REVIEWS: Perfect Example – More on “The Fourth of July”

A few more points of interest on this section that I was too lazy to put in.  On all the sections, with the simplicity of the artwork, where you can barely tell the guys from the gals except for a couple of C’s (symbolic of C-cup  in adolescent dreaming?), the outdoor scenes are by contrast heavily detailed.  For example, the blades of grass are clear on every lawn.  Windowpanes, doors, bushes–they’re all there.   Perhaps it’s foreshadowing the last section where John loves mowing the lawn. There is also another use for these short straight lines besides indicating grass (pot?)

When John is feeling down as he watches Fred and Kristi together on the blanket, there is a radiance of lines on his chest and around his body as he sinks into himself, "back inside where there’s nothing alive."   He also has eyebrows and eyelashes in this closeup of his face, made up of…yep, short lines.

His real anger at being locked out of the house is also at himself and the world that doesn’t work the way he expects and wants it to.  Even his decision to commit suicide is thwarted when he can’t get inside his house.

While I see the ending of this section, where he is in Mark’s office building feeling not a part of the scene ("The faces of people and things around me, there were lights–but I didn’t see them…, sounds–but I didn’t hear them–) demonstrates his mental absence from the world around him.  He sees things (though he claims he doesn’t) going on, but just as with the parties and his friends, he doesn’t feel a part of it.  His conclusion, however, is:  "Because I saw then that life is like a dream."

First of all, he’s a cartoon character and he’s right, none of his world is real.

But, did he really land upon the concept of time and space and the immediacy, the transient nature of the present?  He may have, but I don’t believe he understands it in the same way because he hasn’t come to it from the more logical thought process of seeing the big picture, but rather as a reference to himself within a space.  I think what he’s doing here is turning the problem from blaming himself for being a jerk or a misfit, into a condition of the universe being not real, therefore, moving within it is not real.

Somehow, that makes him feel better.