PARTISAN REVIEW
315
There is a sense in which, one might argue, the obsessive, extreme,
arbitrary violence and necrophilia of
Hawk Moon
dramatizes life in our
culture and is there fore somehow "right" for us. We have Joyce Carol
Oates and Leonard Michaels and John Hawkes and John Gardner, after
all, writing fiction that is often described as neo-Gothic; we have Ken
Russell and Sam Peckinpah knocking them dead in the aisles; we have
what used to be called teeny-boppers dancing kinky dances to Alice
Cooper's "I Love the Dead." But
Hawk Moon
mostly belies these
comparisons, except perhaps for the last.
In one vignette, a maniac calmly licks and pastes five thousand
dollars in one hundred dollar bills allover the body of a naked female
corpse in his hotel room, then takes out his old Buntline Special and runs
his fingers back and forth along the "smooth black barrel." After this, he
plays Russian roulette with the corpse; dress'es up in his favorite cowboy
gear; puts on his Stones
Stick-), Fingers
album at full volume; then pours
gasoline over the "tits," lights the whole works, cremates the corpse in
the bathtub, and tidily washes the ashes down the drain. Shepard
constantly mixes sex with violence in such hideous combinations.
In another fragment, an unidentified character describes how to
start a forest fire at night and then watch "the beautiful orange glow eat
up the blackness and listen to the far away snapping and booms as trees
explode and fall like planes shot down.... " In other instances: a "tour–
ist" is reduced to a sniveling, bleeding heap in the middle of his New
York apartment -- biting and tearing at his own arms -- as the result
of a hexed Kachina doll he has purchased from Hopis in Arizona; the
leader of a gang of twelve-year-old hoods cuts off the left ear of an
innocent young nurse at a bus stop and later drives a hole through the
white lobe with a nail and threads it on a leather thong to wear around
his neck - - and the "Gods are well pleased" by this; an unidentified
character "kick [s] the shit" out of his dog for eating a peacock in their
rich neighborhood, then decides peacocks are "dumb" -- so he starts
stalking and killing them with his twenty-two, returning with his dog
each night "bloody and laughing with murder."
Possibly because of Shepard's screen and theatre background, where
characters are full-bodied the instant they set foot on stage or soundset,
he appears unable (or unwilling) to deal with full characterizations in a
narrative form. One does not have a sense, at any rate, that he is
expressing any special or sophisticated aesthetic theory or attitude to–
ward character or characterization as he works, rather that he is freaked
out on media tempos and disunities and/or figures he is writing for media
freaks. So, he parcels out the intense close-up, the quick cut, the precise
sense of rhythm and timing (which he is very good at, by the way), the
