Pynchon's Celebration of Television as a Preterite Medium in *Vineland*

[jbor]

> the Tube 
> is what co-opted the 60s revolution, a view  echoed strongly by
>  one
> of the most sympathetic characters in Vineland (Isaiah 2:4).

   ... Isaiah's business idea was to set up first one, eventually a chain,
   of violence centers, each on the scale perhaps, of a small theme park,
   including automatic-weapon firing ranges, paramilitary fantasy
   adventures, gift shops and food courts, and video games rooms for the
   kids, for Isaiah envisioned a family clientele. Also part of the concept
   were a standardized floor plan and logo, for franchising purposes. Isaiah
   sat at the cable-spool table, making diagrams with tortilla chips and
   pitching his dreams -- "Third World Thrills", a jungle obstacle course
   where you got to swing on ropes, fall into the water, blast away at
   surprise pop-up targets shaped like indigenous guerilla elements . . .
   "Scum of the City", which would allow the visitor to wipe from the world
   images of assorted undesirables, including Pimps, Perverts, Dope Dealers,
   and Muggers, all carefully multiracial so as to offend everybody, in an
   environment of dark alleys, lurid neon, and piped-in saxophone music . .
   . and for the aggro connoisseur, "Hit List," in which you could customize
   a lineup of videotapes of the personalities in public life you hated
   most, shown one apiece on the screens of old TV sets bought up at
   junkyard prices and sent past you by conveyor belt, like ducks at the
   carnival, so your pleasure at blowing away these jabbering, posturing
   likenesses would be enhanced by all the imploding picture tubes. . . .
                                                                (p 19)

> Character after
> character is seen to value their relationships with the Tube shows as
> high or higher than their relationships with other people

     [Zoyd and Prairie] sat together on the floor in front of the Tube, with
   a chair-high bag of Chee-tos and a six-pack of grapefruit soda from the
   health food store, watching baseball highlights, commercials, and weather
   -- no rain again -- till it was time for the kiss-off story. (p 14)

     Justin found his father and Zoyd in the back of a pickup, watching
   "Say, Jim," a half-hour sit-com based on "Star Trek", in which all the
   officers were black except for the Communications Officer, a freckled
   white redhead named Lieutenant O'Hara. Whenever Spock came on the bridge,
   everybody made Vulcan hand-salutes and went around high-threeing. About
   the time the show ended, Prairie came by, Zoyd and Flash went off looking
   for beer, and she and Justin settled down, semi-brother and sister, in
   front of the eight o'clock movie, Pee-wee Herman in *The Robert Musil
   Story*. It was mostly Pee-wee talking in a foreign accent, or sitting
   around in front of some pieces of paper with some weird-looking marker
   pen, and the kids' attention kept wandering to each other.
    "There's the Movie at Nine," Justin said, looking in the listings,
   "*Magnificent Disaster, TV movie about the '83-'84 NBA playoffs -- wasn't
   that just back in the summer? Pretty quick movie."
    "They've been getting quicker over the years, from what I remember,"
   Prairie said.
    "Hey, Prairie, would you like to baby-sit me sometime?"
    She gave him a look. "Some baby. Maybe I'll have to kid-sit you."
    "What's that?"
    "Involves some tickling," Prairie already headed for her new brother's
   armpits and flanks, and Justin squirming even before they touched.
                                                               (pp 370-1)

> we
> often see their relationship with the Tube getting in the way of
> getting what they want, or preventing them from even knowing what
> they want.

    ... Zoyd could feel another hustle on the way. Hector had been trying
   over and over for years to develop him as a resource, and so far --
   technically -- Zoyd had hung on to his virginity. But the li'l fucker
   would not quit ... and Zoyd knew that one day, just to have some peace,
   he'd say forget it, and go over. Question was, would it be this time, or
   one of the next few times? Should he wait for another spin? It was like
   being on "Wheel of Fortune," only here there were no genial vibes from
   any Pat Sajak to find comfort in, no tanned and beautiful Vanna White at
   the corner of his vision to cheer on the Wheel, to wish him well, to flip
   over one by one the letters of a message he knew he didn't want to read
   anyway. (pp 12-3)

> the little girl with
> a Barbie computer logging on to Disney.com comes to mind

   ... By the time [Prairie] got upstairs to the Ninjette Terminal Center
   and found out how to log on, the midsummer sunset had come and gone ...
    The file on Frenesi Gates, whose entries had been accumulating over the
   years, often haphazardly, from far and wide, reminded Prairie of
   somebody's eccentric hippie uncle. Some was governmental, legal history
   with the DMV, letterhead memoranda from the FBI enhanced by Magic Marker,
   but there were also clippings from "underground" newspapers that had
   closed down long ago, transcripts of Frenesi's radio interviews on KPFK,
   and a lot of crpss-references to something called 24fps ...
    So into and then on Prairie followed, a girl in a haunted mansion, led
   room to room, sheet to sheet, by the peripheral whiteness, the earnest
   whisper, of her mother's ghost. She already knew about how literal
   computers could be -- even spaces between characters mattered. She had
   wondered if ghosts were only literal in the same way. Could a ghost think
   for herself, or was she responsive totally to the needs of the
   still-living, needs like keystrokes entered into her world, lines of
   sorrow, loss, justice denied? ...
    Prairie found that she could also summon to the screen photographs, some
   personal, some from papers and magazines, images of her mom ... (Prairie
   would learn her mother's hands, read each gesture a dozen ways, imagine
   how they would have moved at other, unphotographed times) ...
    She paused at a shot of DL and Frenesi together ... Prairie could feel
   in the bright California colors, sharpened up pixel by pixel into
   deathlessness, the lilt of bodies, the unlined relaxation of faces that
   didn't have to be put on for each other, liberated from their authorized
   versions for a free, everyday breath of air. Yeah, Prairie thought at
   them, go ahead you guys. Go ahead. . . .  (pp 113-5)

> It's also OK -- expected, even --  to defend such an opinion with
> evidence from the texts in question.