Zeroville Steve Erickson

 

“The Searchers is one wicked bad-ass movie whenever my man the Duke is on screen, evil white racist honky pigfucker though he may be.”


Plot: Ike Jerome (Vikar)  arrives in Los Angeles in 1969 just at the time of the Tate-LaBianca murders.  Vikar is obsessed with movies and will eventually parlay that obsession into work as a film editor.  As he travels through the 1970's and the emergence of a New Hollywood, Vikar encounters a wide range of Hollywood's movers, as well as others who share his fascinations to a varying degrees.  Near autistic, Vikar has a hard time comprehending the non-movie world, though he does develop into a fan of punk. 


Why read it: This is a movie lover's book, where you can have characters going into deep conversations on a whole range of movies going back to the 20's, arguing over what some may consider arcane aspects (there's a nice section on what film editors actually do).  Vikar has father issues (when your real name is Isaac, one might guess that to be the case).


A few years ago, I read Easy Riders and Ragin' Bulls, a history of Hollywood film from the late 60’s to early 80’s, when a group of new filmmakers, Scorcese, DePalma, Spelberg, Coppola, and the rest,  radically changed the ways films are made.  Zeroville follows roughly the same time period and involves many of the same characters, just in fictional, or thereabouts, mode.  However, Zeroville goes beyond that, regretting the loss of the old Hollywood and the movies that were made, despite the rigidity of making movies within the existing system that prevailed then.  If you have any love of 20^th Century film, this is a book for you – its filled with discussions, references, and criticisms of a vast catalog of movies, both from Hollwood and other places.  I was tempted to list them all at one point, but it was too daunting a task.

The hero of the story is Vikar, a strange man (“cineautistic”), who arrives in Hollywood in 1969 with a shaved head bearing a large tattoo of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift from A Place in the Sun.  A repressive childhood (“God hates children.  He killed his own child.”) has left Vikar with one passion in life, film.  He manages (after being considered a potential suspect in the Manson murders) to find work building sets and from there getting involved in editing.  He also comes across Viking Man (essentially a renamed John Milius), a member of the new Hollywood, who helps Vikar (and names him as well) understand the odd world he inhabits.  Vikar yearns for the magical Hollywood of old and has a hard time understanding the new – his tattoo is constantly mistaken for Natalie Wood and James Dean, which confounds him to no end; after all this is Hollywood, how could they not know?  Still, Vikar establishes himself as a success in the new Hollywood.  Vikar’s personal life is barebones; he has difficulties connecting to other humans in general, with some exceptions – there’s a rather Taxi Driveresque relationship with a young girl Vikar runs into off and on (her mother is an unstable actress with a fractured relationship with Vikar).  Vikar does also find something in 70's punk - "I Wanna Be Your Dog" touches him like nothing else.

The ending drifts off to its own ambiguous end.  At first, I was a bit put off, as it didn’t seem to fit well.  Much like the hero, the book seemed to just exhaust itself.  Maybe that’s the point.   But I can read about film until the cows come home, and when it is done intelligently and passionately, as many of the characters do here, I'm in literary heaven.

Fuck continuity.  Indeed.

I would imagine if you like this, Suspects would also be worth a try.