A Night at the Movies, or, You Must Remember This by Robert Coover

Woah… So this is one of those books that is best read in a semi-sober or semi-conscious state. It'll go down much easier if you can turn off your inhibitory processes and just play the text through your mind as though it was describing totally normal action in a movie. Of course, it's not. Not really…

Parts of it actually reminded me of Jean Cocteau's film about the artist…the one where the artist's work sort of comes to life and he travels down a hallway and in one room he sees opium and in one room a little girl is on the ceiling, etc., and eventually he finds himself in some courtyard and there's a gallery of aristocrats looking on from a balcony... That's the level of weird you'll find in some parts of this book.

Other parts seem to be mere parodies. But somewhat twisted parodies. Really the whole thing is twisted, dark parodies and interpretations of classic films or amalgams of classic films. The western where the White sheriff saves the town against the villainous Mexican. The kidnapped/almost-killed heroine, who narrowly escapes a tragic fate while semi-clothed. Casa-freakin'-blanca.

I still don't fully understand the beginning. What's the point of spending so much time telling us that the projectionist is melding pieces of things that don't belong together into new art forms with different meanings? What's the point of setting this all up by showing us how pointless feature films are in the grand scheme of things?

What's the point?

~6/10~