David Kronke was appointed Mayor of Television after a bloodless coup in 2000. Since then, he has improved infrastructure, championed greater educational opportunities and fought for reforms that have utterly erased corruption and incompetence from the television industry. Since Mr. Kronke has ascended to power, Television is a far better place. Timequake: Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007
His sardonic nihilism influenced a generation or two and persists, though many don’t realize it, to this day; even though most of us soon grew past him, preferring the more nuanced novels of those he quite obviously inspired, I know teenagers still read him today. The last time I saw him on television, Jon Stewart shed his veneer of irony and sincerely thanked him for helping the “Daily Show” host survive his high-school years. He memorably and vividly described Richard Nixon’s smile, in “Jailbird,” as “a rosebud that had just been smashed by a hammer.” He, even more memorably, survived the firebombing of Dresden during World War II and from that experience created his masterpiece, “Slaughterhouse 5,” in which Billy Pilgrim, beleaguered by the realities of the present day, becomes “unstuck in time” in a futile attempt to escape life’s brutalities.
Anyone who laughed their way through “Breakfast of Champions” knew, in their heart of hearts, that anyone who could write such a wonderfully silly thing could never, ever, be an *. (Not the precise symbol, admittedly, but the best I could manage.)
Though his fiction had been turned into films by talents as appropriately diverse as Alan Rudolph, Keith Gordon, George Roy Hill and Jerry Lewis (who starred in the abysmal “Slapstick of Another Kind”), they tended to prove resistant to translation – it was his words that made his work so resilient and memorable; adding imagery was redundant.
One exception may have been “Between Time and Timbuktu,” a film that first aired on public television when I was 11. It was an unwieldy amalgam culled from a number of Vonnegut stories, but so dense with a glorious glut of ideas that, as a kid at least, you forgave it its messiness. (Remember, we were just trying to emerge from the even messier ’60s.) One sequence in particular etched itself into my brain: A dance troupe, weighted down with “handicaps” lest someone feel less special, less talented, than the ballerinas on display, attempting to celebrate their art despite their burdens. At that time, when the clash between conformity and artistic expression was at its most pointed, it was the perfect metaphor for state-mandated mediocrity, which, somewhere in my unformed mind, I still sort of understood (growing up in Indiana may have made that a smidgen easier).
In the companion book to the telefilm, Vonnegut wrote, “Film is too clankingly real, too industrial for me. … I have become an enthusiast for the printed word again. I have to be that, I now understand, because I want to be a character in all of my works. I can do that in print. In a movie, somehow, the author always vanishes. Everything of mine which has been filmed so far has been one character short, and the character is me.”
You’ll read a lot more studious, articulate and insightful appreciations of Vonnegut today. This one’s lame. This one’s knocked off by someone with too many other concerns on his mind. But this one is indicative of everyone who grew up in Vonnegut’s thrall – it’s impossible not to want to pay tribute to him, if, obviously, belatedly.
So it goes.