Studio by Thomas Maremaa

Abstract

Reviews 89 I saw him somewhere between Muskogee and Tulsa . . . He’ll be back. Don’t worry. He’ll be back. GEARY HOBSON, University of New Mexico Studio. By Thomas Maremaa. (New York: Morrow, 1978. $8.95.) In at least three different senses Thomas Maremaa’s novel Studio is an example of what we have come to call the “Hollywood novel.” First, the setting is the vast patchwork of Southern California, a fragmented landscape of freeways, beaches, canyons, and endless flat plains lined with pink stucco courts and fast food restaurants. Second, it deals with a theme which has become almost synonymous with the Hollywood novel — the confusion of dream and reality, the loss of clear boundaries between the fantasies enacted on the screen and those played out on the hillsides sur­ rounding the dream factories. Finally, the novel is about Hollywood’s major industry, the manufacture of film fantasies. Like Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, this is a novel which really gets into the business of making movies and engages us in the daily politics and power plays of the industry. Life in front of the cameras becomes identical with life behind them. Film and film-making, fiction and reality become interchangeable. “We’re in each other’s movies. And we know all the plots,” Tony (the narrator) says. “We don’t exist unless we’re seen, and our movies don’t exist unless they’re seen too.” Existence has been stripped to visibility; being is being seen. Throughout the novel Tony is aware that his every move is being watched — by others and by himself. The girl who plays the “actress” in the film tells Tony she has the ability to appear in other people’s dreams (metaphor for the perfect movie star?) and agrees to meet him that night in his dream. The world presented in the novel is one in which identity dissolves into a multiplicity of fragments and reflected images. Tony is himself the star performer, playing a variety of roles but all the time mocking his own performance. He calls himself a “studio malcontent” and says he’s the very thing he’s most against, but he is terrified of failure and of being controlled. His goal is to remain in control. He plays his roles convincingly, yet is incredulous when people actually believe what he tells them. He lives 90 Western American Literature in a luxurious canyon home, likes to drive fast German cars, drinks cokes incessantly, and “shtups” one girl after another (they all have names like BB, Cinnamon, and Deirdre). He is the “Adapted Man” who takes on the characteristics of those around him, becoming pieces of them so that “part of the time,” he confesses, “I don’t know who I am, if I belong to them or myself.” DAVID M. FINE, Newport Beach, California ...