Hidden Meaning
I don’t think historians will label this the Era of Subtlety. Flash back to 1989: carefully, of course, because we all know that flashbacks are to be used sparingly. In 1989, though, no one knew that. Everybody was flashing back pretty much all the time, but now it’s kind of a lost art. Like the dream sequence, the flash back adds insult to injury and both are piling up at an alarming rate. Technology may be to blame for all of this in your face immediacy. I’m tired of all that. Let’s have flashbacks and dream sequences and characters in novels telling other characters things they both know but the reader doesn’t. We had that in the 80s. The Go-go 80s. Empires were built this way. Empires.
So, let’s resuscitate the info dump flashback, modernized for today’s harrowing technology. Jim is an insurance salesman, Dawn is a newspaper in Pakistan, no Dawn is Jim’s wife. Well, Dawn is a newspaper in Pakistan which is neither here nor there in this context but the set-up for Dawn’s flashback in real time leans on the mythology of vengeance wherein Dawn, a dental assistant, smokes Osama bin Laden at the mall in a kind of flash forward info dump thing. Why is the mall security guy wearing a Dick Cheney mask? Why can’t Jim get a promotion?
Now we flash back even though we’re lodged in the pluperfect future to find Dawn has become a rapper in South Central while Jim has moved to rural Georgia. How these worlds collide is touching, hilarious, at times Newtonian because Jim likes to drop objects from great heights. He’s a writer for a local newspaper, Dawn, and has editorial license to explore alternative theories in physics. Someday Jim will have a flashback of his own, but for now, time is of the essence, and his late model Yugo is on its way to Brazil to be parted out by a gang of rappers from South Central.
Okay that was a dream sequence.