing, the populace or Tarrytown, New York, where I live, are quite familiar with my antics and was not especially impressed when I started talking like Yoda. People here had seen me be Mickey Rourke and Hugh Grant for a day, so this schtick was getting to be kind of old hat to them.
"Help you I can, yes, um," I told one friend.
"How's the book going?" he asked.
"Don't give in to the Dark Side," I cautioned a neighbor.
"That movie's coming out soon?" he asked.
If there was anything I wanted to avoid in my exploits as Yoda, it was the sense that this was a phone-in job, that I had not gone far enough to inhabit the psyche of this mystical creature and glean profound human truths in the process. So I quickly realized that I could not continue to impersonate Yoda around people who would quickly figure out what I was up to and not give a shit. I had to take Yoda into Gotham. And I had to do it in style--wearing a robe and leaning on a crooked cane.
One place you don't usually think of Yoda turning up is in Harlem, so that's where I started the next phase of my adventure in Yoda drag. No sooner had I climbed aboard the No. 5 subway train at 125th Street than I was accosted by a bag person asking for small change.
"Help you I can, yes, um," I muttered, forking over a crisp $1 bill. This was obviously more than he'd been expecting, and it was all he seemed to notice.
"Thanks, brother," he told me.
"Brother of you am I not," I replied. "Nice day, I hope you have."
"I'm trying," he responded.
"Try not!" I shot back. "Do or do not do--there is no try!"
He quickly got off at the next stop.
Two things stood out about this first exchange. One, the bag person didn't seem to care that I was speaking in grammatically mutilated phrases. Two, nobody on the subway paid any attention to our little tête-à-tête. As a rule, of course, New Yorkers tend to bury their heads in their newspapers when riding the subway, avoiding eye contact in the mistaken belief that if you don't look at muggers, they won't mug you. Furthermore, nobody in New York is surprised if you speak to them in broken English, because half the people in New York speak broken English. I would also point out that my costume wasn't far off from what the transient was wearing.
Already in midtown by now, I stopped in at Starbucks. "Have will I your largest caffe latte, yes, um," I told a girl at the counter. "Venti or grande?" she inquired. Here we had hit upon the crux of le problème Yoda. Two decades ago, when Yoda first burst onto the pop culture scene, the United States of America was still a country where people spoke a lingua franca. It was called English. But since that time coffee bars like Starbucks have so corrupted the English language with their bogus terminology ("grande" means "large" in any language I know of, but at Starbucks it means "medium") that the disparity between Yoda-talk and ordinary conversation has virtually disappeared. Thus, even though I spent the next couple of hours mumbling semi-oracular phrases to everyone I came into contact with, nobody seemed to give a damn.
"Help you I can, yes," I told an old woman crossing the street.
"Thanks," she said.
"Stay and help you I will," I told another senior citizen struggling to get across Madison Avenue.
"Through the Force, you will see other things: the future, the past, friends long gone." I told a waitress.
"Uh-huh."
And so it went. I spoke to people about the history of the Jedi knights. No one much cared. I told people that if they ever started down the Dark Side, it would destroy them. I suspected they thought I was talking about Gary Larson. Before long, I'd decided that being Yoda wasn't nearly as amusing as I'd thought it was going to be. Sure, it was fun being an incoherent jerk, but it wasn't nearly as much fun as tearing off women's blouses and pouring Perrier all over them the way I had when I was Mickey Rourke for a day. And it wasn't nearly as much fun as speaking with a stammer and saying things like, "Frankly, I've always thought of myself as a bit of a whoopsie," the way I did when I was Hugh Grant on British TV.
Thinking maybe I'd failed to update my take on Yoda--he's supposed to be about 40 years younger in The Phantom Menace--I decided I'd try out one of Yoda's lines from the trailer for the new movie. It seemed to me that he was still mumbling the same type of gibberish, but why not make the effort? "Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suuuuuuffferiiiiing," I said to a pretzel salesperson. He just looked at me.
Being a know-it-all mutant all day was getting kind of boring.
That's when I decided to shake things up a bit by actually putting on a Yoda mask. Now people would pay more attention to me because I looked a lot like Yoda. How could I fail to get a rise out of my fellow citizens? Well, this was an even more disappointing experience. People did look my way as I ambled along in my Yoda getup, but they weren't particularly interested in anything I had to say. I was just a living, breathing sight joke.
And not necessarily that memorable a sight joke. Here I'd always thought Yoda was a fixture of American folklore, as bright a star in the mythological firmament as Snow White or Mr. Pink. But most of the little kids who passed by me in Central Park didn't have the faintest idea who I was. I think they simply wrote me off as an extra from The X-Files or something.
The German tourist who asked to have her picture taken with me probably thought I was merely an undercover cop with bad skin. The most deflating experience of all occurred when I clambered aboard a horse at the Central Park merry-go-round to have my picture taken. The ticket taker didn't even blink that a six-foot Yoda was riding his merry-go-round.
As I dismounted from the horse I was accosted by an attractive young woman with a small boy named Alex. The woman wanted to know what we were doing. I explained that I was being Yoda for a day. She asked if I was doing it for fun or business. I told her it was a mixture of both. She was concerned that I might be making fun of the whole Star Wars genre by impersonating Yoda. I said that I was doing precisely that, because I basically felt that movies were, in fact, a joke. A wonderful joke, but a joke all the same. She said that this was not true of all movies. Oh, yes it was, I insisted, and launched into one of my prefab tirades about the pomposity of moviemakers, going out of my way to vehemently trash Life is Beautiful for no reason other than that I was sure she adored it. As all women with children named Alex would. Seeing that this conversation wasn't going anywhere, she asked if she could have a picture taken of me and Alex sitting together on a park bench. But Alex wasn't in the mood, and neither was I. Me and kids named Alex don't connect.
After she left, I realized that this Yoda thing was a total disaster. As opposed to my previous impersonations, where I'd managed to stay completely in character for the duration of the enterprise, I'd gotten so pissed off by this woman that I'd dropped Yoda's persona and Yoda's mannerisms and Yoda's syntax and gone back to talking the way I always talked: like a movie critic with a chip on his shoulder. That night, I went home completely crushed. The Day of Yoda had been a complete bust. No fun. No laughs. No catharsis. Worst of all, I hadn't been able to stick to my original game plan of remaining weird and incomprehensible, but vaguely cuddly. By the time I got to my office the next day, I was just about ready to bag the whole thing. Suddenly, the phone rang.
"Hello, may I speak to the person who handles your long-distance telephone account?" said the man on the other end.
Right then and there, it hit me like a thunderbolt! What was the point in being Yoda unless I could somehow put Yoda to work for me? Remember, what Yoda really had going for him was not the fact that he was cute and cuddly, but the fact that he was obtuse, strange and unbelievably annoying. That was the thing that had attracted me to him in the first place. And here was my chance to shine.
"Help you I can, yes, um," I told the caller.
"Excuse me?"
"Help you I can, yes, um."
"You're the person in charge of the long-distance account?"
"Person in charge of the long-distance account am I," I replied. "Service how can Yoda be of to you?"
I don't need to tell you that the telemarketing rep was a tad perplexed by my wacky lingo. But he soldiered on bravely, trying to get me to switch my long-distance telephone service to another carrier. I wasn't giving an inch.
"Size matters not," I reminded him. "Decide you must how to serve me best. Beware of the Dark Side and let the Force be with you."
Eventually, Mr. Long-Distance Phone Guy decided to bag this particular call. I felt triumphant. For years I'd been getting annoying calls from credit card companies, long-distance phone carriers, cultural institutions, Greenpeace, the New York State Democratic Party and my mom, and I had never been able to figure out how to get any of these people to stop badgering me. Now I had stumbled upon the solution. Talk like Yoda. It would drive them right up the fucking wall.
Armed with this insight, I now set out on a foray into the real world, hoping to use Yoda to avenge myself on everyone who had ever busted my balls. My first target was an organization called America Needs Fatima, which had sent me a series of dunning notices demanding that I immediately send a check for $10.77 for a book I had neither requested nor received. Clearly, someone had ordered the book for me as a prank. Things like this happened all the time, and I always ended up having to spend lots of time on the phone explaining that I was not the person who had ordered the product I was being badgered about. I'd already tried the kid gloves approach in this case. Now it was time to bring in the muscle. It was time for Yoda.
"Receive I dunning notice for book," I explained to the customer service representative at America Needs Fatima as soon as she picked up the phone.
"Excuse me, could you repeat that?" she asked.
"Receive I dunning notice for book," I said. "Not order book did I."
"I see," she said. "Could you let me have your last name?
I gave it to her.
"Could you let me have your address?" she asked.
I supplied that, too.
"OK, and you say you did not order the book?" she inquired.
"Not order book did I," I replied, with consummate Yodic panache. "Prank played on was you a."
"Oh, no," the woman interjected. "We don't play pranks."
"Good is that."
"We'll take care of this," she said.
"Thank you. And beware of the Dark Side."
"OK. Thank you, too."
Now that I had my game plan in place, I realized that Yoda was forevermore going to be a fixture of my everyday life. That afternoon, I grabbed a train to New York and immediately sought out one of those infuriating people who think that the whole world is their office, who honestly expect everyone else on the train--and indeed the planet--to sit by politely while they make their loud, idiotic cell phone calls. I didn't have much trouble finding one: a fortysomething type. As he blathered on and on about nothing in particular, I sat down beside him, pulled out my toy cell phone, and gave him the Full Yoda. "Nothing more will I teach you today," I muttered into the phone. "Away put your weapon."
I paused to make it seem as if someone was on the end of my call. Then I said, "I cannot teach him. The boy has no patience."
Another pause.
"Take you to him, I will."
Another pause.
"Will you finish what you begin?"
Another pause.
"Beware of the Dark Side."
Another pause.
"If you ever start down the Dark Side, it will destroy you." Now the guy was clearly eavesdropping.
"Use the Force."
Pause.
"Always with you what cannot be done."
Pause.
"Size matters not!"
The guy was staring at me.
"You must feel the Force all around you."
Finally, he got the idea. He put away his phone and left. And I put away mine. Mr. Yuppie had met Mr. Yoda, and Mr. Yoda had cleaned his clock. And he will go on cleaning such clocks. Oh yes, for the rest of my life, whenever I am backed into a corner by generic assholes armed with cell phones, or by irksome peddlers, aggressive bill collectors, relentless telephone solicitors, determined door-to-door salesmen, cold-calling brokers or cash-strapped relatives, I will know exactly how to deal with them. As Yoda once told Luke Skywalker, you must learn to use the Force.
Believe you, know how I to use it, um, yes.
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Joe Queenan wrote about serial killer movies for the March 99 issue of Movieline.