COL49 _Courier's Tragedy_

[calbert at hslboxmaster.com]

From:           	Thomas Eckhardt <thomaseckhardt at yahoo.de>

> > I think
> > that Theatre of the Absurd and Beckett's _Godot_ are
> > closer to what Pynchon
> > is up to in his pastiche of Jacobean revenge drama
> > in _Lot 49_.
> 
> 
> Absurd, yes. But not so much "absurd" as in Beckett or
> Ensslin's "The Theatre of the Absurd" as "absurd" in
> "The Evil Dead" or "Re-Animator". Not aesthetics of
> reduction here but aesthetics of surplus, so to speak,
> and this is valid for all of Pynchon's writing. 

yup.....because the progeny of RT's pop up every few years or so in 
Hollywood, and make great money....there was a flood of movies of 
this sort in the mid 80s like "The Class of 1994", and much of the 
Linda Blair catalogue

27.How to Get Revenge (1989) (V) .... Hostess 
37.Red Heat (1985) .... Christine Carlson 
                           38.Night Patrol (1984) .... Sue Perman 
                           39.Savage Streets (1984) .... Brenda 

these would generally conform to the following receipe:

Linda Blair is raped and seeks revenge

Linda Blair's "slow" sister is raped and Linda seeks revenge


either way, Linda Blair exposed her assets repeatedly....as one 
wag once described Barbara Streisand's nose "It bisects the large 
screen from north to south"....If you think I am exaggerating the 
connection, check one out......

....stands to reason......these kinds of productions are amenable to 
the very same formula developed by Kyd.......and I think this is 
where Kyd again is slighted.......to SUCCESSFULLY "manage" an 
audience through a revenge drama is serious work......the audience 
must be conditioned to respond in a predictable way - the villain 
HAS to be so odious that he is beyond any hope of "re-habilitation" 
(hence the appropriatness of his/her grisly demise {in a land where 
the death penalty os hotly debated}) - there has to be 
CONVINCING betrayal of the most henious sort (Linda Blair gets 
set up by an ex boyfriend, favorite uncle, yada, yada) and an 
acceptance that the death of the "protagonist" serves a noble 
purpose (figurative, as Linda sacrifices herself to secure 
"justice")......

RT's satisfy an audiences demand for justice and retribution, which 
they often cannot satisfy otherwise (the Social contract gives, and 
takes away).......since the world fails to operate on such a basis, 
this obliges the "auteur" to fashion a world radically different from 
the one he/she inhabits.....I wonder if this is Pycnhon "twitting" the 
demands of HIS audience for the same, and the source of his 
frustrating (to some) moral "ambivalence"?

love,
cfa