“What are you gonna do today, Napoleon?”
“Whatever I feel like I wanna do. Gosh!”
Maybe you had to be there. I was young, sure, but I was there. I was there in 2005 when the DVD came into my house, probably by will of my older siblings– this is the kind of movie that could only reach great spread in the heyday of the DVD, watched and rewatched at Fruitopia-fueled slumber parties and quoted line by line. I remember the dance craze that didn’t need tiktok to spread, just Jon Heder’s energy released after 90 minutes of simmering. I remember the omnipresent VOTE FOR PEDRO shirts and liger doodles, the listings of skills. You couldn’t be safely seen drinking 1% milk until, like, 2013.
From the opening credits, written in condiments on plates of food slid into frame over the White Stripes’ “We’re Going to Be Friends,” you can tell that this is a movie made for a shoestring and a good time, with half the budget spent on the music. Then again, maybe “We’re Going to Be Friends” and “Forever Young” and “Canned Heat” weren’t iconic until afterwards– they wouldn’t be the only things that Napoleon Dynamite made iconic based on its low budget affinity for the charmingly non-Hollywood. In the DVD commentary (yes, of course I still have that same DVD) director Jared Hess talks about writing a letter to Jack White to ask permission to use the song, apparently the first White Stripes song to ever appear in a movie. Even before the iconic final cut, then, people were falling in love with this movie.
It’s funny reviewing this after my last two Project Hipster movie reviews, 12 Angry Men and Donnie Darko (pre-scheduled for closer to Halloween, of course.) Those are both small-scale, small budget endeavours, but both trying for grand thematic ambition through self-serious dialogue, for the former to unquestionable success, for the latter to, well, wait for Halloween (call it mixed.) On the other hand, the dialogue in Napoleon Dynamite is pretty much masterfully written and delivered, just as every shot is masterfully shot, to be as awkward, strange, and straight up deadpan funny as any sentence could ever be. That’s why any reference to it, online or in real life, will instantly devolve into quoting pretty much the entire movie. The crew and from the sounds of it about half of a cast (they filled in the rest with random locals) spent a month kicking around Jared Hess’ sleepy hometown of Preston, Idaho, recreating scenes from his childhood, everything from a hand-dancing club to crappy chicken farm workdays and a roadside cow shooting, and stringing it all together with a loose class election story that I guess you could say takes something from 1999’s Election. You could say that, but I won’t.
And that’s the attraction. The charm of Napoleon Dynamite is multifold; for one there’s the perfect visual language, wide shots of orange vans framed in the emptiness of grassy foothills and orthometric colour-coordinated Wes Andersonesque shots of characters framed by school lockers; the twinkly royalty-free music; and then there’s the charm that everyone, even the attractive and popular kids, is a little busted and weird by Hollywood gloss standards. It looks and sounds and feels a lot more like real life. If the indie and the hipster is the rejection of that which is so polished by mainstream crowd-pleasing as to become artificial, Napoleon Dynamite is a great showcase of how to follow the indie hipster line of thought and still create an absolute crowd pleaser.
Napoleon himself is a dweeb of course, but also a chronic liar, generally apathetic to most things, not that there’s much to be passionate about, who throws back defensive snark (or what he thinks is snark) against bullies and family alike. Our hero, though this is a distinctly nonheroic world, not in a grim way, just in a slow and dawdling way, is a bit of a Holden Caulfield type in that sort of defensiveness, though that seems a weird comparison because there’s absolutely none of the attempt to project cool, or at least, not much success therein. Napoleon’s slack jaw, sweat pants, and weird little run aren’t exactly what the kids would call aura farming; though all of his t-shirts, and the thrifted suit, are awesome. Deb on the other hand kind of slays with her side ponytail, pastels, and big homemade puff sleeves. Pedro of course has his sweet bike jumps. There’s not much to really be heroic about in 2004 rural Idaho, though what there is to do is to make friends and stand together with the even more mawkish outcasts of this mawkish world. And to lay out the stylistic template for the next decade or so of hipsters.
The core trio of Napoleon, Pedro, and Deb are the obvious characters to reach for when talking about alienation and a tone of gentle awkward loneliness pervading everything, but even the kinda-antagonists to Napoleon are steeped in it too. There’s Kip with an online love interest that we never see until the end, and Uncle Rico, who lived in a van on the wrong drainage slope of the Northwest and a decade too early for that to be cool, plotting to time travel (always remember to add the crystals) back to his glory days of high school football, days which don’t even sound particularly glorious in his reminiscences. That side plot also gives us the iconic shot of Jon Heder getting nailed in the face with a greyish beef steak. Even the school bullies often seem more like they’d just rather be anywhere else.
The final saving grace of Napoleon Dynamite (the guy and the movie both) is a charmingly positive ending, not in grand gestures (ok, so there’s one grand gesture involving a horse, which is, delightfully, hidden at the end of the credits, and of course the dance scene) but in a first date that in a wholesome twist of expectations refuses to be cynical about online interracial dating, in a simple tetherball game against prairie skies. In connection.
In conclusion,
I give this hipster movie a rating of friggin’ sweet
Project Hipster is a futile and disorganized attempt to dive into the world of things that the internet has at some point claimed "are hipster," mostly through ListChallenges search results.
This review comes from the fourth result for "Hipster," "The Definitive Guide to Hipster Movies.”
Up next: something about boxing, I think. This new organization of the lists is throwing a lot of movies at me. But sooner or later I’ll get back around to books, and music, and different kinds of milk.
"How happy is the blameless vestal's lot! / The world forgetting, by the world forgot / Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! / Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd."
I don’t think I was ready for this movie the first time I watched it.
Today’s Hipster Movie, much like the last one, and, for that matter, the one before last, takes us back to the early years of the century — no surprise there, of course. Those were the years of the hipster taking form. I ought to get this one done before the end of Valentine’s Day tomorrow, because the opening monologue to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind describes Valentine’s Day, 2004. 21 years past. This movie can drink even in the most puritanical states now. 2004, a year after Robert Lanham published The Hipster Handbook and (sort of) codified this uncodifiable culture. Strangely enough, by the way, The Hipster Handbook, though it's a source for many of the lists I'm following, doesn't seem to be, itself, on the book lists. Only know that I am aware of the spot it sits in the literature / American / humour section of the Central Library. It's near the end of an aisle, low down to the floor, near the bathrooms at the south tip of the second floor. Where there's a view of the freight tracks out the windows.
But back to Eternal Sunshine. That opening monogologue comes to us from toque-clad melancholy protagonist Joel (Jim Carrey.) Like Lost in Translation again, with Bill Murray, once again this early century movie features another actor famous for comedic chops, leading an unaware viewer to think they might be in for some laughs. You’d have to be pretty unaware though. Unaware of the existence of The Truman Show (to have its own post... eventually) and Carey’s excellent dramatic skills, for one. Opening on February 14, 2004, Joel tells us he hates Valentine’s Day, a holiday made up by card companies to make people feel worse. Preaching to the choir here - although I did buy my parents some cute cakes-in-a-box today and there’s nothing wrong with that. Generally speaking, though, I'm a bitter old codger and don’t like St. Valentine’s Day very much as well. Maybe I would if it focused more on that old Roman’s role as the patron of beekeepers: a day to eat honey. I don’t really like romance stories too often either. Now it’s about time for bed, but I want to finish writing about this trippy, melancholy Valentine’s movie before the day it’s all about comes to an end.
And like the book to be reviewed next (I’m excited for that one; it’s a doozy of a brick of a novel that I spent much of last year thinking about,) Eternal Sunshine starts at the end, leaving the reader/watcher in a bit of a fog of missed context and strange mental states before leaping back, all out of order, to piece together the story. Joel moves through this timeline in parallel with Clementine (Kate Winslet,) introduced on an intercity train (God I wish we had intercities here) in a clash of baggy orange hoodie and stringy blue-dyed hair. You can see how the morose young crooners of the ‘20s (trying not to name Billie Eilish specifically, but the offing’s too obvious to pretend) have taken their aesthetics from this scene, filmed before plenty of them were born I’m sure. Point is, despite Clementine’s attempt at colour, she herself says it’s a transparent attempt. There’s a bitter greyness to this opening beyond that of the winter Long Island beach, a feeling of something missing. But still there’s great sweetness and chemistry to our leading couple and their circling and re-circling meet-cute. There’s just more to be broken down.
At this point, in the movie’s adulthood, it hardly feels like I need to throw a spoiler warning in here for what we do discover in the flashbacks. It’s the sci-fi-ish concept that the whole thing is best known for. Joel and Clementine have both taken a service to erase their memories of each other, and so the pain of knowing about their soured past and crumbled future. Technically, the most part of the movie just takes place on the night between the 13th and 14th of February, as Joel has electrodes hooked up to his head, purging sweet Clementine from his personal narrative. The thought put into how this would work is interesting in itself. It’s a home job, so there’s no strange waking up in an office wondering what procedure you went through and why. Meanwhile your house is consensually ransacked, all souvenirs memory holed. There’s a touch of dystopian possibility here– we have always been at war with Eurasia, and you have never known a hair-dyed bookstore worker. Another story about this technology might be all about how it could be misused and lied about. This one is about the consequences of it going perfectly and being used honestly. A lot of us may think we want to erase memories of pain. But a lot of us have also read enough books to know that we only grow through memories and experiences, so what do we erase in ourselves by erasing that pain? In the mid-movie series of memories, like dreams in that night, we see the original relationship evolve– falling apart before blossoming for the first time, the order more or less chronologically flipped.
There’s an obvious parallel to be drawn here, in the non-chronological decay of a relationship, to (500) Days of Summer. The tone, though, contrasts pretty sharply. Back in my post on (500) Days, I said that it’s be a very different movie with a more sombre take on the story. Well, Eternal Sunshine, predating (500) Days by a few years, may be that movie. And of course the sci-fi aspect is totally original here. That reflects in some really totally original filmmaking. As many of the memory scenes show the relationship dissolving, the memories themselves dissolve and distort in subtle ways. Day turns to night. Books turn blank. Sets grow sparser between cuts, focus blurs out and sound gets fuzzy. It’s clever stuff, and so much more interesting than if it was some high budget CGI dissolution effect. Past and present — or past and further past? — interweave within the same scenes, and it’s thanks to Carrey and Winslet’s perfect performances that you can see the transition right away.
Reversing the order of an increasing series of arguments is also an increasing reminder of what was lost in that dissolution, what came before, and a light shone on the far from irreconcilable personal flaws involved. We realize that to start out, Joel saw a little of that classic indie movie manic pixie dream girl role to Clementine. By the end (the real end, after the beginning) she tells him she’s more than a concept, which I think is always a tough think for anyone to wrap their heads around regarding another person. But it’s less about truly seeing someone all the time with the complexity with which you see yourself; more about accepting that your image, your concept, is inevitably limited and flawed, so you should expect as much when a person is more than that. It’s tough, but also easy, and also hugely important. Funny to think that this came out the same year as Garden State, too. It feels like a response to it. Another way Eternal Sunshine differs from (500) Days, not totally but definitely, is in the susprisingly hopeful ending, an indication that growth is always possible, that love is worth it, and that even what we may not recall in the moment has shaped us. The final lines of dialogue are incredibly simple- one word, back and forth a few times, and I shan't spoil what that word is- but packed with so much meaning and acceptance. I may not be a huge romcom guy, but that can still mean something even to my old cynical heart. In the end this time-bending mind-breaking movie is as sweet as a bright orange clementine.
I give this Hipster Movie five winter beach walks out of five.
Project Hipster is a futile and disorganized attempt to dive into the world of things that the internet has at some point claimed "are hipster," mostly through ListChallenges search results.
This review comes from the twentieth list, The 101 Best Hipster Movies According to Ranker.
Up next: as aforementioned, a proper beast of a book, and don't expect time to get re-stuck in the conventional order anytime soon.
"Couple of things. Taking a break from my wife, forgetting my son's birthday. And, uh, getting paid two million dollars to endorse a whiskey when I could be doing a play somewhere. But the good news is, the whiskey works.”
Quick, name the most hipster country!
The Netherlands, I heard someone say in the back row. For the bike infrastructure and urbanism. Very true, very good. Anyone else? The United States, a multifold country full of division no doubt, but also home to the very cities that originated the hipster. Quite fair. Denmark? Inventors of hygge? France, especially Paris? Why not.
There was a time we might have said Japan, and that time was 2003.
Here’s my theory. After WWII, both “The West” (a nebulous concept at best) and Japan both had to rebuild. North America chose economic force, industrialization, conformity, nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic, suburbanism, the detached house, the car, the white picket fence. Japan chose economic force, conformity, nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic, urbanism, the apartment, the high-speed train, the neon sign. In other words, enough similarity to work together economically while also dangling enough of a hook of alternative placemaking to temptingly make it look like an alternative to the mainstream. I think that might be why Murakami became popular with hipsters. I’ve talked about Murakami way back at the start of Project Hipster, before I was adding playlists and holding myself to a thousand-word minimum, and I will write about him again, in time. Over the 21st century so far I think the knowledge of Japan’s pretty oppressively conformist work culture has spread and killed that fetishistic fascination a bit. I mean, Japan’s still cool, I’d love to visit, but there’s definitely less of a “we ought to follow these Exotic Foreign Ways” than there was when we still called anime “Japanimation,” and when Sophia Copolla could make a movie just about sad white people hanging out in Tokyo.
Okay, so that’s reductive. And so was everything I wrote about America and Japan up there. Because if anticapitalist hipsters were fetishing Japan, at the same time, the Reaganite yuppies of America in the late century were chasing the economic powerhouse of Japan, and obviously hipsters ought to be against that. Can two dichotomies exist in an opposing dichotomy? What is that, a tetrachotomy? Or I guess it’s just the contradictory complexity of reality.
Case in point: Lost in Translation starts with a long, long shot of Scarlett Johansson’s butt. At first analysis we’d think, “ah, the males are gazing.” But of course the director is a woman, Sofia Coppola, of that first family of film that gave the world Megalopolis. Is she just trying to ape her male contemporaries? Or is this irony of the school of making the viewer look too long at what they think they want, making it painfully awkward and forcing us to question it? I can accept that. Johansson’s character is, throughout the movie, trying to break out of a sort of trophy-wife passive role. It’s a very passive movie in general, though, in a Japanese sort of way, so the breakout is subtle.
After the butt, as the shoegazey driving sound of Death in Vegas’s “Girls” comes in, we’re introduced to Bill Murray’s already sort of haggard face against a taxi window, playing Bob Harris, though at first he’s just eyes gazing wearily but in awe at the neon bombast of a Tokyo street. We mostly follow Bob for a while, a washed-out American movie star shooting whisky commercials abroad. Here we feel the gaze of the camera again, with uncomfortably– or perhaps comically– long scenes of Murray having to pose with a whisky glass according to convoluted but largely unclear instructions, the nuance of direction lost in transl… hey, that’s the name of the movie! His wife is practically estranged back home, faxing (faxing!) him for his opinions on ikea shelves. He wanders the hotel, looking out over the city lights, in slow, methodical moments. It’s all very Murakami again, down to the whisky and the enigmatic red-haired woman crooning “Scarborough Fair” in the rooftop bar. A lot of the miscommunication is funny, but more in a solemnly wry sort of way. The first time I watched Lost in Translation, Netflix listed it as a comedy, and I don’t think that’s quite right. But it’s not quite wrong. Murray does have his trademark moments of physical comedy, like getting stuck on an elliptical, but Ghostbusters this is not. Even that elliptical moment occurs in a wide and lingering shot of Bob exercising alone in front of windows looking out over the city, and there’s a touch of tragicomedy to it.
Meanwhile, fellow sad white wayfarer Charlotte (Johansson) wanders Tokyo, pulled between the solitude of tradition and the shallow showbiz self-help world of her kinda shitty music photographer husband (wait, hang on, is that the CEO from Avatar?)
He’s in a midlife crisis. She’s in a quarterlife. They meet in that rooftop bar, over those whiskeys, with that singer, looking over those lights, and the worlds collide. You’d think it’d be a romance from here on out, and it kind of is, but kind of not really. The age gap might be weird but it’s mostly just friendly and doesn’t go that far, though they flirt with the expectations. It’s more about connection among those alienated from the consuming international consumerist culture that surrounds them, and what’s more hipster than that?
Oh, yeah, and all this time they are both still married. There’s this godawful tweet that keeps resurfacing in ever-more-compressed screenshots like a sewer backup, that all adult literature is about sad people having affairs. Mostly that’s just utterly wrong. Sometimes it is true (I’m going to write about The Unbearable Lightness of Being soon enough here and you’d better believe it’s true in that case.) Here it almost is true. But even so, what does that structure of forbidden connection say about people? What’s in the details? It’s all in the details. And here, the slow, atmospheric, naturally neon-lit details, washed in a dream-pop soundscape, make the movie. I’m more fond of it now that I’ve written about it. That does seem to happen.
I give this hipster movie four rooftop whiskeys out of five.
Project Hipster is a futile and disorganized attempt to dive into the world of things that the internet has at some point claimed "are hipster," mostly through ListChallenges search results.
This review comes from the eighteenth list, Google's Ultimate List of Films For Hipsters.
Up next: a fairly short and easy book that I made myself struggle with for a particular linguistic reason.
“We are God's middle children, according to Tyler Durden, with no special place in history and no special attention. Unless we get God's attention, we have no hope of damnation or redemption. Which is worse, Hell or nothing?”
"A bit 2edgy4u, but neat ideas about how angry men be angry. Didn’t care a lot for the terse, repetitive writing style to start but I got used to it as the threads came together to the intense climax. And it’s short, so not like it was a huge investment."
Ok, so that’s a pretty terse review. Ironically, considering that “terse, repetitive writing” was one of my criticisms. That was, directly copy-pasted, the review I posted on Goodreads after finishing Fight Club early last year. For a proper Project Hipster post I ought to expand it. And yet— I actually think that covers it pretty well. Let’s break my terse review of this terse novel down into its aspects, then, and see what I meant, in less terse words, and let’s see whether a year and a half to think things over has changed my thoughts. Terse doesn’t sound like a word anymore.
A bit 2edgy4u, but neat ideas about how angry men be angry
The aspect of Hipsterdom that I’ve never gravitated so much towards is that which stems from angsty postmodern 90s Gen X disillusionment, and as I mentioned back in my first Radiohead review, Palahniuk is kind of the epitome of that. And he does do it well.
Maybe I’m just too young to have lived through it, but I can empathize with it. The routine of life in a bullshit job under Capitalism Victorious is as mind-numbing now as it was then, I know well, and the now laughable late millennium rhetoric of the End of History must have added a particularly different sort of catalyst for mental illness. While today it’s the chaos of the world that fills us with anxiety, its seeming stability in the age of Fight Club must have created another sort of dread, living with the apparent surety that this world of fluorescence and linoleum was the ultimate aspiration of society, and now that it had arrived, it would carry on forever. I need the darkness, someone please cut the light!
Is it any wonder, then, that Palanhiuk’s pointedly nameless narrator falls into a sleepless spiral of desire for chaos, wanting to “wipe his ass with the Mona Lisa” and break beautiful things just to experience the thrill of change? That spiral leads the narrator into Project Mayhem, the anarcho-fascist cult of Tyler Durden, a mysterious, rebellious drifter who may be more than he seems, and promises an escape from monotony through rebellion, ascending over the short course of the novel from pranks to terrorism.
A lot of the discourse around this book and its adaptation centres on that always-crucial question – in stories about men lashing out in anger, how much are we meant to agree? The ending of Fight Club (the book, at least; we’ll come back to that point) makes it pretty clear that Palahniuk is hardly holding up Tyler Durden as a role model. But he comes from a place motivated by genuine criticism of a heartless society. Palanhiuk says that its’ “about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people." It’s a cautionary tale, then, about the fallout of loneliness and toxic masculinity, but where’s the line that morality is transcended in favour of rage? For the narrator, it’s another character’s death. For the reader, should it be the same? Or earlier? These are interesting, worthwhile questions! I have no definitive answers to them. There are interesting metaphors here, too, like how Tyler steals human fat from lipo clinics, literally the offcast fat of the fattening system, and uses it to make his weapons.
Palahniuk was himself a member of something called the Cacophony Society, which sounds a lot like Project Mayhem purely in name, but reading up on it makes it sound a lot less intense, given that it’s more of an unincorporated counter-cultural arts group. Cacophonists allegedly created Burning Man, paint Banksyesque street art, perform satirical Christmas carols, and disrupt the rush by blocking traffic to host picnics open to all visitors. Oh, and, uh, write edgy novels. Sounds fun, actually. Sounds like that’s a much healthier response to the same things that drive the characters in Fight Club to violence. Apparently the Cacophony Society itself stems from an earlier San Fransisco secret society called the Suicide Club, which focused mostly on urban exploration and the benefits of thrill-seeking.
Didn’t care a lot for the terse, repetitive writing style to start but I got used to it
Yeah, I still think this to some degree. I just prefer purpler prose, on a personal level. But I can respect Palanhiuk’s stylistic choices, to the point that they seem to be impacting these very sentences as I type them. Quotes from Fight Club in my mind are right now bleeding into the way I tackle my own keyboard. One maybe generous interpretation of Fight Club’s writing style is that it’s a window into the narrator's deteriorating mental state. When we’re working around sleepless nights, and when stress and anger are eroding reason into base fight-or-flight instinct, none of us are thinking in full sentences. It helps somehow to know that there’s a name and history for this style as well. Palahniuk was a disciple of Tom Spanbauer, who in Portland, where lives the dream of the 90s, taught the style he called “dangerous writing.” Spanbauer defines the style’s tenets as minimalism, realism, and writing from painful personal experience. In a way it’s very similar to Hemingway’s “one true sentence” approach. It’s another swing of the pendulum in the same direction, I suppose. As Hemingway was reacting against the Romantics, Spanbauer and Palahniuk were reacting to the maximalist “hysterical realism” of David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith (who I also like.) It’s a style. Can’t fault style for consistency. In terms of repetition, I’m referring of course to the very prominent motifs, like the narrator's constant (and it is constant) reframing of the Reader’s Digest feature “I am Joe’s…”
as the threads came together to the intense climax
And what a climax. I should preface by saying that somehow I’ve still never actually seen the movie. Through cultural osmosis, though, I knew the twist. If you don’t, stop reading. Despite Publishers Weekly calling the twist “particularly bizarre,” despite the use of then-obscure dissociative identity disorder to justify its mechanics, it’s fairly simple in concept. This character seems to be the character’s secret ambitions manifested ad extremis. And it turns out that’s exactly what he is. It’s one of those devices that leads every scene to be read two ways, which is always good, and it makes the climax thrilling. I also know how the movie ends differently. I think in terms of themes I prefer the book version, but I understand why it was changed to a more visually dramatic ending for the movie. I also think it’s pretty funny that the Chinese release of the movie wasn’t allowed to show Project Mayhem succeeding, so it cuts out the end in favour of essentially telling the book ending in captions.
And it’s short, so not like it was a huge investment.
Unlike this post. Sorry. Good thing I don't write these with the assumption that anyone will ever read them.
I give this hipster book four disillusioned white men out of five.
Project Hipster is a futile and disorganized attempt to dive into the world of things that the internet has at some point claimed "are hipster," mostly through ListChallenges search results.
This review comes from the ninth list, Essential Books For Hipsters.
Next up: a more lighthearted movie that can still make you cry.
I might need a hat like that. Fashion is about having the confidence to face a hard and phony world and protect you from it.
“Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”
I figured I might start adding playlists to these posts, too. I didn't make this one but it's the best one since it's non-lyrical to focus on the lyrical prose of the book, and it's not so anachronistic. There's plenty of jazzy tracks in here that make me think of ambling a '50s New York street on a winter night. And even Holden wouldn't call them corny.
I was sort of sitting there getting ready to write a review of The Catcher in the Rye and it killed me. It really did. I get a big kick out of this book. But it can be so phony to write about a book that everyone knows. That can be so crumby. Still, maybe I could sort of get a bang out of writing like Holden Caulfield.
Sorry. Ok. Me again.
And so we come to it at last. By which I mean, it hasn’t been that long. This is still early days of Project Hipster. The Hip (like the Jest?) is near infinite, at least insofar as my writing and reading and watching and eating and listening capacity can take me in one lifetime. But we’ve come at last to one of the defining books, not just of Hipster counterculture, which might or might not exist, but of the concept of counterculture in general, and of postmodernity and contemporary literature as a whole.
You can find lots of “Shit Hipsters Say” videos dated circa-2011 on Youtube, and most are a bit cringe. The exceptional masterpiece is the series by 1909 Productions. As a Brooklyn music video production co-op, they’re so deep into the scene that it makes me a bit jealous, so they know the real shit that makes it so much funnier. And among rambling lines about warehouse conversions and strange music, one of the pitch-perfect scenes is of a guy just glancing over knowingly and saying, almost suggestively, “Catcher in the Rye.” That’s how Hipster this book is - it’s just the title. Why?
Well, I theorize that it’s for a few reasons.
It’s a masterpiece of subtly experimental style
It was influential for Beats and Hippies, the progenitors of the twenty-first century fusion that is the Hipster.
And most importantly, to the point that those others are just gravy,
3. It’s entirely focused on the character of Holden Caulfield, the most intense and insufferable (but actually very sufferable and enjoyable) hipster you’ve never met.
Man, I don’t know how I can cover this one in one post. Catcher isn’t a long book, but every sentence is packed with meaning.
I’ve found it’s fairly common for Catcher to be derided online these days. I’ve seen it called “male manipulator lit,” which puzzles me a bit when Holden can’t manipulate anyone into anything. He occasionally thinks he might be able to, but it never goes well. Maybe it’s because it’s male-focused and emotionally sensitive, and some might hold that a man showing emotion is obviously doing it to garner sympathy, manipulatively. I hate everything about this thought process, so let’s move past it. Others say that Holden is annoying, self-centered, whiny, miserable in his own head. To that I say: aren’t we all?
The common factor is apparent. It’s never the writing that drives people one way or the other on Catcher, it’s the character. The perception of a whiny and privileged character. There’s a want to dismiss Holden’s suffering and isolation because he’s grown up rich and had expensive schools paid for. Never mind that his parents are paying for those schools because they can’t deal with him being at home. Never mind that Salinger, who fought through D-Day and saw the Holocaust in person, chose this kid as the lens he wanted to use to explore what the isolation of trauma feels like. Him and the Glass family in Franny and Zooey. That one felt like less of a challenge to review, because it’s not SUCH a landmark. These messed-up kids were a veteran’s way of processing his broken generation. That’s why I consider Salinger one of the Beats. Maybe he’s not so much a branch off the Beat tree, but he’s like a poplar split in half at the base of the trunk that grew into two trees. Because even if he never did drugs with Kerouac, they were both of that lost generation trying to figure out where they belonged after the shattering of the American idyll in the war, the split in psyche between those who suffered through war and those state-side who prospered from it. Kerouac found a lifestyle, albeit not a healthy one, that saw him find a new place. Salinger was even more beaten than that, and that’s why his literature all focuses on the search, not the finding. That’s a common factor in alleged “hipster literature” that’s come my way via this project, being the voice of lost and shaken generations, and I have my theories on that. While millennials at the turn of the 10s hadn’t suffered through a world war like Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Salinger or Kerouac or Vonnegut, they’d had their view of the future shaken by the sudden collapse of the market of opportunities. Modernism and confident conformity to the old way, be that European imperialism or American capitalism, suddenly held less promise. Is it any wonder that the contemporary hipster, the postrecession searcher for purpose, would feel the connection?
But this is all reading things autobiographically, which Salinger hated. He went into seclusion after writing Catcher, rather than respond to any of all the inevitable questions raised by the cryptic text. Right near the start, in chapter 3, Holden says “what really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours, and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” There’s some irony to Salinger writing that dialogue (It’s not in quotation marks, but the whole book is dialogue) in a book exactly like that, and then hiding himself away from it.
Speaking of the start.
Catcher starts with our boy Holden getting kicked out of another fancy private school. Except it doesn’t. The beginning is after the end, establishing that Holden is writing the story from some sort of psychiatric institute, and he never outright says that it’s a form of therapy, but why else would he be writing like this, diving into his thought process as much as he can, but never too deep, always bobbing back up into the safe air of narration, hinting at further depths? We’re about to read two hundred compact little pages (like I said, Catcher is a pretty short book, and it reads at such a clip that it’s through before you know it and leaving the reader wanting more, which leads them to Franny and Zooey) of this kid wandering the city looking for any sort of conversation that can feel meaningful to him, anyone who’s willing to listen. There’s something of a subtly implicit happy ending threaded into every chapter though, in the fact that we’re able to read it. “Listen,” says Holden, to begin many a sentence, and if we’re open-minded readers, we do. Here is his voice laid bare, with all the vulnerabilities and wrong thoughts and contradictions of life confused and teetering on the cliff-edge of adulthood, and we can choose to see through it to a kernel of lonely soul yearning for connection. Though even in the writing, Holden’s most vulnerable dialogue, there are walls. He “sort of” does more things than he outright does. He starts off by denying the reader any backstory, and this is a funny knock at overwrought “David Copperfield kind of crap,” common to classic literature, but it’s also him being protective of his life. Who are you to want to know that crap, dear reader? By the way, I hate movies. Never mind that when I meet up with Sally the first thing I suggest doing is going to a movie.
Everyone is a phony to this kid, maybe because he’s phony to everyone, including You The Reader, but for the most part he doesn’t hate them for it. Mostly he feels sorry for them, thinking they may not have genuine connection in their lives. I'll turn the table, then, and think the same about him. On the other hand, when Holden gets on about people close to him that he genuinely likes - dead brother Allie, Jane Gallagher, and above all Phoebe - the pages become third person love letters. This kid is full of love and full of resentment and rattled by trauma but trying to remain pure and trying to keep others pure in the innocence of childhood, where all good things are petrified as in a museum. But he comes to learn to let go, just a little bit at the end as he watches Phoebe place his hat on his head, knowing it helps him. Full of love and pride he watches her grow up just a half-step more, her red hair curling into the curling ornamentation of a carousel horse to create one of the most iconic cover images ever. It’s all contradiction and denial more than straightforward convinced ideology, and isn’t that what growing up is all about? Isn’t that what living in this confusing, contradictory, phony world is all about? It’s laughable and serious and pretentious and vulnerable and scornful and sweet.
Of course, classic books can also be evaluated by their legacy, and Catcher has a huge one. Other books of the mid-century might have had their impact on culture mainly through more widely accessible movie adaptations. Catcher never did, per Salinger's express intent. He never really said why, except that he didn't want to see an intensely personal story adapted by someone else. It's amazing, then, that a solely textual work, so defined by unique textual style, could spawn arguably a whole genre. I see The Outsiders cited as the first modern young adult or teen novel often enough. The word "teenager" was only invented in the fifties, after all, as adolescence began to be recognized as its own stage of life. But Catcher came just before. The Outsiders would probably exist without it, but the modern universe of YA books, from Judy Blume to Leigh Bardugo, thousands of stories that may be wildly genre-diverse but by definition featuring young heroes facing the burgeoning confusion of maturity, responsibility, sexuality, and complexity, would probably look very different without the big splash of a landmark excellent exploration of those themes right at the postwar dawn of American cultural hegemony. Famous coffee company John Green has built a prominent splinter of his own wildly diverse career on just this kind of story. (I like the coffee company’s books quite a bit and look forward to reviewing some of them as Project Hipster continues.) It's no surprise then that he's made no less than seven videos about The Catcher in the Rye. If you want to continue thinking that anything I wrote here is remotely original, don't watch those.
Oh, yeah, I forgot one more reason that hipsters love Catcher in the Rye
4. They’ve got good taste, and this is a damn good book.
In fact,
I give this hipster book five hunting hats out of five.
Project Hipster is a futile and disorganized attempt to dive into the world of things that the internet has at some point claimed "are hipster," mostly through ListChallenges search results.
This review comes from the Twelfth list, Only Hipsters Have Read 17/35 of These Books.
Up next: a movie I enjoyed but I’m not sure I fully “got.”
“Whether or not what we experienced was an According to Hoyle miracle is insignificant. What is significant is that I felt the touch of God. God got involved.”
Somehow, I turned 26 without ever having seen Pulp Fiction. I guess I vaguely knew that this was some sort of violent, amoral movie that college freshmen (emphasis on the men) loved for being subversive. And committed as I was to some sort of soft-revolution folk-listening bike-riding Wes Anderson form of hipsterdom, it wasn’t that I hated the idea of Tarantino, but he was never on my radar aside from watching Inglorious Basterds on cable one night. And now that I’ve actually sat down and watched Pulp Fiction in one sitting after years of posters and memes, I have to say what I didnt fully expect to say: I get it. I think I totally get it. My persona’s not going to be uprooted by this movie, but if this was the first thing I’d seen that wasn’t, like, Michael Bay’s Transformers, I can see how it would have that impact.
A few years ago I might have filled this review with thoughts on whether violent crime in movies, perpetrated by the protagonists, was problematic. But truth be told I’m a bit tired of the vaguely neo-puritan concept that a story’s quality can be evaluated with a sort of demerit system, by going over a script with a comb of fine moralistic teeth and dropping points for every problematic aspect. I could easily do that to Pulp Fiction, and in the interest of fairness, let’s do that briefly here. Few strong female characters: debatable, given how memorable repeat Tarantino collaborator Uma Thurman is as a nostalgic-fun-chasing gangster’s wife and washed up actress, but let’s say point off. Every time Samuel L. Jackson, John Travolta, and Bruce Willis gun down people in cold blood: point off. The entire ending to Bruce Willis’ segment: several points off. Tarantino writing a speech of a white guy standing in his kitchen spouting racial slurs like Pitchfork writers spout baseless comparisons to earlier albums, and then casting himself as that white guy: many, many points off. You can decide for yourself whether you want to take points off for the foot fetish. Was that fun? Are we purified?
I couldn’t say exactly why I’m over this neopuritanism. Maybe it’s the algorithms, censoring anything with naughty bits for the sake of greater appeal and therefore greater profit, forcing a sort of childish doublespeak. I don’t think there’s a single scene in this movie that could survive unedited on Tiktok. No one in Pulp Fiction is unalived. They die. What’s more, they fucking die. Working around that even for progressive reasons all smacks too much of more classical conservative censorship. There’s a classic interview from around the release of Kill Bill that I found before I queued up the movie. A fusty-vibed pundit does her best to take down Tarantino with accusations of corrupting youth through senseless onscreen violence. He rallies back, more convincingly, that even kids can separate movies from reality better than the moral crusaders tend to assume. Why all the violence? Because it’s so much fun, Jan!
And as I watched this apparent frat bro classic, as I was swept into the sheer style of it all, with the classic music and the funky directing and the whip-quick dialogue that swings between incredibly casual and over-the top theatrical, while I didn’t feel myself turning into a frat bro, I felt my inner Jan wither away somewhat, because, yeah, it IS fun! Pulp Fiction is two and a half hours long, and it feels both longer than that for the amount of stuff in there, and shorter than that for its headlong galloping pace. No, the gangster protagonists aren’t good people. They shouldn’t be role models. They don’t need to be. They’re lurid, florid, edgy clowns, and it’s fun to laugh at them while also being a little scared for them, because if they’re shot, then the fun ends. That was the appeal of the pulp fiction of a century past, of cheap crime novellas sold on tables outside train stations that crumbled quickly into paper dust. As in that namesake fiction, Tarantino’s characters navigate a world divided into Their People and shrieking innocent bystanders, with the ratio tilted rather more to the former than you’d expect. Their stories branch and weave together, wrapping back into a thematically cohesive nugget where it all began. Each of them is a little movie in its own right, introducing us to characters in scenarios that spiral into wild climaxes.
One of the problems here is that not every branch of the tree is created equal. We start with the bits I’ve seen in memes for decades. Vincent and Jules, buddy hitmen, talk about burgers and track down some dudes. Jules taunts one, plays linguistic games, and recites a fictional bible verse before shooting him through the head. Vincent takes his boss’s wife, Mia, out to a fifties themed diner. Until I watched Pulp Fiction for real, it should be said, I had this impression that it was a period piece. It’s not, it turns out. It’s set in the early nineties, when it came out. It just so happens that every damn thing onscreen throws back to decades previous. The screen itself feels soaked in nostalgia. Maybe that’s part of why it feels timeless. What’s timeless when it’s created will always be timeless. What’s timely fades. Going back to the diner, for example, Vince and Mia enter a dance competition that feels right out of Grease, which yes, I know, was a period piece too. That leads to this climax involving a big adrenaline syringe.
You see why this is all hard to summarize in a linear manner?
The chemistry of Travolta, Jackson, and Thurman is a great source of the aforementioned all-important Fun through all this. It’s a drop down to suddenly turn to Bruce Willis’ corrupt prizefighter and his character-free doe-eyed French wife, even if that segment does climax the last way you’d ever possibly expect. It mostly all wraps back together at the end, though, with a truly tense final standoff. One thing I like, a closing grace, is that all this blood and swearing and needless slur-dropping ends not in the most violent shoot out yet, but in a calm and simple act of mercy. It’s like the end of The Catcher in the Rye, where you can see a little bit of character development start to seep in, colouring everything previous as explanatory preamble to this little bit of worthwhile change.
There’s a touch of hinting at the role of the author as God in fiction, too. The main catalyst for this all-important change, the change that structures the whole rambling multi-threaded movie, is a coincidence that saves Jules’ life. He calls it a miracle, views it as an Act of God. That’s supposed to be Against The Rules of screenwriting. Acts of God, which within worlds of fiction are obviously Acts of the Author, show the hand of the author, and so inherently call attention to the unreality of the story. But maybe, this movie is saying, that’s sometimes ok. There’s a confidence to rapping on the fourth wall a bit. By making the audience aware of the unreality of the story– something even done as early as the title in this case, it has “fiction” right there in it– the work makes them aware of the craft inherent in creating the fiction they’re watching. You only want to do that if you’re damn sure the craft is good. Thankfully, in this case, it is.
One of the great defining factors of Hipster Fiction, I’m finding, is an appreciation for the auteur, for a story as a product of a singular mind even when, as in the case of a movie, it’s really the product of hundreds of people working together. That stands in contrast to fiction pushed out of homogenizing studios and record labels and publishing houses, eager to erase the most dramatic and therefore potentially polarizing flourishes of the author into a marketable mainstream. That’s why I don’t mind the quirks, even the weird ones, as much as I might. Tarantino is singular, and the weird foot shots are a signature because he’s a weird dude about that. That’s the sort of thing that would be ironed out of a focus-grouped, less auteur driven, less hipster movie aiming to satisfy everyone.
That ending, and the touching on the author’s Godly hand, cements Jackson’s melodramatic gangster Jules as the closest thing this all has to a bit of heart. A bit of heart is nice. It’s not why we’re here, though. We’re here to watch John Travolta talk about burgers, dance the twist, and shoot people.
I give this hipster movie four dorm room posters out of five.
Project Hipster is a futile and disorganized attempt to dive into the world of things that the internet has at some point claimed "are hipster," mostly through ListChallenges search results.
This review comes from the eleventh list, The Greatest Films For Hipsters.
“I don’t think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while—just once in a while—there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting waste of time! But there never is! You never even hear any hints dropped on a campus that wisdom is supposed to be the goal of knowledge. You hardly ever even hear the word 'wisdom' mentioned!”
Everyone’s read J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, yeah? If not, I’ll review it in this series sooner or later. It’s great, it’s very hipster in its deep character breakdown, multiple layers of storytelling, and its analysis of cynical adolescent disillusionment. It’s one of the best-selling, best-reviewed, most-read books in all of literature. Sounds kinda mainstream, doesn’t it?
The discerning hipster, wanting all of Salinger’s great writing in a package that the mainstream sheep are less likely to know, and that subs adolescent disillusionment for young adult disillusionment, might instead turn to Franny and Zooey, his later and arguably only other novel. Franny and Zooey hit the scene in 1957, at the height of the Hipster-beloved beat era, though Salinger isn’t usually considered to be one of the beats, which is basically to say that I don't think he ever did drugs with Kerouac. Your hipness archivist read this book a couple of years after reading Catcher, mostly on a single slow day while working at a ski hill.
Some say it’s two short stories; truth, it’s more like a novella with a bonus opening chapter that could serve as a short story in isolation but works very well as a first chapter. That opening follows Franny Glass on a lunch date. She’s become obsessed with an obscure Russian religious text, but her boyfriend only wants to talk about his upcoming football game, leading Franny right into a panic attack about how much everyone is only in everything for the ego boost. That main theme is tempered a bit by Franny’s disdain for the dullness, the expectedness of everyone’s bragging topics. Certainly that’s something core to the hipster identity: the mundanity of the mainstream. That’s part one, the shorter part, “Franny.”
The second part, “Zooey,” makes up most of the book. Smash cut to the Glass household. Franny’s brother Zooey is fighting with his mom. Franny is in the living room, a few days into a serious depressive funk, when Zooey is all but forced to talk her through it. That conversation, replete with italics to show just how emphatic and pointed everyone is, practically ranting, reveals the Glass family backstory, detailed as well in other Salinger stories that I haven’t read. Turns out, nothing about Franny’s identity crisis came on in isolation. The Glass children were child prodigies on a radio show, in the national spotlight until their voices changed and they suddenly dropped from America’s short attention span. That feeling of being puppets on a stage never really left any of them, and led eldest brother Seymour to commit suicide despite an outward appearance of success. Is it any wonder, then, that these siblings are a bit messed up, and see society as being a bit messed up? The conversation barrels on, Zooey trying to rescue Franny from her depression, until it reaches a surprisingly succinct and positive conclusion, which shows Salinger’s increasing interest in spirituality and alternative theological theory, and which I won’t spoil. Suffice to say, the final page has a lesson that you’ll remember if you’ve ever sat and wondered in light despair at why we all go on performing, and who for.
Reading this book will boost your hipster cred, because you can bring it up when people talk about The Catcher in the Rye. But more importantly, this book will raise interesting and impressively timeless dialogues about life and purpose in modern society by means of great writing and impressively concisely developed characters.
I give this Hipster book five withering glances over an organic cigarette out of five.
Project Hipster is a futile and disorganized attempt to dive into the world of things that the internet has at some point claimed "are hipster," mostly through ListChallenges search results.
This review comes from the first list, Hipster Lit: If You Haven't Read 'em, Pretend You Have.
“To rule forever, it is necessary only to create, among the people one would rule, what we call...Bad History. Nothing will produce Bad History more directly nor brutally, than drawing a Line, in particular a Right Line, the very Shape of Contempt, through the midst of a People,-- to create thus a Distinction betwixt 'em,-- 'tis the first stroke.-- All else will follow as if predestin'd, unto War and Devastation.”
Listen, I know about the Baader-Meinhof frequency illusion. But sometimes I really do think I just have good timing by pure coincidence, because I knew nothing about Thomas Pynchon until after I took the personal dive in over the middle part of 2025, and then suddenly, it felt like everyone is talking about him. Suddenly I was seeing The Crying of Lot 49 on the front tables in every bookstore, everyone’s talking about Vineland because of One Battle After Another, I have since read Vineland and was a bit disappointed by it compared to the movie—but I chose, because of the feckless and inscrutable commands of The Lists, to start with the one about the old-timey surveyors.
Specifically, of course, it’s Robert Lanham again. Mason & Dixon (always with an ampersand– that’s important, because like a border, it’s a singular symbol that represents demarcation and connection both– that’s why it’s blown up to big print on the cover) came out the year I was born, and would have, like me, been six years old by the time Lanham’s Hipster Handbook codified the term for our new century. For context, a novel published six years ago today would be, er, Piranesi, for example, which does still feel like a “new” book, but then again, my perception of time is loosening at my geriatric 28. Here’s what Lanham said about Mason & Dixon, to ground us in the ever-important question (here specifically) of Why It’s Hip:
“Throw out your American History 101 textbooks; Pynchon’s reimagining is much more hip. Hipsters like the Caffeine Theory, which suggests that drinking coffee and smoking can create a more frank and honest world. Conspiracy theorists who try to decipher hidden meanings about masons and the number 23 are pretty fin.”
Recall that “fin” means “lame, uncool, unhip.” Allegedly. I think Lanham was fucking with us a bit on that one.
So, what do I now know about Pynchon? Well, as a member of the general public, I know what he’s seen fit to tell about himself to the general public, which is zippidy-doo-dah and a bit of shit-all. Pynchon is a mystery. He was born on the day of his birth, married on his wedding day, and lives in his place of residence. The only confirmed photos of his face date back to his high school days, the better part of a century past. His voice—and this is extremely funny—has only been heard from guest starring in The Simpsons, in which he played himself animated with a bag over his head, making terrible puns about his own books.
In summary, this guy makes Salinger look like John Green. Pynchon thereby, by his own design, becomes the poster child for Death of the Author, even as he keeps publishing books, as recently as two weeks ago as of writing (that won’t be true by the time this is published, but know then that I finished Mason & Dixon and wrote this whole bit just after Shadow Ticket hit shelves.)
All there is is text.
So below the break, let’s look at the text.
From the first sentence, which is, let’s count them, 122 words long, it became clear that I would be in this novel for the long haul. A fair bit of my life has kind of fallen apart and shifted about and been rebuilt anew since I cracked that first page and read “Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware—the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking'd-foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen…” (that’s not a close approach to the first landmarking Period, not by a long shot) but never mind that collapse. We carry on the Project. You may notice in that Excerpt that there are a great many Letters of the Capital Variety. Apparently this was a Trend in real 18th-century Writing, that almost every Noun is capitalized for Emphasis on its Importance (Tumblr does this too sometimes.) Apparently I haven’t actually read much 18th century writing, because I had to look this up to figure out why the fuck there was so much uppercase. Pynchon throws this style on the reader hard at first, going harder on it than the actual documents he’s emulating or parodying, and it slowly ebbs. The sim-historical prose gets easier, but that’s merely an er; I’d never say it gets easy, but it does get captivating. Reading Mason & Dixon involves a bit of immersion, as the reader must by necessity put aside their modern tastes for the English language and accept a process of compartmentalization, each word understood for itself, assembling into a clause to then be understood, then a sentence composed thereof, a paragraph composed hence of sentences contained within’t, and a page, an assemblage of assemblages of assemblages, takes on the feel of a genuine achievement ‘pon completion. And there are 800 of the things.
History is a puzzle, a maze of sources that may have nothing to do with modern thinking, and it’s very hard to find a single definitive True Story in all the stories that are told. That’s a major theme of Mason & Dixon, and that’s why we start with a frame narrative. That wintery scene of the first sentence brings the reader into a cozy family Christmas in the early years after the American Revolution. The children gather around the chair of their favourite uncle and storyteller, the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke. Pynchon loves his funny names. Rev. Spritecranberry here has told the children stories about “the escape from Hottentot-Land, the Accursèd Ruby of Mogok, the Ship-Wrecks in Indies East and West,” all of which I would also like to hear. But this snowy afternoon, the youngsters ask, why haven’t you ever told a story about America?
And so Rev. Vanillarootbeer begins a story about America, not in America. In fact we remain not in America for a long time, not in America for a quarter-thousand pages. First we must meet our two America-makers, figures whose names echo through the States’ divided history and culture unto its contemporary sundering, but whose lives are known to history only really in outline, allowing Pynchon to sketch characters within the lines.
I’ve never seen the Mason-Dixon line. Odds are that I won’t, anytime soon. I don’t have much of an impression fixed in my mind of how the eastern states are shaped in their precise borders. This is to say, I didn’t know that it was a straight line, perhaps the first border to lie perfectly east-west along a parallel for hundreds of miles. I did know, although I haven’t known it for especially long, I didn’t learn it in school or anything, that it divided the slaving South from the nominally liberated North; I did know that it was the line along which the meth lab downstairs was sliced in twain in its deadly civil war; and I did know that it remains the line roughly demarcating a crowd of populism, simmering racism, and lingering resentment, currently being exploited by the villains of our day to tear open and bleed the sutures of that scar.
I didn’t know that it took its name from two English surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, who laid out the line to settle a dispute between the Penn clan (aha!) of Pennsylvania, and the Marylanders who don’t seem to equally be named Mary, in the years before the Declaration. Pynchon chooses to cast Mason as the pessimistic, gothic widower, a somewhat dismal character to follow as he is literally haunted by his lost love, but one necessary to the contrast of any great bromance. To the point of that contrast, here comes Jeremiah Dixon, a Quaker, whom we as modern folk are inclined to think of as gentle yet conservative oatmeal-box Amish types, forgetting that the original Society of Friends were universalist, progressive, anti-slavery, anti-monarchy, anti-hierarchy pacifist radicals. In fact, with their deck retro hats, I’d hesitantly say that the Quakers of Dixon’s time could be called a sort of pre-Génération Perdue proto-hipster. Pynchon’s Dixon, then, is a bit of a party animal, hitting the town wherever the pair of friends may go, to cavort and sing and drink in taverns and learn all there is to learn of fun in the 18th century. A good chunk of the fun dialogue, once the reader can figure out what the fuck they’re actually talking about, contrasts Mason’s gloom with Dixon’s cheer. The two will amicably argue over anything, too: wine or beer, coffee or tea, and further even more philosophical arguments.
Where they go, by the way, is first to Portsmouth, where… hang on, a fucking talking dog?
Yes, a talking dog, a sophisticated and intelligent Learnèd English Terrier, hanging out in a showroom at the back of a Portsmouth tavern and singing for meat. That’s a strange aside into surrealism that seems totally out of place in the early chapters, although we’ll come to learn that the magical and unscientific and impossible is pretty important in this hipper version of history. We’ll return to that. Remember: per the frame story of Reverend Gingerale, this is a story told to entertain a motley family crowd by the fire in dark post-solstice days. So our narrator might just be adding in some silly stuff for entertainment’s own sake—right?
From Portsmouth, the pair trauma-bond when their ship, bound for Sumatra to observe the transit of Venus over the Sun, is fired upon by a marauding French frigate. Rather than Sumatra, the royally contracted astronomers (not yet surveyors, not at this moment at least) land in Dutch Cape Town. Here we see colonialism at its worst: morally bankrupt Dutch townies keeping slaves from beyond their walls while never venturing to discover if there might be any beauty or worth to that further country. In this walled isolation, slaves and children seem to seek pleasureless sexual sadism because what else is there to do when you’re too afraid of the land you’ve stolen and raped to actually venture into it?
This admittedly harder to read early section builds to the Transit of Venus itself. Something is made here, I think, of how planets alone in the sky are deified points seemingly glowing from their own light, sources of magic and zodiacal force through all preceding human history; but in front of the Sun, the deity becomes a solid, dark, earthly sphere. The pursuit of science grants objective knowledge, but is something of the magic lost?
After South Africa, we sail to remote St. Helena, not yet the site of the yet-unborn Napoleon’s exile, where the relentless wind drives men insane. Then it’s back home to London, where there’s frankly somewhat dull politics and family drama.
But that’s where we are, thematically, when the contract arrives for Mason & Dixon to lay out the borders of the fledgling American colonies. We’re thinking about colonialism and the relationship of the colonizing class to the colonized land; we’re thinking about science in the Age of Reason and its imposition in a way on the preceding world of medieval magical mystery; we’re thinking about the worlds of the maddening wild vs the dull political civilized.
And off we go.
In Philadelphia there are some fun meetings with figures of later importance. Benjamin Franklin is of course a hipster magician-scientist, playing with electricity and eels. Even Pynchon can’t make George Washington all that interesting, if I’m being honest, although there’s some emphasis on his slaves. And Dixon gets a “Say that again?” moment with Thomas Jefferson.
And then, we come to it at last: the line, the line! Chains stretched between marked theodolite-sights, following the stars to find a perfect latitude, and a swath of trees chopped down around it in a perfect “visto,” at first through farms and flatlands, and then— look at those ripples—up and over the forested ridges of the Appalachians.
Here’s where the weirdness starts to creep into the story in force, and the book really takes off for its unpredictability. I don’t want to spoil all the delightfully surreal aspects—the aliens and anachronistic technology and impossible botany and geological revelations and secret colleges. The Swedish lumberjacks are not what they seem. It makes sense, looking back, that this would come in here. Even if it is Reverend Pineapplefanta adding in some storytellers’ liberties, it meshes well with our Surveyors and their ever-growing-and-then-dwindling camp of followers pushing into the wilderness beyond the coastal plain, passing over the mountains they never could in South Africa into the world of the wild, the uncivilized, the unscientific past.
Oh, and the invention of Star Trek.
Into the travelling party, as the ridges grow wilder, comes then a Chinese mystic to lay down some feng shui truth: an unnatural straight line is a conduit for bad energy, and the longer the line, the stronger its power. All of nature follows contours, but our surveyors are cutting the very representation of enclosure and geometric determinism into old, mystic mountains, dividing them, cutting it all in half like a fine-honed razor over the great turtle’s throat. The journey takes them into realms of magic, but its purpose is to slice it into civilized monotony, and so the mystic becomes tragic as its observers can only see it in bringing about its end.
Maybe that’s the American tragedy.
I give this hipster book four miles, three chains, and seven links.
Project Hipster is a futile and disorganized attempt to dive into the world of things that the internet has at some point claimed "are hipster," mostly through ListChallenges search results.
This review comes from the sixth result for "Hipster," "Hipster Lit: If You Haven't Read 'em, Pretend You Have;" which is to say, the list of books printed in Lanham, R, The Hipster Handbook, 2003.
