Gangster Cinema on a Vaudeville Stage: George's Mediated Perception of Reality in Ernest Hemingway's "The Killers"

Abstract:To be specific, through situating Hemingway's media-embedded narrative in a larger media environment of the 1920s, I argue that the killers construct their earlier menacing situation via performing conventions of cinematic gangsters, which indeed intimates Nick and George. However, their failure of performance in the later part of the story triggers George's reframing of them as the comic duo common in vaudeville that was thematically, stylistically, and spatially interconnected with crime cinema. Such a George-centered rereading supplements Nick's limited reception of the terrifying incident by disclosing it as a construct, and even a bluff. In foregrounding George's mediated framing of the incident in the underdiscussed passages, I intend to highlight the often-overlooked connection between Hemingway's writing and the (multi)media environment and, by extension, to further the study between modernist literature and the first media age beyond the familiar narrative of technique imitation.