Paranoia: What is a character?

[John Lundy]

Paul,

You've pushed my button.  John Ford is my button.  How can anyone watch the 
private agony of John Wayne, entombed as a silhouette in the doorway at the 
end of the Searchers and not have that feeling that we are all shadowy 
figures of some description?  Not ectoplasmic but somehow helpless.

Your comments about Rambo are redolent of High Noon.  It's interesting how 
that wonderful anti-McCarthyist polemic enraged a nation in the grip of the 
cold war when Gary Cooper took off his badge and ground it into the dust 
with his heel, yet Stallone's Rambo was cheered and adored.  It was a 
signal that the only way America could deal with the disaster of Vietnam 
was to somehow subsume it.  Somebody mentioned Deerhunter the other day, 
lauding its merits - and I can see why, but I still don't believe the 
honest and definitive Vietnam movie has been made.  (I know there'll be a 
phalanx of Coppola fans baying for my blood here, but for all its majesty I 
think it misses the mark.)

I'll listen to everyone on this, but please, oh lordy lord, please, nobody 
mention 4th of July and Tom Cruise.

As for Freud and the Goths, I'm terribly reluctant to admit this but I 
watched a really bad late night movie last week, an Italian epic about a 
Transylvannian castle brimming with nubile blonde vampires who fucked 
everything that moved.  My wife said that I was clearly perverted and why 
didn't I watch the news or something.  My - at the time lame and rushed 
defence - was that my interest was intellectual and not prurient and that I 
was fascinated by the director's compelling juxtaposition of our darkest 
sexual and primitive fears.

She didn't buy it.  Where were you when I needed you Paul?

John

On Sunday, 7 October 2001 00:16, Paul Nightingale 
[SMTP:paulngale at supanet.com] wrote:
> Thankyou Paul and Terrance. Firstly I'd hate to give the impression I 
think
> of fiction as just words, no different from a shopping list (although 
that
> might depend on where you do your shopping). We do empathise with 
fictional
> characters; that is to say, we do respond emotionally, we have to, 
otherwise
> there is no point reading. Elitist approaches to the appreciation of
> literature have always prioritised an intellectual response as one way of
> saying only a few people are qualified to judge. The study of literature 
(in
> this country anyway, ie Britain) is based on this Leavisite approach. The
> rest, the masses, are easily swayed by trashy writing. Personally, I 
cannot
> consider an intellectual response that isn't informed by some kind of
> emotional investment in what happens to characters.
>
> Secondly, Terrance, you've started me thinking about the Gothic. Shelley 
and
> Walpole et al. Attempts to say the unsayable, pre-Freudian takes on the
> unconscious. Certainly desire, but also class conflict, which Pynchon has
> weaved in-&-out of his narrative in the opening chapters. I take my lead
> here from Marx & Engels. The Manifesto of the Communist Party begins with 
a
> gothic image: "There is a spectre haunting Europe - the spectre of
> communism". Bourgeois capitalism required a proletariat that, like
> Frankenstein's monster, would then threaten its existence. A more recent
> take on the same theme - I think so, anyway - would be the Stallone
> character in First Blood, a Vietnam Vet who threatens to destroy the 
society
> that created him. We can see connections between this narrative and the
> Western hero I've already mentioned, Ethan Edwards (also a war Vet, a man 
of
> violence who presents a challenge to the nascent bourgeois community
> depicted by Ford in his Westerns - and certainly, if you want to know 
what
> Ford thought of the family as a site of sexual repression, you only have 
to
> watch the first 20 minutes or so of The Searchers).
>
> I'm starting to ramble again. I've just been thinking of the alternative
> religions Thompson describes in Witness Against The Beast, which sends me
> back to Keith Thomas and Religion And The Decline Of Magic.