Gloom-Doom Duck Poetry
The men that Weetzie and her gay best friend Dirk pursue are known as Ducks. Unless they aren’t Ducks in which case they may be termed vultures. Weetzie goes through a series of bad Ducks, including one she calls Gloom-Doom Duck Poet who almost certainly will go on to become a Morrissey-like success if he puts his mind to it:
“She met a Gloom-Doom Duck Poet who said, `My heart is a canker sore. I cringed at the syringe.’"
Along Comes Baby
Weetzie grows up and older across the narrative so that the girl who starts out as a classic case of school avoidance disorder eventually becomes a young woman with a child. The process by which that happens is literally like a stupid romantic comedy plot, but the baby is real enough. Her feelings, however, are encased in a hard candy coating of metaphorical imagery:
“Weetzie was pregnant. She felt like a Christmas package. Like a cat full of kittens. Like an Easter basket of pastel chocolate-malt eggs and solid-milk-chocolate bunnies, and yellow daffodils and dollhouse-sized jellybean eggs.”
There’s a Lot of That Going Around
A mélange of metaphor like that quote above would stand out as something special in most books. In this one, however, it is merely one of an assortment of such imagery strung together. The narrator is fond of pushing the limits of whimsy when it comes to this literary device:
“He kissed her. A kiss about apple pie a la mode with the vanilla creaminess melting in the pie heat. A kiss about chocolate, when you haven't eaten chocolate in a year. A kiss about palm trees speeding by, trailing pink clouds when you drive down the Strip sizzling with champagne. A kiss about spotlights fanning the sky and the swollen sea spilling like tears all over your legs.”
More Than Sadness
With the death of her father, Weetzie is introduced to a brand new emotion that she has thus far been fortunate enough to avoid. The reliance upon post-modernist pop-culture reactions to dealing with this deeper level of sadness remains fully in fact, however. But what else would one expect of a guy named My Secret Agent Lover Man?
"`Weetzie,’ he said, kissing her mouth. `You are my Marilyn. You are my lake full of fishes. You are my sky set, my 'Hollywood in Miniature,' my pink Cadillac, my highway, my martini, the stage for my heart to rock and roll on, the screen where my movies light up.’”
The Rom-Com Conception
As alluded to earlier, the conception of Weetzie’s daughter is processed like a bad romantic comedy plot. Who’s the father? Why, it could be any of multiple candidates. The not knowing for sure is the whole point, you see:
“Cherokee looked like a three-dad baby, like a peach, like a tiny moccasin, like a girl love-warrior who would grow up to wear feathers and run swift and silent through the L.A. canyons.”
