This Old Photo Of Mark Hamill Haunts Me
I don’t know who took this photo of Mark Hamill. I don’t want to know.
Wikipedia says it dates to October 1996 and depicts the actor most famous for playing Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars films at a comic shop in Manhattan. That year, he’d co-created The Black Pearl comic and appeared at Jim Hanley’s Universe, which still resides on East 32nd Street in the city, for a signing. The entire wall behind Hamill, who is seated at a cheap folding table wearing all black in the photo, is filled with copies of his comic.
This image haunts me.
It’s impossible for me to correctly gauge the level of fame Mark Hamill enjoyed around this time, 13 years after his appearance in Return of the Jedi, because I was six years old and merely beginning to experience Star Wars for the first time on VHS. From what I can tell, by then, he’d largely retreated into the world of voice acting, giving maniacal life to one of The Joker’s most iconic interpretations and picking up TV credits where he could. Could he have walked around midtown Manhattan in a black leather jacket, black jeans, and black shoes in anonymity?
I like to think all the folks who met him at the comic shop that day were either huge fans of The Black Pearl or had simply been in the store already when the manager popped up the signing table and laid out the three colored Sharpies. Maybe they’d wandered in from outside to get out of the rain and decided to meet a real comic-book writer because hey, he was already there.
But we know that’s not true. They came because of Star Wars (and potentially because of Batman: The Animated Series, though that hadn’t yet achieved its cult status). The person who snapped the photo was either third or fourth back in line to meet Hamill, which makes me wonder why they didn’t simply wait two minutes to get a better, closer one while standing next to him. Perhaps it was merely a signing, not a photo op, and this was captured discreetly. Perhaps the man standing to Hamill’s left, looking down in either disbelief or nervousness, was a friend or relative of the photographer who enlisted them to produce proof he’d finally met Luke Skywalker after all these years.
The confusion here is not why this photo haunts me, though. It mostly has to do with how 1996 this photo is. And by my count, it might be the most uniquely 1996 photo I’ve ever seen.
Let’s break it down.
The distance between the photo’s ostensible subject, Hamill, and the photographer, suggests a seductive, voyeuristic moment. It draws the viewer in. Hamill could’ve possibly seen the photographer out of the corner of his eye or a moment after it was captured as he looked up to signal to the next fan waiting in line. The uncertainty is all there. This secret moment threatens to burst when you contextualize it. This exhilarates me.
Voyeurism is especially handy to help ossify the photo’s dressings: in this case, its painfully ordinary staleness. Here we find a millionaire actor clothed inconspicuously (not unlike he’s about to meet his destiny), seated at a church-basement brown folding table in an unforgiving brown steel chair upon a beige floor of either depressing carpet or ruthless tile in a windowless room. A black carrying bag slumps on the floor next to him. A coffee cup lingers in the frame.
The star doesn’t face his crowd. He sits sideways, offering his profile instead in a manner that, captured here, suggests discomfort. His clothes certainly don’t look expensive, though the jacket could be Italian leather for all I know. The outfit suggests a facelessness, the way a comic-book writer would likely show up to an appearance at a shop that, despite its location in the heart of the busiest city in the country, resembles a suburban strip-mall store. He’s dressed the way I picture one of my dad’s brothers would’ve showed up to a snowy South Buffalo Christmas around that time.
It’s creepy, is what I’m trying to say. And I can’t stop looking at it.
With a gargantuan supporting role in the newest Star Wars film, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to say that good tweeter Mark Hamill is more famous now than he was in 1996, even as the original trilogy falls further into the chronological rearview. As he’s back in front of the camera, he’s taken to dressing up a bit for his appearances (in a vest, specifically). If you ever have a few hours between flights and the airport wifi cooperates, I highly recommend cruising through Getty Images for Hamill’s mid-’90s fashion oeuvre as it’s largely consistent with this photo (and very enjoyable to witness how Hamill’s everyman looks can morph from schlubby to dapper given the right haircut).
That’s neither here nor there. What’s here, though, is another haunting Star Wars memory I can’t shake. It’s just a simple black cotton t-shirt a classmate wore at a birthday party when we were both around nine, only a few years after 1996. No text, no color save for two clashing beams of light in the center: one bright blue, one deep red—the lightsabers of Luke Skywalker and his father, Darth Vader, intersecting in the hazy boiler-room industrial horror of The Empire Strikes Back. Their bodily outlines take shape on the shirt, but they’re afterthoughts. That scene, which culminates in Luke losing a hand and learning his lineage, is the most defining moment in the entire mythology of Star Wars and has so much raw texture and mood that I often rewatch the clip via inferior-quality rips on YouTube just to recapture how it felt the first time I saw the t-shirt. I’ve tried to explain why, to myself, but I can’t.
This clandestinely captured photo of Mark Hamill gives me the same impulse. I’ve stopped trying to find out why.
