BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY
With Michael J. Fox, Kiefer Sutherland, Swoosie Kurtz, Phoebe Cates, Frances Sternhagen, Tracy Pollan, Jason Robards, John Houseman, Dianne Wiest, and William Hickey.
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In a deft act of self-positioning, the novel is prefaced by a quote from The Sun Also Rises, and follows a narrative trajectory that roughly parallels that of The Catcher in the Rye: that is, on the pretext of saying something about a “lost generation,” it follows the obsessions and wanderings of a young hero cut loose from his bearings over a few confused days in Manhattan, in flight from his own despair and nervous collapse (as well as from his family). The novel’s ideological project, on the other hand–to validate the yuppie ethos and life-style (self-interest, cocaine, urbanity, enlightened disdain for one’s surroundings) in literary terms–is a far cry from either Ernest Hemingway or J.D. Salinger, however much the book may cop a free ride on certain mythological associations made with both authors.
One might argue that any American writer since Hemingway and Fitzgerald who deliberately sets out to create a portrait of a “generation” is already doomed to mediocrity. (Our best novelists, from Faulkner to Pynchon to Styron to Percy, have always had bigger fish to fry–especially since the very notion of “generations” has been reduced and multiplied by media hype to mean approximately one new target audience per season.) But whether we accept this caveat or not, it seems reasonable enough to claim that Bright Lights, Big City–the novel and the movie–does capture the sensibility of a particular generation, in however reductive a fashion.
The movie’s best improvement on the book, however, is Michael J. Fox, if only because he makes the hero’s self-absorption seem less apparent and therefore less repellent. Some of this is brought about by a repositioning of the hero’s writerly persona; the movie is divided into sections introduced by typed-out captions for each successive day, and this dilution of the hero’s literary self is both merciful on its own terms and superior to the book’s arch chapter titles. It also frees us somewhat from the hero’s limited self-understanding and allows Fox to give the character some pathos as a loose cog in the world rather than as a self-pitying weaver of his own mythology–a snob whose “sophistication” is defined by his disdain for a bald-headed woman in a disco and his affection for croissants and the New York Times. (McInerney’s use of second person–sparingly retained in the movie–does nothing to distance his narrator’s voice; unlike Michel Butor’s more innovative use of second person in La modification, translated as A Change of Heart, or Salinger’s first-person impersonation of Holden Caulfield in Catcher, it merely functions as a sneaky and displaced use of an unmediated “I.”)
