This New York Times review is one of the most elegantly articulated and insightful reviews I've ever read.
Night at the Movies by Robert Coover -- Review by Edmund White
Erwin Panofsky, the great art historian, recognized that to know a painting requires recreating it within the mind as an ''object of inward experience.'' Robert Coover has extended this doctrine to the movies. His new collection of short fictions doesn't refer to the bewitching influence of films on receptive minds, as did Walker Percy's novel ''The Moviegoer'' and Woody Allen's film ''The Purple Rose of Cairo.'' Nor, at some other literary extreme, does Mr. Coover simply write a whole novel that turns out to be an epic movie, as Thomas Pynchon did in ''Gravity's Rainbow.'' Robert Coover has made literary art out of a total immersion in the movies. He isn't merely recycling old movie plots or drawing on the glamorous atmosphere of Hollywood. Rather, what he's doing is enlarging his literary technique by forcing it to assimilate cinematic conventions and to approximate filmic style. To say so perhaps makes the book sound stiff, but ''A Night at the Movies'' is as vivacious and entertaining as it is one hundred percent American.
The book gives us a long, exhilarating evening at an old-fashioned movie palace. In fact it begins with ''The Phantom of the Movie Palace,'' a sort of celluloid delirium that in 24 pages comes off as the most sustained display of verbal pyrotechnics I've encountered in years. A projectionist is all alone in a vast old movie palace, the sort with a marble staircase and orchestra pit, fountains in the lobby and stars in the dome. He begins to mix and match movies as well as to explore and animate every corner of the theater he inhabits. He fills his lonely booth with ticket rolls and ''gigantic letters for the outdoor marquee''; he starts the popcorn machine thumping and thumbs through scores for the Mighty Wurlitzer.
In the melange of films he concocts, mad scientists bump up against an ape-man and the cat woman, ''a galloping cowboy gets in the way of some slapstick comedians and, as the films separate out, arrives at the shootout with custard on his face; or the dying heroine, emerging from montage with a circus feature, finds herself swinging by her stricken limbs from a trapeze, the arms of her weeping lover in the other frame now hugging an elephant's leg; or the young soldier, leaping bravely from his foxhole, is creamed by a college football team, while the cheerleaders, caught out in no-man's-land, get their pom-poms shot away.''
The first short of the evening is ''After Lazarus,'' an arty horror picture from Eastern Europe or Scandinavia, perhaps. It's a chilling, stylized film, which Mr. Coover narrates in the language of a scenario (''Slow even tilt down to a village . . .''). As the title indicates, the tale is about rising from the dead, but the results are ghoulish and not at all miraculous. Mr. Coover confines his overflowing imagination by restricting himself to describing the soundtrack and the camera work, nothing more. Just as painting was enriched by its supposed enemy, photography, so literature is profiting from contact with the movies.
At the same time, Mr. Coover defiantly demonstrates the greater precision and flexibility of the written word. In ''Lap Dissolves,'' for instance, one scene blends into another but through puns and metaphors, never through the superimposition of visual images. When a woman about to be slaughtered by a pirate's cutlass bites his nose off and chews it ''like a cow chewing its cud,'' a second later she is milking a cow on a peaceful farm, dreaming of adventures (''the milk squirting into the bucket between her legs echoes her excitement or perhaps in some weird way is her excitement''). Transitions (the ''dissolves'') through metaphor and metonymy are all purely verbal.
In ''Shootout at Gentry's Junction,'' the funniest piece in the book, sex, violence and racism mingle and savagery triumphs over law and order. Don Pedo, the Mexican bandit with the luminous gold teeth, imposes his reign of terror and lust on the lily-livered cowboys and their ladies. Indeed, the whole book slowly reveals that it is a pandemonium of anarchic passions, aberrant scripts, unleashed imagery.
Mr. Coover has understood the potential of the movies to persuade and to subvert but also to go out of control and through collage to hybridize unexpected nightmares. Thus in ''Charlie in the House of Rue'' the Little Tramp meets Poe, and Chaplin's pranks turn into sinister acts of violence. Or in ''Cartoon'' the real collides queasily with the animated. In a different vein, ''Milford Junction, 1939: A Brief Encounter'' scrupulously sets the scene for a bittersweet Noel Coward love story - but then hilariously releases into this hushed milieu an eruption of animal and terribly un-British sexual desire.
Chaplin, Bogart, Fred Astaire, Valentino as the Sheik - these are a few of the myths re-imagined in this breviary of cinematic legends. Mr. Coover, to be sure, has always been attracted to mythology, as have the other postmodernist masters of his generation, each in his own way. John Barth in ''Chimera'' built on classical mythology and in ''Letters'' on the conventions of 18th-century English fiction of the ''Pamela'' variety. Donald Barthelme drew on fairy tales in his ''Snow White.'' In ''Omensetter's Luck,'' William Gass played a sin-obsessed preacher off against a hero as humble -and as humbling - as a force of nature. In a mordantly funny short novel, ''The Living End,'' Stanley Elkin pitted a good generous man against an Old Testament fussbudget of a God concerned only with minor infractions of petty laws. Rather differently, John Hawkes has invented out of whole cloth a dreamlike mythology all his own, one that may have the resonance of the archetypical yet never cites traditional fables. BUT Robert Coover needs precisely the fixed boundaries of pop mythology to corral the toros of his anarchic imagination, somewhat as Joyce required the Ulysses myth to limit the proliferating possibilites of his technique. In an earlier collection of stories, ''Pricksongs & Descants,'' Mr. Coover drew on Hansel and Gretel as well as Noah, Falstaff (in a television panel game), Chronos (devouring his children in a train station) and Joseph and Mary. In later books he drew on the romance of baseball (''The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop.''), a weirdly unsettling mixture of sadism and Christian devotion (''Spanking the Maid''), and the Greek tragedy of Richard Nixon and the Rosenbergs (''The Public Burning'').
In his most recent novel, ''Gerald's Party,'' Mr. Coover doesn't evoke either pop or classical mythology, but he does begin to mix the reality of an all-night, orgiastic suburban party with the fantasy of the media (television programs and pornographic films that start to slide off the screen) - a vertiginous collage technique that anticipates the disturbing comedy of ''A Night at the Movies.''
Early on in his career Mr. Coover invoked the spirit of Cervantes and complained that ''the optimism, the innocence, the aura of possibility you experienced have been largely drained away, and the universe is closing in on us again.'' But in fact, as his dazzling career continues to demonstrate, Mr. Coover, though never innocent or optimistic, is a one-man Big Bang of exploding creative force.
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