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Steve Erickson, longtime SF/fantasy novelist and film writer, is fond of the big alpha-omega statement, the kind of expansive, universalizing claim—”The movie is in all times, and all times are in the movie. . . . All scenes anticipate and reflect each other,” etc—that evaporates on inspection, and in Zeroville (Europa, 2007), his eighth long work of fiction, he’s frequently on the verge of swallowing his own rhetorical tail. Not that there’s anything wrong with that necessarily—e.g., Wittgenstein’s devilishly deadpan “The world is everything that is the case” comes as near to saying nothing as saying something can ever get—and Don DeLillo follows a similar strategy in his ’82 novel The Names (his masterpiece, I think), where words rather than films hold the arcane secrets of universe. But DeLillo convinces through the effects he achieves, his claims the product of the writing, not a starting point for it. Language, history, movies, economics, Jesus—change the metaphor and it’s a party game anyone can play. But whether there’s anything solid behind the rhetorical bluff and patter—an Archimedean point of rest, a lever and a place to stand—is another matter entirely.
There’s also the problem of Erickson’s auteurist preferences, which will only seem fresh and provocative if you haven’t read much film criticism (specifically the Sarris-induced kind) in the past 40 years or so. Long, familiar riffs on Now, Voyager‘s talismanic cancer sticks, or on Hawks’s Red River and Ford’s The Searchers, with worshipful nods to the 40s hucksters and studio studs who dared redefine “masculine” sociopathy as aaarrtt (shades of Veit Harlan—or of Soviet-era class-revenge fantasies, with tractors running to fists, etc): we know what that’s about, even with thieves and ex-theology students as duly authorized spokesmen. Not to mention the meticulous, shot-by-shot analysis of Stevens’s A Place in the Sun, less the immortal object of Erickson’s retelling than a lugubrious monstre sacre, which arguably sets its mark on film posterity in all the wrong ways (x shot = y emotion, everything overdetermined and literal, etc). Just a nominal voice of protest amid the fan-boy flights, from Zazi, Zeroville‘s least articulate character, but in Erickson’s cinematic heart of hearts, it’s Viking Man’s megalomania that gets the best lines.
