Pynchon and Film

[LOT64 at aol.com]

Don,
     Just a quick reply, the subject can get very involved.  Your ideas are
quite interesting.  I think Pynchon is also making the point that we are all
used and misled as well as entertained and transmogrified by film.  We have
been turned into a vast audience that is sold to the corporations.  However
there is always that sneaky subversive element in film that somehow slips in.
 As at the end of GR we are all sitting in the audience waiting for the
rocket that was launched many years earlier to come crashing in on top of our
heads.
      Regarding the French critics of the seventies, do you mean the
semioticians who interpret the filmic grammar as an ingrained ideological
discourse that is programming the audience to certain modes of thought?  I
guess the underlying assumption of semiotics is that the deep structures in
our language and communication create meanings that support the culture in
ways of which we are not aware.  Pynchon is looking at these assumptions as
being consciously manipulated by Them, as well as the controlling, hidden,
power elite.  These are the forces who are at home in the world of objects,
who manipulate chains of molecules,  who are not at the mercy of the
inanimate.  Of course the semioticians were undertaking a radical marxist
critique of capitalism.  Pynchon makes some of the same criticisms but
without the same kind of ideological marxist perspective.


                                                   Ron Churgin