more on the star wars kid....
Kid, we feel your pain
BEN RAYNER
Toronto Star
Jul. 27, 2003
Oh, the guilt. The guilt.
No, this has nothing to do with the Rolling Stones and their petulant threats to pull out of Wednesday's Downsview Park date — fine, lads, we'll invest that $12 million in health care instead — over "whinging" elements in the local press. This concerns someone a little younger and more spotlight-shy, someone who has, arguably, provided the world with more consistent entertainment of late than Voodoo Lounge and Bridges To Babylon combined ever could. This is about the Star Wars Kid.
If you spend any time in front of a computer, you are no doubt familiar with the tragicomic exploits of Ghyslain Raza. The spectacularly unlucky 15-year-old from Trois-Rivičres, Que., was catapulted to international infamy this spring when a misplaced videotape he'd made of himself conducting awkward Jedi acrobatics with a broomstick lightsabre found its way onto the file-sharing service Kazaa and, from there, onto more than a million PCs elsewhere on the planet.
The initial humiliation was just a taste of things to come. A tide of digital "remixes" ensued, adding laser lights, music, sound effects, "clone" Ghyslains and footage from various cinematic sources to the original video to cast the portly, bespectacled teen suddenly known worldwide as the Star Wars Kid as a feature player in everything from Attack Of The Clones to Matrix Reloaded to Freddy Vs. Jason to Benny Hill (most are collected at http://www.jedimaster.net).
Fan sites sprang up. Wired and the New York Times came calling.
The Star Wars Kid, meanwhile, took it all about as well as one would expect any 15-year-old who awakes one morning to discover he's become a global laughingstock to take it. He broke down and, according to a $225,000 lawsuit filed last week by his parents against the four classmates who uploaded the video to the 'Net, he will now remain "under psychiatric care for an indefinite amount of time."
Suddenly, all of us who chuckled over the Star Wars Kid .mpg and its many offspring and fired them off to our mailing lists are implicated in a new kind of vicarious, virtual bullying.
The mean-spirited side of the Star Wars Kid saga is, of course, what made the video so funny in the first place.
Inwardly, we cringed at this poor kid — and every e-mail or "blog" on this subject refers to Raza as "the poor kid" at some point.
He obviously had nothing better to do on his school lunch break than to set up a camera, stage a solitary re-enactment of The Phantom Menace and fantasize about being someone other than a chubby outcast with nothing better to do on his school lunch break than stage solitary re-enactments of The Phantom Menace. Who was the kid making that tape for, after all? Certainly not for his friends, right? But it was still the thought of having such private foolishness telegraphed to such an unimaginably huge audience that gave the laughter its kick.
Everyone gets busted in these situations. The confessional note you've just passed to your eighth-grade crush is intercepted by a gaggle of leering chums. You look up from a falsetto singalong to Alanis Morissette's "Ironic" in traffic to realize you've left the window down and there are three hysterical teenage girls in the Honda in the next lane. You make a tape of yourself "air drumming" to Metallica's Black Album at your parents' place in Edmonton and then, six years later, you learn someone's sold a couple thousand bootleg copies of the thing in San Francisco.
The latter's not exactly a universal example, true. But when said fate befell Kevin Dabbs — immortalized doing a truly stellar Lars Ulrich impersonation (sans drum kit, mind you) on VHS five years ago as "Metallica Drummer" — he reacted surprisingly calmly. In fact, he told Spin magazine, he thought it was "f---ing boss." He was in his 20s, though; Raza is 15.
Had it happened today, barely a blink in cosmic time later but an eon in technological terms, Dabbs' notoriety would have come much more swiftly and on a more sweeping scale than the mail-order video industry could ever attain. And Metallica Drummer almost certainly would have been a phenomenon comparable to the Star Wars Kid had Kazaa or one of its brethren been in operation.
Any amateur student of human nature could have foreseen the Internet's potential as a powerful instrument of ridicule. We all enjoy a good laugh at someone else's expense, even if some of us choose not to admit it. That's why America's Funniest Home Videos and Cops and Shocking Behaviour Caught On Tape exist; it's the premise upon which Jackass' goo-splattered cavalcade of self-injury was founded.
The onset of the video age enabled more people than anyone had thought possible to experience the once private foibles of others — the jittery groom vomiting on the bride, little Billy whacking Dad in the groin with a croquet mallet. The Internet has only made the process more efficient. None of this stuff was intended as fodder for mass entertainment before, but then again, neither is most of what we see on the news.
Those who already regard the 'Net as a lawless cyber-wasteland swimming in heresy, hate propaganda and child porn could easily take up Ghyslain Raza's sad cause as further justification for policing of the digital realm. There is, however, evidence the Internet that victimized the Star Wars Kid isn't as heartless as it might seem.
"Since 90 per cent of the traffic to these videos is coming from gaming, technology and Star Wars news Web sites, I'm guessing most of you weren't any cooler in junior high school than the poor kid," the site waxy.org wryly pointed out to those laughing Raza off as a dork.
It then launched a campaign to buy the Kid an Apple iPod in compensation for his troubles and has since collected enough cash to buy him several. There's also a petition going around asking George Lucas to give Raza a part in the next Star Wars movie that has already attracted 16,000 signatures. Better the Kid than Jar Jar Binks.
Cold comfort to Raza, I'm sure. And although I've laughed long and hard at his online misadventures, my heart goes out to him. If there's any consolation to offer the Star Wars Kid, it's that Internet celebrity is as fleeting as it is instantaneous and widespread. Two months from now, no one will give him a second thought and, unless that Star Wars part materializes, his infamy will pass. Too bad he's going to have a tougher time forgetting about it.
posted July 24, 2003 18:43
posted August 21, 2003 13:14
