The American cinema was born, toddled, talked, provided the furniture for all the living-rooms, and the bedrooms, too, of the imagination of the entire world, gave way to television and declined from most potent of mass media into a minority art form within the space of a human lifetime. In the days when Hollywood bestraddled the world like a colossus, its vast, brief, insubstantial empire helped to Americanise us all.
A critique of the Hollywood movie is a critique of the imagination of the twentieth century in the West. Could this be what Robert Coover, most undeceived and quintessentially American of writers, is up to in this new collection of stories, characterised as they are by his particular quality of heroic irony? Certainly they are located almost entirely within the territory of the American film except for a side-trip into a British one, ‘Milford Junction 1939: a Brief Encounter’, which gets onto the bill for A Night at the Movies under the description of travelogue.
Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison. But Coover is no respecter of mysteries. The book kicks off in the cinema, with a story called ‘The Phantom of the Movie Palace’. But nowadays the cinema is a rat-haunted, urine-scented wreck, inhabited only by a lonely projectionist screening reels at random for his solitary pleasure.
‘The Phantom of the Movie Palace’ describes the method of much of what is to follow, as the projectionist puts together his flickering collages:
He overlays frenzy with freeze frames, the flight of rockets with the staking of the vampire’s heart, Death’s face with thrusting buttocks, cheesecake with chaingangs, and all just to prove to himself over and over again that nothing and everything is true. Slapstick is romance, heroism a dance number. Kisses kill.
At last the projectionist finds himself flattened into two dimensions, up there on the screen, ‘surrendering himself finally . . . to that great stream of image activity that characterizes the mortal condition’.
Coover exacts a similar surrender from the reader. There is some exceptionally strenuous image activity ahead in these stories that precisely reactivate the magnificent gesticulations of giant forms, the bewildering transformations, the orgiastic violence that hurts nobody because it is not real – all the devices of dream, or film, or fiction. Coover is also diabolically, obscenely, incomparably funny.
The collection includes, besides the travelogue already mentioned, a weekly serial, some shorts, a cartoon, a musical interlude, and not one but three main features – a Western, a comedy, a romance. Every aspect of the mortal condition, besides every type of Hollywood genre, is comprehensively covered. Some of the movies invoked are imaginary; some, like the musical, Top Hat, reinvent the familiar in hallucinatory terms: ‘he had some pretty fancy moves, but all that nimble-footedness looked to me like something he mighta learned tippytoeing through the cowshit.’
‘Shoot Out at Gentry’s Junction’ starts off deceptively straightforwardly: ‘The Mex would arrive in Gentry’s Junction at 12:10. Or had arrived. Couldn’t be sure . . . Sherriff Henry Harmon grunted irritably and eased his long pointed boots to the floor.’
So far, so good: already the stereotypes are briskly in play and, as so often in Westerns, the set-up is strictly Freudian. If Hank Harmon, clearly the Henry Fonda role, ‘a tough honest man with clear speech and powerful hands’, stands for the Superego, then the Mex is, as ever, the Id incarnate. ‘Here he is in the schoolhouse demonstrating for the little childrens the exemplary marvels of his private member.’
The presence of the Mexican bandit, his grotesque Hispanic accent, that amazing private member, the appalling stench of his fart – ‘The goddam Mex had let one that smelled like a tomb’ – his presence transforms the genre. With the Mex at the centre, all becomes a bloody carnival of sex and death.
It soon becomes obvious the terrible Mexican must triumph at the shoot-out. ‘Adios to Gentry’s Junction! . . . The storekeeper, the banker, the preacher, they swing with soft felicity from scaffolds and the whisky he is running like blood.’
The two other main features exhibit no less manic invention. ‘Charlie in the House of Rue ‘ – yes; it is that Charlie – takes slapstick via its own remorseless logic of paranoia and anxiety to a place of the deepest anguish and disquiet, as darkness, ‘like the onset of blindness,’ irises in on the clown. ‘What kind of place is this? Who took the light away? And why is everybody laughing?’
If Coover turns a Western into a savage fiesta and a Chaplin two-reeler into an analysis of the compulsion to repeat, he is cruellest of all to the love story that is, of all film romances, most precious to buffs, for he turns Casablanca into a blue movie in which Rick and Ilsa get it on again in no uncertain manner: ‘he’s not enjoyed multiple orgasms like this since he hauled his broken-down black-listed ass out of Paris a year and a half ago . . .’
This is desecration on the grand scale, a full frontal attack on – or, rather, a full frontal revision of – one of the sacred texts of American cinema. But Rick and Ilsa also founder amongst gathering shadows and uncertainty. The other characters wait downstairs in the bar for the lovers to get up and dress and the action to continue but is that possible, now? Hasn’t everything been changed? The story, nostalgically titled ‘You Must Remember This’, ends the book; the ending is an unanswered, unanswerable plea: ‘And then . . .? Ilsa . . .? And then . . .?’
It is a wild night, this marathon night’s viewing, in the semi-derelict picture palace of twentieth-century illusion, from which gangsters can whisk you away in an unmarked car during the ‘Intermission’, send you spinning through a dozen different hazards – sharks, seraglios, dud parachutes, etc. – and drop you back in your seat in time for the shorts.
But, wait. Something has happened while you have been away. Now the audience is ‘all sitting stiffly in their seats with wierd flattened-out faces, their dilated eyes locked onto the screen like they’re hypnotized or dead or something’. The most virtuoso single exercise in the book, the strangest, the most exemplary in its demonstration of the transforming resources of narrative, ‘After Lazarus,’ concludes with a coffin being lowered towards the camera. ‘Sudden blackness.’
At this moment, impossible not to recall, as if they were prophecy, the final words of Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard’s great film of the Sixties, ‘Fin du cinema. Fin du monde’.
(1987)