Culturology's I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Booklove Bookclub rolls forward, with me back up on my book-reading shit and having completed the book that I claimed I (we?) was going to read for this week: B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. For those of you that are interested, there's apparently some amount of interest in Traven's personal history, insofar as, apparently, it was just a nom de plume, but know one ever knew--or, whoever did know never squealed--who the author actually was. Which I think is pretty rare, since for the most part we know what fake-author-name's real names were (George Eliot = What's her face, Mark Twain = What's his face, Molly = Nick, etc.). But I'm not really in a mode where I'm tempted to get swept up in such a thing. A fine book though, this one, whoever wrote it.
Perhaps some of you--presuming that you're more-or-less my age (late 20s)--have had a similar experience to this: because of watching cartoons, as I grow older and catch up with all the culture that's happened in the past, as I see, hear, or read iconic works for the first time, I realize that I was first introduced to the trope via a reference in a cartoon from my childhood. For instance, watching the "Goodfeathers" sequences on Animaniacs, and then finally, years later, actually seeing Goodfellas, and thinking "Wow, that was a violent, vulgar (you shut your mother-father mouth!) movie, I can't believe they based a kid's show around it." Or, like, every frame from Citizen Kane, which has shown up in one place or another.
In reading Sierra Madre, I encountered the source for yet another chain of references. My personal narrative of the trope goes like this:
1) In Weird Al Yankovic's movie UHF, the pet-store guy, at some point, yells "Badgers! We don't need no stinking badgers!" Then, I believe, he throws something (some pet) out a window. This was funny.
2) In Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles, the sheriff is deputizing some folks, and a bandit-esque kind of character declares "Badges! We don't need no stinking badges!" And my teenage self, smart as he was, realized that UHF was referencing Blazing Saddles.
3) This line comes from B. Traven's book! I read it with my own sub-section-of-brain-pieces-responsible-for-reading-and-comprehension!
4) I then realized that, given the first two things being movies, they were almost certainly referencing the movie adaptation of the book (starring one of those famous '40s actors), where the "Badges, we don't need no stinking badges." line must have been uttered. It comes full circle.
So that was exciting. I don't think anything else in the book matches that moment. So, if you haven't already surmised, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is Western pulp, taking place in Mexico back during the end of the oil boom and during the perhaps long-running gold if-not-boom-than-like-some-people-consistently-out-there-looking-for-gold. I haven't read a whole lot of pulp fiction in my life, and most of what I have falls into either the hard-boiled/noir genres or sci-fi, so I'm not too familiar with Western or cowboy novels. So I don't know if this one was really better than any other or not. Part of me wasn't thrilled with the prose style, mostly because it's in an omniscient third-person narration that shifts freely between characters, and also tends to be a bit pedantic.
The pedantry isn't a huge deal, since it still does tend to be pinned to one character or another, as we follow a down-and-out American as he wanders about Mexico for a while then goes mining for gold with two other Americans (one of them being an old-timer that knows the ropes). So then they're mining for gold. There's some dialogue, some gold dust, a few hi-jinks, a little bit of danger. Then they stop mining for gold. Then someone's head gets chopped off with a machete, which is a little bit jarring, since there's no other violence to match it in the book. As if the author was thinking either "Fuck it," or "Boo-yah!" I'm gonna have this guy have his head chopped off. Felt more boo-yah-ish to me than anything.
I can't tell if that just means I've been well-trained by the contemporary-literature machine to unconsciously desire Raymond Carver-esque first person narration, or if not that then the kind of distanced third person of a lot of postmodern prose, or just a modern style thing generally, but I can't think of too many books that I've read that sit in such a place narratologically. I mean, plenty of other novels do it, but not in such a sudden and free-flowing manner as the Traven. So I tried pretty hard to keep myself for judging it on such grounds, but after a while it was still hard for me to--it's not quite suspension of disbelief, but there's a kind of realism involved in any given novel, where you have to, as a reader, by it or not, as a tale being told. But since this one's a kind of morality tale, I don't know, it just seemed a bit overwrought to me. But, it being pulp, none of this matters too much, since it all moves very briskly and is delightfully easy to read.
As another note, since I'm still not finished reading Walden, one of the blurbs on the back cover (from who knows how long ago) notes that perhaps The Treasure of the Sierra Madre would take the place of Walden as the book from which the young people might take advice. Though I still feel like it's still much more likely that I go live in a shack in the woods than go mining for gold anywhere.
Coming up on the I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Booklove Bookclub:
July 23rd: Gene Yuen Lang's American Born Chinese
July 30th: Henry David Thoreau's Walden (this time I mean it!)
posting before noon? i am impressed pete. and yes. nick = molly. i demand band tshirts thay say, nick = molly.
i had the same experience with goodfeathers and the whole 'i've seen this before in something' else thing - although i'm surprised pesci wasn't more pissed about it. he always ends up the but of mobster pastiche.
obviously quotes/scenes from movies like scarface/taxi driver are repeated mercilessly throughout popculture - but when does it transform from merely a throwback qoute to homage?
I think on a personal level, movie/tv references can pretty well separate themselves from their original context. There's a ton of stuff that I say all the time that has it's origin as a Simpsons reference or a Mr. Show reference (actually, at various times in my life, huge portions of my utterances have been references to one of those sources (+ The Big Lebowski).
My favorite example of such is times when I see a friend struggling to determine what the proper course of action is to take at a given instance, to which I often say "Where's that red one gonna go?" Which, as you might know, is a reference to the movie The Royal Tenenbaums but ends up working okay even when people don't know what the hell I mean.
On a broader cultural level, though, it's harder to say what counts as reference or homage, or what the difference is. Things like "Goodfeathers" is of the parody/homage category, for certain. Or when South Park makes wholesale visual homage from their bizarre and deep set of references. I think the difference would be, again, when a given homage or reference detaches itself from its source in a way where it still also keeps its legs. I'm not sure if I can think of an example off the top of my head, though. There are definitely iconic ways of framing shots in movies that do it: for instance, the camera panning up-and-over and zooming away from a hero screaming at the sky: by now, it's a trope/cliche, but it must have started somewhere.
in comic books, artists have largely done away with the concept of an homage as a unique thing. reference = homage in comic art nowadays. it's actually gotten kind of extreme.
as for most referenced stuff, mine would be The State, Kingpin, and Adaptation. in fact, since i'm now rewatching all of The State on Netflix streaming, i'm realizing that i reference The State more than i even consciously know. "i'ma make a big tomato sauce!" "what am i doin'?" "chemically man made like the incredible hulk."
and BTW, the first Molly comment was real. i just thought i'd be Molly to tell Neal what i assumed he was hoping to hear.
AudioShocker Shoutouts!
nick=molly. such a comment tease.
it should actually be nick=molly2, cause i had nothing to do with the first Molly comment.
nick = molly looks better
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