Book Review : The Movies: Drawn and Quartered

A Night at the Movies or You Must Remember This by Robert Coover (Simon & Schuster: $16.95)

Challenging and unnerving, Robert Coover’s novels and stories are calculated to demolish icons and reduce cherished illusions to rubble. They’re verbal wrecking balls, aimed directly at the walls of our preconceptions. Religion, politics, literary conventions, even sports crumble at Coover’s assaults.

This newest collection of linked short fiction batters the movies--not The Industry, which would be too broad and obvious a target, but the pictures themselves, with their beloved personalities, their enduring themes, their iron grip on our imaginations and memories.

Name Your Preference

What are your all-time favorites? Westerns, Charlie Chaplin comedies, “Casablanca”? Science fiction? The great Hollywood musicals of the 1930s, the kind they don’t make anymore? Or maybe you prefer serious imports, full of angst, Sturm und Drang , ennui and dolce vita ? None of the above, just the old cat-flatteners that kept you happy while Mom fixed dinner? Never mind, whatever your pleasure, Coover has a surprise in store for you.

The table of contents is a full program including previews, a serial, selected short subjects, a comedy, a cartoon, the travelogue, a musical interlude, and The Feature, called “You Must Remember This” to eliminate any doubt about which classic is under siege. Coover goes far beyond satire to deconstruction. When he’s had his way with a film, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men have their work cut out for them. Though you might be able to put the pieces together again, the form will be irrevocably changed; an omelet to an egg, lemonade to lemons.

The essence will still exist, but not as you saw it first in youth and innocence; not even as you’d see it now through a haze of sentiment. From this moment on you’ll look through the picture to its core, the skull beneath the smiling face. You’ll be a changed person, still laughing and crying at the movies, but at different times and places.

The scene in “Casablanca” where Ilsa menaces Rick with a gun before they melt into a last farewell embrace is now an X-rated sexual fandango, so explicit that the announcement at the front of the book, “Ladies and Gentlemen May Safely Visit This Theater as No Offensive Films Are Ever Shown Here,” becomes still another send-up. In another section, sensitive types who would never quail at graphic sex might be made distinctly uneasy at the spectacle of Charlie Chaplin attempting to stuff the eyeball into an old man’s face; the beloved little tramp isn’t supposed to be involved with loose eyeballs, nor is he expected to cause death by hanging or decapitation. But this isn’t our Charlie, he’s Coover’s, and the rules of slapstick are not only suspended but permanently scrapped.

Bad Guy Wins

“Shootout at Gentry’s Junction” is easier on the sensibilities. In it, Coover merely lets the bad guy win, which is fun for a change, especially since he writes this segment as a devastating Hemingway parody. “There are five aces revealing themselves on the table. Three of the aces are spades. They lie beneath the clever fingers of the smiling gold-toothed Mexican.” It’s not all as jolly as that, of course, but then, we’re conditioned to expect some violence in Westerns.

“After Lazarus” is for the art house crowd, or those who used to be the art house crowd until they read it. In this chapter, the themes of philosophical European cinema become inextricably jumbled with scenes from horror movies to produce a hybrid form exploding both genres. Curious, how much they have in common once the resemblances are pointed out by our knowledgeable guide.

“Milford Junction, 1939, A Brief Encounter” is almost poignant, but leaves you wondering how you could have ever thought it poignant. “Now and then, mind you, there are irresponsible people who don’t behave themselves, people who suddenly start showing high spirits and acting quite dotty, coming back into the refreshment room, having missed their trains, pretending they’ve forgotten something, behaving rather too vehemently, like romantic schoolgirls or excited schoolboys, grasping at each other, crying out, complaining of grit in their eyes . . .” a sentence almost as long as the film, on and on to absolute bathos.

The cartoon is definitely not for children, though it’s written in a parody of a child’s perception. Even the intermission isn’t safe. Style and tone change from chapter to chapter, depending upon the target, but there’s one constant. Nothing is sacred, nothing impervious. At the end of “A Night at the Movies” the audience is no better off than the films, unless you think being smarter and more sophisticated, less complacent, is better off. Admirers of Coover do.