READING CINEMATIC ALLUSIONS IN THE POST-1945 AMERICAN NOVEL

by

PHILIP DERBESY

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

May 2020

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CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the dissertation of Philip Derbesy

Candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy*

Committee Chair William Marling

Committee Member Robert Spadoni

Committee Member Christopher Flint

Committee Member Daniel Goldmark

Date of Defense March 18, 2020

* We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ...... 4

Abstract ...... 5

Introduction: Reading Cinematic Allusions...... 6

Chapter 1: Jack Kerouac’s Supplementary and Complementary Allusions ...... 25

Chapter 2: Affectless Acting in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer ...... 49

Chapter 3: Audience Response and Its Limits for Elmore Leonard ...... 78

Chapter 4: Empty Allusions in Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays ...... 111

Conclusion: Affective Films, Reflexive Novels ...... 142

Notes……………………………………………………………………………………155 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….169

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Acknowledgments

Thank you to William Marling, whose mentorship and practical advice guided this dissertation through to completion, and to my committee members, Robert Spadoni,

Christopher Flint, and Daniel Goldmark, whose formal and informal feedback made this a better project and me a better scholar.

Thank you to the participants in the College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation

Fellowship for their collegiality and feedback, and to Martha Woodmansee and Kenneth

Ledford for leading.

Thank you to Charles Rzepka for his comments on various drafts of my chapter on Elmore Leonard.

Thank you to Michael Chiappini—for friendship, for giving me good things to read and watch, and for looking things over on short notice.

Thanks to Benjamin Fischer, without whom I wouldn’t have known where to start.

Thanks to my mother, who taught me that education is never wasted.

Finally, thank you to my fiancé, Julia LaPlaca, for her love and support. Life is better as a team. 5

Reading Cinematic Allusions in the Post-1945 American Novel

Abstract

by

PHILIP DERBESY

This dissertation analyzes the cinematic allusions that appear in the novels of four postwar American writers: Jack Kerouac, Walker Percy, Elmore Leonard, and Joan

Didion. I argue that these novelists employ cinematic allusions to comment on the ways that audiences interact with narrative texts. My definition for “allusions” is intentionally broad, including references to particular films, stars, tropes, viewing spaces, and productions. I argue that such allusions afford reflection for the readers of these novels, giving them a chance to pause and consider the differences between reading a book and watching a movie. Many scholars have theorized the differences between novels and films, but my project takes a new approach by considering how novelists can comment on these questions directly. All of the authors in my study find the cinema to be manipulative, and their cinematic allusions suggest that they believe the novel to be a more reflective, and therefore morally responsible, medium than film. However, this can lead to uncertainty for readers when their books simultaneously denounce and rely on the cinema’s affective possibilities.

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Introduction: Reading Cinematic Allusions

How does film impact the novel, and how can we write about this impact? Most scholars begin to answer these questions by asking what makes novels “cinematic,” tracing images that resemble camera shots or plot structures that mirror montage editing techniques. Peter Lurie’s work on William Faulkner is a nuanced but representative example:

Although direct and indirect references to particular films or texts occur

throughout Faulkner’s thirties fiction . . . what I find most compelling as a way of

reading Faulkner’s modernism is its inflection by what we might call the “film

idea,” the manner of impression and visual activity his novels model from the

cinema. (6)

Lurie’s project is to investigate the “film idea,” explaining the epistemological significance of novelistic images that mimic the cinema. While scholars define the “film idea” in various ways, this quest to track how films influence novels visually is the primary pursuit of the field. Lurie’s work is among the best examples, as he carefully traces the ways that Faulkner’s novels comment on and foil the conventions of film. This approach notwithstanding, I would like to suggest that it becomes a problem for novel/film studies when everyone is interested in the “film idea” or something like it. The result of this fixation is that Lurie’s “direct and indirect references to films and other texts” remain under-analyzed among scholars who write about the interactions between literature and the cinema. 7

My dissertation articulates the importance of cinematic allusions to the novels of

Jack Kerouac, Walker Percy, Elmore Leonard, and Joan Didion. I argue that these novelists’ direct references to the cinema encourage readers to reflect on the differences between novels and films. When characters in these novels watch movies, or make movies, or describe their lives in terms of the movies, readers can consider how these actions compare to the story that they are reading. For example, Elmore Leonard has movie star Michael Weir comment about a role in Get Shorty (1990), “What fascinates me about this one . . . is the chance to play an essentially cliché-type character in a way that’s never been done before, against his accepted type” (259). I will argue that moments like this afford layered reflection for readers: we can consider how characters in the novel we are reading may be “clichéd,” and we may start to wonder whether they would seem more or less clichéd if we saw them on the screen instead of the page. (We can also see the irony that Michael Weir is fulfilling the well-worn role of the pretentious actor while insisting that he is daring and original when he appears onscreen.) While Leonard treats this question playfully, all the novelists under investigation use similar moments to comment on the differences between reading novels and watching movies.

The term “cinematic allusion” is intentionally broad as I use it, usually to refer to moments where novelists invoke recognizable films, stars, character types, and viewing practices. Sometimes these cinematic elements appear literally in the world of a text, as with Leonard’s actor above or when the protagonist of The Moviegoer (1961) happens to meet William Holden in the street. Other characters merely imagine their lives in cinematic terms, as in On the Road (1957) when Sal Paradise insists that his friend Dean

Moriarty looks like Groucho Marx. Either way, I argue that the allusions in these novels 8 reflect the experience of a single character, usually the protagonist. Thus, my study focuses on the ways that novelists comment on film’s impact on the individual, as opposed to its formal properties in the abstract. To this end, I deploy recent scholarship on affective reader response that examines the moral ambiguity of texts playing on the emotions of readers. All of the authors in my study consider the cinema to be manipulative, and their cinematic allusions suggest that they believe the novel to be a more reflective, and therefore morally responsible, medium than film. However, this can lead to uncertainty for readers when their books simultaneously denounce and rely on the cinema’s affective possibilities.

Film in the Novel Some theorists argue that novels and films are so dissimilar that the best way to write about their relationship is to enumerate the differences between them.1 Among scholars who look for similarities between the two media, on the other hand, there is no consensus about what a movie-tinged novel looks like. Kamilla Elliott gets to the heart of this issue when she points out that “No literary form has been declared ‘cinematic’ more frequently than the novel, regardless of what form the novel has taken and regardless of what form the film has taken” (113). Scholars want to pinpoint the ways that novelists incorporate cinematic techniques into their work, but their definitions vary depending on the argument that they want to make. This is not a new problem, either. In a deftly caustic essay written over thirty years ago, Steven G. Kellman traces the history of the

“cinematic novel” as a concept. Kellman points to the diversity of uses for the term; critics can use it to denigrate a novelist’s work as a “repository of gaudy plots” or to praise experimental novels for being “overtly edited and modern” (473). The upshot is 9 that the moniker “cinematic” is applied to such disparate works as nineteenth-century realist novels, the Aeneid, and Hollywood novels like Nathaniel West’s The Day of the

Locust or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. Kellman considers this final move to be particularly misguided: “To call these cinematic novels . . . is to compound the confusion.

Merely because they depict film production without themselves necessarily taking on the characteristics of a film (whatever those are) makes them as much ‘cinematic’ as a biography of a dietitian is ‘nutritional’” (471).

Kellman’s final pronouncement is a warning for my project: noting that a novel

“depicts” movie-going or film production is not the same as arguing that the cinema formally influences it. Yet this kind of slippage is standard, as scholars tend to assert that novels “about” movies, like those I analyze in my dissertation, mimic cinematic techniques. For instance, Michael Luschei writes the following about Walker Percy’s The

Moviegoer: “In the telling of the tale Percy adapts various techniques of film art, presenting his fictional world through fades and filters, superimpositions and intercuts, an occasional jump or zoom, and focusing effects both sharp and soft, along with tantalizingly nascent dissolves foreshadowing what is to be, or not to be” (25). Luschei treats the novel as a kind of puzzle, where the reader must hunt for the cinematic techniques that Percy incorporates into his descriptions of movie-going. But this can only get us so far. How do we know which vivid descriptions qualify as “zooms”? When is a novel’s use of irony merely a tonal choice, and when is it a “filter”? Much scholarship that relies on analogies between the two media suffers from this problem; no matter how precise the critic’s terminology, there is always a leap of faith that his or her analysis matches the novelistic evidence at hand.2 10

One way that scholars sidestep this problem is by grounding their research in the historical context of a particular era, often literary modernism.3 Many conceptualize the modernist novel’s shifts in narrative perspective as a kind of literary “montage editing.”

Drawing on Sergei Eisenstein’s language from Film Form, Bruce Kawin writes that in moments of narrative difficulty, “When description A fails, and description B fails, one can hope that their juxtaposition will point toward C, the thing itself” (“The Montage

Element” 124). As we will see, scholars have analyzed the novelists in my study

(especially Joan Didion) along these lines. More broadly, critics tend to see cinematic influence in moments when novelistic narration is disrupted. For instance, Michael North writes that “modern writers came to photography not as to a slavish realism but rather as if it were the first significant break in the facade thrown up by the senses” (25). North traces how writers considered photography to be a way around everyday perception, much like modernist literature tried to circumvent the conventions of the realist novel.

Alice Gavin conducts a similar analysis of the influence of early film on pre-modernist forms of free-indirect narration.

I am writing about novels, and I believe that the best way to write about novels is to use the methods of close reading and literary analysis. The failure to do so often leads scholars to shoehorn film theory and cinematic terminology into their analysis in a way that does violence to the texts under examination and film studies as a field. My alternative approach is to consider how novelists intervene in the very debates that I have been describing—not by imitating cinematic techniques, but by bringing figures from the cinema into the novel to be critiqued and analyzed. The result is not an objective declaration about the differences between novels and films, but rather idiosyncratic 11 answers to this question that reflect a given author’s aesthetic and philosophical investments.

The Elements of a Cinematic Allusion Cinematic allusions are multivalent, and my analysis will focus on the ways that they contribute to novels on two levels:

1) The narrative dimension, or how the allusion operates as an allusion within

the story we are reading. This can require some contextualization, unpacking

what a reference to this particular cinematic figure contributes to a given

narrative moment.

2) The reflexive dimension, or the ways that writing about the cinema reflects

back on the reader’s reading experience. This level often relies on descriptions

of the physical realities of film viewership and audience response.

In many ways, the second dimension is more important to my argument; that is where I claim that cinematic allusions are a topic of sufficient weight to warrant a book-length study. But it is impossible to attend to allusions’ reflexive significance without first attending to their contributions to the novel at hand.

Take, for instance, this scene that appears early in James Agee’s novel A Death in the Family (1957).4 The child protagonist named Rufus goes to the theater with his father to see a double feature of a Charlie Chaplin comedy and a William S. Hart western. The

Chaplin film is described at length, almost beat for beat. The movie revolves around a sight gag in which Charlie steals a bag of eggs, then hides them in the seat of his pants when he sees a policeman coming. Later, he falls on his rear end and breaks the eggs.

Rufus’s reaction to this scene is instructive, so I will quote at length from the novel: 12

There was Charlie, flat on his bottom on the sidewalk, and the way he looked,

kind of sickly and disgusted, you could see that he suddenly remembered the

eggs, and suddenly you remembered them too. The way his face looked, the lip

wrinkled off the teeth and the sickly little smile, it made you feel just the way

those broken eggs must feel against your seat, as queer and awful as that time in

the white pekay suit, when it ran down out of the pant-legs and showed all over

your stockings and you had to walk home that way with people looking; and

Rufus’ father nearly tore his head off laughing and so did everybody else, and

Rufus was sorry for Charlie, having been so recently in a similar predicament, but

the contagion of laughter was too much for him, and he laughed too. (13)

We could easily pass this description without giving it a second thought, but it contributes to the novel on the two levels I described above.

First, we can consider what an allusion to Chaplin, in particular, adds to the narrative. One obvious answer is that it contributes to the novel’s setting, helping us to understand moviegoing practices in Knoxville around the year 1915. Chaplin’s brand of humor also drives a wedge between Rufus’s parents. When Rufus’s father suggests taking him to the movies, his devout mother objects to their going on moral grounds. She calls Charlie Chaplin “That horrid little man!” and protests that the way he looks up women’s skirts is “nasty” and “vulgar” (11). But Rufus’s father overrules any objections:

“His father laughed, as he always did, and Rufus felt that it had become rather an empty joke; but as always the laughter; he felt that the laughter enclosed him with his father”

(110). The novel positions Chaplin as a transgressive figure who separates the masculine from the feminine, the religious from the profane. When Rufus succumbs to the 13

“contagion of laughter” in the theater, it binds him to his father, and this continues when his father, a recovering alcoholic, surreptitiously takes Rufus out to a bar after the show.

This outing is the last time that Rufus will see his father, who dies in a car crash early the following morning. Thus, even if the reader does not have any particular connection to

Chaplin, he takes on a symbolic significance for Rufus.

Another reason for Chaplin’s presence is that Agee was obsessed with him; he even wrote an experimental screenplay for the Little Tramp character in the 1940s and tried to get Chaplin to star in it.5 For Agee, Chaplin represented the literary possibilities of film. Agee writes in his film criticism that when a silent comedian got hit on the head, for instance, “It was his business to be as funny as possible physically, without the help or hindrance of words. So he gave us a figure of speech, or rather a vision, for loss of consciousness. In other words he gave us a poem, a kind of poem, moreover, that everybody understands” (Agee on Film 394). Agee adds that “the richest and most poignant poetry were in Chaplin’s work” (Agee on Film 401). Chaplin is the apotheosis of what Agee values in the cinema. If Chaplin’s effect on the viewer is a poem, one’s response is both automatic and a challenge to the intellect; we immediately laugh when we see him get hit on the head, but we can also savor this reaction and consider what it means the way we would with a poem. Even if a film makes the whole theater laugh, it can have a personal meaning for each viewer, just as the egg gag does for Rufus.

Agee’s writings on Chaplin lead us back to the second dimension of a cinematic allusion: how it reflects on the nature of audience response. Rufus identifies strongly with

“Charlie” and must negotiate between his empathy for the character and the social pressure to laugh at his plight. The face that Charlie makes, his “sickly little smile,” 14 actually “made you feel just the way those broken eggs must feel against your seat.” This feeling instantly moves Rufus from thinking about the film to thinking about problems in his own life. Without a sentence break, he launches into a rumination of the time when he soiled himself while wearing a “white pekay suit.” Rufus feels sorry for Charlie, “having been so recently in a similar predicament.” Yet social pressure accompanies and even overrides his sense of empathy, so Rufus succumbs to the “contagion of laughter” in the theater. He joins in with his father and the rest of the audience and laughs at Charlie. This layered response is a helpful example of the “poetry” that Agee sees in the operation of silent films. Laughter gives Rufus access to a shared experience that transcends his own visceral reaction to the film.

This Chaplin picture raises further questions about how Rufus’s embodied experience within the world of the novel compares to the reader’s experience of reading about these events secondhand. Do Agee’s words about the eggs dripping down Charlie’s seat conjure similar feelings in my backside when I read them? Is this feeling the same as the one Rufus experiences in the theater, or does the mediation of language somehow render the feeling less potent for the reader? At a basic level, readers of A Death in the

Family have no raucous crowd to give us cues about how we should react, and it is this social difference that separates literature from the cinema for Agee. This description of movie-going is also unique because of its prominence within the story. If all cinematic allusions were so showy—with a protagonist connecting with his soon-to-be-dead father and ruminating on the nature of identification—they likely would have garnered more critical attention already. But I want to argue that even the briefest reference to the 15 movies can contribute to the narrative and encourage reflection from the reader. We only need to learn how to read them.

The Textual Dimension: Character and Competence When considering the textual impact of a cinematic allusion, we can start by asking two questions: whose experience does it reflect, and how does it fit into the scene? The former will impact the novel’s characterization, the latter its tone. For the novels in my dissertation, cinematic allusions represent a particular character’s point of view, even if a third-person narrator delivers the story. Following Rita Felski’s terminology, I will call this phenomenon “alignment.”6 In the example from A Death in the Family, Rufus’s father and other movie-goers laugh at the Chaplin film, but we are aligned with Rufus. It is his experience of the movies that shapes our experience of the novel.

Because we get one character’s perspective at a time, cinematic allusions in these novels promote a special relationship between the reader and the protagonist. In The One vs. the Many, Alex Woloch writes about the paradox of novelistic protagonists: “The realist novel is infused with the sense that any character is a potential hero, but simultaneously enchanted with the freestanding individual, defined through his or her interior consciousness” (31). To believe in a realistic fictional world, we must understand that every character could have a rich inner life, but we usually only get access to the consciousness of one character or a handful of characters. I argue that cinematic allusions create a stark distinction between protagonists and minor characters because protagonists get to make allusions, whereas other characters are merely described in terms of allusions.

Indeed, these novels often draw attention to this phenomenon. While watching a film,

Binx Bolling, the protagonist of The Moviegoer, writes about the satisfaction of noticing 16

“the little touches we see in the movie” (144). He considers himself to be an exceptional viewer of films, one who can appreciate their grace notes and make connections between them. His moment of self-satisfaction comes immediately after he describes Sharon, his date at the theater: “By heaven she is just like the girls in the movies who don’t put out until you prove to them what a nice unselfish fellow you are” (143). Binx thinks that

Sharon is simple enough to be like a character in a movie. Binx is willing to take on a similar role—that of the “nice unselfish fellow”—in order to woo her, but he maintains a distance from this identity and claims power for himself by ascribing Sharon’s role to her. In novels that are full of references to the cinema, knowledge of the movies is a kind of capital that draws our interest to particular characters. I will discuss the meta-fictional importance of this in the following section, but this dynamic, on its own, is noteworthy.

Beyond garnering a place of narrative prominence for the protagonist, individual allusions are also notable for the way that they impact a novel’s tone. Sianne Ngai defines tone as a text’s “global or organizing affect, its general disposition or orientation toward its audience and the world” (Ngai 28). Nostalgia is one such all-encompassing affect.

While I write about novelists writing after the end of the studio era, their narrators and characters often look back on that period with fondness.7 Elmore Leonard’s narrators want to be like Humphrey Bogart; Binx Bolling in The Moviegoer imagines himself as

Clark Gable. I will argue that in one sense, this is always-already ironic; to engage in this kind of nostalgia is to make a joke that hinges on the reader’s ability to recognize it. By contrast, when characters allude to contemporary films, it is often to disparage the ways that they pale in comparison to the stars of the past (though at times authors will flip this 17 hierarchy or sidestep it completely). Either way, a narrative’s temporal distance from a given allusion will impact its tonal affordances for the novel at hand.

Of course, cinematic allusions do not merely carry meaning to the reader by participating in broad historical trends. They are particular: when a novel mentions a movie star, the reader may have personal associations with that movie star that contribute to a novel’s tone as well. This brings me to a concern that faces any project of audience response: how we can know that a given reader will understand and react to a text the way that I claim they will. To understand how allusions contribute to a novel’s tone, we must assume an “ideal reader” who recognizes the figures in question and has some relationship to them that predates reading the story. I borrow this concept from Jonathan

Culler, who writes that literary competence “is not what actual readers happen to know but what an ideal reader must know implicitly to read and interpret works in ways that we consider acceptable” (Structuralist Poetics 122-3). Similarly, he argues that each allusion need not rely on an actual antecedent. Instead, we can “look at the specific presuppositions of a given text, the way in which it produces a pre-text, an intertextual space whose occupants may or may not correspond to other actual texts”

(“Presupposition and Intertextuality” 1395).8 I will examine the affective stance that these novels take to cinematic intertexts and assume a reader who can appreciate them.

Even assuming an ideal reader, it can be challenging to determine how to read a given cinematic allusion “in ways we consider acceptable.” For instance, when Groucho

Marx appears in Kerouac’s novels, is it Groucho from Duck Soup, or the current Marx who appeared in television’s You Bet Your Life when Kerouac was writing? Throughout my dissertation, I must make judgment calls about how to answer these questions. The 18 same is true for what I can expect my readers to know; if an allusion to a person or film is particularly obscure or essential to the novel in question, I will take more time to contextualize it. I cite historians of film as necessary to establish, say, why Joan Didion refers to outlaw biker films in Play It As It Lays (1970). Even with such contextualization, however, some allusions stand out as being particularly strange or challenging to unpack. Moments when the competence of the “ideal reader” breaks down, where an allusion’s purpose seems intentionally ambiguous or unclear, are the domain of my second level of analysis.

The Reflexive Dimension: Identification and Affect The final piece of my dissertation is to consider the affordances of particular references, or what they make possible for the reader. This is not a simple task. Namwali Serpell warns that “the affordances of a holistic object like a chair are far easier to trace than those of a concatenated or prismatic one like a book” (22).9 It can be unclear what a novel is trying to do for (and to) the reader, and the same is true of cinematic allusions.

Sometimes they afford the pleasure of recognizing a beloved figure from the movies, but many references offer no clear, single meaning. Sianne Ngai points out that such ambiguity can have affordances of its own: “Despite its marginality in the philosophical canon of emotions, isn’t this feeling of confusion about what one is feeling an affective state in its own right?” (14). I argue that ambiguous cinematic allusions push the reader to reflect on the nature of the novel we are reading. I deploy recent scholarship on affect in literature to analyze this phenomenon. 10

In moments of uncertainty, these novels do not attempt to replicate the feeling of watching a movie by imitating cinematic techniques. Instead, they hold up the impulse to 19 identify with characters as a process to scrutinize. In The Particulars of Rapture, Charles

Altieri writes that, in such meta-textual moments,

We find ourselves invited to try out various attitudes toward valuing what we

encounter, and, more important, we find some of those provisional identifications

eliciting our own passionate investments and clarifying paths they might take

beyond the work of art. That is what brings the aesthetic into the existential. (24)

Altieri’s concept of “provisional identifications” is helpful here. His example is Othello, a character whose jealousy the audience does not experience directly but whose experience of the emotion is so extreme that we cannot help but consider its significance. Similarly, when characters in the novels I am writing about identify with characters from movies, the reader is invited to question: is that how I think or feel when I watch a film? And would it be desirable to do so? It can be difficult to tell. For instance, when I read the scene from A Death in the Family, I am unsure whether Rufus has any control over his thoughts and feelings. When characters begin to see different elements of their lives in idiosyncratic cinematic terms, the impact of the movies on their lives, and the reader, becomes even more ambiguous.

Robert Stam writes in Reflexivity in Film and Literature that all works of art exist on a continuum between the poles of “illusionism,” or encouraging the audience to consider their content and characters to be real, and “reflexivity,” or drawing attention to their artificiality (1). Stam enumerates different techniques through which films can achieve reflexivity, such as “the inclusion of two-dimensional materials—paintings, photographs, posters, newspapers, book covers—[that] call attention to the screen as a two-dimensional surface” (255). Similarly, all cinematic allusions within novels are 20 reflexive, in that they draw attention to the fact that my eyes are passing over words on a page and not watching events unfold on a screen. But I argue that ambiguous allusions are more reflexive because they take us out of our usual reading practices. When Sal

Paradise insists that watching movies is a “horrible osmotic experience” that imprints thoughts into his mind, we can wonder whether he is serious and how we should revise our understanding of the remainder of On the Road as a result (224). We face similar questions in Play It As It Lays when Maria Wyeth insists that exploitation biker pictures are more worthwhile than avant-garde art films. All of the novels in my study contain similar moments that actively take us out of the narrative, and the ambiguity of such moments is precisely the point: they encourage meta-cognition instead of providing a single meaning.

Throughout my dissertation, I will enumerate some of the ways that cinematic allusions can foster this kind of reflection. Namwali Serpell is particularly helpful, as her work on affective reader response defines techniques that authors can employ to engender uncertainty in readers. I will apply her terms—such as “oscillation” and “vacuity”— to describe some of these effects. At other times, it is more useful to go back to the work of more well-worn reader-response critics like Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser to analyze what happens when a figure from the cinema appears. I believe that this language of uncertainty provides a new route to consider the significance of film’s status within novels, and likewise cross-media allusions are an under-examined means of eliciting uncertainty from a reader.

Overview of Argument 21

In my first chapter, I analyze the trajectory of cinematic allusions in Kerouac’s novels On the Road, The Dharma Bums (1958), and Big Sur (1962). Kerouac demonstrates that references to the movies can support, or strategically ironize, the action of the novel in which they appear. When a cinematic allusion fits neatly into the story, I call it

“complementary”; when an allusion highlights its own inapplicability in the narrative moment, it is “supplementary.” Both kinds of allusions contribute to a novel’s narration, especially its tone and characterizations, but supplementary allusions destabilize this process for the reader. For instance, Sal Paradise compares his friend Dean Moriarty to

Groucho Marx: “He rushed out of the car like Groucho Marx to get cigarettes—that furious, ground-hugging walk with the coattails flying, except that he had no coattails”

(120). It is as if Dean does and does not have coattails at this moment; the allusion helps to describe his gait and mannerisms, but the lack of coattails points to some essential difference between the world of Kerouac’s novel and the world of a Marx Brothers film.

This element of fitting and not-fitting is what makes an allusion supplementary, drawing attention to the narrator’s creativity in making a given reference to the cinema. I argue that Kerouac’s allusions to the cinema change from being primarily supplementary to complementary throughout his career, as he becomes convinced that the movies are a hegemonic force that precludes individualized, generative interactions. Beyond establishing the language of supplements and complements, this trajectory reflects the waning power of Kerouac’s narrators to make meaning out of cinematic figures; they lose their reflexive edge over time.

My second chapter focuses on a single text, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. Binx

Bolling, the novel’s narrator and protagonist, is engaged in an existentialist project he 22 calls “the search.” As part of this project, Binx has a near-obsessive habit of providing a plot synopsis of each movie he sees. I argue that these synopses are notable because they boil movies down to a template that is devoid of any emotion, such as this one: “Richard

Widmark is a public health inspector who learns that a culture of cholera bacilli has gotten loose in the city” (63). Binx tries to replicate this effect when he imitates movie stars to hide his feelings from other characters, a method I call “affectless acting.” Binx behaves like an aloof leading man whose thoughts and feelings are beyond other characters, and this produces dramatic irony when the reader sees the unstated intentions that he is hiding. If this method gives him power within the narrative, it also makes him unattractive to the reader, as Binx uses his flat acting in attempts to seduce his secretary and shirk his family responsibilities. As with Kerouac’s narrators, Binx eventually abandons the movies as a narrative device and as a model for his actions. This is primarily due to his relationship with his cousin, Kate, who sees through his acting and inspires genuine feelings of sympathy that he is unable to mask or write off. The novel ends ambiguously with Binx and Kate’s marriage; Binx claims to have outgrown his desire to act like a movie star, yet the entire story belies this claim. It is left up to the reader to decide whether his interest in the cinema was worthwhile.

In Chapter 3, I analyze the cinematic allusions in Elmore Leonard’s novels Get

Shorty and LaBrava (1983). These novels, I argue, offer two competing ways to conceptualize cinematic identification, one positive and one negative. In the first novel,

Leonard tells the story of Chili Palmer, a minor mobster who wants to break into

Hollywood as a movie producer by pitching a movie based on his own eventful life. To do so, he must learn to see the world as a producer does, a perspective that the novel 23 portrays as dispassionate and empathetic to characters at the fringes of a given scene.11

Ultimately, Chili must become as cool-headed as a movie producer as he is in his life of crime. LaBrava, the title character of the second novel, must do the opposite: use his knowledge of films to solve a crime in real life. LaBrava meets Jean Shaw, a retired, aging actress who was his first cinematic crush when he was a boy. Shaw represents a central disconnect between LaBrava and the reader: he cannot stop seeing her in terms of the movies in which she has starred, but we cannot see those films because they only exist in the world of the novel. Thus LaBrava’s experience is ultimately unknowable to us. Taken together, these novels position identification as a useful template for imagining the experience of the other, but likewise they warn that each persons’ experience of the world is too idiosyncratic ever to be fully knowable.

My final chapter explores the importance of “empty allusions” to Joan Didion’s novel Play It As It Lays. The term empty allusions refers to stars and films that only appear within the world of the novel and are so abstracted that the reader cannot envision them. Such allusions highlight the fact that Maria Wyeth, the protagonist, experiences reality in a way that we can never access. The most common way to discuss Didion’s novel in cinematic terms is to say that its form resembles montage editing. Because of this, scholars tend to argue that a reader can overcome the novel’s apparent lack of meaning and feeling by considering how its events juxtapose one another. I argue that the novel’s emptiness and uncertainty should be embraced, not overcome; we are supposed to struggle to understand Maria’s responses to the events in her life. Namwali Serpell calls this “vacuity,” an effect that “heightens our desire to interpret, yet thwarts our ability to do so” (246). At the level of plot, violent scenes between Maria and her 24 husband play out repeatedly until they almost seem meaningless to both of them. Maria knows many people in the movie industry, but she mostly refers to them in the abstract, using words like “star,” “actor,” or “director.” When these characters appear, their status as members of the movie industry make them attractive to the reader, and indeed to other characters. But Maria refuses to engage with them, and she eventually loses interest in even this mediated relationship to the movies.

Each author develops a system of cinematic allusions and makes a unique comment on the relationship between novels and films. The most significant difference among them for my purposes is their approach to balancing their allusions’ narrative and reflexive significance. While all the novels operate on both levels, I have organized my chapters to run from most narratively-focused to most reflexive. Thus, it is only the process of re-reading Kerouac’s novels, and considering how his writing practices change over time, that allows us to see the reflexive significance of his cinematic allusions. By contrast, Didion’s allusions are so vague, and the narrative in which they participate is so unnerving, that they tend to afford reflection at the expense of narrative clarity. I include this variety to demonstrate that the interplay between these two levels of meaning is what makes cinematic allusions such a flexible tool for novelists to comment on the relationship between literature and the cinema. 25

Chapter 1: Jack Kerouac’s Supplementary and Complementary Allusions1

“The bus arrived in Hollywood. In the gray, dirty dawn, like the dawn when Joel

McCrea met Veronica Lake in a diner, in the picture Sullivan’s Travels, she slept

in my lap.” (On the Road 82)

Early in On the Road (1957), narrator Sal Paradise and his new love, Terry, arrive in Los Angeles on a Greyhound bus, and an allusion to Sullivan’s Travels contributes to the scene on several levels. In the film, Joel McCrea plays a successful director, John

Sullivan, who decides to live temporarily as a hobo so he can make a realistic film about the horrors of the Great Depression. When he meets Veronica Lake in a diner, the two have spent the night on a train, so they are hungry, discouraged, and ready to give up on the project. We can see parallels between this story, the plot of On the Road, and even

Kerouac’s biography. Kerouac’s narrator is also slumming it, having left New York City with no money in the hopes of having experiences that will help him to become a serious novelist. Despite the discomfort of his travels, Sal imagines himself as a handsome leading man and casts Terry as a sexy, down-home guide who will teach him about the world. This picaresque plot point is itself cinematic, since landing in L.A. is as inevitable for Sal as if he were living in a road movie.2 Kerouac assumes a competent reader who will appreciate these layers of meaning, one who has seen the film in question or at least has a functional knowledge of cinematic genres and types. For such a reader, cinematic allusions like this one will, as Matt Theado writes, “support the novel’s descriptions, adding visuality and cultural context” (295). 26

However, Kerouac’s cinematic allusions often contradict the narrative context in which they appear. Sal’s situation may superficially resemble the plot and characters of

Sullivan’s Travels, but the parallels are complicated as soon as he and Terry arrive in Los

Angeles:

And here my mind went haywire, I don’t know why I began getting paranoiac

visions that Teresa . . . was a common hustler who worked the busses for a guy’s

bucks by making appointments like ours in L.A. where she brought the sucker

first to a breakfast place, where her pimp waited, and then to a certain hotel to

which he had access to his gun or whatever. (82-3)

Sal has two diametrically opposed perspectives on the scene. If he looks at the setting one way, he sees a gray dawn that looks like Sullivan’s Travels, a world of narrative potential and comic romance. In this vision, he is a suffering genius. But Sal fears that this point of view is too optimistic, or that looking at the scene through the lens of the film has caused him to ignore real dangers. Another look and he has a “paranoiac vision,” in which Terry is a “common hustler,” and he is in a trap. Sal invokes a screwball comedy that affords a whimsical tone for a moment, but his subsequent descent into paranoia belies the applicability of the allusion and throws his disillusionment into starker relief.

This allusion is a microcosm of Kerouac’s attitude toward the cinema throughout his career: he began with a belief in film’s potential as a narrative resource and ended in paranoia. In this chapter, I consider what caused this shift in attitude. To unpack the change, I analyze Kerouac’s cinematic allusions throughout On the Road, The Dharma

Bums (1958), and Big Sur (1962). David Sterritt has argued that Kerouac’s incorporation of popular culture is haphazard, an improvised blending of high and low art that is more 27 useful as a metaphor for Beat spirituality than as a sustained comment on the cultural products themselves.3 By contrast, I will argue that Kerouac’s cinematic allusions do comprise such a comment because of the ways that they supplement or complement the narrative. Supplementary allusions highlight their own inapplicability, pointing to the narrator’s agency in imparting meaning to them, whereas complementary allusions fit neatly into the narration, deferring to the reader’s preconceived impressions of the film or star in question. Kerouac’s trajectory from optimism to paranoia is also a trajectory from supplements to complements, meaning he employs cinematic allusions in ways that presage the eventual decline of the narrator. Kerouac uses these methods to theorize how the cinema exerts control over viewers and to question whether his novels have the same impact on readers.

Oscillating Typecasting in On the Road Kerouac employs cinematic allusions in On the Road to describe the split-second sensation of seeing something in life that reminds you of the movies. For example, when

Sal first arrives in California, he lives with a friend named Remi and works with him as a watchman at a nearby barracks. As Sal leaves for his first night of work, he observes, “I had to wear Remi’s trousers; since he was so tall, and had a potbelly from eating voracious meals out of boredom, I went flapping around like Charlie Chaplin to my first night of work” (63). Sal does not ground his allusion to Chaplin in a particular film. He relies on the competent reader’s knowledge of Chaplin’s “little tramp” persona as a character type. In the allusion, “I went flapping around like Charlie Chaplin,” the phrase

“I went flapping” assures the reader of the allusion’s applicability. This image takes a characterization that is merely a comment on Sal’s oversized trousers and applies it to Sal 28 himself, denoting that his actions are as sporadic as ill-fitting clothing flapping in the wind. With this complementary allusion, Sal identifies with Chaplin and begins to behave like him.

When he walks to work, Sal describes the road to the barracks as “a road like you see in The Mark of Zorro and a road like all the roads you see in Western B movies. I used to take out my gun and play cowboys in the dark” (64). Here Sal alludes to a specific movie, The Mark of Zorro (Rouben Mamoulian, 1940), and to the overall genre of Western B movies. Specific and general, the road is a typified setting, and we would expect a familiar gunslinger character to appear on it. But the second sentence undermines the allusion’s applicability: Sal’s reaction to the Western setting is to “take out his gun and play cowboys in the dark,” ironizing rather than identifying with the character type of Zorro or a Western hero. Similarly, when called upon to break up a drunken party at the barracks, the primary purpose of his job as a guard, Sal quips that “It was like a Western movie; the time had come for me to assert myself” (65). Sal knows the expectations of a Western hero. Initially, he tries to lean into this character type, showing his badge and telling the sailors to quiet down, but the attempt is short-lived as

Sal winds up joining the party and getting as drunk as any of them. He is no peacekeeper, and he knows it.

These two examples demonstrate the difference between complementary and supplementary allusions. Complementary allusions represent the experience of recognizing a cinematic type outside of the cinema, then taking the step of identifying with the film in question, acting as though it has a bearing on the scenario. Thus, when

Sal sees that he looks like Chaplin, he begins to behave like him as well. A 29 complementary allusion can be optimistic in tone, but it requires the narrator to cede control to the allusion, usually by typecasting himself or another character. When Sal makes a complementary allusion to Chaplin, the narration takes on the tone of a Chaplin film.

Supplementary allusions also begin with Kerouac’s narrator describing a lived experience with a cinematic allusion, as with the road to the barracks that “looks like all the roads you see in Western B movies.” For supplementary allusions, however, the narrator resists identifying with the scene in question, and the reader’s experience of the allusion hinges on the tension between the source and target domains. In this example,

Sal plays the cowboy, but he maintains an ironic distance from the character type he represents. This posture reflects equally on Sal and the type: Sal may lack the bravado to behave like a Western hero, but he also suggests that the expectations for such a hero are unrealistic. Kerouac’s narrators employ supplements to manipulate cinematic types rather than to be controlled by them. The tone of the novel can contradict that of the film: here, the Western affords humor rather than the tension associated with a climactic showdown.

This process becomes more complicated when Sal assigns cinematic roles to other characters, especially to his friend Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady). Sal alludes several times to the fact that Dean looks like Groucho Marx. Dean and Groucho share a peculiar physicality: “He rushed out of the car like Groucho Marx to get cigarettes—that furious, ground-hugging walk with the coattails flying, except that he had no coattails” (120).

Groucho’s stooped gait is unmistakable, and Sal assumes that the competent reader knows his walk. It is equally vivid in every film, right down to the costume, which includes a jacket with “coattails flying.” We can imagine Dean walking this way, but the 30 phrase “except that he had no coattails” creates uncertainty about the allusion as a whole.

Sal insists that Dean looks like Groucho even though he is missing Groucho’s costume, which stands synecdochically for his vaudevillian persona. We cannot unsee the coattails once they have been described to us, but we know they are not there. This paradox of coattails/no coattails highlights Sal’s choice as a narrator. He describes Dean’s movements vividly, but he also forces the Groucho type onto him when it does not quite fit.

In addition to demonstrating Sal’s power as a narrator, such supplementary allusions afford uncertainty for the reader. Deploying Namwali Serpell’s terminology, I call this effect “oscillation.” Oscillation occurs when a novel presents two possible interpretations for the same set of facts. Even when “one [is] tagged as real or true, the other as illusory or false,” the reader is forced to hold both possibilities in mind while reading (Serpell 41). Dean is like Groucho, and he is not like Groucho. For Serpell, the power of oscillation is what it reveals about identification: “We move in and out of identification – with characters, with their identifications – and come to experience identification as an extreme, error-prone, ongoing projection” (72). Serpell is writing generally about readers’ ability to identify with characters, but her idea applies here. Sal is a limited first-person narrator; we see the cinematic allusions through his eyes. He has no access to the interiority of others, so any time he identifies another character with a cinematic type, we understand that he is projecting the type onto the character. These allusions do not control Sal’s narration, but neither do they grant him and his reader access to the interiority of the character he describes. Oscillating allusions reveal Sal’s 31 process of using the movies to understand the actions of others, but this is an “extreme, error-prone” project. We see both Sal’s power and his limits as a narrator.

For oscillation to occur, the allusion cannot simply be misplaced. Sal repeatedly insists on a connection between Dean and Groucho. At a party, “Dean ran like Groucho

Marx from group to group, digging everybody” (126). When Dean beats Sal in a footrace, he does so with “his legs twinkling like Groucho Marx” (154). At another party,

Dean “was gliding around the house like Groucho Marx” (187). Sal genuinely thinks that

Dean looks like Groucho Marx, and the repeated allusion encourages us to look for deeper parallels between the two. There are some: like Groucho, Dean is irreverent, manic, and one is never quite sure whether he is a dumb man playing smart or a smart man playing dumb. Elsewhere, Sal alludes to W. C. Fields, Chaplin, and Groucho in moments where he defines characters’ Beatness. These comics played a combination of shysters, hobos, quick-witted bums, characters on the fringes of society who embody an attractive spontaneity. On stage and screen, these men were liable to say or do anything in a given moment, and this quality is a useful shorthand for the frenetic, counter-cultural values of the Beat movement. We see how Dean embodies these values, but we also remember that he “has no coattails.” Groucho’s onscreen persona is a vaudeville act, an artificial type, as are the rest. We can understand why Sal sees Dean as Groucho, but we also know that the Groucho type could never exist outside of a movie. The stakes of this oscillation are high: if we are uncertain about the way Dean is cast as Groucho, we cannot fully trust that he ought to be cast as a Beat icon, either.

These repeated, supplementary allusions to Groucho replace another possibility for Dean’s character. Early in the novel, Sal notes, “My first impression of Dean was of a 32 young Gene Autry—trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent—a sideburned hero of the snowy West” (5). At first glance, this allusion seems to complement Dean’s character perfectly. A blue-collar worker from the American West, he is the closest thing to a literal cowboy in the novel. Sal describes Dean as a “young

Gene Autry,” identifying him with Autry’s “real Oklahoma accent.” This phrasing focuses on reality, not possibility; it is as if Dean embodies the kind of genuine Western upbringing that Autry had before he started to play the singing cowboy in Western films.

The comparison suggests that Dean is the genuine article, a real American hero who is unsullied by artifice. Granted, this is only Sal’s “first impression” of Dean, but the fact that he can imagine Dean as both Groucho and young Autry is precisely what makes him a useful symbol of the Beat movement. Dean is a real man, yet Sal can imagine him in various idealized modes.4

Late in the novel, Sal starts to question why he sees the world cinematically. On one of their road trips with nowhere to stay, Sal and Dean decide to sleep in an all-night movie theater in Detroit. They watch the same two movies six times: “The picture was

Singing Cowboy Eddie Dean and his gallant horse Bloop, that was number one; number two double-feature film was George Raft, Sidney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre in a picture about Istanbul” (244). The double feature pairs a musical cowboy B-movie and an international noir thriller. Sal recognizes the genre conventions of such films: “I heard big

Greenstreet sneer a hundred times; I heard Peter Lorre make his sinister come-on; I was with George Raft in his paranoiac fears; I rode and sang with Eddie Dean and shot up

Rustlers innumerable times” (244). Sal does not need to tell us which movies he watched, because these actors were consistently typecast.5 Sydney Greenstreet is always “big 33

Greenstreet,” the English character actor who sneers the same way in almost every film.

The same goes for Lorre (sinister sidekick), Raft (gangster), and Eddie Dean (country singer). They fulfill their assigned roles so precisely that Sal cannot help but associate them with the situations and emotions they represent onscreen.

With these observations, Sal proves that he can note the nuances of genre and typecasting. Despite understanding the artificiality of the films he is watching, however,

Sal turns a corner from passive viewership into identification: “I was with George Raft in his paranoiac fears; I rode and sang with Eddie Dean and shot up Rustlers innumerable times.” Sal begins to participate imaginatively in the action onscreen, especially with the actions carried out by leading men. He does not feel as though he became George Raft or

Eddie Dean, but he does feel as though he was with them throughout their various trials.

The role of a passive observer immersed in a scene is familiar for Sal. He is “with”

George Raft here in the same way that he has so often been with Dean/Groucho, close by but with no sense of what it would be like to take on the other’s role.

This is the moment when Sal turns the corner into paranoia. He does not yet think

(as Kerouac’s later narrators will) that someone is out to get him, but he does feel that he has lost control of his responses to the films in question. He plunges into a reverie:

We saw them waking, we heard them sleeping, we sensed them dreaming, we

were permeated completely with the strange Gray Myth of the West and the weird

Dark Myth of the East when morning came. All my actions since then have been

dictated automatically to my subconscious by this horrible osmotic experience.

(On the Road 244) 34

Sal states that he has been “permeated completely” by the “myths” put forth in the two movies. When he describes the experience as “osmotic,” he invokes a chemical transfer that lacks agency or even conscious thought. We can think of this moment as being affective in Brian Massumi’s sense of the word. He theorizes that bodily responses to visual stimuli are “marked by a gap between content and effect; it would appear that the strength or duration of an image’s effect is not logically connected to the content in any straightforward way” (Massumi 84). Indeed, the content of the movies does not seem to dictate Sal’s reaction: the noir is “paranoiac,” and the Western is lighthearted, but both lead to paranoia for Sal because these types are equally capable of imprinting on his subconscious. While “the strange Gray Myth of the West and the weird Dark Myth of the

East” differ in tone, both impact him in ways that are beyond his control and comprehension.

This description encourages the reader to rethink the supplemental allusions that

Sal has employed throughout his narrative. While they demonstrated Sal’s narrative control, now we see that the types in question were “dictated automatically to his subconscious.” Tim Hunt argues that what Sal learns at this moment is that “The movies are Hollywood pap, but they are experienced with an intensity that suggests something much more profound because of the imagination’s power to transform what it encounters” (51). In Hunt’s account, the movies themselves are meaningless, but Sal can exercise his agency and ascribe them meaning. I am arguing the opposite: he experiences the movies with such an intensity that they imprint onto his mind without his input. He has included dissident supplements to ward off this feeling, but the novel ends on a 35 paranoid note when he suspects that these efforts are futile. Sal can’t use supplements to create. He can only use them to cope.

The Dharma Bums and Escape from the Movies In The Dharma Bums, narrator Ray Smith has a new object of fascination in Japhy Ryder, based on Beat poet Gary Snyder. Japhy introduces Ray to the practices of Zen Buddhism and West Coast outdoor activities like camping and hiking. After climbing Matterhorn

Peak and attending the famed Six Gallery poetry reading in San Francisco, Ray takes a solitary job as a fire lookout in the mountains of Washington state, free to pursue enlightenment unfettered. For Japhy, the outdoors and Zen Buddhism represent two means of escaping from American society, especially American popular culture.

Following this lead, Ray is suspicious of the movies, but this does not stop him from employing cinematic allusions throughout the novel. The Dharma Bums is a transitional step in Kerouac’s use of the cinema. While Ray employs a mix of supplementary and complementary allusions, his main goal is to undermine rather than experiment with them.

Some of Ray’s cinematic allusions resemble those in On the Road. When introducing his friend Henry Morely, Ray notes that “years later I had further Three

Stooges adventures with him” (41). Ray explains that the pair will do manual labor working on Morely’s house, then “walk down Main Street . . . with ice-cream cones in our hands knocking into people on the little sidewalks like a couple of oldtime

Hollywood silent comedians, whitewash and all” (41). The tone of this allusion is ebullient. Ray and Morely will be so full of chaotic energy that a stimulus as mild as an ice cream cone is enough to send them bouncing disruptively off the people around them 36 on the sidewalk. However, there is also a supplement: these “Three Stooges adventures” will not play out until “years later,” a future anterior long after the events of the novel.

Ray demonstrates that he could tell Morely’s story in terms of cinematic types, but he chooses not to. Thus, Morely’s Stooge status oscillates in a new way; Ray says that the allusion is applicable, but not yet. He affirms the description but empties it of weight in the novel’s present.

Ray undermines the allusion because he is modeling himself after Japhy Ryder.

Unlike Dean Moriarty, Japhy Ryder is antithetical to the cinema, a fact that other characters discuss explicitly. Alvah Goldbook (Alan Ginsberg) argues that “Japhy Ryder is a great new hero of American culture,” but he and Ray disagree about how that status should play out (32). Ray holds an ascetic view, while Alvah argues for the popular:

“I think he’ll end up like Han Shan living alone in the mountains and writing

poems on the walls of cliffs, or chanting them to crowds outside his cave.”

“Or maybe he’ll go to Hollywood and be a movie star, you know he said

that the other day, he said, ‘Alvah you know I’ve never thought of going to the

movies and becoming a star, I can do anything you know, I haven’t tried that yet,’

and I believe him, he can do anything.” (32)

David Sterritt states that Kerouac uses film as “a paradoxically precise metaphor for a fundamentally imprecise phenomenon: the ‘impermanence’ of the human condition that constitutes one of the Three Marks of Existence in the Buddhist belief system”

(Screening the Beats 50). The movies and Eastern philosophy are divergent paths here;

Ray thinks that Japhy will wind up in the mountains like the poet Han Shan, whereas

Alvah believes that he can become a movie star. Yet Sterritt is correct to point out that 37 the cinema takes on a “fundamentally imprecise” meaning in this moment. The concept of movie stardom seems especially ephemeral when contrasted with the material realities of living in the mountains or scratching poems into a rocky cliff. We can picture this mountain poet, but Alvah’s assertion that Japhy could be a “movie star” is entirely abstracted, devoid of references to specific actors or character types. The movies remain attenuated as a resource for characterization, and their applicability to Japhy is particularly suspect.

Shortly after this exchange, Ray laments the fact that Japhy, despite all his learning in poetry and Eastern philosophy, is not welcome at Berkeley. Ray states that the city is nothing but “rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everyone looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time” (39). Japhy not only refuses to watch television but rejects the entire “middle- class non-identity” that it represents. This is a vague justification for Japhy and Ray’s distrust of the movies. “Looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing” leads to a

“middle-class non-identity,” but Ray does not elaborate on what kind of ideology is communicated in this process. Television, which is absent from On the Road, is the specific target of this critique because it is inside people’s homes, further enforcing the conformity of cookie-cutter suburbia. Still, the experience echoes Sal’s “horrible osmotic experience” at the movie theater, where a screen changes viewers’ understanding of the world without their realizing it.

Ray’s ideological concerns are not fleshed out in his diatribe against TV, but a later allusion associates TV with typecasting and control. Under Japhy’s sway, Ray conflates the outdoors with inner peace and American civilization with sorrow. He 38 hitches a ride to California, feeling self-sufficient and content: “I realized that I had indeed learned from Japhy how to cast off the evils of the world and the city and find my true pure soul, just as long as I had a decent pack on my back” (156). When Ray hops a train, however, a figure from TV greets him: “Suddenly here came a great big young cop with a gun swinging in a holster on his hip, all done up like on TV the sheriff of Cochise and Wyatt Earp, and giving me a steely look through dark glasses and orders me out of the yards” (159). As in On the Road, the Western figure represents law and order, and a cascade of complements support this point, from his “steely look” to his “dark glasses” to the “order” he issues to Ray. These images align, casting the cop as an impenetrable

Western sheriff. With no recourse to supplement, Ray has no choice but to follow orders.

He is not in control.

These allusions to television demonstrate a shift in attitude between On the Road and The Dharma Bums. TV was, of course, a threat to the very existence of the movie industry in post-war America. Robert Sklar writes, “As more and more small neighborhood theaters closed their doors, there was no longer need to produce scores of

“B” Westerns and melodramas to fill screen time in inexpensive houses” (282). Sklar points out that this talent pool often transitioned into making similar content for television. While Kerouac gives no clues that he understood these economic realities facing the cinema, his narrator prefers figures from the past over the present. The allusion to the Sheriff of Cochise is a good example. Running from 1957-1959, it was on the air when Kerouac penned the novel. Furthermore, while the program employs the Western trope of a sheriff keeping the peace in an Arizona ranch town, it is a contemporary take on the genre where fights are liable to break out at a malt shop rather than a saloon. The 39

Sheriff of Cochise is contemporary and specific, whereas most of Kerouac’s allusions in

On the Road were backward-looking and vague. While a reader, in 1959 or today, might appreciate this allusion for helping us to imagine what the railway officer looks like, there is no question of Ray’s feeling sentimental or trying to fashion something new as

Sal Paradise did in On the Road. It is a complementary allusion with a one-to-one correlation; the authority figure from TV is an authority figure in the novel.

Ray maintains some traces of the old nostalgia when he references figures from

Hollywood, but he often empties these allusions of weight. At one point during the

Matterhorn hike, Ray notes Japhy’s gracefulness as he climbs:

I saw all Japhy’s boyhood in those eastern Oregon forests the way he went about

it. He walked like he talked, from behind I could see his toes point slightly

inward, the way mine do, instead of out; but when it came time to climb he

pointed his toes out, like Chaplin, to make a kind of easier flapthwap as he

trudged. (58)

The allusion to Chaplin is supplementary and oscillating; it fits and does not fit. But there is no question of using Chaplin to draw wider conclusions about Japhy’s character. This is a vivid way to describe what Japhy looks like while climbing, but we do not identify him with the little tramp even provisionally. If anything, we can see a parallel in the way that Japhy and Chaplin make the difficult look simple, as climbing and slapstick gags require a degree of hidden athletic prowess that the viewer may not appreciate. Still, the movies are part of Ray’s worldview. Ray’s mind jumps immediately to Chaplin when he sees Japhy’s bowlegged walk, even though he has other explanations for Japhy’s actions, such as his experience hiking during his Oregonian upbringing. He is less skeptical about 40 classic figures like Chaplin than about the contemporary Sheriff of Cochise, yet he does not allude to them with the kind of optimism that Sal demonstrated in On the Road.

Ultimately, Ray seeks peaceful coexistence with the movies. If he can’t escape them, he may as well learn to live with them. We see this when Ray shares a prayer with

Japhy:

I sit down and say, and I run all my friends and relatives and enemies one by one

like this, without entertaining angers or gratitudes or anything, and I say, like

‘Japhy Ryder, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha,’ then

I run on, say, to ‘David O. Selznick, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a

coming Buddha,’ though I don’t use David O. Selznick, just people I know

because when I say the words ‘equally a coming Buddha’ I want to be thinking of

their eyes. (68-9)

David O. Selznick’s appearance in this list is supplemental. An extraordinary in a list of ordinaries, the producer’s name is out of place and causes the reader to take note of the contents of the prayer. Selznick also oscillates when Ray literally prays for him while insisting, “I don’t use David O. Selznick.” He is and he isn’t there. Ray’s solution to the question of how to use the movies is to empty them of their symbolic power, insisting that those who make and appear in films are just like the rest of us. Selznick is just another friend to pray for, or not, as one will. The act that he appears in a Zen prayer—

Ray’s new path to self-fulfillment—is more important than his status as a producer.

Near the end of the novel, Ray makes a second bold declaration about the movies.

He addresses himself to Psyche, a beautiful love interest and ingénue:

“Psyche,” I said, “This world is the movie of what everything is, it is one movie, 41

made of the same stuff throughout, belonging to nobody, which is what

everything is.”

“Ah, baloney.” (181)

This is not a cinematic allusion in the sense that I have been developing in this chapter, as it refers neither to a particular figure from film nor to film viewership. Instead, Kerouac relies on a “camera eye” metaphor. Michael North writes that such metaphors usually represent a “significant break in the facade thrown up by the senses” (27). Here Ray declares that the camera eye is a grand new vision of existence itself: “This world is the movie.” Ray tells Psyche that the film of existence “belongs to nobody”—it cannot be sold or bought, only experienced on an individual level. Television and film foster conformity because they select and organize what the viewer sees. For the cinema to serve as a metaphor for enlightenment, it must be a purely imaginative experience.

While this might seem like the height of Kerouac’s optimism toward film, it is a step toward capitulation. He abandons the project of using cinematic allusions to experiment with character in favor of a vague camera-eye metaphor. He has retreated from the specificity of allusion in the hopes that analogies from the cinema might help characters and readers to see the world differently. Even Psyche, a young woman under

Ray’s sway, calls this “baloney.” The Dharma Bums’ consideration of film ends unevenly: even as the novel affirms the movies as benign, it records ideological impact.

Middle-class homeowners still watch TV, and the movies inflect Ray’s vision in ways he cannot control. Ray cannot escape the cinema’s impact on his life, even when he runs to the mountains. To say “the world is a movie” is to be stuck. If he makes peace with this fact, it must be an uneasy peace. 42

Paranoia Sans Supplement in Big Sur Big Sur is bleaker than the previous two novels. It is also more reflexive about Kerouac’s experiences as an author. Narrator Jack Duluoz, an embittered writer who is trying to escape the expectations of fame placed on him after the success of a novel titled On the

Road, spends most of the story drunk. Lorenzo Monsanto (Lawrence Ferlinghetti), offers

Duluoz the use of his cabin on Big Sur to convalesce. The novel splits time between Big

Sur and San Francisco, and Duluoz’s drinking and paranoia isolate him from everyone around him, including his lover Billie and his old friend Cody Pomeray (Neal Cassady).

As he surrenders to paranoia, Duluoz gives up on supplements as a means to resist the influence of film. He recognizes that the movies can only control, not be controlled.

Sianne Ngai defines paranoia as “a species of fear based on the dysphoric apprehension of a holistic and all-encompassing system” (299). She points out that in genres of male paranoia that were pervasive in the middle of the twentieth century, such as the noir detective film, this is “not just a singular and unified system, but one anthropomorphized into a subject capable of ‘understanding’ its enemies and ‘dealing’ with them accordingly” (300). Kerouac’s use of cinema in Big Sur fits this description, as

Duluoz mixes the controlling force of the movies with a sense of predestination ordered by a personified God. Early in the novel, Duluoz refers to his own memories as “pleasant mental movies brought up at will and projected for further study” (25). This sounds hopeful until he continues, “As I imagine God to be doing this very minute watching his own movie, which is us” (25). It is not even that God is directing a movie with Duluoz starring in it; God is watching his actions as if they were an already-completed movie. 43

Duluoz feels paranoid that he is not in control of his own narrative, and God is the

“anthropomorphized subject” on whom he projects those fears.

Kerouac’s distrust of mass culture has grown. Ronna C. Johnson suggests that this is partially due to the way his career changed after he appeared on The Steve Allen Show in 1959. During this famous interview, Allen played smooth jazz piano while Kerouac explained his goals as a writer and gave a reading from the unpublished manuscript

Visions of Cody (1971). In Johnson’s view, Allen’s “square” questions served to make

Beat literature digestible for a mass audience rather than taking Kerouac seriously as an author. She writes that “The celebrity commodification of Kerouac cannibalizes the artistic originality that occasioned his television appearance in the first place” (Johnson

26). Gary Snyder and experiments with Zen made Kerouac question mass culture, but this interview had a more significant impact. He saw firsthand how a television interview could reduce the complex figure of “Jack Kerouac” into a type.

Duluoz brings up this interview directly in Big Sur. At one point he tells himself,

“‘Go back to childhood, just eat apples and read your Catechism – sit on curbstones, the hell with the hot lights of Hollywood’ (remembering that awful time only a year earlier when I had to rehearse my reading of prose a third time under the hot lights of the Steve

Allen Show)” (24). Duluoz thinks of the interview as a moment when he needed to be authentic, yet even reading his own words was a challenge that required multiple rehearsals. The hot lights contributed to his feeling of inauthenticity, as they were part of the visual illusion of television and fostered physical discomfort that he was obligated to hide. Duluoz wishes that he could return to a state of childlike, doctrinal innocence, reading his catechism to escape this mediated reality. Unlike the situation in The Dharma 44

Bums, there is no sense that the movies can be fashioned into a metaphor for enlightenment or incorporated into one’s life. There is only monolithic Hollywood, inauthentic and spiritually draining. To be portrayed onscreen is automatically to be typecast, and to watch others onscreen is to be complicit in their typecasting.

Like Kerouac, Duluoz has been frustrated in his attempts to get movies made.

David Sterritt documents the arduous process that Kerouac went through when he tried to sell On the Road to Warner Bros. and later to Paramount. It appeared that Marlon Brando would sign on to play Sal Paradise, but the project was scrapped when he withdrew (Mad to Be Saved 17). Later, when Kerouac succeeded in selling The Subterraneans (1958) to

MGM, the movie that appeared in 1960 famously bore little resemblance to his novella;

Patrick Mullins calls this adaptation “a somewhat misguided attempt to create a lush

Hollywood production about a generally reviled cultural subgroup” (33).6 Scholars consider the film to be a bastardization of its source material.

Duluoz remembers a similar experience in Big Sur. He thinks about all the phony clothes that he needed to buy for a meeting in Hollywood, including “an expensive tweed jacket” and “two silly sport shirts,” which “were nine bucks each!” (34). He got more pleasure out of an “old green T-shirt” that he found in a dump. He muses, “On my deathbed I could be remembering that creek day and forgetting the day MGM bought my book, I could be remembering the old lost green dump T-shirt and forgetting the sapphired robes ---Mebbe the best way to get into Heaven” (34). Many scholars consider the avant-garde spirit of the Beats to be incompatible with Hollywood, pointing to failed adaptations of Beat works as proof.7 Duluoz echoes that sentiment here. From the paranoid perspective of Big Sur, Duluoz’s failed run-ins with the movie industry are 45 bread crumbs that confirm his current mindset. He should have known all along that the movies were trying to take control of his life. It’s obvious in retrospect.

Ngai would call Duluoz a paranoid male narrator: he thinks that friends, fans, businessmen, movie executives, and God himself are all out to get him. Fittingly, he employs complementary allusions to paranoid cinematic genres, submitting to the tone of such movies. For instance, when he sees a cabin on a cliff, Duluoz muses: “Who would build a cabin up there but some bored but hoary old adventurous architect maybe got sick of running for congress and one of these days a big Orson Welles tragedy ghosts a woman in a white nightgown’ll go flying down that sheer cliff” (21-2). This allusion to

Welles stands in stark contrast to the road films, Westerns, and comedies that Kerouac alludes to in the previous novels. Instead of relying on the competent reader’s knowledge of Welles’ oeuvre, we get a composite character. Whoever lives in the house runs for office like Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) and has a ghostly wife who falls to her death like Rochester’s wife in Jane Eyre (Robert Stevenson, 1943).

Once Duluoz thinks of Welles, he has to follow the idea through to completion. Nobody but a “hoary old adventurous architect” would live in such a place, and such men’s wives always wind up “flying down that sheer cliff.” Shadowy genre conventions become a reality in Duluoz’s mind. He sees something from the movies and assumes that all of its layers of association should obtain in life as well.

Even allusions that should serve as respite follow this pattern. The events of Big

Sur mark the end of Duluoz’s friendship with Cody Pomeray, bookending the relationship that Kerouac began to document between Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty in

On the Road. The allusion is familiar: “It always ends up being some hilarious 46 meaningless Marx Brothers adventure which gives me more reason to love him” (135).

The nature of the allusion has changed in an essential way. Instead of focusing on Cody

Pomeray’s similarities to Groucho Marx as a means of characterization, here the allusion is to the plot of a “hilarious meaningless Marx Brothers adventure.” Marx Brothers films defy logic and reason, and in these terms, the allusion is complementary: Duluoz asserts that life, like a Marx Brothers film, is both “hilarious” and “meaningless.” Duluoz and

Cody Pomeray have fallen into a pattern of behavior that neither of them understands, and they are unable to find their way out of it. While Duluoz insists that this gives him

“more reason to love” Pomeray, their friendship is another controlling system about which Duluoz can be paranoid. He ends it.

Duluoz’s paranoia reaches its height in the novel’s final night, when he cannot sleep for his anger at his mistress and fear that his friends are trying to poison him. He articulates this paranoia: “So I try . . . turning over rigidly my eyes wide open staring full fright into the dark like the time in the movie Humphrey Bogart who’s just killed his partner and you see his eyes staring into the fire rigid and insane—That’s just the way

I’m staring” (203). This allusion can only be to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John

Huston, 1948). Humphrey Bogart’s character, Dobbs, makes a fortune as a prospector then goes insane because he is convinced that his partners plan to steal from him. Duluoz himself has identified with Bogart so completely that the only way to convey this to the reader is this single image of “rigid and insane” eyes glinting in the firelight. “That’s just the way I’m staring.” Unlike the supplements to other allusions, this complement forces the reader to picture what his eyes look like. The only access we have to Duluoz’s internal state is by interpreting his face as if we were watching The Treasure of the Sierra 47

Madre. The subject matter of the novel and film align perfectly. Both Duluoz and Dobbs are paranoid, both of them stare into the fire, both sets of eyes gleam.

Conclusion In his earlier work, Kerouac thinks through the ways that movies can change the thoughts and actions of their viewers. Sal’s optimism gives way to Ray’s ambivalence, which gives way to Duluoz’s paranoia. Once Kerouac decided that the cinema’s impact was malign, he used the movies as a metaphor for broader theological questions about the nature of salvation and free will. But these later, heady uses of the movies build on the seemingly lighter ones from his earlier novels. Kerouac made iterative attempts to articulate the ways that the cinema changes an individual’s way of looking at the world, and it was only after he did so that he moved onto the broader implications of this trend.

For Kerouac, the movies are about control. They control those who act in them. They control those who watch them by infecting their minds with unnatural tropes. These ideas appear throughout the three novels I have analyzed in this chapter, with the stakes of the argument reaching a crescendo of cosmic proportions.

Cinematic allusions are an important element of Kerouac’s fiction, yet most analyses of his relationship to the movies either focus on his time as a failed screenwriter or analyze how he seems to replicate cinematic techniques in prose. Granted, some of

Kerouac’s more experimental novels, such as Visions of Cody or Doctor Sax (1959), invite analysis along these lines, as they explicitly test the limits of what novels and films can accomplish at the level of form. Even so, his copious cinematic allusions receive little critical attention because there does not seem to be much to say about them. In this chapter, I challenge this perception by shifting the focus from what the allusion means to 48 how it means. Even if we grant (as I have) an ideal reader who knows all about Charlie

Chaplin, a reference to Chaplin takes on radically different meanings when an author employs tools like supplements, complements, and oscillation.

However, while these techniques are significant to Kerouac’s oeuvre, they do not quite represent a single, declarative statement about the relative affordances of novels and films. Kerouac imagines the cinema to work in affective terms, impacting its viewers without their input or understanding. We can never be quite sure which images will stick in our heads after we watch a picture, and we do not have control over how these images may make us think or feel. With this paradigm, it would seem that Kerouac is trying to claim a primacy of literature over the cinema. He suggests that the movies impact viewers in unexamined ways, whereas his novels—especially On the Road and The

Dharma Bums— afford reflection and allow a reader to diagnose these problems. The complementary allusions in Big Sur complicate this account, however. In that novel,

Kerouac contents himself to replicate the tone of films without any irony or distance, even as he continues to rail against the film and television industries. If cinematic affects are harmful to those who consume them, he leaves his literary project open to the same critique.

49

Chapter 2: Affectless Acting in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer

“Linda and I went out to a theater in a new suburb. It was evident that somebody

had miscalculated, for the suburb had quit growing and here was the theater, a

pink stucco cube, sitting out in a field by itself. A strong wind whipped the waves

against the seawall; even inside you heard the racket.” (The Moviegoer 4)

At the beginning of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, the narrator, Binx Bolling, describes a movie date. Characteristically, he observes the theater’s quirkiness, a “pink stucco cube” that gets noisy in nasty weather. While Binx watches the movie with his date, Linda, the wind buffeting the sides of the theater distracts him. The storm continues throughout the movie, a nondescript film about a man with amnesia who falls in love with the local librarian. It is still raging when Binx and Linda leave the theater: “The waves jumped over the seawall and spattered the street. The manager had to yell to be heard while from the speaker directly over his head came the twittering conversation between the amnesiac and the librarian” (5). The movie’s dialogue, as much as the surging water, drowns out the conversation between him and the manager. These images of seeing a film on a stormy night, when setting and movie interact and even interrupt one another, set up some of the most important questions that recur throughout the novel.

How do the particularities of place “spill over” into our viewing experiences? Which aspects of a movie continue to blare in our minds after we leave the theater?

Binx wants to control this overflow. The movies contribute to what he calls “the search,” a would-be existentialist project whereby he wards off the ennui that attends his 50 twin identities as a Korean War veteran and the black sheep of an aristocratic New

Orleans family. Scholars have struggled to interpret the mixture of irony and seriousness with which Binx approaches the movies. He values them, yet he self-consciously uses them to escape the sense of duty he feels toward his matriarchal Aunt Emily and emotionally disturbed cousin, Kate Cutrer. Amplifying the concepts of supplement and complement from Chapter 1, I analyze the affordances of Binx’s allusions to film, which include plot synopses, portrayals of movie theaters, and references to stars. Initially, Binx employs such allusions to block the transfer of affect between himself and others, especially in moments when he imitates male movie stars. As the novel progresses, however, this system breaks down, as certain places and people call forth feelings of sentimentality and obligation in Binx. He values the movies as a tool for self-fashioning that bypasses intersubjectivity, but he eventually capitulates to social expectations and abandons the project.

Synopses and the Erasure of Affect As the novel’s narrator, Binx provides a synopsis for the reader whenever he mentions a movie; in the first half of the book, this happens roughly once every three pages. These synopses often lack a clear relationship to the action that Binx is narrating. They seem to be an end in themselves. For instance, in the above movie-going scene, immediately after describing the “pink stucco cube” of the theater, Binx launches into a synopsis of the film he and Linda saw:

The movie was about a man who lost his memory in an accident and as a result

lost everything: his family, his friends, his money. He found himself a stranger in

a strange city. Here he had to make a fresh start, find a new place to live, a new 51

job, a new girl. It was supposed to be a tragedy, his losing all this, and he seemed

to suffer a great deal. On the other hand, things were not so bad after all. In no

time he found a very picturesque place to live, a houseboat on the river, and a

very handsome girl, the local librarian.” (4-5)

The synopsis is distinctive for what it contains and leaves out, focusing on the bare-bones elements of the plot: a man has amnesia in a new town. The man survives, but we do not know how he overcomes the obstacles facing him or even if he ever recovers his memory. Despite the mock-objective tone of the synopsis, we can see that this summary is filtered through Binx’s interpretive lens.1 We are aligned with Binx, so this summary represents what he remembers about this film and hints at what he values in movies generally.

Binx’s distillation of the film’s plot is devoid of affective markers. He does not indicate that the movie made him feel anything, and his discussion of the characters’ feelings is cold and distant. The phrase “It was supposed to be a tragedy” shows that Binx knows he is supposed to have an emotional reaction to the film, but he is more interested in analyzing characters than identifying with them. The fact that the amnesiac “seemed to suffer a great deal” does not bother Binx, nor does he take pleasure in the fact that the hero eventually finds comfort and affection. The particular place that the hero finds to live (“a houseboat on the river”) and the handsome girl he finds (“the local librarian”) are bracketed off as parentheticals in the sentence. It would make no real difference if he wound up in a stately cottage in the woods with the night nurse from the local hospital.

Binx reduces the movie’s plot to its most formulaic elements, creating a barricade between himself and the film’s affective content. Rather than complementing or 52 supplementing the action of the novel, his synopses encapsulate the plot of a movie into a self-contained unit. Binx does not point to the differences between the movies and reality so much as he seals the movies into their own reality, separate from his own. The reader may see parallels between this film and Binx’s romantic situation, but he discourages such a reading by distancing himself from its content.

Binx uses this moment to teach the reader how movies fit into his existentialist project, “the search”:

The movies are onto the search, but they screw it up. The search always ends in

despair. They like to show a fellow coming to himself in a strange place—but

what does he do? He takes up with the local librarian, sets about proving to the

local children what a nice fellow he is, and settles down with a vengeance. In two

weeks’ time he is so sunk in everydayness that he might just as well be dead. (13)

Binx values the idea of a man “coming to himself in a strange place” precisely because he is separate from the “everydayness” of life. The amnesiac blocks affect in two directions.

The man with no memory has no preconceptions about the world around him, and his own internal states are unintelligible to anyone who looks at him. This character is pure, formulaic possibility, all surface and no depth. That is what makes him valuable for Binx: not that Binx can project feelings onto the amnesiac, but rather because he serves as a model of an affectless existence. The movies “screw it up” when they close down this possibility in favor of a fixed outcome. When the amnesiac extends love toward the librarian or kindness toward schoolchildren, he loses his potential as an affectless actor.

He changes from unknowable to recognizable. 53

The synopses shorten as the novel progresses, but they always point to this theme of self-fashioning. Another change is that Percy references specific films, breaking with

Kerouac’s practice of alluding to stars and plots in the abstract. For instance, when Binx watches Panic in the Streets (Elia Kazan, 1950) with his cousin Kate, the synopsis is almost absurdly brief: “Richard Widmark is a public health inspector who learns that a culture of cholera bacilli has gotten loose in the city” (63). This synopsis is idiosyncratic, even inaccurate; in the film, the outbreak is the pneumatic plague, not cholera.

Furthermore, Binx ignores those parts of the film that are most pertinent to his circumstances. Widmark plays a responsible doctor who follows through on his familial responsibilities and works for the good of the community. Binx shirks such duties, and his Aunt Emily, the family matriarch, is pressuring him to become a doctor.

Conveniently, Binx’s synopsis avoids mentioning such complementary parallels to his own life because it focuses on a leading man who carries out a discrete action. He is only interested in a simple statement of fact: here is what Richard Widmark did.2

Synopses focus on a protagonist’s visible actions rather than the motivations for those actions or how they might make an audience feel. Binx describes the Western Fort

Dobbs like this: “Clint Walker rides over the badlands, up a butte, and stops. He dismounts, squats, sucks a piece of mesquite and studies the terrain. A few decrepit buildings huddle down there in the canyon. We know nothing of him, where he comes from or where he goes” (143).3 We see Clint Walker’s cowboy, but we “know nothing of him.” The viewer may want to know what Clint Walker thinks when he studies the landscape, but his acting reveals nothing. He is in a separate world from the audience, and he chooses not to tell them anything about it. Binx’s ekphrastic description brings the 54 reader into the experience of watching Clint Walker. As readers, we are closer to this movie than when we read Binx’s other synopses, but it also highlights our sense of disconnect from Walker. Binx suggests that even if we had seen the movie, we would not know what Clint Walker thinks or feels.

Binx seems to enjoy all the films I have described to this point, even praising Fort

Dobbs explicitly. The kind of picture he dislikes is also revealing. On his way home from work one evening, Binx stops off at his local theater to say hello to Mr. Kinsella, the owner. Binx states that he does not want to see the movie that is playing because it is a

“Jane Powell picture,” but Mr. Kinsella pulls him into the theater for a “sample” (73).

While Binx only gets a glimpse of the movie, he has a strong reaction which he records in detail:

There go Jane and some fellow walking arm in arm down the street in a high

wide and handsome style and doing a wake up and sing number. The doorman,

the cop on the corner, the taxi driver, each sunk in his own private misery, smile

and begin to tap their feet. I am hardly ever depressed by a movie and Jane Powell

is a very nice-looking girl, but the despair of it is enough to leave you gone in the

stomach. (74)

Like the Fort Dobbs synopsis, a snippet of action stands in for the whole movie (though in this case the “wake up and sing number” is all Binx has seen). But that is where the similarity ends. The first sentence about Jane and her fellow maintains an objective tone, but the remainder exhibits conflicting emotions: each minor character is “sunk in his own private misery” before smiling and playing along with the dance. Binx, who usually leaves his own feelings about a film’s content out of his synopses, is left “gone in the 55 stomach” by what he sees. Why is this so different from the other examples? The spectacle of musicals is inextricable from the form itself. There is no way to distill down the action into a punchy, affectless sentence because the whole point of a musical number is to stop the flow of the narrative in favor of spectacle. The viewer of Fort Dobbs wonders what Clint Walker is thinking; the viewer of this film sees the feelings of Jane

Powell and all the extras strewn about the screen.

These plot synopses reveal that Binx fixates on leading men whose feelings are opaque to the viewer. At one point he muses,

Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments from their lives: the

time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl

in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say

in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember.”

(7)

Binx scorns romance; a “sweet and natural relationship” with a “lonely girl” is nothing to write home about. He continues, “What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man” (7). Binx does not say what makes these cinematic moments memorable to him. He does not recall the feeling of watching the film, or that he identified with the actions of these leading men.

Nevertheless, these cinematic memories are imprinted onto his mind, and he begins to base his actions off the movies as if they were his real memories.4 Like these leading men, he wants to impact others while remaining impenetrable himself.

56

Affectless Acting Early in the novel, Binx walks down the street and sees a man and woman who appear to be on their honeymoon. Binx, ever the adept student of character, boasts that “It takes two seconds to size up the couple” (15). While he has never seen them before, he explains their problems:

They are not really happy. He is afraid that their honeymoon is too conventional,

that they are just another honeymoon couple . . . He is anxious; he is threatened

from every side. Each stranger he passes is a reproach to him, every doorway a

threat. What is wrong? he wonders. She is unhappy for a different reason, because

he is unhappy and she knows it but doesn’t know why. (15)

Binx believes that he understands the young couple’s problems because they are easily recognizable types. They exhibit the anxiety of newlyweds, wearing these emotions so openly that they are visible from across the street. Their plight is itself a problem of characterization: in the novel he is narrating, as in the movies, Binx does not like characters who are an emotional open book.

In a happy coincidence, Binx and the couple walk past William Holden, who is filming a movie in New Orleans. This is the only time that a movie star appears in the world of the novel, and people on the street are abuzz at the sight of him. Holden casts the couple’s problem into starker relief, but he also provides a solution:

Holden slaps his pockets for a match . . . But nobody can find a match for him. By

now the couple have caught up with him. The boy holds out a light, nods briefly

to Holden’s thanks, then passes on without a flicker of recognition. Holden walks

along between them for a second; he and the boy talk briefly, look up at the sky,

shake their heads. Holden gives them a pat on the shoulder and moves on ahead. 57

The Boy has done it! He has won the title to his own existence, as plenary

an existence now as Holden’s, by refusing to be stampeded like the ladies from

Hattiesburg. He is a citizen like Holden; two men of the world they are. All at

once the world is open to him. (16)

What is it about the interaction that assuages the boy’s ennui? It is the fact that he can suppress his excitement and interact with Holden “without a flicker of recognition.” In this affectless interaction, he transforms from an open book to someone who knows how to hide his emotions. Binx goes on in his semi-mystical way to say that this is an example of the “peculiar reality” that movie stars possess. But instead of explaining what gives them this quality, Binx returns to the boy: “Clearly, he would like nothing better than to take Holden over to his fraternity house in the most casual way. ‘Bill, I want you to meet

Phil. Phil, Bill Holden’” (17). Movie stars teach us how to be cool, a concept that I will elaborate on in my next chapter. We watch movie stars, but they are unfazed and impervious to our looks. We only see what they want us to see, and we can never be sure what they are thinking.

This is the quality that Binx wants to replicate from the movies. William Holden is an especially useful model because of his reputation as a non-actor. A 1957 Time profile argues, “For the good cinemactor [sic], there is only one way to act: don’t. The camera comes so close that the slightest insincerity can be seen. Bill’s whole experience has taught him not to play a part, but to play himself in the part” (qtd. in Cohan, 225).

Steven Cohan, building on Richard Dyer’s work on stars, argues that Holden embodied the ideal of authenticity, of seeming to maintain a genuine core persona as he passed from role to role. I think that the ability “to play oneself in the part,” is a useful paraphrase for 58

Binx’s idea that movie stars possess a “peculiar reality.” Unlike Kerouac’s narrators who value the ability to change between personae, Binx wants to replicate the quality of a male movie star who outwardly remains the same in every situation. This is the phenomenon I am calling “affectless acting,” which has affordances in two directions:

Binx the character takes on star personae that block other characters from seeing what he is thinking and feeling, whereas Binx the narrator shows the irony of such a project to the reader.

At the beginning of the book, Binx gets a new secretary, Sharon. In an attempt to seduce her, he invents a problem at his investment firm, saying that she must stay late to help him write personalized tax reports for each of their clients. As he and Sharon work late, Binx muses: “Toward her I keep a Gregory Peckish sort of distance. I am a tall blackheaded fellow and I know as well as he how to keep myself, make my eyes fine and my cheeks spare, tuck my lip and say a word or two with a nod or two” (68). When Binx says, “I know as well as he how to keep myself,” he places himself on the same level as

Peck. He does so to make himself inscrutable, to block Sharon from seeing that he burns with desire. Like the synopses that only look at the surface of a film and boil it down,

Binx only wants her to be able to see his surface while blocking access to his underlying emotions. When Binx uses Gregory Peck in this way, it sets up a perverse kind of dramatic irony that heightens the reader’s sense of distance from Sharon. We know that

Sharon is in undergoing a campaign of unwanted sexual advances from her boss, but

Binx uses his Gregory Peck mask to conceal this from her and even make the prospect alluring. Sharon sees the full effect of Binx playing the “tall blackheaded fellow,” but we 59 understand that Binx has a heightened awareness of his eyes, cheeks, and lips. His acting seems effortless, but it is a lot of work.

Binx continues his Gregory Peck impersonation while dictating to Sharon until, at the end of the passage, she tells him that she will be busy the following evening and unable to work late. Intuiting that Sharon must have a date with someone else, Binx muses, “Now I am Gregory-grim and no fooling this time. What the devil. Three weeks in New Orleans and she’s already having dates?” (71) The key to this description is the fact that he is “Gregory-grim and no fooling this time.” When Binx learns that Sharon has a boyfriend, it makes him genuinely grim. His identification with Peck is more authentic for that reason, but it ceases to be expedient for him. Instead of putting on Peck’s features as a mask to hide his intentions, Binx finds himself in a situation where he actually feels like brooding like a Peck character working in an office. While the surface that he presents to Sharon remains unaltered by this realization, Peck’s affordances for Binx have changed. The Peck persona now clearly expresses his feelings to Sharon and the reader, instead of being a wall between the two. Ironically, Binx considers it a failure when his face accurately expresses his emotions.

Binx continues his pursuit of Sharon. He takes her out of the office to inspect some land that he is selling, and again he becomes aroused: “I go home as the old Gable, asweat and with no thought for her and sick to death with desire” (96). That Binx has “no thought for her” creates uncertainty for the reader: does he mean that he does not care about Sharon’s wellbeing, or that he is putting her from his mind? Either way, he is “sick to death with desire,” and the Clark Gable persona is the only thing standing between his sexual urges and the seeming propriety of the employer-employee relationship. When the 60 two return to the office, Binx notes that “It is possible to stand at the window, loosen my collar and rub the back of my neck like Dana Andrews” (96). Binx has taken a liberty by loosening his collar, and he must lean on a cinematic model, Dana Andrews, to decide how to perform this maneuver without an appearance of impropriety. Clark Gable is the right star to imitate during the car ride because he is the template for sublimated desire, whereas Dana Andrews is right for the office because he is a figure of manful exhaustion.

Binx is constantly calibrating his performance, deciding what the situation requires.

Depending on the strength or kind of emotion he is experiencing (arousal versus calculated scheming, for instance), he picks the correct actor to mask his intentions. To

Sharon, all of these personae appear to be complementary, as Binx remains some version of the macho boss, but the reader always sees the underlying irony of how hard Binx must work to maintain this role.

Binx’s acting eventually pays off with a romantic trip down to the Gulf Coast with Sharon, which, as we will see, comes with its own set of complications. We might think that his performance is an unmitigated success, but there is a limit to the level of control Binx can exert in this way. Early in the novel, he sees an attractive young woman on the bus as he makes his way through New Orleans. He describes her appearance in some detail, from her “Prince Val bangs” to the “fine swell of calf above her cellophane boot” (12). To Binx, such a woman is a character type, and he posits that “If it were a movie, I would have only to wait. The bus would get lost or the city would be bombed and she and I would tend the wounded. As it is, I may as well stop thinking about her”

(13). Binx recognizes that there is more to the movies than the star personae that fascinate him; movies also have plots that put stars into contexts in which their desires are likely to 61 be realized. Binx can imitate the stars, but he can’t turn his life into a movie plot, producing a deus ex machina to make a woman fall for him.

This scene not only shows the limits of Binx as a narrator (i.e., he is first-person limited, narrating events that have already taken place, so he cannot access the thoughts of the people around him or manipulate the plot to match his will). It demonstrates the limits of his acting as well. After noting that he will never end up with the girl on the bus,

Binx mourns the fact that she will probably fall for “the first little Mickey Rooney that comes along” (12).5 Mickey Rooney is the opposite of the leading men that Binx imitates.

A child star for MGM, Rooney sang songs that expressed joy or lovesickness in sentimental films. Binx mimics movie stars who block affect, making it inaccessible to others, and this serves him well in some situations. But some girls are looking for a

Mickey Rooney, so his method will be no help with them. And, more to the point, Binx can only keep up his acting for so long before he breaks character.

Sentimental Settings and Female Characters Cracks begin to appear in Binx’s stony mask as the novel progresses. While Binx can pen a cool synopsis after the fact, he falls into sentimentality whenever he describes a movie theater. At a showing of the Western Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948), for instance,

Binx has a “faint stirring of curiosity” about the Tiviola theater where he watches the movie (75). He explains, “As Montgomery Clift was whipping John Wayne in a fist fight, an absurd scene, I made a mark on my seat arm with my thumbnail. Where, I wondered, will this particular piece of wood be twenty years from now, 543 years from now?” (75).

Instead of providing his usual, objective synopsis of Red River, Binx gets distracted halfway through a sentence describing an “absurd” scene, then gets caught up in a 62 meditation about his seat. Perhaps he considers this scene to be absurd because it is filled with sentiment. Red River’s plot seems as though it is going to lead to a climactic gunfight between Wayne and Clift, who has betrayed him and stolen his herd. After this fight, however, Wayne relents, accepts Clift as an adoptive son, and makes him a partner in his ranch. However Binx may feel about the macho spectacle onscreen, sitting in a movie theater makes him feel sentimental. He wistfully starts to note the passage of time and think that even the banal arm of a chair is imbued with meaning.

Pointing to articles on philosophy and linguistics that Percy published before The

Moviegoer, scholars tend to read these scenes of moviegoing as a metaphor for various theories of the human psyche. Woods Nash argues that the movie theater is a metaphor for a Cartesian mind and a critique of Western culture writ large,6 and Lawson conducts a

Freudian reading in which the movie theater is a “fantasy substitute for the maternal womb” (Still Following 14). Such allegorical leaps are tempting, but they do little to tell us about the status of the cinema as cinema—what Percy might have to say about the movies themselves. Michael Kobre gets closer to this, writing, “In the theater Binx is contemplative, passive, separated in space and time from the events he watches so closely

– a stance that approximates the way he sees the world from a posture of objectivity”

(51). I only partially agree with Kobre’s analysis. Binx maintains a “posture of objectivity” when he writes a synopsis of a given film, but he is not objective when he sits in a theater. If synopses represent what Binx wants to extract from a movie, the setting of the theater is filled with the kinds of baggage that he explicitly wants to leave behind. 63

Binx tries to remain objective by developing an elaborate web of terms to analyze and explain his movie-going. When he goes to a movie theater from his college days that the students nicknamed “the Armpit,” he calls the experience a “repetition,” a term which, along with “rotation” and “the search,” he takes somewhat ironically from

Kierkegaard (79).7 As Binx puts it, “A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle” (79-80). This is heady stuff for a trip to a rundown movie theater.

Unfortunately, things do not go as planned:

As usual it eluded me. There was this: a mockery about the old seats, their

plywood split, their bottoms slashed, but enduring nevertheless as if they had

waited to see what I had done with my fourteen years. There was this also: a

secret sense of wonder about the enduring, about all the nights, the rainy summer

nights at twelve and one and two o’clock when the seats endured alone in the

empty theater. The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One

cannot simply shrug it off. (80)

Binx personifies the seats, which look “as if they had waited” for him. This theater represents something to Binx – it has “endured,” stayed the same, while he has changed

(including a tour of duty in the Korean War). The theater itself mocks Binx, waits all night and day, rain and shine, for him to show himself. He tries to think of this as a

“repetition,” an exercise that reveals something about sentimentality and the passage of time, but he finds himself merely acting out that sentimentality. “One cannot simply 64 shrug it off.” Binx wants to remain constant and impenetrable, but this theater reminds him that he is changing whether he wants to or not.

This attempt to articulate the effects of a movie theater is on the nose, even for

Binx. “Certification” is a similar concept, the process by which a viewer sees his or her own neighborhood in a film so that “It becomes possible for him to live, for a while at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere” (63). Mark Johnson reasonably observes that these scenes fail because the novel is “too overt and too cerebral. Binx verbalizes like an essayist rather than a character” (78). In the context of this chapter, however, we see that theaters are a problem for Binx because they demonstrate an inconsistency in his thinking. He wants the movies to be objective, rational, and affect- blocking. But films do make him emotional, and Binx spins a web of existential terminology to rationalize away the affective dimensions of moviegoing. His terminology is overblown because he is protesting too much.

Women have an analogous impact on Binx. At one point, Binx describes the plot of a TV movie in which Keenan Wynn plays a nuclear physicist, which is in keeping with the rest of his synopses: “Keenan Wynn played a troubled nuclear physicist who had many a bad moment with his conscience” (8). Even in this extreme example of a character debating the ethics of working on the nuclear bomb, Binx can distill the story down and view it dispassionately. Yet he becomes distracted when Wynn’s character mentions his daughter, Stephanie. Noting that Stephanie is becoming an increasingly popular name for girls, Binx states: “Hearing the name produced sharp tingling sensation on the back of my neck. Twenty years from now I shall perhaps have a rosy young

Stephanie perched at my typewriter” (8). At the mention of Stephanie, Binx’s perspective 65 on the movie changes from calculating to visceral—he actually “tingles” at the image of a new secretary appearing in his office twenty years hence, ready to be seduced. If such a young woman were to arrive, it would mean that Binx remained unchanged for decades at a time. His affectless acting would have been a success.

Unfortunately for Binx, this dream is impossible to realize. When he and Sharon are on their car journey down to the Gulf, they unexpectedly meet up with his family.

Binx approves of the natural way that Sharon interacts with his half-brothers and half- sisters, which is in sharp contrast to his former secretary, Marcia: “Marcia made too much over them, squatting down and hugging her knees like Joan Fontaine visiting an orphanage” (138). The supplementary allusion is a joke on Marcia, who was melodramatic and overwhelmed by the moment instead of taking a meeting with Binx’s family in stride. By contrast, Sharon is game and easygoing, just the sort of woman that

Binx would choose for his secretary and paramour. Yet there is another layer of import here: by disparaging Marcia, Binx forestalls the strangeness of taking multiple secretaries on identical trips down to the bayou. Unlike Marcia, he declares that Sharon “looks like snapshots of Ava Gardner when she was a high school girl in North Carolina” (93). Binx focuses on Sharon’s youth and her potential to bloom into a glamorous and sexy star like

Gardner, yet in each case the cinematic allusion marks the passage of time. If Binx is going to stay the same, his secretaries will inevitably age out of the role and be replaced.

When one starts to behave like a grown woman in a melodrama (such as Joan Fontaine), it is time for her to go. And while Binx focuses on Sharon’s positive attributes, her status vis a vis predecessor Marcia and successor Stephanie is uneasy. Can Binx keep this up indefinitely? 66

Such questions do not arise when Binx employs cinematic allusions to characterize men. Introducing the reader to Kate’s fiancé, Walter, Binx remembers back to their college days, when Walter self-seriously initiated Binx into a fraternity, “Hands in pockets, rocking back on his heels and looking out the window like Samuel Hinds in the movies” (37). The allusion is supplemental. Samuel Hinds is best known as a white- haired character actor of the studio period, often playing a wise father figure, and we can see the ridiculousness of a college senior taking on this persona while talking to a first- year student about the importance of fraternity life. Similarly, Binx describes Ned, the man who sells him newspapers, as “a former jockey and he looks quite a bit like Leo

Carroll only more dried-up” (72). This allusion is complementary, as it helps the reader to see Ned in his or her mind’s eye. These two minor characters are represented as character actors, not stars, but they are still acting as Binx does. If a man makes a misstep, like

Walter being overly serious in inducting Binx into a fraternity, then he is worthy of scorn.

But this is a difference of degree, not kind, from Binx’s relationship to the movies. He assumes that these men are trying to calibrate performances that fit the situation in front of them.

On the other hand, women in (and at) movies pose a problem for Binx because they represent an orientation that is opposed to his own. When watching Fort Dobbs with

Sharon and his sickly brother Lonnie, Binx experiences a “rotation,” which is “an experience of the new beyond the expectation of the experiencing of the new” (144).

Binx waxes poetic about “this ghost of a theater, a warm Southern night, the Western

Desert and this big fine piece, Sharon” (144). He adds, “By heaven she is just like the girls in the movies who don’t put out until you prove to them what a nice unselfish fellow 67 you are” (143).8 Sharon blends into the sentimentality of the viewing experience for

Binx. She also represents aspects of the movies that he despises: she is sentimental, looking for a nice fellow. Here he pokes fun at her for being such a naïve viewer, but this does not change the fact that the same factors are working on him. Sharon and the theater combine to make Binx sentimental; he cannot tamp down these feelings even as he watches the masculine Clint Walker ride across the butte.

Kate and the Limits of Acting One major claim by nearly all scholars of The Moviegoer, especially those who track the ways that it incorporates Kierkegaard’s philosophy, is that Binx is a different kind of character by the novel’s end than he was at its beginning. As Janet Hobbs puts it, at the beginning of the story, Binx is in Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage, in which “man lives only for the outward pressure of the moment; in other words he lives in the realm of immediacy” (38). We can see this sense of immediacy in his acting, the way that he focuses on the surfaces of characters and hides his feelings to satisfy sexual desires. By the end of the novel, scholars agree, Binx has moved from the aesthetic stage into the religious stage, leaving behind his childish ways.9 How does this happen? Leaving aside for my conclusion the question of whether The Moviegoer’s narrative trajectory is satisfactory, I will consider the specific ways that Binx’s cousin, Kate, contributes to

Binx’s transformation.

Kate undoes much of Binx’s work with the movies, both as a project of self- fulfillment and as a tool to characterize others. One formal expression of this fact is that

Kate’s relationship with Binx is fleshed out in direct discourse. Unlike his exchanges 68 with other characters, Binx often records conversations with Kate with a minimum of authorial intrusion. For instance, the two talk during Binx’s first dinner visit:

Kate swings around and her eyes go to disks. “Don’t you dare patronize Walter.”

“I wasn’t”

“Don’t you think I didn’t see the two of you upstaging him at lunch. What

a lovely pair you are.”

“I thought you and I were the pair.”

“You and I are not a pair of any sort.”

I consider this.

“Good day,” says Kate irritably. (47)

Kate understands and disapproves of the way that Binx treats the people around him. She is perceptive enough to know when he is making fun of someone like Walter, the college friend whom he mockingly compares to Samuel Hinds. With Kate, Binx cannot transform himself into Peck or Gable. When she rejects his playful flirtation of “I thought you and I were the pair,” he has no recourse. He has to silently consider what she has said, rather than being in control of the situation. This dynamic is closer to a level playing field than we see in his interactions with anyone else. It is a foil to the interactions with Sharon where Binx chooses which feelings to reveal and which of Sharon’s feelings to deem worthy of comment. Kate’s perception of Binx precludes that kind of behavior, with the result that he presents the same surface to her that he does to the reader.

A further problem with Kate is that while she holds sway over Binx, she is not quite able to control her own characterization. She picks up roles and sets them down again, but they never fit her as well as she would like. On the train to Chicago, Binx 69 observes, “Her gray jacket comes just short of her wide hips and the tight skirt curves under her in a nice play on vulgarity” (184). Just as Kate sees through Binx’s playacting, he sees through hers. While at times it may seem playful, at other times Binx hints at why this is deathly serious:

She sounds better but she is not. She is trapping herself, this time by being my

buddy, best of all buddies and most privy to my little researches. In spite of

everything she finds herself, even now, playing out the role. In her long

nightmare, this our old friendship now itself falls victim to the grisly

transmogrification by which she unfailingly turns everything she touches to

horror. (63)

Kate has a mental illness, though it is never explained. She has attempted suicide and been hospitalized multiple times in the past. She also knows all about Binx’s search (she is “privy to his little researches”) and even understands the obsessive terminology behind it (elsewhere, Kate reveals that she knows about “certification”). But she, too, is playing a role, and she cannot always control when she does so. He sees through her attempts to modulate and tamp down her emotions through playacting.10 Unlike Binx, whose flat acting blocks others from understanding his feelings, Kate overcorrects, committing to each role she takes on in unpredictable ways.

In trying to help Kate, Binx must drop his cinematic personae and attend to hers.

Halfway through the novel, he asks her to marry him. She responds enthusiastically, but he recognizes the falseness of the response: 70

“Not a bad life you say. It would be the best of all possible lives.” She speaks in a

rapture—something like my aunt. My heart sinks. It is too late. She has already

overtaken herself.

“Don’t—worry about it.”

“I won’t! I won’t”—as enraptured and extinguished in her soul, gone, as a

character played by Eva Marie Saint. Leaning over, she hugs herself.

“What’s the matter?”

Ooooh,” Kate groans, Kate herself now. “I’m so afraid.”

“I know.”

“What am I going to do?”

“You mean right now?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll go to my car. Then we’ll drive down to the French Market and get

some coffee. Then we’ll go home.”

“Is everything going to be all right?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me. Say it.”

“Everything is going to be all right.” (116)

Binx begins the exchange by comparing her to Eva Marie Saint, one of the few times he attempts to characterize Kate in cinematic terms. Yet Kate only occupies this role for a split second, as Binx’s attempts to describe her behavior lag behind the changes in the behavior itself. When she reverts to anxiety, Binx’s powers of descriptive characterization fail him. Forced to describe Kate as she actually is, he can only say that 71 she is “herself now.” Kate, as Kate, is irreducible. Binx cannot pretend that he is unaffected by this; when he sees that she is going to have a lapse, his “heart sinks.” He takes care of Kate, telling her what they will do and where they will go, but he also renders the scene in deadpan dialogue without further comment.

It is striking how Binx’s relationship with Kate runs parallel to his relationship with Sharon. Indeed, this exchange is the end of Part Two, and Part Three begins with

Binx closing the office to take Sharon on their trip down the coast. When he is with Kate, he shows his sympathies to her but not the reader; when he is with Sharon, he shows his feelings to the reader but uses a cinematic mask to hide them from her. Neither of these scenarios is tenable for Binx for long. Kate attempts suicide. Binx, looking for a way to help, invites her to come away with him on a business trip to Chicago. Several things change at that point. Binx stops trying to describe his search, stops including synopses of movies, and stops his flat acting. On the train, he sees a man who “looks quite a bit like the actor Gary Merrill and has the same certified permission to occupy pleasant space with his pleasant self” (188). This man seems like a model for the way Binx has behaved throughout the novel. He is comfortable like a movie star, and Binx watches as he reads and clips articles from the newspaper. While Binx admires the man and identifies with his search, he notes, “it comes over me that in the past few days my own life has gone to seed” (191).

Immediately following this observation, Binx tries to convince Kate, once again, to marry him. She cycles through many emotions, from disdain to pity to despair and finally seduction. The pair sleep together in Binx’s train car. Rather than describing this 72 scene directly, in one of the novel’s strangest moments, Binx uses the rhetorical technique of apostrophe to address actor Rory Calhoun directly:

I’ll have to tell you the truth, Rory, painful though it is. Nothing would please me

more than to say that I had done . . . what you do: tuck Debbie into your bed and,

with a show of virtue so victorious as to be ferocious, grab pillow and blanket to

the living room sofa, there to lie in the dark, hands clasped behind head, gaze at

the ceiling and talk through the open door of your hopes and dreams. (199)

The image of the handsome leading man tucking a young woman into bed rather than taking advantage of her is almost as old as Hollywood itself. It puts the characters into an intimate position without compromising their virtue. For Binx, acting like Rory Calhoun would blend the ways he behaves with Kate and Sharon. On the one hand, he would stare up at the ceiling like a movie star, undisturbed by external circumstances. On the other, he would talk through a door, unseen, so that his words are the only way that Kate or any observer would know the affective import of his “hopes and dreams.” He wants to remain impenetrable while attending to Kate’s emotional needs, and he addresses Rory Calhoun as the only person who would understand how to walk that tightrope.

Binx fails, and his image of the movies comes crashing down. Binx’s use of affectless acting to seduce secretaries was a moral failing, but it was adequate for the task at hand. In this case, the template is insufficient to meet the complexity of the situation.

Apostrophizing the absent Rory allows Binx to imagine Rory’s motives, moving beyond the kind of surface characterization associated with flat acting. Binx would not only like to look like Calhoun and replicate the effect that he has on others; he wants to feel what it is like to have that kind of moral courage. The closest he gets to describing his encounter 73 with Kate is a sort of confession to Rory: “The truth is I was frightened half to death by her bold carrying on . . . Kate was scared because it seemed now that even Tillie the

Toiler must fail her. I never worked so hard in my life, Rory. I had no choice: the alternative was unspeakable.” (200). The oblique description of near-failed sexual performance reads like a confession to Rory Calhoun. The passage is an outpouring of heretofore pent-up affect, and Binx feels the need to explain why he broke from the acting that has served as his modus operandi for so long.

When Binx and Kate arrive in Chicago, they make one final trip to the movies.

The theater where Binx and Kate watch The Young Philadelphians (Vincent Sherman,

1959) is the grandest of any in the novel. Binx describes it,

Back to the Loop where we dive into the mother and Urwomb of all moviehouses

–an Aztec mortuary of funeral urns and glyphs, thronged with the spirit-presences

of another day, William Powell and George Brent and Patsy Kelly and Charley

Chase, the best friends of my childhood -- and see a movie called The Young

Philadelphians. Kate holds my hand tightly in the dark. (211)

Lawson writes that this theater is the key to understanding Binx’s moviegoing: “Looking back from his post-recovery vantage point, Binx now knows what the movie theater has meant to him before, the locus of all his repetitional fantasies, and can name it for what it had been” (53). In Lawson’s psychoanalytical reading, the theater is grand, but it is a tomb, and Binx’s emergence from it is the first hint at the salvation that he will claim at the end of the novel. The heightened language surrounding this movie theater is unique, and I think it worth considering the specific ghosts who haunt it. William Powell and

George Brent might be regarded as precursors to the kind of leading man that Binx tends 74 to imitate, but Patsy Kelly and Charley Chase were best known for comedy shorts. “The best friends of Binx’s childhood” encompass all kinds of cinema: masculine and feminine, comedy and drama. He remembers a love of films besides those useful for affectless acting.

In this theater, we get one last cinematic synopsis for The Young Philadelphians.

It reads, “Paul Newman is an idealistic young fellow who is disillusioned and becomes cynical and calculating. But in the end he recovers his ideals” (211). Paul Newman’s role in The Young Philadelphians is strictly conceptual: he goes from idealism to disillusionment and back to idealism without even a hint of what else takes place in the film. While Binx does not mention it, the plot of The Young Philadelphians parallels his plight in many ways. Newman’s Tony Lawrence has a famous name in Philadelphia and excels in the world of corporate law. He falls in love with a girl named Joan and they nearly elope, but they are tricked out of marrying by her father. Joan marries someone else, and it is only ten years later, when Tony has taken a stand against the city’s old boy net, that they can finally begin a life together. (Joan’s husband has died in the Korean

War). Career pressure from a wealthy family, an on-again, off-again relationship culminating in a failed elopement, the war—surely, if one film speaks directly to Binx’s situation, it would be this one. How can he fail to mention any of this?

The parallels continue as Binx himself seems to regain his ideals. His aunt calls the police because Kate has disappeared, and they track her down in Chicago. When they return to New Orleans, Binx must face his aunt’s withering rebukes of his behavior. After this conversation, Binx resolves that he will marry Kate and attend medical school to appease his family. But he begins to panic. Stating that “Nothing remains but desire,” he 75 calls up Sharon, and when he learns that Sharon is not available, he tries to ask out her roommate, Joyce. Midsentence, while he is talking to Joyce, he realizes how he is speaking: “Old confederate Marlon Brando – a reedy insinuating voice, full of winks and leers and above all pleased with itself. What a shock. On and on it goes” (230). The

“winks and leers” of Brando are a far cry from the suavity of Gregory Peck. Perhaps this unattractive description is how Binx always spoke when imitating movie stars; perhaps, in his desperation, all his affectless acting has dissolved into seamy innuendo. Either way, he is ashamed of himself, and he realizes that the movies are no longer a solution to any of his problems. He sees Kate driving his direction and hangs up the phone.

Conclusion The novel closes with a conversation between Kate and Binx. In this epilogue, the two have married, Binx is in medical school, and Kate is continuing to recover her mental health. Binx gives Kate a straightforward errand to run, delivering an envelope to an office downtown. She asks him to describe in detail where to go and what to do:

“While I am on the streetcar -- are you going to be thinking about me?”

“Yes”

“What if I don’t make it?”

“Get off and walk home.”

“I’ve got to be sure about one thing.”

“What?”

“I’m going to sit next to the window on the Lake side and put the cape

Jasmine in my lap?’

“That’s right.” 76

“And you’ll be thinking about me just that way?”

“That’s right.” (242)

At this point in the epilogue, Binx bears little resemblance to the aimless, lecherous moviegoer whom we have gotten to know throughout the novel. His need to be seen through affectless acting has been replaced by Kate’s need to be seen in specific ways to overcome her anxiety. He still talks to Kate without authorial intrusion, but now he is willing to sacrifice his needs for hers. Noting Binx’s newfound capacity for self-sacrifice,

Kieran Quinlain writes that “in the novel’s epilogue Binx comes to an acceptance of the

Christian message in a way that, as Percy himself admitted . . . takes the reader by surprise and strains his credulity” (217).

We might even go so far as to ask if there is a convincing diegetic reason for Binx to write this book in the first place. Lewis A. Lawson has observed that the narration of

The Moviegoer takes place in what he calls a “virtual present” (“Dream Screen” 25). That is, while the novel reads as though Binx is composing the events of the story as they happen, the presence of this epilogue reveals he actually recalls them from a moment at least a year after the fact. What is the point of recreating “the search” in such meticulous detail, replete with synopses and elaborate descriptions of his acting, if Binx is writing from a future in which the search will be called off? The epilogue collapses some of the tension that a reader must feel towards Binx’s most unethical behavior; we can be glad that he ends up with Kate and maybe even forgive his prior selfishness and aimlessness.

Even so, like spiritual autobiographers dating back to Augustine, Binx describes his sin with relish, even fondness, even though he is glad to be on this end of his conversion. 77

Namwali Serpell writes that “When an initial image or event is replaced or denied in reading . . . this effects a layering rather than an outright deletion” (42). By the time

Binx renounces his previous lifestyle, the reader has read an intimately detailed account of it. We are left with the sense that he may have been onto something with his search, that if he had just been able to crack the formula, or found the right words to say, it would have yielded some enlightenment. This is particularly true of the method of affectless acting. Could the movies ever be used as a tool to move beyond the self, providing a subject with new possibilities for interacting with others without violating his or her agency? The novel’s ultimate answer is no; such behavior is destructive and leads one to behave unethically. But the no is not emphatic, and the vividness with which Binx narrates his past life leaves the door open to such a possibility.

78

Chapter 3: Audience Response and Its Limits for Elmore Leonard

“There’s nobody to sympathize with. Who’s the good guy? You don’t have one.”

(Get Shorty 47)

Not far into Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty, we meet Harry Zimm, a producer who is trying to go legit with an award-bait drama after a long career making low budget horror films. He is addressing the “shylock” Chili Palmer, a minor mobster who wants to break into show business by pitching a movie based on his own life. In Harry’s professional opinion, Chili’s idea will never go anywhere because audiences are not going to like him. George Grella writes about Chili, “There’s no good guy in the script he’s writing and living – nobody is going to identify or sympathize with a shylock, which of course also presents a problem in Leonard’s novel” (42). Grella sees this as a moment of reflexivity, where Harry’s insistence that Chili is not a “good guy” causes us to question his status as the protagonist of the novel we are reading. Because he is a

“shylock,” Chili fails to inspire what Rita Felski calls “allegiance” (rooting for a character) and “empathy” (feeling with a character), two hallmarks of literary identification (Felski 157-8).1 So this moment of meta-fictional reflection between Chili and Harry brings two related questions to the reader’s mind: Does the audience need to identify with the protagonist of a story for it to succeed? And if so, what kind of identification is best?

This chapter explores Leonard’s answers to these questions in two parts. First, I argue that Get Shorty contains Leonard’s positive theory of identification as a 79 dispassionate posture that allows one to imagine the perspective of others rather than being swept up in the action of a film. Second, I turn to LaBrava, a novel in which the title character’s dalliance with a movie star stands for the aspects of film viewing that are so unique to each moviegoer that they cannot be communicated to others. Taken together, these novels suggest that the potential of cinematic allusions lies in their imprecision, the ways that they point beyond themselves to the impossibility of having a uniform experience of art.

Pitching Cinematic Identification in Get Shorty2 Scholars of Leonard disagree about whether readers ought to identify with his characters.

James Devlin argues that Leonard “refuses to provide readers with idealized depictions of characters with whom to identify” (133). For Devlin, readers do not identify with

Leonard’s characters because they are too complex. This is to Leonard’s credit because it means that he does not rely on the kinds of typecasting that are standard for other genre writers. Charles J. Rzepka complicates this account, writing that Leonard sees the novelist’s highest goal to be “empathy without sympathy, becoming one with another person, especially someone of an entirely different personality, culture, or (eventually) gender—and perhaps even with an enemy” (58). Rzepka writes that eliciting such

“empathetic identification” from the reader is the end game of Leonard’s style (Rzepka

3). His unobtrusive, free-indirect prose guides readers seamlessly through identification with different characters. In this flow, we might not identify with Chili Palmer’s livelihood as a loan shark and his most violent actions, but we can still feel what it is like to size up a situation coolly as he does. 80

Discussing identification in Get Shorty is difficult because it is recursive. Readers identify with characters; characters identify with one another; characters in the novel identify with characters from the movies. Instead of merely causing readers to identify with characters through prose, Leonard holds up the impulse to identify as an object of analysis. We see this in the “pitch” scenes throughout the novel, where characters try to get movies made. When pitching one another, they discuss what makes a good movie, especially what makes audiences identify with a movie. Each character’s view of cinematic identification points in two directions: toward his or her efficacy in making movies and toward a general ability to see the world from multiple perspectives. In Get

Shorty, successful identification does not mean forging a connection with the emotions or actions of a protagonist. Rather, it is a dispassionate stance that allows one to anticipate the desires of others, often characters on the fringes of a story. To make this argument, I focus on three characters’ conceptions of identification: actor Michael Weir, actor-cum- producer Karen Flores, and loan shark enforcer Chili Palmer, who floats between these roles.

Michael Weir’s Method

As a method actor, Michael Weir believes in a kind of trickle-down identification: if he can make himself believe that he is the character, the audience will feel what he is feeling. We might assume that Leonard would reject this kind of pretentious thinking on its face. Famously, he complained about an adaptation of his novel Stick (directed by Burt

Reynolds), “I do everything in my power to make my writing not look like writing . . . and when it appears on the screen you see all these actors acting all over the place” (qtd. 81 in Geherin 96). As with writing, Leonard preferred acting that did not look like acting, and Michael Weir is one of the clearest targets for satire in Get Shorty. His method acting is so self-focused that it is useless as a posture in everyday life. His behavior toward others tells us to reject his theory of art.

When Weir meets with Chili for the first time, Chili starts an impromptu pitch for the movie based on his life, essentially an adaptation of the novel we are reading. (As we will see, Chili is supposed to be pitching Weir on Harry Zimm’s script, Lovejoy.) Chili’s film, eventually titled Get Leo, tells the story of a dry cleaner named Leo who cons

$300,000 from an airline by faking his own death. Leo owes a loan shark $15,000, and the loan shark follows him to Las Vegas to extract the money from him. As part of this pitch, Chili tells Weir to think about what it would be like to be the loan shark. Weir launches into a back-story worthy of a method actor to help get himself into character:

“My father used to beat me for no reason . . . Take the money I earned in the paper route, that I kept in a cigar box” (140). Weir needs a pathos-laden explanation, hearkening back to childhood, to explain why the loan shark uses money to feel as if he’s in control. Chili cuts him off, insisting that playing a “shylock” is all about projecting affect: “Put it in your eyes, ‘You’re mine, asshole,’ without saying it” (140). Chili does not care what

Weir is thinking or how he gets this look into his eyes. Chili knows the look when he sees it. He favors results over process.

These two approaches to acting participate in different genres, the serious drama and the crime movie, and each method requires a different form of identification of actor with role. Weir is looking to play the dramatic, critically acclaimed role. Audience desires are of secondary importance in Weir’s worldview. He is only interested in his 82 ability to feel like the character, producing empathy with the “shylock” through a melodramatic backstory. Later Weir explains that he used this same method when he played Napoleon: “What I did was separate the man from the historic figure, visualize a dichotomy, imagine him offstage making love, getting drunk, generally kicking back”

(205). Weir’s identification with the character he plays only exists in his mind, and audiences must intuit it when they watch his performance. Chili prefers a different way of identifying, more closely tied to Leonard’s view and to those of actors in crime films: to identify with the loan shark is to experience with immediacy the way that he commands a room. Chili boils this feeling down to a single look, which he models for Weir. Weir’s view of acting is inward-focused, but Chili projects a feeling outward toward the audience.

Weir likes this new approach, but he doesn’t know what to do with it. He tells

Chili, “That was the most ingenious pitch I’ve ever had thrown at me, and I mean in my entire career. You got me playing the guy, the shylock, before I even realized it” (142).

Chili shows Weir more about what it means to be a mobster in this brief exchange than

Weir picked up in Brooklyn when he observed the mob up close for a previous project.

That’s the power of the crime genre at work, the power of looking instead of delving into back story. But when Chili tries to turn the conversation back to Lovejoy, the drama he and Harry are supposed to be producing together, he doesn’t make any headway. Weir says it “has potential,” but he won’t commit (144). And by the time they sit down for their final meeting with him, Weir is back to his old way of thinking about the movies:

“What fascinates me about this one . . . is the chance to play an essentially cliché-type character in a way that’s never been done before, against his accepted image” (204). Weir 83 can’t accept that playing a mobster to type affords a more interesting form of identification for the audience than his focus on method.

A later dinner scene demonstrates that Weir’s perspective on acting impacts his ability to interact with others. The scene is funny for a number of reasons, including the fact that Harry thinks they are talking about Lovejoy, his pet project, when Weir and Chili are actually discussing Get Leo. Weir also behaves strangely, ordering a cheese omelet with tomato sauce and peas. Chip Rhodes writes that this order is a parody of what a celebrity thinks home cooking is: “What even the obtuse Harry can see here is that while stars don’t act like ‘real people,’ they do fashion identities designed to suggest that they are still ‘real people’” (151). As a celebrity, Weir has lost his sense of what ordinary people eat and how they behave, and he thinks he can put himself into that mindset by eating what they do. Weir tries to order something that will give him the background of an average Joe to bolster his performance. But this falls flat because his sense of how ordinary people live is just as artificial as his imagined back story for the loan shark. You can’t method-act your way into a natural conversation.

Michael’s misunderstanding of identification continues up to the novel’s final page. In a sit-down meeting about Get Leo among all the relevant power brokers—Chili,

Karen Flores, Elaine Levin, Harry Zimm—Weir complains about changes to the script that he thinks will marginalize his character. He wants the “shylock” to be the focus of the script. Weir and Chili have one final verbal joust:

Chili: “Michael, look at me.”

Michael, grinning: “Right. That’s what it’s all about, right there, the look.” 84

Chili: “You don’t mind my saying, Michael, I don’t see you as the

shylock.”

Michael: “Really . . . Why not?”

Chili: “You’re too short.” (228)

Weir cannot tell the difference between acting and reality. He thinks that Chili is modeling the kind of intimidating look that a “shylock” would give someone in a movie, but Chili is really giving him that look in the present. Michael Weir is less connected to reality than any other person in the novel. This is not to say that Weir is bad at what he does—quite the opposite: he is successful, and movie audiences respond to his acting.

But when audiences do so, they are responding to something that is essentially phony. It would be nearly impossible for a reader of Get Shorty to identify with Michael Weir as he appears on the page beyond, perhaps, self-deprecating recognition of one’s own pretentiousness. Other characters provide more fruitful templates for identifying with the movies by getting away from an obsessive focus on a single character’s motives.

Karen Flores and the Producer’s Eye

Leonard’s knowledge of the movie industry is well documented. He knew how to maximize the value of his intellectual property, as when he changed the character names in Split Images, originally a direct sequel to his novel City Primeval, because he had already sold the latter novel’s movie rights to United Artists (Geherin 73).3 Several characters in Get Shorty are producers, and Leonard portrays them as people who must balance financial concerns with artistic ones. For my second exemplar from Get Shorty, I want to look closely at Karen Flores as the paradigm of the producer, considering how 85 she foils Harry Zimm. Karen transitions from actor to producer over the course of the novel, and Leonard also shows the reader what skills make her good at each job. Karen represents a different orientation toward acting from Michael Weir: she can imagine the perspectives of others, and it is this sympathetic identification that allows her to jump from one field to another.

As the novel begins, Karen is trying to make a comeback as an actress. She got her start starring in Harry Zimm’s horror flicks, where her only jobs were to look sexy and scream. Now in her forties, Karen auditions for the role of a mother who fights with, but finally supports, her teenage daughter. Showing her ability to articulate her taste system, Karen defends the role against Chili’s criticisms that her character should give up: “People have guilt trips laid on them all the time and they accept it, the guilt. It doesn’t have to make sense, it’s the way people are” (70). Karen views this role from a remove. Unlike Weir, she does not need to feel she has become the mother in order to understand the character’s motivation; she can imagine what it would be like to be in the mother’s position. She adopts a posture similar to the “empathetic identification” that

Rzepka traces in Leonard’s work. She places herself in the character’s shoes accurately but dispassionately.

Karen plays the detached observer throughout, and it serves her well when she attempts to become a producer. It also puts her in sharp distinction to Harry Zimm, her erstwhile director in horror, who can’t keep up with the times. Karen explains to Chili why Harry’s latest films have been failures: “If you’re going to do low budget exploitation you either have to go much heavier on the special effects or you have to get outrageously campy, make pictures like Assault of the Killer Bimbos, Surf Nazis Must 86

Die, Space Sluts in the Summer—they’re so bad they’re fun” (163). Another option is a thoughtful indie movie that “shows what it’s really like to be a vampire” (164). Karen understands that people go to the movies for different reasons: to be wowed by special effects, to laugh at absurdity, to think about beloved types in new ways. Harry only knows one way, playing it straight with sexy, scantily clad women and plenty of jump scares. For Harry, a movie works if it makes you imagine yourself in the scary (or lustful) situation.

Karen’s attitude toward the movies, like Michael Weir’s, bleeds into everyday interactions. When she watches Chili throw a bodyguard down a flight of stairs, she sees the scene cinematically: “There was a scene like it in an Eastwood picture only Clint grabs the guy a little higher” (170).4 This moment of recognition does more than demonstrate that Karen is a competent moviegoer because she also blocks out the scene in her mind. She thinks that

as a film sequence it would work from her point of view if she represented a third

party in the scene. Then another setup to get the effect of it on her face. But there

would have to be close shots too of what was going on. His hand grabbing the

guy’s crotch. A tight close-up reaction shot of the guy’s face. As he begins to

scream cut to a Reverse to see him go down the stairs. (170)

In this blocking, Karen imagines her position as the camera’s, making her the audience surrogate. She will be a “third party,” a passive observer of the action. But it is also important that the scene includes a reaction shot so that the audience can observe “the effect of it on her face.” She does not need to think of herself as the heroine of the piece or as participating in the action as it unfolds. She knows how to be disinterested, to 87 imagine the action from multiple perspectives in a way that maximizes the visual impact for another person. Crucially, she also understands that a film viewer might identify with a perspective other than that of the protagonist—the shot of her own face makes her reaction the affective center of the scene.

Karen’s shining moment is the first formal pitch meeting, where she, Harry, and

Chili get to pitch the idea for Lovejoy to studio executive Elaine Levin. Karen’s ability in the pitch itself is what makes her a valuable filmmaker and conversationalist: she observes and builds on what others want. The meeting starts poorly, as Elaine asks Harry what Lovejoy’s motivation is, and he resorts to vague platitudes about “redemption and retribution” and “seeing justice done” (153-54). But the question is open: in the script, as written, there is no clear motivation for Lovejoy’s behavior, and Harry is unable to account for this. Lovejoy tells the story of a mild-mannered florist whose son is run over and killed by a reckless driver, Al Roxy. With no proof that Roxy was drunk or negligent in the accident, the only punishment is that his driver’s license is revoked for six months.

Lovejoy becomes obsessed with Roxy, filming him at all hours in an attempt to catch him driving so he will be exposed to further legal jeopardy. In the script’s climax, Roxy dies by crashing into Lovejoy’s flower shop in an attempt to run him over.

Elaine’s critiques of that plot seem justified. Lovejoy is a near automaton, and neither his dialogue nor the script’s directions give us a sense of why he behaves as he does. But Karen saves the moment. To add depth to the script, she pitches a new character named Peggy, an ex-girlfriend of Roxy’s, who teams up with Lovejoy to get revenge: “He [Roxy] gets Peggy stoned and shoots nude footage of her. She discovers it, burns the tape and he beats her up . . . This is the kind of situation I mean, not necessarily 88 what will work best. Where does the video camera come from? It’s Roxy’s. She rips it off” (155). Here Peggy is an audience surrogate. Like Karen standing in a scene reacting to Chili throwing a man down the stairs, her presence helps to make Lovejoy’s actions and feelings legible. Karen says this is only “the kind of situation” she’s talking about, and that there are many possible ways to invite audience participation. But she recognizes the importance of providing the audience with multiple perspectives on the action so that different viewers can have different experiences.

Chili is fine with this. An excellent improviser, he pitches the idea that Lovejoy should run over his antagonist at the end of the movie. Karen and Elaine discuss the merits of this suggestion:

Karen: “I kind of like that. Keep it ambiguous till the very end. Say he tells Peggy

it was an accident and she believes him . . .

Elaine: “But the audience still isn’t sure.”

Karen: “That’s what I was thinking. Give them something to think about

after they walk out.” (156, ellipsis original)

Karen has the ability to identify sympathetically with Peggy’s point of view as well as

Lovejoy’s. Like her, the audience must listen to Lovejoy’s claims of innocence and decide whether to believe him. Can we identify with a minor character so that we insert ourselves into the action as observers? This would produce an effect that is longer lasting than identification with a protagonist, giving the audience un regard en arrière after they leave.

Harry can’t adjust to this new requirement, rolling with the punches as Chili does.

Harry claims that Michael Weir loves the script (half-true at best) and tries to bully 89

Elaine into green-lighting the project as-is. He protests that if these changes are implemented, “Then it’s not Lovejoy’s story, it’s the girl’s” (155). In Harry’s mind, the audience can only identify with one character at a time, and it should be the male lead.

He also thinks that viewers will identify with a character merely because he’s on screen for the whole movie and played by Michael Weir. Karen and Elaine realize that identification does not have to be fixed; audiences can handle multiple perspectives on the action. Lovejoy is never produced, so we do not get to see whose perspective is right, but we get some hints. Harry is ignored and leaves the meeting frustrated, whereas Elaine is so impressed with Karen that she offers her a fulltime job as a producer.

Chili Learns the Industry

My third model for identification is Chili Palmer. He acts, but not in movies.

After they have slept together, Karen tells him, “I know you’re acting sometimes, but you don’t show it” (211). She also tells him that he could act in movies if he wanted to, which gets him thinking about what kind of actor he would be: “He could see himself do an Al

Pacino movie, play a hard-on . . . He couldn’t see himself in ones, like say the one where the three guys get stuck with a baby” (212, ellipsis original). But he’s also self-aware enough to realize that if he tried to play himself, “he’d start trying to act like himself and it wouldn’t work, because acting wasn’t as easy as it looked” (212). Chili thinks that he could play a hard-on in a movie, but if he did it in real life it would spoil his mystique. As

Rzepka points out, for Leonard, “knowing you are posing indicates a childlike playfulness, but watching yourself pose indicates an unhealthy, childish investment in the 90 pose itself” (131). Chili treads this line carefully, ultimately self-aware but not self- obsessed.

Unlike the other characters, we see what happens when Chili watches movies.

One of his major preoccupations is the fact that Ray Bones, a mobster he shot in the head and scarred many years ago, is after him and his money for revenge. Watching Shane in his hotel room, Chili considers the realism of a gunfight: “It was almost real the way the guns go off in that movie, loud, but still not as loud as you heard it in a room, shooting a guy in the head just a little too high, and now the guy was coming out here” (102). Chili moves seamlessly from thinking about guns in a movie to guns in life. He recognizes that the scene is “almost real,” and he cannot help but imagine the gunfight in the film as his own. Chili has a similar rumination about Taxi Driver: “But then when Robert De Niro shaved his hair into a Mohawk, Chili started thinking of Ray Bones, even though Ray

Bones didn’t have a Mohawk or look anything like Robert De Niro. Maybe it was all those guns De Niro had, wanting to shoot somebody” (116). Ray Bones does not have a

Mohawk, but Chili knows what it looks like when a violent person with a gun wants to shoot somebody. As with Shane, Chili identifies with the action of the movie, but in the process of comparison he quickly notices the facets that do not match up with his experience. He wants them to be complementary, but they wind up being supplementary.

Chili does not feel what the characters are feeling, but he does use the movies as a jumping-off point to think through his own situation. This is crucial to understanding his relationship to movies in his everyday life. Chili’s persona is cinema-tinged to the extent that he idolizes cinematic mobsters like De Niro and Pacino and adopts their mannerisms, especially when he demands of someone, “look at me.” Chili also fits in a long line of 91

Leonard characters who love the Western. As James E. Devlin points out, “For a long time, Gary Cooper remained the standard by which Leonard measured his ideal taciturn man of action.” (32). Later in the novel, Chili knows the difference between El Dorado and Rio Bravo just by listening. These cinematic allusions reveal a certain degree of expertise, but also a naïve hope that he can behave like the characters in these films. Chili thinks a lot about cinematic character types, but the next step is being able to use the movies to see outside of himself—not merely to recognize the ways that his life resembles those of a movie character, but to take the further step of imagining what it would be like to see the action from another point of view, as Karen Flores does.

Pitches always hinge on two audiences: the person in front of you and the ultimate audience of people who will watch the picture. In the next pitch—with Harry, Karen, and

Elaine—Chili takes both audiences into account when he says, “I think if Lovejoy runs the guy over with his van the audience in the theater would get up and cheer” (156).

Pitching requires the skill not just of putting oneself into the point of view of another but of being able to put oneself into the position of multiple groups at once. As he navigates these meetings, Chili moves beyond his tendencies as a viewer who compares the movies to his own life experiences and starts to see from multiple perspectives. In the novel’s final pitch, Chili consolidates his insights, realizing that the drycleaner Leo is the most interesting character. He pitches a climax in which Leo drives the action and the loan shark is a cool observer: “Suddenly Leo jumps up on the cement railing of the balcony and says, ‘Let’s see if you got the nerve to do this, tough guy.’ The starlet screams. The shylock doesn’t do nothing ‘cause he knows the guy is basically a loser” (227). Elaine and Karen love the new, passive “shylock” character who watches Leo dance on the 92 railing and ultimately fall to his death. The scene works because Chili realizes that the cool, calculating look that is his trademark as a real loan shark can work for a movie character as well. The audience can take on his perspective even if it does not identify with his emotions as it would with those of a Michael Weir character. Viewers see through his eyes; he becomes Karen’s “third party” in the scene. Even if they are more interested in Leo, they will identify with him.

Chili’s most important lesson in perspective comes in a showdown with a criminal rival rather than in a production meeting. Bo Catlett is Chili’s main foil. A hip

African American criminal who has financed several of Harry’s horror movies, Catlett has a head start on Chili in the movie business. As soon as the two meet, they size each other up, each recognizing a rival and fellow “cool” character. In a scene where the pair read through a script for Lovejoy, Catlett has to explain what the shot directions mean. He initially understands the script better than Chili, who thinks the ending is boring: “‘What you don’t understand,’ Catlett said, ‘Is what the movie is saying. You live clean, shit gets taken care of somehow or other. That’s what the movie is about’” (112). Catlett not only understands the business better, but he has also read the script, something Chili has neglected to do.

In the zero-sum logic of the novel, only one of them will stick in the movie business. Despite Harry Zimm’s limitations as a producer, he is Catlett and Chili’s only ticket to working in Hollywood, so they must vie for his attention and trust. This competition escalates throughout the novel. Chili tries to intimidate Catlett then proves his worth to Harry by landing a meeting with Michael Weir. Catlett tries to frame Chili and get back into Harry’s good graces by offering a large sum of drug money to bail out 93 the floundering Lovejoy production. When Chili sniffs out this plot, Catlett decides that he has had enough. He guns for Chili at Karen’s house, provoking a final showdown at his own.

Catlett’s undoing is his lack of perspective. He has a gun on Chili and is about to shoot when his bodyguard, the Bear, speaks up. The Bear tells Catlett that they should block the shooting out as if it were an action scene in a movie, a rehearsal for what they will tell the police later. He directs Catlett to move to the railing of the balcony and lean on it as if he were backing away from Chili in fear. The railing gives way. Catlett realizes his mistake in his final moments of life:

Looking at the sky, Catlett knew everything he should have known while he was

still up there looking at Chili Palmer instead of the Bear . . . Even knowing he was

going to do them both he had listened to the Bear ‘cause it sounded like the

movies and he said yeah, not even taking half a minute to look at it good. (223)

Catlett is so focused on his duel with Chili that he ignores his misgivings about the Bear and gets swept up in the feeling of being the hero of a cinematic plot. Instead of taking in all points of view, Catlett can only focus on himself. This is a passive victory for Chili; he is not even the one who rigged the railing to give way. (The Bear did that—another minor character coming to the fore.) But after watching this scene play out, Chili pitches the new climax for his movie, where the loan shark coolly watches Leo fall to his death, instead of forcing the action. Chili is ready to produce a story, not just act in one.

Much of the scholarship on literary and cinematic identification is wary of the very phenomenon it takes up. For instance, Amy Hungerford writes that “the fantasy that we can really have another’s experience, that we can be someone else, that we can 94 somehow possess a culture we do not practice, elides the gap that imagination— preferable, in my mind, to identification—must fill” (157). This is an influential critique: if we think that texts grant us access to the experiences of others, we ignore the essential differences between persons. Hungerford echoes voices from classic film theory, such as

Jean-Louis Baudry, who argue that identification with the cinema necessarily communicates a totalizing political ideology to the viewer.5 In such a paradigm, the disruption of identification is itself an ethical and political good because it restores agency to the viewer. Leonard provides a slippery vision of identification that avoids many of these problems. The only character in Get Shorty who believes in identification as a totalizing force is Michael Weir, and he is clearly a target for mockery. But the novel’s overall message is more nuanced. Narrative art relies on a certain level of identification, but that isn’t the be-all and end-all. An author can strategically interrupt it.

A viewer or reader can have a different orientation to the text that does not rely on it.

Identification is always there, but it does not have to be the only mode of viewing/reading.

Perhaps more interestingly, Leonard provides a vision of identification that is based on taste, where more sophisticated audiences identify in more sophisticated ways.

Karen recognizes the fact that minor characters can provide interesting forms of identification when an audience is willing to see things from their perspectives.

Identification in Get Shorty relies on the skill of seeing things from someone else’s point of view, and this is something that translates to life as well. But does watching movies make one a better identifier, or are these conditions merely a coincidence? I would argue that in Get Shorty, the movies are a tool that makes one better at identifying because of 95 the ways that they train one to look at others. Karen’s cinematic vision is based on seeing a room as if through a camera lens; Chili’s catchphrase “look at me” is a staple of mob movies. But even if there is not a causal relationship, Get Shorty presents a world in which the kind of people who know how to identify with the movies are the same kind who can identify with people in life. That, by itself, is an argument in favor of identification as a tool for viewing art.

The Potential of Empty Allusions in LaBrava As producers and actors, the characters in Get Shorty know the movie industry (or get to know it). And the reader is aligned with Chili Palmer, so even those who are unfamiliar with film production can fake their way through the reading experience until they do understand. Thus Leonard, like the other authors in my dissertation, assumes an informed reader6 who is familiar enough with movies and movie stars, with Shane and Robert De

Niro, to follow the action and reflect on it. In LaBrava, Leonard asks a further question that is relevant to my overall project: what happens when the reader is not informed, when an author alludes to a star or film that a reader does not know? One way to answer this question would be to write a novel full of obscure cinematic allusions, testing the reader by forcing him or her to recognize and decipher them. Leonard’s method in

LaBrava takes this concept a step further. He invents a movie star, Jean Shaw, who starred in several moderately successful films noir in the post-WWII studio era. The reader of LaBrava has never seen a Jean Shaw picture (Jean Shaw pictures do not exist), so her value as an allusion comes from the fact that she is beyond any reader’s horizon of expectations.7 An allusion to one of them produces the sensation of reading a description 96 of a movie that we have not seen, an experience I call an “empty allusion.” Through such allusions, Leonard suggests that no film or text can take on an entirely stable meaning.

Jean Shaw and Empty Allusions

Jean Shaw holds special sway over protagonist Joe LaBrava, a former Secret

Service agent and current portrait photographer. To him, she is “The movie star he had fallen in love with the first time he had ever fallen in love in his life, when he was twelve years old” (236). LaBrava unexpectedly meets Jean Shaw when she calls their mutual friend Maurice Zola to get her out of a jam; she is being held in a drunk tank, and

LaBrava helps Maurice to collect her. LaBrava takes her photograph that night, but her face is obscured. It is only the next day, developing the photo in his darkroom, that he recognizes her as his childhood crush and his memories of watching her movies come rushing back. Charles Rzepka interprets this dark room as a Lockean “camera obscura,” an allegory for the mind: “In the ‘dark room’ of every mind are drawers filled with movie stills of our past experiences, and every print has a corresponding celluloid negative through which we project onto the world our dreams and fantasies, using the light of our imaginations” (145). The remainder of the novel investigates what these “movie stills” of memory are, how they impact LaBrava’s behavior, and whether their significance to

LaBrava can be communicated to someone else.

Like The Moviegoer’s Binx Bolling, LaBrava can conjure a synopsis of every

Jean Shaw movie he ever saw. He proves that he’s a big fan of her work, telling her, “I think in Deadfall you lured a guy out on the bridge. You were having an affair, and then you tried to blackmail him . . . In Nightshade you poisoned your husband” (247). These 97 synopses tell us what has stuck in LaBrava’s mind after watching the movies: Jean Shaw as the scheming, secondary female lead in noir films. Jean Shaw summarizes this phenomenon herself: “‘I was the spider woman . . . My job was to come between the lead and the professional virgin. But in the end he goes back to little June Allyson and I say,

‘Swell.’ If I’m not dead’” (247). Jean Shaw always plays the “spider woman” to June

Allyson’s “professional virgin.” Because she takes on the same role in each movie, her meaning for LaBrava is stable; he can visualize the paradigmatic “Jean Shaw” performance without having to refer to the plot or characterization of any picture in particular. The informed reader can also imagine this persona, conjuring an image of the kind of actress who would play opposite June Allyson. If the reader aligns with LaBrava, then, allusions to Jean Shaw should complement the action by serving as a shorthand for a recognizable cinematic type.

Jean Shaw is full of meaning for LaBrava, but many other characters do not even know who she is. LaBrava explains to Franny Kauffman, a free-spirited painter who serves as his secondary love interest:

“She was a movie star. She was in pictures with Robert Mitchum.”

“Well obviously I’ve heard of Robert Mitchum. I love him.” (269)

The allusion to Mitchum is similar for the reader and Franny. As long as we know who

Mitchum is, we can imagine Jean Shaw as the kind of actress who would play opposite him—the same goes for other costars like Audie Murphey, Farley Granger, and Victor

Mature. But Jean Shaw herself signifies nothing to Franny. Her iconographic impact has been erased twenty-five years after the fact, and only a cinephile like LaBrava will remember her. Even if LaBrava is right, even if Jean Shaw was the quintessential femme 98 fatale back in her heyday, she is only a footnote in the novel’s present. Allusions to Jean

Shaw pictures do complement and supplement the action of LaBrava, especially by invoking or ironizing the tone of a noir thriller. But we do not get any of the nuances or personal associations that accompany a typical cinematic allusion because we cannot have a relationship with Jean Shaw herself. This is what I mean by empty allusion.

Further complicating the reader’s relationship to Jean Shaw is the fact that

LaBrava himself has only a limited knowledge of her filmography. There is one film,

Obituary, which he only remembers vaguely. Other films he simply has not seen, including Treasure of the Aztecs. Jean Shaw has to synopsize it for him: “Farley Granger was Montezuma’s bastard son. In the last reel I’m about to be offered up to the gods on top of a pyramid, have my heart torn out, but I’m rescued by Cortez’s younger brother”

(250). It is easy for the informed reader to imagine a historical exploitation epic with that title, plot, and costar, but how does this play into our understanding of the overall Jean

Shaw persona? Can she be the sacrificial virgin and a spider woman? When Jean Shaw tells LaBrava that she made sixteen pictures, he is surprised and thinks to himself that he can only remember “four or five titles” (250). Her biggest fan has only seen a quarter of her movies; she is becoming an antiquarian taste, like reading Boswell might be today.

As a result, Jean Shaw represents the phenomenon of a star’s allusive potential fading with time. Many have forgotten her entirely. And even for those who do remember her, hearing the name “Jean Shaw” or seeing her photograph does not ignite the same tinge of exoticism that a viewer of Treasure of the Aztecs would have experienced. The outliers in her filmography, along with their supplementary potential, have been lost to time.

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Interpreting Jean Shaw

We get closer to seeing one of her pictures firsthand when LaBrava, Franny, hotel owner Maurice, and Jean Shaw herself all settle in to watch Let It Ride, a film about illegal gambling. The narrator does not describe the movie directly, but details its effect on the viewers, especially LaBrava. At the movie’s end, “LaBrava got up to make drinks, remembering a Bogart line to the question, ‘How do you like your brandy?’ Bogart, as

Sam Spade: ‘In a glass.’ In that frame of mind after seeing Jean’s picture” (354-55).

Primed by watching Let It Ride, LaBrava is in the “frame of mind” to think of other noir films, like those in which Humphrey Bogart stars as a private eye. But LaBrava has misremembered the line about the brandy, attributing words to Sam Spade in The Maltese

Falcon that were actually spoken by Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. So this direct quotation allows for layered interpretations for the informed reader. In one sense, the quotation is complementary, making LaBrava’s affective state legible and lending the scene a noir tone. But to the reader who catches LaBrava’s mistake, the mix-up serves as a supplement. We realize that we’re learning about Jean Shaw’s movies from LaBrava’s fallible perspective, which is marked by sentimentality and by half-remembered lines.

Thus, the quotation from a real film reflects on Let It Ride’s status as an empty allusion: we see LaBrava’s reaction, but we do not get to compare it to our own.

While LaBrava is making the drinks, Franny and Jean Shaw debate the meaning of her character in Let It Ride, Lila:

Franny: I wasn’t sure, but I had the feeling Lila was getting a little psycho.

Jean: No, not at all. It’s more an obsession. She’s in a hopelessly corrupt

situation, she’s disillusioned, but you know she has to play the game. 100

Franny: It’s the lighting and composition—

Jean: That’s part of it, the ominous mise en scene.

Franny: I mean if she’s not psychotic then it’s the look of the picture, the

expressionistic realism that gives that feeling. (355)

Franny and Jean’s conversation illustrates a further problem for the reader trying to understand the Shaw persona. Even though the women have just finished watching the movie, they disagree about Lila’s motivation. Was she “getting a little psycho” or merely

“in a hopelessly corrupt situation”? Even worse (from Leonard’s perspective), to settle the debate they begin to discuss the film using artsy jargon, moving from formal elements like “lighting” and “mise en scene” to the more abstract idea that the film exhibits a style of “expressionistic realism.” While these phrases demonstrate that they belong to different interpretive communities (film actors and visual artists), both women move away from concrete, verifiable details about the film and into unverifiable interpretations.

The art-speak points to a real problem with cinematic allusions, especially to stars: viewers’ responses to a given performance may spring from features of the film that have nothing to do with that performance. We all bring our horizon of expectations to a given text, based on disparate factors from genre conventions to the personal library of films that each of us has seen. Even if we, the readers, were able to watch Let It Ride, we would not be able to agree on what it means.

LaBrava prefers still images to moving pictures precisely because he believes that photographs contain static meaning. LaBrava shoots candid portraits in black and white, using powers of observation sharpened in the Secret Service to reveal his subjects as they

“really are.” He mocks reviewers who consider his work to be “a frontal attack against 101 the assumptions of a technological society,” or “a compendium of humanity’s defeat at the hands of venture capital,” or “an exorcism . . . forty days in the desert” (285). In contrast to this art-speak, he quotes from Walker Evans to assert that his pictures are no more, or less, than “images whose meanings exceed the local circumstances that provide their occasion” (286). Photographs communicate meaning without resorting to analogy or interpretation. As Rzepka puts it, “His black and white photos are, like every mimetic art, a mirror of life, but a magic one, conveying the truth beneath and behind surfaces, even his own, to everyone who looks at them” (143). If Jean Shaw is that which can never be properly interpreted, LaBrava’s photographs are that which can never be misinterpreted. The audience, just by looking, learns something essential about the people in the photograph.

This brings us back to the question of how to interpret the images of Jean Shaw that LaBrava carries in the camera obscura of his mind. Leo Stein draws the distinction,

“Things are what we encounter, ideas are what we project” (qtd. in Brown 3).8 In

LaBrava, this difference is literalized and hierarchized: the thing, the photograph, is trustworthy, whereas the idea, the mental image, is not. To have a photograph of a person is to learn concrete details about her. When Franny sees one of LaBrava’s photos, she gains insight into the subject without having met her: “I get the feeling she’s a ballbuster.

I feel sorry for her, you know? But only up to a point” (267). Jean Shaw similarly notes of LaBrava’s subjects, “They try to pose, not knowing they reveal themselves” (285). By contrast, when LaBrava looks at a moving image of Jean Shaw, either onscreen or in life, he cannot help but project his ideas outward onto her. These ideas are idiosyncratic, due to his boyhood fascination with Jean Shaw, and they tell us little about Jean Shaw herself. 102

Similarly, the images of Jean Shaw that he carries in his mind are untrustworthy, ideas about her with no physical referent, no thing, to back them up.

LaBrava cannot boil down Jean Shaw’s essence to a single image. She shapeshifts, confounding his vision: “He caught glimpses of her in black and white from the past and now in soft color, the same person, pale features, the lady in lamplight, dark eyes coming to rest on him” (265). Jean Shaw flickers; she oscillates. When LaBrava looks at her, his eyes bounce between the living-color reality of the woman in front of him and the black and white idea of her from his memory. This phenomenon only intensifies when the two go to bed together: “But you see, with all the anticipation, thinking back twenty-five years to the first time you saw her and were knocked out by her, finally when you’re there and it’s happening, it’s almost impossible to quit thinking about how great it’s going to be, how unbelievable, and do it without watching yourself doing it” (287-8). Unlike Chili Palmer in Get Shorty, LaBrava cannot keep his cool around Jean Shaw. He cannot see her as she “really is” because he continually projects onto her his ideas for how she ought to look, how it ought to feel to make love to her, how she is and is not like a movie character. Neither the reader nor LaBrava can interpret

Jean Shaw. The reader cannot see her movies, and LaBrava cannot stop seeing her as if she were in the movies.

LaBrava’s Obituary

LaBrava begins to act on his cinematic vision of Jean Shaw. He behaves like a tough guy in a noir, threatening a lowlife named Richard Nobles who has been bothering her and breaking his arm with a bat.9 But halfway through the novel, we learn that Jean 103

Shaw is in league with this Nobles. The point of view shifts abruptly with this reveal.

Jean Shaw and Nobles meet, and the free-indirect narration shifts to Nobles’ perspective.

She scolds him for various blunders, cluing us in to the fact that he has been acting on her orders. Then she suggests that they watch one of her pictures, Obituary, together. We see the opening shots of the movie through Nobles’ eyes: “Yeah, he remembered this one.

Starts with the funeral. Jean Shaw standing there all dressed in black with her husband, old enough to be her daddy . . . Something going on in her head and not sweet affection for her hubby, from the look of it” (340). Unlike LaBrava, Nobles is unreflective. He does not care that he has forgotten some parts of the movie because he does not mix up the woman on the screen with the woman sitting next to him. Nor is he self-conscious around Jean Shaw sexually, observing, “Yeah, she seemed to be getting in the mood herself, staring at herself in the moving picture” (341). Nobles may not be as smart as

LaBrava, but he reads Jean Shaw better than he does.

Obituary is the key to Jean Shaw’s extortion plot and, by extension, to the plot of the novel. She shows the film to Nobles because it contains a double-cross in which a wife makes off with her husband’s money and swaps it with cut-up newspapers to fool an accomplice. She plans to run the same scam on hotelier Maurice, LaBrava’s friend. While it may seem risky to run a heist based on a movie plot, it is a picture that even LaBrava, her biggest fan, hardly remembers. The significance of the exchange is not apparent until later, but Jean Shaw is startled the first time LaBrava brings up the film: “She looked up and stared at him for a moment. ‘When did you see Obituary?’” (248). Conveniently for her, LaBrava only remembers a few details. Like Nobles, he recalls that “the opening scene was in a cemetery”; other than that, he knows that Jean Shaw’s character is married 104 to a “distinguished looking gray-haired guy” and eventually she “shoots a bad guy” who

“looks down at the blood on his hand, down at his shirt” (248). When he can’t remember more, Jean Shaw plays it off as if the picture is of no significance: “She shook her head, thoughtful. ‘I’m not sure myself who was in it’” (248).

LaBrava’s memories of Obituary suggest that when we see a movie, certain flashbulb features stick with us, and everything else fades with time. A vivid opening, a character archetype, a death scene—can we remember more than that? Usually, we don’t have to. But when Jean Shaw receives a note demanding that she hand-deliver $600,000 in cash, LaBrava can’t shake the feeling that “It was like one of her movies” (370). Even with Jean Shaw driving off to forfeit a bag of cash supplied by her old friend Maurice,

LaBrava remembers vivid images rather than cogent plot points: “He could see her, a glimpse of her with Victor Mature in a room with barred windows. Blowing cigarette smoke in his face . . . the bars casting striped shadows in the bare room” (370). We might expect that this image of Jean Shaw smoking, like one of his photographs, should grant

LaBrava insight into her character in Obituary. But it doesn’t. If anything, the jail cell scene is a distraction from the plot details that would help him to solve the case. It is merely his own image of Shaw that he projects onto the current situation.

So LaBrava does not catch Jean Shaw in her plot. He knows that she likes to watch, discuss, and even quote from her movies,10 but he cannot determine her relationship to her previous film work. Late in the novel, during the heist, a chapter is narrated from Jean Shaw’s perspective that clarifies this relationship for the reader. A police officer named McCormick searches her apartment after the robbery, and she flirts with him to dull his suspicions. Then she reflects on her acting: 105

Not a memorable performance, but not bad. About average. Not nearly as difficult

to make convincing as the love scene in Treasure of the Aztecs—telling Audie

Murphy that neither the sacrificial dagger of Montezuma nor the conquering

sword of Cortes could stop her heart, her pagan heart, from burning with desire

. . . She wondered if she could update it and run it past LaBrava, just for fun.

(341)

Jean Shaw knows that men expect her to behave in accord with her screen persona. She not only realizes that her role in Treasure of the Aztecs is ridiculous; she relishes the idea of using something so silly to trip up LaBrava. She wants to do it “just for fun.” LaBrava spends so much time trying to decide what Jean Shaw represents to him that he fails to consider what might be motivating her. She doesn’t need to carry out this heist, nor does she need to manipulate LaBrava and McCormick. It excites her to do so. There is no single photographic image that will make Jean Shaw’s motivations clear to LaBrava because she is acting, a moving image and a moving target which rebuffs LaBrava’s interpretations.

LaBrava puts together the pieces too late. After days of trying to remember the plot of Obituary, he finally asks Franny, who just watched the picture, to fill him in. She provides an extended synopsis which connects the snippets that the reader has received:

“Her husband knows he’s gonna die of an incurable illness so he kills himself, then makes it look like she did it because she and her boyfriend took him for a lot of money”

(413). Jean Shaw goes to prison for his murder, not for the crime that she committed.

Other details become clear, too: Victor Mature is the serious-faced cop who arrests her and marries the good girl; Henry Silva is her boyfriend. Most importantly, Franny 106 remembers that Jean’s character double-crosses an accomplice by switching money with newspapers. When LaBrava asks her what happens next, Franny says, “‘Well, nothing happens after that the way it’s supposed to’” (418).

That brings LaBrava, and the reader, up to the present. In the film, Jean Shaw goes to meet her boyfriend, Henry Silva. In the novel, Jean Shaw is on her way to meet and double-cross Richard Nobles. The narration shifts from LaBrava’s conversation with

Franny to another section narrated from Jean Shaw’s point of view. As in the movie, Jean

Shaw shoots her accomplice and takes all the money for herself. She notes that the scene is less dramatic than it would have been in a movie: “She shot Henry Silva again and he did a slow movie die, reflecting betrayal right to the end. She shot Nobles again and he might have already been dead, sliding down the door frame to the floor” (418). Jean

Shaw harbors a cinematic idea for how this death scene should play, and in the end, this idea is as inaccurate as one of LaBrava’s. She understands how to use an image from the movies to manipulate the thoughts and behavior of others, but, like Catlett, she has allowed herself to get caught up in the same kind of thinking. Still, her plans only go slightly awry. When the police start to suspect her, she anonymously returns the money to

Maurice and agrees to marry him, solving all her problems. Meanwhile, LaBrava has to kill another man to help cover up the crime.

Obituary’s place in the plot of LaBrava suggests two reasons why cinematic allusions cannot contain stable meaning. The first is that we, like LaBrava, do not remember films correctly. We remember, or often misremember, flashbulb moments—a line, a shot, a character’s face, a scene—and we extrapolate outward from those moments to form our impression of a film. Leonard makes this point by ridiculously heightening 107 the stakes: LaBrava cannot remember further details even when it is a matter of life and death. As opposed to LaBrava’s verifiable photographs, movies are in constant motion, and different moments will imprint onto the mind of each viewer. Second, Obituary, like its star Jean Shaw, is an empty allusion. Even if the informed reader can picture the stoic face of her costar, Victor Mature, or imagine shadowy shots of Jean in a holding cell, there is still no way for us to have seen the picture. It is as if it has been completely lost to time, living on in the vague recollection of those who experienced its original release.

Even with home viewing, every movie and every star runs the risk of someday sliding into obscurity. Yet far from being an argument against using cinematic allusion as literary figures, LaBrava causes us to question our desire for allusions to contain a single, simple meaning. Each viewer’s relationship with each star is impossible to replicate.

Conclusion LaBrava contains a single movie pitch, though we only learn about it long after the fact.

Jean Shaw tried to write and produce a movie back when she was a star:

She had written a script once, walked into Harry Cohn’s office at Columbia and

handed it to him. In a bright red cover. He threw it on the desk, said, “Tell me

what it’s about in three sentences, and no cheating.” She told him: smart,

attractive girl is offered anything she wants by rich playboy who’s nuts about her,

furs, jewels, you name it. Harry Cohn said, “Yeah?” Girl turns him down because

getting it that way is unsatisfying, too easy. Harry Cohn said, “She nuts? I never

met a . . . broad yet’d turn down anything.” Jean said, wait. The girl cons the

playboy out of a lot of money and is happy because she did it, she earned it 108

herself. Harry Cohn said, “You mean the broad wins?” She said, “You bet.” He

told her the idea stunk. (394)

Cohn echoes Harry Zimm’s perspective in Get Shorty, though he makes his point more bluntly. Neither man can imagine watching a movie that forces him to identify with a woman. If Obituary provides the blueprint for Jean Shaw’s heist, this vignette provides the motivation. The movies are capricious. On the production side, the best ideas don’t rise to the top, and producers often don’t know what they’re doing. As time passes, viewers will forget everything about a given movie except for a few half-remembered details. Who can blame Jean Shaw for wanting to break away from the industry and earn something for herself?

Harry Cohn’s myopic response to Jean Shaw’s pitch helps us to combine the lessons from the two novels. For Leonard, the movies draw us into their perspective, but we must remember how limited a perspective it is. It is impossible to decide on a single meaning for a film, even something as seemingly simple as a Jean Shaw noir thriller, because different ideas and images will stick in the mind of each viewer. As a meta- commentary on the practice of employing cinematic allusions in novels, Jean Shaw points to the complications of using even the most frequently typecast characters. For

Leonard, we can’t take meaning from the movies, but we can take practices of looking through sympathetic identification. We can take on Karen Flores’s perspective from Get

Shorty, viewing cinematic characters dispassionately and as sites of perspectival potential. The movies provide Chili Palmer with a new lens to see his circumstances, and he learns to size up every scenario from multiple perspectives. By contrast, LaBrava gets so entangled in his feelings toward Jean Shaw that he cannot possibly imagine what she 109 might be scheming. He wants a single photo to sum her up, but he spends so much time looking at her that he can’t imagine how she might be seeing him. In Get Shorty, identification is predicated on guessing the perspective of another, and LaBrava warns us that failing to do so can cause us to forget the personhood of others. To put it more positively, each viewer’s perspective on a story is unique and impossible for someone else to imagine fully, but it is still worthwhile to try.

Each novel makes these points by interspersing allusions to real stars and films—

Shane and Robert De Niro, The Big Sleep and June Allyson—with references to fictional films that only exist in the world of the novel. I have analyzed the empty allusions within

LaBrava because of their narrative and thematic prominence, but it is worth noting their overall significance to my project as well. I have argued up to this point that one way for cinematic allusions to afford reflection for readers is that they cause us to consider our unique relationship to a particular star or film; we can then compare our mental images to the narrative of the novel we are reading. An allusion will complement or supplement the narrative moment when I recognize how, or whether, it fits. Empty allusions take this concept a step further by allowing me to imagine an unfamiliar star or film in generic terms or by relying on my own experiences. Such allusions are not entirely vacant, as characters like Michael Weir and Jean Shaw exhibit idiosyncrasies that move them beyond the abstract categories of “method actor” or “femme fatale.” Nevertheless, their meta, behind-the-scenes quality is more explicitly reflexive than many of the allusions that appear in Kerouac and Percy’s novels. My final chapter details how Joan Didion takes the concept of empty allusions to new extremes, describing the film industry, 110 actors, and movies in such abstract terms that it is nearly impossible to read them on a literal level.

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Chapter 4: Empty Allusions in Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays

“What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask.” (Play It As It Lays 3)

I begin this chapter with the famous opening lines of Play It As It Lays. They are delivered by protagonist Maria Wyeth, who has suffered a mental breakdown following the death by suicide of her best friend, BZ. Now she lives in a mental institution, having withdrawn from society and given up her career as an actress in film and television.

Instead of stating what these events mean to her, Maria begins with the non-sequitur that she sees no point in asking why Iago is evil. Maria is comfortable with letting Iago’s motivations and development remain a mystery, and she claims the same status for herself in the novel we are about to read. She states plainly, “I am what I am. To look for

‘reasons’ is beside the point” (3). Maria disdains her doctors, who try to explain and diagnose her mental condition: “They will misread the facts, invent connections, will extrapolate reasons where none exist, but I told you, that is their business here” (4). These opening pages are a reflexive, direct address in which Maria tells her readers that we will never be able to understand her motivations. Sandra Hinchman points out that we, like

Maria’s doctors, are liable to look for “connections” that explain her actions, even if we have to “invent” or “extrapolate” them (471). This is natural, but pointless. We are entering a story whose protagonist is going to behave in inexplicable ways.

Didion rehearsed these lines about Iago once before while reviewing the film

Lilith (Robert Rossen, 1964). In fact, Didion wrote this review for Vogue while working 112 on the first draft of Play It As It Lays, so it likely that watching the film spurred the

“What makes Iago evil?” question that opens the novel.1 She writes,

I wonder if what is the matter with Lilith does not lie ineradicably deep in

Rossen’s view of the world—wonder if its glibness does not spring from some

failure to admit that the irrational mind is something quite different from the

rational mind in (correctable) error. “What makes Lilith schizophrenic?” Rossen

can not [sic] help asking, just as he would ask “What makes Iago evil?” or “Why

Auschwitz?” I wonder if it is not beside the point to ask. (“Lilith” 64)

Lilith tells the story of Vincent Bruce (Warren Beatty), a young veteran who works as an occupational therapist at a private mental institution. He begins a sexual relationship with one of the patients, Lilith (Jean Seberg), who has schizophrenia. As the film progresses,

Lilith starts to confuse Vincent for her dead brother, and it becomes clear that the shock of his death is at the heart of her problem. Meanwhile, Vincent behaves increasingly erratically, and the film concludes with Vincent asking the hospital’s doctors to help him

(apparently for PTSD, though the credits roll before we get a definite diagnosis).

While Lilith touches on similar themes of mental illness to Play It As It Lays,

Didion rejects the film’s premise outright. In Maria, Didion writes a character whose behavior and mental illness unsettle the reader’s expectations for narrative causation. In

Namwali Serpell’s terms, Maria “heightens our desire to interpret, yet thwarts our ability to do so” (246). The novel’s portrayal of the movie industry is also frustrating because it relies on generalizations that ignore the elements of filmmaking and celebrity culture that are most likely to interest the reader. Instead of communicating a shared experience, the novel’s empty allusions describe Maria’s personal life in Hollywood to which the reader 113 has no access. I argue that our understanding of Maria’s character and the novel’s descriptions of the cinema are mutually constitutive. Empty cinematic allusions highlight the fact that Maria’s experience is likewise unknowable to us. In other words, Didion’s cinematic allusions instill a mode of reading that help us to approach Maria and the novel’s setting correctly.

Vacuity in Play It As It Lays Scholars of Play It As It Lays have always grappled with the question of how to understand, or even describe, the novel’s apparent lack of meaning. In a story full of disturbing content—abortion, suicide, domestic violence—Maria, her friends, and the third-person narrator all remain emotionally detached from the action. Barry C. Chabot calls this feature of the novel “vacuity,” and he argues that it reaches its apex when Maria enters a mental institution: “If the people in her world chronically shy away from the distress of others, Maria comes to cast a cold eye on their comforts and pains alike” (59).

I will use Chabot’s term because it describes the novel’s affectlessness without trying to explain it away or casting it as an obstacle to overcome as some scholars do with terms like “nothingness” and “the abyss.”2 As a concept, vacuity acknowledges that something seems to be missing from the novel, something that can be difficult for the reader to put a finger on. This lack of affect permeates the novel’s setting, Hollywood, which in turn teaches us how to read the empty cinematic allusions that appear throughout. Vacuity stirs our curiosity but leaves it unsatisfied.

Repetition is one method that Didion uses to achieve this effect. Maria is married to a director, Carter Lang, and her best friend is a producer named BZ. She spends most of her time with characters who work in the film industry and tend to speak in an ironic, 114 repetitive way. Over time, their conversations seem to lose meaning entirely. Serpell writes of this process, “The hollowing out of reality through repetition takes place through semantic satiation: the phenomenon in which a repeated word starts to sound unreal or meaningless” (201). Characters in Play It As It Lays self-consciously use this tactic to perform a sense of nihilism about interpersonal communication. For instance,

Larry Kulik, a lawyer whom Maria and her friends dislike, describes a party as

“beaucoup fantastic” (37). When she leaves the party, Maria repeats the phrase to BZ:

“I have to go home.”

“You’re not exactly a shot of meth tonight anyway.”

“I feel beaucoup fantastic,” Maria said, and turned her face away so that

he would not see her tears. (37)

Maria empties the phrase “beaucoup fantastic” of any possible positive connotation. A mashup of French and English—the phrase is not italicized and uses the English pronunciation of “fantastic”—this superlative represents the kind of Hollywood talk that

Maria and her friends enjoy mocking. Her repetition ironizes in two directions: she belies her own feelings of depression and mocks Kulik for using the pretentious phrase in the first place. Both of these levels of verbal play continue throughout the novel when characters employ repetition to hide their feelings and score points off one another.

Sincerity is absent from Didion’s portrayal of Hollywood, and her characters avoid it to prove that they belong.

An analogous effect occurs at the level of plot, as scenes replay until the reader loses interest in them. Early in the novel, Maria imagines calling Carter in an attempt to reconcile after a period of separation. She opts not to do so, however, because she knows 115 how the exchange will play out: “He would say something and she would say something and before either of them knew it they would be playing out a dialogue so familiar that it drained the imagination, blocked the will, allowed them to drop words and whole sentences and still arrive at the same cold conclusion” (31). Maria and Carter fight by rote, and the repetition has emptied it of meaning and interest. Even this summary of their conversation is meandering, and it is a chore for the reader to read to the end of the sentence. Maria knows that their talk will reach a violent conclusion: “‘Why don’t you just get it over with,’ he would say then, leaning close, his face still contorted. ‘Why don’t you die’” (32). At the novel’s end, we see that Maria is right; after various violent outbursts, Carter tells her to die in the cruelest possible terms. Yet neither Maria nor

Carter invest mental or emotional energy into these fights, and this is what makes them so unnerving. The content of the conversation is disturbing, but its recurrence within the narrative starts to fray the reader’s sense of whether it ultimately matters. In Serpell’s terms, it “starts to sound unreal or meaningless.”

Repeated words and scenes afford emotional vacuity, and Maria’s behavior similarly empties the story of narrative logic. For instance, she goes to the doctor for a pregnancy test but never follows up to learn the results. Carter interprets this behavior:

“You were afraid to call back about it.” He was speaking in a careful monotone, a

prosecutor with an open-and-shut case. “You thought if you didn’t call back it

would just go away.”

She closed her eyes. “I guess so. I guess that’s right.” (51)

Carter has resigned himself to Maria’s irrational behavior, and the reader must do the same because Maria has other moments like this. When she worries that she might be 116 pregnant, she throws away her tampons, reasoning that she will get her period as soon as she’s unprepared for it. She always needs to have a phone handy because she believes that a tragedy will befall her daughter, Kate, if she isn’t there to pick up the phone. We never get an explanation for these irrational actions. The novel’s episodic structure compounds our confusion, as the whole story is related in brief chapters with no clear causal connection between them and no space for explanation. Ronald Foust writes, “The blending of temporal states and narrative perspectives is thematically meaningful as a device of style pointing to Maria’s psychological disintegration, her inability to sense causal relationships between events” (47). Foust argues that the novel’s form helps us to see the extent of her disorientation. We identify with Maria’s confusion.

I think that Foust, and other critics who write about Maria’s mental illness, overstate how much we can learn about Maria.3 Specifically, I do not think that the novel leads me to identify with her. We do not see ourselves reflected in the characters, but rather see possibilities for behavior that we would never think to try. I am confused when

I read the novel, but not in the same way that Maria is. I don’t think, along with her, that refusing to buy a box of tampons is going to stop her from being pregnant. Maria’s actions often go unexplained, and we are not trained to read in the vacuous, anti-causal mode in which they operate. The novel is disorienting, and that is the point. I argue that the same is true of the novel’s depiction of the cinema. Most of the cinematic allusions are “empty” in the sense that I develop in the previous chapter; Didion refers to actors, films, and productions that only exist within the fictional world. But these allusions take on new affordances in the vacuous context of Play It As It Lays, as Maria’s relationship to cinema also alienates her from the reader. 117

Cinematic Analogies Many scholars argue that Play It As It Lays is structured like a film. For instance, Samuel

Chase Coale writes that the novel’s short chapters resemble shots that have been reassembled through montage editing:

For Didion as in films montage becomes metaphor; the arrangement of episodes

reveals the state of mind of her heroine, of the modern world. That abstract and

concrete meet head-on in her ordering of images, her expert cutting from scene to

scene, the discontinuous juxtapositions of a shattered world. (185)4

For Coale and others, the novel’s arrangement of brief, adjacent episodes give us insight into Maria’s mental state. Didion herself writes that the importance of the novel’s white space is in the pressure it exerts on the reader to fill in the gaps. She claims to have written Play It As It Lays as “a book in which anything that happened would happen off the page, a ‘white’ book to which the reader would have to bring his or her own bad dreams” (“Why I Write”).5 There is a subtle difference here between the novelist and her critics. Didion does not write that the spaces in her novel help us to understand Maria by setting up contrasts. They are just that: spaces. They are vacuous, baiting the reader into trying to fill them. In that sense, they do not provide us with specific insights into Maria’s character but point to our desire for such insight.

While the novel’s critics agree about Didion’s use of literary “montage,” they tend to ignore the fact that characters within the novel also draw analogies to the cinema.

Even minor characters do this. When a masseur misses a piece of gossip in a conversation, he quips, “I seem to have come in after the main titles” (47). In such reflexive moments, we are encouraged to consider the differences between a film and the 118 novel we are reading. Most characters, like the masseur, employ cinematic allusions to lament the fact that their lives do not have the neat narrative structure of a Hollywood film. They want their lives to make more sense, like a movie does. By contrast, Maria sees moments of logical breakdown in her life as being full of possibility for improvisation, an alternative to reality rather than a means to understand it. Because

Maria makes analogies that differ from those of the other characters—and that defy the reader’s expectations—this feature makes her experience of the world more foreign, rather than clarifying it.

Carter Lang, the director-husband, uses analogies to the filmmaking process to analyze his relationship with Maria. In a brief introductory chapter, he describes their marriage in cinematic terms: “Here are some scenes I have very clear in my mind” (13).

He narrates a time when she awkwardly contradicted him in front of his friends and another occasion when she walked away from their child, Kate, when they were playing in the yard. Carter has trouble deciding what these scenes mean: “After BZ’s death there was a time when I played and replayed these scenes and others like them, composed them as if for the camera, trying to find some order, a pattern. I found none. All I can say is this: it was after a succession of such small scenes that I began to see the improbability of a rapprochement with Maria” (14). Carter’s monologue reveals his belief in

“composition” and “order,” the desire to arrange scenes in such a way as to impart meaning or purpose. But Maria thwarts his attempts to find a reason behind life’s events, just as she does for the reader who wants to find a reason for the novel’s brief, episodic chapters. It bothers Carter that narrative causation does not dictate the pattern of events in his life, as it does in the movies. Thus, his cinematic analogies do clarify his worldview. 119

These analogies are not mere abstractions for Carter; he literally filmed and edited

Maria when he directed her in two films. Cynthia Griffin Wolff writes that when Carter casts Maria in films, it is an attempt to impose meaning onto her, to control rather than understand. Wolff argues that Carter’s directions are dehumanizing: “Not a person anymore, Maria has become a property: anybody can look at her whenever he wants— speed her up, slow her down, run her backwards. Most of all, this noting of ‘the cut’ denies any intrinsic order to Maria’s identity” (488). We get another nod to Carter’s controlling nature when Maria is watching television and he “appear[s] on television discussing the auteur principle” (138). Carter thinks of himself as a singularly talented filmmaker, and he uses cinematic language to look for order in their relationship. When he and Maria get into a fight, he calmly states, “‘We’ve been through this, Maria. We’ve done this number about fifty times” (42). When Maria reveals that she is pregnant, he says that he “missed a transition” (48). He believes Maria’s actions should be signposted for him so he can understand everything that happens, and he lashes out savagely when she refuses to meet these expectations. In the end, Carter’s cinematic analogies reveal his limited power to control or even understand her.

Maria’s analogies are always delivered through the indirect narration by the third- person narrator, and they represent a different worldview entirely. Shortly after Carter learns that Maria is pregnant and “misses a transition,” they have a well-rehearsed fight in which he asks whether the baby is his (she doesn’t know) and insists that she have an abortion. The narrator states, “It came to her that in the scenario of her life this would be what was called an obligatory scene, and she wondered with distant interest just how long the scene would play” (50). In one of her film reviews, Didion employs the language of 120 the “obligatory scene” to describe tropes that every movie viewer will recognize and expect. She specifically writes that all films about Hollywood contain certain beats:

“Most of us remember the Show Biz movie, and recognize its obligatory scenes. There is the ‘I’ve-Got-A-Dream’ sequence, when those young eyes first pan across an empty theatre” (“The Guest” 57).6 Moviegoers and theater-goers look forward to the obligatory scene; it is the culmination of some tension or narrative thread. Even though Maria’s secret pregnancy has been building toward such a moment, she can only muster “distant interest” for how long it will last. Maria is bored by the scene precisely because it is obligatory, and her attitude distances her from the reader. We are motivated by narrative expectation to see what will happen when Carter finally learns of the pregnancy, and it is jarring to realize that we care more than the protagonist of the novel.

Maria’s cinematic analogies often point toward possibilities rather than explanations. At one point, she imagines a scene that serves as a counterpoint to Carter’s description of their domestic life. Instead of trying to make sense of their relationship as it exists, Maria plays out a mental film that envisions her family as a happy one. She imagines Carter and Kate playing together and other images of their life together. Then the vision is arrested: “Freeze frame. Kate fevered, Carter sponging her back while Maria called the pediatrician. Kate’s birthday, Kate laughing, Carter blowing out the candle.

The images would flash at Maria like slides in a dark room. On film they might have seemed like a family” (138). Carter wants to rearrange shots into an order where they make narrative sense, whereas Maria’s are still images, a “freeze frame” that halts such progression and makes no attempt at coherence. These slides represent an unrealistic 121 alternative to the facts of Maria’s life; they are pictures of how life “might seem,” not life as it is.

Maria uses cinematic analogies to escape from her life, and we see this even more clearly when her cinematic vision veers beyond the optimistic and into the surreal. On one of her many drives around Los Angeles, some street toughs try to steal her car while she is making a phone call:

As if in slow motion she began walking across the grass toward the car, and as

she got closer they melted back, formed a semicircle. Abstractly she admired the

way that she and they together were evolving a choreography, hearing the same

silent beat . . . Later those few minutes in the plaza in Oxnard would come back to

Maria and she would replay them, change the scenario. It ended that way badly,

or well, depending on what you wanted. (131)

Maria considers her exchange with the hooligans to be a moment of surprising profundity and connection despite the more obvious explanation that the boys are trying to rob her.

The sequence is dreamlike; she and the boys are “evolving a choreography, hearing the same silent beat,” moving in “slow motion.” More than that, Maria manipulates her memories of the scene to achieve desired effects, “depending on what you wanted.” By looking at the boys in a cinematic way, she can improvise infinite alternatives to the reality of her own situation.

While Carter and Maria’s cinematic analogies exhibit different perspectives to the cinema, both serve to alienate the reader from Maria. Carter wants life to conform to cinematic logic, and he grows frustrated when Maria fails to do so. Maria, on the other hand, is interested in artifice. She thinks of the movies as an elaborate, mutable 122 choreography. She is aware of spectacle—the idea that a marital blowup with her husband would interest a viewer, or that certain balletic moments in life can yield beauty even if there is no reason for them to do so. If, as many scholars argue, Play It As It Lays is structured like a film or screenplay, it is important to specify what vision of the movies the novel endorses: Maria’s idiosyncratic view that privileges spectacle over narrative sense, a hierarchy that continues to manifest in the novel’s other cinematic allusions.

Reading Maria’s Starring Roles Maria has starred in two pictures, both directed by Carter, and these films help to further clarify the differences between the two characters. Each film belongs to a recognizable genre of American cinema from the 1960s. Angel Beach is an outlaw biker exploitation picture, and Maria is an experimental direct cinema documentary. Didion devotes a whole chapter of the text to describing these films and Maria’s reactions to them. The films are fictional, only existing in the world of the novel; they are empty allusions to the extent that I cannot have seen the films. But they have recognizable correlates in the world, and Wolfgang Iser’s conception for how fictional texts incorporate reality is useful for describing these pictures:

Thus selection as a fictionalizing act reveals the intentionality of the text. It

encapsulates extratextual realities into the text, turns those elements chosen into

context for each other, and sets them up for observation against those elements it

has excluded, thus bringing about a two-way process of mutual review: the

present is viewed through what is absent, and the absent through what is present.

(Iser 6) 123

Iser’s “extratextual realities” are capacious, including any recognizable discourse to which the reader has access. When an author brings such discourses into a fictional work, we can consider their selection to be meaningful. So Didion’s choice forces us to ask: why a biker film and a documentary? What does incorporating these genres (and not others) afford for the viewer? My answer is that they provide the reader with a lens to understand Maria’s taste system, reinforcing her preference for spectacle and improvisation over attempts to explain or represent reality.

The biker film, Angel Beach, provides little beyond spectacle. Its plot is easy to synopsize: “The second picture she had made with Carter was called Angel Beach and in it she played a girl who was raped by the members of a motorcycle gang” (19). We know nothing else about the picture’s plot, though we do know that Carter made it for next to nothing, and it grossed “just under eight million dollars” (19). Still, these few details are in keeping with the collection of tropes associated with biker films. More than fifty motorcycle exploitation films were produced from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, a cycle that began in 1966 with Wild Angels, directed by Roger Corman (Syder). News stories surrounding the Hell’s Angels fueled the subgenre, and the title Angel Beach is a nod to the naming conventions of such films as Hell’s Angels ’69, Angels Hard as They

Come, and Angels Wild Women.7 Similarly, the fact that Angel Beach made back twenty times its budget reflects the success of Wild Angels, which unexpectedly grossed $5 million, making it the twelfth highest-grossing film of 1966 for upstart American

International Pictures (Syder). For Didion’s readers who knew this history or the modern reader who is willing to look into it, the description of Angel Beach vividly evokes the window when the biker picture was a major force at the B-movie box office. 124

The plot of Angel Beach also confirms our expectations for biker pictures. Martin

Rubin observes that “Rape or its suggestion, often of the gang variety, is a feature of nearly every biker film, often more as a lifestyle element than as a central plot device”

(366).8 Rubin’s description of gang rape as a “lifestyle element” is informative here. The bikers in the films are a chaotic force, and when they invade a town on a crime spree, their heinous actions have no reason behind them. Genre conventions demand a gang rape, so the part that Maria plays in Angel Beach is a matter of course. Her character even delivers lines to this effect, stating that the rape itself did not matter: “‘I look at you and I know that . . . what happened just didn’t mean anything,’ the girl on the screen would say, and ‘There’s a lot more to living than just kicks, I see that now, kicks are nowhere’”

(19). These realizations by Maria’s character, in addition to the film’s low budget and violent content, clearly designate it as schlock. We have no reason to think that it transcends the genre or has some kind of hidden artistic merit. It is a biker picture, pure and simple.

Yet Maria enjoys watching the picture and finds it to be valuable. The film’s apparent nihilism is complicated by the fact that it has two alternate endings:

Carter’s original cut ended with a shot of the motorcycle gang, as if they

represented some reality not fully apprehended by the girl Maria played, but the

cut released by the studio ended with a long dolly shot of Maria strolling across a

campus. Maria preferred the studio’s cut. In fact, she liked watching the picture:

the girl on the screen seemed to have a definite knack for controlling her own

destiny. (19-20)9 125

When she watches the two endings for Angel Beach, Maria thinks that each one represents different possibilities for the character she portrays. If the last thing we see is the motorcycle gang, they “represent some reality not fully apprehended by the girl,” whereas ending with a dolly shot of her on the campus communicates that “the girl on the screen has a knack for controlling her own destiny.” As far as Maria is concerned, the events of the film up to that point, including the gang rape, do not need to support an overall hopeful reading.10 Indeed, Maria’s affinity for the ending of Angel Beach is in keeping with her overall characterization precisely because it defies narrative logic. The girl can walk onto a college campus and live her life as if the rape never took place. She

“has a knack” for doing what she wants, even if other people cannot follow how she got there. This knack, more than anything else, is her similarity to Maria.

Ironically, Angel Beach tells us more about Maria than a literal documentary about her life does. Maria, Carter’s first film, belongs to another genre that evokes the

American cinema of the 1960s, the direct cinema documentary. There is no plot to speak of, so it is more difficult to synopsize than a biker film. We learn more about Maria’s production than its final form:

Carter had simply followed Maria around New York and shot film. It was not

until they moved to California and Carter began cutting the film together that she

entirely realized what he was doing. The picture showed Maria doing a fashion

sitting, Maria asleep on a couch at a party, Maria on the telephone arguing with

the billing department at Bloomingdale’s, Maria cleaning some marijuana with a

kitchen strainer, Maria crying on the IRT. At the end she was thrown into

negative and looked dead. (20) 126

At first glance, it would seem that this film aligns more nearly with Maria’s anti-causal perspective on the world than Angel Beach does. It shows a series of unconnected scenes that do not claim to add up to anything more, and we might think that the juxtaposition between these scenes produce a montage effect similar to that of the novel we are reading. But when Carter cuts the movie together, he imposes meaning where there was none before, and this is what Maria reacts against. Carter orders the scenes suggestively and portrays Maria in negative at the end of the film so she “looks dead.” The film is a critical success. Film students from USC approach Carter and ask him questions about it, and it “won a prize at a festival in Eastern Europe” (20). But watching it makes Maria feel nauseous, and she has the opposite response as the one she had to Angel Beach: “The girl on the screen in that first picture had no knack for anything” (21).

Carter is operating in what would have been the cutting edge of the direct cinema movement, an observational documentary style that rose to prominence in American filmmaking of the 1960s. His role as the singular filmmaker of Maria fits the archetype for a director in this mode. As Richard Barsam puts it, “In direct cinema, the term

‘filmmaker’ subsumes the functions denoted by the terms ‘director,’ ‘cameraman,’

‘sound recorder,’ and ‘editor’” (Barsam 205). These roles gave the direct cinema filmmaker near-complete control over a project, and their married life together provided him with near-total behind-the-scenes access to his subject.11 Because of this, Maria carries the patina of representing Maria’s life as it happened. The film holds Maria up as an object of scrutiny, and in doing so it contradicts Didion’s project in Play It As It Lays by claiming to have some explanatory power or comment on reality. When she cries on the train or falls asleep at a party, viewers can feel as though they understand why she 127 does so. Maria’s character in Maria has “no knack for anything” because she has no say in improvising a new perspective on, or escape from, her own life.

For all the potential readings we could have of each of these films, their most significant contribution to the novel is the fact that they exist side by side, both in

Carter’s filmography and on the page. Carter jumps seamlessly between two disparate genres, willing to mold his cinematic vision, and mold Maria, to whatever genre happens to be popular. When he lives in New York, he wants to garner critical attention; when he moves to Los Angeles, he caters to the lowest common denominator. Each film is a success in its way, but we can start to question Carter’s taste. When he watches a screening, producer BZ tells Carter that the Angel Beach looks good, but he has missed the point of the whole thing: “‘How did Maria feel about the gangbang . . . you don’t get that, you’re missing the story’” (111). Carter’s rebuttal is weak: “‘It’s a commercial piece, BZ’” (111). Carter is the kind of person who would sympathize with the bikers at

Maria’s expense, closing the picture with a shot of them riding off into the sunset, whereas the studio pushed for an ending highlighting the resilience of Maria’s character.

Carter does not understand that a commercial picture can have such meaning, and he always views Maria, and the films she appears in, as a means to an end.

More importantly, Maria’s starring roles cement the status of cinema in the novel.

In her reviews, Didion is a champion of niche fare, especially genre pictures. Her tastes included other micro-trends which, like the biker film, the average viewer might dismiss as trashy or disposable. She often expresses enthusiasm for teen surfer films, low-budget science fiction, and Westerns, while she had nothing but scathing criticism for films like

The Sound of Music that purport to tackle more serious subject matter.12 Didion is not 128

Maria, but this background suggests that we should take seriously the possibility that the novel endorses biker pictures over direct cinema documentaries. Maria is interested in what the characters do. The girl in Maria flounders aimlessly, whereas the girl in Angel

Beach takes action. This is her metric for whether a character is worth watching, whatever else may befall her. These pictures, and Maria’s reaction to them, highlight her desire for improvisation, a “knack” that prevents her from having to behave in expected ways. She takes this knack into all of her social interactions, confounding other characters in the process.

Empty Allusions, Named and Unnamed There are a handful of cinematic allusions in Play It As It Lays that the reader can recognize. At one point, Maria describes a haircut she got as a child as having “bangs like

Margaret Sullavan,” a minor studio era star (8). Her relationship with Carter reminds her of a movie: “Quite often with Carter she felt like Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight, another frivolous thought” (40). The informed reader will know that this means Maria feels as though Carter is trying to bait her into insanity. At one point, the novel comments directly on the practice of quoting from films. Maria calls a man named Les Goodwin, with whom she is having an affair:

“Take me somewhere.”

“You got a map of Peru?”

She said nothing.

That’s funny, Maria. That’s a line from Dark Passage.”

“I know it.” (182) 129

Maria refuses to play along with Goodwin’s joke, following the dialogue from a particular film. Maria does not model her actions after specific stars or movies, and these few examples are the novel’s only recognizable allusions. Far more common in the story are references to the behind-the-scenes process of moviemaking and the lives of people working in the movie industry.

Maria does not value actors because of the characters they portray, but rather as a stimulus for improvisation. For instance, one day Maria drops by her agent’s office. She misses him but runs into another client: “In the elevator was an actor she recognized but had never met, the star of a canceled television Western” (23). The actor’s agent compliments Carter’s new film, and Maria and the star play out a scene together when she drops her pocketbook:

Maria smiled and nodded. It did not require an answer: it was a cue for the actor,

who waited for a suitable moment and then picked it up. ‘Your pocketbook’s

open,’ he drawled, and the look he gave Maria was dutifully charged with sexual

appreciation, meant not for Maria herself but for Carter Lang’s wife” (23).

Maria does not take the bait and look down at her pocketbook. Instead, she “leaned against the padded elevator wall and closed her eyes” (23). The actor, “drawling” his part as he would in a Western television program, is of no interest to her as cultural product or as a potential sexual partner. Likewise, she refuses to play the role laid out for her as

“Carter Lang’s wife,” leveraging her husband’s notoriety to continue the flirtation. She opts out of the exchange, demonstrating her knack for the unexpected.

Because her scene partners remain anonymous, the reader gets the opposite of the usual experience when a Hollywood star appears in a novel. Actors are literally present 130 but representationally vacant. In this case, we do not know the most basic element of a cinematic allusion: who the actor is and what, specifically, he represents onscreen.

Granted, we know what he sounds like – he “drawls” – but we do not know what he looks like or have specific tonal valences to unpack. Instead, he represents an economic reality: his show has been canceled and he must play nice with others to find work. In reader response terms, the Western star is so abstracted that the reader does not know whether he extends or confirms our previous expectations for such an actor. It is not that

Didion gives us a few details and leaves out the rest to be filled in with our imaginations.

It is an allusion to the abstracted category of “an actor.” He’s another example of what I called a “empty allusion” in the previous chapter—he only exists within the world of the novel, so we cannot have a pre-established relationship with him. As a result, we can only engage with the actor on Maria’s terms, seeing how she chooses to behave around him.

Many of the novel’s allusions to workers from the movie industry are similarly vacuous. Maria sees one of her friends in a trade magazine photographed with “a starlet whose name she did not recognize” (27). Maria feels awkward at another friend’s house when the only person to talk to is “an actor whose last several pictures had failed” (44).

In one sense, an indistinct starlet and an actor on the downswing of his career do not need to be named because they do not have enough clout in the industry to be worth Maria’s attention. Pat Hise points out that Maria is always aware of the power dynamics that govern every industry exchange: “In the remnants of Maria’s pursuit of success, the knowledge that she could ‘disappear’ from the minds of prospective employers nags her”

(78). One affordance of these characters’ vacuity, then, is that they represent a real possibility for workers like Maria on the fringes of the film industry. She is in constant 131 danger of being forgotten by Hollywood, and she interacts with characters of similar status. Yet it starts to feel uncanny when none of the characters seem to have names or specific attributes. This is another example of “semantic satiation,” as Serpell puts it. One

“actor” or “star” appearing in the novel would be an extraordinary character who is worthy of the reader’s notice, but when these same words repeat with such frequency throughout the story, the characters form an undifferentiated mass from which no single one can stand out.

One extended interaction with an actor helps to show why Maria prefers anonymity. The chapter begins with her exchanging one anonymous movie worker for another: “At a party in May she left not with the choreographer who had brought her but with an actor she had never before met” (152). We never see the choreographer before or after this, so his abandonment in favor of the actor is of no consequence. Since we know nothing about either of them, the only thing that recommends the actor is the fact that he and Maria have “never before met.” The actor, for his part, misremembers Maria’s name and introduces her as “Myra” to a group of friends when he takes her back to his house

(152). Maria doesn’t mind, however: “She liked his not knowing her. She did not much like him but she liked his not knowing her” (152). This exchange clarifies that Maria does not interact with other members of the movie industry to gain status, or at least not notoriety. It is precisely the anonymity of this exchange that allows her to behave in any way she likes. She does not have to play the part of an actress or Carter’s wife, but she can still go home with a movie star as an alternative to the ordinariness of life.

This effect, however, does not last. After Maria and the actor sleep together, she waits for him to fall asleep then drives away in his Ferrari to get away from the house. 132

She is arrested trying to drive it across state lines, but the problem is short-lived. Maria calls on her agent, who pressures the actor by threatening to blackball him from working with any of his clients. The actor drops the charges, and all is well, but he is annoyed to be called away from the set of a Western he is shooting to deal with Maria’s legal problems. The anonymity of their interaction feels like a betrayal to him, and he grows furious when they speak on the phone, yelling, “You never told me who you were” (157, italics original). This actor would have treated Maria differently if he knew that she was

Carter Lang’s wife and had the clout in Hollywood to make a phone call and have drug charges and grand theft auto stricken from her record. But Maria continues to think of him only as “an actor.” Her persistence sets her at odds with the reader and other characters. We want to know who the actor is, and the actor wants to know who Maria is.

But for Maria, an anonymous, vacuous encounter affords freedom that named contact lacks.

When the name of the actor is revealed, it means nothing to the reader that the generic category of “an actor” did not. Helene, BZ’s wife, exposes the actor’s identity while sarcastically lecturing Maria about her erratic behavior: “Nothing at all off about leaving a party with Johnny Waters and ending up in jail in Nevada at eight o’clock the next morning” (158). So we know that the man is called Johnny Waters. It sounds like the name of a movie star, and we know that he has starred in a Western. Helene is intrigued that Maria has slept with him, and asks what it was like. Paradoxically, we know the answer to this question: he takes poppers and demands that Maria hold perfectly still at the moment of his climax. We are privy to Johnny Waters’ most intimate secrets, but we do not know the information that the characters in the world of Play It As It Lays would 133 know—what he looks like, and what kinds of movies he stars in beyond his current

Western project. Even after his name is revealed, Jonny Waters may as well still be “an actor” to me. Because they occupy the same world, Maria can watch Johnny Waters movies; Maria can also bump into Johnny Waters at a party and decide to sleep with him.

Strangely, I only have access to this second, beyond-the-ordinary experience.

Most of the cinematic allusions in Play It As It Lays are empty, failing to communicate specific affective or narrative information to the reader. However, named and unnamed characters carry different affordances, and one more example will help to demonstrate this point. Maria and Carter know a couple, the Loomises: “Sidney Loomis was a television writer and Ruth Loomis was very active in the civil-rights movement and group therapy” (52). As named characters, Maria knows the Loomises and the Loomises know her. There is a specificity to their characterization that influences how Maria behaves around them; she tries to make small talk in an attempt to appease Carter. By contrast, Maria sees a film director and cinematographer at a party who “discuss the dehumanizing aspect of American technology, in French” (37).” Maria makes no effort with these people, and leaves the party because she feels like it. These two sets of characters are not differentiated by the kinds of information that they provide to me as a reader; neither the Loomises nor the French director means much. They represent different ranges of possible actions for Maria, with the unnamed characters allowing greater freedom. Similarly, the novel’s cinematic characters do not tap into the affective potential of particular films, stars, or viewing practices. They merely reflect on the book we are reading, highlighting our desire, and inability, to understand Maria’s experience.

134

The Final Picture During most of the action of Play It As It Lays, Maria has all but stopped working as an actress. After turning down various television roles and begrudgingly taking a guest spot on a program called Interstate 80, her agent gets her a sit-down meeting to star in another biker picture, her first major role since Angel Beach. She is annoyed to be typecast, and even more annoyed when her agent does not show up for the meeting in person: “The least he could have done was show up himself. She did not even want to do another biker picture” (140). However, the situation is even worse than she initially thought. Instead of being cast as the girl in distress, the likely object of another gang rape, she is being cast as the teacher at the local school. A junior representative at the meeting tries to talk her into the role: “‘You read the script, that’s the part, the lead’s just any teeny fluff. I mean the teacher, she . . . she carries the picture’” (141, italics and ellipsis original). Maria walks out of the meeting without comment, illustrating her disengagement from the film industry. It has been so long since she worked that she does not realize she has aged out of playing teens. But this disengagement also upsets the delicate balance of Maria’s life.

She desires anonymity so that she can have the broadest range of experiences, but in the novel’s final third, she withdraws to a point where she no longer has opportunities to exercise that freedom.

One example of Maria’s disengagement from the film industry is the fact that she refuses to watch Carter’s third and fourth pictures. The reader’s perspective is aligned with Maria’s, so we never learn what these films are about despite the considerable influence they exert on the plot of Play It As It Lays. Carter is making his third film when

Maria learns of her pregnancy and he insists that she have her abortion. We repeatedly hear that he has gone “to the desert” to make this picture, but that is all we know about 135 it—is it a Western, another biker picture, a road film? We never find out because Maria refuses to watch the movie. Carter encourages Maria to see it multiple times, but she seems unaware of when it will show:

“You seen it yet?”

“How would I have seen it, it’s not in release, I mean is it?”

“Maria . . . they’ve been screening it every night for a month, you know

that.” (137)

When she finally insists that she has seen it and enjoyed it, he knows that she’s lying:

“‘Just forget it Maria.” His voice was tired. ‘There hasn’t been a print in Los Angeles all week’” (138). Maria’s motivation for avoiding the picture is unclear; perhaps she only wants to watch when she is the star. But she follows Carter’s progress in the trade magazines and asks after him when she meets up with Helene. Carter’s star only seems to be rising. The film, whatever it is, is entered at Cannes, and this is when he gives his lectures about the auteur principle for French and English television. After the niche appeal of Maria and the B movie schlock of Angel Beach, Carter seems to be breaking through to worldwide critical acclaim.

Despite Maria’s total lack of interest, Carter convinces her to come to the desert with him while he shoots his next picture. His only pitch is, “‘It just might be better this time’” (176). The conversation quickly devolves. He belittles the fact that she cannot take care of herself, and she asks about his affair with Susannah Wood, the star of the picture.

Then the two have a vacuous exchange:

Carter pulled her to her feet and kissed her. She stood without moving and after a

while he let his arms drop. 136

“What’s the matter now,” he said.

“Nothing.”

“It’s all gone with you,” he said. “It used to be there but it’s gone.”

“Listen,” she said as if by rote. “I love you.” (178)

Everything about the conversation, from Carter’s giving up on the kiss to Maria’s reverting to tired, unconvincing dialogue, indicates that there is no point in Maria’s going with him. The journey to the film set is not an escape from the ordinariness of their married life but a repetition of its most hopeless aspects. The trip adds nothing to Maria’s characterization, nor our understanding of their relationship, nor even of the film that is being made.

Carter films in the desert, which for much of the novel is a space where Maria exercises her improvisational skills. She often drives across Southern California and into

Nevada, aimlessly wandering as the mood takes her. She is in the Nevada desert when she sleeps with Johnny Waters and steals his Ferrari. Perhaps most importantly, the desert is associated with her upbringing with her gambler father, whose manifesto contributes to the novel’s title: “Always when I play back my father’s voice it is with a professional rasp, it goes as it lays, don’t do it the hard way. My father advised me that life itself was a crap game: it was one of the two lessons I learned as a child. The other was that overturning a rock was apt to reveal a rattlesnake” (200, italics original). While it comes at the end of the novel, this quotation clarifies Maria’s approach to life and her resistance to logic. The desert and craps are twin metaphors for life and its possibilities: one can survey a landscape or a table and decide how to approach them (even if they both present the danger of getting stung).13 Yet when she travels to the desert with Carter, Maria 137 avoids this film’s production as she did the previous film’s release. She spends her days lounging about the hotel, refusing to go to the set despite Carter’s repeated entreaties.

Maria will do anything else—look at the same photographs in the hotel lobby or listen to the woman at the coffee shop talk about obscure ex-lovers. She shows more interest in the waitress’s stories than the movie stars to whom she has access, those who are at the height of her own profession. The reader wants to know what is happening on set and how Carter’s relationship is developing with the actors and actresses, but Maria’s focus grows increasingly tenuous. The section’s ominous tone deepens when chapters about life in the desert start to be interspersed with musings in italics from her time in the mental institution like the one above.

All we know about the film is that it stars two actors named Harrison Porter and

Susannah Wood. Susannah appears in the novel a handful of times, and she always says something nasty. She mocks Maria for getting arrested in Johnny Waters’ car and giggles at a singer she knows when her “single stops at 85” on the charts (208). Carter tells Maria that “‘It’s only her second picture, she’s worried about working against Harrison,’” so we can infer that Harrison is the bigger star of the two (185-6). For his part, Harrison Porter never interacts with the other characters, but we know that he beats Susannah Wood in a hotel room in Las Vegas. Like Maria’s grand theft auto incident, the affair is quickly hushed up: “The unit publicity man got over there right away and Harrison Porter did a surprise telethon for Southern Nevada Cystic Fibrosis” (193). Carter has to “shoot around” Susannah until her face heals, and the film's backers start to get onto his case for going over time and budget. We gain behind-the-scenes knowledge of Carter’s filmmaking process, and we know more about these characters than about the vague mass 138 of “actors” that appear throughout the novel. But Maria ignores them as she ignores other named movie people.

Because Maria refuses to go to the set, we only hear about the production after the fact, as when Carter and Helene describe the penultimate day of shooting:

“We shot the last master after you left this afternoon” Carter said when he came

in with Helene. “Three set-ups in the morning and we’re home. Fantastic.”

“Susannah was fabulous,” Helene said. “Super-good.”

BZ said nothing. Maria stared out the window.

“You should have seen Carter working with her.”

“I bet he was fabulous,” BZ said. “Fab.” (207)

When Helene tells Maria and BZ, “You should have seen Carter working with her,” she may as well be speaking to the reader. If we could see him working with Susannah

Wood, we might be able to decide if she is worthwhile as an actress or if Carter only continues to work with her because they slept together on the set of the last picture. We could discern the direction of Carter’s career, whether he is merely a trendy hack or if his recent pictures deserve the acclaim they have been getting. But Maria and BZ have no interest in the film, so we get no answers to these questions. Maria silently stares out the window, and BZ flatly repeats the words of Helene’s report to empty them of meaning.

We are at a narrative impasse: Maria refuses to go onto the set of the picture, but she has also exhausted her options for improvisation and self-creation. There is nothing to do but go to the set, and she will not go to the set. The narrative, for the first time, is static.

Maria not only refuses to follow the logic of cause-and-effect; she refuses to act at all. 139

From this point, Maria remains passive to the end of the novel. She learns that

Carter is having an affair with BZ’s wife, Helene. And when the cast and crew all go to

Las Vegas for a wrap party, she holds BZ’s hand while he overdoses on pills, the event that results in her institutionalization in the novel’s present. In the novel’s final lines, she provides an ambivalent explanation for her behavior:

One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never

knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what “nothing” means, and keep on

playing.

Why, BZ would say.

Why not, I say. (214, italics original)

This monologue bookends the novel’s opening, where Maria asserts that looking for reasons behind people’s actions is as futile as trying to discover why Iago is evil. Maria addresses her comment to the reader with the phrase “or maybe you,” drawing an explicit contrast between her experience of reality and the reader’s. We have only experienced the

“nothing,” the vacuity of her situation, secondhand. Yet she adds the counterintuitive assertion that she “keeps on playing.” It does not seem to be the case. She lives in an institution now, and all that we know of her life there is that she refuses calls and stares out the window. In these actions, as in all others, Maria’s logic is inaccessible to us. The only reason she can offer is, “Why not.”

Conclusion Didion was already an accomplished film critic when she wrote Play It As It Lays, and she had started work on the screenplay for The Panic at Needle Park. Joseph Natoli points out that Didion uses this insider knowledge to provide her reader with an image of 140

Hollywood: “Joan Didion and I are in the same ‘real world.’ The number and kinds of contacts we make with it are not the same; our phenomenal worlds differ. And yet what she writes and has written has become for me and for other readers part of the experiential foundation of our world” (218). Didion and the reader of Play It As It Lays have had different experiences of Hollywood. If she had portrayed Maria’s aimlessness like Binx Bolling’s, going to every movie and describing the pointlessness of watching them all, I, the reader, could compare my experiences to hers. Instead, Didion makes empty allusions, withholding information or inventing movies altogether. Maria uses the cinema to escape from reality, but both her knowledge of reality and the films she watches are inaccessible to the reader. Didion’s cinematic allusions replicate the feeling of misunderstanding, of taking on another person’s perspective that is unfamiliar and uncomfortable. They are, as Didion once described writing, “the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer's sensibility on the reader's most private space”

(“Why I Write” 271).

While they communicated paranoia and ennui, Kerouac and Percy’s use of the cinema was more optimistic for this reason. Those authors wrote allusions in a way that assumed that readers would understand their complexity. Even Leonard’s empty allusions reflect back on recognizable types and a recognizable relationship between viewer and film. Georges Poulet offers a more restorative way to conceive of reader/author relations than Didion’s: “Because of the strange invasion of my person by the thoughts of another,

I am a self who is granted the experience of thinking thoughts foreign to him” (56). For

Poulet, such identification is exhilarating, the surrender that makes all reading meaningful. We are not quite able to achieve such heights while reading Play It As It 141

Lays because Maria’s motivations are so vacuous and obscure that we never discover what her experience is like. Didion creates a reading experience that is grounded in the experience striving to understand. She does not assume that she and her reader will think of the same thing when a movie star appears in the text, and as a result she creates new possibilities for employing cinematic allusions to alienate instead of connect.

142

Conclusion: Affective Films, Reflexive Novels

This dissertation illuminates two limits for the study of literature and film: the tools that we have at our disposal and the questions that we can ask. First, consider affect theory as a tool for interpreting texts. Any scholar who cites affect theory must balance its explanatory power against the critiques that can be lobbed against it. I have employed affective terminology narrowly, aligning myself with scholars whose work expands our understanding of the mediated relationship between readers and texts. By focusing on literary categories like tone and narrative uncertainty, I have tried to avoid a pitfall that can face humanities research on affect and emotion: namely, readers’ and viewers’ emotional reactions to texts are not quantifiable through humanistic methods. Critics of affect ask, “If we wanted to understand how embodied systems of feeling impact human experience, why would we not ask someone in the hard sciences or social sciences?” I am alive to this critique. I agree that literary scholars cannot make objective claims about how emotions operate in real people in the real world. Attempts to do so often misrepresent scientific research and read the work of other fields shallowly in service of our interpretive ends.1

If my dissertation faces problems in the application of theory, it also enters an academic subfield that is open to many of the same potential criticisms. As I have discussed in my introduction and throughout this project, scholarship on the interactions between novels and films tends to follow a few narrow approaches: analyzing adaptations, examining the careers of artists who work across media, or drawing formal analogies between narrative techniques. This latter approach has held the most significant 143 theoretical sway. For instance, Seymour Chatman has argued that literary point of view allows for greater flexibility than cinematic point of view: “For one thing, the visual point of view in a film is always there: it is fixed and determinate precisely because the camera always needs to be placed somewhere. But in verbal fiction, the narrator may or may not give us a visual bearing” (Chatman 132).2 Chatman’s approach is commonsensical, but he cannot make objective claims for how images manifest in the mind of a reader/viewer.

If it is even possible to investigate such questions, the study would require recourse to data like brain scans or qualitative reports. Thus, affect theory and inter-art criticism both reach an impasse: I will never be able to verify whether my own experience with a text is generalizable to others.

My dissertation throws each of these problems into stark relief because I am unable to provide an empirical account for the ways that readers and viewers consume novels and films. Nevertheless, I study novelists who comment on precisely these issues: the affective affordances of the work of art, and the differences between literature and the cinema. These authors do not make objective claims about the nature of each medium, but instead, they push readers to consider what each medium makes possible for them.

Interestingly, they come to many of the same conclusions about the cinema’s potential vis-à-vis the novel. All of the authors in my dissertation consider the cinema’s impact on viewers to be automatic and unexamined (affective/illusionist), whereas their own literary works can move readers to re-think the ways that texts work on them

(cognitive/reflexive). While this formulation seems to favor literature as the more morally responsible medium, each novelist’s final pronouncement is uncertain because readers may interpret their allusions differently. 144

The Limits of the Cinema as Affect

When I note affect theory’s limits, I do not wish to suggest that it has no utility at all.

These novels do depict the cinema in affective terms when they indicate that films impact viewers in ways that are undefinable, pre-thought, and pre-ideology. Brian Massumi’s conception of affect as an “intensity” helps describe this process. In Massumi’s terms, affect is the bodily response to a stimulus that has no direct correlation to the consciousness of the individual experiencing it or to the stimulus itself. Subjects can rationalize and name this intensity after the fact, but affect is so purely embodied that we can never describe it or even experience it directly. Emotions, by contrast, arise when individuals attempt to make sense of the ever-elusive affect. Massumi writes that

“Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized”

(88). In these terms, emotions are mediated through the consciousness of individuals, whereas affect is direct and unfiltered. Importantly for Massumi, this process of naming and narratavizing affect is where the agency of individuals resides. We cannot control our affective responses to the world, but we may have some say over how we channel them, name them, and make them legible to others.3

In keeping with Massumi’s model, the authors in my dissertation differentiate between the intensity of film viewing and the work that one does to ascribe meaning to the experience after the fact. We can see this dichotomy when Sal Paradise describes movie-going as a “horrible osmotic experience” that controls his thoughts and actions in

On the Road (244). In Massumi’s terms, Sal has not gained direct access to his own 145 affective life (this is impossible). However, we can think of this as a moment when Sal realizes that such a life exists. When he watches films, he experiences a bodily impulse that he does not control or understand fully, and it is only in retrospect that he recognizes this impulse and experiences the socially-constructed emotions of despair and paranoia.

Articulating his lack of control does not provide him with agency; it merely allows him to recognize that he has none. We see a similar process at work when Maria Wyeth in Play

It As It Lays sees herself in a film and thinks that “The girl on the screen . . . [has] no knack for anything” (21). Maria cannot, or chooses not to, articulate why she feels a sense of revulsion when she watches this picture. She claims to dislike the girl on the screen because she is a flat, boring character, but we suspect that there is more to the story. After all, Maria made the film with her estranged, exploitative husband. It seems as though Maria has reacted against the film on a visceral level, and she either does not want to admit it to herself, or she explains it away to make her response acceptable to others.

In either case, she can only ascribe meaning to her reaction after the fact.

If we think of their viewing experiences in these affective terms, characters in these novels do not control the ways that films influence them after they leave the theater.

Sal Paradise continually sees Groucho Marx popping up in his world; Chili Palmer in Get

Shorty is more likely to see Gary Cooper or John Wayne. These experiences have no direct stimulus in reality; the actual figures that Sal and Chili see seem to be random. Just as a song that gets stuck in my head does not necessarily have any relation to what I am feeling or thinking, these characters’ cinematic vision does not align with their articulable emotions. That is what makes cinematic allusions so useful for establishing literary tone.

In their capriciousness, they illustrate the impossibility of assigning a single emotional 146 valence to a given narrative moment. When a narrator employs a cinematic allusion, it complements or supplements the action; whichever happens, we can question whether we would make the same cinematic connection if presented with the same set of circumstances. When a character’s vision is taken over by the cinema, it says more about the character’s lack of control than it does about the figure in question.

If the cinema’s impact on our affective lives is beyond our control, any sense of agency that we feel when watching movies must be illusory. Yet these novels also suggest that each of us imagines that we have a special relationship with the cinema that no one else has. Out of our unexamined, pre-conscious experiences of the movies, we each project outward into the social a particular version of ourselves. My idealized self will be predicated on the idea that I (and, presumably, no one else) have recognized the trap of attaching mass-produced cultural products to my identity and can circumvent these concerns through the strategic use of irony. In each novel, readers can see the impossibility of this state of affairs, even if the characters and narrators do not. For instance, when Binx Bolling takes on the role of Gregory Peck in an attempt to seduce his secretary Sharon, he feels as if he is in complete control of the situation. Indeed, he thinks that he is in such control that he can bend Sharon’s will to align with his own. However, his behavior toward Sharon belies this sense of agency. We should wonder: Why has he internalized the image of Peck as the correct figure to project unassailable masculinity in the first place? Why does that image enter his head at that moment?

These novelists suggest that the cinema’s impact on viewers is capricious, yet the characters in these novels act on their experiences as if they were reliable. In Binx’s case, he uses the image in his mind to justify harassing an employee. Joe LaBrava’s story is 147 another example of cinematic personae gone awry. Under the influence of Jean Shaw, he begins to behave irrationally as if he were a detective in a film noir. These associations afford me, the reader, the pleasure of recognizing the intrigue and danger of a noir film.

That’s fine for someone reading LaBrava’s story from an external perspective, but his actions have disastrous consequences within the world of the novel. He breaks Richard

Nobles’ arm in an attempt to protect Jean when he thinks that she is a damsel in distress, and he later kills a man to cover up her crimes. While this is an extreme example, each novel contains moments where the protagonist feels as if he or she has lost control, from

Jack Duluoz drinking himself into a stupor to Maria Wyeth withdrawing from society into the safety of a mental institution. Seeing the world in cinematic terms affords an illusion of control that dissipates quickly.

Affect theory helps me to describe these novelists’ conception of film viewership, but it cannot verify whether their framework applies to real viewers. I do not invoke

Massumi’s theory because I think that he accurately describes how a subject’s embodied feelings relate to the intellect or will. Rather, his work illuminates these novels because he and the novelists describe experiences that are impossible to communicate to others, or even to understand ourselves. The difference is that Massumi states that this is an unavoidable fact of the human condition, whereas the novelists limit their critiques to the workings of the cinema. When viewing films, characters in these novels respond in automatic ways that are impossible to examine thoroughly and therefore worthy of suspicion. As readers, we get to watch characters in these novels try to harness the power of their affective experiences with films as a means of self-creation. This framework is unverifiable—indeed, probably easily disprovable—as a template for the viewing 148 practices of actual movie-goers, past or present. However, it is worth asking whether these novelists’ attempts to articulate the unprovable can contribute anything to our scholarly debates surrounding the differences between novels and films.

The Limits of Reflection in the Novel The novelists in my study have a pat answer for the differences between film and the novel: in direct contrast to the affective immediacy of the cinema, novels afford reflection and contemplation for their readers. We can see this in the plots of the novels, where the protagonists eventually reach an epiphany that the movies are impacting them in ways that they do not understand and which need to be rejected. Sal Paradise, and eventually

Jack Duluoz, plunge into paranoia when they feel as though the movies are depriving them of agency. Binx Bolling, after sleeping with his cousin and failing to remain stoic like Rory Calhoun, gives up on his cinematic “search” and opts for a domestic life instead. Chili Palmer and Joe LaBrava both see the need to detach themselves from their extensive knowledge of crime films to look with clarity on the real criminal plots before them. Even Maria Wyeth, who erases the movies of any recognizable markers in Play It

As It Lays, eventually gives up on meeting with her anonymous actors and retires to a sanatorium. Different as they are, each story arc positions the cinema as something to be outgrown. The feelings that films produce in their viewers are not to be trusted, and viewers should not consider movies to be a legitimate resource for self-fashioning or discovery. These books present an initial image of the cinema that makes it seem exhilarating, then slowly reveal the problems with that first impression. The unfolding of this information, and the ways that it encourages reflection from the reader, contrasts with the unexamined immediacy that these novelists ascribe to the cinema. They present 149 the cinema as a problem because of its impact on viewers, then pitch themselves, and the reflection afforded by the novel form, as a solution to that problem.

When a novelist invokes a figure from the movies, that figure is instantly recognizable as belonging to another medium. Robert Stam’s work on reflexivity would suggest that the appearance of a film title or movie star draws attention to the process of reading, to the fact that I am experiencing the story through words on a page. In other words, the act of bringing cinematic images, stars, and plots into the world of the novel transforms them into objects of reflection for the reader. Granted, some readers will doubtless gloss over cinematic allusions without thinking of them in those terms, and for such readers the references will afford nothing more than a feeling of recognition (or, even less intensely, of missed recognition because the actor or film in question is unfamiliar). Yet each novel discourages such straightforward reading: characters explicitly ruminate on the nature of the movies; their movie-going experiences often veer into the uncanny; and they eventually decide to turn their backs on the cinema entirely.

Thus, even if readers approach cinematic allusions innocently at first, re-readings or intensive study will highlight their reflexive function. Cinematic allusions might be simple if we read them in a vacuum, but they become meta-textual when we encounter them within these novels.

By drawing such distinctions between the automatic and the reflective, novelists can reify common distinctions that narrative theorists draw between novels and films.

Among theorists who seek to spell out such differences—a movement that Kamilla Elliott has termed “categorical criticism”—the most common distinction to make is in the way that each medium uses time. George Bluestone, in a famous formulation, writes that 150

“Where the novel has three tenses, the film only has one” (48). In other words, we experience the events of a film more or less in the present tense. For Bluestone, even when we move backward and forward in a film’s narrative or time is elided or compressed, we are with the characters in real time in any given scene. The novel, on the other hand, affords greater temporal possibilities because of the ways that we can experience a character’s past, present, and future simultaneously. When he makes this argument, Bluestone draws on a long tradition that begins with Gotthold Lessing of theorists who equate visuality with immediacy and literariness with the progression of time.

In a sense, then, these novelists write about the differences between novels and films in conventional ways, rather than directly stating anything new about the relationship. This is not a problem, per se. For one thing, we do not read novels with the expectation that they intervene in scholarly debates. More importantly, I would further argue that no literary analysis could reveal a clear difference between novels and films, or at least not the kind that would have interested George Bluestone.4 Cinematic allusions illustrate this problem clearly because they operate in a liminal space. They push me to ask, what pops into a reader’s head when he or she encounters a reference to a figure like

Groucho Marx? How similar is my mental image of Groucho to yours? These are unanswerable questions. When real readers come across cinematic allusions, their reactions would be impossible to compare to one another. My reading practices are not scalable to the population at large, and I run up against the limits of humanistic inquiry when I try to make them do so. Thus, cinematic allusions do not solve our scholarly 151 debates about the nature of novels and films, though they do help us to see those debates more clearly.

Instead of making a direct statement about the differences between novels and films, these authors focus on the experiences of individuals. What is translatable between persons is not an objective understanding of how each medium exists in a vacuum but instead how individuals make sense of stories after the fact, bringing their experiences into the social. If someone else’s encounter with a work of art is ultimately unknowable to me, the act of assigning meaning to that work, of making it signify, is worth investigating. Indeed, this is what analyzing cinematic allusions reveals; even as novelists try to assert their superiority over the cinema, they take it seriously as an object of analysis because of its symbolic and tonal potential. Even if it is impossible to pin down that impact in an objective way that obtains for all viewers, we ought to consider how different viewers make sense of their experiences. These novelists make various suggestions for how this process works, and these suggestions tend to be more interesting, and less dismissive, than their other portrayals of the movies.

Final Applications Why do we bring our movie-going experiences into the social sphere, where they can be tested and compared to others’? Why not leave them private and unexamined? If we are uncharitable, we could say that one reason is that people like to show off. The novelists in my dissertation are suspicious of people who are performative about their sense of taste or think that it says something profound about them. Elmore Leonard’s characters are among the most ridiculous examples of this phenomenon, from Michael Weir’s snobbish obsession with Oscar-bait dramas to Chili Palmer’s requisite love of Martin Scorsese and 152

Robert De Niro. Each character treats his sense of taste as a critical personality trait, and

Leonard disapproves of the practice. Chili must outgrow his obsession with gangster films to succeed as the novel’s hero, whereas Weir remains an out-of-touch movie snob and an object of mockery. Leonard’s parodies continue to resonate. In the years since he wrote Get Shorty, the act of making one’s taste in media signify—of putting them into an online dating profile, for instance—has become streamlined and codified. For example, declaring oneself a Marvel fan, or refusing to watch superhero movies altogether, can cement one’s status as a specific brand of nerd, hipster, or something in between.

Other novelists share Leonard’s distaste for snobbishness, drawing a distinction between initial responses to films and the ways that some viewers try to account for their tastes after the fact. Take, for instance, the differences between Binx Bolling and Maria

Wyeth. Binx feels the need to intellectualize his cinematic preferences. His movie synopses contain moments of genuine wonder, as when he describes Clint Walker riding up a butte and chewing a piece of grass in Fort Dobbs. Yet Binx can never leave these moments alone; he must categorize them and explain how they fit into a broader existential framework. Maria Wyeth, on the other hand, states what she likes and doesn’t like. Mirroring Didion’s love of B-movies, Maria has no problem reporting that she enjoys a biker exploitation film more than a high-concept verite documentary. Maria sees that she could become an icon among pretentious film students if she leaned into arthouse fare, but she sticks to her guns. She does not feel the need to justify her taste, an admirable quality that affords her greater pleasure in the cinema than many characters in other novels. This attitude aligns with the novelists’ general perspective of the cinema as 153 anti-reflective; they value a viewer’s initial appraisal of a film because it most closely mirrors the intensity and pleasure that the cinema affords.

When we remove the expectation that cinematic taste must be profound, we can admit the peculiarity of our tastes. Readers of these novels get to experience the uncanny feeling of being forced to see the world through someone else’s cinematic library. Why do protagonists always return to Groucho, Bogart, and Peck? Asking these questions forces us to think back on our own webs of association, on which films and stars might hold the same status for us. Each of us has a set of films that we are most likely to quote from and see reflected in our lives. Usually, I assume that my constellation of films is a default that others will share, but of course, this is not the case. Even the most avid moviegoer will have surprising gaps in his or her knowledge, and there is no accounting for what films will matter to each of us. You and I might share Casablanca, but I have my own constellation of possible cinematic allusions that is unique to me. In life, there are no ideal readers and viewers who have seen every film and understand allusions with perfect clarity. Specific references will mean more to me than others, and reading a novel that employs a wide variety of allusions allows me to test which I value most and why that might be the case.

This existential function is what the authors value about the cinema, despite their reservations. They present images of the cinema that are attractive, lifelike, and fun. Even as each novel retracts this initial image and asserts the primacy of literature over the cinema, the move is never quite convincing. I recall, one last time, the words of Namwali

Serpell: “When an initial image or event is replaced or denied in reading . . . this effects a layering rather than an outright deletion” (42). Even if they eventually turn their backs, 154 there are things that each author values about the movies as a narrative resource. These include the joy of making particular allusions, demonstrating an authentic feeling of tenderness for stars and films of yore. More than that, these authors value cinematic allusions because they instantiate the sensation of making oneself understood in the first place. I will never be able to verify whether my aesthetic life mirrors yours, but references to the cinema can short-circuit these questions altogether. Even if my

“Groucho Marx” might not be your “Groucho Marx,” the allusion affords an instant connection.

These authors grow suspicious, however, when the movies are an end unto themselves instead of serving as a conduit to this kind of understanding. They suggest that the movies give us new ways to describe our lives, but they are not themselves an essential piece of life. When we put too much faith in their explanatory power—as opposed to their communicative power—we can grow distracted from those elements of life that they may have helped us to articulate in the first place. Each protagonist confuses this hierarchy at some point, and that is when he or she plunges into paranoia and despair.

Indeed, the novelists themselves are paranoid about this point. Because of their belief that the cinema functions automatically and affectively, each one seems to be convinced that films can actively confuse viewers into losing their grasp of the differences between the cinematic and the real. This is doubtless due in part to a desire to assert the primacy of the literary over the cinematic; perhaps, too, cinematic allusions afford a greater variety of effects on a reader if they are imbued with a certain uncanny ghostliness. Either way, these novelists’ paranoia at the cinema’s controlling influence on the individual is far less revelatory than their faith in its potential as a signifier. 155

Notes

Notes for Introduction

1. George Bluestone perhaps makes this point more clearly when he asserts, “The novel has three tenses; the film has only one” (48). That is, he argues that novels, especially modernist novels, are able to manipulate time in ways that are unavailable to films. While Bluestone’s writings are no longer in fashion, attempts to pinpoint the epistemological differences between the media continue. See, for instance, Seymour

Chatman’s essay “What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (And Vice Versa).” George M.

Wilson is the most recent contributor to this corpus, as he tries to elaborate with precision the differences between novelistic and cinematic narrators: “I think that strongly robust cinematic narrators, comparable to the dramatized narrators in literature, are rare at best, but the existence of more than minimal narrators that are modestly robust or expressive is neither uncommon nor mysterious” (Wilson 134). I will return to these theorists in my conclusion.

2. See, for instance, Gautam Kundu, Fitzgerald and the Influence of Film. Kundu analyzes Fitzgerald’s work by going through his novels and explaining how each visual description has an analogue as a specific kind of shot, cut, or camera movement.

3. For instance, in The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist

Period (2007), Laura Marcus scrupulously tracks the various ways of writing about film in England throughout the 1920s and 1930s and the interesting ways in which this writing intersects with modernist authors. David Trotter (2007; 2013) and Andrew Shail (2013) similarly argue that the experimental work of modernist authors was inextricable from the cinema. 156

4. I do not include an entire chapter on Agee because this is the only cinematic allusion that appears in his novel; but this scene is a helpful distillation for how cinematic allusions will operate throughout my dissertation.

5. For the history of this strange document, see John Wranovics, Chaplin and

Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer, and the Lost Screenplay.

6. Felski identifies alignment as one of the four major aspects of literary identification. These categories will be particularly important to my argument in my third chapter on the novels of Elmore Leonard.

7. Robert Ray, himself indulging in a bit of nostalgia, writes of the importance of studio era stars to the popular imagination: “Of the great movie stars (Bogart, Cagney,

Gable, Wayne, Stewart, Cooper, Rooney, Flynn, Tracey and Hepburn, Astaire and

Rogers, Lombard, Low, Dietrich, Garbo, Davis, Garland, Harlow, and Elizabeth Taylor), only Wayne, Stewart, and Taylor found their greatest success after 1945. Of the postwar stars, none (with the possible exceptions of Brando, Dean, and Monroe) approached the glamour of their predecessors” (25).

8. Culler’s conception of intertextuality is a synthesis of many theorists, including

Julia Kristeva and Harold Bloom.

9. James J. Gibson developed the concept of affordances to describe the ways that an animal interacts with the environment: “An affordance is not bestowed upon the object by a need of an observer and his act of perceiving it. The object offers what it does because it is what it is” (qtd. in Fountain 61). Serpell and others have found this concept useful for literary study because it provides a way to consider the text and the reader as 157

separate entities; the text is what it is, and we must learn how to approach it and understand its possibilities.

10. This is as opposed to those affect theorists who are primarily interested in their subject as a tool to engage in political critique. The field of affect theory is in a constant state of flux, and I recognize that my use of affect as a term requires some explanation on its face. This sense that affect is a moving target is baked in, as Greggory

J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg note: “No one will ever finally exclaim: ‘So there it is: now, we know all a body can do! Let’s call it a day” (3). The project of affect theory is to think through questions of how unnamed and unknowable forces govern our embodied experience of the world in preconscious ways. For Brian Massumi, affect is the undifferentiated impulse that consciousness only later spins into namable emotion. In this view, we often make decisions because of forces beyond our control then our conscious mind works to provide explanation after the fact. The problem with this as a project for the humanities, as Ruth Leys points out in “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” is that we are not scientists and as such are not trained to conduct research on the ways the mind and emotions interact. In fact, in our attempts to maintain relevance we often misread or misunderstand scientific research. I return to the question of affect theory’s place within the field of literary studies in my conclusion.

11. As we will see, my argument participates in a wider scholarly discussion about the status of identification in Leonard’s work. In particular, Charles Rzepka writes that Leonard seeks to foster “empathy without sympathy” (58).

158

Notes for Chapter 1: Kerouac’s Allusions

1. An article version of this chapter will appear in The Journal of American

Culture under the title “Reading Cinematic Allusions in the Novels of Jack Kerouac.” In addition to some minor changes for length, the article features a different conclusion that brings up some of the content from my dissertation’s introduction.

2. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark write that “Sal’s adventures . . . resemble those in pre-1950s road films, where the unpredictability and chance occurrences of the road mean that getting to one’s destination depends on the kindness – and motor vehicles – of others” (6-7). Cohan and Hark further suggest that Kerouac’s novel would help to redefine the genre, paving the way for countercultural road films such as Easy Rider

(Dennis Hopper, 1969). Ann Bringham adds further detail to this account of Kerouac’s influence in American Road Narratives: Reimagining Mobility in Literature and Film

(2015).

3. Sterritt writes that Kerouac “shares his ‘bad taste’ with other art-mavericks such as the Surrealists, of course, but they often seem more knowing and ironic in indulging their kitschy proclivities” (Mad to Be Saved 13). For Sterritt, this means that

Kerouac’s allusions to cinema should be read symptomatically in Bakhtinian terms.

4. Others have noted that Dean’s status as Beat icon is a form of typecasting.

Omar Swartz calls Dean “metonymic and metaphoric,” an ordinary man who “becomes a symbol of a new value system” of Beatness (85).

5. Stefan Solomon states that this movie was the Casablanca rip-off Background to Danger, directed by Raoul Walsh (136). 159

6. Sara Villa (2016) and Steve Wilson (2007) echo this sentiment even more strongly.

7. Recent adaptations of Big Sur (Michael Polish, 2013) and On the Road (Walter

Salles, 2012) have renewed these questions of whether Beat literature is filmable. Even in a largely positive review of these two films, David Sterritt points wistfully to a gap between the Beats as they lived and as they are depicted onscreen: “We don’t yet have a movie that evokes the full rambunctious essence of the Beats, but at least we have a couple that come close” (“Beats, Beatniks, and Beat Movies” 29). See Terence Diggory

(2016) and Demetrios Matheou (2012) for other reviews that unfavorably compare the new films to their source material.

Notes for Chapter 2: Affectless Acting in Percy

1. Lewis A. Lawson points out that Binx often misremembers details from films, in one case mixing up a movie starring Clark Gable with one starring Cary Grant

(“Dream Screen” 35). This makes his summary of a given film unreliable at the level of plot, but strengthens the idea that they represent Binx’s unique point of view rather than being an objective analysis of the film in question.

2. It seems unlikely that Percy would expect his reader to know this film so intimately as to appreciate these parallels. Indeed, as the film was released in 1950 and

Percy did not write this part of the novel until 1958, it is unlikely that he has seen it himself for several years The fact that he mixes up the illness in question supports this hypothesis. 160

3. Again, Percy seems to be more interested in describing a character type than in accuracy here. While Clint Walker does ride, squat, and squint in the film, he never completes all of these actions in this order; he never sucks on mesquite.

4. Max Webb notes this dynamic in The Moviegoer: “In his portrayal of a man who finds movies more real than his own life, Percy has found the perfect metaphor for the alienated man in our culture; for anyone who feels his own life circumscribed may find it expanded by vicarious participation in the glamour and grandeur of a movie plot, but must also feel that moment of psychic uncertainty and disappointment at the end of a film when he returns to his humdrum self like a rubberband snapping back from the screen” (5). I think that Webb is too quick to metaphorize this process.

5. Percy originally wrote this as “obnoxious little Mickey Rooney.” He and his editors were worried that this might open them to legal action from Rooney, and changed it.

6. Nash writes, “Moviegoing risks being nowhere, just as, for Descartes, there is a sense in which the self, or mind, is nowhere” (35).

7. David Crowe writes that Binx’s use of Kierkegaardian terminology is a

“misreading”: “Rotation is not a bad word for what Kierkegaard observes among the aesthetic-minded. But it seems that Binx has read this essay with no ironic distance, as he takes satirical advice as sincere. In Either/Or and elsewhere, Kierkegaard satirizes merely aesthetic repetitions and rotations because they are compulsive and flippant, bound to fail because they are soon depleted and existentially null anyway” (196).

8. It has often been noted that Percy, a participant in the Southern literary tradition, often writes female characters that serve mostly to reflect aspects of male 161

characters. Timothy Nixon writes, “By identifying herself with Binx Bolling, the female reading The Moviegoer is forced to share his feelings of disdain and near lechery for her own gender and, by extension, herself” (52). While I will complicate this somewhat in my reading of Binx’s cousin Kate in the final section, I do not think it particularly worthwhile to try to answer the charge that Binx is a misogynist. He is, and this is tied to his views on the movies.

9. See Martin Luschei and Linda Whitney Hobson for a detailed account of the theological implications of Binx’s transformation.

10. This is my reading of Kate’s apparent mental illness in the novel. There are those who ascribe Kate more agency than I have here. The most extreme example, Emory

Elliott argues that Kate picks up and drops personae on purpose: “Kate uses the process of defamiliarization to get Binx to see her more sharply. By altering her speaking style, tone, and gestures and playing out roles from stage and screen in the character of her own person, she alters and varies her self-presentation” (44).

Notes for Chapter 3: Audience Response for Leonard

1. Felski argues that the umbrella term “identification” is actually made up of a variety of processes: “alignment,” the ways that a text guides the reader’s point of view;

“allegiance,” the characters or plot elements that a reader responds to on an ethical level;

“recognition,” the process of discerning characters and their similarity to the reader; and

“empathy,” an emotional connection with a character (Felski157-158). In these terms, the reader of Get Shorty aligns with Chili, but he fails to inspire any of the other levels of identification. At least, that is what Harry Zimm thinks. 162

2. This section of the chapter will appear as a stand-alone essay in the edited collection Critical Essays on Elmore Leonard: If It Sounds Like Writing edited by

Charles Rzepka. Reproduced with permission. I have adapted the framing slightly to fit within the larger argument of the chapter.

3. David Geherin writes that once Leonard’s agent reminded him that United

Artists owned the film rights to Raymond Cruz, protagonist of City Primeval, Leonard superficially changed the character and renamed him Bryan Hurd. While tedious, this process was necessary because “A sequel would only complicate matters and make a film deal for Split Images impossible” (Geherin 73).

4. Chip Rhodes points out that this description is a hidden reference to the film

Joe Kidd, an Eastwood picture for which Leonard himself wrote the screenplay (Rhodes

142).

5. For Baudry, identification does not necessarily need to be with a character; it is the apparatus of the cinema itself which has this effect: “It is an apparatus destined to obtain a precise ideological effect, necessary to the dominant ideology: creating a fantasmatization of the subject, it collaborates with a marked efficacy in the maintenance of idealism” (Baudry 46).

6. Elsewhere in my dissertation I have employed Jonathan Culler’s concept of the

“ideal reader” to describe a similar phenomenon. In this case, however, Stanley Fish’s

“informed reader” is more useful because my reading of LaBrava amounts to, as Fish puts it, “descriptions of a succession of decisions made by readers about an author's intention” (476). In order to trace the import of LaBrava’s cinematic allusions, I must posit a reader whose interpretive community will recognize and attempt to unpack them. 163

7. I take this term from Hanz-Robert Jauss. Jean Shaw participates in our expectations for an allusion to a noir heroine, but she is beyond our horizon of expectations because we cannot have seen her or her films. Jauss writes, ““The horizon of expectations of literature is differentiated from the horizon of expectations of historical life by the fact that it not only preserves real experiences but also anticipates unrealized possibilities, widens the limited range of social behavior by new wishes, demands, and goals, and thereby opens avenues for future experience” (33). Jean Shaw might be within out horizon of expectations for a noir heroine, but the fact that our experience of her is mediated through literature points to “unrealized possibilities” for such a character. I will explain the implications for this concept more fully in my next chapter.

8. I am indebted to thing theory for helping me to make this distinction, though I depart from theorists like Bill Brown to the extent that I read LaBrava’s photographs as aesthetic objects, not things to be understood on their own terms, divorced from human intention. As Brown puts it, “We begin to confront the thingnesss of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily” (4). I stop short of endorsing such a fully object-oriented ontology.

9. Rzepka interprets this action, “Under the spell of Jean Shaw, the cop that Joe

LaBrava has now cut himself out to be is nothing more than a noir caricature of police anarchy, a twelve-year-old boy’s fantasy of law enforcement” (153).

10. For instance, when Jean Shaw says, “I have a feeling you’re the best thing that could happen to me, Joe,” LaBrava feels as though he remembers the line from 164

somewhere: “Another one, so familiar. He sipped his Scotch. He looked at the ceiling and a scene from Deadfall, early in the picture, began to play in his mind. Jean Shaw saying to Robert Mitchum, ‘I have a feeling you’re the best thing that could happen to me . . .

Steve’” (288).

Notes for Chapter 4: Empty Allusions in Didion

1. This is how an Editor’s Note introduces Didion in her first film review for

Vogue: “Joan Didion is a young writer with a nourishing interest in all movies. Last April her first novel, Run River, came out; now she is writing her second, Play It As It Lays”

(“Charade” 24).

2. Chabot writes to refute David Geherin’s optimistic, existentialist reading of the novel in which Maria overcomes a Sartre-ian sense of “nothingness”: “Play It As It Lays is not a nihilistic novel. Although Maria encounters nothingness, she survives” (Geherin

72). In a third possibility, Samuel Chase Coale places the novel into a wider context of

American romanticism: “Didion’s is essentially a romantic consciousness, teetering riskily on the edge of a glorified abyss” (181). Coale imagines Didion to be a latter-day

Hawthorne, deflating and testing American myths.

3. Rodney Simard writes, for instance, that Maria suffers from dissociative personality disorder (266-7). Hinchman goes so far as to suggest that this opening invites the reader to consider the parallels between Maria and Didion’s autobiographical accounts of her own mental health issues: “The consciousness of Maria Wyeth . . . closely resembles Didion’s own as described in ‘The White Album’” (459). This 165

includes Didion’s stated inability to link causes with effects in the wake of the Manson murders and other unaccountable events of the 1960s.

4. Rodney Simard conducts a similar reading: “Play It As It Lays belongs to the subgenre of Hollywood novels, and as such, the world it portrays is governed by the metaphor of the cinematic image: romantic illusion in surface representations with an almost total devaluation of integrity, depth, and substance” (273-4). He adds that “In structure as well, the novel is suggestive of a screenplay, a juxtaposition of brief scenes that often end in static tableau” (274). Ronald Foust writes, “It is constructed almost cinematically as a series of eighty-seven short narrative images or ‘clips’ which replace the standard novelistic convention of chapter divisions” (46).

5. Many critics replicate this reading, focusing on the novel’s “white space” without citing the fact that these are Didion’s own words.

6. She writes in a review of a mediocre film about Hollywood: “Most of us remember the Show Biz movie, and recognize its obligatory scenes. There is the “I’ve-

Got-A-Dream sequence, when those young eyes first pan across an empty theatre. With the inflexibility of Kabuki, the Dream is followed by the Rebuffs: hard-eyed agents, closed doors, cold pavements” (“The Guest” 57). While Maria’s conversation with Carter is not on this list, it is interesting that Didion uses the same language to describe a “Show

Biz movie” and a plot point in her own Hollywood novel.

7. Andrew Syder traces the sensationalist news coverage surrounding Hell’s

Angels at this time, arguing that one reason that the biker films subgenre petered out after a few years is because such films combine the genre conventions of films and news stories, “thus destabilizing meaning within the cycle of movies.” 166

8. See Rubin pp. 361-7 for a nuanced synthesis for the different ways a biker plot can be structured. He concludes by stating that the plot itself is often beyond the point of such films: “Biker films frequently give the impression that they are being addressed to an audience that cares little about plot and mainly wants to see big guys riding around on big motorcycles, knuckles colliding with noses, and women, both pure and tainted, being treated like dirt” (365).

9. Didion’s specific mention of the film’s closing shot demonstrates that she is a keen observer of the genre. Martin Rubin writes, “As a further indication of their cool temperament, biker films (especially those with biker protagonists) seem to progress not so much toward a strong psychodramatic resolution based on conflict and identification as toward a type of distanced, emblematic final shot that could be called the 'nihilistic tableau'” (367).

10. I take at face value the assertion that Maria enjoys the picture. Ulrike Koestler writes that Maria’s reaction should only be understood ironically as a feminist critique of

Hollywood: “In the text, the picture serves as a metaphor of the devaluation of female sexuality which reduces women to objects” (107).

11. There were limits to this, however. Barsam points out that while the American direct cinema of the 1960s owes a stylistic debt to the European tradition of cinema verite, there were some essential differences, especially concerning the question of provoking versus recording events. Broadly speaking, direct cinema filmmakers were dedicated to recording life as they saw it, whereas verite directors were more likely to stage or manipulate events for cinematic effect (Barsam 205). From what we see in the 167

description of Maria, it seems that Carter opts for a direct cinema approach when he

“simply followed Maria around New York and shot film.”

12. This literally happens over the course of a single article. Didion admits, “I remain spellbound by even the most spurious science-fiction movie,” then states that she finds The Sound of Music “more embarrassing than most” (“Crack in the World” 143).

13. Sybil Korff Vincent writes that the desert is a blank canvas onto which characters project their thoughts and feelings: “Significantly, Didion doesn’t give this place a name . . . The movie people have a goal and a common interest and a culture, of course, but these are transplanted from Hollywood” (62)

Notes for Conclusion

1. For a thorough dissection of affect theory along these lines, especially the work of Brian Massumi, see Ruth Leys “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.”

2. Other theorists, such as W. J. T. Mitchell, argue that we cannot draw so sharp a distinction between literary and visual imagery. Mitchell notes that “We tend to think . . . that to compare poetry with painting is to make a metaphor, while to differentiate poetry from painting is to state a literal truth.” He argues that the distinctions drawn between the arts, however, are “literally false, or (more generously) figuratively true” (49).

3. Leys points out that Massumi shares this “after-the-fact” conception with other affect theorists, including William E. Connolly (460).

4. Kamilla Elliott points to a few straightforward examples, such as written text in films and illustrated books, that collapse Bluestone’s binaries. This is also easy to do with 168

reference to art films and avant garde novels that do not conform to the kinds of normative narrative logics that interest Bluestone.

169

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