MDMD: Print the legend but don't mention Coppola!

[Paul Nightingale]

Thankyou John. Your reference to High Noon reminds me of a film that came
out at roughly the same time, the flag-waving/union-bashing On The
Waterfront. Much more popular. And Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers managed to
be ambiguous, at least to those too blind to see. The western remained the
most subversive genre, I feel, precisely because it claimed to be about
where America came from: sometimes the cracks showed. Pat Garrett and Billy
The Kid was a great Vietnam film and this was probably why the genre went
into decline in the 1970s; it had become impossible to make such films
without reference to the developing world (which was how the 'wild west' had
always been portrayed). We still hear people blame Heaven's Gate for killing
off the western. Again its revisionist account of the C19th range wars was
unacceptable. In fact, Cimino's first cut (before the studio took the film
away from him) was five hours plus; the battle sequence alone, refusing to
be a celebration of violence, lasted about 90 minutes and (apparently, see
Steven Bach's far from sympathetic account of the making of the film, Final
Cut) left little to the imagination - dangerous stuff!

So where the hell does Pynchon come into all of this? I said earlier that GR
could only have been written in, and was therefore about, the period when
elected governments (in the US and Western Europe) were being challenged by
popular dissent. Pynchon is clearly a writer of dissent, in terms of both
content and form, in everything he has produced (I can't off-hand think of
anything that should be of comfort to the political right or conservative
elements in society generally - but then you only have to think of Reagan
and Born In The USA to know how risky it is making such a statement).

Pynchon, and also Coover and Delillo, and Donald Barthelme, belong to a
generation of writers who took popular culture seriously. It's interesting
that, as Hollywood discovered counterculture-politics, the literary novel
discovered 'trivia' - one of the characteristics of postmodernism. In M&D,
we have serious historical figures being treated as a music-hall double-act:
this is as far from great-man history as it's possible to get.