Of Time and the Wine

[LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU]

John wonders:
" But now, you do something for me:         
tell me
what breakthrough  significance I (must have) missed in that late work of Welles
--I mean
that series of vignettes, we might call them *commercials* where he stentoriousl
y
informs us that: PAUL MASSON WILL SELL NO WINE BEFORE ITS TIME!
 
john m
PS will the Pynch end up this way too?  Doing commercials, or better, infomercia
ls,
maybe?  What products would he endorse?"


Ah!  A true, unrecognized element of The Genius's Art.  For the Dionysian 
associations of wine and their conflation in the vegetation rituals of
ancient Greece tie us to an *agon* that stretches from the shores of the
Aegean to Eliot's denatured Wasteland.

Welles playfully works on the element of wine to tie Eliot's Wasteland to 
Newton Minnow's vision of TV as a "Vast Wasteland" which must inevitably
raise the connotations of Welles's own Vast Waistband so abundantly on
display in those ads.

Welles, then, presents himself as a conflated figure: the New Dionysus (or
maybe more appropriately, Silenus--the perpetual Barney Gumbel at the 
Bacchanal) but also the Harvest King--lord of fertility who becomes the
victim of Hollywood's ritual sacrifice of those who replenish the medium.

U.S.W.  ;-)


Somewhat more seriously, it was those ads and the bits in bad movies and
scale pay for appearances with Johnny and Mike and Merv that allowed him to
live in Europe and keep making films on an almost literal shoestring budget.

Pynchon, on the other hand, has that MacArthur and sales from the members
of this list to keep him going!

Don Larsson, Mankato State U (MN)