She is fading out like Journee’s clothes so you can’t see her now.

I had the opportunity recently to attend the East Coast premiere of the black-and-white version of David Chase’s 2012 film Not Fade Away. This coming-of-age story is many things: a period piece (in fact, a piece of Chase’s own biography), a celebration of music, and an exploration of the desire to “make it” and be a success. Since I write this blog, the movie made me think of Finnegans Wake and Joyce’s work generally in several ways (especially in the film’s conversion of experience into art).

This post looks at a few resemblances I noted between Joyce’s works and Not Fade Away. My purpose is not to assert a direct influence. I’m unclear on how much familiarity Chase has with Joyce. Instead, I want to consider how two different artists, working in different mediums, treat some similar themes, especially the cycle of generations.

Not Fade Away frames its story of a suburban teenage band against the formation of the Rolling Stones. The brief opening scene of the film dramatizes the fateful meeting of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on a train, where they talk excitedly of the American rhythm and blues groups that they both adore. The movie immediately cuts to the suburbs of New Jersey, where a fictionalized David Chase, in the guise of Doug Damiano, meets another young man, Gene. This is the far less auspicious beginning of a different band, which an opening voiceover from Doug’s sister tells us is a group we’ve never heard of.

This framing resembles the way that Joyce situates the stories of Shem and Shaun in the Wake (primarily in Book II) against the older, greater, and more mythic tales of the Father (primarily in Book I). The techniques of both the film and the novel suggest that these stories are a distant echo of something more substantive (but also, perhaps, something harder for us to connect to). Not Fade Away firmly takes place in what Joyce calls “world of the children,” the next generation, but it inhabits that world fully and lovingly, suggesting its importance despite its status (at least under one interpretation) as a pale echo of something greater.

Indeed, the film is something of a portal to 1960s New Jersey, awash in the details of the setting, down to the slang and even the casual slurs that have now passed out of style (to which the movie even calls attention as Doug’s sister explicitly chastises their father for using some words, recalling the kinds of intergenerational conflict that was common in many families at the time and would soon be examined by the sitcom All in the Family). There’s something homey and comfortable about the movie’s fond treatment of this world, even for those of us who didn’t experience it directly. I was reminded of Joyce’s loving depiction of the minute particulars of life in Dublin. Although he left Dublin young and practically never returned, he continued to write about it for the rest of his life, and it clearly held a special place in his heart.

Broadly, the content of the film resonates with Wakean ideas of rising and falling. This is perhaps most obvious in the friction between Doug and his father Pat, played by James Gandolfini in a decidedly non-Tony Soprano role: a working-class man who is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Yet he resembles Tony in that both live a life with which they are unhappy, and both look with despair on the next generation. Though he initially has hopes that his son will join the army, based on a conversation early in the movie, he ultimately faces the disappointment of Doug’s very different life path: Doug grows his hair out, aspires to play music, and, eventually, develops a desire to move to California to work in movies. In a fascinating scene in the middle of the film, Pat takes Doug to dinner and confesses that he himself wanted to join the army to fight in WWII but could not because he worked for a company that directly aided the war effort. Pat’s friends went off to war, where they were wounded or killed, but he stayed home. When he calls himself “lucky” — which indeed most people would consider him — the sarcasm is palpable. After Doug leaves for California, Pat is last seen watching on TV the song “Bali Ha’i” from South Pacific, quietly weeping.

Most of Pat’s character apparently emerges directly from reality, and his dialogue during the dinner conversation is almost verbatim from the actual dinner. Chase himself commented at the end of the film, during a Q&A session, that the reason Pat is crying in his final scene is because he missed out on his generation’s great adventure. And now his son is off on the next generation’s great adventure, a very different kind.

I find it interesting to consider a character who *doesn’t* feel lucky that he escaped death or disfigurement in war. He feels instead a numb sense of loss, and he wanders through life in a “fallen” state that recalls the HCE of Finnegans Wake. [“Well, old Humber was as glommen as grampus, with the tares at his thor and the buboes for ages”] In a sense, he has “faded away,” instead of going out with an adventurous bang, where he at least could have felt more connected to his friends.

As in Finnegans Wake, the next generation rises to replace him, and though the next generation’s adventure is different, it is also one in which dreams similarly will not be realized, or at least not realized in the way people might expect.

The band has its own pattern of rise and fall. The lead singer, Gene, accidentally swallows a joint before a show one night and can’t perform, leading to Doug taking over as singer, first that one time and then permanently, and taking the band to new heights. Gene later falls lower when another accident finally leads the rest of the band members to expel him. Doug himself is discouraged and nearly ends the band when he learns of his girlfriend’s promiscuous past with his bandmates. Wells, another band member, actually dies and is resurrected: after he suffers a catastrophic motorcycle accident, there is a closeup shot of his bloody face as he lies on an ambulance stretcher. The audience naturally assumes that this is filmic language indicating death, but the movie later suddenly cuts to him sitting in a hospital bed chatting with Doug. The actor who plays Wells amusingly noted during the Q&A that he had a dual reaction to seeing his own character’s resurrection: he was at first glad to see he was alive but then, as soon as Wells opened his mouth, he longed to see the annoying jerk killed off again immediately.

It’s interesting to consider the girlfriend character’s name, Grace, which recalls Grace O’Malley, the inspiration for the Wake‘s Prankquean, who ushers in the fallen world. To a degree, she’s responsible for some of the “Fall” of this story — first, kindling Doug’s childish jealousy that nearly tears the band apart (though that’s not at all her doing or her fault) and later tempting him to follow her to California — but I was more taken by the inadvertent Joycean allurement offered to Doug by Grace’s sister: “I’ve seen her take a poo, if that holds any interest for you.” Pat reports being tempted by a woman he meets at his cancer treatments in Boston. He says he considered leaving Doug’s mother for this other woman, but he decides against it. “What would she do?” he asks rhetorically. Pat’s appetite for “adventure” doesn’t lead him to throw his entire life overboard now: he remains a steady, solid presence, devoted to his familial commitments. Perhaps that’s a sign of how defeated he is, how “faded away” he’s become, but I find something admirable in his devotion to his less-than-ideal life and his refusal to chase an idealized fantasy. However, Doug does follow his temptress: Grace leads him across the country before vanishing from the film at the end, perhaps portending a breakup. Doug roams the streets of Los Angeles alone, symbolically birthed into a new life on the West Coast. It’s at this point that another representative of the female principle of the universe — Doug’s sister, who had briefly narrated at the opening of the film — suddenly and jarringly walks onto the frame to break the fourth wall and close the movie by dancing, after wondering whether music or the atomic bomb will prove to be the greater of America’s gifts to the world. It’s an audacious and strange ending, but these sorts of techniques work better in the context of music and autobiography than they do in the context of The Sopranos, where the gimmicky ending and the voiceover narration (in the Many Saints movie) feel more out of place.

In true Wakean fashion, combining opposites, the final “fall” of the band is its success: they perform for a record label who sees promise in them and assigns them to build hype by performing covers at gigs for a year. This is definitely a foot in the door of the music industry, but the band members balk at the prospect of not becoming stars instantly — and at the idea that they will have to put in a significant amount of work. They have achieved success, but not the kind of success they imagined and idealized. It’s at this point that the film makes its cleverest point: Doug’s father had urged him to work hard in school, citing the old maxim that “success is 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration.” In response to the band’s resistance to work at building hype, a record execute quotes the same aphorism.

Music had seemed a glorious rebellion from the previous generation and its ideas of slow and steady effort, but the music industry is revealed to be just another iteration of it. And so the cycle turns.

The irony is that both Doug and his father *did* get tremendously lucky, but they’re unable to see it because of the way they idealize the world. The father sees a great “adventure” that he missed out on, and the son sees a magical rock star “success” that remains out of grasp. They’re both deluded by the ways they narrate their own stories to themselves.

That delusion deserves a special comment: as loosely autobiographical narratives go, Not Fade Away resists flattering its creator. All of the bandmates embody the foolishness of youth, and though they’re presented sympathetically, and their foibles are made endearing, it’s hard not to see the movie as a critique of an idealizing impulse that’s present in all of us. In one of my favorite scenes, the bandmates behold a celestial wonder in the sky and decide that it must be an omen that the three of them are destined for success.

Of course, they’re just reading signs into natural phenomena that are ultimately just “Gasballs spinning about, crossing each other, passing,” as Bloom thinks in Chapter 8 of Ulysses. The characters of the film fail to grasp the apathy of the stars. I cannot help but think of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus talking in Ulysses 17 about celestial apparitions that appear to link their births to the birth of Shakespeare and Rudy Bloom. It reminds me too of the sight that appears as they urinate together in Bloom’s garden:

A star precipitated with great apparent velocity across the firmament from Vega in the Lyre above the zenith beyond the stargroup of the Tress of Berenice towards the zodiacal sign of Leo.

The joining of the lyre (instrument of the poet, Stephen) and Leo(pold) by the star signifies the union of the two characters through Joyce’s art.

Stars remind me of another famous Joycean image of fading, one he borrowed from the poet Percy Shelley, who likened the inspired creative mind to a fading coal. Shelley writes,

the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure

The “invisible influence” is poetic inspiration, which comes unbidden and unpredictably from the unconscious mind. According to Shelley, it awakens our minds to a temporary burst of creativity, one that flares up and quickly fades away. Art tries to capture that fleeting brilliance.

Joyce takes this image and runs with it. His literary alter-ego Stephen Dedalus says during his Shakespeare discussion in Ulysses 9,

as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.

I discuss this quote here, and the gist of my interpretation is that Joyce/Stephen connects the flux of the universe with the stories we create to constitute our “selves” — he figures them as “consubstantial” with each other, that is, of the same substance, like the Father and Son of the Christian Trinity, which I guess would make the process of storytelling akin to the Holy Spirit. That creative process, driven by the wind of inspiration (“inspiration,” like spirit, comes from a root that means “breath”), happens in a Moment of art that unites our concepts of past, present, and future (much as Ulysses unites Stephen and Bloom as past, present, and future versions of James Joyce).

That creativity fades, as all things fade, but what remains is both a record of the creativity and the process itself, which goes on to create anew and turn the cycle of history. Those are the things that do “not fade away.”

What an experience it must have been for Chase in that theatre, seeing his own life and his own artistic recreation of that life from the perspective of who he is now. Past, present, and future. “Hold to the now,” Stephen tells himself in Chapter 9, “the here, through which all future plunges to the past.” The Moment is a uniter of past and future, for both past and future are ideas arising in the ever-fleeting Now.

The past has faded away. That iteration of the director’s life has faded away. But it simultaneously remains, more real than ever, preserved by art.

In Finnegans Wake II.1, we see Issy left alone after Shem flees, and though she fades away, she returns:

She is fading out like Journee’s clothes so you can’t see her now. Still we know how Day the Dyer works, in dims and deeps and dusks and darks. And among the shades that Eve’s now wearing she’ll meet anew fiancy, tryst and trow. Mammy was, Mimmy is, Minuscoline’s to be.

It’s a cute coincidence that the phrase “Journee’s clothes” — the close of the journey of life, as well as the close of day (the French journee) — reminds me of the fact that a Journey song famously closes The Sopranos.

The other aspect of the past that remains is the art that inspired this film: the soundtrack is a glorious tribute to the music that inspired the young Chase, including even Rolling Stones songs like “Satisfaction,” which seem like they would be exorbitantly expensive. In response to an audience question about how they managed to license these songs, producer Steve Van Zandt slyly half-joked, “We know people,” but he also conceded that it wouldn’t be possible to license these songs today. The black and white image of this version of the film seemed to emphasize these songs, as if the fading of color from the image made the sounds brighten in our minds.

Similarly, Joyce’s works, and especially Finnegans Wake, are filled with the music that inspired him and that filled his childhood home (his brother would often sing “Finnegan’s Wake” during family music nights). It’s a testament to the creative energy that leaves its relics in the human mind and that ever seeks to move forward to produce more art.

Altogether, Not Fade Away is, like Finnegans Wake, a love letter to the creative forces that continue to move in all of our psyches. It leaves its audience inspired to create their own art, and craft new stories of themselves in their artistic endeavors and in the everyday labor of daily life.