Out from the curtain of jungle leaves and junk food comes the Barefoot Bandit, parapapapa!A generation weaned on computer games and postmodern TV which has lost itself in the ironic arches of the expressionless Steven Wright eyebrows.
The Barefoot Bandit is a perfect hero for Generation Y whose materialism is the main point of their identification with the world and themselves. The story has yet to hit novelization, for me Douglas Coupland is the man to capture the Barefoot Bandit's essence and importance to our generation. He has already mastered the zeitgeist of generation X in the early 1990s, so he would be well equipped to write about the hero of generation Y ( peoples born between the years 1982-2000) where a young man, rages against the hypocritical authority of this age, clearly he has no intention of hurting anyone or living by the rules that makes our society so turgid and close to a totalitarian state cloaked in illusions of freedom.
To give a brief portrait of the young man, whose real name is Colton Harris-Moore, he suffered abuse from his father and mother, the culmination of such conflict came at a family barbecue where his father tried to chock him. His mother was not as bad as his father but once she started to drink heavily she became quite vicious toward him. He came to find refuge and freedom in the wild just like Che Guevara. To escape a three year sentence for petty robbery he fled his home and set off on an adventure that would define the yearning of a whole generations suppressed desires. He would sometimes sneak into a house to enjoy a warm bath or just eat whatever ice-cream he could find in their refrigerator, he would usually take just the minimum of what he needed to survive in the woods. As the months passed and he mastered this, he moved onto more elaborate artful expeditions, he once used a computer and credit card he came across to order a bear mace and night vision googles that cost around 10, 000 euro.
He was finally caught when he tried to flee police in a power boat, the local police guided by the FBI shot up the engine, when they caught up with him, he had a gun to his own head, he told them he was planning on heading to Cuba. The spiritual land of Che Guevara.
In an age when 9 to 5 means tiling the plasticine pyramids of an empire that seeks to keep you enslaved for your cheap labour and to fuel their lavish lifestyles for as long as they can bloody well get away with it, which means the majority of the world's impoverishment; the Barefoot Bandit is a folk hero,a beacon of hope, hopefully instead of people buying t-shirts with his face, they will go out and rob fabrics and invents strange new exciting clothes.
It should be interesting to see how the director David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express,George Washington etcetera) works with the writer Dustin Lance Black who won an Oscar for his screenplay of Milk and will handle the responsibility for representing this symbolic figure on the celluloid transmogrifier. If Bencio Del Toro who starred in the Che films, was younger he would be a perfect candiate to play him, his awkward, graceful mannerism and physical build are so similar. It is an important job especially in the context of how the collective imagination of a whole generation who treat the medium of film as bible, for example we now view the facebook creater Mark Zuckerberg in an unfavourable light after the Facebook Movie represented him as a kind of pathetic monster. So it is as vital as the photographs of Che's guerrilla operations in the name of humanity in the depths of the jungle, to the imagery of a young teen who said -Fuck it- to the suckiness of this world and did what the hell he wanted to do, isn't that what we should all be doing?
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