HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2015-12-17, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2015. PAGE 5.
I’d be ashamed to admit it to a Syrian
refugee family, but the hardest single thing
I’ve ever done was quit smoking.
I was hardcore. Brigham pipe, Old Port
cigarillos, Rothman’s, Roll yer owns or Wacky
Weed. If it was combustible and I could fit in
my mouth, I did. For years.
When I was young and stupid(er) I
smoked on the off chance that someone might
mistake me for James Dean or Marlon
Brando. When I began using my high school
lunch money to feed my habit I realized
that glamour had nothing to do with it. I
smoked because I was hooked. A nicotine
junkie.
Money was no object. When I started
smoking as a kid, a pack of cigarettes cost 28
cents – 32 cents if you wanted filter-tips. By
the time I quit the price was cresting around $8
a pack.
I followed the typical path of the
hopelessly habituated – I ‘cut down’. I
switched to menthols. I tried going cold
turkey.
Then I got serious. I signed up for aversion
therapy treatments. That’s where a lab
technician attaches an electrode to your
thumb while you watch a film of people
smoking. Every time a cigarette appears on
the screen you get a mild(ish) electric shock.
Aversion Therapy didn’t make me hate
cigarettes, it made me hate electrodes attached
to my thumb.
I tried avoiding bars and pool halls. I tried
Nicorettes. I tried hypnotherapy. I always
crawled back to my dirty little habit. And each
regression carved another nick out of my self
esteem.
In the end a combination of three things
made me quit:
• The price of cigarettes went to $8 a
pack.
• My doctor put me on a medication
called Wellbutrin which inexplicably
cancelled out the ‘hit’ I got from my nicotine
fix.
• I watched one morning as Peter Gzowski,
CBC radio icon and lifetime heavy smoker,
shuffled across the lobby of CBC headquarters
in Toronto pulling a canister of oxygen behind
him.
For me it was an epiphanic trifecta.
My innate Scottish cheapness rebelled
at the thought of shelling out eight bucks
for 20 cancer sticks; the medication I was
taking made cigarettes taste unsatisfying
and finally, the sight of one of Canada’s
greatest broadcasters tethered to an
oxygen tank by plastic tubes running up his
nostrils made me give my head a serious
shake. Fifteen years ago I tossed a just-
opened pack of Marlboros. I haven’t smoked
since.
Sigmund Freud made much of the
symbolic nature of smoking, investing it
with psychological interpretations about
oral fixation and phallic symbolism. He would
know. He smoked about 20 cigars a day.
Regarding his own habit, Freud was as
deluded as any other nicotiniac. “Sometimes,”
he noted airily, “a cigar is just a cigar”.
Yeah, right. Freud would have over 30
operations for the oral cancers caused by his
habit. He would even have a major part of his
jaw removed. In the end he committed suicide
rather than endure the pain.
Sometimes a cigar is more than just
a cigar.
Arthur
Black
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
It can be hard, through all the Star Wars:
The Force Awakens news to find
information about any other film franchise
out there, but one thing definitely caught my
eye this week.
I realize that this may fly in the face of
previous columns I’ve written about leaving
intellectual properties to languish in their
retirement and be remembered for what they
were instead of trying to force new life into
them, but I’m genuinely excited about the
sequel to a movie that is coming out a full 20
years after its original.
What movie, you might ask? Well, we will
get to that. First, however, I have to set the
scene.
The year was 1996 and I was 11 years old. It
was late November and a film, which opened
in theatres on July 3 (and that timing should be
a hint) was finally out on Video Home System
(VHS) cassette and I was fortunate enough to
see it.
While it may not have been the most
critically acclaimed of films, for a mere $75
million, it created a story and characters that
have stuck with me to this day.
Whether it was the President of the
United States who took to the skies as a
fighter pilot, the drunk crop-duster
who swears he had been abducted by aliens
or the young hot-shot United States Air
Force pilot who became synonymous with
the quote, “Welcome to Earth”, the film
and its characters have stuck with me until this
day.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’ll list the
cast and then finally, finally tell you the film
I’m talking (gushing) about.
It was the definition of a star-studded film,
featuring Will Smith, Bill Pullman, Jeff
Goldblum, Judd Hirsch, Robert Loggia, Randy
Quaid, Vivica A. Fox, Adam Baldwin and
many, many others.
You’ve gathered, readers, by now that I’m
talking about Independence Day.
(Note: This is a spoiler warning. If you
haven’t seen Independence Day, a nearly-20-
year-old film at this point, you should
probably go watch it before you finish
reading this. Seriously. There is no excuse
for this one. I’m not talking about some
new film franchise here. This is an established
blockbuster hit. Go watch it.)
A sequel to the film was announced earlier
this week called Independence Day:
Resurgence in which the aliens, who were nice
enough to leave behind those shattered ships in
the first one when they were welcomed to
Earth with computer viruses and missiles,
come back to attack again, this time finding
humanity and Earth has used the husks of their
former invasion ships to arm themselves to the
gills. Unfortunately, Jeff Goldblum’s
character, David Levinson, says in the trailer
for the new flick, that it won’t be enough.
The original film came out on July 3 because
July 2 was when the story occurred in the
movie. This one is set for June 24, 2016, so
who knows, maybe the film will feature more
than a week of exciting action before Bill
Pullman (who is also returning) stands up and
rouses the entire world with a speech about
Independence Day.
Anyway, what makes this film different from
the other ones that Hollywood, like some kind
of buzzard, has picked from the carcasses of
old franchises? Well I guess it’s because I
always wondered what happened at the end of
Independence Day. (Seriously, go watch the
film before you read this.)
After Goldblum discovered a way to cripple
the alien vessels threatening to blow up
Earth so it could be harvested for resources,
after Earth is defended from this alien
invasion, after fighter jets take down alien
ships as large as cities, the movie cuts to black
with Goldblum and Smith’s Captain Steven
Hiller talking about Independence Day with
their families.
What did they do about the aliens that
survived? What about all that glorious
technology that unceremoniously crashed to
the Earth? What happened to Pullman’s
President Whitmore? Was he re-elected? Did
they make it so the man who fought for the
entire planet was now the President of Earth?
Was there peace after humanity realized there
were far greater threats out there than different
ideologies?
I guess the last one came to the surface years
after I saw the film.
Humanity needs to realize that there are
things out there we need to fight together. We
need to forget who worships which god and
look to defeating common enemies like cancer
and global warming and (if they ever show up)
alien invaders.
So I always wondered if that lesson was lost
on the Earth of that film.
Now the time has finally come to see what
happened. To see whether the United States
became a leader of the world of if the world
realized there are bigger threats out there and
they need to face them as a united planet, not a
group of nations.
I’ll get to see what was done with the
amazing technology that the aliens used. The
space craft, the energy weapons, the body
armour and everything else that just looked so
cool.
So yes, this does go against the rules I want
to implement when it comes to banning
sequels and reboots and re-imagings of old
franchises, but hey, what rule doesn’t have an
exception?
Anyway, if you’ve come this far and still
haven’t seen the movie, ignore what I said
above. It’s funny, it’s fun and it’s a great film.
Watch it if you haven’t.
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den
Same as it ever was
For as long as I’ve been alive – and I’m
sure for as long as many readers have
been alive – we’ve been told about the
cycle of things; how things go out of style and
come back into style. Kind of like “what goes
around, comes around” but not in the revenge
kind of way.
Last week, the second season of Serial
debuted. Serial is a podcast and, for those of
you who don’t know, a podcast is a form of
episodic audio that you can download over the
internet.
The first season of Serial told the rich and
detailed story of a murder and what some
believe to be false imprisonment, all
emanating from an incident in Baltimore in the
late 1990s. The second season will tell the
never-before-heard side of the story of Bowe
Bergdahl – an American soldier who left his
post in Afghanistan and was eventually
kidnapped by the Taliban in 2009.
The team behind the first season of Serial is
teaming up with Mark Boal, who has been
speaking with Bergdahl for over a year. Boal,
in case the name doesn’t ring a bell, has
written the acclaimed military movies The
Hurt Locker, which won the Best Picture
Oscar in 2010, and Zero Dark Thirty.
After the first episode was released, Boal
was quoted as thanking someone for
introducing him to podcasts. The future
belongs to podcasts, he said.
And when I heard that quote, I couldn’t help
but think how much “the future” looks like the
past. We’ve all heard the stories, or perhaps
lived them ourselves, about serial radio
programs that would be broadcast over the
radio, telling a story with a new episode every
week.
Television, especially in all of its current
high definition iterations, was supposed to
change that. With stunning visuals and
beautiful people, television was to
revolutionize storytelling – and in many ways
it did. But meanwhile, here are millions and
millions of people every week, downloading
Serial and listening to an hour of audio with no
visual component to be seen (literally).
It reminds me of a point made by the Blyth
Festival’s Young Company in its annual
production one year. I can’t recall the name of
the show, but the youngsters turned technology
on its head while discussing phone
conversations versus texting.
Imagine it, they said, if after decades of
merely typing out messages to one another
with our fingers (texting) like Morse code, new
technology introduced the ability to speak,
with our voices, to one another – to actually
talk, in real time, with our friends and loved
ones.
But instead, we’ve gone backwards. After
decades of being able to talk voice-to-voice to
people all over the world, we sit and pound out
short, often anemic messages to one another.
So, back to podcasting, which marks the
return of the grand old serial radio program
that made people like Orson Welles famous. It
just goes to show that the biggest and best, the
newest and shiniest, isn’t always what’s going
to grab the attention of the masses.
It’s refreshing to me to hear that one of the
most consumed forms of entertainment is one
that values the use of the consumer’s
imagination, good storytelling and quality of
material – not just cutting edge technology
presenting a deconstructed story a monkey
could understand, but with plenty of eye-
catching explosions and super-loud music.
Maybe if more entertainment appealed to
these senses the world would be a better place.
Other Views
Unholy smoke through the years
Sometimes a resurgence isn’t bad
Final Thought
“When you get to the end of all the light
you know and it's time to step into the
darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing
that one of two things shall happen: either
you will be given something solid to stand
on, or you will be taught how to fly.”
– Edward Teller