We Can Guess What Holden Caulfield’s Reaction to the New Salinger Documentary Would Be: LMAO

There’s been a bit of press surrounding the recent documentary about J.D. Salinger, and most of it has been pretty bad. The Washington Post called the movie ”plodding and mostly pointless,” and the Boston Globe said, ”The movie epitomizes everything in the culture from which Salinger himself fled.”

But what would Holden Caulfield have thought? We don’t know, but we can guess he might have laughed his ass off. In fact, according to Mike Vuolo at Slate, Caulfield was one of the first to employ the phrase. In a scene describing a particular war movie Holden hates, Salinger writes:

It ends up with everybody at this long dinner table laughing their asses off because the great Dane comes in with a bunch of puppies. Everybody thought it was a male, I suppose, or some goddam thing. All I can say is, don’t see it if you don’t want to puke all over yourself.

That last sentence is pretty much how reviewers saw Salinger as well.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Memorialize J.D. Salinger at the National Portrait Gallery

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Rose Eveleth was a writer for Smart News and a producer/designer/ science writer/ animator based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Scientific American, Story Collider, TED-Ed and OnEarth.