Beautiful Ruins

The plot of Beautiful Ruins is revealed out of chronological order. Chapter 1 takes place in Porto Vergogna in April 1962, but the following chapter flashes to Hollywood in roughly the 2010s only to flash back to Porto Vergogna in 1962 again in Chapter 3. Walter arranges the plot in this fashion to create a sense of disorder and subvert readers’ expectations in a postmodernist fashion. Postmodernism, a genre of literature that emerged in the aftermath of the chaos of WWII, emphasizes the concept that existence and human history (the 20th century especially) are inherently disorderly. Postmodern literature often employs fragmentation and subversion of traditional storytelling techniques to point toward disorder. Most readers expect stories to be told chronologically, but Beautiful Ruins flouts these expectations in order to demonstrate that post-WWII America is disjointed, and humanity cannot properly arrange memories in an orderly fashion or rely on tradition anymore. Postmodernism is also linked with cinematic techniques of flashback, flashforward, and montage—and cinema is a subject that looms large in Beautiful Ruins.

At the beginning of the novel, Pasquale expresses admiration for both glamourous American celebrities like the Kennedy family and mundane, unknown Americans like Alvis. His fascination stems from America’s cultural imperialism. In the decades following WWII, America rose to global superpower status and left an impact on European countries such as Italy through exports such as cinema, “televisions and telephones,” and “double martinis” (2), all of which appear sophisticated and modern to Europeans like Pasquale. Pasquale credits America with ushering in “the dawn of a glorious modernity” (2) and desperately wants Americans to visit Porto Vergogna so that they can bring “the tiny, backwoods village of his youth” into the modern age (2). Initially, Pasquale sees Dee as the living embodiment of America instead of an actual person. When Pasquale meets her, he begs, “Please. Come. Beautiful America” (9), as though she is America arriving in Porto Vergogna with the purpose of bringing it into modernity. He also thinks to himself, “Here is the future” once she enters The Hotel Adequate View. He remains smitten with Dee throughout the novel, but he comes to see her less as a symbol and more as a complex individual when she opens to him in Chapter 3 and he falls in love with her as a person.

While Pasquale champions 20th-century America, Chapter 2 suggests that contemporary America is in a state of cultural decline. According to Claire, high-brow, sophisticated art is dead in the 2010s since films have turned into “concession-delivery […] ads for new toys, video game launches” (24). Michael Deane, once a leading film producer, produces low-brow TV shows featuring “obese people racing to eat huge meals” (27-28) and “horny middle-aged women set up on dates with horny young men” (28). While 1960s films spoke to complex emotions, 2010s films and TV shows cater to the id, the part of the human psyche that relates to base, animalistic desires. Walter suggests that American society underwent a detrimental, radical change that led to a more debased culture sometime between the 1960s and the 2010s.

Walter proposes that cinema has degraded, but it still impacts American culture, values, and perspectives. Shane originally thinks the phrase “Act as if ye have faith and it shall be given to you” (19) comes from the Bible but later discovers that it is a quote from the David Mamet movie The Verdict. This revelation dismays Shane until he concludes that movies are “the true religion” (21). Cinema resembles religion because it produces “archetypal stories that [become] our shared history, that [teach] us what to expect from life, that [define] our values” (21). Shane and his generation abandon tradition and religion, turning to cinema for spiritual guidance. This abandonment fits with the postmodernist decree that technology, consumerism, and imperialism have eroded values. In addition, cinema’s ability to redefine people’s worldview and sense of reality indicates the Hollywood cinema industry’s subtle control over the masses, which ties into the overarching theme of Hollywood’s dark side.

Chapter 3 depicts Dee reflecting on the life she lives and coming to grips with the likelihood of her own death. Dr. Crane tells her that she has cancer, and she assumes that she will die. While talking to Pasquale on the porch, she thinks about how movies influence people’s perceptions of their own lives, causing them to expect “real action” (54) that never occurs and ignore the present moment. She shows self-awareness by admitting that she is guilty of this behavior. In addition to demonstrating who she is under her veneer of glamour, her confrontation with her negative qualities and disregard for the present relates to the overall theme of time and regret since she expresses sorrow over the fact that she may die without ever having fully lived.

Alvis disappoints Pasquale when he recounts the plot of his novel, The Smile of Heaven, and reveals that there is no happy or heroic ending. Pasquale expects the novel’s protagonist to be a victorious war hero since he is an American soldier in a book about WWII. Instead, the protagonist is an “obscene wreck” (59). Traditionally, protagonists in war novels perform acts of valor and appear larger than life; Alvis breaks away from the rules of the war novel genre. Too young to understand the truth about war, Pasquale does not appreciate Alvis’s subversion of expectations and wants The Smile of Heaven to follow the rules of its genre so that it fits a pattern he understands. Pasquale believes that Alvis can make the novel more suitable to its genre by having the protagonist fantastically kill Hitler. Alvis entertains this idea, but he envisions the assassination as an accidental action. The protagonist still subverts Pasquale’s expectations since he lacks the courage to be intentional in murdering Hitler. Additionally, Pasquale dislikes Alvis’s idea because Pasquale believes that everything happens necessarily as though arranged by a higher power with clear intentions. The accidental death of Hitler is a chaotic element that runs counter to Pasquale’s belief in order. Alvis attempts to impress life’s chaos on Pasquale by proclaiming, “Everything is an accident” (59). Through this statement, Alvis reveals himself to be a postmodernist writer who recognizes the disorder within the world and does not give his readers a semblance of order by catering to their expectations.