[In the following essay, Zinman suggests that the characters in Rabe's plays are similar to cardboard cutouts and comic-strip characters in the vein of Roy Lichtenstein's paintings.]

There is something oddly anachronistic in David Rabe's radically contemporary plays, but his use of anachronism is neither the conventional reference to something too modern for its context, nor the reverse, the nostalgic drift of so much contemporary art; it creates, rather, a puzzling and powerful distantiation.

Rabe's sort of anachronism is perfectly expressed by Phil in Hurlyburly:

ARTIE:
This is sex we're talking about now, Phil. Competitive sex.
PHIL:
That's what I'm saying. I need help.
ARTIE:
You're such a jerk-off, you're such a goof-off. … I don't believe for a second you were seriously desperate about trying to pick that bitch up.
PHIL:
That's exactly how out of touch I am, Artie—I have methods so out-dated they appear to you a goof.

(81)

Here is a post-modernist critical dilemma: what is just outdated and what is a goof? And, even harder, what is just a goof and what is serious art? And harder still, can a goof be serious art? Rabe's use of anachronism creates these problems over and over, and it influences every aspect of his plays, generating that troubling sense of “What's Wrong with This Picture?” This question can be answered the way it always can, by concentrating on the visual field.

Consider how comic-strips have come to dominate the visual field of our popular culture; not only have POW! AARGH! BLAM! become ubiquitous in advertising, but they have crept into serious, literate communication as well as into the conversation of otherwise articulate people. Even more widespread is the influence of the visual style of comic-strips. And consider the bizarre sociological implications of the vivification of Superman, Popeye, Batman, Dick Tracy, and Little Orphan Annie through the agency of human actors playing comicstrip characters in recent films, an attempt—lavish and/or garish—to make the two-dimensional three-dimensional. This suggests a fairly desperate cultural need for simplified realism which would seem to belie our society's serious doubts about the realism of reality; it further indicates that our avenue to understanding and assessing character valorizes physical deeds rather than thoughts or feelings, thus the need for the outlandishly successful hero and the guaranteed happy ending; further still, it demonstrates our culture's total acceptance of film as a realistic medium. Disneyland, with its ambulatory Mickey Mice et al is one extreme of this vivifying impulse (ponder the phenomenon of adults waiting in line for ‘his’ autograph); the technically-acclaimed film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, may be another, more sophisticated version of this impulse, and the movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is, surely, the most peculiar as well as shockingly lucrative mutation of it.

Given this prevalent torquing of the comic-strip, it is a remarkable confirmation of the avant-garde nature of David Rabe's plays that their force is exerted in the opposite direction: the flattening of “real” life, the framing of action, the ballooning of dialogue. Rather than moving from the comic strip to the actor, Rabe presses the actor and the dramatic arena into the disturbing illusion of two-dimensionality, creating cultural critique rather than wish-fulfillment.

Rabe creates characters who do not take their own humanity quite seriously. Pavlo Hummel's alter-ego, Mickey,¹ looks at Pavlo and says, “You're a goddam cartoon …” (69), and in a central speech in Hurlyburly, Eddie says, “You know, we're all just background in one another's life. Cardboard cutouts bumping around in this vague, you know, hurlyburly, this spin-off of what was once prime-time life …” (111). It seems to me that all Rabe's characters must be played as cardboard cutouts, cartoons gone wrong, gone big, and to read Rabe's plays in light of Roy Lichtenstein's big, wrong, comic-strip paintings is, perhaps, to get a handle on the answer to the question, “What's Wrong with This Picture?”

Neither Lichtenstein nor Rabe is dealing with anything so charming as “old-fashioned,” but rather with images and characters weirdly passé; anachronism becomes a distorted lens through which love and war are viewed. Both Rabe and Lichtenstein “quote” in the art-historical sense of the word,² thereby creating temporal disjunction. Just as Rabe's characters in Hurlyburly, a play written in the 1980s, talk about sixties “karma,” and his Vietnam soldiers want to be WWII heroes, so Lichtenstein paints pictures in the 1960s of comic-strip figures drawn from the forties, from bubblegum wrappers and Yellow Pages illustrations. And, by producing by hand that which was formerly reproduced by a mechanical process, that is, by handcrafting benday dots,³ Lichtenstein reverses the usual chronology of artistic processes and progress.

Lichtenstein's comic-strip paintings, both the love group and the war group⁴, contain narrative elements. The war stories are partial but obvious (as in, “I pressed the fire control … and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky … WHAAM!”), whereas the ballooned dialogue in the love paintings suggests a caricature of a person to whom something has happened; passion is archly implied (as in “Oh, Jeff … I love you, too … but …”). But when Simon Wilson likens Lichtenstein to

a Victorian narrative painter … who [in M-Maybe] invites the spectator to speculate: who is the girl? who is the man with the studio? film star, photographer, broadcaster, artist even? and what is the nature of the situation? has he stood her up for another woman? is he really ill? fatally injured perhaps?

(12-13)

he misses the point as well as the joke (“artist even?”!); these soap-operatic questions are inappropriate. Everything Lichtenstein does is designed to create distance between the subject of the painting and the viewer: the gigantic disproportion of Lichtenstein's faces (often larger than 5′ × 6′), the highly stylized, immediately recognizable use of the heavy black or blue outlines and the simple, primary colors, as well as the ridiculously large benday dots, suggest that this is not a painting one responds to in terms of the human drama of the content, but rather a painting about cultural clichés, and about surfaces that erase the record of the artist's hand. It is exactly this same soap-operatic impulse toward the narrative (which has realism at its heart) which audiences and critics often bring to a Rabe play, only to find themselves saying. What's Wrong with This Picture?

To create these distancing effects, Lichtenstein draws on a body of visual clichés, on the formulaic vocabulary which evolved in the history of cartoon making:

A handsome man's face would have a cleft chin and strongly accented lower lip. … Discomfort was conveyed by droplets of sweat springing from out of, and down from, the hairline. … Transitions were jump cuts. … No one believed that this was how things really looked … but you believed that it was how cartoons looked and acted.

(Kaprow, 7)

Although cartoons may look and act like this, paintings do not, and thus Lichtenstein's canvases create that same assault on genre expectations as Rabe's plays do.

This use of graphic clichés is much like Rabe's specifying cliché body language for his characters in their moments of ersatz emotional crises: for example, in Hurlyburly, when Eddie and Mickey feel shame at their treatment of Bonnie's six-year old-daughter, Rabe's directions require them to moan and pound their heads on the kitchen counter, and then to straighten slowly with relief and encouragement; or when, in In the Boom Boom Room. Chrissy and her sexually abusive father blow kisses as they slowly back away from each other. Such gestures not only distance the spectator from the character, but the character from the emotion. Rabe's actors need to revive the whole catalogue of gestures they have learned to avoid. This is supported by Rabe's “Author's Note” to Sticks and Bones when he writes:

Stylization, then, is the main production problem. … What is poetic in the writing must not be reinforced by deep feeling on the part of the actors, or the writing will hollow into pretension. In a more “realistic” play, where language is thinner, subtext must be supplied or there is no weight. Such deep support of Sticks and Bones will make the play ponderous. As a general rule I think it is true that when an actor's first impulse (the impulse of all his training) is to make a heavy or serious adjustment in a scene, he should reverse himself and head for a light-hearted adjustment. If his first impulse is toward lightheartedness, perhaps he should turn toward a serious tack.

(226)

The cartoon elements are most obvious in Rabe's Goose and Tomtom; the two tough guys pull out their pistols and say:

TOMTOM:
Look at 'em. Look at 'em … guns.
GOOSE:
Bang, bang.
TOMTOM:
Bang, bang.

(10)

Tomtom spray-paints graffiti images on the walls, creating pictures of events which have not occurred and then insists that the pictures authenticate his paranoiac fantasies. The entire action of the play is both replicated and interpreted on the stage walls, in a kind of simultaneous translation into visuals. Near the end of the play, the graffiti-covered walls fall down and:

figures enter all in black: long black overcoats, black trousers, hats, gloves, and ski masks. One figure, perhaps, seems to emerge from the floor. They seem to be the target figures come to life. One carries a huge full-length scythe. Others have machine guns. One is huge—ten feet tall—another small, another humpbacked.

(115)

Living cartoons replace the painted cartoons; Rabe seems to have parodied the comic-strip zeitgeist: a preemptive strike.

Rabe's war plays, Pavlo Hummel and Streamers⁵, look much like Lichtenstein's war paintings. Consider these pictures of male violence fantasies: Live Ammo, Whaam!, As I Opened Fire, Blam, Brattata, Takka Takka, Sweet Dreams, Baby, and O.K. Hot-. Many of these are based on trite WWII images (the villains invariably speak German, as in “Torpedo, Los!”) and on the noises which are standard sound effects on all playgrounds. This combination of datedness and childishness sums up Pavlo Hummel's trouble; he is a case of arrested development, a walking anachronism.

It is interesting to note that the basis of Pavlo's character is usually perceived quite differently. Most often critics (Werner, Hughes, and Homan, for examples) talk about the play as demonstrating Pavlo's dehumanization by the military machine and thus the play as an indictment of war. But in “The Basic Training of American Playwrights: Theatre and the Vietnam War,” Asahina sees the play as failing in this political mission:

All the stock characters and standard scenes were in evidence: the blustery drill sergeant, the squad bully, the uncaring family; the barracks-room banter, the ritual brawls and other crude tests of manhood, and finally the senseless death of the protagonist. … But instead of creating an agonized and extreme but nonetheless representative figure of humanity, Rabe deliberately designed Pavlo to be a cipher—a literal nobody instead of an Everyman. The net effect was to make his brutalization and anonymous death almost meaningless: The progressive dehumanization of someone scarcely human to begin with involved so little dramatic motion that the play was less revealing of the cruel irony of Pavlo's empty existence than of the barrenness of Rabe's imagination.

(35)

This, it seems to me, mistakes the tone and the mode just as much as the war-is-hell approach. To see Rabe's characters' lack of humanness as a flaw is to assume that the play operates in a realistic mode. If we see the characters as cartoons, the flaw ceases to be a flaw and becomes the point.⁶

The connection with Lichtenstein is again instructive; the same error in apprehension often takes place in the critical assumptions about the paintings. As Richard Mophet points out, there is the mistaken notion that a Lichtenstein painting is identical to its source, that is, for example, “a canvas seven feet wide can be regarded as an actual comic-strip … or a brushstroke as large as a man as a single gesture of hand and brush” (17). Lichtenstein's paintings are not cartoons but cartoons of cartoons, that is, heavily stylized and self-conscious paintings rather than realistic renderings of the source. Further, to assume, as many art critics have, that Lichtenstein's paintings, and by extension, the whole Pop Art movement of the Sixties, including Warhol's and Rauchenberg's work, constitutes an indictment of crass, mechanical reproduction in our age of technological reproduction, is to politicize and sentimentalize the game being played.⁷

Reading Rabe's war plays as though they were realistic is tantamount to making the same error in critical apprehension. Rabe denies that his war plays are protest plays; they are, rather, a record of the “eternal human pageant” of which war is a permanent part (Introduction to Two Plays, xxv). While he was stationed in Vietnam, he writes, he “kept no journal and even my letters grew progressively more prosaic, fraudulent, dull, and fewer and fewer. Cliches were welcomed, as they always are when there is no real wish to see what they hide” (xvii).

Consider Rabe's comment on Michael Herr's now-famous Vietnam memoir Dispatches, a book that refuses to become The Great American War Novel:

Michael Herr is the only writer I've read who has written in the mad-pop-poetic/bureaucratically camouflaged language in which Vietnam was lived. The trees take up attack postures, sanity defoliates before your eyes and the generals spin out theories like Macbeth's witches. He gets very close to taking you all the way over.

(flyleaf)

This is not the language in which Rabe's “Vietnam trilogy” is written; the playwright knows the language, but writes his plays in another, retrograde language, the realistic speech of another generation. Like Lichtenstein, Rabe is creating images of images, not images of people. We have learned over and over since Dispatches just how witty and cynical the grunts could be; consider, for example, the advertising logo for Stanley Kubrick's film, Full Metal Jacket, a combat helmet with “Born to Kill” written next to a peace sign, a true-to-life detail, Herr tells us, not an adman's invention. But in Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones, and Streamers, the characters are no more capable of that kind of linguistic/iconographic irony than they are of staying alive.

The explosion which kills Pavlo and which begins the play is perfectly visualizable in comic book terms. There is a shout of:

“GRENA-A-ADE!” [And then, the stage directions tell us,] (Pavlo drops to his knees, seizing the grenade, and has it in his hands in his lap when the explosion comes, loud, shattering, and the lights go black, go red or blue. The girl screams. Bodies are strewn about.)

(9)

We can imagine the bright red, flame-shaped exclamatory lines radiating from the grenade. And sure enough, Pavlo is not dead in naturalistic dramatic terms, since he bounces up on command and continues the play.

Pavlo's instincts for self-preservation have been short-circuited by his heritage. He was, after all, fathered by “the old lie” told Hollywood style. His mother tells him:

you had many fathers, many men, movie men, filmdom's greatest—all of them, those grand old men of yesteryear, they were your father. The Fighting Seventy-sixth, do you remember, oh, I remember, little Jimmy, what a tough little mite he was, and how he leaped upon that grenade, did you see, my God what a glory, what a glorious thing with his little tin hat.

(75)

Rabe can create high language out of his inarticulate characters' riffs and rants, just as Lichtenstein can make high art out of bubblegum wrappers. In each play there is at least one astonishing monologue, a mysterious and powerful story which contains a nondiscursive truth. These stories create odd visual images which seem inappropriately funny, and by so doing, convey Rabe's vision of the human condition. In the war plays, these are particularly harrowing; for example, the limbless Sgt. Brisbey's obsession with “ole Magellan, sailin' round the world”:

Ever hear of him Pavlo? So one day he wants to know how far under him to the bottom of the ocean. So he drops over all the rope he's got. Two hundred feet. It hangs down into the sea that must go down and down beyond its end of miles and tons of water. He's up there in the sun. He's got this little piece of rope danglin' from his fingers. He thinks because all the rope he's got can't touch bottom, he's over the deepest part of the ocean. He doesn't know the real question. How far beyond all the rope you got is the bottom?

(89)

The visual image conjured up in the listener's mind by this story is essentially a comic-strip image of a tiny figure with question marks surrounding his head. That, Rabe would seem to be saying, is the way human beings deal with the incomprehensible: we invent answers which are pitifully inadequate.

Consider the similar cartoon image and similar pathos created by the story of O'Flannigan in Streamers:

So O'Flannigan was this kinda joker who had the goddamn sense a humor of a clown and nerves, I tell you, of steel, and he says he's gonna release the lever mid- air, then reach up, grab the lines, and float on down, hanging. … So I seen him pull the lever at five hundred feet, and he reaches up to two fistfuls a air, the chute's twenty feet above him, and he went into the ground like a knife. …

(40)

[and] This [other] guy with his chute goin' straight up above him in a streamer, like a tulip, only white, you know. All twisted and never gonna open. … He went right by me. We met eyes sort of. He was lookin' real puzzled.

(41)

Like Magellan, like this other guy, like all of us, O'Flannigan is deeply wrong.

In Hurlyburly Phil leaves a suicide note which reads: “The guy who dies in an accident understands the nature of destiny.” Although Eddie finds this opaque and mystical, it is, for Rabe, as clear as things get. Phil has found, metaphorically, Rabe's empty Buick (which figures large in Streamers and small in Sticks and Bones), the car which causes meaningless havoc as it cartoonishly careens around. In the immortal words of heavyweight boxer Sonny Liston, whom Rabe is fond of quoting: “Life a funny thing” (epigraph to Pavlo Hummel); it is, as various characters in Streamers discover, “un-fuckin'-believable.”

For Rabe, love is even more unbelievable than war, and Lichtenstein's female figures provide a perfect gloss, in every sense of that word, on Rabe's treatment of women. Consider this statement by Roy Lichtenstein when an interviewer asked him about his “highly-confectioned women,” the red-lipped blondes:

Women draw themselves this way—this is what make-up really is. … I've always wanted to make up someone as a cartoon. That's what led to my ceramic sculptures of girls. … I was interested in putting two-dimensional symbols on a three-dimensional object.

(Coplans, 13)

Compare this to Chrissy in In the Boom Boom Room imagining herself as a Playboy centerfold: “I'd be a good one. I'd be the best one, sittin' in fur, and they'd polish me, make me smooth and glossy—all my marks away. Airbrush me till I'd gleam” (69). Chrissy has confused herself with a two-dimensional object, and as Rabe wrote her, she is right.

In the Boom Boom Room was greeted as a feminist play by critics who may have rued their judgment once they saw Hurlyburly, about which Rabe said, “A lot of people say the play is anti-woman. … I don't think that's true. It's about the price some guys pay to be men” (Dudar, 5). And his own words indicate his cartoon view of what it is to be a man: “There's this primal part of them, like this creature from the black lagoon. It runs through all my plays” (Freedman, 13). Because these male characters' lives are in such horrific disarray, and because they partially know that, the creature from the black lagoon finds a way to keep self-loathing at bay: blame an enemy. The handiest enemy are the “broads,” the “bitches,” the assorted ex-wives and girlfriends whose flaw lies in gender rather than in personality. Once again, Phil's deranged voice is vatic:

Football doesn't have a chance against it. It's like this invasion of tits and ass overwhelming my own measly individuality so I don't have a prayer to have my own thoughts about my own things except you and tits and ass and sucking and fucking and that's all I can think about. My privacy has been demolished. … You think a person likes that?

(58-59)

Rabe's plays are predominantly male, but the female characters of Goose and Tomtom, and In the Boom Boom Room and Hurlyburly out-Lichtenstein Lichtenstein, each one more blonde, more red-lipped, more vacant than the one before. Rabe has created his female characters as cartoon figures, quite likely to sigh, “Oh, Brad. …” But this is not to suggest here that Rabe is anti-women any more than he is anti-men; he does not grant full humanity to any of his dramatic creatures, and he writes plays which depend upon their two-dimensionality.

Perhaps the distinction between an object painting and a still life is useful here: an object painting is a picture of a single thing, while a still life is a picture of the relationship between things. Both Rabe and Lichtenstein treat their characters/subjects as objects, and Lichtenstein's pictures Aloha and Girl with Ball are no less object paintings than those he did of a golf ball or a hot dog or an ice cream soda.

Rabe's characters exist on stage in emotional and psychological isolation, and, in my imagined ideal production, in vivid visual isolation. We witness an object painting in performance, in which each object/character stands in relation only to the ground rather than to the other characters. This is anachronism's counterpart—anachorism, that is, incongruity in space rather than time. This visible isolation of the characters uses the stage space to reveal their lack of capacity for relationship. Thus the characters and their vehicle are well matched, repudiating, as do Lichtenstein's comic-strip paintings, everything but surface.

This smooth, aggressive anonymity of surface reflects Rabe's view of contemporary American culture. Violent and vapid, our society seems capable of only comic-strip responses to love and to war. Even our response to time has been reduced to a cartoon; Rabe's plays seem to have slipped on a temporal banana peel and WHOOPS!!! is about all we can say. This brilliantly disturbing drama leaves us just where it leaves his characters: dislocated in time and deferred in space. He has reinvented stage space, not through special effects or sets or lighting, but by forcing language to create new visuals, new concepts of character and action which we then perceive visually, new ways of seeing ourselves. And that, I think, is what's wrong with the picture: it's a play.

Notes

1. Mickey is allegedly Pavlo's half-brother, but considering that Pavlo's name was Michael before he changed it, it seems safe to assume, especially given all the minor imagery in this scene, that Mickey is Pavlo in mufti, speaking with the contempt Pavlo believes his family feels for him.

2. I am, for the sake of my argument, ignoring Lichtenstein's sculptures and brush-stroke paintings, which are filled with quotations from Matisse and Picasso. These are irrelevant to the discussion of Rabe's plays.

3. According to the Columbia Encyclopedia. 3rd edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 546, Benjamin Day (1838-1916) invented a process using celluloid sheets for shading plates in order to print maps and illustrations in color. His name has become a noun, a verb and an adjective: to give a map a Ben Day, to Ben Day a map, and benday dots.

   Benjamin Day was the son of Benjamin Henry Day, the American journalist who started the New York Sun; he wrote the paper, and set the type all himself. The Sun was the first paper to employ newsboys.

4. Following are the titles of Lichtenstein paintings I included in the slide show when I presented a shorter version this paper to the Drama Division meeting at the convention of the Modern Language Association in New Orleans. December, 1988.

   The “Love” Paintings:
                       M-Maybe
                       Nurse
                       Two Swimmers
                       The Kiss
                       The Engagement Ring

   The “War” Paintings:
                       Whaam!
                       As I Opened Fire
                       Torpedo-Los!
                       Tzing (Live Ammo Series, No. 4)
                       OK Hot Shot
                       Brattata
                       Takka Takka
                       Sweet Dreams Baby
                       Wall Explosion, No. 1

5. I omit Sticks and Bones from the discussion of the Vietnam plays partly because its own dependence on television images confuses the visual issues here, and partly because it takes place on the domestic front and therefore lacks the visual images of war I am discussing here. It is worth noting, however, that anachronistic and cartoon images fill this play as well; consider the picture created by Ozzie's bragging about out-running a bowling ball, and the solution to Harriet's crossword puzzle question, “a four-letter word that starts with “G” and ends with “B,” to which Rick replies, “Club. … It's a cartoon word. … cartoon people say it when they're drowning. G-L-U-B” (47).

6. Compare this to the description of the Vietnam War as image-experience by veteran Philip D. Beidler.

   Golden-age TV: cartoons, commercials, cowboys, comedians and caped crusaders, all coming across together at quantum-level intensity, in a single frantic continuum of noise, color and light—child-world dreams of aggression and escape mixed up with moralistic fantasies of heroism beleaguered yet ultimately regnant in a world of lurking, omnipresent dangers and deceits—in sum, a composite high-melodrama and low-comedy videotape of the American soul.

   (11)

7. Carter Ratcliff discusses Lichtenstein in relation to Walter Benjamin's theories, particularly those in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and notes that although,

   Lichtenstein's canvases mimic photo-mechanical processes, his prints employ them, and he delights in minimizing the difference between mimicry and the mimicked, … nowhere in the spacious labyrinth of his art is there a sign that his play with the mechanics of reproduction has deeply engaged him with history.

   (115)

Works Cited

Alloway, Lawrence, Lichtenstein. New York: Abbeville Press, 1983.

Asahina, Robert. “The Basic Training of American Playwrights,” Theatre 9 (Spring, 1978), 30-37.

Beidler, Philip D. American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1982.

Coplans, Johns. “Roy Lichtenstein: an interview” in Roy Lichtenstein. London: Tate Gallery, 1968.

Dudar, Helen. “… And as Rabe Sees Hollywood,” New York Times, June 17, 1984: 12, 5.

Freedman, Samuel. “Rabe on the War at Home,” New York Times, June 28, 1984: C, 13.

Homan, Richard. “American Playwrights in the 1970's: Rabe and Shepard, Critical Quarterly, 24 (Spring, 1982): 73-82.

Hughes, Catherine. Plays, Politics and Polemic. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1973.

Kaprow, Allan. “Introduction” to Roy Lichtenstein at CalArts. Valencia. California: California Institute of the Arts, 1977.

Morphet, Richard. Roy Lichtenstein. London: Tate Gallery, 1968.

Rabe, David. The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel in Two Plays by David Rabe. New York: Penguin, 1978.

———. Goose and TomTom. New York: Grove, 1986.

———. Hurlyburly. New York: Samuel French, 1989.

———. In the Boom Boom Room. New York: Grove, 1986.

———. Sticks and Bones. New York: Samuel French, 1987.

———. Streamers. New York: Knopf, 1987.

Ratcliff, Carter. “The Work of Roy Lichtenstein in the Age of Walter Benjamin's and Jean Baudrillard's Popularity,” in Art in America (February, 1989): 112-121.

Werner, Craig. “Primal Scream and Nonsense Rhymes: David Rabe's Revolt,” Educational Theatre Journal, vol. 30, 1978: 517-529.

Wilson, Simon. Pop. New York: Barron's, 1978.