“Movies”
Book 1, chapter 6; Book 2, chapter 12
Characters
1.6 Man in a somewhat nostalgic mood (unnamed), child of a broken home.
2.12 Hal/ Yossel, a writer; his mother (unnamed); his wife, Peggy; his seducer/ mistress, Monica Cunningham; Charles Cunningham (Monica’s father); (various other figures)
General Subject/ Plot
1.6: A man arrives at a movie theater he hasn’t been to in years and feels both nostalgic and too wise, at this point in his life, to be truly nostalgic.
2.12: a pastiche or parody of a hollywood movie of the life of a writer –a writer becomes rich and famous for his work; falls prey to a seductress and finds he cannot write; is brought together with his former loyal lover through tragedy; achieves a more substantial degree of fame and riches.
Motifs
1.6 The Alpine (?), movie stars, alcohol, broken marriage (doesn’t sort itself out), happy, adult son of broken marriage. Tarzan.
2.12 Alcohol, writing, broken marriage (sorts itself out), child son survives serious physical ailment.
Notes
In the first “Movies”, the character is standing outside the movies in real life, where nothing works out and its not even clear why it didn’t or who was to blame. In the second “Movies” the action is inside the movie: here there are problems but we have a clear sense of what they are and who the villain is and everything gets sorted out. In the first one, the unnamed son is the central figure while in the second it is the father, Hal. (The narrator in the first “Movies” could almost be the grown, real-life version of the son of the second “Movies”, Scotty.) (Could it be that in the second we see what movies are, and in the first, why people need movies to be like that?)
I think (1.6) is I think the 3rd story consecutively dealing with something long in the past (the previous story involved something forty-one years ago, this story involves something “over forty years ago”)…. We also know that the movies are where divorced fathers take their sons on Saturday Afternoons.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 