VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM (25)
By:
September 30, 2024
One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of science fiction novels and comics from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.
WILD PALMS | BRUCE WAGNER & JULIAN ALLEN | 1990–1993
“History’s so weird. The collapse of communism’s a funny thing. You don’t have to be a genius to guess which way the pendulum’s swinging next.”
Bruce Wagner haunts Hollywood like an urban legend: a filthy Diogenes wandering down Sunset, birthed from the stew of sin and money and drugs and cynicism that powers the American entertainment industry. His works offer up a pantheon of archetypes from our postmodern mediasphere, arrayed and exposed as to shock us with their godlike powers and vicious amorality. Maps to the Stars, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, his underground samizdat self-published stories of “Bud Wiggins, Hollywood chauffeur” — one wonders if Hollywood parcels out Wagner’s work so sparingly because he is capable of conveying the near-cosmic horror behind Hollywood’s global cultural hegemony.
Which makes Wild Palms, his serialized 1990-1993 comic (illustrated by hyper-realist artist and chronicler of American parapolitics Julian Allen) all the more startling. Published in Details, one of the trendiest lifestyle mags of the ’80s and ’90s, and eventually turned into a major ABC miniseries in 1993, Wild Palms puts us inside the life of Harry Wyckoff, Hollywood agent and postmodern Everyman, drowning in the signifiers of conspicuous upper-middle class consumption. At the outset of the series, Harry is drifting through an empty life full of creature comforts until old friend Paige Katz opens his eyes to a world of savage violence and perverse conspiracy that eventually comes very close to home.
Harry discovers that his life, his career, his family are merely set dressing for something far more sinister: Hollywood movers and shakers involved with weird sex, hallucinogenic drugs, and sudden and brutal retributive violence against those who move against “the Fathers,” a vaguely-sketched quasi-cult headed by the enigmatic silver-haired Senator Anton Kreutzer.
The references to other works of art fly fast and furious across the serial’s seventy pages. Literary references are knowingly emptied of all signification. Real-life Hollywood stars pop up alongside the comic’s fictional figures, including Carrie Fisher, a Wagner friend who had a key role in Cronenberg’s adaptation of Maps to the Stars, and Jim Belushi and Dana Delany who played Harry and Beth in the ABC-TV Wild Palms).
Wagner’s kaleidoscopic vision of media overload stands right alongside other chroniclers of postmodern America like Philip K. Dick (Harry ends up in one of Kreutzer’s “Synthiotics” rehab facilities, very reminiscent of “New-Path” from A Scanner Darkly) and Don DeLillo (Kreutzer’s gnomic manner of communication after shooting up with the drug “mimezine” recalls the overdose side-effects of the drug Dylar from White Noise).
Wild Palms being a product of the period immediately following the Cold War is no accident. Wagner’s lascivious tour through Hollywood’s dark century of violence, sadism and kidnapping asks the question, “What sort of hegemony are we in for now that the communist sphere is no longer viable?” and the answer comes back: a shattered mirror populated by vacant ghosts, where no one is innocent, no one is guilty, but everyone is wearing fantastic vintage eyeglasses.
VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on SNOW CRASH | Mandy Keifetz on THE GENOCIDAL HEALER | Matthew De Abaitua on SWAMP THING | Carlo Rotella on THE PLAYER OF GAMES | Lynn Peril on GEEK LOVE | Stephanie Burt on THE CARPATHIANS | Josh Glenn on DAL TOKYO | Deb Chachra on THE HYPERION CANTOS | Adam McGovern on KID ETERNITY | Nikhil Singh on THE RIDDLING REAVER | Judith Zissman on RANDOM ACTS OF SENSELESS VIOLENCE | Ramona Lyons on PARABLE OF THE SOWER | Jessamyn West on the MARS TRILOGY | Flourish Klink on DOOMSDAY BOOK | Matthew Battles on THE INTEGRAL TREES | Tom Nealon on CLAY’S ARK | Sara Ryan on SARAH CANARY | Gordon Dahlquist on CONSIDER PHLEBAS | Alex Brook Lynn on VURT | Miranda Mellis on STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND | Nicholas Rombes on RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH | Adelina Vaca on NEUROMANCER | Marc Weidenbaum on AMERICAN FLAGG! | Peggy Nelson on VIRTUAL LIGHT | Michael Grasso on WILD PALMS.
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