References To Pop Culture
When they gather to watch movies one night, Vielle tells Richard, "As if talking to patients about their NDEs isn't bad enough, in her spare time Joanna researches famous people's last words." So does Willis: each chapter section and each chapter has an epigraph; they include:
- "More light!" (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's last words)
- "To die would be an awfully big adventure." (Charles Frohman, quoting J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan before he died on the sinking RMS Lusitania in 1915)
- "I must go in, the fog is rising." (Emily Dickinson's last words)
- "Hold tight!" (Karl Wallenda's last words)
Willis has the characters discuss a great many movies, some of which have indirect or obvious bearing on the novel's themes. They include Coma, Fight Club, Final Destination, Flatliners, Harold and Maude, and Peter Pan, as well as The Twilight Zone and The X-Files.
Joanna frequently talks about the Titanic movie; she, Vielle, Pat and Kit Briarley, and others share her dislike of it because of the changes to historical fact. Joanna (speaking for Willis), complains
about Lightoller and Murdoch. And Loraine Allison, she thought. She remembered ranting, "Why didn't they tell the stories of the real people who died on the Titanic, like John Jacob Astor and Lorraine Allison?... She was six years old and the only first class child to die, and her story's a lot more interesting than dopey Jack and Rose's!"Read more about this topic: Passage (2001 Novel)
Famous quotes containing the words pop culture, pop and/or culture:
“There is no comparing the brutality and cynicism of today’s pop culture with that of forty years ago: from High Noon to Robocop is a long descent.”
—Charles Krauthammer (b. 1950)
“Every man has been brought up with the idea that decent women don’t pop in and out of bed; he has always been told by his mother that “nice girls don’t.” He finds, of course, when he gets older that this may be untrue—but only in a certain section of society.”
—Barbara Cartland (b. 1901)
“Without metaphor the handling of general concepts such as culture and civilization becomes impossible, and that of disease and disorder is the obvious one for the case in point. Is not crisis itself a concept we owe to Hippocrates? In the social and cultural domain no metaphor is more apt than the pathological one.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)