A Postmodern Take on a Hollywood Film Classic Essay -- Movies Papers

A Postmodern Take on a Hollywood Film Classic The jacket blurb on Robert Coovers 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 Coovers riotously amusive screen, doing things and uttering lines that are as shocking to them as they are funny to the reader. As Coovers Program announces, you will get Coming Attractions, The Weekly Serial, Adventure, Comedy, Romance, and more, scarce turned upside-down and inside-out. It is perhaps more appropriate to call Coovers 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 distributively of the inclusions, each inclusion being devoted to a particular Hollywood movie. Thus, the textual matter as a whole is united b y means of this habitual thread, but the thread is thin and stretched tightly, resulting in each inclusion having the expertness to stand alone as a complete and independent work, think to the others, yet item-by-item. 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 world, a reality of the screen, of the movies, that is brought into closer contact by means of a literary text. The keep back as a whole, then, glorifies in the postmodern tradition multiple interpretations of reality. Movies themselves fork out alternative realities or interpretations of perceived realities, most often differing from our own individual constructions. Thus, by offering ... ...nto playful pornography, and in doing so has once over again acted in the postmodern tradition. Transforming this film classic is in a panache blasphemy. The film has been held in the highest esteem b y movie critics for decades, and here Coover has deconstructed and undone 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.