Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen A DEFINITE SMILE THE AGE OF HAPPY ENDINGS NO SELF-RESPECTING TEENAGER Can hang out at a McDonald's or an Arby's. To hang out you need an eatery that's unique to your turf, a hamburger...
...But we're also sure that what these kids don't know won't hurt them...
...Fenwick asks...
...Dialogue from The Sweet Smell of Success is provided elsewhere courtesy of some flippo who's memorized the entire script and goes around reciting it...
...From the minute we lay eyes oh John Cassavetes in Crime in the Streets (1956), we know that deep down inside he's not bad...
...Since the fast-food chains have driven these places out of business in the last two decades, they now exist for most of us only in memory- as part of our memory of the fifties...
...There's more to this punk than meets the eye, we tell ourselves...
...This does not mean that they don't have their problems...
...John Gregory Dunne and Saul Bellow are about as different as it's possible for novelists to be...
...Like Atomic Cafe, Diner absolutely wallows in fifties' trivia...
...Perhaps that's why The Atomic Cafe and Diner, both of which express a kind of nostalgia for the fifties, are named after such greasy spoons...
...He drops a $2,000 bet to the local bookie, whose muscle comes to the beauty parlor where Boogie works to rough him up so he'll pay...
...While Boogie (Michael Rourke) is trying to get his date at the movies to jump into his jeans, Troy Donahue is on the screen providing appropriate dialogue...
...Then an oldfriend of Boogie's father pays Boogie's gambling debt...
...Like the people who escape nuclear attack unscathed in Atomic Cafe, the characters in Diner live in a world where no real harm can befall you-the world that Americans actually thought existed for them in the fifties...
...Do you ever get the feeling there's something going on we don't know about...
...We must have been awfully lucky just to have survived...
...In my previous column, I was discussing Atomic Cafe...
...But as they approach in shock, Fenwick jumps up laughing and produces from his pocket a ketchup bottle which, he announces, he's been carrying around for a week...
...He's drunk and speeds away from the others, with the result that Boogie and Shrevie round a bend to find his car tipped on its side with him lying beside it covered with blood...
...Gave me a hi-fi for X-mas, Now I'm livin' in paradise...
...Neither the hero nor the novelist can cope with certain scenes their stories contain...
...He only works there to pick up girls...
...And lines from a, third fifties' melodrama, this one seen on a TV monitor in a studio, get all mixed up with what Billy (Timothy Daly) has to say to his pregnant girlfriend...
...In both novels I get the feeling that it is not only the hero, but the novelist himself who feels helpless in the face of these black muggers, junkies, and sex offenders...
...and The Dean's December are in part preoccupied with the same social pathology...
...Diner has it by intention, and writer-director Barry Levinson gets all the mileage out of it he can...
...Again it is as if their ignorance and their misplaced self-confidence protect them from harm...
...Yet somehow these young men, like the people in Atomic Cafe, don't have to suffer the consequences of their own stupidity...
...and The Dean's December, we confront characters so remorseless about acts so horrible that we despair of both them and ourselves In Diner we meet characters so "squirrelly," as we used to say, that we do not need to worry about them...
...To hang out you need an eatery that's unique to your turf, a hamburger joint that's capable of being an institution as well...
...Diner begins with an act of vandalism...
...Nah, nan, I never did," he replies...
...He's got exactly fifty-six dollars to his name...
...The same with Fenwick...
...Shrevie and his wife Beth (Ellen Barkin) aren't getting along, either, which leads Boogie to try to seduce her...
...The black criminals in the novels do not finally have more to them than meets the eye, as Fenwick does, and in consequence Bellow and Dunne are defeated as writers...
...This little scene, ending as it does in a sigh of relief, sets the mood for the whole movie...
...Their life together is, as Fenwick (Kevin Bacon) is so fond of saying, "a definite smile...
...Boogie has the worst one...
...This isn't quite so, but Diner has a lot of the ethos of the fifties movie about delinquency...
...Rare is the scene that doesn't contain reference to a song, movie, or other artifact of the times...
...yet Dutch Shea, Jr...
...Eddie (Steve Guttenberg) makes his girl take a football quiz before marrying him, and Shrevie (Daniel Sterne) knows the label on which "Donna" and every hit in the top 100 was recorded...
...and to top it off, Boogie gets away with punching out the bookie's hood...
...During a high school dance, Fenwick goes down in the basement and punches out some windows for a "smile...
...Most other people's problems sort themselves out similarly...
...When everyone leaves that dance at the beginning, Fenwick's car is in the lead...
...But we know better, for we saw him watching "College Bowl" on television and answering all the questions before the contestants could...
...It recalls perfectly what all the crises of the fifties were like...
...Since the time is Christmas week, 1959, "Merry Xmas, Baby" is inevitably one of the biggies played on the car radios...
...Fenwick hates his family, is half way to being an alcoholic, and on the edge of a breakdown...
...A couple of books I happened to read around the time I saw Diner struck me in connection with the film...
...Maybe so...
...Thus do we get the impression that he and his friends are what used to be called, in the fifties themselves, juvenile delinquents...
...One night he takes off his clothes and curls up in the manger of a nativity scene on a church lawn...
...In Dutch Shea, Jr...
...At the last minute Boogie decides not to go through with his assignation with Beth, which is a good thing since, unbeknownst to him, Shrevie would have been watching them...
...The characters introduced in these sections lurk in the background at the end of each novel, when Bellow's Corde resigns his deanship and Dutch Shea, Jr., kills himself...
...We must have led charmed lives to have been so simple-minded and prospered anyway...
...But at the same time, it makes us rather sentimental about those days because it shows how naive we were...
...At one point Boogie and Fenwick go for a drive in the country, where they watch a beautiful girl galloping across her family's estate...
...It's a film that's scary because it shows us what a cavalier attitude we were taking toward nuclear holocaust twenty-five years ago...
...Merry Xmas, baby, You really did treat me nice...
...Eddie's troubles are that his girl flunks the football quiz, and then he doesn't want to marry her...
...At one point his brother yells at him in exasperation, "Did you ever read a book, huh...
...and we're right...
...Bellow's novel, especially, is a programmatic, almost philosophical, search through different varieties of language that might be applied...
...In the end neither Bellow nor Dunne can overcome the hopelessness one feels living in a society that has these killers and rapists in it...
...This is why they are such a definite smile...
...The kids who hang out at this diner live in a fool's paradise themselves...
...He called them all "bozos" when they missed one...
...Since Americans don't believe they have good luck on their side any more, a movie that reminds us of a time when we did believe it, and have it, is bound to be appealing...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Both novels contain a crucial sub-plot in which their heroes attempt to cope with the black "underclass," urban crime, random violence, etc...
...Atomic Cafe has this appeal in spite of itself...
...Fenwick scowls defiantly...
...The hopelessness seems to be endemic to the society itself...
...Language is a novelist's ultimate weapon, his last line of defense against the world he creates, and neither Bellow nor Dunne can find the language they need to cope with such characters...
...He must have snuck a look at a book somewhere along the line...
Vol. 109 • August 1982 • No. 14
