My Towel Is White

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an intersteller hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you — daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: nonhitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that he might accidentally have “lost.” What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still know where his towle is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence, a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.” (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)

As you may have guessed I got around to seeing the Hitchhiker’s Guide movie tonight, and I’m not really sure what I think. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t under whelmed, but at the same time I had been steeling myself for absolute crap and, in that regard, I was pleasantly surprised.

The problems are easy to recognize: lack of funding and lack of…well, funding. It’s obvious that they had a dreadfully tiny effects budget, but to be honest that didn’t bug me in the least. I’m rather sick of all the CGed crap the movie industry feeds us now, and at this point I’d rather have well-done animatronics any day of the week. Heck, in a comedy like this they even add a certain charming atmosphere to the whole spectacle. So, the real problem isn’t effects (as some have suggested) but length – I didn’t clock it, but the movie started at 7:15 and we were back in my apartment by 9:15. Considering that the start time includes previews and we sat through the credits to see any extra bits (there is one) you’re looking at not much more than an hour and a half, certainly less than two hours. Given how much ground they tried to cover (the entire first book) it’s no wonder everything feels rushed and poorly explained. I know I found myself laughing at references to things in the book that I’m certain no one else in the audience got, which makes me think my opinion is probably slanted.

I’d say that if you’ve read the book it’s a good ride because you’ll not only get the main vein of jokes but also enjoy all the in-jokes that only fans of the book are going to get. I think it’s too bad that so many of them had to be in-jokes, but I guess it works out in the end.

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