-
There's this fact that I love
that I read somewhere once,
-
that one of the things that's contributed
to homo sapiens' success
-
as a species
-
is our lack of body hair --
-
that our hairlessness, our nakedness
-
combined with our invention of clothing,
-
gives us the ability to modulate
our body temperature
-
and thus be able to survive
in any climate we choose.
-
And now we've evolved to the point
where we can't survive without clothing.
-
And it's more than just utility,
-
now it's a communication.
-
Everything that we choose
to put on is a narrative,
-
a story about where we've been,
-
what we're doing,
-
who we want to be.
-
I was a lonely kid.
-
I didn't have an easy time
finding friends to play with,
-
and I ended up making
a lot of my own play.
-
I made a lot of my own toys.
-
It began with ice cream.
-
There was a Baskin-Robbins in my hometown,
-
and they served ice cream
from behind the counter
-
in these giant, five-gallon,
cardboard tubs.
-
And someone told me --
I was eight years old --
-
someone told me that when
they were done with those tubs,
-
they washed them out
and kept them in the back,
-
and if you asked they would give you one.
-
It took me a couple of weeks
to work up the courage,
-
but I did, and they did.
-
They gave me one -- I went home
with this beautiful cardboard tub.
-
I was trying to figure out what
I could do with this exotic material --
-
metal ring, top and bottom.
-
I started turning it over in my head,
and I realized, "Wait a minute --
-
my head actually fits inside this thing."
-
(Laughter)
-
Yeah, I cut a hole out,
-
I put some acetate in there
-
and I made myself a space helmet.
-
(Laughter)
-
I needed a place to wear the space helmet,
-
so I found a refrigerator box
a couple blocks from home.
-
I pushed it home,
-
and in my parents' guest room closet,
-
I turned it into a spaceship.
-
I started with a control panel
out of cardboard.
-
I cut a hole for a radar screen
-
and put a flashlight
underneath it to light it.
-
I put a view screen up,
which I offset off the back wall --
-
and this is where I thought
I was being really clever --
-
without permission, I painted
the back wall of the closet black
-
and put a star field,
-
which I lit up with some Christmas lights
I found in the attic,
-
and I went on some space missions.
-
A couple years later,
-
the movie "Jaws" came out.
-
I was way too young to see it,
but I was caught up in "Jaws" fever,
-
like everyone else in America at the time.
-
There was a store in my town
that had a "Jaws" costume in their window,
-
and my mom must have overheard
me talking to someone
-
about how awesome
I thought this costume was,
-
because a couple days before Halloween,
-
she blew my freaking mind
by giving me this "Jaws" costume.
-
Now, I recognize it's a bit of a trope
-
for people of a certain age to complain
-
that kids these days have no idea
how good they have it,
-
but let me just show you a random sampling
-
of entry-level kids' costumes
you can buy online right now ...
-
... and this is the "Jaws" costume
my mom bought for me.
-
(Laughter)
-
This is a paper-thin shark face
-
and a vinyl bib with the poster
of "Jaws" on it.
-
(Laughter)
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And I loved it.
-
A couple years later,
-
my dad took me to a film
called "Excalibur."
-
I actually got him to take me to it twice,
-
which is no small thing,
because it is a hard, R-rated film.
-
But it wasn't the blood
and guts or the boobs
-
that made me want to go see it again.
-
They helped --
-
(Laughter)
-
It was the armor.
-
The armor in "Excalibur"
was intoxicatingly beautiful to me.
-
These were literally knights
in shining, mirror-polished armor.
-
And moreover, the knights in "Excalibur"
wear their armor everywhere.
-
All the time -- they wear it at dinner,
they wear it to bed.
-
(Laughter)
-
I was like, "Are they reading my mind?
-
I want to wear armor all the time!"
-
(Laughter)
-
So I went back to my favorite material,
-
the gateway drug for making,
-
corrugated cardboard,
-
and I made myself a suit of armor,
-
replete with the neck shields
and a white horse.
-
Now that I've oversold it,
-
here's a picture of the armor that I made.
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(Laughter)
-
(Applause)
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Now, this is only the first
suit of armor I made
-
inspired by "Excalibur."
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A couple of years later,
-
I convinced my dad to embark
on making me a proper suit of armor.
-
Over about a month,
-
he graduated me from cardboard
to roofing aluminum called flashing
-
and still, one of my all-time favorite
attachment materials,
-
POP rivets.
-
We carefully, over that month,
-
constructed an articulated suit
of aluminum armor
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with compound curves.
-
We drilled holes in the helmet
so that I could breathe,
-
and I finished just in time
for Halloween and wore it to school.
-
Now, this is the one thing in this talk
-
that I don't have a slide to show you,
-
because no photo exists of this armor.
-
I did wear it to school,
-
there was a yearbook photographer
patrolling the halls,
-
but he never found me, for reasons
that are about to become clear.
-
There were things I didn't anticipate
-
about wearing a complete suit
of aluminum armor to school.
-
In third period math,
I was standing in the back of class,
-
and I'm standing in the back of class
-
because the armor did not
allow me to sit down.
-
(Laughter)
-
This is the first thing
I didn't anticipate.
-
And then my teacher looks at me
sort of concerned
-
about halfway through the class
and says, "Are you feeling OK?"
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I'm thinking, "Are you kidding?
Am I feeling OK?
-
I'm wearing a suit of armor!
I am having the time of my --"
-
And I'm just about to tell her
how great I feel,
-
when the classroom
starts to list to the left
-
and disappear down this long tunnel,
-
and then I woke up in the nurse's office.
-
I had passed out from heat exhaustion,
-
wearing the armor.
-
And when I woke up,
-
I wasn't embarrassed about having
passed out in front of my class,
-
I was wondering, "Who took my armor?
Where's my armor?"
-
OK, fast-forward a whole bunch of years,
-
some colleagues and I get hired
to make a show for Discovery Channel,
-
called "MythBusters."
-
And over 14 years,
-
I learn on the job how to build
experimental methodologies
-
and how to tell stories
about them for television.
-
I also learn early on
-
that costuming can play a key role
in this storytelling.
-
I use costumes to add humor, comedy, color
-
and narrative clarity
to the stories we're telling.
-
And then we do an episode
called "Dumpster Diving,"
-
and I learn a little bit more
-
about the deeper implications
of what costuming means to me.
-
In the episode "Dumpster Diving,"
-
the question we were trying to answer is:
-
is jumping into a dumpster as safe
-
as the movies would lead you to believe?
-
(Laughter)
-
The episode was going to have
two distinct parts to it.
-
One was where we get trained
to jump off buildings by a stuntman
-
into an air bag.
-
And the second was the graduation
to the experiment:
-
we'd fill a dumpster full of material
and we'd jump into it.
-
I wanted to visually separate
these two elements,
-
and I thought,
-
"Well, for the first part we're training,
so we should wear sweatsuits --
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Oh! Let's put 'Stunt Trainee'
on the back of the sweatsuits.
-
That's for the training."
-
But for the second part, I wanted
something really visually striking --
-
"I know! I'll dress as Neo
from 'The Matrix.'"
-
(Laughter)
-
So I went to Haight Street.
-
I bought some beautiful
knee-high, buckle boots.
-
I found a long, flowing coat on eBay.
-
I got sunglasses, which I had to wear
contact lenses in order to wear.
-
The day of the experiment shoot comes up,
-
and I step out of my car in this costume,
-
and my crew takes a look at me ...
-
and start suppressing
their church giggles.
-
They're like,
" (Laugh sound)."
-
And I feel two distinct things
at this moment.
-
I feel total embarrassment
-
over the fact that
it's so nakedly clear to my crew
-
that I'm completely
into wearing this costume.
-
(Laughter)
-
But the producer in my mind reminds myself
-
that in the high-speed shot in slow-mo,
-
that flowing coat is going to look
beautiful behind me.
-
(Laughter)
-
Five years into the "MythBusters" run,
-
we got invited to appear
at San Diego Comic-Con.
-
I'd known about Comic-Con for years
and never had time to go.
-
This was the big leagues --
this was costuming mecca.
-
People fly in from all over the world
-
to show their amazing creations
on the floor in San Diego.
-
And I wanted to participate.
-
I decided that I would put together
an elaborate costume
-
that covered me completely,
-
and I would walk the floor
of San Diego Comic-Con anonymously.
-
The costume I chose?
-
Hellboy.
-
That's not my costume,
-
that's actually Hellboy.
-
(Laughter)
-
But I spent months
-
assembling the most screen-accurate
Hellboy costume I could,
-
from the boots to the belt to the pants
-
to the right hand of doom.
-
I found a guy who made
a prosthetic Hellboy head and chest
-
and I put them on.
-
I even had contact lenses made
in my prescription.
-
I wore it onto the floor at Comic-Con
-
and I can't even tell you
how balls hot it was in that costume.
-
(Laughter)
-
Sweating! I should've remembered this.
-
I'm sweating buckets
and the contact lenses hurt my eyes,
-
and none of it matters
because I'm totally in love.
-
(Laughter)
-
Not just with the process of putting
on this costume and walking the floor,
-
but also with the community
of other costumers.
-
It's not called costuming at Cons,
-
it's called "cosplay."
-
Now ostensibly, cosplay means
people who dress up
-
as their favorite characters
from film and television
-
and especially anime,
-
but it is so much more than that.
-
These aren't just people
who find a costume and put it on --
-
they mash them up.
-
They bend them to their will.
-
They change them to be the characters
they want to be in those productions.
-
They're super clever and genius.
-
They let their freak flag fly
and it's beautiful.
-
(Laughter)
-
But more than that,
-
they rehearse their costumes.
-
At Comic-Con or any other Con,
-
you don't just take pictures
of people walking around.
-
You go up and say,
-
"Hey, I like your costume,
can I take your picture?"
-
And then you give them time
to get into their pose.
-
They've worked hard on their pose
-
to make their costume look
great for your camera.
-
And it's so beautiful to watch.
-
And I take this to heart.
-
At subsequent Cons,
-
I learn Heath Ledger's shambling walk
as the Joker from "The Dark Knight."
-
I learn how to be a scary Ringwraith
from "Lord of the Rings,"
-
and I actually frighten some children.
-
I learned that "hrr hrr hrr" --
-
that head laugh that Chewbacca does.
-
And then I dressed up as
No-Face from "Spirited Away."
-
If you don't know about "Spirited Away"
and its director, Hayao Miyazaki,
-
first of all, you're welcome.
-
(Laughter)
-
This is a masterpiece,
and one of my all-time favorite films.
-
It's about a young girl named Chihiro
who gets lost in the spirit world
-
in an abandoned Japanese theme park.
-
And she finds her way back out again
-
with the help of a couple
of friends she makes --
-
a captured dragon named Haku
-
and a lonely demon named No-Face.
-
No-Face is lonely
and he wants to make friends,
-
and he thinks the way to do it
is by luring them to him
-
and producing gold in his hand.
-
But this doesn't go very well,
-
and so he ends up going
on kind of a rampage
-
until Chihiro saves him,
-
rescues him.
-
So I put together a No-Face costume,
-
and I wore it on the floor at Comic-Con.
-
And I very carefully practiced
No-Face's gestures.
-
I resolved I would not speak
in this costume at all.
-
When people asked to take my picture,
-
I would nod
-
and I would shyly stand next to them.
-
They would take the picture
-
and then I would secret out
from behind my robe
-
a chocolate gold coin.
-
And at the end of the photo process,
I'd make it appear for them.
-
Ah, ah ah! -- like that.
-
And people were freaking out.
-
"Holy crap! Gold from No-Face!
Oh my god, this is so cool!"
-
And I'm feeling and I'm walking
the floor and it's fantastic.
-
And about 15 minutes in something happens.
-
Somebody grabs my hand,
-
and they put a coin back into it.
-
And I think maybe they're giving me
a coin as a return gift,
-
but no, this is one of the coins
that I'd given away.
-
I don't know why.
-
And I keep on going,
I take some more pictures.
-
And then it happens again.
-
Understand, I can't see anything
inside this costume.
-
I can see through the mouth --
-
I can see people's shoes.
-
I can hear what they're saying
and I can see their feet.
-
But the third time someone
gives me back a coin,
-
I want to know what's going on.
-
So I sort of tilt my head back
to get a better view,
-
and what I see is someone walking
away from me going like this.
-
And then it hits me:
-
It's bad luck to take gold from No-Face.
-
In the film "Spirited Away,"
-
bad luck befalls those
who take gold from No-Face.
-
This isn't a performer-audience
relationship; this is cosplay.
-
We are, all of us on that floor,
-
injecting ourselves into a narrative
that meant something to us.
-
And we're making it our own.
-
We're connecting with something
important inside of us.
-
And the costumes
are how we reveal ourselves
-
to each other.
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)