Adultescence: a novella

Opening Day

"He [or she] who angers you conquers you."

-Chinese Proverb

1.

If you think 6:00 a.m. is too early to go to a movie, you obviously neither know nor care anything about the Mark Mulberry saga, and you think nothing like the hundred or more young men-and a few women-in their mid-twenties and early thirties who, on a late July morning in the year 2000, the sun less eager to rise than them, are walking down a network of converging streets still dark and wet with overnight rain, strewn with paper coffee cups and discarded flyers for pizza delivery and various live sex shows lying prostrate on the ground. A similar group is converging on cinemas and shopping mall multiplexes not just here in H-town but in every major city in the developed world this morning in the expectation that they are about to participate in a "cultural watershed moment." After all, that is what three years of carefully orchestrated hype, slowly ratcheted up to an insane pitch, has promised them. In the rush to acquire their tickets, some will absent-mindedly abandon their children in parking lots; others will deplete those same children's college funds by hundreds of dollars to buy from scalpers. After eighteen years of waiting, they will either skip work today, cut out early, or rise long before they are due at their places of employment to catch the earliest possible show, as Natheny Baruwal has done this morning.

Why? To follow the taut narrative lines and thrilling backstory of Mark Mulberry, hero of two of the highest-grossing movies of all time. It will, they hope, deepen their appreciation of the previous two films; revive their flagging, slouching-toward-mid-life spirits; and return them to the innocence and wonder of the earliest years of their childhood, when those two beloved films burned themselves onto the collective retinas of an entire generation.

Natheny, for one, expects nothing less.

It had become a cliché to say that the Mulberry movies, written and directed by Australian-born American filmmaker Frank Howard Castle, had given birth to "a modern mythology." A murder-mystery adventure film blending genre elements of film noir, science fiction, and fantasy, Ghost in the Machine (1979) quickly became one of the most successful films in box office history, as did its tonally and thematically darker sequel, Mano a Mano (1982), universally hailed as superior to its predecessor.

Thus, diehard fans-Natheny among them-had strenuously objected when, in the lead-up to the prequel, Mano a Mano was rereleased in an 'enhanced' version with a new coda. Although Mark Mulberry meets his fate on an icy ridge of the Swiss Alps in his climactic final confrontation with Gareth Draclo (a former industrial rival-and the likely murderer-of Mark's father, Arthur Mulberry III), the offensive new appendage implied that our hero had, in death, nonetheless achieved a moral victory over his nemesis. Incensed fans saw it as a retreat from the ambiguity and even nihilism of the original, and called for the removal of the coda from all subsequent dvd and box-set releases of the films.

But it was a mythology that only meant something to you if you happened to have been born between about 1965 and 1975. One generation of young people were deeply smitten with it, their imaginations-and, in cases like Natheny's, 75 percent or more of their childhood playtime-consumed wholly by it. Whereas those born five years before or after this wave were often mystified as to what was so 'holy' about this holy text. It was also, largely, a guy thing.

As Natheny rounded the corner onto Grande Avenue, H-town's main thoroughfare, and joined the self-selected group of fellow travellers where they formed their guilty line in front of the Revue (a repurposed vaudeville-era live theatre still dotted with gold sconces and oozing red-velvet sophistication), he found them remarkably quiet. They didn't need to discuss what they were doing there. They were all in tacit, blood-thick agreement about the significance of the event in which they were about to participate.