Actors Who Say They Hate Actors Are Phonies

Does Holden actually hate the movies? Look, I know he says he does, more than once. But throughout the book, I felt like he wasn't making good on that statement. "Does Holden actually hate the movies?" is written three times in my notebook in various places. I feel like its the sort of thing that Holden would like to say because he likes how it sounds, how people react when you say something as outlandish as "I don't like pizza". I also think he sees the film industry as a proxy for certain values that he'd like to reject, so he wishes he hated the movies. But he doesn't actually hate them.

Sure, he hates Laurence Olivier's Hamlet but that's because he thinks its bad; he was still excited to see it. He says the nice thing about Phoebe is she can tell a good movie from a bad movie, implying there are good movies. He talks about people who laugh at the wrong parts (Brossard and Ackley), implying there are right parts. I hear you say "Caroline, these are such picky points. He probably still dislikes most movies, even if its not every single one". And I hear you. I still got the impression throughout the narrative that Holden seems exactly the kind of person inclined to like movies, because he's constantly casting himself in them.

Holden likes ideals---especially if they can remain unchanged---and images that represent those ideals. He starts fights he has no intention of winning so that he can be the guy getting beat up by a bully without hitting back. He values martyrdom (as we see from his admiration of James Castle), so he puts himself in that role even if that image gets ruined when we pan out and see Holden is the one that started the fight. He likes to paint himself, despite being a 17 year old, as a weathered and jaded old guy. He laughs and thanks them when bartenders ask how old he is, and he claims that he smokes far too much and is trying to cut back. When he's talking to Sally Hayes, the way he describes running away sounds less like a plausible reality, and more like he's got a movie script and is trying to cast Sally and himself in the lead roles. Also, the way he romanticizes people feels like a movie too. Its all expositional details, the kings in the back row, and never the broad strokes that most people would use to describe a friend to someone who doesn't know them.

The overall effect produced by these things is weird. On the one hand, Catcher in the Rye is a work of fiction, and thus I should not be surprised it contains the conventions of fiction (show, don't tell, etc). But on the other hand, it really does feel like it's Holden and not just Salinger who utilises these tropes and tools of works of fiction. Maybe Salinger is only trying to hint at Holden being a natural writer, but for me I kept being struck by the feeling that Holden (being so well versed in and inclined to use the conventions of storytelling) watches a lot more movies than he'd like to let on.

I Want to Be Friends with Holden Caulfield and Here's Why

I have just scanned the "Early Life" section of J.D. Salinger's Wikipedia page. If you did the same, some phrases would jump out at you. He "managed the fencing team," and "Salinger's Valley Forge 201 file reveals that he was a 'mediocre' student." Familiar, no? Others would jump out for the opposite reason. "In youth, Salinger attended public schools on the West Side of Manhattan." Perhaps Holden's dissatisfaction with the elite schooling system is a reflection of the fact that, unlike Holden himself, the author was not born into this society?

All of this is to illustrate a rather obvious point: a fictitious coming-of-age story is going to inevitably be a reflection of the author's own real-life coming-of-age story. We have read one and started another and thus far (my esteemed peers' opinions of Mr. Caulfield notwithstanding) I would much rather be friends with Salinger than Joyce. (Not that J.D. would necessarily want to be friends with me. A few paragraphs later on his Wikipedia page you'd learn he became something of a recluse later in life). 

I came into the possession of this conviction while reflecting on the similarities between Stephen and Holden. I remembered feeling a distinct deja vu for The Catcher in the Rye in the first few chapters of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Now that we've finished Portrait, though, that feeling is gone. Admittedly, I still see both protagonists as textbook iterations of the self-important, intellectual, cynical teenage boy trope, but to very different effect. Stephen, as a reflection of Joyce, pulls himself away from the world in order to create beautiful, objective art about it. He's indifferent to his family and friends, and is only interested in the objective artistic concept of women, not their living, breathing, thinking reality.

Holden is the exact opposite of this. Although not as explicitly stated in the title this time, here we are also seeing the creation of a writer (English is the only class he didn't fail!). Salinger seems to believe, as reflected in Holden, that to create art about your experiences you have to be absolutely enthralled with them. Holden is hyper-aware of the people in his life. He fixates on the most minute details of their habits. He is affectionate (in different ways, of course) of everyone, even as he's calling them phonies, and over the goddamn moon for his kid sister Phoebe, Allie and Jane. I guarantee he knows how many kids his mom has. I'm not saying he's a saint or anything, but the kid has profound empathy.

Maybe Joyce is the truer artist, but Salinger is the guy I'd want to go bowling or something with for sure.