Hollywoodland

A Barthesian close reading of Snow Crash, rather than producing a series of hermeneutic codes, proairetic codes, etc., might look something like this:
1. Die Hard code
2. Kurosawa code
3. Bogart code
4. The Godfather code
5. Sergio Leone code
And so on. With respect to its plot and characters, Snow Crash as a novel seems to be a sequence of film tropes. Its choppy syntax reflects action movie editing styles.

Yet it wears its derivative-ness on its sleeve. On page 305, Stephenson writes, “After that – after Hiro gets onto his motorcycle, and the New South Africans get into their all-terrain pickups, and The Enforcers get into their slick black Enforcer mobiles, and they all go screaming out onto the highway – after that it’s just a chase scene.” He doesn’t need to describe the chase – we’ve all seen the movie.

This is obviously self-conscious on Stephenson’s part. I haven’t discounted the possibility that the book’s Hollywood qualities can be traced, at least in part, to a mediocre prose stylist exploiting his own deficiencies by crafting postmodern pastiche narrative. But in any case, the book bears an interesting relation to Baudrillard’s ideas on simulation. Baudrillard frames Disneyland as a colossal red herring, a fantasy that masks the simulation that is the United States. Snow Crash, by presenting an America that has been reduced to a network of film clichés, makes this same point in a different way.