In addition to stage musicals and operas, movies
feature prominently as settings and plot devices throughout Lorrie Moore’s
stories in Self-Help. In “How to Be
an Other Woman,” Charlene goes to “a Godard movie” with Mark, the banker her
co-worker sets her up with, but she neglects to read the subtitles and instead
ponders whether or not to sleep with him—when he winks at her in the middle of
the film, she exclaims silently, “Good god” (19). Most of the plot of “The Kid’s
Guide to Divorce” features the mother and daughter watching a Cary Grant movie,
which they have seen before, and which always makes the mother cry (maybe
especially now, given the great unspoken tension in the room); they follow it
up with “The Late, Late Chiller” featuring a mummy and a werewolf. A key scene
between Trudy and Bob in “Amahl and the Night Visitors” takes place in a mall
movie theater (“Cinema 1-2-3”)—decidedly not the “downtown theaters of your
childhood” (112)—when Moss had been allegedly “too busy” to go. The previews
take forever (even in the 1980s previews took forever!), and the movie itself
(ostensibly “about Brazil”) starts to seem more like Trudy’s own anxieties
projected onto the screen: “The images melt together like a headache. The movie
seems to be about a woman whose lover, losing interest in her, has begun to do
inexplicable things like yell about the cat, and throw scenes in shopping malls”
(113). The audience’s laughter makes Trudy “tense with comic exile”—they are
ostensibly laughing at her very predicament—and she and Bob beat a hasty
retreat.
These references to movies—the act of watching
movies together, with the screen reflecting and affecting the “real life”
depicted in the story—are of a piece with the book’s other popular-culture
references. Many of Moore’s male characters are performers of one kind or
another (singers of opera and stage musicals, actors), and plays and popular
songs are referenced throughout. Her stories are set firmly in the cultural
landscape of the 1980s—her characters allude to movies, TV shows, and popular
songs as common points of reference. But this last example, where
Trudy doesn’t “objectively” see the film about Brazil on the screen (they
should have opted instead for the one “about sexual abandonment in upstate New
York” [107] as an escape from her worries!), is especially interesting to me,
and reflects the way Moore depicts her characters and their worlds as moving in
and out of familiar fictions—and movies, rather than literature, become the
template for these “fictions” they inhabit. Her characters sometimes see
themselves as living scenes out of the movies, finding themselves playing out
roles that seem familiar somehow—not from personal experience, but a more
postmodern kind of “deja-vu.” So Trudy goes to the movies to take her mind off
everything with Moss (and now Bob), but then Bob accompanies her, they talk
about Moss during the movie, and all
Trudy can see on screen is her own predicament reflected back—with the audience
laughing at her. She has become a character on the screen, and her life has
become the kind of thing that would be projected on the screen.
Moore introduces this blurring of movies and “real
life” in the first paragraph of the first story in the collection, “How to Be
an Other Woman.” While Trudy undergoes the strange dissociative experience of
seeing her life projected on the screen for others to laugh at, at the start of
this first story, the dynamic is reversed: it’s as if Charlene (or the “you” we
eventually learn is named Charlene) suddenly finds herself living in the middle
of a movie, cast in a role she didn’t audition for: “Meet in expensive beige
raincoats, on a pea-soupy night. Like in a detective movie” (3). Being “instructed”
to “meet” a stranger seems to suggest a life as following a script—go here,
stand here, cue the appropriate atmosphere and mood lighting, and . . . meet! As if to drive home the
artificiality of the scene Moore is calling up here, we get images of artifice—“fake
velvet Hummels,” a “small mound of chemical snow” on display in the store
window. The atmosphere may evoke a detective movie, a film noir, but what
follows is a “romantic” scene—a “cute meet.” If it’s a detective movie, then
Charlene is the “femme fatale,” luring the male hero into a shady underworld of
deceit and illusion. (Only it seems more like he’s the one luring her—an “homme
fatal”?) The man’s entrance is straight out of Hollywood: “He emerges from
nowhere, looks like Robert Culp, the fog rolling, then parting, then sort of
closing up behind him” (3). Only in movies does fog part like a curtain, and
then seal up again photogenically behind the strong-jawed leading man, who here
is explicitly likened to the film actor and archetypal but not-quite-famous-as-Cary-Grant leading man Robert Culp. What do two lovers do when they meet in these kinds of
movies? You already know the answer: “He asks you for a light. . . . He lights
the cigarette, cupping his hands around the end, and drags deeply, like a
starving man” (3). They proceed to stand next to each other waiting for the
bus, each palpably aware of the other: “You begin to circle, gauging each other
in primordial sniffs, eyeing, sidling, keen as Basil Rathbone” (3). One more
allusion to an actor,
to solidify our sense that we’ve seen this scene before—not in life, but in the
movies. They get on the bus (as she pretends to be reading a biography of the
movie star Doris Day, even though she’s really reading Flaubert’s novel of
marital infidelity, Madame Bovary),
and she attempts some snappy dialogue (which “sounds dumb,” but still gets the
job done). The rest, as they say, is history.
This is such a self-consciously constructed “start
of a story”—Moore risks opening her collection of innovative narrative fiction
with a scene that evokes every cliché you can think of for a “romantic”
meeting. The second-person narration here reads like a director instructing
actors, choreographing their movements and words to produce a scene that not
only explains how they meet, but which tries hard to invest that meeting with
an atmosphere of romance. There’s the sense of the character losing all control
or free will: she’s now “the other woman,” and once cast, she must follow the
plot to its inevitable finish. The distinctive second-person narrative style
Moore employs in different ways throughout this book flaunts its artifice, even
as it is used to represent distinctive and emotionally complex, realistic, and
distinctive characters: it “puts us in the character’s position,” but it also
runs the risk of reminding us, at every turn, that this is not “us,” that “we” haven’t done any of these things, and often our
inclinations would be quite different from those of the characters. It’s hard,
for most of these stories, for the reader to not be aware on some level of the style being deployed—to know that an
author is putting together a story for us, and finding tricky ways to try and
get us into that narrative. With first-person narration, it’s pretty easy to
maintain the illusion that the narrator is an autonomous person choosing to
share their story with you. The second person calls attention to itself,
reminds us that there’s an author
telling us all this stuff.
In this first story, with this self-consciously “cinematic”
opening, Moore is inviting us to play along, to imagine this wholly unrealistic
yet uncannily familiar scene, as the character finds herself falling into an
all-too-realistic and familiar “role” as an “other woman.” It’s as if Charlene
can’t believe the opening of her story is so clichéd, either. As the story
unfolds, she becomes increasingly uneasy with and detached from this version of
herself—she has become “another woman” (5), and this is not the plot she had
envisioned. The familiar story is full of the kinds of clichés introduced in
the opening scene, and the reader will have the feeling of having seen it all
before (there is a surprise plot twist at the end, with the revelation that “the
wife” is really just the “other mistress”—but surprise twists are,
paradoxically, an expected feature of cinematic narrative). Her awareness of
the artifice doesn’t stop her from falling for its magic (“He leaves before you
have even quite fallen asleep, but before he does, he bends over you in his
expensive beige raincoat and kisses the ends of your hair. Ah, he kisses your
hair” [6]).
Charlene imagines a quite different life for herself, with her
college education and her Phi Beta Kappa key, but she ends up being cast into this
role as if she’d wandered onto a movie set on that “pea-soupy” night, and she
can’t quite escape. The inevitable breakup scene remains in cliché territory. When
he says, lamely, “what I’ve always admired about you, right from when I first
met you, is your strength, your independence,” she replies, “That line is old
as boots” (21). He leaves as cinematically as he enters—“pulling up the collar
on his expensive beige raincoat, like an old and haggard Robert Culp”—but all
Charlene, or “you,” can do is “slam the door like Bette Davis.”
As Moore puts it in “How,” “One of those endings”
(64).
