WOZ

[Otto Sell]

The structural importance of movies like WOZ or King Kong or Metropolis or
Frau Luna, which are all quoted in GR seems to me to lie in the general
importance of movies to 20th century-literature cuz we´re all
cinema-experienced readers nowadays. See Rushdie on that. And movies had an
extraordinary importance in Nazi-Germany to keep the simple folk at the side
of the nazis. Above, when Pynchon wrote GR it seemed highly possible that at
least some of us, maybe we`re all, seemed to be doomed to be killed by an
ICBM -does an American from remote Texas know the difference between Kiel
and Kiew?- while sitting in a cinema like it happened to those Belgians in
the cinema in Antwerpen which was hit and had the largest number of dead in
one single V-2 assault. This is where Pynchon got his idea for episode 73
from. We all assume that London had been hit the hardest - but Antwerpen got
the biggest single hit - but this is the way history goes.

TP´s choice are fantasy or early SF-movies. Out of Frau Luna he takes the
countdown, Metropolis delivers the Raketenstadt, Oz the Yellow Brick Road
and the Balloon. King Kong is important for the scream of Fay Wray, the
always female-victim in our male-oriented body-of-literature.

Since Lot 49 one of Pynchon´s topics is the fictionalizing -?- of reality -
are we all sure to be on the right planet? When the reality turns out to be
simulacred fantasy it could be that our spaced-out fantasies could be or
become real. To better or worse, much of what we called S.F. in the sixties
is reality now and I´m not sure if I like it.

Otto (not Gnahb)