Posturing on Pynchon-l

[davemarc]

At 09:28 AM 6/12/96 +0100, Andrew Dinn wrote:
>
>Your ever so humble
>moral posturing cuts no ice, I'm afraid. 

Typical:  I challenge the specious comparisons between Spielberg's work and
that of Nazi propagadists Goebbels and Riefenstahl and Andrew accuses me of
posturing. 
>
>And I will say in amplification of my previous point that on both
>aesthetic grounds and when judged on her craft as a propagandist
>Riefenstahl beats anything I have seen by Spielberg hands down. But
>then maybe Spielberg just has it real easy compared to Riefenstahl. He
>has a fat, complacent, self-important and self-centred public to
>manipulate. Riefenstahls's public was hungry, tired and angry. Nothing
>like an easy ride to lower the quality of one's art, eh?

Here is another example of what strikes me as truly bizarre posturing, in
which participants seem to feel a need to evaluate Spielberg's filmmaking
not in terms of, say, Lang, Hitchcock, Bunuel, or Scorsese but in terms of
Goebbels and Riefenstahl.  Oh, how daring.  I guess the US government should
have brought Riefenstahl--apparently the Werner von Braun of
moviemaking--over to Hollywood, instead of settling for her former
colleagues Lang and Billy Wilder.     

As far as the question of "public" is concerned, Riefenstahl made propaganda
films extolling the might of the Nazi regime, which gained public
compliance, in part, by using its might to intimidate, murder, and imprison
millions of dissenters and potential dissenters.  Yet Andrew claims that
Spielberg--creator of the disastrous *1941*--is the one who had "an easy
ride" as far as the public was concerned.  Now, if Riefenstahl had actually
made a movie under the Nazis that challenged them in any way (others who
were persecuted as a result of doing so), then I might be more sympathetic
to the claim.  

ObPynchon:  I recall that, in *Vineland*, Pynchon critiques (and criticizes)
the Hollywood Red Scare, and the chilling effect it had on the American
citizenry.  He notes that Reagan was the compliant leader of the Screen
Actors Guild around that period.  I suggest that Riefenstahl had it better
than Reagan, for a time.  

Alluding to a North American playwright,

davemarc