Back in December the cinetrix made a promise to write about Steve Erickson's excellent new novel Zeroville when she had "the time to do it justice." She's beginning to fear that day will never come. But she suspects that if you've found your way here, you may like this book.
So, here's an excerpt:
96.
Each scene is all times, Vikar tells himself, and all times are in each scene. Each shot, each set-up, each sequence is in all times, all times are in each shot, each set-up, each sequence. The scenes of a movie can be shot out of sequence not because it's more convenient, but because all the scenes of a movie are really happening at the same time. No scene really leads to the next, all scenes lead to each other. No scene is really shot "out of order." It's a false concern that a scene must anticipate another that follows, even if it's not been shot yet, or that a scene must reflect a scene that precedes it, even if it's not been shot yet, because all scenes anticipate and reflect each other. Scenes reflect what has not yet happened, scenes anticipate what already has happened. Scenes that have not happened yet, have. "Continuity" is one of the myths of film; in film, time is round, like a reel. Fuck, as Dotty would say, continuity.
Still on the fence? Steven Shaviro's excellent post on the book cropped up a few days after I made my empty promise. You should read the whole thing, but let me whet your appetite, for it and the novel:
Zeroville is somewhat more linear and straightforward than most of Erickson’s other novels — though that is only a relative statement. It’s also largely focused on the movies, and almost requires a reader who is a movie freak. The novel takes place against the backdrop of Hollywood in the 1970s — the decade of the “New Hollywood,” with its promises of radical auteurism that eventually devolved into merely a new version of business as usual. One important minor character is closely modeled upon John Milius, and directors like Scorsese, De Palma, and Cassavetes, and actors like Robert DeNiro, make cameo appearances throughout the book. Indeed, much of the novel consists of rapt discussions of the movies: the main character is a film obsessive, and even the muggers and prostitutes whom he encounters turn out to be cineastes eager to argue about the relative worth of different movies in Howard Hawks’ oeuvre, or the position of Irving Rapper as an auteur. If you aren’t as enchanted by reading (or overhearing) such discussions as I am, then you probably won’t enjoy Zeroville nearly as much as I do. But if you are old enough to have participated in the cinephilia of the 1970s that Erickson channels here, or if you are now caught up in the contemporary (DVD- and Internet-fueled) second wave of cinephilia, then there’s a lot in Zeroville that will delight you.
Yeah, you begin to understand why I'm drawing it to your attention. Still need more convincing? Two or three weeks back, Bat Segundo posted a wide-ranging interview with Erickson about, among other things,
following the narrative laws of movies, Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Walter Murch and Michael Ondaatje’s The Conversations, catchphrases from movies that enter into the vernacular, “God, I love this movie,” John Cassavettes, Chauncey Gardener, Vikar “speaking more than four words for the first time,” criticism and annotations as the contextual panacea to Los Angeles, Vikar as the anti-critic, John Milius, the model church and architecture, ambiguity, reenactments, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, on not tying up loose ends, the burglar, blaxpolitation, Hollywood incongruities, Vikar’s tattoo, flesh as a marker, social flotsam, flamboyant press conferences, the parabolic chapter structure of Zeroville, Chuck Palahniuk, single frames of film, symbols with multiple interpretations, pronounced purity, continuity, anti-context, other settings representative of the pervasive nature of Hollywood, and repetitive sentences as a narrative guide.
Intrigued? Listen to the whole podcast here.
As for the cinetrix, she's not sure she'll ever be able to articulate what the experience of reading this book was like. She'll just say that immediately after she finished the story of Vikar, whose head is tattooed with the image of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun: “the most beautiful woman and the most beautiful man in the world,” she flicked on the television, disconsolate to be back in the "real" world. It happened to be tuned to TCM. And on TCM at that very moment was, you guessed it, A Place in the Sun. But not just any scene from the film, precisely the scene with Montgomery Clift and Shelly Winters in a small rowboat on a lake to which the narrative and its protagonist return to again and again.
Ah, sweet apophenia. "In film, time is round, like a reel."
