Hubert Selby, Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, a searing novel of working class people, small-time violent punk hoodlums, homosexuals, and drug users, was published in the United States in 1964. When it was published in Great Britain, its publishers were prosecuted for publishing an obscene book. During the trial in November 1967, one witness for the prosecution said that "if this book is not obscene then no book is obscene." On the other hand, one champion of the novel, Anthony Burgess, wrote "No book could well be less obscene. ... We are spared nothing of the snarls and tribulations of pimps, queens, and ‘hip queers,’ but the tone is wholly compassionate although sometimes whipped by the kinesis of anger" (Selby, "Preface to the Post-Trial Edition"). Having been in the small cadre of adventurous and proto-sophisticated twelve year-olds who read and then passed around a rather worn-out copy of Mary McCarthy’s The Group in 1967 when I was in seventh grade, I can understand the shock that those deluded MPs experienced when they read Last Exit to Brooklyn, or more likely heard some prudish luddite describe it to them, and decided to bring charges against its publishers. I can imagine having read Last Exit to Brooklyn, too, when I was growing up and having been shocked by it. I probably would have been shocked by it up until the time I was eighteen or so. But no longer. The world that I grew up in, the world of Leave It To Beaver and Lawrence Welk, while not entirely an untrue depiction of some parts of America some of the time, was nonetheless deceptive because it neither included depictions of nor left the possibility for some parts of America that most Americans would rather not be bothered about, such as those parts described in Last Exit to Brooklyn. Selby shocks not merely for the purpose of shocking but to depict accurately in its shocking form the last exit neighborhood of the novel and the marginalized people who inhabit it. It is typical of mainstream, middle-class, straight, whitebread America to ignore people, places, and subcultures that are not mainstream, middle-class, straight, and whitebread. Most Americans (and Britons, too, I suppose, given the fact of the obscenity trial) would rather not be bothered with the marginal existence, the dehumanizing scramble for survival, the violent activities, and the often illicit behavior of invisible people and so denounce depictions of such people and such problems as "obscene." In at least one sense, such people and such problems are literally obscene because they take place off-stage, that is, out of the sight for most people and thus definitely off the political and cultural stage and therefore not real, not worthy of attention. But having passed through the assassinations, the wars, the cruelties, and the social changes of the intervening twenty-five years, we are ready to look at Last Exit to Brooklyn, to take it from an underground cult classic not widely read to a full-scale commercial film marketed to a broader audience. It is probably not accidental that the film adaptation of the novel was finally possible to make in 1989, post-MTV, post-Madonna, and in the middle of the spread of violence and drugs from the inner city to the suburbs and the smaller towns. We are no longer innocent. The things which were "obscene" twenty-five years in the past are more commonplace now.

Asked if he sees his "writing as an extension of the Angry Young Men writers (such as Sillitoe and Osborne) out of England of the 1950s," Hubert Selby responds, "I don’t believe so. I haven’t read them extensively. They were socially conscious people making a social statement. I am not" (Vorda, p. 289). But the reality of the novel belies this disingenuous self-description, for whether he intends to make a social statement or not, he does. His descriptions of the lives of these people on the fringe of society, told with first-hand concern as well as with detailed honesty that is nearly always disturbing, inform us about sectors of society of which most of us either do not know or pretend not to know, and that process of informing is a social and political statement. Even he who says "I will not affect a style" is, by affecting no style, affecting a style. Yet, Selby uses words to describe, not to editorialize. Selby is not painting pictures of these people to use as recruiting posters to get "freedom riders" to come to Brooklyn to help out the tortured souls that he depicts, that is surely so, but he informs nonetheless, and the informed reader, the shocked reader can then make informed opinions about the shocking social conditions thus revealed and perhaps take political action to change them.

A film-maker intent upon adapting Last Exit to Brooklyn, then, needs to find cinematic ways of expressing the shocking nature of the language, the desperation of the characters, and the nihilistic attitude towards life, love, family, work, and existence that makes the novel so powerful a depiction of alienated life in this last exit neighborhood. In those senses, the film must attempt to be as "obscene" as the novel is in order to provoke the same kinds of responses from the audience.

In his review of the film version of Last Exit to Brooklyn, Stuart Klawans writes that the film is "an insult to the borough" of Brooklyn because "the paradox of [director] Uli Edel’s film, and of the book ..., is that they depend on convincing you that this is what Brooklyn is really like" (Klawans, p. 255). As such, Klawans decides that the film is a failure because it depicts an "hallucinatory Brooklyn [that] threatens to fall into an incoherence of cliches at every moment." I disagree. On the contrary, neither Selby nor Edel and his screenwriter/adapter Desmond Nakano are trying to deceive us about the content of the novel or the film. Selby very clearly labels this as what we might find if we were to take the last exit to Brooklyn before heading over the East River into Manhattan via the Brooklyn Bridge, the Municipal Bridge, or the Manhattan Bridge some forty-five years ago. Although Selby universalizes to an extent by suggesting that any one of these neighborhoods, any one of these mixtures of lower middle working class people and lower class unemployed or marginally employed people, is interchangeable with another, whether in Brooklyn or Newark or New Haven, the strip of land wedged between the western edge of Brooklyn and the East River is not meant to represent all of Brooklyn. On the contrary, it is specifically of the problems of these working class and underclass people that Selby wants to tell us.

Selby relies upon four major techniques to tell his stories:

I suspect that if we were to create a list of all the words used in Last Exit to Brooklyn and ordered them according to frequency of use with the first word on the list being the most frequently used word and the last word on the list being the least, we would find that the words "a," "an," "the," "and," "but," "to," "he," "she," "it," "we," "they," "you," "am," "are," "is," and so on would be amongst the first listed. No surprise there. But not too far down the list, perhaps even in the top ten or top twenty most frequently used words would be the word "fuck" in its various forms—fuck, fucked, fucker, and fuckin, no apostrophe to indicate the missing "g" inasmuch as Selby has a unique typography, probably to emphasize the attention that he is calling to the language. It is not polite, grammatical English that he writes; it is the language of the Brooklyn streets near the waterfront, and it has its own rules, demands its own meaning.

Indiscriminate use of vulgarity is a rite of passage that most young people, especially young men, go through, but the salient characteristic about a rite of passage is that it is something that is by definition passed, not a condition of stasis. The occasional use of vulgarity during times of extreme duress or for emphasis is more or less proper, something that most adults learn to do and then pretend that they do not, but the insistent use of vulgarity along with the concomitant use of profanity and sacrilege all the time is something that shocks, and to shock is what Selby’s use of such language does in his depiction of the stories of the characters in Last Exit to Brooklyn. In the second paragraph of the novel, in Part I, "Another Day Another Dollar," describing the kinds of records in the jukebox that soldiers from the nearby Brooklyn army base, soldiers from more rural parts of the country might play when they come into Alex’s diner, also known as "the Greeks" (no apostrophe), the neighborhood punks gathered there are thus described by the narrator: "If somebody played a Lefty Frazell [sic] record or some other shitkicker they moaned, made motions with their hands (man! what a fuckin square) and walked out to the street" (Selby, Last Exit p. 11). The violence that occurs in their speech is also a part of the way that they treat each other. When one evening Freddy, one of the punks, slaps Rosie, a neighborhood slut, "Three drunken rebel [i.e., southern] soldiers ... stopped when they heard Rosie shout and watched as she staggered back from the slap, Freddy grabbing her by the neck. Go giter little boy. Hey, dont chuall know youre not to fuck girls on the street" (Selby, Last Exit p. 16), we wince at the violence, the misogyny, and the vulgarity as well as at the pathetic quality of such an existence, but we acknowledge them as reality, someone else’s reality, thank goodness, but reality nonetheless, and it is Selby’s use of language that helps to convince us of that reality. This is a time and a place where Brooklyn punks can find some silly reason to believe that they are "better" than rural, southern GIs. This is a time and a place where the so-called poor white trash element amongst such GIs can shout "We/ll [sic] cut your niggerlovin heart out," and both sides can back up their threats with switchblades quickly pulled and fists quickly thrown. This is a time and place redolent of violence for its own sake and to stake out a place in the world, even a tiny, shabby place, and say, "I am here. I am a man. I am important. I am better than you. Don’t fuck with me or I’ll prove it to you." Their location is their culture and their culture defines them. The street, the army base, the factory, the tenement apartments, the strike office, the bar, the diner, these are the only choices for people in the neighborhood, and they respond to the lack of space, beauty, intelligence, and options in animalistic fashion. The punks pass the time by listening to passing cars and trying to guess the kind of engine each contains, by drinking, swearing, stealing, beating up other people when they grow tired of pretending to beat up each other or when they need some money and can most easily get it by rolling a drunk.

Each of the six parts of the novel makes use of its own kind of shocking language. In each case, the shocking language is a result of the outre subject matter. In Part II, "The Queen Is Dead," we learn in great detail of the pathetic, tragic, sad, violent, empty, drug-filled life of Georgette, "a hip queer" (Selby, Last Exit p. 23), and his friends. Georgette and his friends inhabit a world of "weed," or marijuana (a mild central nervous system intoxicant), "bennies," or benzedrine (that is, amphetamine sulphate, a strong central nervous system stimulant), and gin. In the late 1990s, we are not surprised by the idea of people smoking marijuana, nor are we unknowledgeable about the lingo that includes not only "weed," but "grass," "shit," "bong," "doobie," "joint," "toke," "hit," and so on. But these words were much less in common use in the 1950s and early 1960s outside of college dorms and pockets of bohemianism and rebelliousness. Moreover, in this part of the novel Selby also tells us, in frighteningly close-up detail, the perceptions, thoughts, and sensations—emotional, tactile, visual, auditory, olfactory, and gustatory—of homosexuals involved in acts of homosexual lovemaking, something which straight America, even in those pockets that might know about marijuana, most likely knew nothing about in the 1950s and 1960s. Selby uses the language that the homosexuals themselves use, words like "prick," "ass," "come," and the ubiquitous "fuck," words which are well-known outside the family of homosexuality but whose use in these contexts are likely discomforting to straight America. Moreover, Selby introduces words such as "john" and "rough trade," which likely were not well-known outside the family in the early 1960s. In Part III, "And Baby Makes Three," we learn that having a baby feels "like shittin a watermelon" (Selby, Last Exit p. 89). No doubt, but the vulgarity of this simile is indicative of the people who live in the world of Last Exit to Brooklyn. In Part IV, "Tralala," we learn of the tragic, pathetic, sad, lonely life of a young woman in the neighborhood, the counterpart of the punks from Part I, a woman with the impossible name Tralala, which falls trippingly from the tongue nearly as easily as she uses her tongue and the rest of the gifts and abundance that God has given her to negotiate falling into bed with some poor fellow whom she will ultimately rob. We know that her life is pathetic because of the way she thinks about it: "Tralala shrugged her shoulders. Getting laid was getting laid. Why all the bullshit?" (Selby, Last Exit p. 93). Although this insouciance about sex and sexuality is not unknown elsewhere, it is sad no matter where it occurs, and in Tralala’s case, it occurs in conjunction with an attitude towards all aspects of life uncluttered with any sense either of self or of community. In Part V, "Strike," the centerpiece of the novel, we learn of the lonely fecklessness of Harry Black, the union steward at the factory who cannot do his own work as a machinist. Given to jactitation when he talks with his comrades—who can barely tolerate him—he expresses himself on the factory floor and nearly everywhere else with the same kind of vulgarity that the street punks who congregate at the Greeks use: "Harry stepped closer to [a machinist he was haranguing], turning his back to the foreman yelling louder. I dont give a fuck what ya can cut, ya hear me?" (Selby, Last Exit p. 129). Harry is married to Mary, a woman whom he cannot stand, a woman whom he mistreats sexually, emotionally, and physically, a woman with whom he has a child, but he is notwithstanding a repressed, self-loathing homosexual who stumbles out of both the closets that he has made for himself and that society has made for him in a most unwise and unhealthful way, all to self-destructive ends. In Part VI, "Coda," Selby gives us a fugue of short pieces describing the lives of other people in this last exit neighborhood that demonstrate the universality of the themes that he depicts in the first five parts of the novel. Thus, the language of the characters alienates them not only from the reader, who is in general shocked or at least annoyed by such language, but from each other, for surely it is difficult to ingratiate yourself to someone while shouting vulgarities and sacrilege in her or his ear ad infinitum. True, some vulgarity brings people together, as in the rite of passage for teenaged boys who use vulgarity to test their growing independence from their parents and to join in the brotherhood with the other boys who likewise swear, but the aggressive vulgarity used by the characters in Last Exit to Brooklyn is more likely to lead to confrontation than to embrace.

Not only is it the vulgarity of the language that contributes to the naturalistic portrayal that Selby presents, but also the rhythm of the spoken language. When words as they exist are inadequate for expressing the feeling that accompanies them, Selby records the words as they are spoken on the street, creating a dialect that draws attention to its speakers. Vinnie, one of the punks who hangs out at the Greeks, audibly punctuates his decision-making not by saying playfully, "What the fuck?" like northshore suburban Chicagoans Joel and Miles do in the witty 1984 film Risky Business, but by saying, "whatthefuck?" (Selby, Last Exit p. 13), deliberation and carefree conclusion being less important than the staccato vulgarity itself. Harry Black, the union steward at the factory, hanging out with the punks in the Greeks, says "he was fullashit, he didnt really see him hitim" (Selby, Last Exit p. 13). Alex, the Greek who owns "the Greeks," and the punks exchange insults by saying such things as, "You should get a job. Hey, watch yalanguage Alex. Yeah. No cursin in fronna married women. ... Someday you get in trouble. Ah Alex, dont talk like that. Ya makus feel bad. Yeah, man, ya hurt our feelings" (Selby, Last Exit p. 20). Tommy, the poor young schmeckle who gets roped into marrying the very pregnant young Suzy with whom he has slept—but he is probably not the only one—in Part III, "And Baby Makes Three," is compared to his new wife: "she was only a inch or 2 shorter than Tommy and outweighdim by 40 pounds" (Selby, Last Exit p. 84). Harry berates that fellow worker in Part IV, "Strike," by shouting, "Look buddy, youd better shut yafuckingmouth or youll be out on your ass" (Selby, Last Exit p. 129). In all of these cases, Selby draws attention to the language by concatenating existing words that when spoken as he has written them sound more like the way they are pronounced in this Brooklyn neighborhood than the way they are written in formal English, emphasizing the veracity of his writing, the veracity that he has picked up by observing and participating in the life of the people that he portrays, by listening to the way people really talk and recreating that sound typographically. The dialect is alienating, for it identifies the speaker as coming from that sliver of territory hard by the river at the extreme edge of Brooklyn and not yet into Manhattan. That is, the speech that Selby records separates these people from people in other places as surely as their desperate lives are different from those of people in middle-class, whitebread, straight America precisely because they are not middle-class, whitebread, straight America, and probably not even the kind of people who would read Selby or other serious novelists. There is no hint of sophisticated culture beyond that pretended by Georgette, who has confused a sassy put-down with wit because he "took a pride in being a homosexual by feeling intellectually and esthetically superior to those (especially women) who weren’t gay (look at all the great artists who were fairies!)" (Selby, Last Exit p. 23). But the truth about Georgette is in Selby’s choice of the descriptive gerund "feeling" instead of the word "being."

The use of both the vulgarity and the dialect contribute to Selby’s stream of consciousness style. Selby does not divide speech by the conventional use of "she said," "he said," or similar constructions. Punctuation is often idiopathic or lacking. There are no quotation marks to demarcate the beginnings and the endings of the words that are spoken, to delineate those spoken words from the descriptive and explanatory words of the narrator which are interspersed among them. One thought leads to another, one spoken phrase or sentence leads to another, not jumbled but running up against each other as they would in a radio drama in which actors and actresses step on each other’s lines. In some cases, the sentences wend on for hundreds of words over more than one page. Excisable examples of this stream of consciousness style can be found on any page. The following example is only one:

Here the stream of consciousness is a shouted communal stream belonging to several unnamed characters, policemen, factory security, and strikers, the capitalization representing the heated, confused shouting and the tumbling flow of one speaker’s words following without break those of another speaker. Sometimes the stream is a private stream that belongs to a single character. For example, in the same part of the novel, "Strike," we read of Harry’s acting and reacting to the expansion of his role from being merely shop steward to running the strike office as well:

Both his churlish bravado and his feckless fumbling of interfacing with the world emerge from this stream of consciousness description of the inane moments before the first morning’s picketing without Selby having to point them out as a more inexpert writer might have done. The stream of consciousness style, too, is alienating because of its pronounced difference from the usual style of descriptive realistic and naturalistic novels. The literary nature of the writing comes not from the beauty of the language but from its ugliness and from the unpleasant realization that such language is ubiquitous in those sections of American society that mainstream America knows nothing of. Telling those unknown stories gives the novel significance.

The six parts of the novel depict different aspects of the stifling life lived by the people off the last exit to Brooklyn. Each begins with a different quotation from the Bible and each depicts alienation of a different kind. Part I, "Another Day Another Dollar," begins with this quotation from Ecclesiastes: "For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity" (Ecclesiastes 3:19). This rather humbling piece of Biblical wisdom reminds us that we humans are in many indissolubly important ways no different from our vertebrate brethren. We both live, we both breathe, we both die. Although the purpose of this Old Testament verse is to remind us that we are mortal and that nothing we can do on Earth can exempt us from our mortality, that there is no purpose in stockpiling worldly goods or titles, the effect of juxtaposing this reminder with the worker’s commonplace "another day, another dollar" is to equate life, which is either a miracle or an absurdity depending upon your point of view, with the monetarization of labor and the mundane inanity of daily living. That is, people are not who they are, but rather they are reduced to what they can produce, and what they can produce is exchanged for money which they can then in turn exchange for the food, drink, clothing, and shelter that allows them to continue to live for another day. They are in a classical Marxist sense alienated. In this part of the novel, this equation is ironic because the punks who hang around the Greeks produce nothing except sloth and criminal violence. Yet that is how they are valued by the capitalist system that has produced them and their surroundings, for that is how they "earn" their living. The picture is rounded out by the inclusion of Rosie, one of the neighborhood sluts, and the soldiers from the Brooklyn army base. They provide other yet no more desirable options for ways in which people of the kind who live in this last exit neighborhood, and its small-town and rural counterparts, have to earn their livings.

Part II, The Queen Is Dead, begins with this quotation from Genesis: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" (Genesis 1:27). The term "queen" is a term for an effeminate homosexual, a term of proud self-identification if the homosexual chooses to apply it to himself, a term of derision if someone else applies it to him. The linking of this term with the story of the Creation of Humankind from Genesis has a similar two-edged result. On the one hand, it could be argued that God created human beings in his image and since God created both men and women, then there must logically be something in God that is both male and female, that the use of the third-person singular masculine pronoun "he" for God is a convention, not the result of a biological assignment of gender. And if that is so, then it is equally logical and reasonable that both the male and the female parts of God may reside within a single soul, thus making homosexuality a blessed rather than a cursed state, for surely all human beings are children of God. On the other hand, it could be argued that the verse specifically says that God created male and female "men," that is, different kinds of "men," each with its own identity and purpose, and therefore a soul that combines both male and female characteristics as a homosexual sometimes does is not the result of divine intent.

Selby does not judge the morality or the divine origin of Georgette, the protagonist of "The Queen Is Dead." But Selby implicitly respects Georgette as Georgette has defined himself, for it is likely that Georgette’s given name is George or something more recognizably masculine, yet Selby accepts him as Georgette, that is, as Georgette accepts himself. Selby also uses the construction "she (he)" to refer to Georgette, and most often simply as "she." We are never sure whether Georgette is a homosexual, a transvestite, a transsexual, or perhaps some combination. Perhaps he does not himself know for sure, but he comports himself as a deliberately effeminate homosexual.

In spite of the title, Georgette does not die in the novel, although in the film he does. But Selby does describe Georgette in such a way that we understand that Georgette is alienated. The opening sentences of this part of the novel trumpet his affectional orientation as well as his alienation: "Georgette was a hip queer. She (he) didnt try to disguise or conceal it with marriage and mans talk ... but, took a pride in being a homosexual" (Selby, Last Exit p. 23). Not straight but queer, not just queer but a hip queer, separated even from the mainstream of homosexuals, Georgette appears liberated to an extent, some seventeen or so years before the Stonewall riot on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, because Selby says that he takes pride in being a homosexual, and indeed, Georgette seems not to have any difficulty in acting in stereotypical homosexual fashion when he hangs out in the Greeks to be close to Vinnie, one of the punks, whom he impossibly loves. Indeed, Vinnie not only tolerates Georgette’s attention, but seems to take pleasure in insulting Georgette while at the same time acknowledging to his punk friends that he lets Georgette perform oral sex on him from time to time. So it is true that Georgette takes some pride in some cases in some places in his homosexuality, yet he is not quite as well adjusted as he would perhaps wish.

When Georgette is taunted by the punks, Harry, who happens to be hanging out in the Greeks at the same time, opens a switchblade which he and Vinnie, Sal, and Malfie toss around Georgette in a kind of freaky dodgeball game, and Georgette is ultimately severely wounded in the leg. They take him home, but Georgette is terrified of the response that his brother will have to the effeminate g-string that he wears under the dungarees which surely have to be pulled off to tend to his wound:

So Georgette, despite his demonstrations to the contrary of his pride in being who he is, still feels constricted by the roles that other people push onto him, son, brother, whatever. Moreover, we know that he is afraid of his brother finding a single capsule of benzedrine in his pants pocket, benzedrine, also known as speed or amphetamine, being one of the drugs of choice for people who do not have too much money and who want to feel up, feel high, feel good. His habitual use of illicit drugs could be a sign of what he mistakes for independence, and indeed that "independence," that feeling that the user is different from other people and does not need to follow the same rules, does not need to worry about getting hooked, is one of the rationalizations that drug users often provide themselves to explain away their addiction.

Selby tells us that Georgette’s "life didn’t revolve, but spun centrifugally, around stimulants, opiates, johns ..., the freakish precipitate coming to the top" (Selby, Last Exit p. 24). Drugs are a significant part of Georgette’s life. There is no judgment put on his or his friends’ use of drugs, and certainly there are abundant images of straight people smoking as well as drinking copious amounts of beer, that is, using some of the legal drugs that our society allows, so it is not drug use in and of itself that lets us know that Georgette is severely alienated. Rather, it is the use of illegal (though not particularly harmful) drugs in prodigious amounts and the decision to spend money on drugs rather than on other things—such as renting a nicer place to live, paying the electric bill, and the like—that lets us know that these drug users have a problem. We also know that it is because of Georgette’s homosexuality that he abuses drugs. After he leaves his mother’s apartment, he goes to the apartment of some gay friends, where one of them

Moreover, Georgette knows that the changes to the way he feels that are brought on by the speed are a lie. Yet he needs the lie immediately, and his desire for immediate erasure of the pain of the world indicates an urgency that is consistent with addiction. These few pills are not enough, so their cup of broth becomes a ciborium into which they dump a fistful of benzedrine capsules in order to celebrate the pathetic sacrament of getting high on speed. Ultimately, high on speed, high on marijauna, high on the pain from his soul as well as the pain from his leg, singing tiny bits of La Boheme and Madama Butterfly—partly because he identifies with both Mimi and Butterfly and their impossible lives and loves, partly because being an opera queen is a stereotypical role for some gay men, and partly because he considers himself intellectually and culturally superior to the other homosexuals and therefore actually knows at least a little about these operas and feels the need to demonstrate his knowledge as a kind of superiority—he thinks that he has a sexual encounter with his beloved Vinnie, only to realize that it was Harry and not Vinnie on whom he performs oral sex. His escape from the pain of his world thus ultimately leads him to do something that he would not ordinarily have done, something that alienates him from whom he thinks that he is.

Part III, And Baby Makes Three, is the shortest section of the novel at just over 7 pages in a novel nearly 300 pages long. In this novel about relationships and their alienating nature, this section’s purpose apparently is to show one of the ways, perhaps the most common of ways, in which young people in this last exit neighborhood come together to marry, that is, by passionate "accident" and the resultant "shotgun." Here we learn of Tommy, a good kid who has a fine motorcycle, who must marry Suzy because of his putative paternity of the child she carries. No romance here, no long courtship, no getting to know each other, no choice, no independence inasmuch as Tommy and Suzy will be moving in with her parents. All in all, a most unpleasant picture of wedded life, a most unappealing way to make the most important decision in young people’s lives.

This section begins with a quotation from Job: "Thou shalt know also that thy seed shall be great, and thine offspring as the grass of the earth" (Job 5:25). Having children is one reason that some people marry, one reason that some marriages are blessed. Yet neither Tommy nor Suzy has much say in the matter. In fact, having children was probably the result that they least wanted when the slept together, for it was sex and not love that brought them together. Having children changes the dynamics of their relationship, and they are forced by Suzy’s parents and local custom to get married. Having children, which can be a joy, is to them a physiological reality that alienates them from their youth and from their choice of whom and when to wed, of when to have children. Their freedom has died with the birth of the child. The reassurance from Eliphaz to Job is not particularly reassuring to Tommy and Suzy, and not to Job, either, as it turns out.

Part IV, Tralala, is perhaps the saddest section of the novel. It, too, is short at 22 pages. It begins with this quotation from the Bible: "I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him but found him not. The watchmen that go about the city found me: to whom I said, Saw ye him whom my soul loveth?" (Song of Solomon 3:2-3). Like the woman from the evocative Song of Solomon, Tralala goes about the city or at least her small part of it looking for men to love, but unlike that woman, Tralala never gives us the feeling that she truly loves anyone, and that is a tragic alienation.

We learn very nearly all we need to learn about Tralala from her name—and we never learn whether it is her given name, a label someone stuck on her, or a name she has chosen for herself—because it indicates a forced or at least unthought carefree attitude towards the life that happens around her and from the first three sentences of her section of the novel: "Tralala was 15 the first time she was laid. There was no real passion. Just diversion" (Selby, Last Exit p. 93). She is very proud of the body that God has given her, but has chosen to use it in remarkably unGodly ways. She deliberately moves in to seduce young men when other girls are interested in them. She deliberately entices men, especially drunks, so that the punks with whom she hangs out at the Greeks can knock her tricks unconscious, rob them, and split the proceeds with her. Her attitudes towards sex are much like the attitudes of the men in the neighborhood towards their jobs—it is a way to make a living, another day another dollar.

But Selby does not judge her harshly for the way in which she earns that living. He describes her activities but does not editorialize about them. Indeed, Tralala has few options in this last exit neighborhood. She could trap some man into marrying her as Suzy has done to Tommy. But even though she has the same financial and life problems that the rest of the people in the neighborhood have, she does not identify with them, she has no empathy for them: "If a girl liked one of the guys or tried to get him for any reason Tralala cut in. For kicks. The girls hated her. So what. Who needs them" (Selby, Last Exit p. 93). Tralala sees herself not only as independent but as derisive of the people around her, the people with whom she should most likely associate, the people from whom she is most likely to find compassion. After robbing a young soldier from the Brooklyn army base of his wallet one night, she encounters him a day later. He needs his identification so that he can get back on the base without getting into trouble:

In her specious and tragic logic, he should have had more not because he deserved more for putting his life in danger as a soldier, not because he was a good man, not for any reason in the world having to do with him, but rather he should have had more money so that she could have stolen more. When the punks beat the soldier, she joins them and "stomp[s] on his face until both eyes were bleeding and his nose was split and broken then kicked him a few times in the balls" (Selby, Last Exit p. 97). They later learn that the soldier "was in bad shape. Had to operate on him and he may go blind in one eye. Ain’t that just too bad. ... We oughta dumpem on general principles. Tralala laughed. I shoulda pressed charges fa rape" (Selby, Last Exit pp. 97-98).

The crisis in her life comes when she picks up a young army officer who actually treats her well before, during, and after making love to her. Perhaps for the first time in her memory someone treats her as a human being, certainly for the first time in a sexual relationship. He talks kindly and shyly to her. He demands nothing. He is gentle in his lovemaking. He takes her shopping: "She protested slightly when he told her to buy a cosmetic case (not knowing what it was when he handed it to her and she saw no sense in spending money on that when he could as well give her cash), and he enjoyed her modesty in not wanting to spend too much of his money" (Selby, Last Exit pp. 103-104). They stay together a few days. She expects a big cash payoff, and when he leaves her at the train station, he indeed gives her an envelope. It contains not money but a naive yet gentlemanly love letter. Feeling misled and betrayed, she is furious.

She begins to slip, staying drunk, picking up men in cheaper and cheaper and more and more tawdry bars, not bothering to clean herself or change her clothes. Ultimately, drunk and dirty, she takes on an entire barful of drunken men and is sexually debased and abused beyond words. That is, being treated well for the first time in her adult life in a sexual relationship, however brief and professional, alienates her even from the pitiful sense of herself that she had prior to meeting the kind, shy Army officer. Rather than finding in his humanity a bridge to finding that same humanity in herself and the people around her, she slides even further into a self-loathing and abusive relationship with men, she loses the control that she once had, and becomes not a woman in charge of her own life, but a nearly lifeless and limp body to be taken advantage of in the most humiliating ways by the most casual passersby.

Part V, "Strike," is the centerpiece of the novel, taking up 114 of the 296 pages. It begins with this quotation: "I went by the field of the slothful, and by the vineyard of the man void of understanding; And, lo, it was all grown over with thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof, and the stone wall thereof was broken down" (Proverbs 24:30-31). "Strike" is the story of the strike of the workers at an unnamed factory and of the relationship of Harry Black, union steward at the factory, to the workers, to his wife and son, and to the gay men with whom he becomes involved. It is not clear whether the derision of slothfulness and lack of understanding mentioned in the quotation from the Bible is directed against Harry, the workers, the goons hired to break the strike, the police, or the parasitic management class at the factory. The ownership class makes no appearance. There is certainly derision enough for all.

The first image we have of Harry comes in "The Queen Is Dead." It is Harry who playfully pulls the switchblade that is ultimately thrown somewhat accidentally into Georgette’s leg. This is ironic because the knife is used to taunt Georgette inasmuch as it could be used to castrate him and make him, in the eyes of the punks who taunted him, more like the woman that his feminine behavior made him appear to be. Georgette is struck by the knife and he bleeds, but he remains genitally intact. In "Strike" the first image we have of Harry is him watching his infant son: "Harry looked at his son as he lay on the table playing with a diaper. ... He looked at his sons penis. He stared at it then touched it. He wondered if an 8 month old kid could feel anything different there" (Selby, Last Exit p. 117). All men are interested in their penises, but Harry’s fascination is special, as we learn as the section progresses.

Harry is married, but he fails to pay attention to his wife in the ways that she would like. Leaving the crib containing his son, he joins his wife the living room of their small apartment: "Harry tried to ignore the presence of his wife but no matter how he stared at the t v, or covered the side of his head with his hand, he was still conscious of her being there. There! Sitting on the couch. Looking at him. Smiling. For krists sake, what thefuck she smilin at?" (Selby, Last Exit p. 118). Harry does not have a happy relationship with his wife. He would rather stare at his son’s penis than at his wife’s body. It is not unusual, apparently, in this last exit neighborhood for husbands and wives to have few conversations with each other, it is not unusual for them to dislike each, but at least the other examples of married couples that we see have sex, perhaps with other partners as well, but at least with each other, too. But Harry does not want to make love with his wife. When he wordlessly relents and does make love with her, he "shoved and pounded as hard as he could, wanting to drive the fucking thing out the top of her head ... physically numb, feeling neither pain nor pleasure, but moving with the force and automation of a machine" (Selby, Last Exit p. 120), undoubtedly much like one of the machines at work where he "was the worst lathe operator of the more than 1,000 men working in the factory" (Selby, Last Exit p. 126). For he is as bad a lover as he is a machinist, and sex is means not of pleasure, not of sharing, not of recreating or procreating, but of impaling his wife, of using his penis as a weapon. For Harry feels constricted by his marriage. Sex leaves him full of "nausea and slimy disgust" (Selby, Last Exit p. 121). He is afraid of sex as well as disgusted by it, for "[h]e had [cried] many times, locked in a bathroom or on the street running from the woman he had been with, but now the tears no longer rilled his eyes" (Selby, Last Exit p. 121). He has ceased caring about himself and his own feelings to the point that he can no longer even feel this sadness. When he dreams, "Harpies swooped down on Harry ... [and] he could hear his flesh being ripped from his belly, could hear the sharp tearing sound prick its way into his ears ... and once more plucking the eyes from his head" (Selby, Last Exit pp. 124-125). His eyes roll away from him in Sisyphean fashion, and in searching for them with his blinded groping hands, he repeatedly jams burrs and other such misfit things into his eyesockets.

Harry is a repressed and severely disturbed homosexual, his anger at his wife merely a displacement of his anger with himself which returns to him in the form of the female harpies who tear him apart and in the dreamwork substitute an Oedipal eyeplucking for castration. It is no wonder that he is fascinated by the tiny penis of his son, no wonder that making love with his wife leaves him feeling crushed and constricted, almost dead, or worse, continually almost dying and continually feeling the fear of that dying that manifests itself as a pressure in his body as well as his soul: "The pressure must have gone down. It was still there, but it must have lessened. It must have. Should be able to move. He swallowed ... again ... his throat burned with the bitterness. He lay completely immobile. Not breathing. Stomach bubbling" (Selby, Last Exit p. 123).

This feeling of constriction oppresses him at work, too, yet in his imagination at work he is a heroic vanquisher of the oppressive management class, crushing "gigantic concrete buildings ... [and] heads and bodies and heaving them from the windows and watching them splatter on the sidewalks below ... [as] he, Harry Black, age 33, shop steward of local 392 watched and roared with laughter" (Selby, Last Exit p. 137). Hovering above the wreckage and causing the carnage, it is Harry here who has the ability to fly and not the Harpies. Yet Harry is a feckless man, a terrible worker, a pain in the ass union steward whom the bosses hate, but whom the union tolerates because his nitpicking adherence to union rules, although unnecessary and of no logical benefit to the workers, keeps management on the defensive and makes it easier for the union leadership to ask management for other concessions. Even as the union leadership announces Harry as being the union brother in charge of the strike office one evening in their union hall, a moment which should be filled with some pride and glory for him, "Harry tried to look over the heads of the men in the hall as he spoke, but was unable to keep from seeing their faces so he lowered his head and closed his eyes until they were open just enough to see his shoes and the edge of the platform [and he] stumbled [back to his seat]" (Selby, Last Exit p. 142). Even here where he is accepted as a leader helping to run the union, he is always on the periphery just as he is with whatever group he seems to find himself.

Yet the advent of the strike does change Harry. First, the union leadership tells him that he has an expense account and can charge more or less anything he "needs" to run the strike office. In a sense, he has taken one small step closer to being like the accursed management men that he despises in the factory, men who also have expense accounts. But more than that, Harry notices a gay man in the bar near the strike office, and for the first time he is intrigued rather than repulsed. Fascinated, Harry "stayed there for more than an hour ... listening and ignoring his beer" (Selby, Last Exit p. 148). When he returns home, the excitement he feels from having been aroused by the gay man makes it easier for him to make love to his wife again, but it is not she who excites him as he tries "desperately to evoke the image and the sound" (Selby, Last Exit p. 149) of the gay man. Selby accurately pictures Harry’s desire as desire and nothing more: he sees a gay man, he is moved by what he sees, and he desires to commune with the body as well as the soul of that man. There is no judgment on either Selby’s or Harry’s part. Harry’s homosexual desire simply is, and although it has taken him a long time to discover the meaning of his confusion and his fear of his wife and other women, he accepts his new relationship with men as natural. That is rather positive and certainly gay-affirming, but if Harry had stopped to think about his new relationship with his desires, he probably would have been able, if not to reflect deeply the meaning of his newly acquired identity, at least to have made better choices in how he expresses that identity.

Although the strikers believe that the strike will be over soon, and although they think that it is a lark to be getting strike pay from their union while picketing but not actually working, time for Harry in the strike office passes slowly in a life measured out not by coffee spoons but cigarettes and pronouncements of false importance: "A cigarette takes only a certain amount of time to smoke and though this takes time it seems to take less and less with each one" (Selby, Last Exit p. 150). For Harry, "nothing seemed really to exist" (Selby, Last Exit p. 150). Soon, to pass the boredom, Harry does not mind when Vinnie, Sal, Malfie, and Tony, the punks who usually hang out at the Greeks, decide to hang out with Harry, especially inasmuch as Harry orders barrels of beer to be delivered to the strike office, all on his expense account. The beer is ostensibly for the strikers, but soon it is Harry and the punks who drink most of it, even though Harry has begun ordering more and more barrels of beer each day. Soon Harry becomes patriarchal "getting drunk and entertaining about a dozen of the neighborhood guys" (Selby, Last Exit p. 155). The guys induce him to buy a radio for the strike office and the music helps pass the time. As the strike drags on, the workers become more sullen and Harry feels more and more alone, blaming his wife and his boss for his misfortunes and the feeling of emptiness and fear inside him, but he enjoys the company of the neighborhood punks at the strike office, especially when the gay man accompanies them.

Though management at the factory has carefully orchestrated the moving of work to other locations so as to avoid being hamstrung by the strike, the strike becomes ugly when management realizes that in spite of their planning, they have to bring in some trucks through the picket lines to pick up some boxes of critically needed machine parts that they somehow overlooked in their logistical preparations. The confrontation between the strikers, the goons, and the police who are ostensibly there to protect both sides but who protect the goons and management more than the strikers, becomes violent when the trucks arrive to take away the parts. Harry notably avoids the violence.

But the action of the management by crossing the picket lines with the trucks requires a reaction from the union, and so the union leadership hires the neighborhood punks to set the trucks afire as they are parked in the trucking company’s lot elsewhere in this last exit neighborhood. Harry, having nothing to do with either the planning or the carrying out of this criminal response, spent his time "wishing he could tell [his union brothers] what he had planned to do to the trucks. If only he could tell them. Then theyd really know how important he is. But whatthefuck, theyd know how important he was anyway" (Selby, Last Exit p. 174). But again this posturing is false self-aggrandizement, for in spite of Harry’s wish to the contrary no one knows how important he is because he simply is not important.

The most disturbing image of the confrontation in "Strike" is that the two sets of workers—the strikers and the police—fight each other instead of helping each other. Both sides are tools of the management and ownership. They insult each other, hurl missiles at each other, and hit each other with clubs and fists, yet after the strike is resolved, nothing has changed. Neither the police nor the strikers are any better off than they were, still alienated by the design of the overclass from their fellow workers and not realizing it.

After the punks and the gay man visit the strike office again, "Harry had a long lovely sleep" (Selby, Last Exit p. 176) in contrast to the restless sleep he has had in the past. A day or so later, when the punks come to the strike office to drink free beer and bullshit with Harry, the gay man, whose name is Ginger, catches Harry’s eye again. As Ginger "whirled around the room shaking the tight cheeks of her ass and Harry caressed his beer glass and licked his lips not knowing exactly what he was doing, his body reacting and tingling" (Selby, Last Exit p. 179), Harry becomes giddy, fascinated, and filled with a feeling of power. It is only after the violence, only after Harry believes that he has begun to prove himself as a man that he starts to act upon the confused attraction he has towards Ginger, who toys with him while at the same time despising him, wanting to shout at him "IM MORE OF A MAN THAN YOU" (Selby, Last Exit p. 182). Yet Harry feels good remembering "how [Ginger] liked to talk with him and feel the muscles in his arms and legs" (Selby, Last Exit p. 185).

Harry goes to a gay bar named "Mary’s," is picked up by a gay man named Alberta, and has his first gay sexual experience:

This in contrast to the violent, angry, fearful passion he directs towards his wife, also conveniently named Mary, demonstrates his pleasure and acceptance of his gay sexuality, but it is an acceptance without deep understanding. Harry is living for the moment, drunk on the sensuosity of his first gay sexual experience and on the power that derives from his self-inflated vision of his importance to the union, to the strikers, and to his new gay acquaintances. Time, which has passed with agonizing slowness in the past, now passes quickly.

Harry begins to spend more money on his widening circle of relationships with gay men. He takes a taxi to Mary’s, an extravagance that he could not ordinarily afford, he buys champagne, he takes his assignations to restaurants. His hatred of his wife turns violent when for the first time he strikes her (Selby, Last Exit p. 200). Yet even amongst the "freaks" with whom the gay prostitutes consort, Harry stands out as different, partly because of his ignorance of gay culture and gay lovemaking, partly because he seems totally clueless about who and what he is. He is happy but he does not know why, and his happiness keeps him from responding in a wise and healthful way to the gay prostitutes who take advantage of him simply because he has a bottomless pocketbook in the form of his union expense report. Harry does not even realize that he is spending the union’s money fraudulently because he has misinterpreted his importance, because he has misinterpreted the latitude that "bosses" have. Yet his union superiors do not mind him spending their money fraudulently because Harry remains a bargaining chip with factory management—described as "stuffedshirtbastards" and "bellyrobbinbastards" by the union leadership—who want to fire Harry for his incompetence as a worker and his intransigence as an "enforcer" of the fine details of the union contract.

Harry ultimately has a relationship with Regina, another effeminate gay man who has sex with Harry only because of Harry’s access to money. But Harry misreads Regina’s pecuniary attention as love and becomes unwisely devoted: "The weeks following Thanksgiving were lovely and exciting for Harry. He saw Regina often ..." (Selby, Last Exit p. 216). Regina is a particularly bitchy and condescending partner, something that Harry instinctively feels but neither understands fully nor acts upon because he is afraid of losing the happiness that accompanies the apprehension. But another crisis changes Harry’s life again; the strike is resolved. Harry is no longer needed as the manager of the strike office, and his expense account is terminated. Telling Regina that he no longer has money to show them both what passes for "a good time" in this last exit neighborhood, Regina cuts him off, abruptly telling him to go out and get more money if he has none. He panics. "Harry stood for a long time, feeling a swelling behind his eyes—how long since he had felt it? It almost felt new yet he knew it was not ..." (Selby, Last Exit p. 221), for "things seemed to be all loused up again" (Selby, Last Exit p. 223). The incapacitating feeling returns, the feelings of constriction and fear that were his companions when he was cooped up with his wife and forced to have sex with her. Yet it was not only the loss of his sexual relationship with Regina and the other gay men that causes his distress, it is the economic strictures he faces as well. When he has the means to act like a capitalist big shot, he is fine or at least he believes that he is fine, but when his means disappear, he realizes what a small man he is, indeed. He is always but a pawn, in the trap of a marriage with his wife, in the machinations by both union leaders and factory bosses, as a toy that the gay prostitutes play with only because he has money; there is never a sense that any of the gay men love Harry as Georgette loves Vinnie. Yet, Harry expresses himself most confidently during his obsession with Regina.

Thus trapped, disappointed, and frightened, Harry lashes out at his wife again: "Ya ballbreakin cunt. Ya hearme? ... Yeah, you bitch, grabbing an arm, twisting it and yanking her up to a sitting position" (Selby, Last Exit p. 223). Harry gets drunk, and having no luck in re-establishing his relationship with Regina, Harry in a daze of desire, hurt, anger, and alcohol tries to perform oral sex on one of the young neighborhood boys, obsessed as he is with the new-found liberation and happiness that comes from his being able to act upon his homosexual feelings, but the boy squirms free to alert the punks in the Greeks who come to beat Harry severely for this transgression. "Harry lay still, sobbing. He cried then screamed a long loud AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAA that was muffled as his face fell back into the dirt of the lot. ... He yelled again. He heard the sound loud inside his head, GOD O GOD ... GOD YOU SUCK COCK" (Selby, Last Exit p. 227), the irony of the profanity and the sacrilege mixed with the pathetic, half-self-knowing desire undoubtedly lost on Harry. For he is a totally alienated man, alienated from the God he curses for making him the Harry that he is: feckless, underpaid, fearful of women and of sex with them, moved and thrilled by but not fully understanding attraction to and sex with men, a pawn in the game that passes for labor-management relations, an abject figure despised and beaten by the punks and children of the neighborhood even though all he ever wanted was to be happy.

The final part of Last Exit to Brooklyn, "Coda," is a fugue of lightly interwoven stories that spin out portions of the last exit lives of other people in the neighborhood. It begins with this quotation again from the Book of Job: "How much less in them that dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, which are crushed before the moth? They are destroyed from morning to evening: they perish forever without any regarding it. Doth not their excellency which is in them go away? They die, even without wisdom" (Job 4:19-21). This passage asks whether people live without ever questioning the reality of their eventual death, without understanding or complaining about the fragility of the human condition.

In this section, we learn of the animosity in the marriage of Mike and Irene Kelly, perhaps a glimpse of the kind of marriage that Tommy and Suzy will ultimately have; the kind that Harry and Mary Black might have had had he not discovered and acted upon his homosexual impulses and yet might still have if they do not have the courage to end their marriage; the kind that perhaps Georgette’s mother and father had; the kind that perhaps all the workers at the factory have; and we wonder if the children in the Kelly family will grow up to have a different kind of relationship with their spouses, whether they will break the cycle of violence, cruelty, and pain, whether they will leave the unhealthy role models behind them, but we fear that we already know the answer to our question—that they will not.

We learn of the lonely widowhood of Ada, an aged Jewish woman whose son died in the war and her husband sometime after that. They worked hard at their candy store all of their lives, Ada and Hymie. Yet now, living in a public housing project, Ada bears the crushing burden of loneliness and the hatred of the other people in the neighborhood for no reasons other than her Jewishness and the fact that her shyness keeps her from reaching out for companionship, her behavior being mistaken for haughty aloofness: "Ada stood in front of her wailing wall looking at heaven through the frost covered glass smeared with [her] blood ... and she would fall against her window weeping, sobbing, slowly sinking, sinking to her knees muttering ... [hoping that now that] winter was over ... she could sit on a bench and feel the sun, watch the birds, the children playing and perhaps someone would sit and talk with her" (Selby, Last Exit pp. 235-236).

We learn of Vinnie and Mary who "would still be unmarried if they hadn’t met" (Selby, Last Exit p. 236), and who now spend their life yelling at each other and the two children that they have quickly produced. A conversation about the necessity of paying attention to each other’s needs, something that should be second nature to people in a loving relationship, paying attention to each other’s urgent needs in a tiny apartment with only one small bathroom reveals that this is far from a loving relationship: "FA KRISTS SAKE OPEN THE DOOR. I GOTTA PISS. GAWAY. WHY DONTYA DRESS IN THE BEDROOM? CAUSE YA BODDA ME. ... I CANT WAIT. OPEN THE DOOR. GO WAY. ... I/LL KILLYA WHEN YA COME OUT" (Selby, Last Exit p. 238).

We learn of young mother Lucy who tries very hard to raise her two children, Robert and Johnny, the best she can in the project where to get to the laundry room she has to endure an elevator dirtied with human excrement, where her husband is of no help, where she worries that "the nice white girl" downstairs might think of her and her children as being like "the rest [of the black people in the projects]" (Selby, Last Exit p. 242). But sadly, Lucy worries when she spies Johnny "playing with a spick boy wearing dirty dungarees and filthy ripped sneakers" (Selby, Last Exit p. 259), worries that her children will play with "patched pants kids" (Selby, Last Exit p. 272), unable to break the cycle of fear, mistrust, and hatred that she hopes other people, white people, will not direct at her, unable to escape the time-killing and mind-numbing details that it takes her to get through a day.

We learn of black Abraham Washington, whose thoughts revolve around his fancy Cadillac and his ability to impress young women other than his wife.

We learn that the most common reasons that people are evicted from the project are Criminal, Miscellaneous, and Morals. And we learn that the bodies of infants are from time to time found in the garbage or in the incinerator, a horrible metaphor for the meaning of life that depicts the insignificance of all human life and the lack of interconnectedness in this last exit neighborhood.

It took twenty-five years between the publication of the novel in 1964 to the making and release of the film version of Last Exit to Brooklyn in 1989. By that time, perhaps the insignificance of individual human life had become a terrible reality and not seen only in out-of-the-way urban neighborhoods. The film was directed by Uli Edel from an adapted screenplay by Desmond Nakano. A title at the beginning of the film quotes the passage from "The Song of Solomon" that begins Part IV of the novel, "Tralala." A second title quickly tells us that we are looking at a street not just anywhere but a street in Brooklyn, 1952, a grey world to which we are first introduced by a crane shot down into the street outside Willie’s bar and the Greeks diner, where the camera follows three soldiers as they pass some strikers standing around a fire burning in a garbage can. As they approach, Tralala (whom we do not yet know by name) is arguing with one of the punks, probably her pimp. The soldiers shout some smartass comments that are evidently meant as much as a challenge to the masculinity of the punks and to their domination of the turf as they are meant to be what passes for wit, and the punks respond by confronting and chasing the soldiers, catching the slowest soldier and beating him fiercely. We learn that the punks are named Vinnie, Sal, Al, Tony, and Freddie. Vinnie is the apparent leader and Tralala’s pimp.

Thus the first image that we have of this neighborhood that can be entered by taking the last exit to Brooklyn is of bleak living conditions, bleak working conditions, hatred, division, defiant sexuality, vulgarity, and violence, the film making an admirable attempt to establish cinematic equivalents of the literary devices in the novel:

The vulgarity is easy to depict in the film. The language that the characters speak comes straight from the novel, the inflections and concatenations that they bring to words giving them the authenticity that Selby records. The delivery of the dialogue is the result of the director’s influence and the actors’ and actresses’ performances, and it is a bit more shocking when heard than when read. This shock benefits the film, for it is at least in part to shock his readers that Selby writes in this fashion. The characters spit out the vulgarity with an aggressiveness that is intended to cower, and it is effective. These characters are the kind of marginal people that middle-class, whitebread, straight America avoids on the street and on the subway. The time period covered by the novel and the film parallels the early days of television, which gave most of America an image of New Yorkers more akin to Lucy, Ricky, Fred, and Ethel than to Vinnie, Sal, Tony, and Tralala. Thus shaking the sensibility of the audience, the film shocks to much the same extent that the novel does.

But vulgarity takes many forms, and in this film, the vulgarity of the exploitation of the working class is best shown in the story of Harry Black in his role as union steward and manager of the strike office. In his introduction in the film, acting as a false witness for the punks who have terrifically beaten the young soldier, Harry identifies himself as an important man with the union bragging, "I’m in charge of the strike office up the street," and later, "I run the whole show." This interweaving of the stories of Harry and Tralala is more than just mimicking the lightly interwoven style of the novel. The film wisely attempts to pull the vignettes of the book together in some semblance of cohesion. Although the six parts of the novel are lightly interwoven, the stories are more formally woven together in the film, with some cross-cutting between them, to produce a linear drama. The intercutting allows two separate stories to comment upon and counterpoint each other. Moreover, the film elides some events and moves the actions of some characters to other characters purely for the purpose of maintaining a linear drama. For example, the story of Georgette is woven into Harry’s story, and the story of Tommy and Suzy is opened up so that we can see a christening and a wedding, which the director intercuts with the story of Tralala’s decline and final gang rape. But none of these changes in any way diminishes the impact of the film.

The novel also in part creates its impact from the stream of consciousness style that reflects the jumble and collision of events within a mind or within a shared experience of several minds. The effect of this stream of consciousness in the novel is to reveal the limitations in thought that mirror the limitations in the lives of the characters, limitations imposed on them by the social and economic condition of the last exit neighborhood in which they live.

This stream of consciousness style is more difficult to portray in a film. Yet, the film does try to mimic the sense of limitation that defines the lives of the characters in the film. This visual limitation is evident from the opening scene of the soldiers, the punks, Tralala, and Harry in the street. The scene is lit and shot to look something like the famous Edward Hopper painting of people in a diner at night time, but in the film all the colors have been drained out, for all is dim, leaving a grey, sweaty, grimy world of sex, violence, work (or stikes against work), and alcohol. The police arrive and inject some sense of authority, but their authority is laughable because the beaten soldier is unconscious and severely hurt, the other soldiers are not sure which of the punks did what to them, and the punks lie about their role in what happened. "They insulted my wife," says Vinnie indicating Tralala, and the punks snicker at the cleverness of the joke, for Tralala is clearly no one’s wife and everyone’s plaything. But their ridiculous claims are backed up by Harry, who has been watching the whole thing from his window. In fact, Harry has been doing a great deal of surreptitious watching, and to emphasize the importance of him watching and of the audience looking at him, the camera dollies in on a closeup of Harry’s face. Moreover, the lies that Harry makes to cover up the crimes of the punks parallel the lies that he tells himself about who he is, what he is, and how he feels.

Thus very early in the film, we know the importance of looking, specifically of Harry’s looking, for we are invited to watch with him. Indeed, we are invited to identify with him. The events that happen in the street are what both we and Harry watch, and we are initiated into the sense of how ordered everything is in the world of the film, ordered in the sense of limited. Everything is bounded by limitations. Choices are not apparent. When Harry leaves the scene in the street, he returns to his wife who tries to engage in a bit of foreplay, but because he resists, because he is not interested in following through on what she tries to initiate, she represents a limitation. Harry’s life is ordered by the fact that he is married and has a specific, well-known, well-defined role to play—strike office manager, husband, lover, father, provider. Yet we observe that he is clearly uncomfortable with the last four of those facets to his life. And so, seeking the escape from the order that society has imposed on his life, he literally looks elsewhere, beyond the limitations of his life, trying to find something that appeals to him; and we look with him.

Rejecting his wife’s offer of a bit of love-making, he chooses instead to look at something else, in this instance, an ancient western movie on his tiny black-and-white Dumont television. There is a quick cut to a scene of rain outside the apartment followed by a quick cut to the interior of the bedroom and Harry asks his wife if she is asleep. Here, the importance of looking betrays Harry because he cannot see what we can, that she is awake but that she is ignoring him, for what reason we do not know. We do not know, that is, until we see Harry slide into bed lying on his side and then we see his wife’s hand come up over his shoulder and chest; the camera zooms in on Harry’s face as he stiffens with dread. He responds to his wife’s advances by hurting her with only a few violent, fierce pelvic thrusts, not making love, but taking out his anger on her.

The next segment of the story carries the image of out-of-place lovemaking to the tiny apartment of very-Italian Joe, one of the workers at the factory, his wife, and their two children, a boy of maybe fourteen and a very large girl in her mid-to-late teens. Joe gives us a lesson in the importance of not looking, for before his eyes over the past several months, his daughter Donna has been growing even larger as her pregnancy progresses. In this confined space with two hefty adults, one very pregnant hefty daughter, and a slighter son, the cause of Joe’s immediate consternation is the fact that Donna has locked herself into the bathroom to examine in privacy the progress of her pregnancy—and noting how large she has become, she begins to cry—and Joe has an urgent need to micturate. Locked out of the family bathroom, Joe opens the window in his public housing project apartment and pees into the airshaft, splashing someone below. All of the family is limited, constricted physically by the tiny apartment, by the airshaft, by their roles in the family, by the pressure of their desires, by their dull-witted approach to the world that they inhabit but cannot understand. When finally awaking to his daughter's pregnancy, Joe asks Donna "who dunnit?" and she cannot reply, the young teenaged son, nicknamed Spook, helpfully asks, "Was it Tommy with the bike?"

This scene ends with a cut to a shot of a young man riding up to the union hall on his motorcycle, and the logic of the cut and the dialogue that follows immediately informs us that he is "Tommy with the bike." But the segue links the story of Tommy and Donna to the story of the strikers, which is an outgrowth of the story of Harry’s fumbling approaches to his sexuality, whatever it might be. The union president, Boyce, recaps the situation to the gathered striking union members. The strike is six months old, they do not want to strike, they want to return to work, and they are not happy with the way the union management is treating them. The strike is beginning to take its toll on them physically, financially, and emotionally, and they are not quite as willing to devote themselves as much to the strike as they were six months ago. They try to shout down Boyce, but he reminds them that they do not want to return to work by giving into the demands of the factory bosses; that would be defeat. Boyce manages to whip enough bravado into this speech and enough energy into the men to convince them temporarily to put aside their unwillingness to continue the strike. Boyce’s announcement that each of the strikers can pick up a bag of groceries provided free of charge by the union is met with modest enthusiasm. As the men queue up, Joe gets into a fight with Tommy over Donna’s being pregnant, and they fall onto the makeshift tables holding the bags of groceries. Again, each is limited in what he can do. Joe must fight to protect the honor of his daughter, Tommy must fight because he is attacked, and their fight is emblematic of the division amongst the striking union brothers who respond to the situation around them but do not control it. Joe’s and Tommy’s response is animalistic, not human. Their lives are ordered by their roles in relation to Donna. The lives of the men are ordered by their belonging to the union that tells them what to do and by their roles in relation to their own families.

Cut to a shot of Tralala walking down the street. She passes a young teenaged boy, Joe’s son Spook, who wears a ludicrously out-of-place antique motorcycling cap wherever he goes. She asks Spook if he has enough money yet to buy a motorcycle of his own, and we can tell that this is a conversation that has happened many times in the past. To Spook, owning a motorcycle of his own is equated with being a sexually active man whom women, especially Tralala, will respect and desire. This belief is perhaps something that Spook has learned from observing Tommy’s relationship with Donna. Spook stammers a bit, embarrassed because he admits that he does not yet have enough money but enthusiastic that he soon will.

Tralala enters Willie’s bar crammed tight with people watching Joe Louis fight another black fighter on a tiny black-and-white television, a typical scene which locates the film in the early 1950s when most people did not yet have a television set at home and did indeed go to bars to watch the new phenomenon. Tralala picks out from the crowd someone to seduce, a soldier who seems to have won a large wad of cash on the outcome of the fight. She promises him a good time and they leave. As they pass the diner, she gently raps on the window to alert the punks inside that she has another candidate for mugging. She takes him to a dark alley behind a car, where he thinks that he is going to receive oral sex from her, but instead he gets smacked on the head. As he falls unconscious, the punks beat and rob him. They give Tralala her cut as they leave.

Cut to inside the union strike office. Harry, who has been watching the happenings in the street again, sees Georgette go into the cafe. Georgette flaunts himself in front of Vinnie, begging him to let Georgette "do" Vinnie, and in return Vinnie taunts Georgette. They go into the street, the punks taunt Georgette with a switchblade that Sal has pulled, threatening to castrate Georgette. Harry watches from inside the strike office. When Georgette is wounded, Vinnie and one of the other punks take Georgette to his mother’s apartment. Georgette lies in bed, in pain from his wound but in greater pain from the derisive hatred of his gay-baiting brother and his fear that his brother will find out that Georgette is wearing a frilly, feminine g-string. Of course, the brother sees the g-string when he pulls down Georgette’s trousers to clean the wound, and he takes off on a rant against Georgette, opening the drawers of Georgette’s dresser, pulling out the women’s clothing hidden there. Georgette cries, "Why me? I can’t stand it, Momma, I can’t stand it!" We know that Georgette is alienated because of his emotional distance from his family, because of his impossible pursuit of Vinnie, and because he refers to the people around him as freaks, not coming to terms with his own difference but transferring it to others so that the difference becomes easier for him to deride.

Cut to outside the following day where Tralala asks Spook about his bike again. As Spook starts to respond, Joe intervenes, telling his son that he does not want him to know "girls like that." Cut to preparing Donna’s wedding dress inside the family apartment. As her mother frets about how to make the mother’s old wedding dress large enough to cover Donna’s pregnancy and her natural largeness, Donna’s water breaks, indicating the onset of labor. The irony of Donna perhaps being "a girl like that" is lost on Joe and his family.

Cut to Tralala’s story again. She picks up another man in a bar, setting him up as before by rapping on the window of the diner to alert her punk partners. This time is different, however, because rather than sneaking up to beat Tralala’s john, they watch from afar and snicker as she actually has to go through with the act of performing oral sex on the man, something that she was not expecting to do. After he leaves, the punks come up to her, laughing at the enormity of their "joke." They exchange insults as Tralala tries to keep all the money, insisting that she earned it, but they take their cut from her, nonetheless. She picks up another trick in the bar, and when he suggests that they go to Manhattan, Tralala takes off with him, giving the finger to her partners as they stand around dumbfounded. They decide to get high, and Harry, flush with money from his union expense account, offers to spring for a cab. The punks and Harry go to a pot party at an apartment where they meet four homosexuals, three of them in drag—one of whom is Georgette—and Regina, an effeminate homosexual who is dressed not quite in drag but almost. This scene does not exist precisely in the novel. Rather, several scenes including the pot party in "The Queen Is Dead" are elided to make this scene. The effect is to continue to emphasize the tightness of space that has been constricting all of the characters from the outset of the film. The rooms are small, dingy, and poorly lit, providing a visual metaphor for the lack of options that exist in the lives of the punks, the homosexuals, and especially Harry, who is emotionally constricted as well as physically constricted because of his inability to deal with his sexuality. He is visually "in the closet" as well as emotionally and culturally.

Cut to Manhattan. Tralala’s trick passes out from drink at the table, and so she picks up another young soldier, an officer fresh out of OCS, who "just got my orders [to ship out] today." Indeed, everyone in this film gets orders from someone, be it the Army, the union, a pimp, a john, a wife, the Catholic church, whatever. Manhattan, on the other hand, offers a contrast with the confinement of Brooklyn, much as it does in the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever, directed by John Badham. Manhattan is a place of greater opportunities, and indeed, Tralala picks up an officer not an enlisted man here, and he is different from the men she usually picks up. The newly-minted lieutenant is young and innocent, originally from Idaho, and looking every bit as much like Opie Taylor grown up as Ron Howard did when he was in his early twenties. When the lieutenant asks Tralala something about local geography, she responds, "This is Manhattan. I don’t get out of the neighborhood," and we know that she, too, is limited by what life offers her.

As if to emphasize the limitation on their lives in the last exit neighborhood, the film cuts back to the pot party, where reality is exchanged for drug-induced euphoria and where marijuana is apparently not strong enough for Georgette, who injects himself with a single-dose hypodermic filled with heroin, I suspect, although the film never specifies. (In the novel, it is clear that Georgette uses heroin.) Thus drugged and unable to be fully aware of his surroundings, Georgette gets hit by a car when he runs out of the apartment looking for Vinnie. (The driver of the car is played by Hubert Selby, Jr., in a cameo role in the film.) This violent end is significantly different from the novel, for despite the title of that part of the novel, "The Queen Is Dead," Georgette does not die in the novel, but we suspect that he will someday as presaged by the title. The film realizes what the novel hints at, and by making Georgette’s death violent as well as the result of his own stupidity for taking the heroin and rushing out onto the street while he is under the influence of the narcotic, the film combines the alienation of homosexuality and that of drug abuse with the ultimate alienation of death. Although Georgette is different, he is never seen in a negative way. He harms no one, except perhaps himself through the use of drugs, and only wants to find happiness. The implication is that Georgette is so alienated that he cannot live in the world from which he comes. In this way, he is much like Harry, for Harry, too, is only interested in finding a way to be happy. Meanwhile back in Manhattan, the young lieutenant tells Tralala that she has "the best tits in the western world," a description which pleases her. The counterpointing of these two pathetic stories emphasizes the notion that the inhabitants of the last exit neighborhood are confused by the world, abused by the world, constricted and limited in choices.

Cut to dawn and a long shot of trucks approaching the factory gate through the early morning haze. The strikers, unprepared for the trucks, are ineffective in stopping them. Cut to Harry, who wakes up in bed with Regina. He comes out of the apartment and goes to the factory where he sees that the picket line has been broken at about the same time he has been broken into gay lovemaking. Moreover, after having found something in himself in that encounter with Regina, Harry for the first time acts like a "real man" rather than a peripheral nobody. Cut to a close-up on his face, which is worried. A handheld camera moves with him as he moves into the crowd of strikers outside the gate of the factory now trying to keep the loaded trucks from leaving. Harry climbs up onto the gate, a heroic leader of the strikers in a sharp detour from his actions in the novel, as he leads the strikers in the chant, "No trucks out! No trucks out!" Tralala returns to the neighborhood at the same time that mounted policemen arrive to restore order. That night policemen patrol the factory gates, and the factory takes on the appearance of a prison, emphasizing the notion that despite the violence of the strike, this is a controlled society. A horrendously violent fight breaks out as the trucks try to leave. Fists are thrown and truncheons are slammed into flesh. The police use teargas and the goons in the factory turn firehoses on the strikers. Order returns because of the use of violence, that is, in spite of the violence, there is greater violence at the disposal of the powers that be, and this is still an ordered society because the factory bosses make the critical shipment from the factory and the strikers are put back into their position of subservience.

The four stories of Harry flirting with his gay passions, the strike, Tralala, and Tommy and Donna are all intercut at this point, with the tempo of the editing picking up slightly. In Manhattan, Tralala is with her lieutenant again, but has a moment of fear when she is seen by another soldier from whom she has stolen money. In the strike office, Harry is a "big guy" in a small world, but it is the union president who makes sub rosa arrangements with the neighborhood punks to set fire to the trucks that crossed the picket lines, not Harry. As the punks go to the Bulaggi Brothers lot where the trucks are parked, Harry shows up at Regina’s apartment, dressed up and carrying flowers and a bottle of champagne as if he were on a date, which he is, but his manner here is very different from what we have seen of the way he treats his wife. As the trucks of the Bulaggi Brothers explode, Regina asks, "What’s that, darling?" and Harry responds, "That’s teachin people not to fuck with Harry Black," the irony of the use of the words "teaching" and "fuck" being lost on Harry even as he delicately enters the world of homosexual behavior. Indeed, it would be wise if someone were to teach Harry how not to be taken advantage of by the men whom he "fucks;" Nonetheless, Harry becomes obsessed with Regina.

Harry is not as big a man as he might think. The union president, Boyce, is upset that Harry was not at the strike when the trucks arrived. If Harry had been at his post, he would have been able to telephone for backup union strength. Failing to have done so, Harry is stripped of his positions of union steward and head of the strike office. So Boyce dresses him down, retrogressing the dressing up Harry performed before his assignation with Regina. When Harry pleads, Boyce tells him not to beg and not to slam the door when he leaves. Harry returns to Regina, asking if they can stay in instead of going out because Harry no longer has any money. Regina rebuffs him, telling him bluntly to get more money if he has none. Later, Harry sees Regina at a gay bar with another man. Dejected, he gets drunk and wanders home, stopping only to toss an empty beer bottle off a bridge and into the river. On his way home, he is dazed like an animal, like the deer of Central Illinois by the headlights of an oncoming car. He returns home and watches his wife sleep, but in the close-up of his face, we see no emotion at all, neither hate nor love, for Harry has hit bottom.

Meanwhile, Tralala’s lieutenant has to board a troop ship (which is more dramatic than the train on which he departs in the novel). Before he leaves, he gives her an envelope that she expects to be filled with money, her reward for staying with him. But it is only a simple love letter from a humble, gentle, innocent boy. Angry and annoyed, she crumples it and tosses it away. She goes to a bar where she quickly picks up someone new.

Harry telephones Regina but is rebuffed again. He looks into the strike office where he used to be important but now other men are important. He is approached by a neighborhood boy of about thirteen or fourteen, Bobby, who laughs, "You’re drunk, Mr. Black!" Harry wordlessly puts his hand on Bobby’s neck and leads him to a nearby vacant lot and behind a billboard, much like Tralala led her tricks to a vacant lot in earlier scenes of the film. We hear Harry offscreen pathetically attempt to perform oral sex on Bobby, pleading with him much as he pleaded with Regina. Cut to the two behind the billboard just in time to see Bobby squirm free. Medium shot of Harry saying, "Please!" as we hear on the soundtrack Bobby run to the diner to get help from the punks. Just as Harry says, "Please!" another time, we see one of the punks kick his head. In a short sequence of violence that equals the violence perpetrated by the punks on the soldier during the opening scene of the film, the punks beat Harry severely. Even Bobby kicks him. But then there is a cut and the camera is above the action, at the level of the top of the billboard and behind it. We continue to hear the action but we do not see it. We ultimately see and hear the punks and Bobby return to the diner, and then the camera cranes down to the back of the billboard where we see Harry hung up on the support beams, sobbing, unable to form distinct words but vocalizing cries of pain and of agony for both his body and his soul. Sacrificed by forces that he does not understand in his marriage, exploited by the factory bosses and sacrificed by the union, exploited by his new homosexual acquaintances, he is crucified by a world that rejects him. He does not die as Georgette has done, but it is clear that he is as alienated from the world as Georgette was, and his suffering is to continue to live—he is crucified but he is still alive, too—in the world into which he does not fit.

Cut to the contrast of the christening of Tommy and Donna’s baby, where we are reminded by the priest that Christ, that other sacrificial lamb, brought us new life through baptism with water. Further, we are reminded that we are to observe the commandments of God, an ironic commentary given that Tommy and Donna have broken at least two of the commandments in order to wind up as newlyweds and new parents more or less simultaneously. The counterpointing demonstrates that the two instances of sex outside the boundaries set by society are not all that different. Harry suffers for his transgressions deeply in his soul and will continue to do so for the rest of his life, long after his wounds heal. But Tommy and Donna, although they are now sanctioned by the church and by their families and the community that surrounds them, are stuck in a marriage that they did not seek. It is implicit and highly likely that they will wind up like Joe and Helen. The film offers no other options. As if to emphasize that lack of options, the film cuts back to Tralala inside Willie’s bar where she is very drunk. Nonetheless, she plays her old games, trying to steal away a man who has already been picked up by other prostitutes. She plays with the fellow’s pants zipper a bit, but is unsuccessful. Cut back to Tommy and Donna at their combined wedding reception and christening party for their infant son, whom they have named Joe in honor, we suspect, of her father. The film equates the relationships, and it equates them both as sexual and as economic relationships. We know how Tralala earns her money. Now we are invited to understand that the relationship between Tommy and Donna is purely one of sexuality and economic dependence. There is no love in their marriage; it happened in response to an accident and not by design, an accident that was so inconsequential to Tommy that he had not even seen Donna since the time or two that they slept together. Donna is not smart enough to play games as Tralala does, and so she accepts the role that she has fallen into.

Cut back to Tralala, who sees things as if they were happening in slow motion (a camera trick) because she is so drunk. She rips open her blouse, two sizes too small but a gift from her boyish lieutenant admirer, and shouts, "Best tits in the western world!" sharing with the drunken crowd the only gift from the lieutenant that means anything to her. Her shout is met with cheering, and it is taken to be as much an advertisement as it is a proud claim as she half-falls and is half-pulled around the bar. Challenged to back up her claim, she drunkenly, joyously responds with a challenge of her own, "I’ll show all of you!"

Cut back to the union hall, scene of Tommy and Donna’s reception. Now drunk, Joe decides to fight with Tommy again, still unclear on what the moral and expected behavior is. Again they knock over the makeshift tables that this time contain food for the reception. But the newborn baby is also lying atop one of the tables, and so the two grown men, in a violent and stupid metaphor for the way that they are screwing up their lives as well as the child’s, accidentally knock the baby to the floor. Fortunately, he is unhurt. Cut back to Tralala, who shouts, "Come on, you bastards, I’ll fuck you blind!" perhaps a metaphor for her alcohol-induced visual impairment at the time. She is carried outside to a vacant lot where she is laid first in a car and then on a dirty discarded mattress. There quickly forms a long line of patrons from the bar, soldiers, sailors, and just plain guys from the neighborhood waiting to take their turn in copulating with Tralala, and the line is getting longer.

Cut back to the inside of the union hall where the union president announces that the strike is over, that the men are going back to work on Monday. Cut back to outside the wedding reception where Spook, Joe’s son and Donna’s younger brother, has with difficulty started the ancient motorcycle which he has finally saved up enough money to purchase and which he is proudly showing off for the first time to the reception guests. They dismiss him and his pathetic bike, but he proudly rides away to give the first ride to Tralala, on whom he maintains an impossible crush. But he approaches to find her in the vacant lot, now only a few neighborhood boys and the dirtiest of drunks left standing in line to abuse her. He "rescues" her, covers her chest and belly, long stripped of their covering garments, with his sweater. As he sobs, she finds a tiny bit of strength left with which to comfort him. As she pulls his head down to her chest, she remembers and we hear on the voiceover soundtrack the words of the boyish lieutenant’s goodbye letter. That is, the only scene of tenderness which she shows anyone comes at the expense of having totally lost what pathetic control she had of her life, at the expense of being sexually degraded and abused beyond description. It is the only time when someone reaches out to Tralala to give her something and wants nothing in return. Indeed, this is the only scene of genuine human compassion in the entire film.

Fade to dawn the next day as the men go back to work in the nameless grey factory, making an undefined product, go back to work by the hundreds as the camera slowly cranes up to see the long, wide line of men enter the factory gates where so recently they shouted curses at the men for whom they must now work. Joe passes on some wisdom to Tommy about married life. Tommy marvels at the wonder of his newborn son while at the same time complaining that all the baby does is "shit, pee, and cry all day," that is, the newborn is limited to an animal state, not unlike the other people in this last exit community as we watch the long, slow march of men entering the mouth of the local Moloch, in a shot influenced by a similar shot, though more stylized, in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. For that is all they know. To them it passes for good. There is no resolution, for their lives will continue to consist of more of the same.

The film version of Last Exit to Brooklyn presents the grim images of an ordered society, ordered not only in the sense that options are limited but ordered also in the sense that people receive orders from the institutions that surround them but in which they have no say. In the streets, especially at night, people are shadows, not fully lit, the film trying to find a visual way of representing the reality of the people in the last exit neighborhood while also representing them as different from the American mainstream. Here the film portrays the characters as edges between the darkness and the light, not full-bodied people who can be plainly seen. They are sweaty and dirty, not pristine as they would be in a Hollywood film from fifty years earlier. The camera most often shoots the action in medium and close shots, with the edges of the frame crowding the people just as their life crowds in upon them.

Director Uli Edel and his cinematographer Stefan Czapsky have been largely successful in finding a visual method of portraying the limitations in the lives of the characters. Indeed, nearly all of the action in the film takes place within a few hundred yards in the streets where the Brooklyn army base, the waterfront, the factory, the diner, the bar, the strike office, the union hall, and the tenement apartments come together. There are visually and literally no options available other than those pictured on the screen, and Edel includes enough long shots that show the entire neighborhood amidst the medium shots and closeups for the audience to understand the close proximity of these options within this grimy neighborhood.

The changes made to the novel which link the various stories together contribute to the sense of limitation. The two parts, "Tralala" and "Strike," are the most important parts to have been lifted virtually whole from the novel and placed into the film. Indeed, as I mentioned earlier, I find "Tralala" to be the saddest part of the novel and "Strike" to be the centerpiece. Together, interwoven as they are, they form the central pillar of the film. The story of Georgette that comes from "The Queen Is Dead" is linked with the story of Harry Black in "Strike" in the film. The story of Tommy and Donna (whose name in the novel is Suzy) that comes from "And Baby Makes Three" is also linked with the story of "Strike" in the film. The story of Tralala remains a separate story in the film, but it is intercut with the story of the strike, lending a sense of another labor option, another sexual option that is equally unappealing. The centerpiece of the film are the scenes of labor violence when the trucks cross the picket lines on the way into the factory and even of even more violence when they leave. The firehoses turned on the strikers invade the neighborhood, the force of the water smashing windows in the bar and perhaps elsewhere on the street. These shots emphasize the constricted atmosphere, where an action in one sphere directly influences action in the others, so close are they. The shots also emphasize the animal-like nature of the lives that these characters lead, having to fight for the basic rights to work and to bargain collectively to improve the nature of that work, and then mistaking those rights with the "right" to commit random violence, having to submit to unfulfilling sexual relationships, sexual relationships not of their own choice. The intercutting of the stories from the novel in the weft of the film reiterates the limited options that the characters have because the limited options presented in one story are counterpointed by comparable limitations offered in the others. And indeed, nearly all the scenes in the film are lifted directly from the novel, with some elision of events and the assignment of some actions from one character to another.

The changes made to the characters from the novel to the film are minimal except in the case of Harry Black. The novel takes time to build up a picture of Harry as a failed worker, a feckless minor union official, a man tortured by his confusion and misunderstanding of his homosexuality. Because the strike has already begun at the outset of the film, the images of Harry as "the worst machinist" in the factory are lost. Accordingly, the film needs to build Harry up a bit so as to make his fall all the more dramatic, and so Harry becomes a leader at the gates trying to keep the trucks from leaving the factory whereas the Harry of the novel would only dream of making so dramatic a statement and never act upon that dream. It is with Harry that we are invited to identify, watching the action in the street as the film opens, moving in close-up to catch the expression on his face as he misunderstands all that happens around him. Harry is a liar, however. He is a liar in his relationship with his wife, his relationship with the union, and his timorous relationship with Regina, whom Harry fails to recognize as a liar as well. The reality of Harry’s mendacity is emphasized by his ultimately being beaten by the punks at the end of the film for whom he lied to the police at the beginning of the film, a logical closure to his lie. The intercutting of the stories at the end of the film finally shows that all the characters in the film are punished and further alienated—Harry is crucified, Tralala is gang raped, Tommy is bound in a marriage he does not seek, and the men return to work in the factory, trudging as they enter because nothing has changed. Their relationships to each other are the same, as are their relationships to the factory bosses. We know that this last exit neighborhood has limited options, and we have seen them all—the Army, the diner, the bar, the street, and the factory. To emphasize visually the lack of options, the shot shows the men all walking in the same direction, into the factory. None of the problems that exist at the beginning of the film have been resolved. The cycle will repeat.

Uli Edel’s film version of the Hubert Selby, Jr., novel Last Exit to Brooklyn is probably the most successful of the four films from this study in recreating "faithfully" on screen the text of the novel. Indeed, the liberties that the screenplay takes with the novel, particularly the interweaving of the four major stories of the film, successfully amplify the theme of alienation in the novel and the concomitant themes of responding to alienation through violence, vulgarity, and outre sexuality. The film could not be made when the novel was first published because of the shocking nature of the subject matter and the language. The film does nothing to prettify any aspects of the novel. Indeed, it portrays them with such forcefulness and clarity that they succeed in being at least as shocking as the novel, and one of the novel’s obvious intentions is to shock.