Elmore Leonard's Postmodern Code Hero: Chili Palmer

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Elmore Leonard’s Postmodern Code Hero: Chili Palmer

by

John J. Daily

Elmore Leonard’s novel Get Shorty (1990) and its sequel Be Cool

(1999) deconstruct Ernest Hemingway’s modern code hero by

developing a postmodern code hero, a Miami loan shark named Chili

Palmer, who becomes a Hollywood film and record producer. A

closer look at Leonard’s texts reveals some similarities with

Hemingway’s code hero, but the postmodern differences interest us

more because they blur morality in the characterization of a

fundamentally honest gangster. As Bob Dylan in his song

“Absolutely Sweet Marie” writes, “To live outside the law you

must be honest.” Certainly, Chili Palmer embodies most, if not

all, of this honesty as Leonard’s most interesting post-modern

code hero.

In a sly tribute, Leonard introduces his protagonist who puns

on Hemingway’s first name. “Ernesto Palmer got the name Chili

originally because he was hot-tempered as a kid growing up…Now he

was Chili, Tommy Carlo said, because he has chilled down and

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didn’t need the hot temper.” (Leonard, G.S., 5). Leonard

continues the pun in the opener to Be Cool, the sequel to Get

Shorty. “The studio asshole says, in this tone of voice, ‘If you

don’t use the same actor in the part, Ernest, it’s not really a

sequel, is it?’ He’s the only person in L.A. calls me Ernest”

(Leonard, B.C., 2). Chili Palmer descends from Puerto Rican and

Italian parents from Brooklyn, so in the Mafia he can only be

connected, never made. He loves movies and doo-wop. In between

collecting debts, facilitating midnight car repossessions, and

making courtesy calls for Las Vegas casinos, Palmer obsessively

goes to the movies. He becomes a bona fide film buff, if not a

savant. After twelve years in Miami and a busted marriage from

working with, as his ex-wife put it, “those people” he becomes

bored (Leonard, G.S., 8). He goes to Hollywood to collect a debt

for a mob boss. There he transfers his skill set and seamlessly

morphs into a film and record producer in the amorality of

Hollywood.

The term “code hero” is a creation of the critics, most

notably Hemingway scholar, Phillip Young. In three words, it is

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defined as “grace under pressure” - a famous phrase that

Hemingway coined while speaking about bullfights in a letter to

F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Was not referring to guts but to something

else. Grace under pressure. Guts never made any money for

anybody except violin string manufacturers” (qtd. in Baker 200).

Chili Palmer, whose cheeky guts create grace under pressure in a

postmodern world, resembles Hemingway’s code heroes in more than

one way.

Hemingway’s code hero, often wounded, represents a

courageous goal that allows a man to live honorably in a world of

tension, violence, suffering, and disorder. It’s a stoic code of

conduct that makes life’s losing battle tolerable. The code hero

confronts danger and defeat and death with dignity. Jake Barnes

in The Sun Also Rises comes to mind. So does Santiago in The Old Man

and the Sea. Leonard most admired Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell

Tolls. Charles Rzepka, author of Being Cool: The Work of Elmore Leonard,

the definitive study looking at all of Leonard’s corpus, notes

that “Leonard has cited For Whom The Bell Tolls as one of the earliest

and most important influences on his writing, and [Robert] Jordan

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himself, a young American explosives expert fighting Fascists in

the Spanish Civil War, is an obvious source for ‘cool’

protagonists like Chili Palmer” (9). Jordan’s singular goal is

to blow up the bridge; Palmer’s is to produce a film (Get Shorty)

and then an aspiring rock star’s debut album (Be Cool). Both

protagonists will do whatever it takes. Like a Hemingway code

hero, Chili Palmer lives in a dangerous world and faces death

repeatedly. He is loyal to the code of the mob and does not talk

about it. But he is not a member of the family. He’s an

outsider, a loner. He’s a man of action, based upon his concept

of life. He possesses some noble qualities: he looks out for

widows and innocents badgered by wise guys and wannabes. And, he

endures, although not stoically like a Hemingway code hero, nor

does he die like some Hemingway code heroes. He survives. You

could say he even flourishes.

Leonard has also paid tribute to Hemingway as a stylistic

influence on his hardboiled prose style. Both are minimalists.

Like Hemingway, Leonard revels in its texture. A recent article

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by Christopher Orr in The Atlantic, “The Elmore Leonard Paradox,”

makes this connection with Hemingway:

But more even than their content, it is the style of

Leonard’s books that evokes the movies. In contrast

with writers—and, in particular, crime writers—whose

paragraphs bulge with physical detail, Leonard was,

after Hemingway, perhaps America’s preeminent

evangelist for literary concision. About half of the

“10 Rules for Writing” that he offered to readers of

the Detroit Free Press in 2010 are pleas for reduced

verbiage, including: “Try to leave out the part that

readers tend to skip.”

Leonard’s code for writing, his famous 10 rules, “Easy on the

Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle,” was

originally published in The New York Times in 2000. Leonard says,

“My most important rule is one that sums up the 10. If it sounds

like writing, I rewrite it.” He defines what to skip, the

hooptedoodle, and says, “I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.”

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Listen to Leonard’s terse dialogue in this excerpt from Be

Cool, when Chili Palmer introduces himself to a gangsta rapper

named Sin Russell who, along with his posse, is threatening a

record executive over unpaid royalties:

He said, “So you Chili Palmer, huh, the movie man.”

Chili walked up to him eye to eye, almost toe to toe,

saying, “I’m Chili Palmer, I’m Ernesto Palmer, I was

Chili the Shylock, Chili the Shark, and I’m Chili the

Notorious K.M.A.”

Sin Russell said, “Shit.” He said, “You notorious,

huh? What’s K.M.A.?”

“Kiss My Ass,” Chili said in the man’s face, “a name I

was given on the street. How can I help you?

Sin didn’t answer, by his look trying to decide if he’d

been disrespected.

Chili stared and again moved in on him. “You and I

have met before, haven’t we? I’m thinking Rikers,

waiting on a court appearance?”

Now the man spoke. “I was never at Rikers, ever in my

life.” (155)

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This terse dialogue reveals how Chili Palmer keeps his cool under

the threat of violence, a sign of a code hero. He will not be

intimidated. Chili uses his imagination and his facile wordplay

to turn the tables on his adversaries. He faces the possibility

of violence and death in both novels. For example, Be Cool opens

with a drive-by murder of the record executive lunching with

Chili al fresco on Beverly Boulevard. Instead of fighting wars,

shooting lions, and vanquishing raging bulls, Chili Palmer faces

bull daily from lowlifes, first in Miami collecting debts due

from his shylock loans while fending off adversaries like Ray

Bones and then in Hollywood collecting investments and

commitments from producers, stars, and wannabes, while dodging

threats from adversaries and manipulating competitive edges in

showbiz. In both locales, he fights bull with bull. This street

skill, his gift of gab, contributes to his success as a

postmodern code hero. Rzepka comments in an email to me, “Chili

is an authentic “bullshitter”:

…“bullshitting” is what he does, and because he commits

himself to it and does it so well to the point of

becoming one-with-it and even enjoying his mastery of

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it, he is authentic in a postmodern, Leonardian sense,

but not in the sense Hemingway conceived. The

difference between a classic Hemingway hero like Jordan

and the postmodern version, Chili, is that in the

postmodern version playing a role or “bullshitting” is

seen, not as being inauthentic or refusing to “be

yourself,” as it would be with Hemingway, but just

another way of behaving that can be done well or ill.

We must remember that Leonard, like many other post World War II

intellectuals, is intrigued by Jean-Paul Sartre and his notions

of leading an authentic life that depend on affirming one’s

despair and doing what one must do for oneself and for the

greater good.

Here is where Chili Palmer differs from Robert Jordan, who

is willing to die for his perception of the greater good. When

Jordan shoots it out on the hill in the woods at the conclusion

of For Whom The Bell Tolls, he muses about how his work may benefit

others. “I have fought for what I believed in for a year now.

If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place

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and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it”

(Hemingway 467). Chili Palmer will not die for a moral code like

Robert Jordan’s. The world is not a fine place for Chili and not

worth fighting for. This is a key difference between Hemingway’s

modern belief system and Leonard’s postmodern belief system.

Leonard’s and Chili’s world is a postmodern concrete jungle full

of hustlers and assassins and wannabes. It is more neon than

natural. On a personal level, it is more self-centered. Chili

has a strand of protective self-centeredness, even when

protecting innocents like widows in both stories. Chili is

willing to put himself in harm’s way for his personal code of

loyalty to a select few but not fighting for the world and the

greater good. Rzepka comments, “I think the best way to

describe the difference between Chili’s code and Hemingway’s is

not with respect to rules, per se, but with respect to

authenticity. A Hemingway hero like Robert Jordan believes in

nothing but doing his job, “being-at-one” with what he does and

the hell with “higher” motives and ideals” (email to author). I

agree. Jordan is at one with being an irregular operative

working behind the lines. Rzepka sees this as an existential

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connection, but not a seamless connection, between Hemingway and

Leonard. He comments in the same email to me:

In For Whom the Bell Tolls, he doesn’t give a damn about the

corruption and incompetence of those fighting on the

side of the Republic, he just knows he’s got a job to

do and, damn it, he’ll get it done even when he doesn’t

have the dynamite to do it and has to die doing it.

That’s Hemingway’s version of existentialism, I think—

and in part it’s Leonard’s as well: in an absurd world

the only thing that counts is what Leonard recognizes

as the need to “do what you do,” not according to some

abstract ethical system lying outside you, but just as

an expression of who you really are—in short, you are

what you do, so dammit, do it well.

We hear overtones of Sartre’s notion of leading an authentic life

based upon a personal code that also benefits the greater good.

Hemingway’s portrayal of Robert Jordan’s code affirms Sartre’s

notion of existential authenticity benefitting the greater good.

Leonard’s portrayal of Chili Palmer’s code, being cool, differs

in this regard because Chili’s personal authenticity does not

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necessarily benefit the greater good. It may benefit a select

few, for example Be Cool’s aspiring rock star Linda Moon and Edie

Athens, the widow of the assassinated record executive, but in

each case Chili has a personal profit motive. His good works are

a byproduct of his profit motive. Chili works his work, or as

Rzepka puts it “do what you do…as an expression of who you really

are” and Chili’s work is profiting from being cool, first on the

mean streets of Miami and then on the street of dreams in

Hollywood, the land of cool.

“Jazz musicians invented our understanding of the word

cool,” as Wynton Marsalis has pointed out in his weekly “Jazz for

Young People” broadcast. The cool school of jazz musicians in

the postmodern era is best exemplified by Miles Davis’ album Birth

of the Cool. Marsalis says cool jazz musicians, “played with

patience… they played softly, not loud…and they played with

intensity.” This sensibility would also describe Chili Palmer.

He patiently waits to for his opportunity to collect his debts,

most of the time, with soft intensity. In both Miami and

Hollywood you owe Chili once he does you a favor. After all,

he’s a shylock turned film and record producer. The common

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currency remains a favor. Why else would one borrow shylock

money or seek stardom from showbiz power-brokers and the fans

they feed? Owing Chili money in Miami or a favor in Hollywood is

really nothing personal. It’s just business. That’s the cool

part. Chili is so cool he offers a postmodern payback twist near

the end of Be Cool regarding the gay Samoan bodyguard Elliot

Wilhelm: “Elaine, the guy saved my life. The least I can do is

put him in a movie” (267).

But Chili can also be cruel as well as cool, and he will if

he’s disrespected. Chili Palmer’s adversary in Get Shorty, Ray

Bones, is a Miami loan shark who has despised Chili Palmer ever

since he punched out Bones for stealing his leather coat from a

cloakroom. When Bones seeks to even the score, Palmer fires a

bullet that gives Bones a reverse Mohawk. Bones follows Palmer

to Hollywood. Palmer sets him up and sends Bones to an airport

locker to retrieve a duffle bag full of drug money that Palmer

knows is being staked-out by the feds. Some might argue that

Chili Palmer is a common thug, amoral. But he is not. He is

uncommon, in a postmodern way.

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Leonard redefines Hemingway’s notion of “grace under

pressure” in Chili Palmer, who comically achieves a postmodern

dark side of his contemporary American Dream, fame and fortune in

Hollywood. Rzepka sees this redefinition in his discussion of

“courage” and “cool”:

But Hemingway’s ‘courage’ and Leonard’s ‘cool’ differ

in important ways…Courage, however, retains a moral

dimension, despite Hemingway’s well-known contempt for

abstract moral imperatives, while ‘cool’ is essentially

amoral…Hemingway’s version of courage is ultimately

hot, not cool…Courage is thus highly self-conscious and

principled and adheres to a recognizable ‘Hemingway

Code’…Cool is different…because it is either natural…or

a second nature born of deliberate habituation” (9).

This is a fine distinction, but it creates some slippage. It

serves Rzepka’s splendid book, Being Cool, well. But, to some

extent, this is a comparison of apples and oranges, Hemingway’s

courage and Leonard’s cool and Rzepka’s definitions of hot

(Hemingway) and cool (Leonard) are perhaps too neat. I agree

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with Rzepka on his distinction of Hemingway’s modern sense of

morality versus Leonard’s postmodern sense of amorality. Chili

Palmer has the morals of an alley cat compared to Robert Jordan’s

do or die for the greater good ethos. But, overtones ring with

Marshall McCluhan’s framing of hot and cool media wherein

McCluhan defines television as a hot media and radio as a cool

media because radio leaves more to our imagination and is

therefore cool compared to television’s (and film’s) hot graphic

portrayals that attack both our eyes and our ears. In McCluhan’s

definitions radio, which was historically first a modern media,

is cool and television, an historically postmodern media, is hot.

Rzepka borrows this frame, but flips it time wise in his modern

(Hemingway is hot) versus postmodern (Leonard is cool)

distinction. The question is, does the hot-cool analogy hold-up?

Certainly, Chili Palmer’s postmodern coolness leaves more to the

imagination than Robert Jordan’s modern courage, which makes

Chili cool, not hot. Both Hemingway and Leonard give us graphic

portrayals of courage in a modern and postmodern way, but is

Hemingway’s “version of courage ultimately hot, not cool” as

Rzepka argues, or is it ultimately cool? Courage is cool. Code

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heroes, modern and postmodern, are warriors in the final

analysis, and therefore really cool customers who don’t blink

under pressure. They’re not hot or hotheads. Robert Jordan and

Chili Palmer are both cool, full of courage and “grace under

pressure.” How can there be hot in cool?

The differences between Hemingway’s sensibilities and

Leonard’s tell us a story about Leonard’s postmodern code hero’s

evolution. Leonard’s protagonists evolve from his sensibilities

of a modern code hero, inspired by Hemingway’s Robert Jordan, to

his sensibilities of a postmodern anti-hero, perhaps best

exemplified by Jack Foley in Out of Sight, and later on to his

sensibilities of a postmodern code-hero, Chili Palmer. “In

Leonard’s work, by contrast, heroes and heroines rarely conform

to standard patterns of virtue, and we can even be surprised by

feelings of sympathy for the devil, often in his least appealing

form” (Rzepka 2). The story of Leonard’s code hero’s evolution

is one of modern authenticity becoming postmodern, becoming

“street-cred” in Chili’s case. The story begins in the Wild

West.

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Leonard started out writing westerns in 1951. He wrote in

the modern tradition of code heroes; he was not postmodern at

this point, although the postmodern movement had begun. The

figure of the lone hero in the Wild West is the narrative thread

through his early work. His protagonist in his first published

story “Trail of the Apache” is an Indian agent, Eric Travisin.

Rzepka compares and contrasts free indirect discourse (FID, also

called free indirect speech) in Leonard’s and Hemingway’s

descriptions of campsites seen through Travisin’s and Jordan’s

eyes. “Making us see with Travisin’s eyes helps to keep his

creator invisible, but does little else…Hemingway creates a

greater sense of intimacy in these 102 words than Leonard can

create with Eric Travisin in six paragraphs” (15). Rzepka notes

that, like Hemingway, “Leonard uses verbs of sensation and then

thought or belief not just to convey information about a

character’s inner life, but also to introduce passages of mental

discourse” (20-21). At this point in his development as a writer

the journeyman Leonard is no match for the modern master

Hemingway. But by the time of 1989’s Killshot “Armand’s [Armand

“The Blackbird” Degas, a half-Ojibway hit man from Toronto]

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demotic second-person soliloquy in Killshot reveals a mastery of

free indirect discourse and interior monologue unsurpassed in our

time, and among the surest of all time, even if we include Jane

Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and Hemingway in the mix” (Rzepka 21).

Leonard’s evolution as a writer is not just stylistic.

Leonard’s attitude towards violence also bears scrutiny. In

1961, ten years after his first published work, Leonard published

Hombre. Leonard’s character John Russell is an outcast, a loner,

with his own code that serves the greater good, but he is also an

antecedent of postmodern cool. He is played by Paul Newman,

nicknamed “King Cool,” in the 1967 film. Newman starred in Cool

Hand Luke the same year. Russell’s fellow stagecoach passengers

disdain him because he’s a half breed raised by Apaches. This

was a common American social phobia before Indians became hip

during the civil rights era and the American Indian Movement

(A.I.M.) in the sixties and seventies. That era created a

makeover, an image change, in Hollywood’s postmodern portrayal of

Indians as wise and noble and misunderstood rather the modern

era’s view of them as savages and primitive buffoons who needed

to accept the white man’s ways or die. In this sense, Leonard is

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a trailblazer in his respect for Indians, and John Russell is a

precursor of his postmodern respect for diversity and the

development of his postmodern Indian character Armand “Blackbird”

Degas.

In Hombre John Russell becomes the passengers’ only hope for

survival crossing dangerous territory populated by outlaws, as

well as Indians. Then his capacity for violence, part of his

code, becomes valuable. B. R. Myers “…laments the turn toward

violence for its own sake – or worse, for the sake of a laugh –

that he thinks disfigures the versions of ‘cool’…True cool is the

hero of Hombre, a white man raised by Apaches, leading whiny

settlers through the desert without so much as a backward glance”

(qtd. in Rzepka 8). When the outlaws pin them down on a hill,

one of the outlaws shouts out, “Hey Hombre, how you going to get

down that hill?” Of course, Newman’s character John Russell

answers by getting down the hill with his charges. “Leonard’s

‘postmodern’ sense of humor …taking violence seriously does not

preclude joking about it” (Rzepka 8). Leonard gets down the

hill with his further development of postmodern anti-heroes and a

code hero that stand in contrast to Hombre. Leonard’s migration

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begins with anti-heroes and then moves on to his postmodern code

hero, Chili Palmer.

This is where Leonard begins to depart from Hemingway’s

modern model in his switch from westerns to crime fiction. The

publication of Hombre in 1961 marks the “effective conclusion of

Leonard’s Western period” (Rzepka 56). As we sadly recall, this

was also the year Hemingway died. When Leonard abandons westerns

for crime fiction, he begins to create comical post-modern anti-

heroes. The critic James E. “Devlin sees [George V. Higgins’]

The Friends of Eddie Coyle as Leonard’s new ‘enchiridion’ (16), the

‘handbook’ he used at the start of his crime-writing career, just

as he used For Whom The Bell Tolls to write his early Westerns” (qtd.

in Rzepka 99). In fact, Leonard wrote an introduction to a Henry

Holt edition of the book in 2000. Leonard also stipulated in his

will that his papers and manuscripts go to The University of

South Carolina, where George V. Higgins’ papers reside. Crime

fiction provides Leonard the platform for more challenging work.

The character that stands out in Leonard’s development of a

post-modern code hero is his postmodern anti-hero Frank Ryan, a

former minor-league baseball player gone bad, whom we first meet

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in 1969s The Big Bounce, Leonard’s entry into crime fiction. He

turns-up a decade later in a sequel, 1977’s Unknown Man No. 89.

Ryan at thirty-six is still a process server and now has a

drinking problem, like his creator Leonard and like Hemingway.

Leonard develops Ryan into a car salesman turned stick-up artist,

small-time without having done time, in Ryan’s Rules (1976), later

retitled Swag.

Swag stands out for its comic postmodern portrayal of a

failed code hero, an anti-code hero. Ryan writes ten rules for

becoming a successful criminal in blue ink and all caps on

assorted cocktail napkins from Detroit’s The Club Bouzouki, The

Lafayette Bar, Edjo’s, and the Lindell AC. His inept sidekick,

Stick a.k.a. Ernest Stickley, Jr. from Norman, Oklahoma, and

formerly of Pompano Beach, Florida, says: “You wrote the book,

ten rules for success and happiness,…I didn’t.” (Swag, 110).

Ryan then proceeds to violate each of his code rules until he is

busted in the conclusion. This demonstrates Leonard’s love for

postmodern anti-heroes who predate Chili Palmer, his postmodern

code hero. Frank Ryan is an antecedent to Chili Palmer, but

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unlike Frank, Chili doesn’t mess-up; he’s disciplined and he’s

cool.

Here are Ryan’s Rules, in all caps but not in blue ink or on

cocktail napkins:

1. ALWAYS BE POLITE ON THE JOB. SAY PLEASE AND THANK YOU.

2. NEVER SAY MORE THAN IS NECESSARY.

3. NEVER CALL YOUR PARTNER BY NAME – UNLESS YOU USE A MADE-

UP

NAME.

4. DRESS WELL. NEVER LOOK SUSPICIOUS OR LIKE A BUM.

5. NEVER USE YOUR OWN CAR. (DETAILS TO COME.)

6. NEVER COUNT THE TAKE IN THE CAR.

7. NEVER FLASH MONEY IN A BAR OR WITH WOMEN.

8. NEVER GO BACK TO AN OLD BAR OR HANGOUT ONCE YOU HAVE

MOVED UP.

9. NEVER TELL ANYONE YOUR BUSINESS. NEVER TELL A JUNKIE

EVEN

YOUR NAME.

10. NEVER ASSOCIATE WITH PEOPLE KNOWN TO BE IN CRIME.

(Leonard,

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Swag,18).

Notice the correspondence with Leonard’s “Ten Rules of Writing”

that he observes, unlike Ryan. Ryan says to Stick later on in

regards to women, “Buddy, it’s all good. Like chili, when you’re

in the mood. Even when it’s bad it’s good.” (Leonard, Swag, 97).

Perhaps this reference to chili is an antecedent of his

character, Chili Palmer, who is so bad he’s good? Perhaps he’s

just being frank and earnest? Leonard’s postmodernism includes

puns on his characters’ names. This is another distinction

between Leonard and Hemingway.

Hemingway’s code heroes confront violence in its purest form

defending their dignity and fighting wars. It’s not gratuitous.

There is a fundamental respect for life and death. It has a

personal morality, or in the case of war an imagined public

morality. Hemingway’s code hero Robert Jordan provides Leonard a

point of departure. When he turns to crime fiction, Leonard’s

postmodern anti-hero best exemplified by Jack Foley in Out of Sight

and his postmodern code hero Chili Palmer both have a capacity,

if not a proclivity, for violence, but it has an immoral or

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amoral and personal not public or political agenda. In the case

of war, the goal is simple: don’t die. For Leonard’s postmodern

anti-heroes like Father Terry Dunn in Pagan Babies, who faces the

Hutus versus the Tutsis in Rwanda (he’s also facing charges in

Detroit for transporting illegal cigarettes across state lines),

or the female documentarian Dara Barr from New Orleans in Djibouti,

who faces the Somali pirates, getting out alive is enough.

Unlike Hemingway’s code heroes, who endure with dignity in

personal defeat - Santiago’s warring with the marlin, Fredric

Henry and Jake Barnes suffering during World War I, or Robert

Jordan dying for a political cause in the Spanish Civil War -

survival is enough for Leonard’s postmodern anti-heroes and for

Chili Palmer, his postmodern code hero.

The violent threat of death or disfigurement also warrants

discussion. Leonard’s characters delight in postmodern mayhem,

as opposed to Hemingway’s characters more dignified modern

respect for violence. Jake Barnes and Frederic Henry and Robert

Jordan have faced violence as a public agenda, not a personal

agenda. When it comes to violence, Leonard’s characters seem to

regard it as a contact sport. Frank Ryan’s and Elliot Wilhelm’s

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love for baseball bats to threaten people tips us off to

Leonard’s love for playing baseball as a kid. Chili Palmer, who

delights in creating imagined violence in the minds of his

adversaries and debtors, occasionally indulges in violence. In

Get Shorty he throws The Bear down the mezzanine stairs of a

Hollywood restaurant and blasts the hair off Ray Bones’ head in a

Miami barbershop. Violence is almost always an option for

Leonard’s protagonists to achieve their personal and sometimes

illegal and often amoral agenda. However, Chili Palmer exercises

the use of violence more sparingly than most, if not all, of

Leonard’s postmodern anti-heroes. As a postmodern code hero he,

at least, tries not to use violence as a first line of approach

most of the time. Like a cool jazz artist, he prefers the soft

touch. He revels in an imagined violence, which he creates in

the minds of his adversaries with his signature recurring line,

“Look at me.” This gives him at least a postmodern shtick, if

not a code.

Imagination in action is Chili Palmer’s, like Hollywood’s,

stock in trade. His signature line, “Look at me,” sounds like a

tag line for a film, but it becomes a running gag. It has worked

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wonders for Chili collecting loans, and it serves as his coup de

grace in Hollywood. Most humorously, he directs a star on how to

say it. Critic William Nelles notes, “Leonard drew upon his

personal experiences with the film industry for Get Shorty,

including modeling Michael Weir, the actor whose short height and

large talent and ego provide the title, on Dustin Hoffman, who

had been in line to play the lead in a film version of Leonard’s

LaBrava (1983).” Danny DeVito plays the short guy in Get Shorty.

John Travolta, who stars as Chili Palmer in both films, delivers

the line flawlessly, with a whiff of his character Vincent Vega

in Pulp Fiction.

“Try it again,” Chili said. “Look at me.”

“I’m looking at you.”

“No, I want you to look at me the way I’m looking at

you. Put it in your eyes, ‘You’re mine, asshole,’

without saying it.”

“Like this?”

“What’re you telling me, you’re tired? You wanta go to

bed?”

“Wait. How about this?”

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“You’re squinting, like you’re trying to look mean or

you need glasses. Look at me. I’m thinking, You’re

mine, I fuckin own you. What I’m not doing is feeling

anything about it one way or the other. You

understand? You’re not a person to me, you’re a name

in my collection book, a guy owes me money, that’s

all.”

“The idea then,” the movie star said, “I show complete

indifference, until I’m crossed.”

“Not even then. It’s nothing personal, it’s business.

The guy misses, he knows what’s gonna happen.”

“How about this?” the movie star said, giving Chili a

nice dead-eyed look.

“That’s not bad.”

“This’s what I think of you, asshole. Nothing.”

“I believe it,” Chili said. (Leonard, G.S., 178-179)

This hilarious scene shows how Chili makes cruelty cool with one

look that tells all. Any questions? As Chili might say,

“Fuhgedaboudit.” Leonard creates an ironic metafiction in this

scene where the movie savant, Chili Palmer, teaches the movie

star, Michael Weir, how to act, how to create imagined violence

like a shylock might. This is most postmodern.

27

Why does Chili Palmer tickle our postmodern sensibilities

about a code hero? He blurs our moral perceptions with

situational ethics. Blurring is a postmodern trait. Chili plays

by his own rules and we like him for it. Chili Palmer is no man

to trifle with. He is basically a good bad-guy in a worse

world. He suffers no illusions about the world that he is in,

but he finds humanity and humor in it. In both tales, he

protects the interests of widows married to scoundrels and we

like him for it: in Get Shorty, the widow of a Miami dry cleaner

who fakes his own death to cheat an insurance company and also

stiff Palmer on a loan, and in Be Cool, a widow of an assassinated

record company executive who wants the company, and her

livelihood, to carry on. Chili has a code of fundamental

honesty. Leonard gives Chili Palmer a code of ethics, however

postmodern. Consider this passage from Get Shorty:

He thought of that and started thinking of Ray Bones

again and Leo the drycleaner, his calling Leo dumb for

leaving three hundred grand in a hotel-room closet, and

where was it now? Under his bed at the Sunset Marquis.

He’d check, make sure Leo and Annette had taken off,

28

just to be on the safe side. Later tonight he’d call

Fay, tell her to look for the three hundred big ones

coming by Express Mail. Put it in one of those

containers they gave you at the post office. He’d hang

on to the extra ten grand. Maybe pay off Ray Bones,

get that out of the way, or maybe not. But the three

hundred, basically, was Fay’s. Let her do whatever she

wanted with it. Two to one she’d tell a friend of hers

about it and pretty soon the suits would come by, knock

on the door, flash their I.D.’s. (169)

Chili Palmer is also a bad guy gone better among Hollywood

lowlifes. He’s not going to steal from the widow, although we,

like Chili, know that would not go unnoticed. He’s honest

because he has to be in order to survive. This is a postmodern

code.

Chili Palmer appreciates imaginative minimalism, another

postmodern trait. Here we hear a reprise of Ryan’s Rules, “Never

say more than is necessary.” Chili explains in this excerpt from

Get Shorty:

29

Chili said the secret was in how you prepped the loan

customer…

You know he’s desperate or he wouldn’t be borrowing

shylock money in the first place. So, you tell him,

‘Okay, but you miss even one payment you’re gonna be

sorry you ever came here.’ You never tell the guy what

could happen to him. Let him use his imagination,

he’ll think of something worse. In other words, don’t

talk when you don’t have to.” (Leonard, G.S., 6).

This is another example of how the tight-lipped Frank Ryan anti-

hero is an antecedent to the postmodern code hero Chili Palmer.

And this ethos also works to raise money for producing films and

records in Hollywood, where almost anything goes in a world of

secrecy. Leonard capitalizes on Hollywood’s secret and diverse

universe in developing his postmodern code hero, Chili Palmer.

Diversity constitutes a postmodern trait. Sexual freedom

and ethnic diversity stand out as examples. Hemingway’s modern

sensibilities push the edge of the envelope in his time with his

portrayals of sexually uninhibited women, most notably Lady Brett

30

Ashley. He populates his narratives with characters like Spanish

bullfighters and freedom fighters and Cuban fishermen and Italian

soldiers and African hunters to broaden his readers’ horizons.

However, Leonard exposes a greater diversity in postmodern

America as well as the world. Chili Palmer is nonplussed by the

world he inhabits, a world that includes characters of multi-

cultural ethnic backgrounds and assorted sexual persuasions that

are now respected in our postmodern world. For example, in Be

Cool, Leonard delights us with Elliot Wilhelm, a gay Samoan

bodyguard. By the end of the book, Elliot has become a rap

artist, Elliot Wilhelm and his Royal Samoans, “six beefed-up men

in black, in black felt hats and shades, prowling the stage…”

(Leonard, B.C. 271). Leonard first introduces a gay wannabe

gangster, Louie, in 1977’s Unknown Man No. 89. Why not, after the

sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies? Certainly

Hemingway, as we now know from his posthumous publications such

as The Garden of Eden that portrays a ménage a trois, was no prude, but

he was restricted by his modern era’s morality and publishing

mores. Leonard is quick to embrace the diverse postmodern sexual

sensibilities in our time.

31

Likewise, Leonard’s portrayal of romance is postmodern and

stands in high contrast to Hemingway. Although Hemingway gives

us a peak at the future of female sexual liberation with Lady

Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises, he relies on romance to propel

it, at least in Jake Barnes’ unfortunate case. Leonard also

deals in romance, but it concerns gangsters like bank robber Jack

Foley in Out of Sight, who falls in love with a female cop who

ultimately arrests him, and Chili Palmer, who fancies actresses

and a female film executive. Leonard offers us more sex than

love, and it’s less of a love story and more of a fulfilling

plotline. Compared to Hemingway’s portrayal of Robert Jordan’s

and Maria’s love and their living in the moment in the face of

death, or Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley risking everything

and getting away from it all in A Farewell To Arms, or even Jake

Barnes’ unrequited love for Lady Brett Ashley, Leonard’s Jack

Foley and Chili Palmer possess a code for love and romance that

pales in comparison to Hemingway.

What constitutes postmodern love? Is Chili Palmer even

capable of love? Or, is loving himself enough? “Can’t buy me

love,” a tribute to the Beatles, is the beginning sentence that

32

introduces Catherine Belsey’s look at Postmodern Love: Questioning the

Metaphysics of Desire. “To the degree that the postmodern condition

implies an unbridled consumerism …love is a value that remains

beyond the market. While sex is a commodity, love becomes the

condition of a happiness that cannot be bought” (678). Chili

Palmer lives in the market. He loves in the market. He’s a

shylock and producer who loves money. His attractions to the

women in Get Shorty and Be Cool are driven by the market. Is he in

it just for himself. No, Chili believes in reciprocity, if not

love. Maybe that‘s postmodern love that has been colonized by

consumerism? Hemingway’s portrayal of romance stands out in high

contrast to Leonard’s. Love is a virtue, a value, that his code

heroes like Jake Barnes and Fredric Henry and Robert Jordan

worship. Love is not perceived as a commodity in Hemingway’s

modern sensibilities as it is in Leonard’s postmodern world.

Metafiction and intertextuality are postmodern traits.

Intertextuality enters the postmodern critical discourse via the

Bulgarian-French scholar Julia Kristeva, who has also written

novels that resemble detective stories. “Kristeva declared

that 'every text is from the outset under the

33

jurisdiction of other discourses which impose a universe

on it'” (Chandler). Leonard capitalizes on this in Be Cool

with Chili’s comments about Get Shorty. Metafiction, as we recall,

draws attention to a previous work as an artifact and self-

reflects about questions on the relationship between fiction and

reality using irony. For example, we learn in Be Cool that there

has been a sequel to Get Leo titled Get Lost. Like many sequels, it

didn’t do as well at the box-office.

Leonard’s postmodern metafiction and intertextuality does

not escape the reviewers. The satiric rock artist turned crime

fiction novelist, Kinky Friedman, comments on Leonard’s

metafiction in his 1999 New York Times review of the book Be Cool,

“Admirers of Get Shorty will be gratified by the return of Chili

Palmer, a tenuously connected, mild mannered mobster turned movie

producer, who invariably seems to have a delightfully devious way

of making a life out of his movie.” Here Friedman recognizes

Leonard’s parody of Hollywood’s love for sequels with his

intertextuality of Be Cool that continues Chili’s adventures as he

morphs from a film producer into a record producer who still

34

makes movies. Crime fiction writer George Pelecanos comments in

a Sight and Sound article from 2005, “More Hemingway than Chandler,

Leonard is similarly elliptical about character description,

sometimes relying on the shorthand of identification between his

characters and movie stars. As the narrator says of Chili in Get

Shorty, ‘He could see himself in different movies Robert De Niro

had been in. He could maybe do an Al Pacino movie, play a hard-

on.’" Here Leonard delights us with his metafiction of popular

entertainment superimposed on his character’s dreams. Bill

Delaney notes: “Leonard continues to develop his hypermodern

style of fiction, telling his story through the eyes of his

characters in a streamlined interior-monologue technique which

imitates modern film-making with its restless splicing of

different camera angles. Get Shorty may be the best novel about

Hollywood to date.” Delaney recognizes Leonard’s evolution with

his use of the descriptive “hypermodern” that is another way of

saying postmodern. Self-reflective story telling is a trait of

metafiction and intertextuality. Leonard creates a house of

mirrors wherein art imitates life which imitates art imitating

itself. Leonard takes us beyond the modern into the postmodern

35

with a self-referential timeline that doubles back on itself with

the character development of a mature and fundamentally honest

gangster.

The metafiction continues when Chili Palmer discusses

casting with a B-movie horror producer, Harry Zimm.

“I told you. I need a half million to get started,”

Harry said. “See, the guy I want is the kind of star

not only can act, he doesn’t mind looking bad on the

screen. Tight pants and capped teeth won’t make it in

this one. If I could get Gene Hackman, say, we’d be in

preproduction as I speak. But Gene’s got something

like five pictures lined up he’s committed to, I

checked.” (Leonard, G.S., 71)

The film hilariously parodies the book with metafiction by

casting Gene Hackman in the role of Harry Zimm. Harry Zimm

embodies the worst in Hollywood producers. He’s disingenuous,

crafty, and immoral. Like many, he hires “readers” to give him

“coverage.” In this scene, we get the lowdown as Chili talks to

actress Karen Flores about fixing a script:

36

“You’ve read the script?”

“Not all of it, but I know what it’s about.”

“You and Harry’ll make a great team. Has he read it?”

“He bought it, he must’ve.”

“You sure? Harry used to have someone else read for

him. Then he’d skim it if he thought he was going into

production.” (Leonard, G.S., 144)

Leonard’s pun on “skim” amplifies Harry Zimm’s ethics, or lack

thereof. He provides a comic foil to Chili Palmer, the loan

shark learning the movie business.

Screenwriting also gets, pardon the pun, the treatment. As

in Robert Altman’s spoof of Hollywood, The Player, which is based

on the premise “kill the writer,” Leonard deconstructs and

parodies screenwriting with metafiction. Chili Palmer uses his

life for his scripts. He relies on chance and what’s happening

right now for ideas, another postmodern trait, not cause and

effect as in the modern tradition. “Leonard’s characters are

most authentically themselves, most ‘living in the now,’ when

focused entirely on the task at hand” (Rzepka 5). Being cool is

what’s happening now. This distinguishes the postmodern’s

37

irrational and intuitive sensibilities from the modern’s reliance

on the rationality of cause and effect. The film Chili Palmer

makes at the end of Get Shorty is titled Get Leo, and it is based

upon the name of the deadbeat Miami drycleaner whom Chili

followed to Hollywood. In another stroke of metafiction, the

sequel that fails is titled Get Lost. Leonard’s best postmodern

poke at screenwriting is in his development of a character named

Bo Cattlett, an African-American limo service owner who also

deals cocaine, and who invests in one of Harry Zimm’s unproduced

films. In the following long, but hilarious, lines by Bo

Catlett, Leonard parodies screenwriting and really gives it the

treatment:

Chili opened the script again, flipped through a few

pages looking at the format. “You know how to write

one of these?”

“You asking me,” Catlett said, “do I know how to write

down words on a piece of paper? That’s what you do,

man, you put down one word after the other as it comes

in your head. It isn’t like having to learn how to

play the piano, like you have to learn notes. You

already learned in school how to write, didn’t you? I

hope so. You have the idea and you put down what you

38

want to say. Then you get somebody to add in the

commas and shit where they belong, if you aren’t

positive yourself. Maybe fix up the spelling where you

have some tricky words. There people do that for you.

Some, I’ve even seen scripts where I know words weren’t

spelled right and there was hardly any commas in it.

So I don’t think it’s too important. You come to the

last page you write in ‘Fade out” and that’s the end,

you’re done.”

Chili said, “That’s all there is to it?”

“That’s all.”’

Chili said, ‘Then what do I need you for?” (Leonard,

G.S., 143)

Bo Cattlett does not survive. He has crossed Chili and it’s

time for the payback. Bo’s own fix-it man, a former stunt man

named The Bear, whom Catlett has treated poorly, fixes a railing

on Bo’s Laurel Canyon deck by removing some nuts and bolts, so Bo

can fall to his death while The Bear and Chili watch. After the

fall, The Bear plays the innocent as he drops the nuts and bolts

over the side of the railing. It turns out The Bear used to

choreograph fight scenes for films. Here is yet another example

39

of Leonard’s postmodern metafiction that he uses to give

screenwriting the treatment.

The metafiction continues in the sequel to Get Shorty, Be Cool.

Delaney writes, “Palmer fakes his way into the recording

industry, even as he had earlier faked his way into the film

industry in Get Shorty.” The fictional sequel to Get Leo, Get Lost,

is a bust. It opens the sequel to Get Shorty, Be Cool. In the “how

life is like art” department, Be Cool is not as good a novel as

Get Shorty and did not do as well at the box office. But it

delights us with a reprise of Chili Palmer, the real star of the

show, who gets involved in the record business and does some good

along the way for his and others’ paydays and at the same time

eliminates some scumbags. Be Cool climaxes when the villain, Bo

Cattlett, a pimp who is an unsavory wannabe music manager, takes

a fall off a balcony. In the dénouement Chili Palmer ends up in

bed with his new love, a female film executive, while they’re

plotting a film deal involving Elliot Wilhelm, the gay Samoan

bodyguard turned rap artist. Chili in his postmodern just-trust-

chance modus operandi says, “We’ll have to wait and see what

40

happens. I’d still like to use him” (267). At its core, cool is

also about what’s happening next, not just now.

Chili has the girl, he has his fortune, he has his reputation

in Hollywood. And he hasn’t killed anyone to get it, though some

have died at the hands of others in the process. But Chili

Palmer has survived and prevailed, not endured or died like a

Hemingway code hero. He is a contemporary American Dream, a

postmodern code hero. At the end of Get Shorty, Chili leaves the

set and discusses a possible ending for the next film he’s

producing, Get Leo: “Chili didn’t say anything, giving it some

more thought. Fuckin endings, man, they weren’t as easy as they

looked” (Leonard 292). Now that is a postmodern code hero,

Elmore Leonard style.

41

42

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