You know, I've seen FLCL countless times and I'm frankly amazed that I haven't written more about it for Barbelith. So in order to answer my own question. . .
When I was fifteen/sixteen years old or so my then best friend (who I'll call Rory) and I would leave the house every night and walk to Ocean Village, a little parade of shops, restaurants and cinemas along the harbour where people moored their yachts. It's a two-mile walk from the house where I grew up.
Rory's home life was pretty sucky back then. His parents were breaking up, nothing that many kids don't go through, so he practically lived at my place. Mum loved him and was happy to have him there. My family was more stable but a little weird, as Dad was away at conferences so much. Jack the Bodiless/Hellbunny was in Uni and living elsewhere.
We were bored and totally directionless. We loved music and wanted to form bands, were in a couple together with me on drums (very badly played back then) and Rory singing. I loved sci-fi and watched Star Trek: The Next Generation every weeknight at 1700 on Sky. I think DS9 had just started by that point too.
And we were just starting to get interested in girls. Rory was a year older and had a head start on me. He also went to a mixed school, whereas King Edwards was single sex apart from the sixth form. We were just starting to meet girls from other schools, some from out of town. It was right at the cusp of us leaving school and going to college.
I had a huge crush on a girl four years older than me who was at University in Plymouth. The awkward thing was it was reciprocated, and she didn't know what to do about it. All I got were a bunch of mixed messages, swinging between "You're so mature for your age" and "You're just a kid." I wrote to her loads and she wrote back. Actual letters, that is. This is before I was online, before most people were online. I kissed her once and it was really awkward. Our teeth clashed because she'd thrown herself at me too hard and she was really aggressive with her tongue. Back then four years was an unbridgeable gulf of an age gap and it felt really strange kissing the person I thought I loved and it being such a fumbled, broken moment.
I think at the time I kissed her I was in my first relationship, with someone else. It's strange. With my girlfriend we kissed and stuck our clueless fingers down each others clothes without any real idea what we were doing, and I'd always feel guilty, like I shouldn't doing it or that we were doing something wrong. But when I cheated on her and kissed this older girl (nearly a - gasp - woman!) I felt no guilt at all, just totally elated. Even though it wasn't anyone's definition of a good kiss. My friends told me I was a bastard and in retrospect I was a selfish little idiot, but at the time I just didn't get why they were so angry with me. I didn't have a clue.
Rory was getting over a relationship with someone who'd really hurt him. I can't even remember her name. To this day I've never met her, it was before I really got to know him.
Rory had lots of good looking friends and I think he fancied every one of them.
At weekends we'd meet up in Rownhams, North Baddesley or Romsey and get drunk on the streets with alcohol that my six-foot plus classmate was able to get. If my life were Bleach then this guy would have been Chad, only more talkative. I lost my virginity to his girlfriend two days after they'd agreed to take a break from the relationship, and I remember meeting up with him on Southampton Common shortly after he found out. Actually, he didn't find out. Somehow he knew. He had a tree branch gripped in his hands and he was beating it as hard as he could against everything in sight in order to stop himself beating me up. He was one of my best friends and our friendship is only just now becoming properly restored.
All the time he was smashing stuff I felt no fear. He was the one who'd called me a bastard for cheating on my first girlfriend, and here I was having had sex with the girl he loved. And I felt no remorse or guilt other than immediately after she and I had finished and quickly got up off the floor of my bedroom and put our clothes on when I heard Mum coming in through the front door downstairs.
My six-foot plus friend and I were on Southampton Common and he had a tree branch that was his weapon and I felt no fear or guilt or even sorry for him.
The sex was pretty dreadful. I didn't know what to do and my body wasn't working how I thought it should. Not like it does in porn.
When my six-foot plus mate couldn't get drink, or when we had no money, we'd just wander the streets. Every Friday and Saturday night.
Anyway, almost every weeknight after school Rory and I would walk to Ocean Village. We would be bored, the kind of bored that has a long summer evening ahead and nothing to put in it. We'd walk down the High Street and buy cigarettes with whatever small amount of money we could scrape together. We'd walk through past the train station and round the back of Toys'R'Us, through town and cut down Oxford Street, past the casino and through that weird covered area that's now a block of expensive flats that no-one can afford.
We felt lost. We were about to go to college. The older of our friends had jobs or had moved away to University. There was nothing in Southampton. No cool bands. A lot of our friends lived out of town. We were too young to sneak into the local indie nightclub and too old to sit around playing at home. There was nothing for us to do or be, or nothing that we wanted to do or be. We sat by the water at the harbour and looked at the boats, hear the sound of people eating in the restaurants and the music coming from the bars. When we needed the toilet we'd go in the cinema and get out before we were asked to leave.
We talked the whole time. I would talk endlessly about the Manic Street Preachers. Rory was into Pearl Jam. We'd rabbit on about the X-Men or Star Trek or Star Wars, I'd enthuse about Akira, he'd go on (and on) about Prince. We chatted about the girls we fancied and he spoke about what he did with them. I didn't so much. I've put a little detail in this account because it needs to be there, but on the whole I've seldom been one to kiss and tell. On the rare occasions that I did he'd laugh and say something along the lines of "Nice one."
I met the first major love/infatuation of my life a couple of years later. It was when I was old enough to finally get into the indie nightclub. I was still young and clueless, and to me she was like an alien from another world. I couldn't take my eyes off her. I was lovestruck in turmoil and my adolescent hormones threw me all over the place. She listened to different music, she was into politics, she dressed cool, she read Angela Carter and Maya Angelou and her mum had divorced her dad for another woman. She was pretty much abandoned by her parents and lived alone in the house that she grew up in, which was unbelievably cool for someone only a year older than me. She was about five feet tall and had an amazing figure, short black hair and green eyes that looked brown in certain lights. She lied all the time and even though she said she was with me she'd never really split up with her boyfriend of two years. She wouldn't sleep much and I secretly always knew that she was too much for me, too much for anyone. Including herself.
Meanwhile I watched Fist of the North Star and Tetsuo the Iron Man. I listened to Wu-Tang Clan and Tricky and The Holy Bible, there were too many X-Men titles to maintain an interest in and Enabran Tain was leading a doomed first strike against the Dominion.
I had a recurring dream that the dimensions in my head were expanding and contracting, like there was some kind of vibrating red spatial phenomena that was occupied all points in the universe but was nowhere all at once. Within the vibrations was a sense of guilt, as though something somewhere had gone horribly wrong. A space captain of a vast intergalactic vessel was guilty of an ancient sin at the inception of the universe, and a black hole was slowly spaghettifying him and his doomed ship and every soul on board. Sometimes it felt as though all this fit into my mouth, and my tongue would feel weird and I would be like another person.
The adults had other concerns and I had fallen through the cracks. It would take me years to find my way out again.
A decade later, the girl who told me lies and read Angela Carter told me that the recurring dream was a birth dream. That I was remembering being born.
I still go to Ocean Village to watch films at Harbour Lights. It was voted Britain's Best Loved Independent Cinema. When they had financial troubles the staff worked there without pay. It closed for a while and reopened with some local government money.
The old shopping area has been torn down to make way for expensive flats that no-one can afford.
All that stuff that I just wrote. That's what FLCL is about. And that's why we love it. And it's probably why you'll love it too.
Best non-spoiler review I can manage. |
