Daffy Duck In Hollywood - Analysis

A cartoon body that feels pain

The poem’s central claim is that modern life—especially the Hollywood life of images—is a kind of enforced performance: you are made into a character by other people’s songs, plots, and expectations, and then left to deal with the bruising consequences. The speaker begins with possession—Something strange is creeping—as if a mood, a soundtrack, or a spell is overtaking him. What triggers it is telling: not a memory or moral insight, but the first few bars of a standard, I Thought about You, or an opera. Culture doesn’t merely accompany feeling here; it manufactures it, and once it starts, everything comes clattering—baking powder, a celluloid earring, Speedy Gonzales—junk and glamour in the same breath.

The “mean old cartoonist” and the horror of reflection

Early on the poem names its hidden antagonist: That mean old cartoonist who promised rescue but instead has “done” something to the speaker. This is the nightmare underneath the comedy: to be drawn is to be controlled. The speaker’s dread of his own face—his attenuated reflection in a hubcap, so jaundiced, so déconfit—turns slapstick into body-horror. The hubcap is a perfect object for this: shiny, public, automotive, disposable. Even the suggested audience for his ruined face, a quack phrenologist’s waiting room, implies a fake science of personality—another system that pretends it can read you, label you, and keep you.

When the noise chokes into loathing (the poem’s turn)

A hinge arrives when the sensory carnival tightens into suffocation: everything is getting choked to the point of Silence. The “magnetic storm” over the Fudds’ garage reduces the world drastically to an aura on a commemorative cover: reality flattened into a collectible image. Then the speaker blurts the bluntest sentence in the poem: Suddenly all is / Loathing. He doesn’t want to go back inside—inside the studio lot, inside the cartoon frame, inside the self that’s been authored. Even “people” dissolve into comings and goings, mutterings, splatterings: not relationships but anonymous motion, life as background crowd-noise.

A river called Lethe that leads to Tophet

The poem’s most explicit “announcement” lands like a warning label: this Civilized Lethe—forgetfulness made pleasant, with maypoles and châlets de nécessité—leads to Tophet, a dump-haunted hellscape. The joke-pleasure of the setting (Anaheim, theme-park glow, a lamé barge “borrowed” from the movies) is suddenly reclassified as spiritual danger: entertainment as amnesia, amnesia as damnation. The grotesque image that follows—This whole moment is the groin of a borborygmic giant rolling in sleep—suggests the speaker’s helplessness inside some vast, unconscious system. Hollywood isn’t just deceitful; it’s indifferent physiology, digestion, noise.

Depending on being remembered: the tender core inside the collage

Out of the baroque commotion, a plain dependency appears: I have / Only my intermittent life in your thoughts. The poem’s tenderest line may be its most bleakly social: Everything / Depends on whether somebody reminds you of me. In other words, the self is not continuous; it flickers when recalled. The speaker tries to dignify this by calling the whole thing a fabulation, and by insisting that the “other times” are silences of the soul—dark velvet studded with diamonds. But he immediately admits matters less than it should. The tension is sharp: he can name depth and soul-silence, yet he can’t make it win against the louder machinery of timing, plots, and “prodigies” arranged to make worlds seem one-dimensional.

Philosophy as another movie: Aglavaine’s complaint and the final surrender

Midway, the poem slips into a different register—Aglavaine speaking to Sélysette—like a sudden scene from another genre. Her complaint targets a world of fragments: bits and pieces, spangles, patches, where nothing / Stands alone. She resents a culture that praises a disappointing sequel to ourselves and calls it success in London and St. Petersburg. Yet the poem also stages the counter-argument: since all / By definition is completeness, why not accept whatever pattern occasionally reveals itself—a turret, an art-deco escarpment—even if the pattern stays hidden in pagination. The poem doesn’t settle the debate so much as live inside it: craving coherence, distrusting it, and then choosing motion anyway. The closing imperative—Grab sex things, swing over the horizon like a boy—is not simple hedonism; it’s a strategy for surviving a reality where Morning is / Impermanent and where “life… is between”, neither whole nor nothing, an echoing summer day under a green, parrot-colored sky.

The most unsettling possibility

If Everything / Depends on someone remembering you, then the bright, busy world of Anaheim and Hollywood isn’t just distracting—it’s competitive. The poem’s manic abundance (baking powder, garage, traffic-island, firecracker, ambulances) may be the very force that makes any single life intermittent, easy to lose in the rush of new “comings and goings.” In that sense, the speaker’s fear of the mean old cartoonist is also fear of an audience: not that they will judge him, but that they will simply move on.