Buckaroo Banzai the novelizations: a series retrospective.

 

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension

 

"The essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration," - Susan Sontag.

The Buckaroo Banzai movie novelization is an elaborate shaggy dog story and the punchline is after reading it you are inspired to try to be a better person.

I heard someone else describe the movie this is based on as a partially successful adaption of its own novelization. I would agree.

Most people, compare it to jumping into an ongoing series without the context of a beginning or an ending. Much like life the loose ends seem to imply that the noise can become a type of music.

I have also heard Buckaroo Banzai as a character described as America's forgotten answer to Dr who and this may be so. But in the spirit of camp when confronting greatness Buckaroo is not a time lord, he is a renaissance man. A measuring stick for the fever dream of what was twentieth-century America and dreams are dangerous things you have to be careful who you give them to.

 

 

Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League

 

 

 This book is a deconstruction of fandom. Of life as seen from someone born in the twentieth century and makes you feel like you took a hallucinogenic that was stronger than you anticipated.

This book is so far the only thing that seems to be an adequate summation of living in the post trump (hopefully it will stay that way) era.

A glorious trainwreck of a novel with some interesting ideas and possibly the single most condensed euphoric-inducing level of lunacy I have ever read.

I like getting messed up on weird and or bizarre fiction but I am in this case more akin to say not sure if it was surreal or just phawked up.

Words fail me for the first time in my life (I read the last hundred pages of the novel at a gallop and am utterly overwhelmed and going against my best judgment to not wait to write a review.)

The writing is overwrought and drawn out but is so funny that there can be no doubt E. M. Rouch had complete control of himself when he wrote this novel. The message remains the same but he more than humanizes Banzai by the end of the book, making him a flawed character unable to react to what is going on like everyone else (including this reader). Then ends the book by making the guy a god-emperor.

Certainly, I think I know what the basic idea was. Do a deconstruction of pulp/superheroes all the while staying true to the form of that particular genre. On these terms, I can not argue that he succeeded.

The metagames of Buckaroo thinking at one he was a character in a fiction or the character in an RPG are cute. The main metagame seems to be on the reader of which the punchline last sentence most closely surmises this whole story is supposed to be set in our world and so is true.. though it is in a were not in Kansas anymore kind of way

I wish things had wrapped up in any sort of significant way but honestly, I have more questions about the characters, Realty, and my own sanity than I did before reading this book.

Not sure I can recommend it but it is readable. Not for everyone but I loved actually reading it myself. I enjoy lowbrow humor and this made me laugh a lot. It's almost like Rauch couldn't decide what direction to take the story so he decided to go with all of them. For better or worse, this is what we got. To quote the God emperor of the earth "no matter where you go there you are."

One last thing if you got stuck on the first two hundred or so pages like me... keep reading at the risk of losing your own sanity.