The Last Picture Show

 

The Last Picture Show – Larry McMurtry

There have been several instances where I have enjoyed reading a novel so much, that I went out of my way to watch the movie. This was a rare example of the opposite.  I recently watched the wonderful 1971 critically-acclaimed film, and since I had enjoyed other novels of Larry McMurtry, it was a no brainer to pick this one up.  I even paid the full price for a digital copy via Amazon! That’s not like me at all.  I’m a cheapskate when it comes to….well…..everything.

Well, this was a very good read and the film was a very faithful adaptation.  I have to admit, though, this book made me kind of queasy.  It definitely wasn’t what I expected. I mean, I knew the story, but I was surprised at how graphic this book was.  For a novel written in 1966, I’m surprised that many of the hard-right religious organizations didn’t try to ban it.  Maybe they did and I’m just unaware.  This book was a very crass, X-rated look at life in a small town in Texas during the early 1950s. The fact that the book is somewhat autobiographical makes it even more disturbing.

The small town where all the action takes place is named Thalia. It’s fictitious. From what I can tell, it’s somewhere north of Fort Worth and somewhere south of Wichita Falls.  There’s almost nothing for the residents to do in this town, and 90% of the action involves sex.  When the story begins, our 3 high school protagonists Sonny, Duane, and Duane’s girlfriend Jacy, are all virgins.  Not by the end of the story. Oh no.  What’s so sad in this book is that sex is never utilized as a way to demonstrate affection and/or love.  We see sex used as a weapon, and excuse for boredom, and a notch on some sort of ladder of maturity.  Although the 3 main characters are high-school seniors, the adults in the story aren’t any better.  To the best of my recollection, there were only two married couples in the story, and although the two women in each of these couples had a lot of sexual intercourse in the book, none of it was with their husbands. Of course, we get the notion that their husbands wouldn’t even care if they found out their wives were diddling around.

Particularly disturbing is Jacy’s mother Lois.  This mother and daughter are quite the pair, and the apple obviously did not fall far from the tree.  When Jacy seems to sleep her way through the entire town for less than ethical purposes, we’re not too surprised when we meet her 40-year-old mother.  Lois is a far cry from any standard of morality and seems to encourage her daughter to live her life in the exact same manner as she, herself, does.  These people are pretty callous. The reader may want to consider using an Excel Spreadsheet to aid in keeping proper track of who sleeps with who in this story.

If it seems like I’m talking a lot about sex it’s because that seems to be the only thing that ever happens. The story is supposedly somewhat autobiographical, but that does little to alleviate one’s queasiness.  For all of the modern-day rants about how immoral today’s society is, people should read a book such as this to counter that argument. It would dispel any kind of ridiculous notion that everything was all Andy and Opie in these small towns across the nation.

There are rare times when everything isn’t sex, sex, and more sex, and I wish some of these areas had been explored more. Example: the Thalia high school basketball team is pretty underwhelming, and being such a small school in a small town doesn’t help. Duane and Sonny are both on the team (the coach has to practically beg the high school students to play on the team. There really isn’t much interest for anyone to play). The team travels to play a game in a neighboring town where the basketball court is so small, that the foul lines are actually drawn on the walls.  So a lot of players injure themselves running into the walls with various degrees of concussions etc.  To make matters worse, the referee is the Home Economics teacher at the school who doesn’t like, nor know anything about, basketball.  He’s only drafted into his job by the high school since it’s determined that he gets paid an awful lot to teach girls how to cook and clean, so he must supplement his money doing other things.

I laughed at that portion of the book. I didn’t laugh much elsewhere. I’m glad that I saw the movie before the book since it added a strong level of believability to the story.  The movie wasn’t that much different, but it allowed me to see things a bit more clearly and actually made it more believable that people could get through their day to day lives the way they do.  Larry McMurtry is an author that I hold in high regard, and actually viewing the movie gave me a much better perspective of the points he was trying to enunciate as he told this somewhat dismal tale.

Although the point isn’t strongly made, the “last picture show” element to the story alludes to the fact that in the 1950s, television slowly appeared on the scene which meant that fewer and fewer people were going out to the evening movies or the weekend matinees. It’s meant to add an element of sadness to the story.  I confess, though, that my thought was that if everyone in the town of Thalia eventually got a tv, maybe they would have something to do other than cheap carnal sex all of the time?