A Postmodern Take on a Hollywood Film Classic

A Postmodern Take on a Hollywood Film Classic

The jacket blurb on Robert Coover’s creative compilation A Night at the Movies reads: “From Hollywood B-movies to Hollywood classics, A Night at the Movies invents what ‘might have happened’ in these Saturday afternoon matinees. Mad scientists, vampires, cowboys, dance-men, Chaplin, and Bogart, all flit across Robert Coover’s riotously funny screen, doing things and uttering lines that are as shocking to them as they are funny to the reader. As Coover’s Program announces, you will get Coming Attractions, The Weekly Serial, Adventure, Comedy, Romance, and more, but turned upside-down and inside-out.” It is perhaps more appropriate to call Coover’s work a creative compilation as opposed to a novel or even a collection of short stories. A single theme of “what might have happened” runs throughout each of the inclusions, each inclusion being devoted to a particular Hollywood movie. Thus, the text as a whole is united by means of this common thread, but the thread is thin and stretched tightly, resulting in each inclusion having the ability to stand alone as a complete and independent work, related to the others, yet individual. The complete collection may be examined as a work, or conversely, each individual “story” may be considered a finished work to be studied.

Each chapter invents its own reality, a reality of the screen, of the movies, that is brought into closer contact by means of a literary text. The book as a whole, then, glorifies in the postmodern tradition multiple interpretations of reality. Movies themselves present alternative realities or interpretations of perceived realities, most often differing from our own individual constructions. Thus, by offering ...

... middle of paper ...

...nto playful pornography, and in doing so has once again acted in the postmodern tradition. Transforming this film classic is in a way blasphemy. The film has been held in the highest esteem by movie critics for decades, and here Coover has deconstructed and destroyed it in a mere thirty-one pages. The manner in which he has done it is indeed witty, however, and certainly eclectic and new.

Works Cited

Barth, John. “The Literature of Replenishment,” from Atlantic Monthly 254: 1. January 1980.

Coover, Robert. “You Must Remember This,” in A Night at the Movies. Normal: Dalkey

Archive Press, 1997. 156-187

Epstein, Julius J., Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch. Casablanca. Original Screenplay. Warner Brothers Studio, 1942.

Hoover, Jeff. “Towards a Description of Modernism and Postmodernism in Literature.” Cedar Rapids: Coe College, Sept. 21, 1999.