Many of you will already know Ben Elton as the talented pen behind such successful British programs as The Young Ones and Black Adder. Elton’s novel, Popcorn, will appeal to a much broader readership than his Brit-coms currently affect.
Popcorn transcends definition. All at once it revels in the cult of Hollywood as much as it uses a broadsword to slice Tinseltown to shreds. To call this satire is an understatement. It has the power to offend every poor soul who’s ever purchased a copy of Us, People, or The National Enquirer.
Bruce Delamitri is a bad boy Hollywood writer and director: think Oliver Stone crossed with Quentin Tarentino. He’s just received an Oscar for his movie Ordinary Americans (a thinly veiled Natural Born Killers) and is kicking himself for the cliché acceptance speech he gave instead of ranting – as he’d wanted – against the safe pabulum of the establishment, which he has just become part of.
But when we are introduced to Bruce, he is in a police interview room. Little by little, Elton feeds us snippets of the past couple of days in Bruce Delamitri’s life, working backwards to the origin of the incredible events that landed him in the police station.
Bruce’s chapters are interspersed with chapters focused on Wayne and Scout, a young couple hell bent on meeting Bruce, their hero. They’ve been copying murders committed in Bruce’s movies. But Bruce disavows in many interviews any implication that violence in movies incites others to violence.
Wayne has a devious plan to get himself absolved of the crimes he’s committed – have Bruce admit on national TV that his movies are the reason Wayne and Scout killed, that they themselves are blameless, weak souls wrongly influenced by Bruce’s films. That it’s all Hollywood’s fault. And by the end of the book, Elton will have you, too, questioning whose fault it really is.
Are Wayne and Scout really blameless? How much influence does Hollywood have an the misguided and psychopathic, or even the mildly imbalanced mind?
298 pages
