At the makeshift funeral scene, the Dude is much more concerned about the content of Walter’s speech and later getting Donny’s ashes thrown on him than he is with the death of his friend. Receiving condolences from the bowling alley bartender, the Dude replies, “Yeah. Well, you know, sometimes you eat the bear, and, uh . . .” (Coen and Coen 139). The Dude often trails off when speaking, either unable to articulate what he means or to finish his thoughts, which one might conclude is an aftereffect of smoking too much weed or an inability to process quickly. While the Dude seems to represent an inner calm, like Clinton, his outer hostility is not a trait the two share.
Often, the Dude seems most closely identified with another 1990s icon, the cartoon patriarch Homer Simpson. At his bungling worst, Homer always comes through in the end, saving the day, and his children’s respect for him, even if it is granted grudgingly. Author Chris Turner sees Homer’s emphasis on intention, rather than results, as analogous to the Clinton era focus on well meaning over action. As Turner explains, “The family’s tolerance of Homer’s best-intentioned bumbling has grown into complete acceptance and a gentle, good-humored love” (94). Likewise, the Dude debauches his way through an absurd escapade replete with a fake millionaire, porn king, band of nincompoop nihilists, a feminist artist, and a fascist police chief without demonstrating the Zen-like attitude that commentators so often affix to the character.
If Dude is, as the mysterious Cowboy insinuates, “the man for his time’n place, he fits right in there,” then one certainly realizes that the traditional idea of what makes a hero or is heroic is long gone (Coen and Coen 4).
I Won’t Say a Hee-Ro, ’Cause What’s a Hee-Ro?
The idea of the traditional hero died somewhere in the 1990s. Today, for the first time in American history, one could argue that heroes no longer exist. Perhaps the best one could determine is that the notion of who stands in as a hero has gone through such a revolution that whatever a hero is, it certainly isn’t Superman or some other patriarchal figure. The Clinton/Lewinsky scandal served as the most important (and perhaps final) nail in the coffin. Rather than seen as a single nut or oddball—a deviation—like Richard Nixon’s fall from grace after Watergate, the public viewed Clinton as a troubled friend or family member. Many people absolved him of his crimes before he even faced all the charges, similar to the support a family member might receive. More than a decade later, as a result, the nation suffers through scandal after scandal, promoted by an increasingly sensationalism-based mass media and millions of self-styled pundits given a platform via the Internet. The consequences are evident. Anyone held up as a hero soon faces relentless, unyielding scrutiny, as if the media’s portrait of the public downfall and resulting humiliation would be found much more satisfying than the hero’s rise to glory. President Barack Obama is another case study in the hero’s rise and fall as he moved from savior to villain over the course of his term in office.
What we can ascertain from TBL, Wonder Boys, and Clinton is that middle-aged white men in the 1990s confronted a culture vastly different than the 1960s or 1980s. The former era would be held up as a testament to their slovenly or slacker ways, while the latter decade pointed to a crisis in which men could no longer act, sound, or look overmasculine. Yet, at the same time these Clintonian men were allowed (practically enabled) to shamble along, bungling and bumbling through a variety of escapades and still escape intact. Writer Peter Rubin explains the public’s ease with the Clinton type and its consequences, saying, “Clinton is widely viewed in a way that Americans rarely view their political leaders: as a member of the family.” Rather than pushing him away, the public supported the president like “a family defending an embattled member” (12). The general familiarity with men like the president or men who acted like him served as a kind of tacit approval, but these ideas regarding male identity in the era were not without consequences.
While Clinton benefited, I argue that the idea of the hero died as the public fully acknowledged and accepted his faults. Since the president’s impeachment, contemporary American history is a series of crises and personal missteps by so-called leaders. Today, the media and public drops the “hero” label on the military, police officers, and firefighters, but concurrently does little to help these individuals out once the gun is put down or the uniform hangs in the closet. The hero gets a parade down Main Street USA or holds the flag at an NFL game, appearing on TV for twenty seconds, but is later left jobless, without benefits, and unable to cope with mental and physical ailments.
Perhaps in the post-hero age symbolized by Clinton, the Dude, and Grady Tripp, however, there is actually an authenticity that emerges. What these figures represent is the gritty, ongoing, and difficult challenge that embodies life in today’s society. They reveal the depths of chaos and confusion at the heart of the American spirit as the nation becomes more complex.
Maybe from a different perspective, what our culture needs is an evolving array of potential heroes, rather than the traditional patriarchal politician or other leader. We do not expect a superhero to save us anymore, so maybe the focus should be everyday acts of heroism or just common decency. Grady and the Dude, then, serve as models for a new type of hero, applauded for momentary or small victories over the challenges of daily chaos and missteps. That they bring these problems to bear on themselves is a minor aspect—wink, wink—of the overall triumph they achieve.
Works Cited
Browne, Ray B. “Redefining the Humanities.” Eye on the Future: Popular Culture Scholarship into the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Marilyn F. Motz, John G. Nachbar, Michael T. Marsden, and Ronald J. Ambrosetti. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State UP, 1994. 247–58. Print.
Chabon, Michael. Wonder Boys. New York: Picador, 1995. Print.
Coen, Ethan, and Joel Coen. The Big Lebowski. London: Faber, 1998. Print.
Gibbs, Nancy, et al. “Men Behaving Badly: What Is It about Power That Makes Men Crazy?” Time 177.22 (2011): 24–30. Academic Search Complete. Web.
Greene, Maxine. Variations on a Blue Guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on Aesthetic Education. New York: Teachers College P, 2001. Print.
Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. New York: Nation, 2009. Print.
Kavadlo, Jesse. “Blue Angels Meet Dying Animals: Textual and Sexual Subversion in the Clinton-Era Academic Novel.” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 37.2 (2004): 11–25. Print.
Malin, Brenton J. American Masculinity under Clinton: Popular Media and the Nineties “Crisis of Masculinity.” New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Print.
“The 1992 Campaign: Verbatim.” New York Times 28 Mar. 1992. Web. 30 Mar. 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/28/us/1992-campaign-verbatim-heckler-stirs-clinton-anger-excerpts-exchange.html.
Rubin, Peter. “Family Man.” New Republic 27 Apr. 1998. Print.
Tangney, ShaunAnne. “The Dream Abides: The Big Lebowski, Film Noir, and the American Dream.” Rocky Mountain Review 66.2 (2012): 201–18. Print.
Turner, Chris. Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Defined a Generation. New York: Da Capo, 2004. Print.
Chapter 3
Quentin Tarantino and the Paradox of Popular Culture in Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue
John Joseph Hess
In his introduction to Michael Chabon Presents the Amazing Adventures of the Escapist (2004), the first Dark Horse Comics anthology of Escapist comics, Michael Chabon claims that “escape and escapism, in art and literature, have received a bad name” (4). There are several resonances for the words escape and escapism as key terms for the Eisner Award–winning Chabon/Dark Horse collaboration. The titular hero, the Escapist, is an escape artist. The Escapist’s origins in Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), derive in part from Joe Kavalier’s own training as an escape artist as well as his escape from the Nazis during World War II. Escape is a central theme in the novel and, as critics like Lee Behlman
have argued, “escapism” is the partial logic of its aesthetic. Finally, the anthology of comics art extends the novelistic adventures of the Escapist. As I have elsewhere argued, Chabon’s emphasis on “escape and escapism” also signals the transfer of the Escapist from one artistic medium to another.[1]
The idea of “escape” is foregrounded in one of the epigraphs to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and it is reemphasized in the novel’s opening paragraph. Here it is linked to the word “transformation” (3, emphasis Chabon’s). This word suggests the transformative potential of escape for the novel’s comic book–creating protagonists. Chabon repeated this emphasis on the potentially transformative power of escape in a series of brief essays that were published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern at approximately the same time as the Dark Horse Comics anthologies. In “Independent Comic Book Publishers of the Pre-Independent Era” (2004), Chabon—writing as anagrammatic comic book critic Malachi B. Cohen—focuses on the efforts of the young Michael Chabon to create Nova Comics. This independent comics publishing company would have allowed Chabon and friends to use their inspiration by such real superheroes as Batman and Captain America to transform their own shared adolescent experiences in Maryland (127). Chabon’s introductions to two anthologies of genre fiction—McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales (2002) and McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories (2004)—follow a similar logic. In the introductions to these anthologies of genre fiction synthesizing the literary world of Roddy Doyle, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Lethem, and Chabon himself with the popular fiction of Michael Crichton, Elmore Leonard, Stephen King, and Peter Straub, Chabon promotes what he was then beginning to see as the liberating potential of popular forms for literary works.
That a sustained engagement with popular culture is perhaps the most salient feature of Michael Chabon’s fiction and criticism would, at this point, find little critical dispute. Chabon’s novels and essay collections have used the language and structures of popular culture including detective fiction, adventure tales, comic books, film, music, and other popular forms at the levels of both form and content. This is especially true of Chabon’s work since the publication of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. While his earlier work had incorporated popular culture elements, his first two novels were, by Chabon’s own account, largely literary affairs. In the Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing along the Borderlands (2008) essay “My Back Pages,” Chabon identifies the literary debts of his debut novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), by emphasizing his reading of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (1913), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), and Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus (1959) (147, 150–151). Chabon’s second novel, Wonder Boys (1995), is even more direct in its attention to literary culture as the novel’s plot revolves around literary conferences, publishing, and academic programs in creative writing.
Since the publication of Chabon’s style-forming The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, however, Chabon has transformed and constantly extended his frames of reference beyond the literary. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay repeatedly emphasizes the extent to which the superheroes of 1940s comic books had mixed various cultural elements. Chabon’s novel offers a similar synthesis as it blends the thematic concerns of adolescence, sexuality, and family of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh with the investment in artistic creation and circulation of Wonder Boys with Chabon’s own knowledge and love of the superhero comics tradition represented by such popular and personally significant superheroes as Superman and Batman (77, 587). In the past dozen years, Chabon’s subsequent novels—Summerland (2002), The Final Solution (2004), The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Gentlemen of the Road (2007), and Telegraph Avenue (2012)—have continuously extended his synthesis of literary and popular forms.[2]
Few would deny the importance of popular idioms to Chabon’s fiction. Indeed, most popular reviewers and academic critics of Chabon’s work highlight the connection between Chabon’s literary fiction and its consideration of genre.[3] It is difficult not to note and emphasize Chabon’s obvious interest in popular narrative forms since his editorial projects and critical essays have been invested in the active promotion of popular narratives. In “The Losers’ Club,” the first essay in his collection Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son (2009), Chabon describes his failure to start a successful club for the young comics aficionados of Maryland as one of his foundational personal failures. Chabon’s contribution to My Ideal Bookshelf (2012), an illustrated collection of brief essays by notable contemporary authors and cultural figures, reiterates his conviction that genre writing is an essential component of the literary tradition. Effectively repeating the claims of his McSweeney’s introductions, Chabon describes the juxtaposition on his ideal shelf of genre writers like Frank Herbert and H. P. Lovecraft alongside Jorge Luis Borges, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Herman Melville, Marcel Proust, Thomas Pynchon, Virginia Woolf, and other major international literary novelists (31).
The (understandable) critical emphasis on Chabon’s fiction and his praise of genre writing in interviews and critical essays, however, narrowly circumscribes Chabon’s interests as primarily textual. It is notable that when his introduction to McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories was republished in Maps and Legends as “Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story,” Chabon transformed his declaration regarding “escape and escapism” to redefine his popular focus. Chabon opens this rearticulation and expansion of his earlier essay with the claim that “entertainment has a bad name” (Maps 13). Chabon’s emphasis on entertainment broadens the scope of his earlier argument about genre fiction to link it to a continuum of cultural products that includes not only narrative forms such as fiction (genre and literary), comics, and film but such apparently nonnarrative forms as popular music.
Seen from the perspective of this revision in his thinking, it is puzzling that Chabon’s own extraliterary products—from the Dark Horse Comics anthologies to a pilot for a television series for HBO—have received comparatively little attention from critics.[4] Increasingly, Chabon’s use of entertainment—rather than simply genre fiction—is the characteristic feature of his fiction, editorial projects, cultural criticism, and work in the fields of film, television, and comics. Reviewed through this lens, Chabon’s work since The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay has been deeply invested in a range of popular entertainment products: Citizen Kane (1941) helps Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay refocus their approach to comics narratives and illustrations (362); the essays in Manhood for Amateurs focus on such entertainments as baseball (“On Canseco”), television (“The Splendors of Crap”), radio formats (“Radio Silence”), the Beatles (“D.A.R.E.”), and on the development of plausible links between William Shakespeare, Jorge Luis Borges, Woody Allen, and the Rolling Stones song “Stupid Girl” (234). Featuring temporally specific popular cultural references that are explicit and implied—from the mention of “Gamera, the giant mutant flying tortoise of Japanese cinema” on the first page of the novel to baseball cards on its final page (3, 465)—Telegraph Avenue offers an intensification of Chabon’s longstanding interest in popular forms.[5] Indeed, entertainment has become embedded in Chabon’s very use of language. Just as the essays in Manhood for Amateurs had fluidly incorporated Beatles titles, Star Wars, and Star Trek (“D.A.R.E.,” “The Splendors of Crap”), the sentences of Telegraph Avenue are suffused with pop diction and, especially, analogies to entertainment elements that are used to describe and define events, attitudes, and emotions.
In its use of popular music, record collecting culture, and especially in its sustained engagement with and distinction from the film aesthetic of Quentin Tarantino, Telegraph Avenue emphasizes the centrality of entertainment idioms to Chabon’s current literary style while also extending, intensifying, and rearticulating that style. In the process Telegraph Avenue clarifies Chabon’s role as a novelist who is invested in theor
izing what he sees as the communicative potential of popular culture within an increasingly mediated twenty-first-century U.S. society. Contrasting the “self-enclosed academic” world of a course on “Sampling as Revenge: Source and Allusion in Kill Bill” with the communal world of Brokeland Records, Chabon repeatedly emphasizes the communicative potential of popular forms like music over Tarantino’s “self-reflexive . . . hermetic, empty universe[s] of physical artistry” (97). Instead of individual artistry and repackaged popular forms (such as the “Quentin Tarantino Presents DVDs” watched by characters like Julius Jaffe and Titus Joyner and criticized by Luther Stallings), Brokeland Records offers a “space” for the investigation of the “common passion” of music (267, 465). In this sense, Telegraph Avenue offers the apparent hope for the construction of a “utopia” of shared interests (277). The paradox of popular culture in Telegraph Avenue, however, is that the communicative potential of popular music is limited by the personal meanings that individual listeners find within them. These personal meanings ultimately limit communication by atomizing the audience for popular forms through the construction of “self-reflexive and hermetic” universes of personal vision.
Although Michael Chabon and Quentin Tarantino were born two months apart in 1963, the idea of an extended comparison between their works might never have become apparent without Chabon’s repeated references to Tarantino in Telegraph Avenue (90, 92–101, 118, 133, 135, 215, 246, 248, 267, 284–85). While Michael Chabon has noted his admiration for Tarantino’s films, Tarantino’s frequently criticized stylization of violence differs significantly from Chabon’s own infrequent and indirect depictions of violent acts.[6] The ship carrying Joe Kavalier’s brother is torpedoed by Nazis in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (401) and Popcorn Hughes is shot in Telegraph Avenue (24–30). In both cases Chabon describes the violence from a distance, after the fact. Kavalier reads a newspaper account of the sinking of the Ark of Miriam and a later investigation reveals that the sinking, while initiated by the violence of the torpedo, ultimately resulted from a natural storm (401). The shooting of Popcorn Hughes, a major plot element in Telegraph Avenue, is narrated entirely from outside of the club as Luther Stallings sits waiting to help the shooter, Chan Flowers, escape (24–30). When the novel returns to the event, the shooting is narrated after the fact, as a reminder of a key element in the novel’s blackmail plot, or it is represented by the remaining evidence that directly links Flowers with the shooting, the bloody glove of a children’s Batman costume (75–81, 423–24).
Michael Chabon's America Page 6