Michael Chabon's America

by Jesse Kavadlo

  Tarantino’s work is noted (and criticized) for its gratuitous, often cartoonish violence. The number of acts of violence in the eight films directed by Quentin Tarantino is too extensive to list. To represent three broad and sustained acts of carnage simply by the physical locations of their occurrence, it can be noted that the warehouse, club, and plantation locales that conclude Reservoir Dogs (1992), Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (2003), and Django Unchained (2012), respectively, are layered in blood. Often the mise-en-scène of each film seems to feature more blood than its predecessor.[7] While Chabon’s work acknowledges the human capacity for violence, he generally depicts such acts from a respectful distance. Tarantino, in contrast, has repeatedly noted his interest in what he describes as the humorous side of violence (Fuller xiv).[8]

  Chabon’s and Tarantino’s narratives initially seem radically different, but the two artists nevertheless share several overlapping interests. Both Chabon and Tarantino emphasize the possibility of acts of love in the face of extreme obstacles. In “Shepherding the Weak: The Ethics of Redemption in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction,” Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack identify love as one component of what they see as Tarantino’s ethical framework, emphasizing, for example, the love that Butch (Bruce Willis) exhibits toward his dead father and toward Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros) (63).[9] Surprisingly, examples of love appear in nearly every Tarantino film.[10]

  Acts of love appear as well at the heart of Chabon’s novels. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay concludes with Sam Clay’s self-exile from the renewed love partnership of Rosa Saks Clay and Joe Kavalier. This exile replaces the “never-more-than-theoretical family” with a family structure that the narrative has implied always should have existed (636). The Yiddish Policemen’s Union concludes with the hope of reconciliation between Landsman and Bina (409). Chabon concludes Telegraph Avenue with another familial reconciliation that is again paired with a business partnership gently (and lovingly) ended (459–61). The successful navigation of a character’s obligation to himself and to the characters he loves in spite of all obstacles—including social, economic, and sexual concerns—has been one of the central themes of Chabon’s fiction since he first linked love to nostalgia in the conclusion to The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

  More important than these thematic connections between Chabon and Tarantino is the fact that both are unabashed popular culture enthusiasts. Tarantino’s second film, Pulp Fiction, begins with a definition of the word pulp, and Chabon’s style-forming third novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, describes and relies on the “smelting intensity of . . . fanatical love and compendious knowledge of the pulps” (77). Tarantino’s films and Chabon’s fictions convey their serious enthusiasms for genre narratives. They also suggest their linked interest in all the various forms of popular culture from the ephemeral (the cigarettes of Pulp Fiction) to the nonnarrative (the music that plays crucial roles in each Tarantino film and in fiction and criticism like Telegraph Avenue and “D.A.R.E.”). With their similar interests in recovering (and/or inventing) undervalued and forgotten forms of popular culture, the careers of both Tarantino and Chabon over the past twenty years have been invested in the recovery and reintegration of neglected forms, genres, media, delivery systems, and figures from John Travolta, Pam Grier, and Robert Forster to The Long Ships (1945) author Frans G. Bengtsson.

  This connection presumably results in part from Tarantino and Chabon’s relationship as contemporaries. Echoing other film critics, Michael Rennett has described Tarantino as part of a “Video Generation [of] . . . contemporary [filmmaking] cinephiles” (404). This phrase, developed within the critical context of film studies to apply to filmmaking, is strikingly similar to the self-characterization of American novelists like Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Lethem, and David Foster Wallace, who have all emphasized their awareness of and formative experience with television culture.[11] Chabon discusses the similarly formative experiences of constant film and television exposure in his essay “The Splendors of Crap,” in Manhood for Amateurs. In this essay, Chabon argues that pop products can simultaneously be inconsequential and inspirational.

  For Chabon, part of the inspiration of popular forms is their exchange value. In “Trickster in a Suit of Lights,” Chabon insists that “entertainment” is rooted in “the entertain[ment] of visitors, guests, ideas, prospects, theories, doubts, and grudges.” It is a form of communication, Chabon argues, a “contact across a void” as well as an “approximation of the relation between reader and writer” (Maps 15). In connecting reading, writing, and entertainment, Chabon emphasizes that popular idioms are languages and, as such, have the inherent potential for communication “across a void” between individuals. In this sense Chabon’s essay suggests another unexpected parallel with Tarantino’s films.[12]

  These similarities are essential to understanding the complexity of Michael Chabon’s characterization of Quentin Tarantino and to Chabon’s critique of popular culture in Telegraph Avenue. Chabon’s critique of Tarantino within Telegraph Avenue is not a critique that is based on Tarantino’s subject matter. Chabon’s account of Tarantino does not dismiss the cultural content of Tarantino’s pop-influenced work. Telegraph Avenue does not reflexively criticize Tarantino’s frequently (and easily) criticized use of violence. Instead, Chabon’s critique of Tarantino within Telegraph Avenue is thoughtful and sustained. Chabon’s critique of Tarantino is primarily invested in differentiating Chabon’s own use of popular forms from what Chabon presents as the more limited aesthetics of Tarantino’s postmodern narratives. In the process, Telegraph Avenue highlights previously underexamined limits to the communicative potential of Chabon’s own use of popular idioms.

  Kill Bill primarily functions as a plot device in Telegraph Avenue.[13] Julius Jaffe and Titus Joyner (abandoned son of Julius’s father’s business partner, Archy Stallings) meet in a “Berkeley Southside Senior Center” course on “Sampling as Revenge: Source and Allusion in Kill Bill” (92–93). The course, taught by a local film scholar named Peter Van Eder, adheres closely to its title, identifying and screening a number of sources for Kill Bill (such as Lady Snowblood [1973], 36th Chamber of Shaolin [1978], and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly [1966]). Julius and Titus subsequently bond over their shared interest in the films (99–101).[14]

  Van Eder’s course title, “Sampling and Revenge: Source and Allusion in Kill Bill,” aligns with contemporary critical approaches to Tarantino’s work such as Michael Rennett’s analysis of Tarantino’s role as “DJ” (391). According to Rennett (following critics Jim Smith and D. K. Holm) Tarantino’s “cut-and-paste, mix-and-match directorial style is similar to that of a music DJ, who borrows sounds from older songs and combines them in order to create a new song through a process called ‘sampling’” (392). Rennett describes the link between this aesthetic and what he describes as a “postmodern, hip hop–remix culture,” emphasizing the role of audience adoration that he argues is rooted in the possibility of audience participation (392, 401–3). While such an audience-aware framework accurately describes the contemporary media environment of audience participation identified by media theorists like Henry Jenkins, the Tarantino aesthetic that Rennett describes is reminiscent of critical descriptions of the director in the 1990s as postmodern or “post-post-modern” (Fuller ix). Such earlier frameworks focused on Tarantino’s “interest in pop cultural artefacts and ideas (television, rock music, comics, and junk food, as well as movies) that themselves spring from earlier incarnations or have already been mediated or predigested” (Fuller ix).[15] Separated by seventeen years, Fuller’s and Rennett’s accounts both suggest Tarantino’s connection to the postmodern aesthetic of pastiche identified by Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).

  In this sense, Peter Van Eder’s version of Tarantino echoes and extends Chabon’s earlier critique of postmodern art in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. In the comics history outlined in that novel, original modern styl
es of comic strip arts were followed by degraded successors who suffered not from a lack of artistry but from a lack of originality. According to the narrator of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay:

  Most of all, comic books suffered not from insufficient artwork—for there was considerable vitality here, too, and a collective Depression-born urge toward self-improvement, and even the occasional talented hard-luck competent pencilman—but from a bad case of the carbon copies. Everything was a version, sometimes hardly altered at all, of a newspaper strip or a pulp-radio hero. Radio’s Green Hornet spawned various colors of wasp, beetle, and bee; the Shadow was himself shadowed by a legion of suit-wearing, felt-hatted . . . trained vigilantes; every villainess was a thinly disguised Dragon Lady. Consequently, the comic book, almost immediately upon its invention, or soon thereafter, began to languish, lacking purpose or distinction. There was nothing here one could not find done better, or cheaper, somewhere else (and on the radio one could have it for free). (77)

  The logic of Chabon’s comics history (unique individual stylists followed by “versions” and “carbon copies”) essentially follows the distinction Jameson draws between the “idiosyncrasies of the moderns and their ‘inimitable’ styles” and the “neutral practice of [postmodern] mimicry” (16–17).[16] Fortunately for comics history, Chabon’s narrator explains, Superman arrives to save the day (and inspire Chabon’s novel). While Van Eder certainly misunderstands aspects of Tarantino’s work, the image of Tarantino as creator of “versions” is suggested by Jackie Brown’s reliance on audience recognition of earlier Pam Grier vehicles like Foxy Brown (1974) and by Telegraph Avenue’s description of Lady Snowblood as “a dream Kill Bill” (98).[17]

  The idea that Chabon’s fiction critiques postmodern art might seem counterintuitive. After all, critics like Hillary Chute have linked Chabon’s work to the postmodern literary tradition. Chabon has acknowledged his interest in the films of Quentin Tarantino (Mechanic). He has praised reclusive postmodern novelist Thomas Pynchon in My Ideal Bookshelf (31), McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales (5), and “Trickster in a Suit of Lights” (Maps 18). He has even described comics legend Jack Kirby—identified in the author’s note to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay as a personal hero (639)—as a “cultural magpie” in the Manhood for Amateurs essay “A Woman of Valor” (190).[18] Chabon’s own style, as emphasized throughout this chapter, comfortably synthesizes literary and popular idioms in a way that recalls Davis’s and Womack’s description of Tarantino’s work, Jameson’s account of collapsing cultural hierarchies, and Andreas Huyssen’s more favorable view of postmodernism in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986). How could Chabon possibly be criticizing the postmodern tradition on whose success his own critical and popular acclaim appears, at least partially, to rest?

  Peter Van Eder’s course on “Sampling as Revenge: Source and Allusion in Kill Bill” in fact helps to clarify Chabon’s specific critique of an academic version of postmodern aesthetics as they have generally been understood. Echoing critical discussions of Tarantino’s films that emphasize their formal innovations but allegedly shallow content (Thomson 881), Van Eder describes Tarantino’s films as offering a “self-enclosed, self-reflexive world.” This world, Van Eder asserts, is “a hermetic, empty universe of physical artistry” (Telegraph 97). Van Eder’s description of Kill Bill is applicable to other Tarantino narratives such as “The Man from Hollywood” segment of Four Rooms. This segment takes place entirely within one room and emphasizes its use of a plot from an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (“The Man From the South” [1960]) as well as point-of-view shots aligned with the perspective of the frightened bellboy (Tim Roth) to effectively immobilize the audience and focus its attention on the narrative machinations of the acclaimed director, Chester. Chester, not coincidentally, is played by Tarantino himself. For critics and viewers inclined to despise Tarantino, the film segment represents the director at his most self-indulgent. For critics and viewers inclined to praise Tarantino, it represents the director at his most stylish. Both must agree that it is “self-enclosed” and “self-reflexive.” The segment is all about Tarantino.

  A paradigmatic Tarantino moment with respect to Chabon’s version of Van Eder’s version of Tarantino occurs shortly before the final battle in Kill Bill, Vol. 1. “The Bride” (Uma Thurman) and her former assassin teammate, O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), upon seeing each other again for the first time in years, engage in a pop-infused dialogue that is inspired by the marketing campaign for an American cereal. When Kill Bill, Vol. 1 is viewed in isolation, this dialogue appears to offer little more than yet another example of Tarantino’s apparently inexhaustible catalog of popular references. Paired with Kill Bill, Vol. 2, however, this dialogue is suddenly clarified. “The Bride,” viewers learn, is named Beatrix Kiddo. Presumably, then, the Kiddo/Ishii dialogue in the first Kill Bill film represents what Davis and Womack identify as the potentially communicative function of popular forms between characters in Tarantino’s early films (61). If this is the case, Tarantino tellingly elects to leave it as an in-joke between these two characters. In the joke’s reliance on knowledge from Tarantino’s subsequent film, it is a joke of which Tarantino’s audience is only partially (and retrospectively) aware. It is a joke, Peter Van Eder might argue, that “self-reflexively” emphasizes Tarantino’s “physical artistry.” It is Tarantino’s joke with himself.

  Chabon’s pop-infused language, in contrast, functions as a common language in Telegraph Avenue. This language is implicitly understood by the characters of Telegraph Avenue. This style of reference enables subtle and productive communication between different characters. When Archy Stallings joins his former friend Walter “Kung Fu” Bankwell before the two meet Bankwell’s employer (and Stallings’s business rival) Gibson Goode, Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Vol. 1 enables their sophisticated communication. Seeing Bankwell’s yellow-and-black-striped car and recognizing it as “an homage intended by the paint job to the jumpsuit worn by former Oaklander Bruce Lee in his last, incomplete [martial arts] masterpiece, The Game of Death,” Archy exclaims, “Oh my goodness . . . Uma Thurman! Love your work” (215). With this exchange Stallings, who is not happy to see his former friend, attempts to insult Bankwell by purposefully misreading the cultural reference, substituting Tarantino’s then contemporary Kill Bill for the Bruce Lee wardrobe that Tarantino’s film had self-consciously echoed. Unlike Tarantino’s cereal reference, Chabon’s Kill Bill reference has the effect of briefly reuniting the two former friends in conversation. Bankwell explains that the Kill Bill reference “ain’t even a insult” because he would like to be like Beatrix Kiddo: “Step one, regain consciousness. Step two, tear it up” (215, emphasis Chabon’s). Bankwell has been introduced as having previously worked at the edges of, and then failed in, the media industry (110). For a character like Bankwell to see his life in terms of a film character’s revenge might therefore seem to suggest that popular culture offers little more than the “escapism” that critics like Lee Behlman have identified in the aesthetics of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

  With the exception of Luther Stallings, however, the characters in Telegraph Avenue do not see and hear popular film and music as substitutes for their lives. Instead these characters engage in more complex analyses of entertainment. What is so notable about the popular references of Telegraph Avenue is the extent to which they have become integrated in the style of individual sentences. The logic of the language of Telegraph Avenue is, in part, the logic of the language of analogy. Thus Chan Flowers is introduced to the narrative by way of the introduction of his hat, which the narrator describes as being like one “whose vibe wavered between crime boss and Henry Fonda in Once upon a Time in the West” (35). Such descriptions repeat throughout the novel (“a row of LPs lounged like boys at lazy angles” [226], “like Beatrix Kiddo readying herself to take revenge on the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad” [246]). In the most basic sense, these
descriptions reflect the extent to which the characters all live in an intensely mediated world that shapes their thinking in similar ways. At the same time, however, this use of analogical thinking suggests similarity, the recognition that life and popular forms are like each other, are explainable through reference, but are not the same.

  The characters of Telegraph Avenue examine entertainment media for similarities to their own individual lives and they attempt to use these forms to meaningfully communicate “across” the distances between themselves. Julius Jaffe, for example, sees Lady Snowblood as a film that differs from Kill Bill in important details, details that he perceives in terms of Lady Snowblood’s reflection of his own personal loneliness (98). While leaving the film, Julius and Titus Joyner introduce themselves by replicating the swordplay of Lady Snowblood. Chabon emphasizes, however, that this is not mere emulation and fantasy. Instead, as the two young men begin to know each other, they use the language of films to establish a personal connection. Prompted by Titus’s quotation of part of Roy Batty’s (Rutger Hauer) dying speech in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), Julius responds with Rick Deckard’s (Harrison Ford) response in the film (102). The speech, which comes from Batty and Deckard’s only significant conversation in the film, is presented by way of introduction, standing in for a past that Titus does not want to discuss while also serving as Julius’s simple offer of friendship. As in the previous example of the Kill Bill discussion between Archy Stallings and Walter “Kung Fu” Bankwell, the popular cultural reference is not even flagged with a textual citation. Instead, such implicit references reflect Chabon’s imagined “contact across a void” by indicating the shared cultural awareness between characters and between author and reader (Maps 98).