http://www.best.com/~rpirani/gr&mst3k.htm (fwd)

[John Roca]

Found the attached while searching a pynchon query on a browser.  There 
is a God...my favorite author and my favorite television show.  For those 
unfamiliar, Mystery Science Theatre 3000 is a story about a man trapped 
in space with three robots whos is forced to watch "bad" b-movies by evil 
scientists.  The entire show is Joel( now someone else) and the robots 
sitting before a movie screen of the movie of the week and wisecracking 
to beat the band.  It is simply hilarious!  Chcek it out on the Comedy 
Central cable channel.

The URL for this web page is in the subject above.  It has a cool picture 
of Joel and the robots with a box of Gravity's Rainbow cereal.


John
---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Subject: http://www.best.com/~rpirani/gr&mst3k.htm
>
>> Everything Is Subtext I : Gravity's Rainbow & MST3K
>> 
>> 
>> Echoes between the greatest American novel of this century and the
>> greatest television series ever.
>>     ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> 
>> 
>> The literal plane
>> 
>> Gravity's Rainbow is one of the "Cereal Novels" designed by Joel to
>> upgrade the literary content of the breakfast table.
>> [Joel adds post-modernist fiction to the
>basic food groups for Tom and Crow]
>> 
>>      Tom - "For the adventurous,you can start your day eating
>>      Lucky Charms, while reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's
>>      Rainbow. It's magically obscure." Crow contributes annoying
>>      Leprechaun giggles.
>> 
>> 
>>      A slightly more obscure direct reference can be found in the
>>      Edward Platt as genuis-beatnik-criminal epic when a
>>      coffee-house dweller turning the page of a book elicits from
>>      Tom -- "A screaming comes across the sky"
>> 
>>      Tom (is his Pynchon-penchant possibly a hint why he is
>>      called Tom !?!) has another throw-away line in "Teenagers
>>      from Outer Space" when referring to the V-shaped duct-tape
>>      design on the alien uniforms he says "..or Thomas Pynchon's
>>      V."
>> 
>> 
>>     ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> 
>> 
>> The plane of personae
>> 
>> 
>> Dr. Forrester/Pointsman -
>> Both these evil scientists are behaviourist psychologists who in their
>> deranged search for knowledge and power have turned the life of their
>> subject/victims into a living experiment.
>> 
>> Joel/Tyrone -
>> Our hero/victims are nonchalantly competent, resourceful and
>> ultimately doomed. (If Joel "escaped" why have we not heard from him,
>> why no Hamdinger sightings in Wisconsin ?) Joel is trapped on the
>> Satellite of Love and forced to watch the Cinema of the Lame, so the
>> bad doctor can monitor his thoughts for signposts to power and wealth.
>> Tyrone is trapped in the Zone, so Pointsman and an army of
>> para-psychologists, military intelligencia, and salesman-gone-native
>> can use him as gude-post in the search for the Holy Rocket
>> One of Tyrone Slothrop's many identities is Rocket Man (or Rocket
>> Mensch) which certainly applies to Joel.
>> 
>> Joel/Gottfried -
>> A cogent misreading finds an unthreatening yet real echo of the overt
>> sexual relationship between on the one hand Blicero/Weissmann and the
>> the world's first astronaut Gottfried, sealed in the nose of the
>> mythic V2 known as s-gerat and Dr Forrester's attitude toward Joel and
>> Mike. The names he uses for Joel are the most revealing - Boy-Toy,
>> Joely-Boely, etc. Add the conspicuous absence of females in Deep 13
>> ...
>>     ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> 
>> 
>> The thematic plane
>> 
>> 
>> A World Well Lost For Cinemart
>> For Tyrone Slothrop the world has become film. A musical war film
>> complete with lyrics and fade-in, dissolve instructions from the
>> author. German Expressionist cinema is invoked, re-enacted and
>> supplies numerous characters and sub-plots to Tyrone's picaresque trek
>> across the Zone. For Joel Robinson film has become the world. Every
>> invention and activity is a product of the film-experiments he and the
>> 'bots are forced to watch. Every visitor to the satellite comes to
>> life from the film disasters and spooky propaganda shorts.
>>     ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> 
>> 
>> The plane of identity
>> 
>> 
>> Wild and Recluse in Minnesota
>> Now we come to the essential question. Given the following 1) No one
>> will claim to have seen or spoken to Thomas Pynchon for decades. 2)
>> When he received the National Book Award he sent Prof. Irwin Corey to
>> represent him. 3) Joel is just the right age to be his son. 4) The
>> Wisconsin-based origin of MST3K suggests that we may know the identity
>> of Gravity Rainbow's Kenosha Kid, eh ? 5) Why did Joel have to leave
>> the show, just as all these connections began to become all too clear
>> to those with II 2 C ?
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