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kitten she finds at the Roman fountain: like Susan, she's
a picture-perfect starlet who empathizes with weaker, neglected
animals). Then, in a single, cunning sentence, Coupland undercuts
the scene with a decidedly contemporary dichotomy: "She
was a woman on a magazine cover, gazing out at the checkout stand
shopper, smiling, but locked in time and space, away from the
real world of squalling babies, bank cards and casual shoplifting."
Squalling babies, bank cards and casual shoplifting--ah. Now
we know the era to be our own (a damning recognition, that),
and we, poor reader, are the checkout stand shoppers studying
the picture-perfect starlet.
But in these opening pages, Coupland isn't packing heat for
the likes of us. Like Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49(which
is also a mystery about signs), Coupland is interested in the
preponderance of seemingly invisible signs that surround us--both
in the 'real' world and in our 'media-tainted' perceptions of
it. A couple examples: when Susan meets John Johnson (the "semisleazebag
movie producer" whose biggest hit was Bel Air PI),
she notices that he has "sad, pale eyes like snowy TV sets."
And when they agree to leave the Ivy restaurant and go for a
walk, they do so "in the space of what seemed like a badly
edited film snippet." Our very perceptions, which the naïve
realists would tell us are exact matchups to the outside world,
are actually 'edited' by a Hollywood-trained filmcutter deep
in our unconscious, it would seem. Even the Oscar Meyer wiener
truck makes an appearance during their walk, in a Venturi-style
transformation of work-a-day objects into moving ad images. (If
you doubt your own visually-based, media-driven acumen, read
one of Coupland's characters describing himself and tell me you
don't know exactly what the guy looks like: "'If I were
in a movie, I'd be a sailor like back in the old days, with a
sunburn and a duffel bag, and I'd be on shore leave wearing a
cable knit sweater.'")
To paraphrase Eliot: this is Signs land.
Without a doubt,
Coupland puts his strong visual sensibilities and his Pynchonesque
skills at illuminating the Pop images that form the bedrock of
contemporary society to good use in Miss Wyoming, particularly
in these Hollywood scenes. But he's up to something radically
different on a larger, thematic scale. While Pynchon's adventures
in the semiotic maze are playfully comic, Coupland's forays here
have a decidedly moral tone.
Here, for example, is Susan describing her experience with
a commercial she did in Italy:
"I was doing a set of TV commercials for bottled spaghetti
sauce. Maybe you saw them. They were on the air for years. They
spent a fortune getting everybody over there and then they shot
it inside a studio anyway, and then they propped it with cheesy
Italian stuff, like it was filmed in New Jersey."
In some sense, TV is the aesthetic equivalent of Plato's cave,
giving us only fitful shadows. But Plato's shadows were characterless
imitations of Forms; in Coupland's Hollywood, the shadows are
often generated by people like Susan searching for the true Forms--and
that's where John and Susan find themselves interconnected.
Months before
meeting her at the Ivy restaurant, Johnson (coked-out and suffering
from a life-threatening bacterial infection) had been semi-conscious
in a Cedar-Sinai hospital bed when Susan appeared to him in a
vision and told him to clean his slate and enter his "own
private witness relocation program." Even though he discovered
that the vision was generated at least in part by a rerun of
Susan's 1980s sitcom playing in the hospital room, he took it
seriously and traded in all his worldly goods for a period of
desert-wandering. When he emerges in Hollywood again and finds
Susan, Johnson--the apparent pariah and crazy man of the hour--is
drawn to save Susan from drowning in seeming success: "[I]t
came to him," Coupland writes,
that maybe he could sponge away the look of loneliness
that he'd seen in Susan's eyes--and John was pretty sure it was
loneliness he'd seen, despite the smiles and the confidences.
If he'd learned one thing while he'd been away, it was that loneliness
is the most taboo subject in the world. Forget sex or politics
or religion. Or even failure. Loneliness is what clears
out a room. Susan could be more to him than his latest box-office
ranking. With Susan he might actually help for once, might raise
something better out of himself than a hot pitch for a pointless
film. Something moral and fine inside each of them might sprout
and grow.
It's John and Susan's extended backstories and what they reveal
about loneliness that turns Miss Wyoming most decisively
away from Pynchon. (Susan is a veteran of high-pressure beauty
pageants, and, three years before the novel begins, she had her
own period of anonymous forest-dwelling after being declared
dead in a horrific plane crash from which she alone walked away
unscathed. It was not a guilt-free survival: "Susan felt
as though the other passengers must be angry at her for jinxing
their flight--for being the low-grade onboard celebrity who brought
tabloid bad luck onto an otherwise routine flight.")
Their stories are not merely amusing forays into signs and
their ambiguous meanings, and they make Coupland's novel into
a heart-felt exploration of the seemingly bridgeless gap that
lies between oneself and the others around you. Miss Wyoming
is certainly not an existentialist novel, but its deeper,
abiding themes have a lot in common with the existentialist tradition.
Of course, Coupland has a good eye for comic detail, and Miss
Wyoming can be viciously funny (like the weatherman / beauty
pageant judge whose colonial-style mansion is "as colorfully
lit as an aquarium castle, surrounded by dense evergreens that
absorbed noise like sonic tampons"). But it's equally a
sad, almost mournful novel, at times. To poke fun at a crass,
commercial society is good fun; to analyze its victims is almost
painful.
It's perhaps Coupland's finest achievement, I think, to make
us care so deeply for John and Susan and worry about their salvation,
in the midst of such a well-drawn, caustic comedy.
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