Vieux Carré

Last month I reviewed a production of Tennessee Williams' rarely-produced Vieux Carré at the Pearl Theatre. The production was adequate if a little uninspired, and did more to shed light on a terrific play that ought to be performed more frequently than it held succeeded in its own right. Still, the stage and lighting design were terrifically unusual, and a couple of actors kept the proceedings interesting. Mostly, the production seemed to be creating a tableau of Williams's work rather than turning the text into something new. Click here to read the whole review.

Puppet Kafka

In my review of Drama of Works' production of the new work, Puppet Kafka, I discuss the inherent strengths and problems with the idea of adapting Franz Kafka's stories with a cast of puppets. Mixing narratives from The Penal Colony, The Trial, Metamorphosis and the author's life, Puppet Kafka has some inspired characters and scenes, but on the whole never manages to recover the momentum lost every time actors and puppets must move awkwardly through the play's precious (though beautiful) stage and set. Read the whole review here.

Dreams With Sharp Teeth

Directed by Erik Nelson

After writers (the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd) retrieved genre filmmakers (Hawks, Ford, Hitchcock, etc) from the dust heap of cinema, how fitting that movies should reciprocate by rescuing genre writers from literature’s recycling bin. With Philip K. Dick now firmly canonized (thanks in no small part to Blade Runner), long-time Werner Herzog-collaborator Nelson turns our attentions to the somewhat-obscure yet searing bright Harlan Ellison. An incredibly intelligent, opinionated, and funny graying man with a scrappy work ethic, Ellison (and longtime friend Robin Williams) electrifies this otherwise utilitarian documentary – bizarre green screen-backed excerpt-readings notwithstanding. Intentionally or not, you’re likely to leave with an intense desire to read a collection of Ellison’s short stories, but only vague recollections of the movie that sparked your interest.

This review will appear in the June 4 issue of The L Magazine.

Defecting to Define America Anew

The notion of breaking from tradition, taking the road less travelled, venturing from the beaten path, has been at work since the beginnings of American Literature. From the misadventures of Rip Van Winkle in the mysterious Catskills, to the dizzying cross-continental romps of Dean Moriarty, defection looms large in the American literary tradition. Three texts from the last sixty years, Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and David O. Russell’s Three Kings, recreate an American frontier so that their characters may defect into uncharted territory. By setting their narratives in the deep and mystical South, the vast expanse of Cold War America, and the unfamiliar deserts of Iraq, these texts give their characters an opportunity to defect from dominant society, in each instance sculpting a unique American identity.

In Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms defection occurs both physically and psychologically. Joel Knox’s voyage to a mystical rural Alabama signifies a journey into the American subconscious; to where cripples, invalids, and deviants have been banished. Characters such as Randolph, Miss Amy, Missouri, Idabel and Miss Wisteria populate the fringe of American society and the depths of its unconscious. By sending Joel, the closest-to-normal of the novel’s odd characters, to the frontier of American social conventions, Capote is defining a new American identity. He gives voices to other characters that embody perceived social ills such as child sexuality and adolescence (Joel, Idabel, Miss Wisteria), homosexuality (Randolph), civil rights and racism (Zoo), emasculation and castration anxiety (Mr. Sansom), to mention a few. In so doing Capote sends his readers with Joel to the psychological frontier of America, and from this defection seeks to create a more unified and accepting collective consciousness.

Therefore, Joel becomes the readers’ guide to their own unconscious, as he advances both physically and psychologically through rural Alabama. Even as his journey towards Noon City progresses, Joel becomes incapable of suppressing his subconscious. He “hadn’t had a proper hour’s rest since leaving New Orleans, for when he closed his eyes, as now, certain sickening memories slid through his mind” (Capote 8). As Ihab H. Hassan writes of Other Voices, “the image of adolescence throws a new light on that perennial conflict between the self and the world to which Freud assigned a decisive role in any culture” (Hassan 313). As he ventures from the comfort and familiarity of New Orleans to the challenging lifestyle of Skully’s Landing, Joel comes to belong in this community of misfits. The archetypal masculine Southerner Sam Radclif finds Joel “too pretty, too delicate and fair-skinned; each of his features was shaped with a sensitive accuracy, and a girlish tendency” (Capote 4). By defecting to the backwaters of Alabama, Joel Knox embraces the unconscious at the dawn of an era of thorough repression in modern American history.

In Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a similar psychological motivation drives the protagonists to travel all over America incessantly. Much like in Other Voices, Kerouac seeks to acknowledge the need for personal development between childhood and adulthood, the period of adolescence. Therefore, defection for Sal Paradise, Dean Moriarty and their cohorts serves multiple purposes, all of which are ultimately formative. Firstly, their perpetual travels are a way of avoiding responsibility, prolonging the comforts of youth by fleeing adulthood on the open road. Secondly, Sal and Dean’s departure from settled life is a way of defecting from the American identities which their parents have come to exemplify. Thirdly therefore, defection is also a metaphysical search for their own identity; their journeys become tools of experience rather than travels with an explicit destination. As one critic writes, “[t]he book moves from hierarchy to openness, from the limitation of possibilities to their expansion” (Dardess 201). Sal betrays awareness of this when asked by another man of the road, a carnival owner, “‘[y]ou boys going to get somewhere, or just going?’ We didn’t understand his question, and it was a damned good question” (Kerouac 20). The roads of America become Sal and Dean’s open frontier, and a unique and uniquely American identity becomes the object of their defection.

In his film Three Kings, David O. Russell makes similar use of open territory as a way of giving his characters physical space for defection. Though their defection has very material goals at the outset, its result is an experience much like that Sal and Dean seek in On the Road; that is emotional growth and a new sense of identity. Set against the backdrop of the Persian Gulf War, Three Kings chronicles the efforts of Major Archie Gates, Sergeant First Class Troy Barlow, and Staff Sergeant Chief Elgin to recover for their own personal gain gold stolen by Iraqis from Kuwait. The fringes between war and civil society become their frontier, the desert space between American barracks and Iraqi settlements. Their quest is typical of American capitalism, echoing the westward expansion of the Gold Rush. However, while they begin by seeking financial wealth with no regard for the impact on others, their journey becomes a socially conscious mission when its focus shifts to the rescuing of Iraqi civilians. Through this tale of American soldiers’ defection in the Persian Gulf, David O. Russell posits a new American identity of social consciousness and humanitarian benevolence, rather than military peacekeeping abroad and irresponsible capitalism at home.

By setting their narratives in unsettled spaces, these texts allow their characters to seek out a new identity free of historical and geographical constraints. Many critics, most notably Richard Slotkin, have identified the frontier myth with conservative social politics and militaristic foreign policies. Capote, Kerouac, and Russell repossess the American myth of the frontier, incorporating it into a progressive, socially inclusive political project. Rural Alabama, miles of American highway, and the deserts of Iraq provide Capote, Kerouac, and Russell’s characters with the physical and emotional freedom to defect. In their respective frontiers these narratives carve out a new American identity. Capote brings his readers to the geographical and psychological fringes of America in an effort to create a more accepting national consciousness. Kerouac sends Sal and Dean out on the road in search of their own sense of American adolescence, and thereafter adulthood, free from the constraints of their parents’ mistakes. Finally, Russell goes to the Iraqi desert to forge a more socially conscious and responsible American political identity. All three texts acknowledge that change is needed, but also that the right conditions must exist before that change can take place.

Note: Written for English 325: Modern American Fiction course taught by Dr. Jason Polley at McGill University in the Winter 2006.

Works Cited

Capote, Truman. Other Voices, Other Rooms. New York: Modern Library, 1948.

Dardess, George. “The Delicate Dynamics of Friendship: A Reconsideration of Kerouac’s On The Road”. American Literature 46.2 (1974): 200-206.

Hassan. Ihab, H.. “The Idea of Adolescence in American Fiction”. American Quarterly 10.3 (1958): 312-324.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. London: Penguin, 1957.

Three Kings. Dir. David O. Russell. Perf. George Clooney, Ice Cube, Mark Wahlberg, Spike Jonze, Nora Dunn. Village Roadshow Pictures, 1999.

Subverting the Suburbs in Mildred Pierce

In Mildred Pierce, the title character transforms the patriarchal space of the suburb into one which suits her ambitions. This takes place in the historical context of economic depression, of women’s rising social power and independence, and of the resultant male anxiety. The suburbs, originally passed off as female-coded spaces, are seen as detached, and alienating at the beginning of Mildred’s story. However her actions are not destructive or dismissive; she does not build a new home or move to the city. Instead she adapts the isolating space of the suburb to the needs and demands of her personal and entrepreneurial agendas. She creates a network of supportive women who help her (temporarily) overcome the isolating fabric of the suburb. She changes the physical space of the suburban home into a successful restaurant. Finally, she turns her skills as a homemaker into assets which become money-makers. I will argue that Mildred Pierce successfully transforms the suburbs into a space which works for her rather than against her, though she is ultimately punished for doing so and reinscribed into a patriarchal power structure.

In an article on the evolving roles and activities of suburban women, Kim V. L. England illustrates the adaptive skills of women in the suburbs. Using a study of thirty women in suburban Columbus, Ohio conducted in the late 1980s, she identifies some of the tactics women have used to incorporate their professional ambitions into the suburban lifestyle. She begins by summarizing previous and contemporaneous writings on the positions of women in the suburbs. From this she concludes that “because societal expectations about gender identities are literally fossilized into bricks and mortar they will continue to partially constrain the possibilities open to women” (England 40). She argues for “the suburbs as contextualizing how women define and reconstruct their identities and their neighbourhoods to better facilitate the integration of their various roles” (30). Her conclusions are based on observations made some five decades after the events in Mildred Pierce are set. Mildred’s proto-feminist timing only amplifies the transgressive nature of her actions. In the context of the 1930s her financial ascent is scandalous, and it is necessary to reincorporate her into a patriarchal structure before the novel’s end.

From the beginning, the Pierce household is characterized as one in which monetary concerns prevail. Shortly after Mildred is introduced it is made known that her baking is for commercial purposes as she tells Bert: “I’m making this cake for Mrs. Whitley, and she’s going to pay me three dollars for it” (Cain 6). Mildred qualifies this statement with the implications of the following: “I don’t see anybody working around here but me” (6). Thus it is already clear that in light of Bert’s ineffectuality, Mildred has converted the female space of the kitchen into a place of economic production. Later in this scene, as Mildred indicts him for his affair with Maggie Biederhof, the narrator is quick to point out that Bert’s infidelity is translated into economic terms. “She had little to say about love, fidelity, or morals. She talked about money, and his failure to find work” (7). This concern for money is partly a symptom of the early 1930s having been a time of economic depression in the United States. However, this also reflects a larger social movement of women who became more aware of money and their own possibilities as wage-earners. As the novel opens Mildred has already reversed the typical power structure within her home, becoming the bread-winner while Bert is passive and dependant.

After Bert’s passage out of the house and Mildred’s usurping of his car (71-3), she sets out to reconstruct the male space outside their home into one which can be profitable for her. The reapropriation of the car in this suburban novel is doubly important. Firstly, it is a symbol of social mobility, and a necessary tool for financial independence and ascension in the suburbs. Without it, Mildred could not accomplish her “various daily activities usually being associated with widely dispersed locations” (England 28). Secondly, it furthers Bert’s symbolic castration. Not only can he not provide for his family financially, but he can no longer move around independently. The car becomes a tool of empowerment for Mildred, allowing her to commute to her job at Mr. Chris’ diner, and to widen her network of pie distribution. Just as suburban expansion was first promoted by car manufacturers, so the development of Mildred’s suburban enterprise is made possible by her having a car.

The network of supportive women which Mildred creates around her is also a crucial asset in the business’ expansion. As England writes, for the suburban women she interviewed “localized social relations were an important part of their coping strategies. For instance, relationships with other women (…) were important for finding paid work and making child care arrangements” (England 39). Mildred’s support network consists of Ida and Mrs. Gessler primarily. Their support is never made more explicit, nor cast in such heroic light, as when they come to Mildred’s rescue on the opening night of her restaurant. Mildred “saw her opening turning into a fiasco (…) Then beside her was Ida, whipping off her hat, tucking it with her handbag beside the tin box that held the cash, slipping into an apron” (Cain 144). Moments later, “Mrs. Gessler laid her hat beside Ida’s and went out” (145). The community of women evolves into a company of women under the ‘Mildred Pierce’ neon sign.

Similarly, what was once the model suburban home becomes the headquarters of a model suburban business. When Mildred’s production needs surpass her kitchen’s capacity, she maximizes the female-coded space of the Pierce Homes model home by making its ground floor half-kitchen, half-dining room. The ‘reconstruction’ England refers to in her article is made literal in Mildred Pierce. As Cain puts it, Mildred’s changes were ‘transforming’ the model home (103). Thus, her antiquated oven becomes the “gigantic range that made her heart pump when she looked at it” (103), and the small driveway becomes “the gravel that had been dumped for the free parking” (112). Finally, the defunct Pierce Homes Inc. becomes the more profitable Mildred Pierce Inc.. This parallel is reinforced by the detail that the initial advertising for the opening of Mildred’s restaurant relied on “the Pierce Home lists, so that every person who had bought a home, or had even thought of buying a home, had been covered” (137). What was built as a place for selling suburban homes is rebuilt into a place for selling suburban homeliness.

Similarly, Mildred’s support network is incorporated into Mildred Pierce Inc. when Ida and Mrs. Gessler become managers of their own branches. Cain never specifies whether Ida’s branch opens in a suburban or residential area of Beverly (203-204). However Mrs. Gessler’s branch epitomizes the theme of converting stultifying suburban homes into bustling suburban dining establishments, which began with the Pierce Homes model home. Firstly it is in Laguna Beach, perched on a cliff “halfway between L.A. and San Diego” (205), putting it as far West as one can go in a nation long characterized by its Westward expansion. Secondly, the home’s spectacular setting and the upscale restaurant which Mrs. Gessler turns it into (206-7), evoke the economic hierarchy of suburbs which prompt Mildred’s move from Glendale to Pasadena (262). The dramatic changes which are made to the Laguna Beach house echo and amplify the modifications made to the Pierce Homes model home.

In the novel’s denouement, Mildred is multiply punished for the transgressive activities she has undertaken. Her manipulation of the physical space of the suburbs is compensated for by other peoples’ manipulations of her. Thus, Mildred ends the novel with much less than she had to begin with, having gained and lost everything she ever wanted in the process. “She had mortgaged the house on Pierce Drive, into which she had now moved” (295). Not only has she moved back into the coded-male space of the Pierce Homes development, but she has assumed the mortgage payments that were Berts’ at the novel’s beginning. She also “could no longer do business under her own name. That, it turned out, was still owned by the corporation” (293-4). Her name having become something profitable, and for having subverted the Pierce from Pierce Homes Inc., Mildred is robbed of her identity. The retribution for her throwing off of patriarchal power structures is made complete when her role as mother is also taken from her. She had ignored the portents of Ray’s death, a symbolic warning coming a few days before the opening of Mildred’s first restaurant. Finally she must “draw the knife across an umbilical cord” (298), severing her maternal ties to Veda, giving up her role as a mother.

The multiple roles which Mildred had assumed are thus taken and re-appropriated by patriarchy, as well as her name and voice. The suburban homes she had transformed to fit her commercial needs become reinscribed into the patriarchal space of the suburbs. This is made light of when Mr. Chris voices his distaste for the pies being sold to him (296). Run by Wally rather than Mildred Pierce, the pies coming from the Mildred Pierce Inc. kitchens simply aren’t as good. The return of Bert at the end of the novel completes a re-establishment of patriarchal law, as impotent and ineffectual as it has proved to be in Mildred Pierce. Though the last line of the novel is spoken by Mildred, it is in Bert’s words. Even her means of self-expression are usurped as she echoes: “Yes—let’s get stinko” (298).

Note: Written for the course English 492: Divergent representations of the suburbs in postwar American fiction and film taught at McGill University by Dr. Jason Polley in the Fall of 2006.

Works Cited

Cain, James A.. Mildred Pierce. New York: Random House, 1941.

England, Kim V.L.. “Changing Suburbs, Changing Women: Geographic Perspectives on Suburban Women and Suburbanization.” Frontiers: A Journal of Womens Studies 14.1 (1993): 24-43.

Déjà vu: Representation and Re-Presentation in White Noise

In Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, the narrative trope of repetition is purposefully overused to detract from its effect. This technique mirrors the endless repetitions of disaster which the Gladney family watches on their television Friday nights (DeLillo 64). Repetitions in a novel demand the reader discover the significance of a recurring detail or passage. White Noise problematizes this literary convention. The entire novel becomes a series of repetitions or déjà vu, every moment being an adaptation of one already shown on film or television. According to John Frow, what unifies the fragmented episodes in DeLillo’s narrative, “is their source in a chain of prior representations” (Frow 421). White Noise brings together a conscious repetition of television news scenarios, narrative conventions from popular genres of fiction and everyday tropes of the suburban life experience, all of which are common to most Americans. Re-presentation of recognizable scenes, however, does not indicate a passage of particular significance in White Noise. The frequency of uncannily familiar scenes is the significant point; every narrative event is a déjà vu.

The entire novel becomes a series of reiterated scenes, much like the suburban landscape that repeats a formula of houses, strip malls and fabricated main streets. The déjà vu in White Noise do not duplicate lived experiences of the characters, but instead re-enact events represented in popular texts and newscasts. These texts and tropes form the American collective conscience, one of the few things aside from suburban landscapes that are universal in the United States. Describing one such landscape Jack Gladney observes

The two-story world of an ordinary main street. Modest, sensible, commercial in an unhurried way, a prewar way, with prewar traces of architectural detail surviving in the upper stories, in copper cornices and leaded windows, in the amphora frieze above the dime-store window. (DeLillo 257)

This scene draws on suburban conventions, DeLillo’s Blacksmith becoming a re-presentation of any number of preceding and subsequent fictional Anytowns. Watching Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life suddenly provokes a sense of déjà vu as James Stewart’s George Bailey runs down the main street of Bedford Falls. DeLillo, consciously or not, begins retelling this trope with the word ‘story’ rather than ‘storey.’ This spelling suggests just how storied this two-storey main street is in American fiction.

Other moments of contemporary suburban déjà vu mark the landscape of White Noise. The road out of Blacksmith that the family takes to get to the first evacuation center draws on a universally familiar cliché. The Gladney station wagon takes “the main route out of town, a sordid gantlet of used cars, fast food, discount drugs and quad cinemas” (119). The ‘airborne toxic event’ and its abnormality make the contrasting unremarkable familiarity of this suburban construction ‘sordid.’ Later Jack describes the hypothetical Gray Research headquarters as another instance of déjà vu in the repetitive suburban landscape. The company’s name, real or not, contributes to the universal nature of the building Jack imagines. Its greyness mirrors the indeterminacy of all suburban constructions. It is, not surprisingly, a building that anyone who has driven through a suburban office park can imagine: “One of those long low brick buildings with electrified fencing and low-profile shrubbery” (193). Jack’s use of the phrase ‘one of those’ in the description immediately signifies his reference to a frequently recurring structure in the landscape.

Déjà vu of this sort become invested with sudden meaning at the time of the chemical spill. Authorities cite and then disregard déjà vu as one of the symptoms of exposure to the ‘airborne toxic event,’ itself a familiar trope from disaster films and special television bulletins. The phenomenon of déjà vu, after its association with exposure to Nyodene D., is explicitly and self-consciously addressed in the novel. Seeing a roadside accident as the family proceeds to the evacuation center, Steffie proclaims “I saw this all before” (125). The car crash scene ‘this’ refers to is a familiar image from television traffic reports, Steffie’s déjà vu resembles any other in the novel, including our own. Similarly, the toxic spill which punctuates the center of the narrative is deflated by its own familiarity in the collective conscience. The minor media attention devoted to the ‘airborne toxic event’ testifies to its frequent representation both in television newscasts and narrative fiction. As the ‘man carrying a tiny TV set’ demands: “Does this kind of thing happen so often that nobody cares anymore” (161-2)? He implicitly answers his own question moments later when he turns to Jack after his speech: “I saw this before” (162). That his complaint is a déjà vu dooms the subject of his complaint to being one as well.

The lingo and recurring terms of surveillance and television news infiltrate the vocabulary of White Noise’s characters. Knowledge and clichés associated with the world portrayed by reporters become déjà vu when incorporated into Jack’s narrative. He re-presents the terminology of political scandal, made common parlance by television news associated with Watergate and more recently ‘Monicagate.’ Asking Babette for the Dylar Jack pleads, “I only want them for the sake of historical accuracy. Like White House tapes. They go into the archives” (209). His interpellation of disinterested and archival intentions holds no sway with his wife. Jack can’t hide his selfish motives from Babette or us, the objectivity once implied by journalistic phrases being long forgotten due to their endless repetition.

Television news terminology reappears frequently in White Noise, and always fails to have the desired impact. When easily integrated into familiar newspeak, the name of the drug whose mystery motivates the novel’s second half tellingly proves to be a pliable signifier. Interrogated about the drug, Jack’s doctor “said he thought Dylar was an island in the Persian Gulf, one of those oil terminals crucial to the survival of the West” (180). A double-edged familiarity and ignorance of the world political situation, a widespread result of American news reporting, makes this exchange unremarkable and familiar. A similarly familiar mood of everyday paranoia, reinforced by reports of abductions and murders, is casually referred to as Jack waits for Denise outside her school. As he puts it, “I sat in the driver’s seat scanning the mass of faces, feeling like a dope dealer or pervert” (210). These paranoid conventions of the surveillance genre are emptied of their shocking implications because they are so relentlessly repeated to American consumers of news.

Many of the other déjà vu that appear in White Noise stem from the characters’ awareness of genre conventions. The concept of conventions emerges from one of the foundational texts of genre theory, Thomas Schatz’ book Hollywood Genres. Conventions are tropes which reappear and come to characterize a specific genre, like the femme fatale character of so many film noir. White Noise employs many conventions of the family, melodrama, suburban and disaster genres. Jack and Babette , after a fast-food meal taken in the car, anticipate a convention of the family narrative. The parents are aware that “[a] sulky menace brewed back there. They would attack us, using the classic strategy of fighting among themselves” (235). The term ‘classic’ in this sentence does not imply actions previously taken by Jack and Babette’s children. It refers instead to a frequent scene of tired children in back seats on long drives, the repeated demand “Are we there yet?”

To avoid repeating this narrative déjà vu from so many family movies and sitcoms, Babette begins a debate about the conventions of another genre, alien films and UFO sightings.

Why is it these UFOs are mostly seen upstate? The best sightings are upstate. People get abducted and taken aboard. Farmers see burn marks where saucers landed. A woman gives birth to a UFO baby, so she says. Always upstate. (235)

This observation sparks a comically distracting debate which eventually leads Jack to ponder the existence of conventions in geography: “There had to be large cities in the northern part of some states. Or were they just north of the border in the southern part of states just to the north” (235)? Babette mobilizes genre conventions again when telling Jack about her encounters with Mr. Gray. She invokes tropes of the melodrama and suburban fiction genre, wherein affairs must always be conducted in motels. She describes the one where she meets Mr. Gray as “a grubby little motel room. Never mind where or when. It had the TV up near the ceiling” (194). Jack and readers immediately recognize this image, a re-presentation of a motel room represented in countless other narratives. Babette’s suggestion to ‘never mind where or when’ underlines that this image of a motel room is completely divorced from space and time. The motel, like the toxic spill or quaint main street, becomes a set removed from its original narrative location and integrated into DeLillo’s collage of re-presented familiarities.

The medium of White Noise is, therefore, not a novel of fiction but a quilting of scenes and moments from previous fictions. Thus, when authorities first set up the déjà vu hotline, Jack explains that “[t]here were counsellors on duty around the clock to talk to people who were troubled by recurring episodes” (176). That Jack uses the phrase ‘recurring episodes’ not only evokes the recurring conventions mentioned earlier. This also points to the episodic nature of the novel, the way in which scenes change like television channels with the press of a button. As John N. Duvall points out, the Gladneys occupy “an imagistic space of consumption that one accesses by playing dial-a-rama, turning the dial/dyl to the channel of one’s choice” (Duvall 449). DeLillo’s characters and readers are made aware, if they weren’t already, that the postmodern text is a self-conscious pillaging and re-presentation of previous representations. With a turn of phrase pillaged from Marshall McLuhan, the novel’s re-presentation of countless widely-diffused narrative conventions becomes its message.

Note: Written for the course English 492: Divergent representations of the suburbs in postwar American fiction and film taught at McGill University by Dr. Jason Polley in the Fall of 2006.

Works Cited

DeLillo, Don. White Noise. 1985. White Noise: Text and Criticism. Ed. Mark Osteen. New York: Viking Penguin, 1998. 1-326.

Duvall, John N.. “The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo’s White Noise.” 1994. White Noise: Text and Criticism. Ed. Mark Osteen. New York: Viking Penguin, 1998. 432-455.

Frow, John. “The Last Things Before the Last: Notes on White Noise.” 1990. White Noise: Text and Criticism. Ed. Mark Osteen. New York: Viking Penguin, 1998: 417-31.

It’s A Wonderful Life. Dir. Frank Capra. Perf. James Stewart, Dona Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Mitchell, Henry Travers. Liberty Films, 1946.

Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. New York: Random House, 1981.