All the great movie stars play a version of themselves. The genius of the studio system was to establish what that essential persona was, then have the star produce it again and again. It may not be what the actor wants, but it is certainly what the public wants. Selfish beasts.
As one such selfish beast, I confess to two kinds of relief on hearing Harrison Ford had survived crash-landing some hunk-of-junk second world war plane on a Californian golf course. The first is the basic, human sort: we don’t want people to die or be seriously injured in accidents – amiright, kids? The second is the movie-lover’s sort, the kind that places me miles away from the end of the spectrum occupied by the Kathy Bates character in Misery – but still on that spectrum.
Look: I don’t just want Harrison Ford to successfully land his malfunctioning plane on a golf course; I need Harrison Ford to successfully to crash land his malfunctioning plane on a golf course. That, as anyone who has watched his movies can tell you, is what Harrison Ford does. Stuff is going to go wrong, and it is going to fall to him to deal with it. He will have to think quickly, in that grimly determined way. He will get the job done.
If I wanted someone to plough his plaything into a crowded street and either die or live with consequences, I’d have got some world cinema character actor to do it – and then found reasons never to watch his efforts in favour of a 437th viewing of Raiders.
Like all the best stars, Harrison is two kinds of real. I don’t go to the movies to see him wipe out – and I certainly don’t watch the news to. In fact, I’m using this latest, triumphant real-life Harrison Ford accident to erase the memory of last year’s profoundly unsettling real-life Harrison Ford accident, which almost sent me into a decline. (Never again let anyone tell you that being a first-world metropolitan idiot isn’t easily as stressful as going down a mine.)
Soon after waking one morning last summer I read the news that Harrison Ford had injured his leg on the set of the new Star Wars movie. Naturally, I was on the point of sending him imaginary flowers and moving on to the sports pages when I read the fateful words, “police said the crush involved a garage door”.
Surely – surely – not? But there it was, in black and white. “Police said the crush involved a garage door.” I sank back against the pillows. Harrison Ford caught by a closing door. How could this happen? I mean, if you had to boil Harrison Ford’s movie career down to a single quintessential action, it would be his just managing to avoid a closing door. He might be rolling under it to escape some stormtroopers; he might be reaching back to retrieve his hat. Those are details. The point is, the door misses him. He’s too quick for it. But not any more, it seemed. Garage doors were catching up with Harrison Ford. Talk about a memento fricking mori.
Had I been in analysis, I think my notional therapist and I could have had a good twenty grand’s worth of dementedly self-obsessed discussion about this. I imagined yanking great wads of Kleenex out of his exquisitely inlaid tissue-box cover and wailing how I had been really fine about turning 40 a couple of months previously, but this had thrown me for a loop. It was the wake-up call, wasn’t it? Garage doors were coming for us all.
If this feels a just a shade absurd – and I’m minded to accept that reading – it’s only rooted in the same impulse that unleashed a tide of jokes based on Ford movies in the wake of his crash. Having apparently established to its satisfaction that the actor was to make a full recovery, the web declared open season on every Millennium Falcon / Air Force One / Ford-based gag out there. How could it not?
Ford is unusual among the stars of his era in having created not one but two truly iconic characters: Han Solo, and Indiana Jones. Sylvester Stallone did the same (with Rocky and Rambo), but others to have achieved the feat in those times are few and far between. For countless people, Harrison Ford characters are knit into the way they see the world.
Only hours before hearing about this crash, I’d been reading the story of the discovery archaeologists have made deep in the Honduran jungle, and speculation it might be “the lost city of the monkey god”. Like many people my age, I’d hazard, I found myself quite unable to read those words without reflexively imagining Ford’s Indiana Jones pulling back some vines to reveal his quarry, and imagining all the booby-traps he’d have to get through to the monkey god’s holy of holies or whatever priceless, totemic treasure haul is supposed to be in the middle of it.
Honestly, who wants real life to get in the way of the movies? Certainly not the witness to Ford’s crash who extrapolated to NBC: “I’m sure there was a moment where he said, ‘I’m not going to risk lives. Whatever happens, happens. It’s just going to be me.’” Mr Ford is wished the speediest of recoveries, and thanked profusely for playing his accident to type.
