Matinée by Robert Coover

Reviewing Coover's 1987 collection of interlocking short fictions, A Night at the Movies, for The New York Times, critic Edmund White stated: "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."

Edmund White's observation rings true when we read this well-crafted fourteen-page Robert Coover story published in The New Yorker in 2011. Matinée, short story as infinite regress of movie within movie within movie within movie, nearly all touching on those golden romantic moments - the first gaze, the first kiss, the first heart-throbbing intimacy.

“Weary of the tedium of her days, her lonely life going nowhere, she skips work and steps inside a half-empty old movie house showing a scratched and grainy romantic film from her youth; she takes her favorite seat in the middle of the seventh row, hoping to experience once again the consoling power of sudden uncomplicated love, even if not one’s own, love that has no trajectory attached to it but is a pure and immediate enrichment of the soul and delight of the body.” Initially, reading this opening line of Matinée, we accept the woman’s reality in the same manor we accept the reality of any other character in a short story, however, as we read on, we realize this opening scene of a woman stepping inside a half-empty old movie house is probably itself the opening scene in a movie.

So the question we might ask is: What difference does it make? Since we read a short story using our mind as a kind of movie projector, creating internal pictures of characters, dialogue, action and atmosphere unfolding as we turn the pages, does it make a great deal of difference if the woman stepping inside the half-empty movie house is doing so as part of her everyday life or an actress in a movie?

Well, one thing for sure, Robert Coover’s first line captures so much of what it means to partake of American movie culture: like listening again and again to those rock n' roll songs first heard as teenagers, through a repeated viewing of old movies, our movie-going lady can continually relive her own youth. And since she possesses a romantic heart, she can deeply feel the consoling power of sudden uncomplicated love even if it is not her own.

It’s that “even if it is not her own” that seals the deal for the movie industry, an industry that spends millions on glitz and hype - billboards, trailers, movie stills, full-page ads, posters, trinkets and other paraphernalia, all to encourage the pubic to buy tickets and live vicariously through the silver screen. Additionally, as she so aptly notes in so many words, movies provide life’s tantalizing, romantic highpoints, all compressed in two hours. What magic!

Matinée features at least three dozen shifts, yes, that's right, no less than thirty-six shifts and slides back and forth between the character’s “everyday life,” so called, and drama on the screen. The first shift is to the film our enthralled female viewer is watching in the old movie house showcasing two strangers, a man and a women, separately boarding an old time train. How romantic! Movie makers are forever making movies of times past to soak our sentimental, wistful, nostalgic longing for all its worth. Predictably, in a few moments the strangers look into each other’s eyes and their hearts are visibly melting.

The lady in theater row seven reflects between tears how a man has never gazed into her eyes that way, “a moment so human, so iconic, so unspeakably beautiful-essential, really, to a well-lived life.” What?! Who says such an experience is essential to a well-lived life? Of course, Hollywood makes this tacit pronouncement, the underlying message being that your life is inferior, your life will never be as good as actors up on the screen; so, if you really, really want to be in touch with the fullness of what it means to be alive, continue to buy your tickets and let what happens in the movies serve as your ideal, your highest value.

The theme of movies as the ideal standard by which people judge life continues, as when the lady steps out into the aisle and bumps into a man who has also stepped out into the same aisle. Is it an accident or something ordained? Oh, my Hollywood Oscars, ordained – how romantic! Or is it scripted, as if part of a movie? We read: “A sourceless music rises, throbbing, as though from out of their shared gaze.” Nothing like a soundtrack to add that special something.

And when you are outside the theater you can create your own mental soundtrack, just like in the movies, as you walk down the street forever searching out your very own illusive romantic encounter. And when you step into a bar for a drink, like the man in Matinée, you can watch as “he watches the old movie that is playing silently on the TV above the bar, one he remembers well. It once had the power to excite him inordinately, and it excites him now.” With the ever present TV screen and other electronic media, its movie time all the time, exactly what Hollywood wishes.

The reel of Matinée keeps spinning and Robert Coover masterfully weaves in many more keen insights regarding the influence of movies, such as how overexposure to movies can jade us to the drama of our own lives, how repeated viewing has a powerful influence on memory, including the way one movie can bring to mind another movie and then another, how our emotions are funneled away from those around us and projected onto the stars of the silver screen, all of which brings to mind another Edmund White quote: “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.”

As Robert Coover himself was quoted in an interview: “We see a lot of filmic imagery – in television, in films – and we learn to think in ways that correspond to filmic technique. It’s a language that one cannot ignore.” Curiously, a perceptive reader familiar with film jargon and film industry technology will pick up close parallels between the making of movies and Coover’s Matinée. To cite several: the repetition of scenes and dialogue (looping), a fictional farce having the "look and feel" of a documentary (mockumentary), comic parody where conventional situations and plot devices are intentionally exaggerated to the point of absurdity (camp), an expected, cliché scene (obligatory scene). All this to say, Matinée is chockful of the movies, composed by a master of fiction writing, one of America's finest.