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)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)