Girlfriend in a Coma - Douglas Coupland

"You're to be different now. Your behavior will be changing. Your thinking is to change. And people will watch these changes in you and they'll come to experience the world in your new manner."

Though the title inevitably evokes the classic Smiths song this novel is quite literally centers around a main character's girlfriend who falls into a coma. Though this seemingly mundane premise quickly turns interesting when said coma is the catalyst for a post-apocalyptic world in either instance this particular novel seemed a strange choice for an undergraduate religion class.

I first read this novel as an assigned text in Dr. Harrison's lower division Christian Tradition class and amidst a slew of other religious/philosophical texts this seemed a very odd choice. In some ways I feel that pedagogical choices like these probably contributed to Dr. Harrison's limited presence on campus in subsequent semesters (the guy somehow managed to eek discussions of The Matrix into a class focused on the development of later Christian religious philosophy...seriously).

To summarize, Girlfriend in a Coma tells the story of a group of mediocre high school students, one of whom falls into a coma after overdosing on Ecstasy the night after losing her virginity and conceiving a child with her jock boyfriend. Years later after each member of this group of friends has been partway down the road into mundane lives the girlfriend wakes up at the same moment of an unspecified apocalyptic event that leaves the very same group of friends (including the coma-delivered daughter of the eponymous girlfriend) the only survivors on earth. Though apparently the last humans left on the planet this group of now thirty-somethings proceeds to simply survive in an unremarkable and rarely commendable fashion. Most of the hard questions of the novel are asked directly by the ghostly narrator, a high-school classmate and football jock (hardly a likable character but somehow his death gives him the perspective to put the philosophical screw to his former friends), questions which ultimately amount to: what does it take for one to want to live remarkably.

Now I won't be the one to say that the question Coupland poses is invalid or even dismissible. In our media-saturated and leisure-oriented culture I would hope that even more people were willing to answer the call to live remarkable lives. But for some reason the context in which this novel was presented sidelined the question. Admittedly Girlfriend in a Coma is not a novel I would have ever picked up but for some reason attempting to appropriate a secular perspective on finding meaning and purpose in one's life to a Christian context somehow seemed like a backwards move. As a result the novel led me further into musings on post-apocalyptic narratives than existentialistic introspection.

Modern media has no lack of exploration into post-apocalyptic narratives. Indeed Hollywood has been dreaming up new approaches from Mad Max to Waterworld to I Am Legend (though this last started in comic form). Literature has been considering the same concept since Mary Shelley's The Last Man to Cormac McCarthy's The Road. All of these narratives leave us with a more general question that Coupland seems to ask, which is: if we are stripped of everything we know, what do we do? Think about it...what each of these narratives have in common is the complete removal of the character from all social, economic, sanitary, gastronomic, etc. norms that we in our civilized and industrialized societies are able to accept as consistent realities. But if everyone but you and a few others in the world were dead, contaminated, or simply disappeared what would it all mean and what would you do?

Even after providing for basic survival (made particularly difficult without electricity, running water, gasoline, or fresh food) the next mental void to fill is to make that very same survival justifiable on an existential level. With a constant social network it is easy for us to find meaning and importance even in the most mundane of tasks (doing dishes, depositing paychecks, writing blogs, etc.) because even such minuscule acts represent a re-validation of an individual's existence since the effects of these acts is perceived by others from without the individual. Conversely, in a post-apocalyptic world with no apparent hope of global reconstruction the weight of solitude on our vast, spinning rock-in-space is likely to make any lone individual either commit suicide for the sheer futility of continued existence or simply relapse to a hedonistic and short-sighted manner of existence. In Coupland's novel it is the latter which his characters pursue and if you think about it it is difficult to blame them despite the fact that the author does. But the reason for this may be the fact that he offers the prospect of redemption via a magical jump back in time to the narrative's catalyst (the coma-event). Of course in retrospect all characters have the perspective to pursue wildly different and philosophically informed and significant lives (which seems to be Coupland's point throughout). But I have to feel somewhat cheated by this particular deus-ex-machina since a regression to a more primitive survivalist mindset is probably the only way to mentally cope with the essential end of life on earth that post-apocalyptic narratives depict.
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Coupland, Douglas. Girlfriend in a Coma. New York: Harper Collins, 1998.

The Emperor's New Groove - Disney film

"If you had done what I ordered you to do in the first place, we all could have been spared your little 'kiss of life'."

I'm diverting a bit from the formula today to relay the meat of a debate I had with my mother in the past few weeks about the evil, bloodsucking, corporate monstrosity that bleeds the minds of children and the wallets of parents in order to uphold a fictionalized concept of American society that its deceased creator is still channeling from beyond his frozen grave. I am speaking, of course, of Disney. Now before you all get excited and angry at me for talking about a movie rather than a book let me say that 1) this does technically belong to The Eastin Collection and 2) though they might not have pages to flip and words to read (ha!) Disney films still represent fascinating artifacts of modern American culture especially since they are often placed in settings that are not America.

Let me also offer a proper preface for this discussion since the above conspiracy-theory preface tragically derailed any productive details in my previous conversation. Though the above is true (I'll be sure to modify the Wikipedia entry for 'Disney' to comply) it still represents an opinion and opinions are things that one must at least appear to leave at the door when engaging in literary inquiry. Being such a massive economic force as Disney is it is inevitable that the entertainment media they produce will reflect the culture for which it is made and this is the main assumption with which I begin.

I first saw The Emperor's New Groove on a into-town foray on what was meant to be a camping trip and I soon discovered that it was one of the funniest and my favorite Disney film. This may have something to do with David Spade or the fact that the music-and-dance moments were kept to a minimum but in either case I thoroughly enjoyed it. In case you haven't seen it, the film is basically about a young, spoiled Mezzo-American monarch named Cuzco (voiced by David Spade) who is put in his place by an ambitious advisor (imagine a cross between Cruella DeVil and Jafar) who turns him into a llama and sends him home with a peasant. He must then find his way back to his kingdom to reclaim it with the help of the Peasant (Pacha, voiced by John Goodman) and discover himself along the way, etc, etc.

There are plenty of scenes in the film that are hilarious and quotable and my sisters and I have enjoyed doing so on many occasions but there was one scene that recently struck me as somewhat odd and the more I thought about it the more I found was happening beneath the surface of an otherwise lighthearted film.

We've all heard the stories about Disney animators inserting little goodies, often of a sexual nature, into their family films (for full discussions check out Snopes.com). While strange and controversial these little nuggets of animated tomfoolery are, for the most part, juvenile. But what I noticed in The Emperor's New Groove carried a much more prominent representation of cultural discourse.

After a classic cartoon plummet over an enormous waterfall a soaked Pacha drags the unconscious Cuzco (in llama form) to shore and begins administering CPR. Now, what got my brain turning along this vein was the strangeness of a Mezzo-American peasant being capable of performing this life saving technique. According to Wikipedia techniques of Cardiopulmonary resuscitation as it is currently practiced and as it is practiced by Pacha in the film, have only existed since the 1950's yet the supposed period of the films setting would have been during the height of the Aztec empire circa 1500. Now don't get me wrong, I don't expect Disney to portray historical accuracy especially since we are considering these settings as mere backdrops for realizations of modern American cultural discourses. But it still struck me that an emperor who should have had no knowledge of CPR would undoubtedly find it odd that his big bear-like companion was leaning in close with his eyes closed...

And Cuzco responds just as we expect him to, with the line included above. As an audience we laugh at this joke and then move on unaware of what exactly it was that just happened and I suspect that this same joke was written edited and animated with a similar chuckle. What we have here is a homoerotic moment in a Disney film but presented in such a way that it immediately becomes a homophobic scene. Despite a nearly romantic dressing to the scene both characters are quick to refute any possibility of the scene turning out differently. I imagine that if Cuzco had sighed and thanked Pacha for saving his life families everywhere would have been up in arms. But instead Cuzco's eyes go wide and he scrambles away spitting and disgusted and we as an audience think nothing else of it.

To me (and I admit I may be reading too far into it, but Disney films are just so fascinating when you really rip them apart!) the unquestioning nature of a homophobic hue is possible because of the nature of Dinsey films as cultural artifacts. It doesn't take a genius to realize that 109% of Disney's marketing campaigns are marketed to citizens who will be spending other people's money (i.e. kids). And as such it makes perfect sense for this media/consumer interchange to have no doubts about its validation of familial units. In fact it makes biological/fiscal sense for an established economic force like Disney to reinforce heterosexual units since it can probably cash in on its investment in twenty-year intervals.

Now if you find yourself thinking that I've taken this too far, you're probably right, but then again I'm just happy I've gotten you to read this far. I don't necessarily think promoting heterosexuality is an intricate part of Disney's master plan to take over the world. In fact this scene is so small that it is practically negligible. I merely wish to point it out to illustrate a small manifestation of cultural discourse within the film (and hopefully destroy some of its innocence in the process). There is so much in Disney films to read into (a professor of mine discussed Beauty and the Beast as reinforcing young American girls' need to remain in potentially abusive relationships) and I imagine I'll find another way to fit a Disney film into this blog again (if nothing else I'm sure I could get a hugely interesting racial discussion about Pocahontas, Mulan, and The Princess and the Frog).

Blow Up and other stories - Julio Cortazar

"It'll never be known how this has to be told, in the first person or in the second, using the third person plural or continually inventing modes that will serve for nothing..."

I was introduced to Julio Cortazar in a class I didn't really want to take entitled "Latin American Literature." It wasn't that I necessarily didn't want to take the class since it contained a number of modern Latin American works of literature that I have come to appreciate and laud, but mostly because a schedule conflict kept me from taking the Medieval Language and Literature class (sometimes I feel like I would have decided to be a medievalist much earlier. Drat). I will fess up to the fact that I have only read one story out of this collection but it leads me to a very interesting issue in teaching literature.

The text assigned for the class was Cortazar's story "Blow Up" which is a postmodern foray into the concept of our perception of time as understood through a photograph (really, that's the best I can do to sum it up). This story was one of those that I'm sure we've all encountered where we read it through a few times yet it still doesn't seem to make sense. The ensuing class discussion subsequently revealed an interpretation that I hadn't even considered and probably wouldn't have if not for the professor's suggestions. After class I went back to read the story again and still found that the consensus at which the class had arrived still presented some problems. It was not until recently, ironically after a great deal of experience with the varied presentations of language in Medieval Literature that I have arrived at some explanation for my confusion.

It is a common oversight in English classrooms to ignore the linguistic heritage of a text. This is not always an intentional oversight and is often simply done as a result of time or contextual constraints. Cortazar, obviously, wrote his original text in Spanish but since Latin American Lit. was essentially an English class we worked exclusively with translations. I find it somewhat interesting that despite our professor being mainly teacher of Spanish classes (she taught this class since she was still connected with the rather broad Department of Literature, Journalism, and Modern Languages) she had a tendency to present the texts read for the class as authoritative and unfortunately ignored the idea that despite the editor's best efforts there is no one-to-one transmission of a text from a different language and the class, especially in light of our postmodern course canon, may have suffered from this oversight.

As a medievalist I must be constantly aware of the effects of translation upon our reading of the text. I've read multiple translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and each offers a very different reading. Thinking in terms of texts which I will be teaching this coming fall I am quite aware of the undergraduate students difference in response to Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf (or 'Heaneywulf' as it is known in some medieval circles) and other more academic translations. As an undergraduate I read Heaney's version and must admit that despite its anachronism, Heaney's translation does do significantly more to excite the literary tastes of the medieval novice.

To bring the discussion back to Cortazar I find that, in retrospect, the language and imagery that I may have seen as lofty artistic flourishes or intentional ambiguities may actually be confusions caused by the shift from Spanish to English rather than deficiencies in my own understanding. In either case Cortazar's short fiction is challengingly abstract but I feel that, had my classroom context been cognizant of translation issues I may have felt a bit less belittled by the text. Hopefully such a mindset will help in my own classrooms.
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Cortazar, Julio. Blow Up and Other Stories. Trans. Paul Blackburn. New York: Pantheon, 1967.